The Twin's Shadow

Anonypop -Just a Number 05272011

2011-03-27T12:33:00.003-04:00

Good "God's Country" People

2010-09-24T09:13:00.005-04:00

They Just Kept Calling Out & Calling Out - An Operetta In a Terrarium

2010-09-15T06:08:00.003-04:00

Never Tell Someone They're Beautiful If They Already Know It.

2010-09-15T04:25:00.005-04:00

"What is most curious about America is that no matter what you say about it...
it is always true." O.W.
do you remember how you leapt...
where no profane foot has ever set but I
will remember this hour
till I die:

"Those people have taken advantage of us..."
and the rest of us stood naked in the rain,
a neat line waiting,
not saying anything,

but he barked from an ignorant angry throat,
"Those people have taken advantage;"

Did he speak for himself or for
the rest of the sun bronzed giants?
Portraits of history made stone
pillars to butress lesser acomplishments.

It was want, whose name alone was vulgarity.

rats leave the sinking ship but we...
we didn't leave, so the ship didn't sink,
and that's madness,

Fitfull Un-Realization of the Limits of Force of Planetary Gravity

2009-04-30T20:31:00.010-04:00

-or- This is How We Learned to Walk on the Moon.I have more zest than a boat pushing the sea aside, because it pushes it evenly.
I enjoy spasmodically.
As if the sun would be put out and be born again.
For this is worth getting addicted.
To be able to be dragged out,
to be whipped as a kind of Christ.
But engineers who made the paw to the bridge, the girders,
don’t remain in history.
They lack spasmodicality.
If my car would be thrown from the bridge over Loire,
or at least would be finely shaken,
I’d remember it.
The hand’s move is always the first one.
And the opening of your little mouth:
yours, yours, yours, is always the first thing, no matter the age.

...As Will Also When Even The Callous Have Worn Tender

2009-01-20T09:48:00.007-05:00

I, too, sing America. They send me to eat in the kitchen...

when company comes,

but I laugh,
and eat well,

and grow strong.

Tomorrow, I'll be at that table...

when company comes.

And nobody'll dare say to me,

"Eat in the kitchen," then.

Besides, they'll see how beautiful I am and be ashamed--

I, too, am America.

Not Göring, It Was Never Göring. Goebbels Neither.

2008-11-24T00:45:00.003-05:00

-- --“Uninquisitive, completely myopic in her understanding of the legacy or her heraldry, the Queen is merely poorly educated and a Philistine.”
No paradise will entice you out of your barbed wire entanglement!” -- “That's for damned sure! Barbed wire is barbed wire! I know what I'm up against.... No rose without a thorn!”“...And the last thing I'll stand for is ideas to get the better of me! I know that rubbish from [before]..., fraternity, equality, freedom... beauty and dignity! You gotta use the right bait to hook 'em.”“...And then, when you're right in the middle of a parlay they say: ‘Hands up!’ You're disarmed by those [liberal] voting swine! — No, let 'em keep their good distance with their whole ideological kettle of fish.” “...I shoot with live ammunition! When I hear the word culture, I release the safety on my Browning!"
--“When I hear the word culture, I grab my revolver.”
--"Whenever I hear the word culture, I bring out my checkbook.""Some years ago—some horrible years ago—the Nazis used to take out a pistol instead of a checkbook."

We May Be Able to Repeat the Stories yet They Seem So Foreign

2008-10-14T23:06:00.004-04:00

-or-
Our Ulteriors and Their Effects on Our Posteriors

August 11, 1928
"Unemployment in the sense of distress is widely disappearing. . . . We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. The poor-house is vanishing from among us. We have not yet reached the goal, but given a change to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, and we shall soon with the help of God be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation. There is no guarantee against poverty equal to a job for every man. That is the primary purpose of the economic policies we advocate. September 17, 1928
"When we [the Republican Party] assumed direction of the Government in 1921 there were five to six million unemployed men upon our streets. Wages and salaries were falling and hours of labor increasing. . . . The Republican Administration at once undertook to find relief to this situation. At once a nationwide employment conference was called. . . . Within a year we restored these five million workers to employment. But we did more; we produced a fundamental program which made this restored employment secure on foundation of prosperity; as a result wages and standards of living have during the past six and a half years risen to steadily higher levels.
This recovery and this stability are no accident. It has not been achieved by luck. Were it not for sound governmental policies and wise leadership, employment condition in American today would be similar to those existing in many other parts of the world." October 22, 1928
“Prosperity is no idle expression. It is a job for every worker; it is the safety and safeguard of very business and every home. A continuation of the policies of the Republican party is fundamentally necessary to the future advancement of this progress and to the further building up of this prosperity.” October 6, 1928
“As never before does the keeping of our economic machine in tune depend upon wise policies in the administrative side of the government. July 27, 1928
“The outlook of the world today is for the greatest era of commercial expansion in history. The rest of the world will become better customers.” November, 1929
“Any lack of confidence in the economic future or the basic strength of business in the United States is foolish.” January 21, 1930
“Definite signs that business and industry have turned the corner from the he temporary period of emergency that followed deflation of the speculative market were seen today. The reports to the Cabinet showed that the tide of employment had changed in the right direction." March 8, 1930
“The worst effect of the crash upon unemployment will most certainly pass during the next sixty days.” May 1, 1930
“While the crash only took place six months ago, I am convinced we have now passed the worst and with continued unity of effort we shall rapidly recover. There is one certainty of the future of a people of the resources, intelligence and character of the people of the United States—that is, prosperity.” October 2, 1930
“During the past year you have carried the credit system of the nation safely through a most difficult crisis. In this success you have demonstrated not alone the soundness of the credit system, but also the capacity of the bankers in emergency.” October 21, 1930
“The idleness of the working public has become a drain upon the whole of the nation. The only valid response is that of expansion of business. Taxes on business are hindering the growth of this economy, and this hindrance is the beginning of a dangerous cycle for the health of this country’s economy. I am calling for an adjustment to the corporate tax code to encourage the expansion of the market and the help to place 2,500,000 persons back to work this winter.” December 15, 1930
“Economic depression cannot be cured by legislative action or executive pronouncement.” June 15, 1931
“I am able to propose an American plan to you. . . . We plan more leisure for men and women and better opportunities for its enjoyment. We plan not only to provide for all the new generation, but we shall, by scientific research and invention, lift the standard of living and security of diffusion of wealth, a decrease in poverty and a great reduction in crime. And this plan will be carried out if We Just Keep on giving the American people a chance.” October 1931
“On September 8, I requested the governors of the Federal Reserve banks to endeavor to secure the co-operation of the bankers of their territory to make some advances on the security of the assets of closed banks or to take over some of these assets, in order that the receivers of those banks may pay some dividends to their depositors in advance of what would otherwise be the case pending liquidation. Such a measure will contribute to free many business activities and to relieve many families from hardship over the forthcoming winter, and in a measure reverse the process of deflation involved in the tying up of deposits." October 18, 1931
“The depression has been deepened by events from abroad which are beyond the control either of our citizens or our government.”

...das schwerste Gewicht

2008-10-14T15:27:00.006-04:00

There is a vicious adherence to the concept of blindness in the face of eternal return. History blocks our route and we stand still, impatiently waiting for the reality of the past to step aside and permit us passage. This will never happen.
Incidentally, I despise everything which merely instructs me without increasing or immediately enlivening my activity. Our consideration of the worth and the worthlessness of history may begin at the intersection where it affects or impedes our experience of being. This work is to set down why we must seriously despise instruction without explication, why we must reject the permitting of ill-knowledge which structures societally destructive memes, and and why we must repulse the anti-intellectualism that holds to the belief of history as a worthless surplus of knowledge; a luxury for the out-of-touch.
This anti-elitism takes form and denies us what is most essential to us; they deny us our reliance of facts as if they were superfluous to the debate, and this superfluousness is necessarily aggressive and hostile to the rationality that is essential to logic. To be sure, we need history, but we need it in a manner different from the way in which the spoilt idler in the garden of knowledge uses it, no matter how elegantly he may look down on our coarse and graceless needs and distresses.
That is, we need history as that is permitting of life and action, not merely as a comfortable justification for turning away from life and action, or merely for glossing over the difficulties brought about by the absurdities of life or the subsequent cowardice to confront that absurdity. We wish to use history only insofar as it serves living in the most active senses.
But there is a degree of history and a valuing of it through which life atrophies and degenerates. Insomuch as history is the story that power decides, the recording of the struggle of the individual dissolves in the face of itself, this is rarely recognized by the individual. To bring this phenomenon to light as a remarkable symptom of our time is every bit as necessary as it may be painful.
I have tried to describe a feeling which has often enough tormented me. I take my revenge on this feeling when I expose it to the general public. Perhaps with such a description someone or other will have reason to point out to me that he also knows this particular sensation but that I have not felt it with sufficient purity and naturalness and definitely have not expressed myself with the appropriate certainty and mature experience. Perhaps one or two will respond in this way.

However, most people will tell me that this feeling is totally wrong, unnatural, abominable, and absolutely forbidden, that with it, in fact, I have shown myself unworthy of the powerful historical tendency of the times, as it has been, by common knowledge, observed for the past two generations, particularly among Americans.
Whatever the reaction, now that I dare to expose myself with this natural description of my feeling, common decency will be fostered rather than shamed, because I am providing many opportunities for a contemporary tendency like the reaction just mentioned to make polite pronouncements. Moreover, I obtain for myself something of even more value to me than respectability: I become publicly instructed and set straight about our times.

Prosperity Is No Idle Expression -HH, 10.22.28

2008-10-14T00:25:00.003-04:00

"Oh Yeah?" -Edward Angly

Memories of Wall Street and Butchers Inc. (not Robt. Lowell)

2008-10-09T07:57:00.007-04:00

(Daddy I want a pony, Daddy I want a pony NOW!!!)
Not only on Tuesdays, but for the last two years
book-worming in pajamas
fresh from the washer each morning,I hog a whole chair hidden aloft in the Borough of Queen's
shy of "hardly passionate 30th Ave"where even the man
scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans,
has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate,
and is "a young Republican."I have a nine months' grudge,
new enough to seem as if I have held it
my whole life.
Like the sun that rises
in flame-flamingo infants' hearts.Those were the coke fueled, “greed is good” Eighties,
and I am thirty and broke.
Ought I to regret my seedtime?I was a fire-breathing man, a misguided believer
in calloused hands and their protestant code of ethics.I made mistakes with my manic statement,
telling off the state and market, and then
sat waiting sentence in the bull pen
beside defaulters and the no longer “entitled”…Given a year, on certain days
in those rare minutes of roof time
I could spy gluttonous monks
hustling along the Street;a pillared, stern enclosure like
those historically built for bakcheia,
and through the steel screened portholes
saw the once a day Exchanging
beyond the sooty entanglements.Pacing, I yammered the theories of Agamben with Eyal,
Us both jaundice-yellow
("awash in our shrunken theory")
and as fly-weight economists,so held all front stand, short sold,
he wore his work shoes,
he knew the weight of a hammer,
he preferred bruised fruit.He tried to convert the Representatives,
the exchangers, and
the commerce men on our guard,
to his ascetic ideological diet.Shaven, muscular, suburban,
wearing grey wool blend bespoke suits,
they blew their tops and
beat him black and blue.I was so out of things, I'd never heard
of the credit default swap.
"Are you a C.O.?" I asked a fellow jailbird.
"No," he answered, "I'm a wage labor sucker."He taught me the "hospital tuck,"
and pointed out the T-shirted back
of the Liquidity Czar,
there piling towels on a rack,or dawdling off to his little segregated cell full
of things forbidden to us common men:
a 60 inch screen, a humidor, an Eames lounger,
and extended furlows to a day spa;
he returns with two cynical toy American flags.Flabby, bald, filled with avarice,
he drifted in a sheepish calm,
where no agonizing reappraisal
jarred his concentration on the promised pardon
hanging like an oasis in his air
of lost transactions.
..and finally the REAL Robert Lowell, as there are no analogs or usurpers.

Charting A Course Toward An Austere Latitude

2008-10-06T06:37:00.005-04:00

When Devils Will the Blackest Sins Put On

2008-10-06T06:27:00.004-04:00

Even as her appetite shall play the god
With his weak function. How am I then a villain
To counsel Cassio to this parallel course,
Directly to his good?

A Vast Variety, That'll Grow the Economy

2008-10-06T04:44:00.002-04:00

You've reared your head and said enough for both of us.

That Name Uttered Once and Hushed Forever After

2008-10-06T01:27:00.005-04:00

Yes, strange, darkness best, and the darker the worse, then all well, for the time,but it will come, the time will come, the thing is there, you'll see it,get off me, keep off me, all dark, all still, all over, wiped out- Yes, perhaps, a shade gone, I suppose, some might say, poor thing, a shade gone,just a shade, in the head-just a shade, but I doubt it, I doubt it, not really,I'm all right, still all right, do my best, all I can-
Yes, peace, one assumed, all out, all the pain, all as if . . . never been, it will come...-pardon, no sense in this, oh I know . . .none the less, one assumed, peace . . . I mean . . . not merely all over, but as if . . . never been

NECESSITAS NON HABET LEGEM

2008-09-01T23:55:00.009-04:00

"I will not accept the attribution to me the label of historian; it is a deplorable term. I shall not be held accountable for any future manipulation of these comments, this system, or shall it be said, this genealogy of knowledge.""There is no guarantee that in the future these words will not be appropriated by some tyrant, espoused by some demagogue, and warped beyond recognition to justify some horrible campaign; or that they might falsely frame another's visions as dystopic through a willful and malicious mis-reading.""There is no security in the belief that these ideas, these thoughts, will not be manipulated as an anulment to dismiss one's accountability in respect to their dogmatic adherence to ill-formed philosophies and apologetics.""I will not act as the recorder of what may someday not be an illegitimate impression of what should be merely seen in the immediate."Art can no longer be justified as a superior activity, or even as an activity of compensation or exchange to which one could honorably devote oneself.The cause of this deterioration is clearly the emergence of productive forces that necessitate other productive forces that necessitate other production relations ad nauseum until the detritus demands a new practice of life.In the civil war phase which we currently and perpetually engaged in, and in close connection with the orientation we are discovering for certain superior activities to come, we can consider that all known means of expression are going to converge in a general movement of propaganda which must encompass all the perpetually interacting aspects of social reality. Necessity knows no law.

If You Show the Fucking Gun, It Damn Well Has To Go Off

2008-08-18T04:32:00.003-04:00

The strong wind is gathering the storm-clouds together above the gray plain of the ocean so wide.The storm-finch, the bird that resembles dark lightning, between clouds and ocean, soaring.Skimming the waves with his wings, shooting up, arrow-like, into the dark clouds on high, the storm-finch is clamoring loudly, shrilly; the clouds can hear the bird's fearless cry. In that cry is the yearning, the thirst for the tempest, and anger's hot might in its wild notes is heard; the keen fire of passion, the faith in sure triumph
—All these the clouds hear in the voice of the bird.The seagulls lament with a storm impending; they flitter o'er the waves with a piercing wail; they are ready to hide in the depths of the ocean as their dread of this tempest threatens from on high.The cargeese and grebes, too, shriek hoarsely in terror; they mourn and complain when the tempest is near; they know not the joy of life-and-death struggle; the crash of the thunderbolt fills them with fear.
The fat, foolish penguin hides, timid and craven, in nooks of the cliffs, where it finds a safe home; alone, the proud storm-finch soars blindly fearless above the rough ocean, all hoary with foam.Still nearer and darker the storm-clouds lower themselves onto the broad ocean; the waves as they beat sing and dance as they lift themselves upward, as if they were longing the thunder to meet.The thunder is crashing, billows are roaring; the depths are foaming with rage. They shriek and they gasp as they strive with the gale.Now the storm-wind clasps fiercely the bevy of waves in his powerful grasp; it hurls them, with all his mad strength, in grim fury, against the precipitous cliffs of the rock.
The emerald masses of water are shattered to spray a fine mist by the force of the shock.
The storm-finch, the bird that resembles dark lightning, soaring with cries 'mid the tempest's fierce breath; like an arrow he pierces the clouds; with his pinions dashing the foam from the billows beneath.He darts like a haughty black demon of tempest, in wild exultation that knows no alloy.
'Twixt the sea and the sky he vacillates laughing and sobbing. He laughs to the clouds defiantly his sobbing is for valiant joy!In the wrath of the thunder, the keen, quick-eared demon has long since detected a note of fatigue. He is firm in his faith that the clouds will nary cover a bright sun for aye, though they stretch league on league.The storm-wind is howling, the thunder is roaring; with flame blue and lambent the cloud-masses glow o'er the fathomless ocean; it catches the lightnings, and quenches them deep in its whirlpool below.Like serpents of fire in the dark ocean writhing, the lightnings reflected quiver and shake, as into the blackness they vanish forever.
The tempest! Now quickly the tempest will break!The storm-finch soars fearless and proud 'mid the lightnings, above the wild waves that the roaring winds fret; and what is the prophet of victory saying?
"Oh, let the storm burst! Fiercer yet—fiercer yet!"

I Watched the Clucking on the News and Went Looking For My Hatchet

2008-08-18T02:30:00.004-04:00

I was sayin let me out of here before I was even born-
It's such a gamble when you get a face
It's fascinating to observe what the mirror does, ...but when I dine it's for the wall that I set a place.
I belong to the blank generation and I can take it or leave it each time.
Triangles were falling at the window as the doctor cursed,
...he was a cartoon long forsaken by the public eye.
The nurse adjusted her garters as I breathed my first breath,
...the doctor grabbed my throat and yelled, "God's consolation prize!"
To hold the TV to my lips, the air so packed with cash then carry it up flights of stairs and drop it in the vacant lot,
I lose my train of thought, fall into your arms' tracks, and watch beneath the eyelids every passing dot.
I belong to the blank generation and I can take it or leave it each time.

The Transfiguration of the Common Man/Woman

2008-08-14T12:01:00.003-04:00

Is it we who are active subjugates of our societies, or is a society's purpose to serve toward our benefit? This question begins where all similar questions begin; in the "state of nature". But has that state ever been agreed upon. The creation of this theoretical past is always forged into the shape of the desired gains of the future.
This is where the notion of the power to suspend the societal agreements concerning it structure and boundary should be confronted -if not all out demolished. While this discussion has been taken up at great length elsewhere, it is not too simplistic to state: the moment that the societal pact is breached, is the concurrent moment to which all obligation to that societal pact is superseded by natural sovereignty. Here, as in all contractual legal obligations, both parties are only culpable in that both parties or diligent in their portion of the contract.
Extra-legal action does not inherently prove validity of power; it negates it.

The Transfiguration of the Common Idea

2008-08-14T10:20:00.007-04:00

..In fact history does not belong to us; we belong to it.
Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination,
we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the form of the immediate:
the family, society, culture, and state in which we exist.

The self awareness of an the individual is only flickering in the closed circuit of historical life.
This is why predjudices (pre-judgments) of the individual, far more than their experiential judgements, constitutes the historical reality of their being.

...That They Don't Understand

2008-07-24T17:44:00.005-04:00

And when at length the drear and long time soothed thy fiercer woes,
How plaintively thy mournful song upon the still night rose

I've heard it often as if I dreamed, distant, sweet and lone;
The funeral dirge, or so it seemed, of reasons dead and gone.

Air held her breath; trees with the spell seemed sorrowing spectres round,
Whose swelling tears as dewdrops fell upon the listening ground.

But that is past, and naught remains that raised us o'er the brutes;
Our piercing shrieks and soothing strains are both forever mute.

Now fare thee well! Once, more cause than subject of woe.
All mental pangs by time's unkind laws hath lost the power to know.

O Death! thou awe-inspiring prince that keepst the world in fear,
Why dost thou tear more blest ones hence and leave madness lingering here?

Manifest Destiny & the Beginners Guide to Surrendering Sovereignty

2008-07-22T17:52:00.007-04:00

A hot wind curls the leaves and chases the dogs digging deep into the dry soil.

I live in the gut of the bright failure called America.

I live in this hell named [fill-in-the-blank].

It's one hundred and seven today and grasshoppers from outer space are dancing in my brain.

The air-conditioner is broke so I run a tub of cold water and submerge every half hour.

There's a wet trail from the bath to the couch and nearby fan.The air is heavy with grain dust.

The "wheaties" are up from Oklahoma with their caravan of combines.

I crave winter. I want a blizzard that blinds me to my fellow man.

These are my dark times.

Every other day I grieve for the me that was and every man or woman I see fills me with contempt.

These half-wit inbreds love to imagine that nine out of ten "Skins" in our Gomorrahs are hang-around-the-fort welfare sucking addicts.

Yet every weekend their violence and drunken wretchedness fills this county's jail, so I'm far beyond embarrassment by these fucks that are worse than the boogiemen they prod each other into fearing.

Varied branches of that inbred, toothless mountain trash in "Deliverance,"settled here and now own
the bank and most businesses.

It's undeniably true that these white people in Cowturdville could be hillbillies except for the fact that these are The Plains.

Drive on, rednecks, to the edge of your flat world and fall down to a better hell.

Every single thing about this town is sadly second-rate and I haven't been laid in more than two years and there's this fat lady with varicose veins who calls me late at night and begs me to come over to her trailer for a drink.

Here, in this Panhandle town, farm kids speed desperately up and down the main drag wearing baseball caps backwards and throwing gang signs they've seen on the tube and their parents, glad they're old and tired, truly believe that those pictures we're now getting from Mars have meaning.

As far as I can tell, I'm one of the few people in Cowturdville who's gone to college and I often wish I never had, but Christ on a pogostick . . .

I think I'm starting to like it here in this American heartland.[ease in to the cushion of our adjustable apathy.]

Thunderheads are forming and the sweet-ass rain of forgiveness is in the air.

You Ain't a Beauty But Hey, You're Alright...

2008-07-14T23:53:00.007-04:00

We make our meek adjustments, contented with such random consolations as the wind deposits in slithered and too ample pockets. For we can still love the world, those of us who find a famished kitten on the doorstep; we know recesses for it from the fury of the street; or warm, torn elbow covers. We will sidestep, and til that final smirk, dally the doom of that inevitable thumb that slowly chafes its puckered index toward us, facing the dull squint with what innocence and what surprise!And yet these fine collapses are not lies more than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;

our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise. We can evade you, and all else but the heart: what blame to us if that heart lives on.
The game enforces smirks; but we have seen the moon in lonely alleys,
making a grail of laughter of an empty ash can,and through all sound of gaiety and quest; have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

You Were Beautiful; Yet So Many Other Things Were As Well.

2008-07-13T03:37:00.005-04:00

I was born and this was a fact that I never wanted to be known.

I have spent the better part of my existence trying to sweep the evidence of my being under the carpet. This would somehow provide for me a life that was mine, genuinely and independent of the historic fate of the punctually supplicant and the indecisive.

Can you imagine what it was like to be one of them, to breathe heavy like them, to talk with the complex emptiness like them, to live life only to protect the right of denying inevitability.

I knew from a very early age that if there were ever any possibility of escaping the collective fate of this cabal of moralists I would necessarily be denying the inevitable as well.

I left numerous times, and without ever returning home, I would escape again; always fleeing that lilting, minacious, thread. These are what have come to be known as my hidden years.

As the quote goes, “Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.”
Perhaps these are still the hidden years.

While holding this ignominious pose I have seen and I have learned and I am beginning to think there is no escaping history. My attempts to remain obscure have not served me well.

And how are your teeth today?
Can you afford to fix them?
How high is your rent?

The people with beautiful teeth are not on the streets. They are seen everywhere. The neither hide nor obfuscate themselves. Nothing is hidden, and their inevitability is halted, paused in the hectic circling of cosmetic jubilance…circling like vultures.

Can we really trust shellaced hair-dos; public-square, heavily coded, slickslime vernacular; or those gleaming cosmetic veneers to represent us? What are the clandestine proposals that they have in store for us?

Q: What will we do about this dilemma?
A: Not a god damn thing.

Do we ever?

Isn't the very nature of the veneer to hide the rotted truth? Are we so arrogant as to challenge Nature?

There are commercials promising us the ease to which we can give them our gold. There are programs on throughout the night teaching us how to become wealthy by picking the remaining meat off the bones of the foreclosed; the bones of our neighbors and friends.

I have learned that this culture is not the stuff of civics classes. Do you know what the message of Western Civilization is? It is that we are alone.

The irony of being collectively alone, but that we are willing to change everything about ourselves, willing to consume anything presented to us in the hopes of abating that alienation, if only for a instance.
Am I alone tonight?

I don't think so. Blanchot said that this proposition is not possible.

Am I the only one with bleeding gums tonight?
Am I the only one a hangnail? Am I the only one with greasy skin? Am I alone in my ripe odor? It is only me that feels offended by my own self?
No, in these I am not alone.

Is it merely these aspects of misery and discomfort the manner in which we share our experience of being with others?

You Always Keep Repeating.

2008-06-22T19:39:00.002-04:00

You are alone and you are easy.

You see the history of your life and lineage in your mitochondrial genes, cells, confirming what we suspected: bottleneck, enlargement, plague,vulcanologists from everywhere, studying the site, thinking aren't you a cute disease.

The music is so loud you blink every time there is a drum. Yes, best we heirloom quietly, for we are powerful weak. Overcoat, spread your wings.

Almost a legend, knots laced with passed-over glass, daddies in pastel suits next to the only surviving witness from a life best spent in big years, dreaming of sliding on your belly.
Tough night, wet ink, loose seams. There is plenty of time for nothing and you should volunteer for it. Time allotted is never enough.

Roll over and tell me you're a sofa, backboned by an old quilt, tied to the notion of design, of pattern, of words so staccato they bang like rats atop the roofs of government embassies, that is, without regard for what those below will try to assume you are: harmless and preoccupied, known through your gestures to be true.

The ropey cuisine of another planet awaits you tonight, something freeze-dried and wet just for you, and molded into whatever you want: lids and caps, some beans or rice, coelacanth, but the remains will leave their fossils on your plate.

Memory is like this,patterns already laid out across neurons and blisters,each occasion which follows will fit into that shape,even sans arms or eyelashes,rendered sharp-tongued with bad desire.

Complicity Sounds LIke A Woman's Name

2008-06-21T04:35:00.003-04:00

...yet compliance sounds like the name of a machine that washes, erases, destroys.

"Whenever someone makes a 'breakthrough' into honesty, it means not just self-knowledge but knowledge of what others can't see. To be honest in a real, absolute way, is to be almost prophetic, to upset the applecart."

"Because after all, the applecart is just an endless series of indigestible means and social commitments that are useless and probably shouldn't even be honored."

"It's futile, pointless conversations and gestures until finally there is nothing left but to die abandoned,..."

"...treated like a piece of garbage by people in white coats, name tags, and lapel pins who are no more civilized than sanitation workers ... that's what the applecart means to me."

This was contained in the interview made just three days before they collapsed on Avenue A with a massive and inoperable brain tumor.

"...and instantly I felt like I'd understood something powerful that had up until then eluded me. "Fassbinder was such an ugly man," I said.

"That's the real subject of his films: an ugly man who was wanting, looking, longing to be loved."

This was so elementary, yet unspoken because of course I was ugly too. And the way you took this in, understanding it without any explication, made me realize how everything that's passed between us came back to desire and ugliness; longing and identity.

In The Sun With A Heavy Heart

2008-05-29T01:40:00.005-04:00

Mungo Jerry said that it all happened in the summertime. Nobody took this seriously, the again why should they?

In Mai we were told that there was a beach beneath the pavement, but by June it was merely a phantom; the virtual display of a denial of class distinctions.

By Juneteenth the only thing that still lay beneath the paving stones were the workers.
The students had left the war and went on vacation. We, as youth, once took a stand for something far bigger than ourselves, ...and showed that wouldn't stand for these ideals being derailed. Now we politely move into our corrals where we are obediently disobedient. We contest them in the style in which we have been instructed to disagree. In the way that will not offed them as our opwn young are eaten. Yessir Messrs. Inglis, Conant, Peabody, and Cubberley, them schools is a workin'; 'twas the boredom done taught us.

Have we sold our teeth for the comfort of pre-chewed food? Our militancy for a free softdrink?
A soft voice fluttering down from on high it was said softly "I am here for you, I feel your pain."
Die Heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe shouted back up, defiantly "How can you feel our pain if it is not yours as well?"

Or maybe it was we who shouted those words back at her.

Or maybe she just meant to say "Don't be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life."

Or maybe it just doesn't matter as these words were never listened to. No one ever cared.
Maybe it's the summer sun that is the only thing that matters while it is shining. Maybe sometimes underwear and the East River is enough. The burden of knowing in the swelter of a humid summer is unbearable in light of the silent hum of the glacial winter.

Summer is here, just listen to this song for proof.

The joy of the summer sun is the very reason... With our bloodied noses and battered spines, we still find reason to stand tall and smile.

Juvenal Pop Songs- Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis

2008-05-28T11:56:00.005-04:00

Q: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
A: The answer is found somewhere below.

Remembering, Memory, Remember, ...Forgetting

2008-05-28T01:17:00.005-04:00

A great man once said-
"Does the fact that I'm trying to do it do it for you?"

I rarely utilize this as a record of events in my life any more- now is a time that I will do so.
I knew you first when you were Mary Coleraine with an Amelia Earhart fixation, and now you are more than just remembering and forgetting. I care very deeply for you and it is out of my own selfishness that I feel some need to say something to assuage your loss now. I'm no fool. I know that anything I say is just for me; to lessen the sting of my own failure at making things better.
With that in mind, my words here might not be in vain. Time will make this all taste less like hot horse shit, and in the end I will have had nothing to do with it.

I saw the "artist" that recorded this song- couldn't believe. Been saving it for rain, now is rain.

"Esse est Percipi" Said the Bishop

2008-05-19T20:29:00.003-04:00

..and one more for you Brendan.

Quite Possibly the Most Underrated Man I Know Of

2008-05-14T16:40:00.003-04:00

There is really nothing to say. Just watch.

"Pedal Up" by Rahsaan Roland Kirk

In Case You Forgot What Totally F*cking Crazy Looks Like

2008-05-14T12:39:00.005-04:00

If you did forget what BAT-SHIT NUTBALLS looks like, it took the rest of the people on the train a second to recognize it as well. BUT WHEN THEY DID- holy shit this is AMAZING!

You Like Swimming? It's Like Swimming.

2008-05-08T08:21:00.003-04:00

"It's not torture, not even close. It nothing worse than what happens when you go swimming. Is going to the beach and swimming torture? ...as far as the falsely contentious issue of its [torture's] constitutionality, that is a non-issue brought up by activists with destructive agendas. The eighth amendment deals with cruel and unusual punishment- inferring a punitive nature to the action. What is going on is not punitive, it's interrogation. The result is not to punish, but to get answers."
This came out of his mouth not his ass.

So you been to school, for a year or two
And you know you've seen it all
In daddy's car
Thinkin' you'll go far

On your five grand stereo braggin' that you know
How the brothers feel cold
And the slums got so much soul

It's time to taste what you most fear
Right Guard will not help you here
Brace yourself, my dear:
It's tough, kid, but it's life

You're a star-belly sneech
You suck like a leach
You want everyone to act like you

Kiss ass while you bitch
So you can get rich
But your boss gets richer off you

Well you'll work harder with a gun in your back

For a bowl of rice a day, you slave for soldiers 'til you starve

Then your head is skewered on a stake

Now you can go where people are one
Now you can go where they get things done

Where people dress in black
Where you'll kiss ass or crack
Where you'll do what you're told
Where the slums got so much soul

#3…You Gotta Get Me One of Those Jumpsuits

2008-05-06T01:54:00.002-04:00

...for you though this rough patch(HOLY SHIT! it does say Oceanic)

Back in the garage with my bullshit detector
Carbon monoxide making sure it's effective
I don't wanna hear about what the rich are doing
I don't wanna go to where the rich are going They think they're so clever, they think they're so right
But the truth is only known by guttersnipes

I was tuning in the shine on the light night dial
Doing anything my radio advised
With every one of those late night stations
Playing songs bringing tears to my eyes

I was seriously thinking about hiding the receiver
When the switch broke 'cause it's old
They're saying things that I can hardly believe
They really think we're getting out of control

They say you better listen to the voice of reason
But they don't give you any choice 'cause they think that it's treason
So you had better do as you are told
You better listen to the radio

I wanna bite the hand that feeds me
I wanna bite that hand so badly
I want to make them wish they'd never seen me

Some of my friends sit around every evening
And they worry about the times ahead
But everybody else is overwhelmed by indifference
And the promise of an early bed

You either shut up or get cut up, they don't wanna hear about it
It's only inches on the reel-to-reel
And the radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools
Tryin' to anaesthetise the way that you feel

Alone Again Or...

2008-05-02T05:54:00.001-04:00

..to Where It All Seems Familiar Again.

2008-04-26T02:12:00.003-04:00

History repeats itself. [Somebody said this.]
History throws its shadow over the beginning, over the desktop,
over the sock drawer with its socks, its hidden letters.
History is a little man in a brown suit
trying to define a room he is outside of.
I know history. There are many names in history ...
But none of them are ours.

¿Dónde estabas tú?

2008-04-20T21:39:00.003-04:00

Titaness Mnemosyne; Mother of Muses

2008-04-18T10:02:00.004-04:00

Thinking is forgetting. Only in forgetting can thought be born.

We think because we forget.

Thinking generalizes, synthesizes, eliminates peculiarities, but only as forgetting enables it.

Forgetting traverses thought with the same intensity as memory.

Neither forgetting nor memory is absolute; the capacity for thinking rests upon this notion.

Both forgetting and memory must counteract one another through their interaction in thinking, so neither one may overcome the other.

Thus as there can be no thought without forgetting, there too cannot be thought without memory, without its flashes.

Memory coats our every thought, our every generalized remembrance with that personal, individual, unique fragrance that makes it our own.

Forgetting may engender thought, thought may be subordinated to the arbitrariness of forgetfulness, but the senses are devoted to memory, to the preservation of that which logical thought, subservient to forgetting, attempts to suppress.

It is out of this interaction, in this interaction itself, between a forgetting that spurs logical thought as surrogate memory and the memory of the senses that resist generalization, that thinking proper occurs, individual thinking, creative thinking, free thinking, thinking in itself, unbridled and innocent like a child.

BEHOLD- The Muselmänner of Agamben Have Fully Surrendered

2008-04-11T04:56:00.008-04:00

[...so, what did the letter say?]

If the mind, while imagining non-existent things as present to it, is at the same time conscious that they do not really exist,

...this power of imagination must be set down to the efficacy of its nature, and not to a fault, especially if this faculty of imagination depend solely on its own nature— that is if this faculty of imagination be free.
[In light of this previous statement I present to you the question: Why do we not protest the incarceration of our own imaginations, yet demand vociferously the liberation of things like "trade" and "the market"; things which ultimately rob us of our imaginations?]

“…in all probability, the virtual is now more powerful than the actual, and the conceptual possible more real than the real. The brain has surpassed the world and, in the antagonistic fashion, is making another out of it.”

Irony looks cute on no one anymore. [He said so]

It is a distancing technique meant to be used to highten the impact of what is being presented through counterpoint; it is not an affectation meant to adorn the presenter with an appearance of disaffected boredom, disengaged ennui.
This has cheapened our lives and has shrunk our authentic experiences into molecules of ridicule.
Are these wolves of condescension the brutal monsters of inherent human evils or merely the products of starved intellectual reasoning.
Does the body become rabid when starved of it's right to it's own psychological responses?
Is naked, paranoid aggression the outcome of increased constriction of variation within our social norms?
Do we become aggressive, contemptuous, scornful, with inhibited cultural freedoms?

80s ephemera; B-movie stars; and the under-tongued mocking of disaffected, arrested/perpetual adolescents have usurped any real emotion and dismissed it as banal.
This usurper of the 'real' is it's sibling, the 'hyper-real' in the form of paranoia. Through this militant cynicism it instructs our experience of being and transforms the norms of social exchange into boredom and mockery.
There are tales of a wandering bandit bringing meaning back to our exchanges, but in the end the rightful king "Sincerity" the Lionheart won't ever return to the throne. [BTW]

It is a testament to the true power of the late stages of capitalism that we are ashamed to express our true emotions and desires, however it is thoroughly acceptable -even preferable- for us to simply cynically mock the entirity of 'being' with our 'cool adoration'. Nothing is that can interest me. [I think that is the next line]

We are paralyzed by our own fear of ridicule. We walk in the hum of our own deteriorated being. The experiential half-life of a civilization denied its right to cultural exchange beyond the structured role of docility; the obedient and passive receiver.

It isn't something as spectactular as THE END TIMES that is coming- it will just be droning.

Not the bang
Just the whimper.

Living Without Your "Sorry"

2008-04-09T04:45:00.009-04:00

-or- You could only bring yourself to love money; my love was poor and couldn't buy the dirt to bury you.

Comprehension of the watchworks behind the capital-circuit only explains the non-livability of life under these terms. We can participate only in willful ignorance. We consume on an ever-increasing schedule, that is the only permitted manner of existance. That first symptom of knowledge and "survival sickness" is severe depression; a consistant and enveloping disillusionment with what was once perceived as the magic of the world.
Dogs must find a place to shit, but finches don't share that concern. Hebbel, in a surprising entry in his diary, asks what takes away "life’s magic in later years.’ It is because in all the brightly-coloured contorted marionettes, we see the revolving cylinder that sets them in motion, and because for this very reason the captivating variety of life is reduced to wooden monotony. A child seeing the tightrope-walkers singing, the pipers playing, the girls fetching water, the coachmen driving, thinks all this is happening for the joy of doing so; he can’t imagine that these people also have to eat and drink, go to bed and get up again We, however, know what is at stake." Namely, earning a living, which commandeers all those activities as mere means towards an end not of our own. It reduces these daily actions to interchangeable, abstract labour-time incriments, the benefits from which are only ever fractionally our own. MinimaMoralia
An appearance of enjoyment is the primary, and to no small extent necessary, attribute required for all of our successful social exchanges and yet that very illusion is empty, fabricated. This deceit of joy is how we convince others (and to extent ourselves) that we experience life fully; that we have transcended the role of mere subsistance-existing machines.

This saccharin happiness is the only acceptable emotion with a positive social cache as it is proof that we are doing this whole "life" thing correctly.

Desperate Cry For That Sweet Realease of Death

2008-02-17T08:25:00.002-05:00

The Desert Ball of Thorns Bruising My Hand With Their Face

2008-02-01T22:04:00.004-05:00

The man had been complaing about the puss coming from the pungee stab and said that he "always cared more about his feet than he should have."

Games, Games. Here's some games. (the games are locked behind a metal screen) Games that want to get out, ha. See? More games. Games, they vegetize you. See? BAH! If you play the games you're voluntarily taking a tranquilizer.

I guess they gave you some chemical restraints, huh? DRUGS! What'd they give you? Thorazine? Haldol? How much, how much?? Learn your drugs, know your dosages, it's elementary.

There's the television. It's all right there. All right there. Look, listen, kneel, pray.

Commercials. We're not productive anymore. We don't make things anymore. It's all automated. What are we for then? We're consumers. (We'll buy our way to victory- if not the terrorists have already won.)

Yeah. Okay, okay, buy a lot of stuff and you're a good citizen. But if you don't buy a lot of stuff, if you don't, what are you then I ask you? What? Mentally ill!

Fact, Jim, fact. If you don't buy things: toilet paper, new cars, computerized blenders, electric operated sexual devices, stereo systems with brain implanted headphones, screwdrivers with miniature built in radar devices, voice activated computers!!

So, uh, you wanna watch a television show, you go to the charge nurse, you tell her the day, the time, the show you wanna see. But you have to tell her BEFORE the show comes on.

There was this guy, and he was ALWAYS requesting shows that had already played. YES! NO! You have to tell her before. He couldn’t quite grasp the idea that the charge nurse couldn’t make it be yesterday, you can’t turn back TIME, thank you Einstein. Now HE, HE was nuts! He was a fruit cake Jim!(.)

In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nusquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro.

Telephone call? That's communication with the outside world. Doctors discretion. Uh-uh. Nah. Hey, if all these nuts could make just make phone calls, it would spread insanity oozing through telephone cables. Oozing to the ears of all these poor, sane people. Infecting them. Wackos everywhere, a plague of madness.

In fact, very few Jim, Jim, very few of us here are actually mentally ill. I'm not saying you're not mentally ill, for all I know you're (twitches) crazy as a loon. But that's not why you're here. That's not why you're here, that's not why you're here!! You're here because of the system.

"Sometimes I think nothing is simple but the feeling of pain"-He said this before he disappeared over the railing. He never finished his drink; yet they said that Natalie Wood was sleepwalking and that the coroner could only declare a passive apllication of stoppage of that simplicity- scarcely could it be deemed a word as aggresive as DEATH, not without the corpus.

"Quit talkin out yo fuckin neck BITCHES." (in regards to the immediately preceeding statement please see above)

addendum
I feel like this:

knowing your soul looks like this:

FACE

The Hooves of Finite Mortality, in a Well Handled Manner

2008-01-22T07:35:00.000-05:00

The word wavering has so much more meaning with seagulls high above it, just as only a neon sign could be used to explain agony appropriately.

"America is the country that shows all the written guarantees in the world for freedom are no protection against tyranny and oppression of the worst kind. There the politician has come to be looked upon as the very scum of society."
Her constant thought of this day was of the difference between concentric and concurrent circle patterns.
He was a man as he was merely nothing else, he was only everything that he could not be called.
Purity equals nothingness, and we find it irresistibly attractive because we are all children of nothingness longing.

"Who hears music feels his solitude peopled at once."
sorry -more videos

"When I think about nonlinearity, I think of consciousness itself, and that your consciousness is the way that you collect various pieces of information to understand the world around you."

"How helpless they all looked in the ugliness of sleep. A third of life spent unconscious and corpselike. And some, the great majority, stumbled through their waking hours scarcely more awake, helpless in the face of destiny. They stumbled down a dark alley toward their deaths. They sent exploring feelers into the light and met fire and writhed back again into the darkness of their blind groping."

"People are ambivalently amped-up on celebrities. They wildly worship them. They aim their adolescent adoration at them and get bupkis back. It's depressingly dissassociative. It's idiotic idolatry. Fan magazines fan the flames of fatuous fancy and reinforce the fact that your favorite stars will never fuck you. Scandal rags rip that reinforcement and deleriously deconstruct and deidolize the idols who ignore you. It's revisionistic revenge. It reduces your unrequited lovers to your own level of erratic eroticism. It rips the rich and regal and guns them into the gutter beside you. It fractiously frees you to love them as one of your own."

Gilded means to make beautiful, or to adorn. It also used to mean to make red with blood. The good old times, that Gilded Age is about to return.
The magic of the "eternal recurrence" is also the ugly face of the historical dialectic.
Apasmara will only ever see the snake shedding its skin (as he votes the way the pundits instruct), Vishnu will blink his eyes a thousand more times before his 401K matures, and Schopenhauer will have a different name the next time he fires his maid for dusting the Buddha (no fear, labour enthusiasts- he hires her back tomorrow).

Excuse me- is you sayin' somethin'?

2008-01-14T22:13:00.000-05:00

Yes it's old, I know. Can't tell me nuthin'.

Christmas Is A Time Of Joy !!!!!!

2007-12-25T08:05:00.001-05:00

This is off track, off topic, but somewhat au courant.

Merry Christmas everyone (especially to all those who love their stuff).

It is a time for love and joy; a time for togetherness. Better to give than receive, and all that.

It is a time to re-connect with our family and other loved ones.

And don't forget motherfuckers....

We are a Christian nation and we must remember that Jesus is the reason for the season.
and if this isn't enough...

...at least I tried.

“Any change is resisted because bureaucrats have a vested interest in the chaos in which they exist.” -Pres #37

2007-11-26T07:57:00.000-05:00

A short while back one of America's Great, Rich, Old, White Men said this -
"You got the first mainstream African American, who is
and a nice-looking guy."

What he really meant was:

Thank God that we have those Rich, Old, White Men to run this country for us.
Who knows what would happen to us if they weren't there to keep us from destroying us-selves.

Are You F#cking Kidding Me??????????

2007-11-21T00:45:00.000-05:00

I saw it on the evening news; it must be true.

Thieves Get Rich, Saints Get Shot, And God Don't Answer Prayers A Lot.

2007-11-21T00:20:00.000-05:00

"I'd discovered, without knowing it, the difference between speaking and being. This is what listening is, true listening, the lonely but open mind...The soul's path is in the ear -- not in the mirror."

"For the thing I greatly feared has come upon me. And what I dreaded has happened to me."
- Job 3:25

"I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest, for trouble comes."
- Job 3:26

Words stand between silence and silence: between the silence of things and the silence of our own being. Between the silence of the world and the silence of God.

When we have really met and known the world in silence, words do not separate us from the world nor form other men, nor from God, nor from ourselves because we no longer trust entirely in language to contain reality.

You are made in the image of what you desire.

The only thing I will ever miss, is the goldfish that I never got to meet.

Why Travel Anywhere If You're Blind? You Can't See.

2007-11-20T23:17:00.001-05:00

"But the blind are merely casual observers of life. Lack of being, but recorders of being." stated the ambivalent (target demographic).

"No. We have method...Even when listening to traffic the mind draws its own pictures of the streets crowded with Russian ghosts and wheels that have broken loose from their carriages." replied the blind anterior (niche market).

After crossing the bridge of sighs and standing firmly in a truncated eternity; he turned and admitted the failure of his thought.

There is more than the two lives he distinguished: the life of the one how suffers,
and the life of the one who records the suffering of others.

The third is the one oblivious to life beyond the conventions that they are hurled into.

The third is the living dead. The good old salt of the Earth who delivers hemlock.

Salt of the Earth makes the land barren.

The Birds In The Hand Of Any Mountain

2007-11-20T22:02:00.000-05:00

I have nothing left to translate

Into the figures of night

Or the pale geometry

Of the fire-birds.

If I once had a wagon of lights to ride in

The axle is broken

The horses are shot.

The Oppressor Would Not Be Strong Without Accomplices Among The Oppressed

2007-11-20T19:28:00.000-05:00

Mystification of power is one of the forms of oppression;
Ignorance is a situation in which man may be enclosed as narrowly as in a prison;

...every individual may practice his freedom inside his world, but not everyone has the means of rejecting, even by doubt, the values, taboos, and prescriptions by which he is surrounded;

...doubtless, respectful minds take the object of their respect for their own;

in this sense they are responsible for it, as they are responsible for their presence in the world: but they are not guilty if their adhesion is not a resignation of their freedom.

The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity.

To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won.

Absurdity challenges every ethics; but also the finished rationalization of the real would leave no room for ethics; it is because man's condition is ambiguous that he seeks, through failure and outrageousness, to save his existence.

"We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there."

"This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures."

"Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman." (- the witty luddite's book of philology)

Maddening Crowds Know Only Mastication (just ask Hardy)

2007-11-20T18:39:00.000-05:00

"The power of hiding ourselves from one another is mercifully given, for men are wild beasts, and would devour one another but for this protection." (redux)

"How helpless they all looked in the ugliness of sleep. A third of life spent unconscious and corpselike."

"Some, the great majority, stumbled through their waking hours scarcely more awake, helpless in the face of destiny."

"They stumbled down a dark alley toward their deaths."

"They sent exploring feelers into the light and met fire and writhed back again into the darkness of their blind groping."

"The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair."

Academic Palaver and The Blind Surrender of Ambivalence

2007-11-20T18:35:00.000-05:00

"The founders of religions must have also slept in unheated rooms."

"Good Evening Pyongyang - Are You Ready to ROCK?!?!?!"

Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,
The dear repose for limbs with travel tir'd;

But then begins a journey in my head
To work my mind, when body's work's expired:

For then my thoughts--from far where I abide--
Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee,

And keep my drooping eyelids open wide,
Looking on darkness which the blind do see:

Save that my soul's imaginary sight
Presents thy shadow to my sightless view,

Which, like a jewel (hung in ghastly night,
Makes black night beauteous, and her old face new.

Lo! thus, by day my limbs, by night my mind,
For thee, and for myself, no quiet find.

"Sometimes I think nothing is simple but the feeling of pain"

"C'mon, Everybody Now- Put Your Muthafuckin Hands Together For the One That Made It Possible For This All To Happen..."

"Keep On Rocking in the Culturally Hermetically Sealed World!!! Thank You and Good Night Commrades; You've Been Great!!!"

"I Like America and America Likes Me"

2007-11-08T16:04:00.000-05:00

Schrödinger's Vote
When it is not one nor the other, it could be both concurrently.
Pay close attention, choose wisely:

VS.

Big Sur As 'Misstra Know-It-All'

2007-11-02T14:48:00.000-04:00

It’s sad. It’s almost
sad what we shed
in the changing room.

The awe in it almost
with sadness. No more
traveling by night, car, jet
lag, or moonlight.

This ocean did once taste of home
if not temporary then deep, as if

I’d stepped out of the shirts of my family,
who always carry time with them.

I cling to them blindly. Coasts
being only where what’s walkable
stops,

not some ballad of hand
and slate. Beach only dumping
ground for the floatable.

So I don’t float.

So I never loved
my floatable ones. So
what. As if it brings
them back.

Who it's for knows who it's for.

Autobiography of a Totally Harmless Person

2007-11-02T14:10:00.000-04:00

Without you, bathysphere, the silent world
will dive even farther and more bravely
from us. Without crew, museability
will take one final blow, sounds will dead-weight
a useless rap against every seafloor.

I did not cherish my way to the end
of the street, sweet tank. Carried no houses,
crossed streets vainly. I was riding a bus
and there was fatigue throughout the city.

And the dog I was dreaming never scared
of dirtytalk. She cowered to muck up
the pride we have at last torn from our selves.

Only steep in these leagues may I pilot
your steel subject. Only now everyone
in the photographs dead. Boy I buried

finally tame. No retractiles, no dark
so long unpatented. But that dog, she
goes so heavy with pause at water’s edge,
quieting her truest locomotive.

Didn’t I invent that? We know to dive,
not for tidal wave, not for subterrain,

but for making echo, knowing nothing
of each other’s loss. We dove. I knew you
and never knew you. Both happened. Both true.

Who it's for knows who it's for.

Buildings Fighting (and How They Learn)

2007-11-02T10:55:00.000-04:00

Hello Mrs. Johnson
Hello Mr. Brown

I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything.
—Raymond Carver

The Tune and Also the Words
I was in my city but I didn’t feel like I was inside anything.
I was walking through rain to other rain, ajar as any well-winded door.

That was the first word. When we were still getting prehistoric with each other.
Pith with a strand torn from scalp. Folded into your wallet in tiny effort of voodoo.
This is no longer sleeping around a lake-based square.
This is no longer any kind of hustle, so what is this?
The seeds out back may well have escaped.
Pumpkins pouring down the road near the driveway. Nasturtium ricketing all around the fenceline.

Riddle kin, take not your part in this disaster.
I want to smell different and remind people of new things based on smell alone.
I want to smell alone, reminding things of people when they were different.
I want different reminders, basing smells on people being alone.

Is it possible to know the weight of crushed bird hope?
I don’t believe in it. I don’t believe we had a first word.
The morning was swift and bruised, a vivid pillar.

Then I lost it.

"...here, then, is what is considered to be desire; desire known as a mobile void."

Goodbye Mrs. Johnson
Goodbye Mr. Brown

Who it's for knows who it's for.

The Prison We Choose To Dance Inside

2007-09-20T06:44:00.000-04:00

Government by showbusiness... well, every authoritarian government understands this concept well.

Think of Hitler's great mass demonstrations when millions of people were whipped up into hysteria, or the enormous military parades of North Korea or the former Soviet Union, using beautiful children. dancing and preforming gymnastic routines; flowers, songs and signs..accompanied with threat and fear. The mass is compelled to participate for fear of being trampled, albeit idealistically, by the crowds.
Our terrifying rapidly developing technologies go hand in hand with the ever increasing psychological impact that this information distribution has upon this mass-mind of the state.
Sometimes this technology leads to unforeseen results. I have read accounts of how soldiers destined for the front lines are routinely, systematically desensitized by deliberately exposing them to brutality in such a way that they lose the capacity to recognize any trace of humanity in the people that they have to interrogate [currently in some cases torture], attack, and kill.

This is a controlled and skilled process where their controllers are trained to know the exact methods to carry out such desensitization without their active knowledge of doing so.

Under the guise of normalized training regimen the soldiers immediate superviser exercises what is believed to be the necessary desensitization rtequired to survive -safely- under such circumstances.

This methodology has been proven false scientifically; and has shown to, in the long run, cause greater danger, and propensity for greater casualities among soldiers.
-from the golden notebooks (of prisons)

"Reflections" by the Supremes Was My Mothers Favorite Song

2007-09-18T03:23:00.000-04:00

Amalgam of Being

2007-09-18T02:57:00.000-04:00

An amalgam is any mixture or blending of mercury with another metal or with an alloy. Most metals are soluble in mercury, but some (such as iron) are not. Amalgams are commonly used in dental fillings.

[photos censored to abide by photobucket's puritanical fanaticism; gore = passable, human body = pornography]

Sleep; Puissant Cousin of Death

2007-09-18T02:39:00.000-04:00

You carry your memories like a sack of old stones
Though some are lighter than air
Sleep is the place where the bones can rest
Unless the world follows you there

Accurate Scholarship & A Psychopathic God

2007-09-17T03:33:00.000-04:00

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Cusanus, Our Gentle Inquisitor (route of finite-form)

2007-09-11T00:14:00.000-04:00

It is common folk belief around the world that a camera can steal your soul. Photos are the Devil's Proof.
What sound do elk make in the wild? What sound do elk make in the American Legion Hall?

"You're Being So...Ordinary"

2007-09-10T00:37:00.001-04:00

L'art atteste ce qu'il y a d'inhumain dans l'humain.
Art attests to what is inhuman in man.

-from "I'm Too Sad To Tell You" ISOTM

"Yeah, it's like-whutsit called- man's inhumanity to man. Isn't that, like, a pallumdrone[sic] or something?"

"That moment, if it comes, when one begins to move beyond the guise of the urbane world traveler who pens erudite letters from far-flung corners of the globe, into the pursuit of another identity; an identity that is not yet clearly defined, but one which, on the strengths of his new ideas/creations, might act as the critical conscience of contemporary [S]ociety,
- or as -
a Cosmonaut of human history"

anniversarius gauisus

2007-09-09T16:26:00.000-04:00

"One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph"
--Annus Horribilis

Forever - Not For Better

2007-09-09T15:31:00.000-04:00

Dillinger's final words of comfort for the lonely and weary of heart of this grate[sic] land:

"If you try to probe, I'll lie to you. Seventy-five percent of what I say in interviews is false. I'm like a hen protecting her eggs. I cannot talk. I must protect my work. Introspection is bad for me. I'm a medium, not an orator. Like certain oriental and Christian mystics, I think the 'self' is a kind of enemy. My work is what enables me to come out of myself. I like what I do, not what I am . . . Do you know the best service anyone could render to art? Destroy all biographies. Only art can explain the life of a man -- and not the contrary."

"You, Dear Reader, will take little note, nor long remember what was written here, but it can never be forgotten what has been un-done here. How it has all come to be undone?"

And these memories lose their meaning
When I think of love as something new
Though I know I'll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
A-06/S-02/F-06 [cliche]

-Simon Whitethatch Potentloins
aka Admiral Hoarce Teely Kneckbrawler
aka Alejandro "Baby" Penits
aka Charles Leopold Salamander
aka William Bixby Banner
aka "Slowit" Slipple T. Rentsman

Like Nails Through Velum...

2007-09-06T16:11:00.000-04:00

Martin Luther ignited the Reformation of the 16th century by nailing to the door of the church in Wittenberg in 1517 the 95 Theses that he wished to debate. I will publish this challenge to Christianity, post my theses on the Internet, and send copies with invitations to debate them to the recognized Christian leaders of the world.
My theses are far smaller in number than were those of Martin Luther, but they are far more threatening theologically. The issues to which I now call the Christians of the world to debate are these:

1. Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. So most theological God-talk is today meaningless. A new way to speak of God must be found.

2. Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So the Christology of the ages is bankrupt.

3. The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.
4. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.

5. The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.

6. The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.

7. Resurrection is an action of God. Jesus was raised into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history.

8. The story of the Ascension assumed a three-tiered universe and is therefore not capable of being translated into the concepts of a post-Copernican space age.

9. There is no external, objective, revealed standard writ in scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.

10. Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.

11. The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.

12. All human beings bear God's image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one's being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.

This 'dehv-leesh'[sic] heresy brough to you by the great -Bishop Spong -

I Have Nothing To Say And I Am Saying It

2007-09-06T14:11:00.000-04:00

"Communication guerrillas do not intend to occupy, interrupt or destroy the dominant channels of communication, but to detour and subvert the messages transported."
-Mr. Luther Blissett*

This means not to play as innocent actors but to imitate spectacle and its deceptions "...against a symbolic order of Western Capitalist societies which is built around discourses of rationality and rational conduct. Guerrilla communication relies on the powerful possibility of expressing a fundamental critique of power through the non-verbal, paradoxical, or mythical."
-Sir Luther Blissett, GGA, PPJD, ACS*

Our roles in the spectacle make us complicit in the crimes of the structures of power, and naivete will not be permitted us as an alibi.

Every paper we push in our towers of exploitative commercial enterprise --and let us be honest, all commercial enterprise is necessarily the exploitation of the less powerful-- is evidence of our complicity. There will one day, no longer be an ear for Eichmann.
-The Honorable, Judge Luther Blissett,(MotherFucker)*

This change from within, this clandestine experience must never be one of destruction, for nothing will replace the structures of explotation and tyranny, but more exploitation and tyranny.
-Fra. Luther Blissett, Ordet of the Iscariot Consternation*

*Playing the part of Iago this evening will be

L.S.-1899-1973 aka The Man With The Ears of the Gods.
[ +SPOLIER ALERT- the Prince never actually dies in the end ]

The change must not be a cancer, but a song.
The change must come from the Army of the Poem.
It is here -nestled in the middle of the text- where the true message of this new politic will be hidden (see Iago):

--Catullus’ # 8
Miser Catulle, desinas ineptire,
et quod uides perisse perditum ducas,
fulsere quondam can didi tibi soles,
cum uentitabas quo pella ducebat
amata nobis quantum amabitur nulla.
ibi illa multa tum iocasa fiebant,
quae tu uolebas nec puella nolebat.
fulsere uere candidi tibi soles.
nunc iam illa non uolt: tu quoque inpotens noli,

nec quae fugit sectare, nec miser uiue,
sed obstinata mente perfer, obdura.
uale, puella. iam Catullus obdurat,
nec te requiret nec rogabit inuitam.

at tu dolebis, cum rogaberis nulla.
scelesta, vae te, quaetibi mnaet uita?
quis nunc te adibit? cui uideberis bella?
quem nunc amabis? cuius esse diceris?
quem basiabis? cui labella mordebis?
at tu, Cattule, destinatus obdura.

For Realz!

Now for those Anglicized, yet not Latinized-
--Catullus' #8 (translated English)
you feel bad, Catullus, but quit acting stupid
and face facts. what's lost is lost.
you had yourself some sunny days for a while,
just going wherever she led you,
no girl ever got the loving you gave her.
a lot of laughs and good times they were too,
anything you wanted she never said no,
yes, those were some sunny days alright.
but she doesn't want you now, so forget her.
don't chase her around, making yourself miserable,
make your mind up it's over, and stick to it.
goodbye my girl. you heard Catullus, he's had it.
he doesn't need you, he won't bother you anymore.

you'll feel sorry though when nobody wants you.
too bad, bitch! what are you going to do now?
who'll visit you? who'll think you're beautiful?
who will you love? whose girl will they call you?
who else will you kiss and bite on his lips?
but you, Catullus, remember: it's finished.

Marrowed Drunkening

2007-08-10T04:31:00.000-04:00

Despair seems to be the only appropriate response to the palpable meaninglessness of the past and future life.

Any other attitude belongs solely to intoxication- alcoholic, anxious, or religious. Man is a creature of nothingness and can only confront his inconceivable tribulations -these few and limited years of being- by getting himself dead drunk.(Tournier)

Secret Piercing Surveillance

2007-08-10T04:15:00.000-04:00

My secrets are what I can control, your glance kills all I control- your gaze pierces my secret. - Daniel Dennett- on video surveillance society

Forced Anonymity.

2007-08-07T21:56:00.000-04:00

A man walks into a bar and says:
Take my wife--please.
So you do.
You take her out into the rain and you fall in love with her
and she leaves you and you’re desolate.
You’re on your back in your undershirt, a broken man
on an ugly bedspread, staring at the water stains
on the ceiling.
And you can hear the man in the apartment above you
taking off his shoes.
You hear the first boot hit the floor and you’re looking up,
you’re waiting
because you thought it would follow, you thought there would be
some logic, perhaps, something to pull it all together
but here we are in the weeds again,
here we are
in the bowels of the thing: your world doesn’t make sense.
And then the second boot falls.
And then a third, a fourth, a fifth.

A man walks into a bar and says:
Take my wife--please.
But you take him instead.
You take him home, and you make him a cheese sandwich,
and you try to get his shoes off, but he kicks you
and he keeps kicking you.
You swallow a bottle of sleeping pills but they don’t work.
Boots continue to fall to the floori
n the apartment above you.
You go to work the next day pretending nothing happened.
Your co-workers ask
if everything’s okay and you tell them
you’re just tired.
And you’re trying to smile. And they’re trying to smile.

A man walks into a bar, you this time, and says:
Make it a double.
A man walks into a bar, you this time, and says:
Walk a mile in my shoes.
A man walks into a convenience store, still you, saying:
I only wanted something simple, something generic...
But the clerk tells you to buy something or get out.
A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river
but then he’s still left
with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away
but then he’s still left with his hands.

On Words,

2007-08-03T05:14:00.000-04:00

Some Of It Is All There

2007-08-03T05:07:00.000-04:00

I.

I am in the big green park which is green again and it is spring and I love
you and the park and the red birds in it. When you have birds in you
they are red and when it rains they eat enough for several years. Worms
become an offering to the sidewalks, or perhaps it is a performance,
two boys playing basketball, but it is really you and me who are
playing basketball but you are taller so you always win unless you let me
have the last word or one of yours. I would prefer that. Red birds are
positioning themselves in the field. They are coming closer and by the time
they get here, I’m in my room looking through all my things wondering
where you are. How many charges we’re going to get. I think you made the wind
blow harder because I hear something. If we get far enough south
we could grow new tongues, we could regard each other newly. When I mail this
it will contain paper and ink and those will make up a rendering of my house
just as they also make up certain declarations. I am not keeping anything
secret.Your night is becoming my morning and if we keep this up
we could be all the time in sunlight and even the weather wouldn’t bother us.

II.

I am in the big green park which is green again and it is spring and I love
where you are. How many charges do we get? You made the wind
have the last word or one of yours. I would prefer that red birds are
playing basketball but you are taller. So you always win unless you let me
become an offering to the sidewalks, or perhaps a performance,
a containment of paper and ink. Make-up, a rendering of my house,
which is red. When it rains they eat enough for several years. Worms have
you and the park and the red birds in it.When birds are in you they are
two boys playing basketball but it is really you and me who are
positioning themselves in the field. We are coming closer and by the time
we grow new tongues, we regard each other newly. When I mail this
secret, your night is becoming my morning and we keep
blowing harder because I hear something. If we get far enough south,
we could be all the time in sunlight and even the weather wouldn’t bother us.
But it arrives, and I’m in my room looking through all my things. I wonder
if it makes certain declarations, weather. I am not keeping anything.

III.

We could be all the time in sunlight and even the weather wouldn’t bother us.
You and the park and the red birds in it.When you have birds in you they are
an offering to the sidewalks, or perhaps a performance,
positions in the field. They are coming closer and by the time

I am in the big green park which is green again, it is spring and I love
playing basketball but you are taller so you always win unless you let me.
Blow harder because I hear something. If we get far enough south,
red and when it rains they eat enough for several years. Worms address
two boys playing basketball but it is really you and me who are
there, and we are getting charged. How many times have you made the wind
arrive? I’m in my room looking through all my things, wondering
how to make certain declarations like I am not keeping anything,
we could grow new tongues, we could regard each other newly. When I mail this,
please have the last word or one of yours. I would prefer that. Red birds are
secret. Your night is becoming my morning and if we keep this up
we will contain paper and ink. Those will make up a rendering of my house.

IV.

Have the last word: it’s one of yours. I would prefer that red birds are
in the big green park which is green again and it is spring and I love
containing paper and ink: those make up a rendering of my house
if we can be all the time in sunlight. Even the weather wouldn’t bother
two boys playing basketball but it is really you and me who are
new tongues: we can regard each other newly when I mail this.
Blow harder because I hear something. If we get far enough south,
(secret: your night is becoming my morning) and if we keep this up,
(red) and when it rains. They eat enough for several years, worms,
just as they also make up certain declarations. I am not keeping anything
in the field. They are coming closer and by the time positions
arrive, I’m in my room looking through all my things wondering,
offering. The sidewalks are performing.
Where are you? And how. You are wind-charged,
the park, the red birds in it.When you have birds in you they
play basketball.You are taller so you always win. Unless you let me.
thank you very much to -Mary Austin Speaker

Prediction: The Cold Stone In The Chest

2007-07-31T07:04:00.000-04:00

My Beloved -Her Name Harvester- announced that she was leaving with a voice only slightly more dedicated than it was to breath.

My Beloved -Her Name Kerf Straightener-was cutting cucumbers for a salad, and continued without the slightest recognition to the weight of what she had just uttered.
My Beloved -Her Name Weather Vane- knew the power of her words but had been moved beyond concern for the damage that they may cause.

I threw myself at her feet. I stare at her toes; there I could see in her posture that this had been something fully decided.
My Beloved -Her Name Severence Package- had already banished me from her heart and I would no longer be recognized there.

I felt dragged between two powerful beasts, the neglect of one and the extortion of the other.
I want this all noted for the record, though I make no excuses for my behavior. This happened.

Work Horse

2007-07-18T03:03:00.000-04:00

I own you because I have to.
I am not self-sufficient.

When I tried to be poor, I was thrown gold;
When I kept the gold, I was called a wastrel;
When I gave it back, I was shunned for my ingratitude.
And you tried to please me, but I will never be pleased.

We are simpatico; We both know futility.

We made the land work, but neglected the niceties.
Those who have done the reverse dislike us.

We dislike ourselves for the work seems like grief.
And what is work anyway but a turgid mirror
whose revelations quiver in recalculation:

We are something today; we are nothing today.
We are something today; we are nothing tomorrow.

With Certain Blue Crystallizations

2007-07-18T02:43:00.000-04:00

The night is of the color
Of a woman's arm
Night, the female,
Obscure,
Fragrant and supple,
Conceals himself.
A pool shines ,
Like a bracelet
Shaken in a dance.

I measure myself
Against a tall tree.
I find that I am much taller,
For I reach right up to the sun,
With my eye;
And I reach to the shore of the sea
With my ear.
Nevertheless, I dislike
The way the ants crawl
In and out of my shadow.

When my dream was near the moon,
The white folds of the gown
Filled with yellow light.
The soles of its feet
Grew red.
Its hair filled
With certain blue crystallizations
From stars,
Not Far off.

Not all the knives of the lamp-posts,
Nor the chisels of the long streets,
Nor the mallets of the dromes
And high towers,
Can carve
What one star can carve,
Shining through the grape-leaves.

I Can't Be More Clumsy With My Inferences.

2007-07-18T01:41:00.000-04:00

Longing Of The Wayward Cloud

2007-07-18T01:35:00.000-04:00

Sometimes it's the heat and the humidity.

The Beloved Infidel (C-Up v.1)

2007-07-16T22:29:00.000-04:00

Of course all of life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work- the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside- the ones you remember and blame things onand, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at once.

There is another sort of blow that comes from within- that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.

The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick- the second kind of happens almost without your knowing but is realized suddenly indeed.
- Admiral Fitzwallace (Trimalchio, O' say can you see, Uncle Francis Scott Key?)

-these photos have all been used before- REHASH -death of the thinking bone, but we still love you Pat Hobby

Snakes and Snails et al

2007-07-16T01:36:00.000-04:00

I wasn't born of a whistle
Or milked from a thistle at twilight

No, I was all horns and thorns
Sprung out fully formed, knock-kneed and upright
So enough of this terror we deserve to know light

And grow evermore lighter and lighter
You would have seen me through
But I could not undo that desire

-this disembodied voice on the line is high pitched and ... fey.

Molded And Cast Aside

2007-07-15T03:50:00.000-04:00

"This diagnosis carried an emotional tone that could not be parried. The world as a chorus now rejected all that I knew to be myself, for now there was clinical justification for this calculated and aggressive elimination of self-as-social-being."*
" And this chorus was not just a selection of my (recently) former intimates and friends; it was the world of birds and pine trees, the world of canned pineapple and fluorescent lights.
The world of tea and coffee and polite conversation. "*

"The diagnosis was the porthole to the world of the nameless, and the abstract class of 'human-being-as-object.' "*

[*a Werther's Candy 'Original']
"On an ordinary day
a child's bright laughter fills the air
one loving word
one loving glance
there's sunshine everywhere
Your Werther's are his Werther's too
So glistening, with its golden glow
So sweet and creamy, it tastes so good
You're so alike the two of you.
Werther's and that feeling
That you never will forget
When one who loves you says to you
You're someone very special too."
(Werther's sorrows are His sorrows too-?)

Alas, Poor (Parson) Yorick!

2007-07-15T03:32:00.000-04:00

I hath been framed

And it is the walls that I speak to. Yet when they answer I begin to take note of thine own voice and in it harkens the sound of...treachery!

Post-it Cliche

2007-07-14T23:49:00.000-04:00

It is a sad state of affairs when even my cliches are cliche.

The term cliche originated with the movable type printing presses; the idea of hammering out an image or phrase repeatedly.

The French call snapshots cliches. This began in a sort of derisive manner; insinuating that posed photographs were overwrought, hackneyed, and disingenuous.

I am lost as to who needs to be striking that "right note," I am not sure what is expected of me. I am not even sure if you are catching all the subtle clues left here.

Fluttering Dangled Modifiers

2007-07-14T22:29:00.000-04:00

I never thought you threatened me-
I've seen a sparrow alone.

It's a bird that nests in many places,
so it's never far from home.

I find comfort when the world's amiss,
So take this as your cue.
I'm whistling into a great abyss
...but have I frightened you?

Eternal Recurrence- Again

2007-07-14T19:46:00.000-04:00

How goofy and horrible is life. Just
look into the faces of the lovers
as they near their drastic destinations,
the horses lathered and fagged.

Just
look at them handling the vase
priced beyond the rational beneath
the sign stating the store's breakage
policy, and what is the rational but
a thing we must always break? I am not
the only one composed of fractious murmurs.

From the point of view of the clouds,
it is all inevitable and dispersed—
they vanish over the lands to reconstitute
over the seas, themselves again
but no longer themselves, what they wanted
they no longer want, daylight fidgets
across the frothy waves.

Most days
you can't even rub a piece of charcoal
across paper laid on some rough wood
without a lion appearing, a fish's umbrella
skeleton. Once we believe it told us
something of ourselves. Once we even believed
in the diagnostic powers of ants.

Upon
the eyelids of the touched and suffering,
they'd exchange their secretive packets
like notes folded smaller than chemicals
the dancers pass while dancing with another.
A quadrille. They told us nearly nothing
which may have been enough now that we know
so much more.

From the point of view
of the ant, the entire planet is a dream
quivering beneath an eyelid and who's to say
the planet isn't. From the point of view
of the sufferer, it seems everything will
be taken from us except the sensation
of being crawled over.

I believe everything
will be taken from us. Then given back
when it's no longer what we want. We
are clouds, and terrible things happen
in clouds.

The wolf's mouth is full
of strawberries, the morning's a phantom
hum of glories.

Subject/Object Deathmatch- Chapter: Prologue

2007-07-14T19:04:00.000-04:00

The gaze does not belong to the subject but, rather, the object.

"I can feel myself under the gaze of someone whose eyes I do not see, not even discern. All that is necessary is for something to signify to me that there may be others there. A window for instance, if it gets a bit dark, and if I have possible reason for thinking that there may be someone behind it, is straight-away a gaze."
-JL(GazeMaster)

When viewed, the act of viewing changes the actions of the subject being observed.
-see- (Nathaniel) Hawthorne Effect [or Reflexivity]

But is there any gaze at the non-existant?
The Subject as the Platonic/Symbolic Object for political concern.

Immensity Made Manifold

2007-07-14T13:15:00.000-04:00

I screamed, and -- lo! -- Infinity
Came down and settled over me;
Forced back my scream into my chest,
Bent back my arm upon my breast,
And, pressing of the Undefined

The definition on my mind,
Held up before my eyes a glass
Through which my shrinking sight did pass
Until it seemed I must behold
Immensity made manifold;

Whispered to me a word whose sound
Deafened the air for worlds around,
And brought unmuffled to my ears

The gossiping of friendly spheres,

The creaking of the tented sky,

The ticking of Eternity.

One Hand Clasping

2007-07-13T05:29:00.000-04:00

"...that you express yourself much better through the texts of others, among which you have complete freedom of choice, than by your own."
-Henry Bemis -Luthius Blisser -Chris Marker

Keep your eyes on the dummy; he talks while I drink this glass of water. Aren't you AMAZED!?!

The Real Question At Hand-

2007-07-13T05:00:00.000-04:00

"Do you hear, or does some fond illusion mock me?"
-Horace (you remember Horace, right? "don' lemme be misundastood")

Lama the Priest, Llama the Beast

2007-07-13T04:47:00.000-04:00

Thus we play the fool with the time and the spirits of the wise sit in the clouds and mock us.
-Edward de Vere (but does it really matter?)

...I Never Watched Stardust Memories

2007-07-13T03:38:00.000-04:00

"We prefer your earlier, funny films."

"I never read Moby Dick"- Leonard Zelig

"He painted my house a disgusting color. He said he was a painter. I couldn't believe the results. Then he disappeared."

"I said no rabbit!"
"I thought that you meant just that one time."

Some Of The Times It's Never

2007-07-13T02:47:00.000-04:00

What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?

-JL (the SYMBOLIC)

The best image to sum up the unconscious is Baltimore in the early morning.
-JL (the IMAGINARY)
The best image to sum up the lengths of desire's fingers is an Ohio motel late at night.
What could be more convincing, moreover, than the gesture of laying one's cards face up on the table?

-JL (the REAL)
It was a ten minute walk to a clearing in the woods, and they broke a glass underfoot, tying a knot.

Systems Two- Survival Sickness (More Than The Sniffles)

2007-07-13T02:34:00.000-04:00

Kierkegaard describes survival sickness well: "Let others bemoan the maliciousness of their age. What irks me is its pettiness, for ours is an age without passion...My life comes out all one colour." Survival is life reduced to bare essentials, to life's abstract form, to the minimum of activity required to ensure people's participation in production and consumption.

Survival is life in slow motion. How much energy it takes to remain on the level of appearances! The media gives wide currency to a whole personal hygiene of survival: avoid strong emotions, watch your blood pressure, eat less, drink in moderation only, survive in good health so that you can continue playing your role.

We must be economical with survival for it wears us down; we have to live it as little as possible for it belongs to death. In former times one died a live death, one quickened by the presence of God. Today our respect for life prohibits us from touching it, reviving it or snapping it out of its lethargy. We die of inertia, whenever the charge of death that we carry with us reaches saturation point. Unfortunately there is no branch of science that can measure the intensity of the deadly radiation that kills our daily actions.

In the end, by dint of identifying ourselves with what we are not, of switching from one role to another, from one authority to another, and from one age to another, how can we avoid becoming ourselves part of that never-ending state of transition which is the process of decomposition?

Systems One -(to Another) and the Whole

2007-07-13T01:12:00.000-04:00

Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever.
- Faughn Marbles (portent larious)

Up until now people have merely complied with a system of world transformation. Today the task is to make the system comply with the transformation of the world.
-Michel Thorgal (possibly)

A Course In Curses

2007-07-13T00:39:00.000-04:00

Images drown out the subtlety of language.
Be aware of the language that you lay next to an image, once there, the text surrenders its claim to meaning
--and dies.

Caesar's double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.

Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.