Gass bag, a recondite in felicitous drag

“So sentences are copied, constructed, or created; they are uttered, mentioned, or used; each says, means, implies, reveals, connects; each titillates, invites, conceals, suggests; and each is eventually either consumed or conserved; nevertheless, the lines in Stevens or the sentences of Joyce or James, pressed by one another into being as though the words before and the words after were those reverent hands both Rilke and Rodin have celebrated, clay calling to clay like mating birds, concept responding to concept the way passionate flesh congests, every note a nipple on the breast, at once a triumphant pinnacle and perfect conclusion, like pelted water, I think I said, yet at the same time only another anonymous cell, and selfless in its service to the shaping skin as lost forgotten matter is in all walls; these lines, these sentences, are not quite uttered, not quite mentioned, peculiarly employed, strangely listed, oddly used, as though a shadow were the leaves, limbs, trunk of a new tree, and the shade itself were thrust like a dark torch into the grassy air in the same slow and forceful way as its own roots, entering the earth, roughen the darkness there till all its freshly shattered facets shine against themselves as teeth do in the clenched jaw; for Rabelais was wrong, blue is the color of the mind in borrow of the body; it is the color consciousness becomes when caressed; it is the dark inside of sentences, sentences which follow their own turnings inward out of sight like the whorls of a shell, and which we follow warily, as Alice after that rabbit, nervous and white, till suddenly—there! climbing down clauses and passing through ‘and’ as it opens—there—there—we’re here!…in time for tea and tantrums; such are the sentences we should like to love—the ones which love us and themselves as well—incestuous sentences—sentences which make an imaginary speaker speak the imagination loudly to the reading eye; that have a kind of orality transmogrified: not the tongue touching the genital tip, but the idea of the tongue, the thought of the tongue, word-wet to part-wet, public mouth to private, seed to speech, and speech…ah! after exclamations, groans, with order gone, disorder on the way, we subside through sentences like these, the risk of senselessness like this, to float like leaves on the restful surface of that world of words to come, and there, in peace, patiently to dream of the sensuous, and mindful Sublime.”

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Apropos of this enervating, execrable moment that is all there is and is as good as as it might get (terrible food, and such small portions)

We don’t have to struggle or strive for reality to keep happening, for sensations to keep arising and washing over us, for thoughts welcome and unwelcome to keep arriving unbidden. That reality happens, that sensations arise and then dissipate, and that thoughts arrive are realized and then go wherever abandoned thoughts go - it is not so much automatic as indwelling.

Against this soft pettable insight I have a history of being enamored with fiction that is not sci-fi dystopia but more like inner life malignancy dystopia. And, like two snails racing across a small British lawn under a gray sky pregnant with rain, i feel the insight and the personal history strain to gain purchase, to win a race that can’t be won. There but for the glory and the indifference of a fictitious God, go I.

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Rose madder, stand oil, and tortured gesso: Ecstatic acknowledgment that even the losses are lost

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And yet there was indeed shame in his game

“He splits hairs until there are no longer any hairs to split, and the mental gesture becomes merely the making of agitated passes over a complete and disconcerting baldness.”

she was a she, not a he, and blessed in her unremitting ability to cut to the quick. Go West, young man, and follow her until the trail that ought to go cold just consumes itself instead. find one who will encircle you in wit and barbed repartee to a degree that will make you dizzy with sustaining envy and want to tickle more keys, pull more out of your mind, some of which might stick, to the page if not yet the brains of the readers for which you yearn like a fever does to break. And still she’ll be so far ahead of you, a glimpse omitting itself behind a sightline, then a long shadow cast at six o clock against your squint, and the mind in the body from which the shadow is cast is back on the move, gobbling up so much new ground that you won’t even countenance a vexing idea of catching up.

Being caught up, entangled, beholden as if by a vexing secret spell: yes that happens, often and often enough still more. Put down she’s book and go field dress a pheasant, taking from its crop the makings of a glaze that might be sautéed in oil, reduced down, and brushed on its naked hairless broken down body to make the skin steam and crackle. Spit out the shot, as one does, without complaint or pageantry. It is fall in the northern plains and shots ring out, as they are wont to do. The black lamb doesn’t budge, and the grey falcon, circling above, has not yet discovered the gyres it will make elastic. Stoke the fire and read on - only twelve hundred and ninety more pages to get lost in.

Forgetting not forgiving remembering not repeating and coffee is for closers only

Rejoice . . . . [that voice]

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Snippets of Solie

That day I’d walked the beach,

picking up shells, their spirals of Archimedes and logarithmic
spirals, principle of proportional similarity that protects
the creature and makes it beautiful. Sandpipers materialized
through tears the wind made, chasing fringes of the rising tide.
At first there were two, then three appeared, but when I began
to pay attention I realized they were everywhere.

And

The perspective is unfamiliar.
We hadn’t looked back, driving in,
and lingered too long
at the viewpoint. It was a prime-of-life
experience. Many things we know
by their effects: void in the rock
that the river may advance, void
in the river that the fish may advance,
helicopter in the canyon
like a fly in a jar, a mote in the eye,
a wandering cause.

And

Our culture is best described as heroic.
Courageous in self-promotion, noble
in the circulation of others’ disgrace,

its preoccupation with death in a context of immortal glory
truly epic, and the task becomes to keep
the particulars in motion

lest they settle into categories whose opera
is bad infinity.

A revolutionary aims to have a tight grasp on the reality without the converse necessarily being true

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It is an affliction, forgetting music is. That numbing forgetfulness that gives a muffled day enough fuel to become carnivorous and gobble row after row on the calendar, stacked days shuffled through without any exposure to the rush of recognition that this melody, this flow, this anguished plea of a voice that cracks at just the right frequency - each in its own way confers exactly what is needed at this moment to express what this moment might amount to if a self could only get outside of itself. Show me that lever, Archimedes.

It takes all kinds. Sometimes it is four-on-the-floor transitioning to a melodic, barbed hook (Jeff Rosenstock, No Dream) sometimes it is throwback to some fierce vintage with the staying power to gobble up Maybach Music like a airy canapé at a black tie affair (Rakim, When I be on the mic; Mos Def, Redefinition) and sometimes it is that salve that speaks to a broken not-quite-yet-bled out person because it makes the Humpty-Dumpty fracture real (Bonnie Prince Billy, The Way, Phoebe Bridger Halloween). A dagger through the heart, a jolt that no facsimile can approximate, a defenestration that continues long after the body and the broken glass have been swept up - it’s all that and a schmear of more fully felt sensation on top. And then it seems momentarily impossible to be lulled back into the absent-minded worrying over and worship of a list of tasks that is the hustle and the lifestyle-design creep it lionizes.
Yoking awe and drawing it right up against the dally of the saddle horn takes practice, and practice doesn’t make perfect, but it does enable keen kernels of lucidity that can be spiked into the ground so that I won’t float back away into those numb, monochrome days and succumb to that baffling, cunning delusion that wearing this facepaint of will and control is what will render everything A-Ok. Show me yours and I’ll show you mine, and then it seems like sustaining escape velocity will be possible, after all.

When you hit a wall, kick it in

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A ruler attempting to measure itself, a deep foreboding tap-dancing on innumerable unleavened souls, and a soupçon of emotion desperation. Season to taste.

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Two frames

Life,

Liberty

Pursuit of happiness

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Stability

security

pursuit of property

Saddled with serendipity, afflicted with empathy, rippling with ready ripeness

And then the people made still even more Powerpoints and commented on each other’s failure to become

simple - direct - vibrant

in a long, undirected, and vituperative discussion on an

open Slack channel.

I felt like those star-crossed soldiers who fell

off the rope bridge into the river and then ripped to shreds by happy, basking crocodiles in the temple of doom movie

Conscripted in a role I hated, fated to a miserable senseless death after which no trace of me would be left.

Ok, it wasn’t that bad. Did you know Tom Stoppard touched up that script? For Spielberg? Or maybe the following one. I forget which.

Guess which is his:

Life is a gamble at terrible odds, if it were a bet, you would not take it.

Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking: Well, at least I'm not dead.

The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.

Ripeness is all.

Readiness is all.

Did you guess?

black magic removal of a man’s beating heart is a metonym for what sixteen-year old autodidacts in small towns think poetry’s function: a gender neutral truism.

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TV hijack, or how I learned to love faux agency and the pushed envelope paradox

In the pressing project to stop taking myself and the world so seriously, to embrace mortality, I have been reading, consuming, and making a lot of art. This art making mode has been going on for about 12 months or so. Much of it shitty and intemperate stabs at expression, but gleeful all the same. The big grab - the reach that exceeds the grasp - is to be a conduit through which the restless, tensile culture shines. Works, even.

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I am not sure that slathering cheap paint on a cheap canvas is an adequate response to the various realizations that have been dawning on me, like sun to a flower, or seizing me, like an epileptic attack, but I am also not sure that having an adequate response to these realizations is what these realizations call for. Evolution is not undirected, exactly, but it is unresponsive to a guiding hand. It is aloof to intentional intervention, but / like all great neuroses / it is always on call, always with its teeth on the bone of reality, chewing and grasping. These trees gave us hands to climb, these predators gave us unthinking flight, and all that.

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I can say - and do avow - that the burden of inheritance is not lightly borne. And the burden of depiction is not easily transfigured into a burden of signifying something more. And the burden of declaring small, smoldering truth is not more perfunctorily compensated for by snatching embers from someone else’s well-banked fire. Fire makes shadows as evolution manifests effects. That unduly burdensome residue from the smoke and the accumulated ash.

And they sometimes maintain a rigorous obliviousness to their culpability in their own lives

A mind like a CT scan, that could clinically and comprehensively render a complete psychological cavity search, but that still, in the end, functioned like a machine.

He whose status as a chronically underrated author (if largely in his own mind) was almost mythic, who in private tended to wear his natural feelings of competitive envy toward his famous old friends on his sleeve in a way that was likably, neurotically funny but painful too, because it wasn’t delusional: He was less well known, his books were weird, he didn’t write blockbuster suburban-sexual family dramas, he didn’t write massive postmodern game-changers — and though he wrote funny, his funny was dark. He ought to feel lucky to have a readership! (And he did feel so, in his strongest moments.) Now, “the culture” had turned its gigantic mechanical eye toward him and blinked and said: You, you are real. You must keep writing. Here is $625,000.

JJS ON DT

We play at games until death calls us home

There is no pursuit like slithering into a position of visibility. We who are observers engage in particularly slimy slithering in order to change teams and join the they who are observed. And the knock on making a bid for attention is that it betrays some shallow need. Which it often does and is (a betrayal).

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I say this as though only callow, talentless turds make bids on attention. Or that being shallow is self-defeating or that “betraying some shallow need” is betraying some stable quality that is more honorable than mooning for eyeballs or plaudits or some sexual healing. But if it’s all in the end a game, an unwinnable game that starts long before and ends long after the blinking ephemerality that is this life, then is the aversion for prostitution-as-popularization status just a question of style? Of not proclaiming and not seeking to be proclaimed? A different distinguishable status-seeking but one that is not less sought after, for that, that defines itself in not selling, not seeking and is therefore a style warped by the same inexorable force that its nemesis-style? A particle repelled by a force outside of itself is no less controlled than one that is attracted.

If this problem is a hole, and these ways of thinking are just different kinds of shovels, one with differently tangible bites on the ground that they seem to excavate, can there be a different kind of tool? How about a hand, with a strong grip?

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A verbless kind of life

“Within any given system, there are claims which are true but which cannot be proven to be true.”

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Months could go by,

A-marinating and stewing

that vat and this brain

with an attendant who might enter

with shaving bowl and straight blade

The nearest approximation to

A minor key friendship

a witches brew, my mind

Shallow itinerant who punches

only at the liver of each moment’s opponent

a knockout a distant dream

Monday is a castaway and Tuesday sees Pip take one last swim, Wednesday -

That kind of annalis mirabilis, it has been

each moment being an opponent but

four on the floor the beat goes on

clinging on for lack of will at being found and being dressed and eulogized

Nihilism an overreach, beyond the nib of the inner pamphleteer, too much bile to accustomize, and the stink of clammy pedantry besides

this sour digestion this itchy verve to dip a mind in the stale scrim scraped from communion wine and soak a wafer in

Bobbing like an apple or a boxer or a buoy at the entrance point of the riptide, way out but with a just-so way of ending, scattering forces and conjuring banalities.

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From that chaste revolt, to a clever melancholy

Vvvvvvvvvrrrrrrrt-iiiiicaaaaaaal. Vertical vertigo.

It is that feeling you get when you have momentarily fallen into sleep and images begin to assemble in your brain into a coherent dream narrative (coherent in a very loose sense), except just as that washes up onto the shore you snap out of it, shudder back into the open aperture of wakeful consciousness. What is this? Where am I? And there is now no going back into whatever that was. You don’t have a grasp. Falling without any possibility of knowing where or when you might land.

Zzzzzzzzzzipppppppppttttttttttt-cclllllllikkk.

As compared to being full-on immersed in a dream and coming out of it because your brain is sick of kicking and jonesing for the real but through will or desire or whatever it might be termed you go back and re-enter the dream, maybe not where it left off, but it’s still there, you’ve back into its frames and logics and sensations, maybe even within dream-recognition to know (in the loose sense) that you’ve gone and done it, shunned whatever splintered shift your brain had in mind and become integrated into IT. Which seems remarkable and is, in a tight, locked-down-with-a-sealed-click, comprehensively wondrous sense.

So much depends on a red wheelbarrow v. Let be be the finale of seem. Open ended play v. chomping on the bit technical rigor. I want what I can’t have until I get what I wanted to have and then what I wanted is what I’m violently ejected out of and can’t get away from fast enough. Like this. There. Finally.

And then George Steiner started quoting himself and Kafka was all the Rage

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Pretty women

making fun of travel writers for describing wrong thing I.e. church’s

dimensions

travels as fleeing from death

(j baldessari)

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This is only one aspect of the conspiracy

People are always saying - and have always been saying for months, years, decades, centuries - that we must tear the mask of the illusion, notice and identify the true conditions of existence. People are in a hole with a shovel and don’t know what else to do but dig. Beneath every bandage is a wound, but that does not make the bandage bad. To say it differently, to come at it from another angle - the bondage of the self is extricable from suffering in the same way that the wound is affixed to the bandage by virtue of its function. The bandage needs the wound to have a function - but it’s not reciprocal. The bandage does not call the wound into being, does not introduce it into the things of this world.

People are always saying - and have been saying for months years decades and yes centuries - that the unseen is the repository for hope in the same way that the visual - what is capable of being seen and understand - is the repository of truth. The future of an illusion, indeed. To say it another way, that this concept covers or is covered by this name for the concept . . . I need to stop to eat a candy bar before my blood sugar gets too low and I pass out and hit my head on the rim of the toilet bowl. Seeing stars, yes; yes that too.

Dig: for what other purpose is this tool?

Imitating frozen art imitating calcified life

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I stole a brick once from Harvard Square and used it as a door stop for a year or three. Incandescent fury of youth, and also an inability to feed or clothe or nurture or care for the body in which the self and soul each annealed unto the other. The time of dropped percocets and the endless buffet of meal plan hegemony and the ceaseless rumble of soldiering on with the insomnia. “Sleep when you’re dead” a stamp on the forehead of every self respecting wordsmith, like a tuning fork for burnt candles and testament art.

That one when Pusha T trills until the 808 drops

Flat stones on the shore flipped across a tranquil surface and skipping so long as the friction is less than the momentum. Call that math.

Tangled concepts suffer from the opposite problem, as any effort to casually let them loose and sail off on an independent vector files at the outset. Is there more to be said? Always. Call that the law of conservation.

Go ahead and take first steps towards a trenchant narrative wanting to take you on that trip, a long tale that Mia judges or stumbles or gets caught up in the reverie of getting there and forgets the point is saying something here and now. That guy who said our moods do not believe in each other is moldering away. Also that idea of how God is the circumference of a circle whose expansion is a kind of molting process. He said that too.

Find me the committed man, the one who does not eventually see the symbolic shift away from radicalism as inevitable, who understands a totally unbelievable fixed rate mortgage to be a kind of quietest trophy to assimilated complacency, and I will pay for your breakfast.

Find me a payphone. That is where the ideas needed to combat this slick limpid casting call will simmer. That is where this ethereal stone, walking on water, will come to bloom. A place that still makes it possible to plug a quarter into a slot and find someone out there with answers, or at least a voice that can respond to questions, perhaps in the same bewildered tone as they are haltingly uttered.