a wildflower, and endangered plant, a trail closed for restoration. the dog wanders. seconds filled with detail, scent of rotted something in the freezer, a cool humid breeze brushes dry foothills. she sniffs, sticks her head all the way in. i tell you this is not like it ever was. returning to the same but completely changed. this other me. a distant imagined you. the dog, like the path, seems to intuit direction. morning evening birds, this isn't the desert at all. rocks underfoot, I am thinking that there was a moment when I would have wondered otherwise. but in this, exactly, there is no other present. no example of a replaced moment. a dog sleeps under the desk and nothing has happened, not before I thought you existed, nor is there momentum toward a future struggle. it is this. two dogs jump under the showers of a garden hose. one dog watches. one dog sleeps. the image stands still with no purpose. that is the lesson.

1.
Can you dare encounter each detail, a personality, in relation, a situation. We are all in context. She wandered across the room: grey carpet, grey walls, the scent she remembered used to waft through hallways, mingle over letters received from far away. An earlier comfortable moment, that is, in terms of not knowing so little for so long. How to relate each feeling encountered, that is, shredded fingernails, hair tightly curled, blemished skin. That is, an inability to process emotion. Temperament. Holes in the wall. Self flagellation. Verbal abuse from the inside out.

2.
Describe your own specific location:

Concrete. Moving layers of human built not nature. Planned, usable, landscaped. Wild Detroit. Birds, overgrowth, taking over empty lots, spaces, wildlife call it home. Crumbled sidewalks covered in weeds. New gardens using space among impromptu wilderness.

3.
What's your story?

4.
History of economic turmoil. Disturbed dreams of suburbia. Fleeing city grounds. Undone. History of mixed emotion. Stay. Leave. Stranded. Abandoned and crumbling. History of a city full of profit. Lingers in shadows of monuments: an old train station, high ceilings, frescoes. What grows around in through. Write your story. Years of sediment. Emotional rubble. Graffiti consequences. Art in public where once stood capitalism's empire. The auto center of industry. The self(identity) in context. History of emotional abandon. Grey.

revolt is continuous
the space of a body in space
pieces cohere, dissolve, calculate
coins, instruction, an orange hue
wafting
smooth tones linger
wasting precariously
why imagine any
future
refuse
choice

number the sections in order to tell
truth grey mist
every day is otherwise
but need
fake photos fake plants
remember
blue sky decorated streets characters
colored in crayon
outlines
striped
hold distance at length
with or without lyrics
chords vibrate
decades the false progression
looping each nervous intention
scared scarred diverge
neatly censored (sensory) concrete
seeps

mostly inhibit decline rancor aggressive viral or a stairway
of iron tells otherwise, choose a word write it in parts one
section after another list pleasure weighted over a list

cat crawl spiral iron
mint ice in summer
bowling after hours

can you this page cut at the edge missing words display
a new sparkle, or pretend, at least walking one distance

or another
focus each line

an extended visual moment. flame. scattered. a camera shifted microsecond. your wild hair. my manic laugh. there was talk and sound. in that instant. a wish, a beginning with inarticulate syllables. repeat the number 30. count. repeat. a sentence with no predicate stands still. flame scatters suspended. illuminates. repetition with a shift, slight, clear.

from Plot by Claudia Rankine

10:12 pm

Is it allowed? Am I, as a descendant of particulars, unneeded times, permitted the thing and more? This world, its worst is real. What doesn't hurt, ticking past, what doesn't intersect? Our destinations recalled, our points of fracture, of limbs crushed to memory, no more than experience, I am too aware of other ways.


Still Life

A draft enters. A sketchy gust. Blown is the woman standing within her likeness. To her left the sun needs to be drawn but her hands are the shape cradling her breasts, keeping her nipples in place. Each breast is the rest floating within metonymy. Her swollen scape keeps her awake. In its milky silence she feels distaste. She holds still. She waits. The draft draws dust into her eyes. Her eyes tear until her outline dislodges, dilutes, blurs. In the time it takes to fix her face the moon is drawn quartered.

from Branches Without Leaves
an essay on a word

4.
In terms of grief, it’s a matter of time. This is what they say. But it is not what one hears. The words are intangible. The notion of time, of grief, of what has even been lost is not conceivable. There is no time. There is only time. What is time. There is only this.

Grief caused by loss. Death. Displacement. Deconstruction. There are symptoms, treatments, complications. All of these only equal moving through stages in time. Deny. Anger. Be numb. No sense of time passing, not passing, standing still, falling.

So many people show up for the funeral. From all over. Many were here for the wedding. Tell stories, look at pictures. One night we drink beer at Mike’s favorite bar down the street. The next day his dad gets up to speak during the service. We all hold our breaths, don’t hold our tears. He tells us to have faith in what happens next. We have lunch in the same room where we ate ribs and corn on the cob at the rehearsal dinner almost five years ago. You were with me then. I don’t know how things came to this.

from Branches Without Leaves

5.


Cathy Caruth explains that the traumatic neurosis is “not the reaction to any horrible event but, rather, the peculiar, and perplexing experience of survival” and asks the question “what does it mean to survive?”

The pathology or neurosis is not in the original event, but in the haunting repetition of the image or event that takes hold of the traumatized in different manifestations, and for which there may be no understanding. The obviously traumatic event for both family and friends of victims, and the general American public is 9/11, into which there is no real access, nor does it seem possible to represent. Alongside a photo of a pile of stretchers made of wood for transporting rescued victims (or bodies) from the Trade Center wreckage, Rankine writes, “The language of description competes with the dead in the air” (82). What does it mean to survive? Caruth explains, “contemporary trauma” involves “a crisis of truth” that “extends beyond the question of individual cure and asks how we in this era can have access to our own historical experience, to a history that is in its immediacy a crisis to whose truth there is no simple access” (Trauma 6). But the stretchers were, for the most part, unnecessary. There were no bodies. At first, some few survivors of the event itself, and later, family, friends, rescue workers who experienced the event only in its aftermath, and through the loss incurred.

grey

from Branches Without Leaves
an essay on a word

9.

The rain makes her crazy. The smells. Not able to walk around outside. She takes off, runs, leaps, climbs the neighbors’ fence, gone. Only instinct, the desire to keep going. After a squirrel, a smell. She’ll endure the consequences later, now, she doesn’t think, just goes. Later, she’ll reflect on her actions from her time-out place in the basement.

When one thing disappears, something else takes its place. Sometimes it doesn’t seem like it, or it isn’t apparent. One day I was missing you, but thanked you, quietly, for giving me the opportunity to do some things: adopt Tash, listen to myself, do more yoga, sleep in the middle of the bed. One day I forgot altogether, and then remembered: Friday happy hour, eating with friends, snow in the woods, breaths instead of thoughts.

Tash is always in trouble. She runs away and climbs fences. She gets into the garbage and pulls out things to lick like wrappers or plastic bags, or things to tear into a million pieces, like empty milk cartons. Still she is all love and energy. Her whole body wiggles when I walk in the door. She sticks her nose right up against mine and stares deeply into my eyes like she knows we are connected, like she is telling me everything will be fine, we have each other. She jumps on the bed and curls up with her body pushed as close to me as possible and we keep each other warm.

Some Buddhists say that emptiness simply means inconceivable, or infinite, potential. In order to have the opportunity to realize this potential, one must surrender to complete emptiness, release attachments, trust in letting go. Pure possibility. Like a tree with no leaves, heading into spring.

from Branches Without Leaves
an essay on a word


6.
scribbled on scrap paper. you want to keep doing this into the future. sign here. date it. write it. say it. live it. the narratives we tell (ourselves). you tell hybrid stories. fact, fiction, sound misplaced, modifiers, dreams repeated as misheard memories. you decide how to narrate my past.

(Rankine: is he dead? is she dead?)

present elided by blurry images. you paint between lines you have drawn by hand.

(no one deserves to be shot 41 times.)

re-create events for some character who has my initials, is not me. I am in a room with no door, no window, a phone that doesn’t call out. when it rings I talk to you but there is no one the other end. I can’t find my stories. filed in another room I try to narrate them for you but there are no verbs, or articles, available. I realize there is no phone. I am talking to the face I imagine is you, projected on the wall. when I wake I am on the floor. suffocating. repeating the same 3 line story wondering if you can hear me. a chant. trying to catch my breath. repeat. what happened to that paper? the one you signed? in a file with my stories. the stories you told before you disintegrated on the breeze. you are in front of me. cannot speak. mumble in nonsense syllables. lips contort. my hand goes through your chest. I wake in the corner. why did you, I repeat. I crawl into the closet. curl on the floor. the dog snores. your face moves out of focus.

(Rankine: what’s the use of forgetting if its followed by dying? this is the most miserable in my life.)

Laura Mullen

"Original Material"

Laura Mullen

so fabulous...

Bride Journal

from Precarious Life

by Judith Butler

I do not think, for instance, that one can invoke the Protestant ethic when it comes to loss. One cannot say, “Oh, I’ll go through loss this way, and that will be the result, and I’ll apply myself to the task, and I’ll endeavor to achieve the resolution of grief that is before me.” I think one is hit by waves, and that one starts out the day with an aim, a project, a plan, and finds oneself foiled. One finds oneself fallen. One is exhausted but does not know why. Something is larger than one’s own deliberate plan, one’s own project, one’s own knowing and choosing.
Something takes hold of you: where does it come from? What sense does it make? What claims us at such moments, such that we are not the masters of ourselves? To what are we tied? And by what are we seized? Freud reminded us that when we lose someone, we do not always know what it is in that person that has been lost. So when one loses, one is also faced with something enigmatic: something is hiding in the loss, something is lost within the recesses of loss. If mourning involves knowing what one has lost (and melancholia originally meant, to a certain extent, not knowing), then mourning would be maintained by its enigmatic dimension, by the experience of not knowing incited by losing what we cannot fully fathom. (21-22)

On one level, I think I have lost “you” only to discover that “I” have gone missing as well. At another level, perhaps what I have lost “in” you , that for which I have no ready vocabulary, is a relationality that is composed neither exclusively of myself nor you, but is to be conceived as the tie by which those terms are differentiated and related (22).

What grief displays, in contrast, is the thrall in which our relations with others hold us, in ways that we cannot always recount or explain, in ways that often interrupt the self-conscious account of ourselves we might try to provide, in ways that challenge the very notion of ourselves as autonomous and in control. I might try to tell a story here about what I am feeling, but it would have to be a story in which the very “I” who seeks to tell the story is stopped in the midst of the telling; the very “I” is called into question by its relation to the Other, a relation that does not precisely reduce me to speechlessness, but does nevertheless clutter my speech with signs of its undoing. I tell a story about the relations I choose, only to expose, somewhere along the way, the way I am gripped and undone by these very relations. My narrative falters, as it must.
Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other, And if we’re not, we’re missing something. (23)

For if I am confounded by you, then you are already of me, and I am nowhere without you. I cannot muster the “we” except by finding the way in which I am tied to “you,” by trying to translate but finding that my own language must break up and yield if I am to know you. You are what I gain through this disorientation and loss. This is how the human comes into being, again and again, as that which we have yet to know. (49).

from Introduction to A Stein Reader

Ed. Ulla Dydo

No time, no space, no center, standard, or authority. Stein wrote in a world changed by Einstein and even more by Heisenberg and Schrodinger. She knew she was one of them, constructing for words what they had constructed for quantum mechanics. On 25 May 1928 Dorothy Dudley Harvey wrote to stein from New York...Harvey described Stein with a quotation from Russell ["Physics and Metaphysics"] as a visionary in the world of the new physics.

"Nowadays, physicists, the most hard-headed of mankind...have embodied in their technique this insubstantiality which some of the metaphysicians have so long urged in vain."
In connection with grammar I thought at once of you, and wondered, knowing little about them, if you have not been one of the metaphysicians as an artist, with whom the physicists have just caught up.

from "Things to Do Today"

by Joe Wenderoth


1. thaw the wounded

7. decrease the drama to the point of gesture, phrase, a weathered and weathering yard

10. organize and dispense an imperceptible the

19. determine the cause of the cause

22. set the famous criminals free

26. make the beautiful go to work

37. prepare the eyes for the oncoming absence of voices

42. produce a striking likeness of any one unproductive moment

53. clarify a morning posture

59. insist on the sad waste at the heart of all honest work

70. control the urge to farm

75. rehabilitate the truth tellers

77. practice saying something

79. try to fluster the bulk of language with the idea of buried faces

80. discontinue the breadth of the applicable horizon

87. mimic the open area

90. post signs indicating relevant battlefields

92. make the faithful look at us

93. weep new syllables

"54. sing of eyes freezing, thighs giving birth, what have you"
--Joe Wenderoth, "Things to Do Today"

have not into cold
a flash of cutting crisp
in the dead
of terror
shivers what freezing
birth white frost
giving new
slide screech shatter
finger
nails
lengthen scratch a
formidable horizon falls
into disrepair regard
silences in flesh
composed sweet
notes ring
fast

from Don't Let Me Be Lonely

by Claudia Rankine


Define loneliness?

Yes.

It’s what we can’t do for each other.

What do we mean to each other?

What does a life mean?

Why are we here if not for each other? (62)

relates

“Of this kind is the distinction betwixt figure
and the body figur’d; motion and the body mov’d.”

--David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature


your marble sphere my box
dimensional
the words laid one on top
across
broken letters
an articulation of history through space
on the page
who was defeated
whose artifacts
weapons

kiss me present tense against shining marble
does not move
its form holding together
molecules
straddling
how much means
across letters objects
viewed from every direction
will not simply show and tell

stories without verbs

punctuation wasted

linoleum can you bend

all the way

against yesterday

scheduled mishaps unruly

confined progress still

each hair meticulously

nails hammered into steel

without structure

in accordance with

dreams, textured

in the gaps tangle

wine, peppermint, cardboard

details

sustain sun in through the window unexpected listening masks a visual sensation narrates the lines set against her, can you tell me how and in what manner? not angry but potential, under the surface, bare tree branches of the inconceivable. hope has feathers you know, little else. concrete array of vocabulary intoned against, detour instead, storms lingering. grey orange mix with silent refrain—repeat and hold back—the coloring texture noisy scattered maneuvering. the body impulse, intoxication, monologues of manic silence.

from "Poetry is Not a Luxury"

by Audre Lorde

If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core--the fountain--of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds.

For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt--of examining what those ideas feel like being lived on Sunday morning at 7am, after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth, mourning our dead--while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while we taste new possibilities and strengths.

one notices the slivers of pale flesh in the ash. she is come undone. flakes scatter a breeze it will be impossible to close our eyes without the smell, of ash, of flesh. heat amplified against flame and a forgotten history, never recorded by victors or anyone else. we tie our ends with neon ribbon, pretend there is a common story that would make us feel better, that we could remember fondly, that we could displace into lines of feeling. Pale, gruesome, emotion. she led us to believe there was another way. instead, coming to this.

from "Proportion Surviving"

by Renee Gladman

For years I had known that if there was a wall between where I was and where I needed to be, I did not want it there. Some people have personal goals that are demanding. Certain goals make it impossible to lounge around in bed.

from "Translation"

by Renee Gladman


I love this town. It's still vibrant though I have not seen anyone in years. I am not in jail--they have just gone. I cannot remember where I was when I came back to find them gone--maybe at the river or drying my hair in the hot part of the forest. All I know is the sudden ghostliness of it. Imagine having loved something for so many years that you don't see it anymore. I mean, you feel it, but so synonymously with the flow of your blood or taking in air that the beauty seems to be about you. Life was that dynamic. We could not love ourselves more. Well, imagine coming home to a one-hundred-mile expanse of beauty that you always have thought of as yourself, and finding on that day that it exists without you. Furthermore, contemplate the disturbance of that compounded by the apparent exodus of those who, in your mind, were extensions of yourself.

"You may have noticed, however, that there is frequently an irritating, if not depressing, discrepancy between our ideas and good intentions and how we act when we are confronted with the nitty-gritty details of real life situations." --Pema Chodron

from Don't Let Me Be Lonely

by Claudia Rankine

Or I remember that the last two sentences I read in Fanny Howe's Tis of Thee before falling asleep the previous night were: "I learned to renounce a sense of independence by degrees and finally felt defeated by the times I lived in. Obedient to them."

Or, well, I tried to fit language into the shape of usefulness. The world moves through words as if the bodies the words reflect did not exist. The world, like a giant liver, receives everyone and everything, including these words: Is he dead? Is she dead? The words remain an inscription on the surface of my loneliness. This loneliness stems from a feeling of uselessness. The Coetzee's Costello says in her fictional lecture, "for instants at a time I know what it is like to be a corpse."

in one postcard, an image of a girl, layered, purple, half smiling. the landscape, distinct and European, old buildings, a cafe, sipping coffee facing the street watching each passerby stroll through life continuous and still. captured, the intent of sharing adventure, a scene of symbolic space: we are here, we have discovered architecture, we may decide to never return home. romantic notions of food, drink, visual collaboration of time split and standing.

from Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart

by Mark Epstein

Most of us exist in a state similar to that of Freud's friends. Our minds are running on without us, keeping us at a distance from that which we love, or from love itself. We justifiably complain of feeling unreal because we are busy keeping ourselves at arm's length from the biggest reality of all--the transience of which we are a part. Rather than permitting a flow, we impose an interruption that interferes with satisfaction or fulfillment. As my rabbi discovered, successfully permitting an intimate connection requires the ability to embrace impermanence. The flower that blooms for only a single night is indeed a sight to behold. (72)

from Retallack's Experimental Feminine

Which is to say, experiment and tradition should, in an ideal world, form the dialogic energy that creates vital cultures. In fact nothing of interest happens without this synergy which is not to say that it’s business as usual. Our Western cultural image resembles a brain with a severed corpus callosum—each side functionally innocent of the other. Did an evil surgery occur while we were all asleep in one fairy tale or another? One side happily thinks everything is simple; the other side unhappily thinks everything is complex. In this chronic bifurcation, a potentially collaborative “we” is missing the fact that complex dynamics aren’t monsters lurking in forests, threatening the simple pleasures of blue skies. They are the forest. They are the blue skies. They are our entire natural-cultural environment. They may indeed consume us, but this is only a grim certainty if we don’t embrace them with respect and understanding. Since Mandelbrot presented us with computer models of the fractal geometry of nature, we have recognized the beauty in forms of chaos, which is inherently fractal. It was apparent before in turbulent romantic landscapes, but not yet identified as global dynamic principle. Perhaps our dysfunction, at this point has less to do with a paucity of intellectual and aesthetic evidence than the lingering wound of Occam's razor regularly sharpened by market logics. Chaos theorists may tell us that things are not as simple as we’d like them to be, but can we afford to believe that?

The Clem in Winter

Berlinale to screen restored 'Metropolis' at Brandenburg Gate

released or in process can you put the pieces or maintain a puzzle assortment of wandering each color like Picasso in shapes across the image reflected against my memory having heard you sleep like red or orange in displaced lines curving and undecided can you reflect this intended or forgotten sometimes there are dots or stripes a geometry of body breast simultaneous association can you place or replace with each new thought (specifically) (constructed) for this or every purpose rearrange the letters the lines with a color one color for each notion though sometimes notions are confused having listened to misplaced memories ((re)constructed) a process of coping antipathy surviving a modern visual aesthetic with too many possible immediate layered inflection or innuendo how many ways can you see this me the clarification of disorder explosion of detail communication of the impossibly simple.

yellow wall swirl the bird she says listen to nothing no song no idea in order to in the face of without regard a constant effort. a constant turning fear that most desired fragmented whole of sounding cacophonous as if without sound. silver shards remind me to sit alone against the wall, yellow, burning winter shimmer quick turns fear into grey, along the edges, a refrain. moving parts slow quell repeat a soft hum replaces chatter endless reason, the edge of nothing. the blind can only hear everything. close your eyes, listen every silence.

from Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart

by Mark Epstein


As a student of human neurosis, Freud was familiar with the mind's tendency to interfere with its own satisfaction. In his own way he understood something of what the Buddha explained to Angulimala. In his descriptions of the obsessional character, for example, he gave great credence to the power of the mind to interrupt the flow of gratifying experience. He called this a psychological defense and gave it the name isolating. Speaking primarily in sexual terms, Freud described how the thinking mind interferes with experience and removes the possibility of successful contact. Erotic experience depends on the ego's striving to become one with that which it desires, Freud recognized, but this is also a potent source of anxiety. We fear that which we most desire, the falling away of self that accompanies a powerful connection. In a moment of successful contact...there is a brief but exuberant unity, a touching or a connection in which we forget ourselves and are enriched. Our selves are reconfigured in this process. But Freud was witness to how people restrict this capacity by holding themselves back. It is as if we have a "taboo on touching," he said. (57-58)


Once Freud figured out that the purpose of so much of our thinking is to isolate us from the flow of gratifying experience, he began to see this dynamic in many of his friends and patients. Much of the liberating promise of early psychoanalysis stemmed from its attempts to cure this isolating tendency of the human mind. But scattered within Freud's writings we find references to his frustrations in actually effecting the kinds of changes he was reaching for. He thought deeply about the reasons for the self-imposed isolation of the thinking mind but had difficulty translating his insights into a method of change. While his insights were revelatory, he did not have the method of the Buddha within his grasp. (61)

from Butler's Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence

Perhaps, then, it should come as no surprise that I propose to start, and to end, with the question of the human (as if there were any other way for us to start or end!). We start here not because there is a human condition that is universally shared--this is surely not yet the case. The question that preoccupies me in the light of recent global violence is, Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And, finally, What makes for a grievable life? Despite our differences in location and history, my guess is that it is possible to appeal to a "we," for all of us have some notion of what it is to have lost somebody. Loss has made a tenuous "we" of us all. And if we have lost, then it follows that we have had, that we have desired and loved, that we have struggled to find the conditions for our desire. We have all lost in recent decades from AIDS, but there are other losses that afflict us, from illness and from global conflict; and there is the fact as well that women and minorities, including sexual minorities, are, as a community, subjected to violence, exposed to its possibility, if not its realization. This means that each of us is constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies--as a site of desire and physical vulnerability, as a site of a publicity at once assertive and exposed. Loss and vulnerability seem to follow from our being socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing those attachments, exposed to others, at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure. (20)

on process

copied from Kristine's Flickerfit post: New

From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, on process philosophy page:

The philosophy of mind is another strongpoint of process philosophizing. It feels distinctly uncomfortable to conceptualize people (persons) as things (substances) -- oneself above all -- because we resist flat-out identification with our bodies. However, there is no problem with experiential access to the processes and patterns of process that characterize us personally -- our doings and undergoings, either individually or patterned into talents, skills, capabilities, traits, dispositions, habits, inclinations, and tendencies to action and inaction are, after all, what characteristically define a person as the individual he or she is. Once we conceptualize the core "self" of a person as a unified manifold of actual and potential process -- of action and capacities, tendencies, and dispositions to action (both physical and psychical) -- then we thereby secure a concept of personhood that renders the self or ego experientially accessible, seeing that experiencing itself simply consists of such processes. What makes my experience mine is not some peculiar qualitative character that it exhibits but simply its forming part of the overall ongoing process that defines and constitutes my life. The unity of person is a unity of experience -- the coalescence of all of one's diverse micro-experience as part of one unified macro-process. (It is the same sort of unity of process that links each minute's level into a single overall journey.) On this basis, the Humean complaint -- "One experiences feeling this and doing that, but one never experiences oneself" -- is much like the complaint of the person who says "I see him picking up that brick, and mixing that batch of mortar, and troweling that brick into place, but I never see him building a wall." Even as "building the wall" just exactly is the complex process that is composed of those various activities, so -- from the process point of view -- one's self just is the complex process composed of those various physical and psychic experiences and actions in their systemic interrelationship.

in a moment of aimless falling powder burns
cold the insufferable closed system undoing
undying where do you think it is possible
that he has gone, an ounce measured once
ink splayed played, notes left on a grave
it is not in the timing everything in space
simultaneous suffering an explosion unexpected
funeral of detail and control, he will have been always
as winter, my ear to concrete opens quiet into detour
into grace, chatter clatter stilled breathing empty
tones of earth of hum, his voice an atmosphere attitude
having lived, having loved


--in memory of mike grzymkowski

what can be safely carried
like crows cooked with oatmeal
or left alone
toss advice, crack it like an ax
breathe fire and marginalia

what can be wrong
washed, tolerated unfamiliar
under a leaf realize
little green bullets
or blackberries

drive a truck through each false
allusion
and recede

water, like small silver bells
waits, distant
moving through molecules of desert air
eating every saturday, teach it
to answer

Lyn Hejinian from A Border Comedy

Just as you’ll note that breathlessly though wordily I’ve been making micro-
scopically libidinous movements
Toward your nebulous rosy and always retreating body
Which feathers a mention
And needles in question
And is ever in flight between
But I will have it
The daring statement unites us
Going by the longest way—the roundness (211)

Lyn Hejinian from "The Rejection of Closure"

In the gap between what one wants to say (or what one perceives there is to say) and what one can say (what is sayable), words provide for a collaboration and a desertion. We delight in our sensuous involvement with the materials of language, we long to join words to the world--to close the gap between ourselves and things--and we suffer from doubt and anxiety because of our inability to do so.

Yet the incapacity of language to match the world permits us to distinguish our ideas and ourselves from the world and things in it from each other. The undifferentiated is one mass, the differentiated is multiple. The (unimaginable) complete text, the text that contains everything, would in fact be a closed text. It would be insufferable.

Daily Tao

Sunday, 17 January, 2010 :: 29


Do you want to improve the world?
I don't think it can be done.

The world is sacred.
It can't be improved.
If you tamper with it, you'll ruin it.
If you treat it like an object, you'll lose it.

There is a time for being ahead,
a time for being behind;
a time for being in motion,
a time for being at rest;
a time for being vigorous,
a time for being exhausted;
a time for being safe,
a time for being in danger.

The Master sees things as they are,
without trying to control them.
She lets them go their own way,
and resides at the center of the circle.

sonnet

"Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom."
--Shakespeare Sonnet 116


That breaking lesson purchased and forgotten
creeps between time's appetite, keen
like maladies eager, appealing every sense
shaken, unknown, fair past reason
music, without name, disgrace, full of blame.
Bliss, once proved straight
Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame
breathless living lips blush, a gentle gait.
False, or foul sweet fingers sound
doubting impediments prove, urge, accuse.
Accidents dream in red, delight cruel
raven eyes surmise, wandering slander.
What with bold reason hated
Ever perfumed, only pleasing, faded.

each crystal turning
toward a hint
knowing passersby shed
caffeine while i no longer
faces in a crowd
detail relation between
unnoticed and meaning
carried shining like
nickels
held firm
while every minute
sheds
a rock displaced
changing
the landscape

Carla Harryman on HOW2 Now Available!

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Fugue of Death
by Paul Celan Translated by Christopher Middleton
Black milk of daybreak we drink it at nightfall we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night we drink it and drink it we are digging a grave in the sky it is ample to lie there A man in the house he plays with the serpents he writes he writes when the night falls to Germany your golden hair Margarete he writes it and walks from the house the stars glitter he whistles his dogs up he whistles his Jews out and orders a grave to be dug in the earth he commands us strike up for the dance Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night we drink you in the morning at noon we drink you at nightfall drink you and drink you A man in the house he plays with the serpents he writes he writes when the night falls to Germany your golden hair Margarete Your ashen hair Shulamith we are digging a grave in the sky it is ample to lie there He shouts stab deeper in earth you there and you others you sing and you play he grabs at the iron in his belt and swings it and blue are his eyes stab deeper your spades you there and you others play on for the dancing Black milk of daybreak we drink you at nightfall we drink you at noon in the mornings we drink you at nightfall drink you and drink you a man in the house your golden hair Margarete your ashen hair Shulamith he plays with the serpents He shouts play sweeter death's music death comes as a master from Germany he shouts stroke darker the strings and as smoke you shall climb to the sky then you'll have a grave in the clouds it is ample to lie there Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night we drink you at noon death comes as a master from Germany we drink you at nightfall and morning we drink you and drink you a master from Germany death comes with eyes that are blue with a bullet of lead he will hit in the mark he will hit you a man in the house your golden hair Margarete he hunts us down with his dogs in the sky he gives us a grave he plays with the serpents and dreams death comes as a master from Germany your golden hair Margarete your ashen hair Shulamith.
By Paul Celan, translated by Christopher Middleton, and published by HarperCollins in The Poetry of Our Own World, edited by Jeffrey Pain. © 2000 by Christopher Middleton. Used with permission. All rights reserved.

Judith Butler

Although we are compelled to give an account of our various selves, the structural conditions of that account will turn out to make a full such giving impossible. The singular body to which a narrative refers cannot be captured by a full narration, not only because the body has a formative history that remains irrecoverable by reflection, but because primary relations are formative in ways that produce a necessary opacity in our understanding of ourselves. An account of oneself is always given to another, whether conjured or existing, and this other establishes the scene of address as a more primary ethical relation than a reflexive effort to give an account of oneself. Moreover, the very terms by which we give an account, by which we make ourselves intelligible to ourselves and to others, are not of our making. They are social in character, and they establish social norms, a domain of unfreedom and substitutability within which our “singular” stories are told. (Giving an Account of Oneself 20-21)

from The Geographical History of America

by G. Stein


Volume I

Money is what words are.
Words are what money is.
Is money what words are
Are words what money is.
There can be no romance without nature, there can be no money without words.
There can be nature without words.
Nature is here used in the sense of natural scenery and what land is.
And so nature is not what money is. (461)

indiscriminately

or wander

each space according

fragments

having not been

an array of detail

layered placing claims

each settled point

lingering

wander

complete

ancient timing
unraveled
whisper
over
colored flags
the unheard
stuck in my throat
smoke
flawless
i am always falling down
toes
or radiance
unhinged
bend at the waist
further
into the earth
whisper your
treasure
laden
cartoon
images
the narrator
translates broken scenes
recalled (remember take back etc)
her character hitchhiking across
states angles colors
of flags
whispering
prayers
against time
disperse

from Writing Down the Bones

by Natalie Goldberg

Go Further

Push yourself beyond when you think you are done with what you have to say. Go a little further. Sometimes when you think you are done, it is just the edge of beginning. Probably that's why we decide we're done. It's getting too scary. We are touching down onto something real. It is beyond the point when you think you are done that often something strong comes out.

lucid dancing scattered

an orchestra leaves

whipped pasted wet

against ambition

faltering flagrant attempts

he said

consume or be

wasted return over time petals fall

over his tone marking time

one leaf or

another

lift lament red petals against

horns sound the dramatic finish

fall scattered dances where

otherwise would waste

intention carefully

orchestrated until such time

minus attention

muted shades

falter

or

cling

rapid

an arc of orange

cleverly layers a wild

union

of sorts dangling

just before

array

misplaced

a road map of any

state

curls over layers

colored

blank

a voice solid

deep

in a memory

still happening

arc among

wild blades

hue

pasted

clever

orange

before

voice (mis)heard

that once

winding off the map

flames

behind ever having

announced

union

curls

solid

clever

a blade leans

await

past reflected

here

intonation

sound of

a greek myth

set to

voice

kickin

a new tale

recitation

against lyric

flow

make each word

stand slam

consonant

sliding

assonance

alliterate

characters

quenching

kickin

beat this

barely

listen

off

the

page

Gertrude Stein

more from the Geographical History

Now you take anything that is written and you read it as a whole it is not interesting it begins as if it is interesting but it is not interesting because if it is going to have a beginning and middle and ending it has to do with remembering and forgetting and remembering and forgetting is not interesting it is occupying but it is not interesting.
And so that is not writing.
Writing is neither remembering nor forgetting neither beginning or ending.
Being dead is not ending it is being dead and being dead is something. Think of any crime of course being dead is something.
Now and that is a great American contribution only any flat country has and can be there that being dead is actually something.
Americans are like that.
No Europeans and so no European can ever invent a religion, they have too much remembering and forgetting too much to know that human nature is anything.
But it is not because it is not interesting no not any more interesting than being drunk. Well who has to listen to anything. Any European but not any American.

Gertrude Stein

from The Geographical History of America or the relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind


Part IV

The question of identity


A Play

I am I because my little dog knows me.
Which is he.
No which ishe.
Say it with tears, no which is he.
I am I why.
So there.
I am I where.


Act I Scene III

I am I because my little dog knows me.


Act I Scene I

Now that is the way I had played that play.
But not at all not as one is one.


Act I Scene I

Which one is there I am I or another one.
Who is one and one or one is one.
I like a play of acting so and so.
Leho Leho.
Leho is a name of a Breton.
But we in America are not displaced by a dog oh no no not at all not at all at all displaced by a dog.

The Clem 2

The Clem 1

eclogue

in order to reciprocate

we were talking about concrete

details

an urban setting

history in the present

(he was shot for appearing just

so)

respond to each line

with a new image

oatmeal

butterflies

the problem with

trash

in the city

musical quality

of poems

about garbage

political demonstrations

give something back

when even words

sounding through spaces

keep us in relation

Ed Roberson from City Eclogue

Height and Deep Song


Pulled by the full disaster's view of thrown
upward to the look-out's level
crying

from that ledge the song of what it comes
down to
but unable to jump strapped in

with the wonder the words can come up with
stripped in the scramble of birth spill--
the speechless

cover binding
the know this
on the spine

the body arrives screaming written
all over it

what breath is
then writing

more of

each hot fuss pink kills

the lyric tangled goodbye

she wrote crisp turning

trees in wind step

in time instrumental montage

speeding a beat bodies float in sync

outside of

the abstract quality of

clear paper sliding across sand

a display of chaos

wind screeching across years

of misunderstood

she curls half underneath the covers

and I think

trains passing through the dark

sound less violent

fading instead

like images without photos

that disappear over distance

the imagined

the almost

the near

potential

an arc of voice

carried distant fades

splashing shades sing along

roaring flames

a coral touch

of leaf

crumbling under

constructed words sculpted

into shapes sleeping

unsent

only as close as parallel

lines on the horizon

from Daily Tao Tuesday, 29 September, 2009 :: 41

Thus it is said:
The path into the light seems dark,
the path forward seems to go back,
the direct path seems long,
true power seems weak,
true purity seems tarnished,
true steadfastness seems changeable,
true clarity seems obscure,
the greatest art seems unsophisticated,
the greatest love seems indifferent,
the greatest wisdom seems childish.

butterflies fall like stars

oatmeal, or the truth

stolen

crack an egg, sharpen it

carry bells and twist them

into glimmering silence

pocket, sleep, imagine

the sky burning

a breathing miasma

of crows

inflated, starving

catching individual seconds

lost and floating

against every passing

inclination

it becomes apparent
that in times
turned
keep twisting to the
apparently
move further with each
reverting to
keep breathing
a defense strategy
repeats
slow down that
even now freshly
slow
a new packaging
covers the same
try the other side
what matters
twist
release everything
always in retrospect
from the inside
apparently
still
stretch
scared
face the other way
unable to hold to

insist upon

each word representing

or at least spelled

accordingly

stand aside

patiently

encouraging

until each syntactical error

is acknowledged

cannot take back characters

sent across wires

first hold each thought

it is best

to linger

with a pencil

outline

each word

like skin remembered

before having met

manage this communication via

sense, a shiver of skin

tasting a future

imaginary

a motor hums, hands lightly touch

the back of

settling toward this

possible

turning over a list

clarification

or suggested intention

always before an encounter

of mismanaged

faith

afterward, as the jeans hang

a strategy of

visualizing

what is your motivation

would be prudent

to assume

or communicate in virtual

time

hanging

a strategy of enclosed spaces

hum relieves shaking

toward the image

denim, faded, impossible to

see the fog of recall

hanging around shoulders

thighs

impossible to see before

or after

the distance

from that

to this

from DailyTao.org

Thursday, 10 September, 2009 :: 22

If you want to become whole,
let yourself be partial.
If you want to become straight,
let yourself be crooked.
If you want to become full,
let yourself be empty.
If you want to be reborn,
let yourself die.
If you want to be given everything,
give everything up.

The Master, by residing in the Tao,
sets an example for all beings.
Because he doesn't display himself,
people can see his light.
Because he has nothing to prove,
people can trust his words.
Because he doesn't know who he is,
people recognize themselves in him.
Because he has no goal in mind,
everything he does succeeds.

When the ancient Masters said,
"If you want to be given everything, give everything up,"
they weren't using empty phrases.
Only in being lived by the Tao can you be truly yourself.

highlight the hours in layers
time it
from one category to another
you were never listening
nod
hum
mismatched lyrics
each space a specific
bells
reminders
pages of detail in order
to arrive
at exactly this

days
events
a wish, underlined
no longer worthwhile to hear
single notes
in correspondence

instead
schedule
the rest
of

the only thing moving

1.
blind manifest of
waste(ing) verbena
(scent seeps steep)
you curve above an
inflection
blind wither(ing)
speed covers red
or scaly
(a steep scent)
(the nape of)
blackbird over verbena
(whistling) hard ball
on parade
seeps


2.

hardball she called over verbena
a scaly inflection withers
red, blind, steep
the nape an angle
a blackbird a curve
on parade

cover over under a splash of green each day is new but what did you notice previously is what he said after confessing to metallic noise a skip through the park fashion design the messy details shatter each instant always turning over don’t forget what happened yesterday but do leave it behind as useful but no longer real an impression of having come so far a pink sky behind industrial jobs and pollution turning this chance into temporary use the pain to an advantage images captured sentiments fill senses the weed that flowers by chance

DailyTao.org, The Book of The Way, Day by Day

Tuesday, 1 September, 2009 :: 13


Success is as dangerous as failure.
Hope is as hollow as fear.

What does it mean that success is a dangerous as failure?
Whether you go up the ladder or down it,
your position is shaky.
When you stand with your two feet on the ground,
you will always keep your balance.

What does it mean that hope is as hollow as fear?
Hope and fear are both phantoms
that arise from thinking of the self.
When we don't see the self as self,
what do we have to fear?

See the world as your self.
Have faith in the way things are.
Love the world as your self;
then you can care for all things.



Translation by Stephen Mitchell.
Site © Copyright 2003-5 Glen Sanford.
All Rights Reserved.

traveling sideways each unexpected disintegrating on the wind a variety of textures at this moment the process of—grains of wood long and fine spread across indiscernible movement the feel of time slowed this empty space of a single note lingering—a skin irritation a humming appliance an eyelash falls without warning this lesson (in)stilled no test no outcome—taste this permanent timeless circle frozen stop here—rest

fluted lyrics a day in rain flickering as if. as if announced, invited, or the entertainment swallows any serious discussion of rain or the correct calibration of. the correct calibration of nonsense, humor, desperation having intended to continue in an affair long awaited and yet, ever so gently. ever so gently a brush, silence the wandering or wayward ever on to something more poignant or flattering what could never be this or otherwise. this or otherwise he tried to articulate without agreeing to drink first, so clever or unannounced, a generic unfulfilled wish or constant repeating car tires through rain at street level, one last hope. one last hope negotiated over mundane sci-fi and casual brushing, after each syllable placed or replaced with personal expression, the sound of your eyelashes, fluttering, intoxicated.

Daily Tao

DailyTao.org
The Book of The Way, Day by Day
Friday, 28 August, 2009 :: 9


Fill your bowl to the brim
and it will spill.
Keep sharpening your knife
and it will blunt.
Chase after money and security
and your heart will never unclench.
Care about people's approval
and you will be their prisoner.

Do your work, then step back.
The only path to serenity.



Translation by Stephen Mitchell.
Site © Copyright 2003-5 Glen Sanford.
All Rights Reserved.

act/abstract

Grace
to be born and live as variously as possible
--Frank O’Hara


circling around the finding is the part of (dis)grace, what is left in clutter or shredded notions of past ignited in present tense each word shaved off like curls of soap, carved wood ornaments, one stray hair after another. the intention of falling rock or (grace) hartigan’s colors swept into place among a social mess of history and the inevitable, each line feeling canvas on skin, each stroke trusting and failing simultaneously, collage parts into a new whole, spacing expressions of the everyday, among art or emotion, moving stillness parallel to any destination.

pieces of reflection leading blue lines scattered stories only remembered in photos, an old farm, buildings now long gone, a single moment still and content captured before the storm before waves washing over distort everything underneath. having heard your voice in my head, resonating, hold each string for a moment longer listening to each note, a voice mingling the various sounds, sweet and floating, or the rhythms of a drum in sync, in my chest, an african drum beat in 3s, weaving waking the start of something. pieces mingling, scattering, finding new form, parts of moments captured, a smile, a touch, before this distance only leftovers, left, what always remained under, washing over, lines scatter delirious and blue water meets sky at the endless horizon. where once imagined scented ideas sent on the wind, this still collapse.

at the instant of x

Brutes abstract not.

--John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding


the way that I can put each number
against the cool of your skin
lingering above
cotton

the ratio matching nature
greek symbols across the sidewalk
like hopscotch for theorists
explaining each dimension
of yard grass limb

stretching over moments
from the very first
when you stood, brown corduroy
and i listed the mathematics
of inclination

8:20

after thought
an image
scented

where have you been, i'm looking

foward, around a constellation of minutes
that may or not
exist

yesterday

between the lines

i am running and think: if only, yes, this single drop of.

pacing the day. heavy under grey.

a placard reads: falter and save your ink.

what becomes difficult to read.

i want to say: please stop by every day.

write this into your schedule.

add: a trigger of lemon-scented products reminds me of you

and floss, flossing mint-flavored.

walking in the street. sitting.

out of ink, postage, shifting intent.

wanting to add: even in that case, it could be like this.

wanting to decide to paint lines on any court.

memo

these slender pieces
of
molecule
molecule
drip
gravity holds us together

his body was filled
with the chemicals that make up flame retardant

your black saturn
so shiny and new
forgive me

the plums i didn’t eat for lunch
not sweet
fresh from the farm

have we not (don’t say evolved, don’t say adapted)
been selected for this
all along
particulates
of a symphony for example (the one repeated/repeatable refrain)

can you hum the entire movement?

an ode
to an old
acquaintance

we swallow
and breathe
in a dangerously close space

proximity of red tiles
a recording device
lines on a road
separate me (green subaru)
from

from Odes

by me


8.
No more than subtext my/your own text under every word only words falling waiting characters casting letters under your breath above my words over under (knowing something waits under forgets to take) on the opposite of wondering the opposite forgetting, a springboard, no, sill of the flower pot. Placing one letter after another placing one letter after another placing each side by side (cleverly you thought but not this quickly may I remind you) if the pace precedes (I am) each character drifting into singular space taking shape.

Lorine Niedecker

from The Granite Pail


In the great snowfall before the bomb
colored yule tree lights
windows, the only glow for contemplation
along this road

I worked the print shop
right down among em
the folk from whom all poetry flows
and dreadfully much else.

I was Blondie
I carried my bundles of hog feeder price lists
down by Larry the Lug,
I'd never get anywhere
because I'd never had suction,
pull, you know, favor, drag,
well-oiled protection.

I heard their rehashed radio barbs--
more barbarous among hirelings
as higher-ups grow more corrupt.
But what vitality! The women hold jobs--
clean house, cook, raise children, bowl
and go to church.

What would they say if they knew
I sit for two months on six lines
of poetry?

Lorine Niedecker

from The Granite Pail


I knew a clean man
but he was not for me.
Now I sew green aprons
over covered seats. He

wades the muddy water fishing,
falls in, dries his last pay-check
in the sun, smooths it out
in Leaves of Grass. He's
the one for me.

from The Wisdom of No Escape

by Pema Chodron


In Taoism there's a famous saying that goes, "The Tao that can be spoken is not the ultimate Tao." Another way you could say that, although I've never seen it translated this way, is, "As soon as you begin to believe in something, then you can no longer see anything else." The truth you believe in and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.


Holding on to beliefs limits our experiences of life. That doesn't mean that beliefs or ideas or thinking is a problem; the stubborn attitude of having to have things be a particular way, grasping on to our beliefs and thoughts, all these cause the problems. To put it simply, using your belief system this way creates a situation in which you choose to be blind instead of being able to see, to be deaf instead of being able to hear, to be dead rather than alive, asleep rather than awake.


"When you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha" means that when you see that you're grasping or clinging to anything, whether conventionally it's called good or bad, make friends with that. Look into it. Get to know it completely and utterly. In that way it will let go of itself.


Seeing when you justify yourself and when you blame others is not a reason to criticize yourself, but actually an opportunity to recognize what all people do and how it imprisons us in a very limited perspective of this world. It's a chance to see that you're holding on to your interpretation of reality; it allows you to reflect that that's all it is--nothing more, nothing less: just your interpretation of reality.

Disclosures

by Michael Palmer


1
Beneath the writing on the wall
is the writing it was designed

to obscure. The two together
form a third kind


2
There is no writing
on the wall's other side

Perhaps this lack
constitutes a fourth kind


3
Some of the writing on the wall
will be designated as truth

some as art


4
It is said to represent a mirror
of everyday life in its time


5
"Fabius Naso
talks through his asshole
and shits out his mouth"
for example


6
"Foute les Arabes"
for example


7
Certain words and images
or parts of images

have been chipped away
These often turn up for sale

at sidewalk stalls
before the walls

of other cities


8
I too have an image for sale
It's the image of a poem

and is to be found
on the reverse of this sheet

from The Wisdom of No Escape

by Pema Chodron


Our life's work is to use what we have been given to wake up. If there were two people who were exactly the same--same body, same speech, same mind, same mother, same father, same house, same food, everything the same--one of them could use what he has to wake up and the other could use it to become more resentful, bitter, and sour. It doesn't matter what you're given, whether it's physical deformity or enormous wealth or poverty, beauty or ugliness, mental stability or mental instability, life in the middle of a madhouse or life in the middle of a peaceful, silent desert. Whatever you're given can wake you up or put you to sleep. That's the challenge of now: What are you going to do with what you have already--your body, your speech, your mind?

Here's something that's very helpful to know about now. The biggest obstacle to taking a bigger perspective on life is that our emotions capture and blind us. The more sensitive we become to this, the more we realize that when we start getting angry or denigrating ourselves or craving things in a way that makes us feel miserable, we begin to shut down, shut out, as if we were sitting on the edge of the Grand Canyon but we had put a big black bag over our heads.


Life's work is to wake up, to let the things that enter into the circle wake you up rather than put you to sleep. The only way to do this is to open, be curious, and develop some sense of sympathy for everything that comes along, to get to know its nature and let it teach you what it will. It's going to stick around until you learn your lesson, at any rate. You can leave your marriage, you can quit your job, you can only go where people are going to praise you, you can manipulate your world until you're blue in the face to try to make it always smooth, but the same old demons will always come up until finally you have learned your lesson, the lesson they came to teach you. Then those same demons will appear as friendly, warmhearted companions on the path.

Prelude

by Michael Palmer


The limit of the song is this
prelude to a journey to
the outer islands, the generative
sentence, waltz project, forms,
qualities, suns, moons, rings,
an inside-outside then
an outside-inside shaped
with her colored clays. The days
yet propose themselves
as self-evident, everything there
everything here
and you are reading
in a way natural to theatre
a set of instructions
that alters itself automatically
as you proceed west
from death to friendliness, the two
topics upon which you are allowed
to meditate
under the first broad drops
of rain. The planes
will be piloted by ancestors
who have come back to life.
Why the delay.

Thinking about Socrates

"Perhaps someone might say, “Socrates, can you not go away from us and live quietly, without talking?” Now this is the hardest thing to make some of you believe. For if I say that such conduct would be disobedience to the god and that therefore I cannot keep quiet, you will think I am jesting and will not believe me; and if again I say that to talk every day about virtue and the other things about which you hear me talking and examining myself and others is the greatest good to man, and that the unexamined life is not worth living, you will believe me still less. This is as I say, gentlemen, but it is not easy to convince you."


Apology: The Examined Life

Because of his political associations with an earlier regime, the Athenian democracy put Socrates on trial, charging him with undermining state religion and corrupting young people. The speech he offered in his own defense, as reported in Plato's Apologhma (Apology), provides us with many reminders of the central features of Socrates's approach to philosophy and its relation to practical life.


Ironic Modesty:
Explaining his mission as a philosopher, Socrates reports an oracular message telling him that "No one is wiser than you." (Apology 21a) He then proceeds through a series of ironic descriptions of his efforts to disprove the oracle by conversing with notable Athenians who must surely be wiser. In each case, however, Socrates concludes that he has a kind of wisdom that each of them lacks: namely, an open awareness of his own ignorance.

Questioning Habit:
The goal of Socratic interrogation, then, is to help individuals to achieve genuine self-knowledge, even if it often turns out to be negative in character. As his cross-examination of Meletus shows, Socrates means to turn the methods of the Sophists inside-out, using logical nit-picking to expose (rather than to create) illusions about reality. If the method rarely succeeds with interlocutors, it can nevertheless be effectively internalized as a dialectical mode of reasoning in an effort to understand everything.

Devotion to Truth:
Even after he has been convicted by the jury, Socrates declines to abandon his pursuit of the truth in all matters. Refusing to accept exile from Athens or a commitment to silence as his penalty, he maintains that public discussion of the great issues of life and virtue is a necessary part of any valuable human life. "The unexamined life is not worth living." (Apology 38a) Socrates would rather die than give up philosophy, and the jury seems happy to grant him that wish.

Dispassionate Reason:
Even when the jury has sentenced him to death, Socrates calmly delivers his final public words, a speculation about what the future holds. Disclaiming any certainty about the fate of a human being after death, he nevertheless expresses a continued confidence in the power of reason, which he has exhibited (while the jury has not). Who really wins will remain unclear.

Plato's dramatic picture of a man willing to face death rather than abandoning his commitment to philosophical inquiry offers up Socrates as a model for all future philosophers. Perhaps few of us are presented with the same stark choice between philosophy and death, but all of us are daily faced with opportunities to decide between convenient conventionality and our devotion to truth and reason. How we choose determines whether we, like Socrates, deserve to call our lives philosophical.

from philosophypages.com

more Pema Chodron

from When Things Fall Apart

Having read this on more than one occasion, still, one always learns again and anew, upon going back, listening, reading again, about oneself, about the world, about presence.

Chodron:

What makes maitri (loving-kindness) such a different approach is that we are not trying to solve a problem. We are not striving to make pain go away or to become a better person. In fact, we are giving up control altogether and letting concepts and ideals fall apart.

The most difficult times for many of us are the ones we give ourselves. Yet it's never too late or too early to practice loving-kindness. It's as if we had a terminal disease but might live for quite a while. Not knowing how much time we have left, we might begin to think it was important to make friends with ourselves and others in the remaining hours, months, or years.
It is said that we can't attain enlightenment, let alone feel contentment and joy, without seeing who we are and what we do, without seeing our patterns and our habits. This is called maitri--developing loving-kindness and an unconditional friendship with ourselves.

Our personal demons come in many guises. We experience them as shame, as jealousy, as abandonment, as rage. They are anything that makes us so uncomfortable that we continually run away.
We do the big escape: we act out, say something, slam a door, hit someone, or throw a pot as a way of not facing what's happening in our hearts. Or we shove the feelings under and somehow deaden the pain. We can spend our whole lives escaping from the monsters of our minds.

All over the world, people are so caught in running that they forget to take advantage of the beauty around them. We become so accustomed to speeding ahead that we rob ourselves of joy.

from When Things Fall Apart

by Pema Chodron

In the teachings of Buddhism, we hear about egolessness. It sounds difficult to grasp: what are they talking about, anyway? When the teachings are about neurosis, however, we feel right at home. That's something we really understand. But egolessness? When we reach our limit, if we aspire to know that place fully--which is to say that we aspire to neither indulge nor repress--a hardness in us will dissolve. We will be softened by the sheer force of whatever energy arises--the energy of anger, the energy of disappointment, the energy of fear. When it's not solidified in one direction or another, that very energy pierces us to the heart, and it opens us. This is the discovery of egolessness. It's when all our usual schemes fall apart. Reaching our limit is like finding a doorway to sanity and the unconditional goodness of humanity, rather than meeting an obstacle or a punishment.


We might think, as we become more open, that it's going to take bigger catastrophes for us to reach our limit. The interesting thing is that, as we open more and more, it's the big ones that wake us up and the little things that catch us off guard. However, no matter what the size, color, or shape is, the point is still to lean toward the discomfort of life and see it clearly rather than to protect ourselves from it.


"This very moment is the perfect teacher, and it's always with us" is really a most profound instruction. Just seeing what's going on--that's the teaching right there. We can be with what's happening and not dissociate.

Awakeness is found in our pleasure and our pain, our confusion and our wisdom, available in each moment of our weird, unfathomable, ordinary everyday lives.

berlin wall 2009

history spaced across moments suspended
or a movement of color
shading every emotion
lines drawn across
tie together the complications
how one human can hurt another
how many destroy millions
sontag says this is what humans are capable of
and we see it, study the images
of brutality

transformed here
a material space both of history
and a living present, changing

away from popular tourist destinations
just this structure
along the water
next to a bridge



new artists paint over history
never forget
keep moving in every direction

this is what humans are capable of
new lines drawn
in color
paint a composition of chords
translates
hopeful

Music in Berlin

She was playing in the plaza outside the national library, and near the memorial to the nazi book burning that happened in 1933. The memorial is basically a window on the ground, that you can walk on, and through which you can look down and see a room full of empty bookshelves.

Germany

Went to Dachau
the other day:

We went together as a group: Americans, Germans, Romanians. We have been meeting and sharing discussions of culture, theory, mobility, politics for a week. And today we walked around quietly and thought about history. History in the present. The past brushed against the grain of contemporary knowing, questioning, feeling, trying to understand.

Arriving by train, the town of Dachau is a little outside of Munich, and is a beautiful little Bavarian German "suburban" town. It is spring so everything is green. Flowers. By afternoon the sun was out and everything seemed clean and quaint. Apparently, when the concentration camp was liberated, the local townspeople were brought in to see just how much violence and destruction was caused there. The film image shows onlookers turn away in disgust when they see the pile of corpses, in various states of decompose, in the crematorium; the bodies in the last months before the liberation were piled up, or buried in mass graves, because there wasn't enough coal to run the cremation fires.

We think how strange to live in this town, with this memorial site right in the middle.

From the train to the bus and we are left off in what seems like a lovely park. Trees. A little river. The stone road continues on into more residential areas. We walk through the memorial site, on the path lined with trees, and then through the gate that opens into the prisoner area. The roll call area. The barracks area. The "maintenance" building that once housed the baths, and where prisoners were hung up by their wrists from the ceiling as punishment or just for torture, now serves as the museum. History explained in texts and displays. Artifacts and photos.



Walk down the gravel road past the former barracks' foundations, pass the religious monuments, erected for reflection from a variety of denominations, and across the bridge into the crematorium area. The small original building and the larger, assembly line style buildings are set among trees and pathways lead out into a small woods that reminded me of the paths one might take for reflection and meditation at a retreat center. But here, instead, one now reflects on the graves marked for the thousands who died, were cremated, and buried en masse.

The experience is obviously strange and difficult. Intense and quietly meditative. History in memorial. Signs and paths and museum displays show us history on site. Site non site of trying, still, to make sense of. It seems strange to eat lunch in the cafeteria after, head back tired, eventually moving into the conversations that locate, help some of us think further, or at least, think present, in the context of.

from The Transformation by Juliana Spahr

“Flora and fauna grow next to and around each other without names. Human add the annotation. They catalogue the flora and fauna, divide them up, chart their connections and variations, eventually name them, and as they do this they read into them their own stories” (13).

“Huehue is the name of a climber native to the islands. Haole is the word that is used to describe some of them in this story, people who arrive from somewhere else. In the world of plants it is also used to describe a particularly noxious and invasive species” (14).

The politics of the island were more complicated than the boths of the beauty of the island. The politics were not really built around boths but instead around the one or the other. The politics were something else altogether. They were a part of the island that bit into them and those around them with bladelike, piercing mouthparts that stabbed through the skin and then injected a saliva that teemed with digestive enzymes, viruses, and anticoagulants. This bite often left behind an annoying itch, a reminder that things were not both the one and the other, could not be both the one and the other because both made no sense because there could not be both colonialism and sovereignty. (39)

The expansion did not happen overnight and one could point to how the local languages and the languages that were often created by the arrival of the expansionist language, the pidgins, and creoles, the burrowing languages, the negotiated languages refused to go away as evidence of how the expansionist language might not be as good at expansion as one might think. (95)

The gray matter at the back of their brain told them to move to the islands in the Atlantic because the islands were known for their perversions and various sexualities and they wanted to live someplace known for its perversions and various sexualities. The gray matter at the back of the brain wanted to move to the place that self identified as a place of complicated sexuality, a place for people who liked to be getting in and out of various beds in various different ways. A place that celebrated different beds and different ways of bedding down and around. The islands in the Atlantic, were full of perversions of all sorts and the stories told about the people of the islands had all genders in all the different combinations, even the ones beyond the two that so defined their culture at this moment. They liked this. They liked it that the islands in the Atlantic to which they moved were so famous for their perversions, so famous that televangelists mentioned them often as the root of all evil. (123)