impossible

“In the whole of what’s possible, you’re not missing anything.”
--Laura Wetherington


when the impossible becomes one
and the same vibration
show me
I am this body, turned and judging
missing only the possibility of
symptoms, listing ways in which
a breath, a cough, dust in the air
figures perceptibly like fragile
velcro scratching against yarn
this knitted deafness

I am (this body) under
the pressure of breaking through holes
of mist, part of a parcel
of forgotten worry
strangers meet at the intersection of 3
states, cross each border
and reconsider
symptoms can lead to other than death

when the possible becomes inclined
to ask
a philosophy of circular thinking
redundant emotional clutter
intervenes
smoke figures loosely in this analogy
see lightning, wait for
more undeniable clues
and ignore, like a sore throat
what lies behind eyes of
inclination
circling around the obvious
musical interlude
on repeat

cool Poetry Blog

Lemon Hound

in february

listless antecedent reaching heights
of fancy a gaze splayed through dirty
glass elements of sun disperse gather
dust a silent
ring

i imagined it a voice telling me something in rubble
rumble a bubble of nonsense syllables like a singular
om uttered by 100 voices simultaneously
off key

i heard a voice still repeating polite
affirmations
not unnoticed until cleverly
dismissed
accidentally nonsensical or paralyzed

loss of individual words
word sounds
making sounds like words
fails

i resort to thinking in overtones
heavy breathing
particles linger just away
from

from Slow Love by Dominique Browning

Slow Love

How Words Fail

from:

How Words Fail by Cathy Park Hong

Blevins says that the poetic “sentence” is a unit for “talk” and that “talk” is the essence of the poet’s authentic being. I, however, cannot shake the belief that English is “an artificial, stiffish thing” and was grateful to discover Stein and a whole lineage of poets, in particular the Language poets, such as Lyn Hejinian and Ron Silliman, who pretty much thought the same. Their poetry emphasizes the materiality of language rather than language as transparent conduit for soulmaking. They asserted that the “I” in the poem is really a fabrication of the self rather than a direct mirror of the author’s psyche. As Hejinian once wrote, “One is not oneself, one is several, incomplete, and subject to dispersal.” From these ideas, the Language poets stylistically formed their own versions of what poet Ron Silliman dubbed the “new sentence”: poetic lines that are syntactically fractured, purposefully atonal, averse to the first person.

Ultimately, though, I was more drawn to poets who severed syntax out of a sense of cultural or political displacement rather than for the sake of experimentation. History and circumstance alienated these poets from their own language, placed them in the margins of their cultures, where they were witness to language’s limits in articulating a cohesive voice. Through deliberate inarticulation, they managed to strain out a charged music from syntactic chaff, a music borne out of negation. The poet I have most in mind is Paul Celan.

Celan’s relationship with the German language was tortured and ambivalent. Son of Jewish parents, he lived in Romania and grew up speaking German and Yiddish, Hebrew, Romanian, and Russian. When the German forces conquered Romania, they deported Celan’s parents to the concentration camps. Because his German mother tongue was also the language of his parents’ murderers, Celan wrestled with it in his poetry, a tension evident in the fissures, elisions, and neologisms of his poems. From these ruptures, Celan sutured a composition that radiates a haunting and terrifying music. To wit:

No one kneads us again out of earth and clay,
no one incants our dust.
No one.

Blessed art thou, No one.
In thy sight would
we bloom.
In thy
spite.

A Nothing
We were, are now, and ever
shall be, blooming:
the Nothing-, the
No-One’s-Rose.

With
Our pistil soul-bright
Our stamen heaven-waste,
Our corolla red
From the purpleword we sang
Over, O over
The thorn.

read the rest: How Words Fail

from The content of Form

by Hayden White


What I have sought to suggest is that this value attached to narrativity in the representation of real events arises out of a desire to have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary. The notion that sequences of real events possess the formal attributes of the stories we tell about imaginary events could only have its origin in whishes, daydreams, reveries. Does the world really present itself to perception in the form of well-made stories, with central subjects, proper beginnings, middles, and ends, and a coherence that permits us to see “the end” in every beginning? Or does it present itself more in the forms that the annals and chronicle suggest, either as mere sequence without beginning or end or a sequences of beginnings that only terminate and never conclude? And does the world, even the social world, ever really come to us as already narrativized, already “speaking itself” from beyond the horizon of our capacity to make scientific sense of it? Or is the fiction of such a world, capable of speaking itself and of displaying itself as a form of a story, necessary for the establishment of that moral authority without which the notion of a specifically social reality would be unthinkable?...Could we ever narrativize without moralizing? (24-25)

check this out

EMU Creative Writing Blog

from HERmione by H.D.

There are of course bits of colour to be thrown down like counters in a banking house, or chips across a poker table. All your life you will retain one or two bits of colour with which all your life will be violently or delicately tinted. You will have an infinitesimal grain of purple dye or a flat counter to hoard or to risk in one reckless spendthrift moment. there are gamblers of the spirit as there are gamblers of the mind, passions of the psyche as well as passions of the body. All of life may be spent looking in vain for a counter that might bring glory or fame or wisdom which at some off-moment you may pick up unexpectedly—from the gutter—then you save it or you spend it. (53)


One conversation of all the conversations may retain significance; by one leaf you may judge the contour of a great tree, whether it be oak, or beech or chestnut. One conversation can give clue to the whole insistencies of a forest; analyse it and you will find whether the tract of oak wood may or may not, at some specific later date, be lighted. Analyse pulp substance of green gelatinous woodleaf and you will find worlds revolving and a continent of armies, massed to slide along ridges of leaf-vein or to swarm in battalions into another exact triangle of wood fibre. Here a patch of brown may show the invidious canker or here some sodden bubble under the living texture may foretell a waterlogged anaemia. One conversation in a sodden jungle (her yet unformulated consciousness and her consciousness of America) gave her a clue to a new race and a new revaluation of the forest. The jungle must be weeded out surely…but the soil was ripe for a new sort of forestation. (57)


Choriambics of a forgotten Melic. Chroiambics of a forgotten Melic beat rhythm and rhythm through the alert avid out-watching mind of Her Gart. “Choriambics,” she repeated valiantly swaying with the jerk and sway of the trolley (149).


Now more than ever she knew they were out of some bad novel. Sound of chiffon ripping and the twist and turn of Hermione under the stalwart thin young torso of George Lowndes. Now more than ever thought made spiral, m ade concentric circle toward a darkened ceiling. the ceiling came down, down. The ceiling became black, in a moment it would crush down, crushing her and George Lowndes under a black metallic shutter. The ceiling was a sort of movable shutter like some horrible torture thing out of Poe’s tales, the wall that came close out of Poe’s tales was coming close, the wall was coming close. Doors were no more in walls, the curtains were no more curtains. Walls were coming close to suffocate, to crush her… “You’ve torn this chiffon sleeve thing horribly.” (173)


“…I want to sit here sensing this moment that is dawn and morning. A moment and an infinitesimal fraction of a moment and dawn slides into morning like starlight into water. There is a quivering, a slightest infinitesimal shivering. The thing that was is not.” (212)


Then in a moment, in an infinitesimal second, the moment that divides day from dawn, that other moment that divides dawn from morning, perhaps that moment that divides early morning from exact morning, will intercede. A moment will stand in a starched apron and the moment will save Her’s being. I will draw back tenuous antennae of delirium… Her will be quite sane. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps on its petty pace from day to day and all our yesterdays and all our yesterdays… (216)


Heartless means without a heart. Less a heart. Hermione. Less-a-heart. What is Hermione Less-a-heart? Hermione heartless is this thing. Tossed like a winter branch on a snow bed. I am Hermione stripped of blossoms. Flowers drifted here, there, incandescent flower. Snowdrop under a cedar. You are a parasite, drifted here and there to perch a moment parasitically on George Lowndes. Branch flowers dipped parasitic feelers down and down into the live bark of somewhat common tree branch. George could love no parasite, could love no flower as I am. (219)

narrate the space of a line in motion or the shortest distance
between what you say, and then what you say, and then
an anecdote spoken verbatim down to the shoelaces (stars
of every color, sparkles) before she stepped on one, tumbled over the other

from this story to your intention is what i am implying directly, present
future hyperbole, a state of unplanned reason

include characters such that ages and eye color vary, one smart like a stone,
another holding pet scissors, somewhere a gerbil hides in terror from domestic predators
a setting in which situations (tripping, bad humor, emotional conflict) perform educational content, characters lose their footing and fall into awareness or attraction

the distance between an intention and a bleeding wound, lines curve in sand, he tells me she was only 20, a fake promise of a pulse, glimpse an instant possible return

i'm just saying that to scribble any word phonetically is to claim a resistance
to dripping body fluids, outside lines of reason, an instant in retrograde blinks shivers

november turns quick minus desire, flavor of a general understanding when February lingers
the distance in favor of turning from one side to another, completely still, washed clean

Bathhouse Online Journal-check it out

Dear Peers,

A brief note to invite you to peruse the website of BathHouse, a hybrid arts journal published by the Creative Writing Program at EMU. Issue 7.1 just went live this weekend, and we're eager to share its cornucopia of hybrid goodness. Inside you'll find visual art by Andrew Abbott and Sarah Walko, a sound piece by Meghan Lamb, plus text-based creations by Emileigh Barnes, Rebecca Mertz, and Felicia Shenker.

Additionally, we would be thrilled for you to "join" BathHouse on the student orgs web portal. Joining doesn't lead to any commitments on your part; it simply shows support and gives you access to news and events on our student orgs page. Just go to the web portal, login using your normal e-mich name and password, click "organizations," and search for Bathhouse. If you're interested in becoming more involved, e-mail eic@bhjournal.com.

We recently set up a facebook page, which is another way to find out about BathHouse and other hybrid arts events. Please consider visiting and clicking "Like."

Thanks so much for your time,

Joe Sacksteder

Editor-in-chief
BathHouse Hybrid Arts Journal
http://bhjournal.com/

from Bhanu's blog

from: was jack kerouac a punjabi

at the level of constructing from dirt and gravel
I have held you my breath for a distance
not unrecorded by elements of lyric measurement
carry a tune not unlike a choir in unison
gone flat on occasion missing notes
entirely as I stroll across the capital sidewalks
into blistering wind I recall
building resistance toward uneven displays of honesty
and conjecture a subtle move, and continuous, toward
the multiplication of inhale no matter the status
of particles of pollution per

can one write about traffic
as landscape
the surrounding hills
of concrete
cliche
you paved my forest
plowed down the blue skies
and put up a shopping mall
this is where i am
paved
potholed
stuck in chronic
reduced lanes
of sensory
damage

from Orlando

by Virginia Woolf


Life, it has been agreed by everyone whose opinion is worth consulting, is the only fit subject for novelist or biographer; life, the same authorities have decided, has nothing whatever to do with sitting still in a chair and thinking. Thought and life are as the poles asunder. Therefore--since sitting in a chair and thinking is precisely what Orlando is doing now--there is nothing for it but to recite the calendar, tell one's beads, blow one's nose, stir the fire, look out of the window, until she has done. Orlando sat so still that you could have heard a pin drop. Would, indeed, that a pin had dropped! That would have been life of a kind. Or if a butterfly had fluttered through the window and settled on her chair, one could write about that. Or suppose she had got up and killed a wasp. Then, at once, we could out with our pens and write. For there would be blood shed, if only the blood of a wasp. And if killing a wasp is the merest trifle compared with killing a man, still it is a fitter subject for novelist or biographer than this mere wool-gathering; this thinking; this sitting in a chair day in, day out, with a cigarette and a sheet of paper and a pen and an ink pot. If only subjects, we might complain (for our patience is wearing thin), had more consideration for their biographers! What is more irritating than to see one's subject, on whom one has lavished so much time and trouble, slipping out of one's grasp altogether and indulging--witness her sighs and gasps, her flushing, her palings, her eyes now bright as lamps, now haggard as dawns--what is more humiliating than to see all this dumb show of emotion and excitement gone through before our eyes when we know that what causes it--thought and imagination--are of no importance whatsoever?

But Orlando was a woman...And when we are writing the life of a woman, we may, it is agreed, waive our demand for action, and substitute love instead. Love, the poet has said, is woman's whole existence. And if we look for a moment at Orlando writing at her table, we must admit that never was there a woman more fitted for that calling. Surely, since she is a woman, and a beautiful woman, and a woman in the prime of life, she will soon give over this pretence of writing and thinking and begin to think, at least of a gamekeeper (and as long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking). And then she will write him a little note (and as long as she writes little notes nobody objects to a woman writing either) and make as assignation for Sunday dusk; and Sunday dusk will come; and the gamekeeper will whistle under the window--all of which is, of course, the very stuff of life and the only possible subject for fiction. Surely Orlando must have done one of these things? Alas,--a thousand times, alas, Orlando did none of them. Must it then be admitted that Orlando was one of those monsters of iniquity who do not love? She was kind to dogs, faithful to friends, generosity itself to a dozen starving poets, had a passion for poetry. But love--as the male novelists define it--and who, after all, speak with greater authority?--has nothing whatever to do with kindness, fidelity, generosity, or poetry. Love is slipping off one's petticoat and--But we all know what love is. Did Orlando do that? Truth compels us to say no, she did not. If then, the subject of one's biography will neither love nor kill, but will only think and imagine, we may conclude that he or she is no better than a corpse and so leave her.

"all this language is floating"
Beverly Dahlen


the anchor torn away dust
flies rampant
spinning blades inevitably
alter
the landscape
dry
against august lull
floating away from
words entirely
five years turns
into
a choice between
every option
including the places
(rugged, slanting, wet)
where one is named
outside of chronological
determination
go on ahead
i will meet you there
climb back down
where the trail begins
marked
with stones

from A Reading 1-7 by Beverly Dahlen

a moon, the Rockies, the mountains in which you were. crestfallen. I came out on a high place looking back. there was where I had come from. here among stars, Olduvai, the canyon, the oldest bones. I was thinking of that line, of that longest line. a river and its tributaries. it doesn’t look like that, this is a map. (108)


your teeth, a tongue. gondola. teeth, a tongue, a dark. putting his finger in her mouth. in her mouth. the weird way in which the world gets in the way. rattle, rattle. getting into it, filthy marriage. opal. a silver drawn out dark, the new moon. a halo. finding food, water, there in the desert. she said that too, that desert was a nature. (114)

from A Reading 1-7 by Beverly Dahlen

terror, the first word lighted, brushed across my eye, my eye, mother said, in that version. a chain of tears, one tear for every year, how summing up a year in that single painted drop. (87)


a white space intervening.

a white space intervening, white, white. that white light, static. questioning the first draft. this is not a literary work, I told him, this is not fussy. this is not my mother dusting the daisies. this is not domestic duty. this is not the idea. a preconception. this is it. the baby. the corpse. you can take that body and cut it up forever. this is a metaphor. a something. a meaning carried over. from one thing to the next. these are my leg hairs. the short hair that grows at the edge of my lips. lips, teeth. this is my little bow mouth. here it is. you will never know what I mean. when I say you I mean me. erasing all the I’s and using instead the third person. it alternates. an alternation, or alteration of generations. it changes. in other words. i.e., it changes. that is to say, it changes. it alters. it becomes something else, though its original form is still visible. one can trace that. he put a mark over it, a cross, but the word could still be read beneath it. ‘the effacement of the trace.’ to deface it, to cross it out, with a knife, to scar her face, his legs, that gesture, to whip the knife out, to scar it, the sign, these words do not match the thought. we will put an end to that longing. what thought there was we do not know. we will never discover it. it is not there. it is gone, or it never existed. impure. a fig leaf, someone said, of my imagination. covering it. (89-90)

from A Reading 1-7 by Beverly Dahlen

wishing someone would give a talk against psychoanalysis in order to test, what, faith, embarrassing word, what is the ground of what you believe. how come it’s easier to write her, that third person. how come saying I means I. a confession. the I is never identical with the fictional character being written. ‘the moment of writing.’ but what I that is not a fiction, there isn’t one, me from moment to moment, I think I know where I am. ‘where you are there arises a place.’ a theory of relativity. (72)

endlessly in that place. Foucault: ‘Henceforth, language was to grow with no point of departure, no end, and no promise. It is the traversal of this futile yet fundamental space that the text of literature traces from day to day.’

I could cry salty tears. (74)

what this yes means. the binary. symmetry. open-ended. the limist of yes. the limits of no. (76)

anything may mean its opposite, green may mean red, you can’t tell an omen when you see one. reading it. must we go on reading as if we lived in the sixteenth century.

(All this language is floating. The men make statements. They use the forms of the verb ‘to be’ with confidence. What I write is provisional. It depends. It is subject to constant modification. It depends.)

(Equivalence.)

(They are so sure this equals that. Reading their sums.)

on the other hand. all dark. blank. the blank wall waiting. in it. waiting for something. The Other. (76)

wonderful, the critique of wit. the critique of reason. a woman on the bus, demented, talking about another woman who had eight children. old mother Hubbard. getting the bone. saith Gertrude Stein: my little dog knows me. Lucky Pierre, Lynn’s dog, knows her, is getting older, grayer with each passing year. this is wonderful. lying in bed I would never have thought these things. (77)

the reading of the writing goes on, this is for you because you are not here. you are always not here. you are never here. I make you up, I wonder how you look. and now it is so much easier to write than to speak. an other is so much an hallucination it’s scary. I don’t know what I speak to. (78)

that X which was laid over it ages ago. no wonder I am a woman. now. impossible. woman, that impossibility. that it takes place at all in any of us. “takes place.” take it. there’s a word for you. by god, it makes me angry to think that “take” appears here so easily, or any word, upon the ‘mystic writing pad.”

the reading of the writing goes on, this is for you because you are not here. you are always not here. you are never here. I make you up, I wonder how you look. and now it is so much easier to write than to speak. an other is so much an hallucination it’s scary. I don’t know what I speak to. (80)

all that flash in the pan, fly by night. it is heartless. I had
a still uncertain distancing of the mother, by the simple fact of naming…”

(impossibility)

found but claimed as loss. to say it. (81)

gathering light shadows naked

on peaks born into clouds

how we have arrived

pale anxious determination

walking downhill

for once

the flexible comfort

breathtaking curves of gravel

converse lightly around wildflowers

covering thick and spreading

fragile petals

low to the ground

and calming

from "To Autumn" by Keats

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

from "8 a.m., Sunday, August 28, 2005"
by Patricia Smith


Now officially a bitch, I'm confounded by words--
all I've ever been is starving, fluid, and noise.
So I huff a huge sulk, thrust out my chest,
open wide my solo swallowing eye.

You must not know

Scarlet glare fixed on the trembling crescent,

I fly.

minus one

in the end, static
the tuner set to an inappropriate station
cable goes out in the storm
you never existed
in the moment
middle of night
when time stops
when the network stops
broadcasting
lines of grey fuzz
lies rest heavy
you again repeat an undisclosed
fabrication
a sham, would be deceit
if you had not already
disappeared

an early hour waiting in the past
misdirected play against tides chronic
and seamless
your notes linger

blackbirds have many ways
cold plums
white chickens in the rain

soak in salt water or
humid mountain air
the gravel trail unwinds
simultaneous wandering a figurative
explanation for moving from point to
point without the use
of any straight line

Foucault, from "Heterotopias"

Brothels and colonies are two extreme types of heterotopia, and if we think, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development (I have not been speaking of that today), but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.

"The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed." (Foucault, "Heterotopias")


perform a continuous utterance:
over a space, she clarified

recite the lyric
quality

that is

simultaneous
circles drawn in pencil
on a white board

contingent
or history laid out
on a table of elements:
artifacts, debris, fragments

each piece a present
intervention
between past
future

an ensemble of relations

proximity site grid
real unreal virtual

in the cemetery both
alive and dead
the illicit meeting
contained and
secret

time sliced into
pieces
laid out across

a horizon
at once moving forward
standing
still

inspiring and thoughtful articulation...Naropa Summer writing, and Thinking

michelle naka pierce : no use in a centre: Continual Surface

alongside 600 leagues base by base
green fields saunter knock it out and
away every 11th time
scores
how many can you list
recall statistics from previous
across the lawn
pass it call it blown across
an average telling
narrate experience told through
numbers rate players all the world's
a stage

make a list

sun in the eye
something sweet and peppery
pieces of a board game
wood tiled disruption

send instructions leaving out each noun

using prepositions, adverbs, exclamation
no commas only disrupt the continuous

a scratched memory repeats
rock ledge crumbling
reflection curved
a glimpse falters

more great Stein quotes

“Poetry and Grammar” (from Lectures in America in Stein writings 1932-46)

One of the things that is a very interesting thing to know is how you are feeling inside you to the words that are coming out to be outside of you.

Do you always have the same kind of feeling in relation to the sounds as the words come out of you or do you not. All this has so much to do with grammar and with poetry and with prose.
Words have to do everything in poetry and prose and some writers write more in articles and prepositions and some say you should write in nouns, and of course one has to think of everything. (313)

When you are at school and learn grammar grammar is very exciting. I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagraming sentences. I suppose other things may be more exciting to others when they are at school but to me undoubtedly when I was at school the really completely exciting thing was diagraming sentences and that has been to me ever since the one thing that has been completely exciting and completely completing. I like the feeling the everlasting feeling of sentences as they diagram themselves. (314)

Sentences and paragraphs. Sentences are not emotional but paragraphs are. I can say that as often as I like and it always remains as it is, something that is.
I said I found this out first in listening to Basket my dog drinking. And anybody listening to any dog’s drinking will see what I mean. (322)

Prose is the balance the emotional balance that makes the reality of paragraphs and the unemotional balance that makes the reality of sentences and having realized completely realized that sentences are not emotional while paragraphs are, prose can be the essential balance that is made inside something that combines the sentence and the paragraph, examples of this I have been reading to you. (326)

Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that and doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a great many kinds of poetry.
When I said.
A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.
And then later made that into a ring I made poetry and what did I do I caressed completely caressed and addressed a noun. (327)

imply.

your silence by which I mean
there is no eye contact

a tattered ball
night giggling
mud scented

intend.

it is unclear by which I mean
I try turning in each direction
and yet

yellow light
a waxing moon
at all hours
or a shared taste sweet
and salty

indiscretion.

by which I mean
every possibility

against smooth
against skin
against thinking for a moment
outside of this

more Stein

“Lecture 1” from Narration (Selections Ed. Joan Retallack)

It is something that any one interested in narrative has to very much think about, because it has never happened before. Always before the language of each nation who had a narrative t make a story to tell a life to express a thing to say did it with a language that had gradually become a language that was made gradually by them to say what they had to say. But here in America because the language was made so late in the day that is at a time when everybody began to read and to write all the time and to read what was written all the time it was impossible that the language would be made as languages used to be made to say what the nation which was coming to e was going to say. All this has never happened before. History repeats itself anything repeats itself but all this had never happened before. (293)

So there they were and the Americans were not at all that way they did not live their life at all no not at all in that way and they had it to say that they lived their own life in their own way and they had it to say it with the words that had been made to tell a nation’s story in an entirely different way as the nation who had made the language had the entirely different story to tell of living their daily life every moment of every day. (295)

I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do when they live where they have to live that is where they have come to live which of course they do do. (300)

from "My Debt to Books"

by Gertrude Stein

So many books have been important to me, it is like the man who said about automobiles when some one asked him is that mark a good one, all automobiles are good, some might go better than others but they all go, and that is the way books are to me, any book that I can read at all is important to me and I can read most of them, each one does something to me, you have to read a lot of books if you are going to read all your life and read at least five or six books a week, you can read them over and over again but even so it does take a good many if you begin when you are very young and you live a reasonably long life.

intuitional transfer, a geographical space, topographic concerns relate to an array of condensation (emotionally speaking). these things I offer in response: catalyst or cataclysm. each photo a design specific to internal conflict, blurring scenes interrupted by color, fragments of lines, framed monotony of landscape nonetheless in constant flux.

what I will tell you is this: each implication like a gravel floor, shifts underfoot. specific pebbles stuck between toes or in the crevasses of the soles of my shoes. the dry dusty pattern of comprehension gets muddy in the rain.

this space, filled with the sound of cars and industry, hints toward complete isolation, outside of...then turns away entirely. a continuum of populated reflection.

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

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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