On the secular sexual economy, it’s not clear at what rate inflation has taken hold

A not entirely outdated take:

In an economic system where unfair dismissal is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find their place. In a sexual system where adultery is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find a bed mate. In a totally liberal economic system certain people accumulate considerable fortunes; others stagnate in unemployment and misery. In a totally liberal sexual system certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude

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On the question of art and mistrust:

We should mistrust
picturesque people
we should mistrust
old master painting
we should even mistrust painting
painted without mistrust

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Remember when 33,371 college sophomores wrote an essay on problematizing desire. Which isn’t, in itself, problematizing the problem with problematizing the desire, but emblematizing it:

When Richard Rorty​ wrote, in one of his many familiar pragmatist pronouncements, that the only way you can tell if something is true is if it helps you get the life you want, it sounded either like a provocative assertion or another advertisement, masquerading as epistemology, for consumer capitalism.

But in all delusive self-important seriousness, does pedagogy still encourage the formation of drawing groups in college art studios and do they or do they not continue to pass around a woven collection basket which may or may not be wood to pay nude models to do classical or classicist takes on the human form? Is it now Venmo? Or still cash? Or is the nude gone the way of the naked? Do the cool kids still use charcoal brushes?

No one to witness and adjust, no one to drive the car, and because of that or despite that, we forget which, these pure products going crazy

Have I had occasion to tell how often I sit up in the middle of the night, with tears welled in my eyes from yawning, not from grief or sodden depression, and sleep remains well beyond my waking grasp? So I lay and stare in the dark, considering how incredible it all is, all the different real and phantom events that had to collide and jostle and integrate into this disjointed semblance of a stitched together life to reach this moment that defies legibility, and then plunge down into the grave depth of recognition that what Seneca would say is the shortness of life is just a series of dumb choices meant to put off living.

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Like this insomnia right here in the now. Who knew Joan Miro was a man?

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Of course it’s inevitable that I will tomorrow see someone in bathing suit rocketing down a five story waterside with a tattoo of amor fati emblazoned on a torso.  Acres of flesh, boiling and reddened, and all kinds of effrontery, proof positive that what children deem fun is sometimes just a thing to be suffered through, but there may be encoded in the day a moment or two like that, which stand as a discrete time-symbol specifically held out to just the Me Myself, a true gift of a moment to decipher and be struck dumb by, like esoteric Straussian texts or the shifting currents of the Bosphorus running from Istanbul all the way, in time, to Constantinople.

I don’t think you can begin with what you should end up with, or how things, in the largest sense of that word, hang together, in the largest sense of that word

Feel the tide shifting back from years of pseudo libertine permissiveness to a slow and patient acceptance of the cloak of the penitent.  The fields lie fallow, restrictions flower with every breath, and so long as there is routine and ascetic primacy the question about how come we aren’t happy and rich and lathered in fecundity need not come up. By choice this barren desert. By necessity this well-worn circular path. What is good in the way of belief is not incorrigible, but subject of revision and discipline.

*****

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Hey mister, if you’re so smart, how come you ain’t rich? What’s the point, spending all that time wallowing in the mud of your own mind, keeping tabs in books to go back to? You do that for what, just in case you need to remind you that they say what you think they say? Your back is crooked and your hands are soft and your mama didn’t love you and your daddy is a stranger but not to the man you think is your daddy. What gives? How come somebody has to be dead and consecrated to get you to pay them attention? What’s all this purity in unhappiness about? To what end? You don’t like girls? You don’t like to go so fast that everything might tip over and end? You don’t like to strain against your body and find out if it can do more, to the point of puking your guts out and then getting up the next morning and doing it all again? You don’t want to even try to be in your body, to feel in every pore? You don’t even want to try to be enjoyed and enjoyable, to spread yourself thin in the thickness of things? And here you sit, empty pocketed and rot-gutted to beat it all. All that time trying to be learned, and not even a medium size pot to piss in. Just a stumblebum playacting at being a mandarin.

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Thickly distributed, like Polish consonants, and unevenly distributed, like the future

I sometimes wonder if my grandparents - the off the boat (literally) immigrant ones - would write notes to themselves in their native language or in Americanized English.

I have furniture my grandfather built including a bedside stand with three drawers and there is pencil scrawl which I can’t discern to be English.

They must’ve thought it strange how completely assimilated - not merely imitative - my life was to what was to them an adopted country. One traveled to by choice, but also foreign.

Maybe aging is waking to the idea of being a descendant and potentially having descendants, a series of events long before and long after this pulse of consciousness winked into and out of being.

Ok sure but aren’t you forgetting Biggie Smalls?

The Italian mafia and RICO, a removable abscess runs into a cauterizing scalpel. Gerald Stern could no longer make exculpatory rabbits emanate from black hats once he became a witness.

And the come up at the same time of the redemption arc rappers who didn’t have to do crime but could rap about having done crime, about how Christmas missed us, and 80% or more of the literati couldn’t track it, but the youngsters could and did and some of them fell in love with language then and there and only later came to see the same patterns, the same magic in the canon but without any preening pose of false fidelity to the idea that it amounts to a closed off pinnacle of human achievement.

———) Irish Ballads are ballads and narcocorridos are too.

——-) Ether is not the bullet or the ballot, but it stands as art sure as Richard Corey does.

————-) Souled American is a distilled howl of discontent and also why shouldn’t we all do better.

————-) It’s easy to forget that yes we can answered to a yearning that originates in Whitman.

————-) It’s easy to discern that the journey to the end of the night is execrable and still ache from its beauty.

A closed casket escapade

I learned what some had called the dignity of work by putting a three foot ruler into the depths of an embedded fuel tank to measure the levels of dyed diesel and 87 octane gas. This was before we grew corn to have more fuel trucks. We could smoke on the job but could not buy cigarettes. We could ring up twelve packs of Bud diesel and MGD, paid for out of our $4.25 an hour wages, and sneak it out into the back in empty cardboard boxes.

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I carded a 38 year old once, and he yelled at me.  Said he was coming from his dad’s wake.  Everyone is, I want my 15 year old self to have responded.

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I remember one local drunk who apparently did excellent finish carpentry and could charge to an account of his general but we were only supposed to let him charge one case each day, usually before noon and sometimes shortly after we opened.  He would spit on the floor and then look at me like I should immediately come and clean it up. With a mop i suppose.

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We used cleaning spray on the hot dog machine because it seemed easier than scraping distaff chuff of hot dog grease.  The hot dogs would have bubbles on them.  No one who was willing to feast on a gas station hot dog thought twice about this

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Once an adult came in leading a large bellowing developmentally disabled teenager into the bathroom. They left soiled underwear on the floor. Didn’t buy anything. I left it for the manager who made $11 an hour.

There comes a moment you realize other people are not interchangeable

There comes a moment a person traditionally considered to be smart and unique is slapped aside the head with dumbness and walks willingly squeezed into a chute of sameness.

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There comes a moment when a hovering docile bee abided by is swiped   at and a young adoring believer aims the plane at the deck of the ship, pirouetting through a volley from the 8 inch guns.

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There comes a moment when a poet steals a line as thoughtlessly and inevitably as lust invalidates a marriage, bites like a noiseless patient spider the cadence from a previous incantation of the world. this rescrawling of a blank space inside our souls reverberates in other unexpected places, a blooming blight for which there is not yet conceived any functional form of penicillin.

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There comes a moment of fashioning that is no longer feasting, as if making myself up as I go along in the same desolate rescrawled space were a mountain, the eye a beholder, and the terrorizing task of up up up the shiftless specimen endlessly endures.

The smile of the Mona Lisa is the stigmata of original sin

Cosmology is a consolation, in part because it puts a positive valence on our smallness

It will not do to forget how small we are, how enmeshed in a web of incomprehension and innumeracy we remain. Contemplate a river for too long, what it is, dynamically, and then go and try to summon a way to break through the event horizon of Fermi’s paradox. Or find one and soak feet.

Contra: ask Stanislav Petrov about inconsequence and the weight of the starry night sky.

consensual metaphor too, impersonal, uncoercive, democratic metaphor

Argue not concerning God and despise riches.

How many inkpots have been spilled to describe the abundance mindset, millions of words signifying nothing, the galling way in which wanting more always leaves wanting more.

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death under the breast-bones, hell under the skull-bones

Piles heaped higher than a tall man’s reach, which exceeds his grasp but only in the folded lineaments of placid dreamless sleep, which ends as abruptly as a clenched fist becomes a hand extended, but with less gravitas and coils of unfocused anger. Walking numbly in the wet dew across the grass, blowing on the the steaming coffee, content with diminishing deflationary returns, poor dumb fat and happy, the borrowed ambition picked clean as a preacher’s oval plate 25 minutes after the service.

Do I stutter and stumble over myself? Very well, then I stutter and stumble over myself. Wet leaves in dry creek, mind as threadbare as a wolfpack with nothing to scavenge and more running to be done yet tonight. Better to be a sophist gone aphasic, with the promise ahead of finding a path back to the word, through the word and carved out of the word, than to mine the quarries owned by another soul, with solace held out like a mirage at the working end of a pitiless desert extending to the vanishing point of the horizon in all four cardinal directions.

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Escapades in the fervent light of acknowledgment

The children want to hear adults recount stories of the youth gone wild in the before times, when the presently predominate technology did not exist and the assumed mores of the day had not rigidly set.

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And the adults want to be able to regale and cast the past in a semi heroic but not malignant light.

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Calling out for escapades - for blood letting and drunken bumbling, sexual mishaps and car crash while hitchhiking  - isn’t anything that anyone who is heedless about listening has an interest in.

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There is a small window when the children are still children - not autonomous but old enough to know not mud wrestle with a pig in school clothes - in which they are not heedless in their listening or flippant in their disavowal of past experience. 

I want to want to stay sentient and alive in that window. But I don’t really want to, and I rarely stay there. And I laugh out loud only at times that would be inopportune if anyone else was present.

In the ruthless furnace of the world, plants eat light and air and water.

Coming on five years of written muttering and calculated inversion, with shame at the hope that the collected works will be read, if not understood, and exalted, if not reified. I deflect and deflect and deflect, trying ever more elaborate knuckling of dependent clauses and conditional antecedents, in the hopes of achieving dizzy rhapsody. Of late I stage mother imaginary scripts and cryptically refer to idiosyncratic culture previously consumed as though it were a genetic marker showing a predilection for blood cancer and bone cancer. I shall establish that five years is a blink to someone with more discriminating taste who can shake a stick at this claim to inestimable provenance.

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Painting is above all translation. Ada’s partner has never been part of a boring conversation, and Tilda Swinton can confirm.

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He came from the era of the crop top and sweat-sheen tanned skin.  She was departing the era of the long white socks with green stripes and being voted most likely to be in need of naxolone.  It wasn’t love at first sight but if this were a movie and not a desolate display of mental furniture it might be pulled off if Vera Farmiga signed on to play her mother and Sydney Pollack (RIP) played a take-no-prisoners lawyer who was working feverishly to stop a corporate takeover and periodically paused from implementing the poison pill to urge the young charge in the long white socks whom he served as guardian ad litem to summon the nerve to make a move on Vera’s troubled waif girl before she overdosed already. Trent Reznor’s son would do the arpeggios. Obviously.

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It was the era where David took Peter’s corpse’s photo and held it all in close to the knives, standing rooted in one fatal spot in a studio apartment without running water and rippling with frenetic rage. In that era Our Lady of the Self-Devouring Image maintained that papa don’t preach. Ten years later, when effort took too much effort for most of them, she starred in a movie where hot wax was a foil to bring bigger doses of release to the foe, our Lady’s defender.  That coffee table book made all the pawns overeager to march a straight line to the end of the board and get slaughtered in the process. Sharon who gazed at Medusa also played a character in a movie featuring murder and lust and made smoking seem alluring.

A different era, with a different kind of necrotic malaise, with a different assemblage of know nothings careening us off the cliff.

Nostalgia for the Absolute

Nostalgia for the absolute, and there is a man taking off his shoe and chucking it at the President. Some would call him the leader of the free world, this one shoed wonder.

Nostalgia for the absolute, and I can’t quite remember in stand by me who the kid was who got hit by the train, that absence at the center who prompts the great crusade, a twin to John Cusack, the dead brother. Dead kids and dead brothers and crazy one eared anomalies who are lost to the dustbins of history but not the angels who hover silently.

Nostalgia for the absolute, when conviction and faith existed, back in the centuries when cathedrals were being built and dissenters were being defenestrated. Men feared witches and burnt women.  If there is one fixed constellation in our constitutional system, it is that craven myopic egomaniacs will elevate rent seeking above play acting at nostalgia. the atomic absolute succumbed to quarks and color and spin and gluons, but not before god rolled snake eyes.

I could spew out more, like quarters plugged into a meter, so long as we have meters and quarters and the concept of parking isn’t displaced by the concept of compassionate coups and dioramas of L-shaped battle structures with battalions filled with okies, Bronx tough guys, and quiet spoken killers from The dakotas.

Nostalgia for the absolute, or else parenthood didn’t happen and all the false stories we told around the campfire are but instantiated metonyms for our multigenerational sins. The price of progress is a relative field onto which those who lack class map out fatalities and those who can’t help themselves do not fear to tread before ending up dead. Like all the rest of us.

Every surface craves dust, for dust is the flesh of time

Consecrated space, true, but not like what you would think, or fear, when the quotation marks bracket the sacred. Different horses for different courses, and no harm in being illegible to what denizens of alter egos and deifying motives would take for worship.

I sing for my supper with a foamy sophist’s mouth, whored out to the highest bidder whose cause cashes out and whose end to be achieved can be cajoled into a talking point and zealously curated. Masked clout, claimed suction, intimated access to a personage behind the curtains - what hangs together is the appearance of the ability to deliver. That is the coin of the realm in the schizoid souk that sits in the middle of this city and stands out like a solitary star against the deep dark blackness of this nowhere. This besieged city surrounded in all directions by section line roads no one travels down that serve no purpose beyond framing in a grid the endless unharvested cornfields, clattering in the wind.

But back to consecration:  in the quiet of late night this pervading lack may pass for what self-help tomes would deem restorative.  Pay no heed that I’ve never once been mindfulness, never once succumbed to the hard husk of suffocating love. the universal standard bearer is a television strapped to the chest of a median voter.  It’s not for nothing that Parnassus isn’t mapped or couldn’t be.

How do you externalize emotion without descending into sentimentality?

The trees are still screaming, Kurt Loder, and you’ll never convince me otherwise.

Big brother number two on loop and Joe Camel on the hour every hour,

Sinking into inertia, doing nothing but questioning the accounting of amounting into anything .

kick push and kick push and kick push again.

Carving Pussy Riot into the bus stop bench and wrapping a Mike Kelley premade in gold leaf and unleaded abasement.

The kids are alright so long as the seven inches are buy two get one GED.

Sleeping it off in august Rapid City and gilding the limpid lilly in Waukegan,

From this duct taped grandeur may be mortgaged a slimming abject grandiosity,

why fail better when trying one’s betters’ patience works so well.

You might’ve had to have been there.

Good gracious it feels to hurt.

Through a gray fog of tepid sentiments

The nervous, the anxious, the self-abridging and stretched taut, the tachycardic and the leg-shakers, a dog’s breakfast of walking neuroses fill all the available seats and worry that those who stand will stare in vacant judgment until whatever occasions this assembly - no one really knows - comes into focus.

Proserpine and the dark black place

Beauty on an ass-cart

Sitting on five sacks of laundry

That wd. have been the road by Perugia

That leads out to San Piero.

Eyes brown topaz,

over brown sand,

The white hounds on the slope,

Glide of water, lights and the prore,

Silver beaks out of night,

Stone, bough over bough, lamps fluid in water,

Pine by the black trunk of its shadow

And on hill black trunks of the shadow

The trees melted in air.

“The loss of form through aimlessness, through moral slither, through the continued use of form without content, or by influences hostile to the organic nature of a form is a metamorphosis that is seedless, a stasis.”

Having units of measure at hand,

We stand churlish at a new path and

Think it fine new rising action

To run amuck into Lethe’s silver shadow

And declaim the appalling peal of a

Refurbished bell sounding

In the chastened steeple

Trees melt in the air, for sure,

And this limpid bidding of the long dead

We stoop to praise anew

Outcomes birthed from incomes, and the escapist wants nothing more than to get somewhere really real

Sick as a dog,

sheets damp and clammy from

the shiver sweats

and it seems possible

the night has itself began

to elongate

and shape shift.

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Morning chock with tasks and

early worms getting birded isn’t enough

to shake free from impudent sickness

which isn’t waiting for me to traverse

the eleven steps into the soft hazy noon of the bathroom

But comes up as soon as feet hit floor

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Dab dab don’t rub the slick sheen

Leftover of what has been wrought from a meal it seems ages ago having eaten

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And hours or days later

still comes the sweats and shivers,

an unnursed body married to flayed ego

like soutine’s meat hanging on abased display,

but with no flaneur passing by the window or

sauntering through the white box gallery

to take me in and feed me

to my own lonesome company

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Alone and unwell,

candle burning to compete with

the smell of the stain

that has effloresced

into the carpet’s fibers,

not so faint

that it can’t yet be glimpsed,

waiting for yet more morning and

what might pass for respite

from this sharp shriek of a night

which might have more flaws and

more fissures in store

but it’s hard to fathom how

Thanatos Generalized v. Green Emergence of Dream

It is the cruelest month but you need not accept that as fact.

Choosing not to accept facts can be like choosing not to accept that actions have consequences, that squirrelly responses to direct questions can decimate whatever momentum toward clarity was building. Lightning in a bottle is a desultory fiction that we seduce ourselves into thinking an improvement on the real live wild thing.

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I miss the clarifying moment that would come in the predawn stillness like you miss sitting on the edge of the tailgate of your father’s pick-up with the garage door up listening to a soft steady rain, kicking the heel of one foot with the toe of the other.

Newness is an affliction. The logic of obsolescent design is a curse. Documenting experience as a precursor and condition of its authenticity is an affliction. Pic or it didn’t happen is a curse.

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it is also “against” death in the sense that it seeks to “defeat death,” to magically, mystically, apotropaically make death die purely through the force of its sentences, presenting its wordings as warding spells to annul the reaper or at least dull his scythe.

J Cohen.

Let Hypnos have a say.

The ascetic’s last pleasure is blaming you for all he has forgone.

Reading Yeats on Blake, and Blake on Milton, and Elliot on Blake, and Milton on divorce, and Mlinko on Koethe, and Heaney on Yeats, and Hofmann on Murray, Solie, Seidel, Lowell, Bishop, Schuyler, Goethe, Heine - Hofmann on a shopping list, an obituary of a tepid life lived in the interregnum, on anything that causes his pen to scrawl on paper.

The phenomenology of a sigh.  The epistemology of a claimed infidelity.  The futility of a clasp on this living hand, now earnestly grasping. The causal vector of a distracted driver. The slow spreading of a spilled secret across the dead leaves by which this enlivening conversation occurs. Where Have You Been?