Stabbed shattered rooted to the place you are I cannot comprehend what elegance of sex you are to make me ache as every ocean rushing to a shore it can not reach
Why your eyes unfold me
Tame me create me ravenous for your voice
As if you were the moment of my beginning
Why your hands delicate and fine
Trouble my sleep
As a tiny pair of birds
Haunting my heart with their wondrous feathers
I am consumed as an endless empty moment and the absolute alonelyness of not possessing your body
Erupts from my pulse
Without your body so majestic and your fierce fragility I am the wreckage of a man
I prowl my imagination searching for you
For your scent stitched inside my bones
Your laughter
Your whirlwind of movement
Your most silent gesture
Transforms me
Until I am become within the within of becoming
And I glimpse you waiting for me
As the earth beneath the sky arching its back
With the precision of pleasure opening itself endlessly generating this truth
I am
The happy servant of your thighs
Saturday, February 9, 2008
Mike Brancatti and The Woman Who Gave Birth to Herself with Whales
Note: This short story is adapted from a chapter in my novel in progress, The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover.
Bass said it all started with Mike loving Gail but Bass never knew Doctor Kim and when I knew Mike he told the story with Brooklyn being the start of the whole thing and if you knew Mike you’d know that Bass was wrong and Mike told it this way - as a kind of no-man’s land he inhabited and that voice, sryup-thick with tones of a vanished Brooklyn suggested how a kingdom of order became a country without borders but many checkpoints and the entrance was always the same; that he was a punk back then living in Brooklyn, and his mother went insane. She heard voices coming from the wall sockets. They had to lock her up – him, his older brother Dean and their father, who was destroyed by the process. After, when they had locked her up, the old man would sit inside himself like his life was then become a birdcage and his feelings fluttered around as small birds but they never went back anywhere even when the cage was open, and he just sat there in the living room and sometimes he fell asleep in his gray chair by the window.
Of course who am I to say she wasn’t hearing voices – real voices. They lock you up for that sort of thing but who are any of us to say…think about it: A man says – let’s invade Babylon and if you disagree with me, god will never forgive you, and millions of people say, ok, let’s do that; let’s invade Babylon…and these people never get locked up, at least not for that, so he was a punk living in Brooklyn and he drank and he knew people with exotic names like Spider Bruscatto and Wheels Lanergan, just like he was a character in an old movie but of course those movies get written by people who had lives and some even lived in Brooklyn where they knew guys named Spider or Wheels and as much as I liked Bass and thought he was a good guy he never understood that and when he told the story it was really the story of Bass telling the story of Mike and not the story of Mike true or even the story of Mike as told by Mike and so when Bass told it, it was funny enough, with all the things about Spider and Wheels, but more like a clever joke and he never told it except as a clever joke over poker at his place or at the café where we all knew each other for a while and Mike was there late or even after the place was closed, forlornly grading the papers of his students and he told me about growing up in Brooklyn and the whole terrible sad story about his mother and her troubled soul.
He did this and that for a while and hung around with his older brother and his crew and then got a job driving a gangster; a genuine real gangster who knew people who hurt other people and he wore fine clothes the gangster did, and had a lawyer who always got him from here to there without too much trouble, and they hired Mike to drive.
Years later he still had the habit he learned then, when the old man would get in the car and say – drive – and he’d drive in long lazy swooping circles around the city going nowhere as if nowhere were a place on a map with its own roads and signs and later, when I knew him, he’d take two hours (if you let him) to make a twenty minute drive mostly because he missed it; it was, in a strange and curious way, a great job.
So, we drove around the city and he’d tell stories that overlapped with previous stories and dovetailed with portions of stories he hadn’t quite told completely, and the stories really had no beginning or any end but just sort of went on where one thing leads to the next and ideas of order are just ideas, and he said one day that he got into serious trouble (which he never specified but which Bass said must have been the driving of the car after a heist and he said heist as if he could taste it and I just smiled because that was Bass true and always like that wishing he could be somewhere else doing something other than what he was doing until later when he finally found himself happy being himself doing what he liked) and the judge (he just brought the judge into the story without preliminaries of any kind, as if I knew the judge and we were friends and I knew about his heavy winter coat that smelled like cigars) said: you can go to jail or join the army so he was in the army, and one day the sergeant has them all lined up and says, he says, I want every tenth man to step forward and volunteer for the marines, and of course the marines don’t work like that but the war was going very badly, and they needed bodies and Mike, he was good with numbers, he saw that he was a tenth man and thought, holy fucking Christ I’m going to get my legs blown off in some fucking jungle in Asia, when the guy to his left steps forward and is all gung-ho, and he says, and he says you know, I just can’t bring myself to ever go to the damn wall; that memorial they have in DC for the war, because maybe that guys name is on the wall and I’m here because he was the guy who really volunteered, and that was only the beginning of the story,(which really had no beginning middle or end and was really just the echo of stories older and older still and then new again as if you were hearing it for the first time) and he went on about getting posted stateside in the Carolinas, meeting Kim for the first time and went to work for a famous general, who needed a driver and a secretary, and had a vast collection of hats to which he gave orders and had Mike move them as if they were divisions and brigades, pushing them with a broom across the vast smooth floor of an empty dinning room in his house, and then how he came to the city in 1970, and lived in the Presidio, and when he got out he started drinking again and going to school to learn a trade which morphed in a strange way so that he ended up learning to be a plumber, an electrician and, believe it or don’t, taught physics, chemistry and biology in a weekend accelerated program that netted him tens of thousands of dollars which he concealed by always going around in the same old two pairs of baggy faded painter’s pants, and the same battered tweed sports coat while driving in a twenty year old two door car that said (as might a giant neon sign) I am ordinary, but he was not ordinary in that regard; and when I knew him he was married by then to Doctor Kim who had asked him to marry her three times, and only the last time had he said yes, out of exhaustion and he confessed, because the girl he wanted truly, (with a genuine heartbreaking and staggering unironic love), had gone and got pregnant by another man, who was a musician and played the saxophone as if someone were writing a story full of what people foolishly dismiss as clichés without realizing that they are not clichés but your family and your own self that you recognize as if every face were a fingerprint of memory stamped upon the scene of the crime which is not crime at all but only your own truest self and that was where Bass came in and met Gail but not Doctor Kim (and only ever heard about her as an idea or a rumor) and only ever knew that one corner of the story that presented itself as Mike and Gail at the café where Bass then worked and we agreed, Bass and I, that Gail was lovely and you could see Mike’s love for her tattooed on his every word and the way he smiled at her as if his life was pouring out in a gush every time she left without him and he went home bleeding his alonelyness.
So, Mike made his peace with not having her and went on being in love with Gail, and she gave birth to a girl everyone called the Bean, and Mike and the saxophone player and Gail and Gail’s brother Kevin, all knew each other and synchronistically I knew Gails’s brother from a hideous job at a department store, (and then Kevin went away to Los Angeles to be an actor and I only ever saw him once more when he was an extra on a television show) long before I knew Gail or Mike, and the Bean and that’s how it is with people being songlines and crossing over each other, and the woman Mike married, (but did not love exactly yet did somehow out of a familiar warmth and mysterious honesty that had no name) worked as a surgeon on children who had cancer and when Bass heard about that he said, oh she’s a saint, and it must be hard for Mike to be married to a saint, and her name was Doctor Kim and she was so tiny and strong you thought she might slip into your pocket with an idea or a Paul Simon song.
But she ran the house and Mike, and she was polite to the people who came and went in Mike’s borderline Bohemian life, and Mike said (once while we took an hour to drive a few blocks), that after they’d been married a few years and he’d gone those years with his drinking under something approximating control, he’d gone on a true and epic bender and ended up in the drunk-tank, and after she bailed him out, she said nothing; nothing at the station, and nothing all the way home and then at home, she very quietly slipped out of her tiny shoes and took one up in her hands and she attacked him with it, beating him again and again, and again (and once more after that), hitting him everywhere saying nothing until he was just sitting there in a chair by the window, and the only sound was the air rushing and the shoe cracking on his body, and he hadn’t had a drink since, and the way I got to know her was strange enough, as these things go, and while the details aren’t that important, (and really are only the sad and forlorn and mysterious strings attached to the way I lost my faith and for a time gave up on being devout and made myself ill with anxiety after having worked for a year on Mr. Herman’s Books of the Dead which were eighteen ledgers full of names and dates stored in his offices at the Columbarium where if you were so inclined you’d have your departed-beloved’s ashes interred in a vault and the building was itself an odd node in the neo-classical style jutting up and out from the rows of oh-so-modern boxes marking where the city had departed from its Victorian remembered to its present forgetfulness with a great circular atrium full of small plaques inscribed with names and dates and sometimes there were flowers and wreaths and over the decades from Mr. Herman’s grandfather to his father to Mr. Herman the books were filled with signatures and went on and on, beloved of and beloved of, and they were all still dead and Mr. Herman said, son, we’re going to speak for these who are gone and he had a terrible comb-over and big watery blue eyes and smoked cigars that seeded his jacket with fine powdery ash and the scent of dried pine wood and he paid me to copy the names into a computer file as if, he said, someone had to ferry these people’s memory across the river) so what happened was that I landed in the hospital, and she was kind enough to visit and see that things were done with the usual efficiency but more than the usual levels of gentleness, and one evening, she and I sat together in the hospital room ,and she produced a bottle of most elegant scotch, which surprised me as much as it delighted me, because she hardly seemed the type not only on account of her formulaic and seemingly ridged personality but, more importantly, on account of Mike’s debilitating condition, and she told me about growing up in China and the strange and mysterious tides of the Cultural Revolution, and Mao’s train with its great bed into which he took the concubines of his kingdom, and she told me about meeting Mike and proposing three times, and her hands were tiny forceful planes of reality, her voice a bold and subtle river, and I thought, China must be so much so a very old man who is a great sheltering sky, and a very old woman who is a grain of rice, that never stops becoming something else with many doors, (and yet, said Bass, if that was true then Toledo was as much China as China was Dundalk and we should be happy and drink more beer) and years later, many years later, I was crossing the upper quad of the campus in Baltimore, within the within of electric pulses and shimmering tides of a wondrous late fall bursting with trees exploding their negative capability and the habits of time in red, orange and crunchy leafy yellow, and the sky drifting between hard logical gray and stabbing obedient blue, (and the truth of it was in its beauty and its beauty was of course concealed in its truth) and the wind rushing up coldly from the harbor said, I am the wind precise and shattered, and you know me, and I saw her standing on the stairs of old Gilman Hall, resplendent in a tan trench coat, her hair pulled back as a mighty and delicate wing, and I waited, then I followed her and stopping her, she turned and looked at me with her enormous green eyes and I said, I just wanted to say, I think your lovely, and she lowered her head and then raised it and her eyes were so very green and her smile lit up the darkest corners of any sadness, and after what was before, we were sitting in my small apartment, drinking a bottle of wine, and Duffy the Wonder cat was sitting in her lap purring,(my cat Duffy all wonder and fur and a mechinisim of blood) and Becky of the enormous green eyes, and the push and pull of yes and no, and soon to be going to France to study why exactly Verlaine had shot Rimbaud in the ass (talk about your mot just) said, tell me a story, and I said a story she said yes a story from before; before I knew you, and before we entered into this story of ours with fall opening its sacred doors, and she asked after a mythical place I knew called San Francisco, which appeared only on Tuesdays when the fog was in, and the Golden Gate Bridge was shinning like a national jukebox playing the hymns of the sea and the wind, and thinking about telling Bass the story of telling Becky the story of San Francisco, and the terrible ordeal of whether or not I should believe in redemption or the utility of faith, I recalled reconstructing the threads that led from Mike Brancatti to Doctor elegant scotch and her hands that held balance as if balance were the hollow bones of every bird, and how she said she was certain she was only an instrument of something greater than herself, and Bass, who knew San Francisco as well as I did, and knew the places I described to Becky, from the windmills to the dirty-wet windows of the café where Mike often went and felt briefly as if he had returned to the Brooklyn he’d left behind, and we sat, Bass and I, in our respective corners of the universe talking on the phone, him in Eugene, (where he’d gone to write for a newspaper and to heal from the wicked abuses of the city, as the fog was often as much a lash as it was just the fog), and I sat in the vast center hall of Union Station, recounting tales of how life just went on relentlessly ruthlessly chewing us up and using us, and I told him about the proverbial action of throwing caution to the wind, and how I had chassed down Becky, risking just about everything; how it had all tumbled out like a basket breaking and the ocean falling impossibly from within a small space containing infinity, or the corner of a pretty girl’s smile, and I said to Bass, that I said to Becky, that I said to Doctor Kim, how do you manage; the death of children and the stress and so many songs about dead children, and the mash of it, and she drank her scotch and she said that she did two things and the first thing she did was to pray, every day, for god to give her more strength than she had before, and then she was quiet for a while, and the nighttime moved within the halls and the rooms of the hospital as nighttime is want to do, machines buzzed, flashed and did what they were supposed to do, and then she said, that the second thing she did, was once a year, she left Mike for a week (and because she was who she was and not at all or even a little someone she wasn’t, she included in the within of the story that she left a fridge full of plastic containers full of food and instructions precise and true about what was what and how long to reheat), and went down south, out past Baja, and went swimming with the whales, and in her eyes the ocean rose up mighty mighty and blue, surging the elemental story of her death and her birth looking at the pulsing heat of vast walls of flesh and muscle and power and infinite grace pushing the ocean and pulling the sea after themselves, as if you could kiss a train in motion, and she became small as any child, and began again to be herself full of the terror of coming close to them, knowing they could snuff her gone and the sea sensuous endlessly elegant and holding her as a never-ending embrace which of course had to end, but waited for her to return, and after a long long day, and the metro and train ride and sitting there in crazy-mad Union Station with everything and everyone coming and going away from where they had been to where they were not, I told Bass about the impossible threads of the story, and how dear old San Francisco had become Alex which had become DC which had become Baltimore and love going or coming and whether or not Pooh Bear was right and being faithful meant you went on being faithful without being told things and Bass asked what I told Becky, and how the story of the story told to her had unfolded, and I said that Becky had said, what are you thinking; what, she said, are you thinking, after the story of Doctor Kim was done, and we were sitting drinking the last of that bottle of wine, and we were listening then to Bruce sing, No Retreat, No Surrender, (acoustic if you must know) and I had not at first answered her, and she asked again, and Bass had asked what I said to Doctor Kim, who had asked, what are you thinking, and I said that I said that I said to the doctor, whales by god whales that you come from and Becky of the oh-so-red lips and the terrible dilemmas of her push and pull existence (or how to be herself as herself and not someone else’s idea of what she should be when she was being who she was and not who she wasn’t) said, what are you thinking, and I said, that I said, that I said, I am thinking that the eyes of love, must be another country.
Bass said it all started with Mike loving Gail but Bass never knew Doctor Kim and when I knew Mike he told the story with Brooklyn being the start of the whole thing and if you knew Mike you’d know that Bass was wrong and Mike told it this way - as a kind of no-man’s land he inhabited and that voice, sryup-thick with tones of a vanished Brooklyn suggested how a kingdom of order became a country without borders but many checkpoints and the entrance was always the same; that he was a punk back then living in Brooklyn, and his mother went insane. She heard voices coming from the wall sockets. They had to lock her up – him, his older brother Dean and their father, who was destroyed by the process. After, when they had locked her up, the old man would sit inside himself like his life was then become a birdcage and his feelings fluttered around as small birds but they never went back anywhere even when the cage was open, and he just sat there in the living room and sometimes he fell asleep in his gray chair by the window.
Of course who am I to say she wasn’t hearing voices – real voices. They lock you up for that sort of thing but who are any of us to say…think about it: A man says – let’s invade Babylon and if you disagree with me, god will never forgive you, and millions of people say, ok, let’s do that; let’s invade Babylon…and these people never get locked up, at least not for that, so he was a punk living in Brooklyn and he drank and he knew people with exotic names like Spider Bruscatto and Wheels Lanergan, just like he was a character in an old movie but of course those movies get written by people who had lives and some even lived in Brooklyn where they knew guys named Spider or Wheels and as much as I liked Bass and thought he was a good guy he never understood that and when he told the story it was really the story of Bass telling the story of Mike and not the story of Mike true or even the story of Mike as told by Mike and so when Bass told it, it was funny enough, with all the things about Spider and Wheels, but more like a clever joke and he never told it except as a clever joke over poker at his place or at the café where we all knew each other for a while and Mike was there late or even after the place was closed, forlornly grading the papers of his students and he told me about growing up in Brooklyn and the whole terrible sad story about his mother and her troubled soul.
He did this and that for a while and hung around with his older brother and his crew and then got a job driving a gangster; a genuine real gangster who knew people who hurt other people and he wore fine clothes the gangster did, and had a lawyer who always got him from here to there without too much trouble, and they hired Mike to drive.
Years later he still had the habit he learned then, when the old man would get in the car and say – drive – and he’d drive in long lazy swooping circles around the city going nowhere as if nowhere were a place on a map with its own roads and signs and later, when I knew him, he’d take two hours (if you let him) to make a twenty minute drive mostly because he missed it; it was, in a strange and curious way, a great job.
So, we drove around the city and he’d tell stories that overlapped with previous stories and dovetailed with portions of stories he hadn’t quite told completely, and the stories really had no beginning or any end but just sort of went on where one thing leads to the next and ideas of order are just ideas, and he said one day that he got into serious trouble (which he never specified but which Bass said must have been the driving of the car after a heist and he said heist as if he could taste it and I just smiled because that was Bass true and always like that wishing he could be somewhere else doing something other than what he was doing until later when he finally found himself happy being himself doing what he liked) and the judge (he just brought the judge into the story without preliminaries of any kind, as if I knew the judge and we were friends and I knew about his heavy winter coat that smelled like cigars) said: you can go to jail or join the army so he was in the army, and one day the sergeant has them all lined up and says, he says, I want every tenth man to step forward and volunteer for the marines, and of course the marines don’t work like that but the war was going very badly, and they needed bodies and Mike, he was good with numbers, he saw that he was a tenth man and thought, holy fucking Christ I’m going to get my legs blown off in some fucking jungle in Asia, when the guy to his left steps forward and is all gung-ho, and he says, and he says you know, I just can’t bring myself to ever go to the damn wall; that memorial they have in DC for the war, because maybe that guys name is on the wall and I’m here because he was the guy who really volunteered, and that was only the beginning of the story,(which really had no beginning middle or end and was really just the echo of stories older and older still and then new again as if you were hearing it for the first time) and he went on about getting posted stateside in the Carolinas, meeting Kim for the first time and went to work for a famous general, who needed a driver and a secretary, and had a vast collection of hats to which he gave orders and had Mike move them as if they were divisions and brigades, pushing them with a broom across the vast smooth floor of an empty dinning room in his house, and then how he came to the city in 1970, and lived in the Presidio, and when he got out he started drinking again and going to school to learn a trade which morphed in a strange way so that he ended up learning to be a plumber, an electrician and, believe it or don’t, taught physics, chemistry and biology in a weekend accelerated program that netted him tens of thousands of dollars which he concealed by always going around in the same old two pairs of baggy faded painter’s pants, and the same battered tweed sports coat while driving in a twenty year old two door car that said (as might a giant neon sign) I am ordinary, but he was not ordinary in that regard; and when I knew him he was married by then to Doctor Kim who had asked him to marry her three times, and only the last time had he said yes, out of exhaustion and he confessed, because the girl he wanted truly, (with a genuine heartbreaking and staggering unironic love), had gone and got pregnant by another man, who was a musician and played the saxophone as if someone were writing a story full of what people foolishly dismiss as clichés without realizing that they are not clichés but your family and your own self that you recognize as if every face were a fingerprint of memory stamped upon the scene of the crime which is not crime at all but only your own truest self and that was where Bass came in and met Gail but not Doctor Kim (and only ever heard about her as an idea or a rumor) and only ever knew that one corner of the story that presented itself as Mike and Gail at the café where Bass then worked and we agreed, Bass and I, that Gail was lovely and you could see Mike’s love for her tattooed on his every word and the way he smiled at her as if his life was pouring out in a gush every time she left without him and he went home bleeding his alonelyness.
So, Mike made his peace with not having her and went on being in love with Gail, and she gave birth to a girl everyone called the Bean, and Mike and the saxophone player and Gail and Gail’s brother Kevin, all knew each other and synchronistically I knew Gails’s brother from a hideous job at a department store, (and then Kevin went away to Los Angeles to be an actor and I only ever saw him once more when he was an extra on a television show) long before I knew Gail or Mike, and the Bean and that’s how it is with people being songlines and crossing over each other, and the woman Mike married, (but did not love exactly yet did somehow out of a familiar warmth and mysterious honesty that had no name) worked as a surgeon on children who had cancer and when Bass heard about that he said, oh she’s a saint, and it must be hard for Mike to be married to a saint, and her name was Doctor Kim and she was so tiny and strong you thought she might slip into your pocket with an idea or a Paul Simon song.
But she ran the house and Mike, and she was polite to the people who came and went in Mike’s borderline Bohemian life, and Mike said (once while we took an hour to drive a few blocks), that after they’d been married a few years and he’d gone those years with his drinking under something approximating control, he’d gone on a true and epic bender and ended up in the drunk-tank, and after she bailed him out, she said nothing; nothing at the station, and nothing all the way home and then at home, she very quietly slipped out of her tiny shoes and took one up in her hands and she attacked him with it, beating him again and again, and again (and once more after that), hitting him everywhere saying nothing until he was just sitting there in a chair by the window, and the only sound was the air rushing and the shoe cracking on his body, and he hadn’t had a drink since, and the way I got to know her was strange enough, as these things go, and while the details aren’t that important, (and really are only the sad and forlorn and mysterious strings attached to the way I lost my faith and for a time gave up on being devout and made myself ill with anxiety after having worked for a year on Mr. Herman’s Books of the Dead which were eighteen ledgers full of names and dates stored in his offices at the Columbarium where if you were so inclined you’d have your departed-beloved’s ashes interred in a vault and the building was itself an odd node in the neo-classical style jutting up and out from the rows of oh-so-modern boxes marking where the city had departed from its Victorian remembered to its present forgetfulness with a great circular atrium full of small plaques inscribed with names and dates and sometimes there were flowers and wreaths and over the decades from Mr. Herman’s grandfather to his father to Mr. Herman the books were filled with signatures and went on and on, beloved of and beloved of, and they were all still dead and Mr. Herman said, son, we’re going to speak for these who are gone and he had a terrible comb-over and big watery blue eyes and smoked cigars that seeded his jacket with fine powdery ash and the scent of dried pine wood and he paid me to copy the names into a computer file as if, he said, someone had to ferry these people’s memory across the river) so what happened was that I landed in the hospital, and she was kind enough to visit and see that things were done with the usual efficiency but more than the usual levels of gentleness, and one evening, she and I sat together in the hospital room ,and she produced a bottle of most elegant scotch, which surprised me as much as it delighted me, because she hardly seemed the type not only on account of her formulaic and seemingly ridged personality but, more importantly, on account of Mike’s debilitating condition, and she told me about growing up in China and the strange and mysterious tides of the Cultural Revolution, and Mao’s train with its great bed into which he took the concubines of his kingdom, and she told me about meeting Mike and proposing three times, and her hands were tiny forceful planes of reality, her voice a bold and subtle river, and I thought, China must be so much so a very old man who is a great sheltering sky, and a very old woman who is a grain of rice, that never stops becoming something else with many doors, (and yet, said Bass, if that was true then Toledo was as much China as China was Dundalk and we should be happy and drink more beer) and years later, many years later, I was crossing the upper quad of the campus in Baltimore, within the within of electric pulses and shimmering tides of a wondrous late fall bursting with trees exploding their negative capability and the habits of time in red, orange and crunchy leafy yellow, and the sky drifting between hard logical gray and stabbing obedient blue, (and the truth of it was in its beauty and its beauty was of course concealed in its truth) and the wind rushing up coldly from the harbor said, I am the wind precise and shattered, and you know me, and I saw her standing on the stairs of old Gilman Hall, resplendent in a tan trench coat, her hair pulled back as a mighty and delicate wing, and I waited, then I followed her and stopping her, she turned and looked at me with her enormous green eyes and I said, I just wanted to say, I think your lovely, and she lowered her head and then raised it and her eyes were so very green and her smile lit up the darkest corners of any sadness, and after what was before, we were sitting in my small apartment, drinking a bottle of wine, and Duffy the Wonder cat was sitting in her lap purring,(my cat Duffy all wonder and fur and a mechinisim of blood) and Becky of the enormous green eyes, and the push and pull of yes and no, and soon to be going to France to study why exactly Verlaine had shot Rimbaud in the ass (talk about your mot just) said, tell me a story, and I said a story she said yes a story from before; before I knew you, and before we entered into this story of ours with fall opening its sacred doors, and she asked after a mythical place I knew called San Francisco, which appeared only on Tuesdays when the fog was in, and the Golden Gate Bridge was shinning like a national jukebox playing the hymns of the sea and the wind, and thinking about telling Bass the story of telling Becky the story of San Francisco, and the terrible ordeal of whether or not I should believe in redemption or the utility of faith, I recalled reconstructing the threads that led from Mike Brancatti to Doctor elegant scotch and her hands that held balance as if balance were the hollow bones of every bird, and how she said she was certain she was only an instrument of something greater than herself, and Bass, who knew San Francisco as well as I did, and knew the places I described to Becky, from the windmills to the dirty-wet windows of the café where Mike often went and felt briefly as if he had returned to the Brooklyn he’d left behind, and we sat, Bass and I, in our respective corners of the universe talking on the phone, him in Eugene, (where he’d gone to write for a newspaper and to heal from the wicked abuses of the city, as the fog was often as much a lash as it was just the fog), and I sat in the vast center hall of Union Station, recounting tales of how life just went on relentlessly ruthlessly chewing us up and using us, and I told him about the proverbial action of throwing caution to the wind, and how I had chassed down Becky, risking just about everything; how it had all tumbled out like a basket breaking and the ocean falling impossibly from within a small space containing infinity, or the corner of a pretty girl’s smile, and I said to Bass, that I said to Becky, that I said to Doctor Kim, how do you manage; the death of children and the stress and so many songs about dead children, and the mash of it, and she drank her scotch and she said that she did two things and the first thing she did was to pray, every day, for god to give her more strength than she had before, and then she was quiet for a while, and the nighttime moved within the halls and the rooms of the hospital as nighttime is want to do, machines buzzed, flashed and did what they were supposed to do, and then she said, that the second thing she did, was once a year, she left Mike for a week (and because she was who she was and not at all or even a little someone she wasn’t, she included in the within of the story that she left a fridge full of plastic containers full of food and instructions precise and true about what was what and how long to reheat), and went down south, out past Baja, and went swimming with the whales, and in her eyes the ocean rose up mighty mighty and blue, surging the elemental story of her death and her birth looking at the pulsing heat of vast walls of flesh and muscle and power and infinite grace pushing the ocean and pulling the sea after themselves, as if you could kiss a train in motion, and she became small as any child, and began again to be herself full of the terror of coming close to them, knowing they could snuff her gone and the sea sensuous endlessly elegant and holding her as a never-ending embrace which of course had to end, but waited for her to return, and after a long long day, and the metro and train ride and sitting there in crazy-mad Union Station with everything and everyone coming and going away from where they had been to where they were not, I told Bass about the impossible threads of the story, and how dear old San Francisco had become Alex which had become DC which had become Baltimore and love going or coming and whether or not Pooh Bear was right and being faithful meant you went on being faithful without being told things and Bass asked what I told Becky, and how the story of the story told to her had unfolded, and I said that Becky had said, what are you thinking; what, she said, are you thinking, after the story of Doctor Kim was done, and we were sitting drinking the last of that bottle of wine, and we were listening then to Bruce sing, No Retreat, No Surrender, (acoustic if you must know) and I had not at first answered her, and she asked again, and Bass had asked what I said to Doctor Kim, who had asked, what are you thinking, and I said that I said that I said to the doctor, whales by god whales that you come from and Becky of the oh-so-red lips and the terrible dilemmas of her push and pull existence (or how to be herself as herself and not someone else’s idea of what she should be when she was being who she was and not who she wasn’t) said, what are you thinking, and I said, that I said, that I said, I am thinking that the eyes of love, must be another country.
The Realitystudio Interview
I recently completed an interview with Burroughs expert and Beat affcianado, Jed Birmingham. The interview grew out of conversations both specific and general about The Beats, and Burroughs and writing, life and how to pass time on a train. Much of the interview is taken from an essay that appears in my novel in progress, The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover. The untruncated text of that essay is below.
Faulkner’s Sparrows
An Interlude in the form of a Brief Essay
1.
At the beginning of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom, we are told that the sparrows were coming and going in a random gust. I have found this an odd and mysterious and perplexing statement.
There are two competing ideas at work in the gesture of the sparrows’ movement. The first is that, Faulkner is correct, the birds, without purpose in their movement, drift for no reason other than in response to random stimuli which cause them to go from one place to another. The second is that there is a reason and either Faulkner did not perceive it or did but chose instead to deploy the movement of the sparrows as a sign of drift reinforcing the drift of the burdensome heat and the weight of time both present and absent and contained in memory and memory itself reflecting time and the idea that time being both now and past is never what it appears to be but rather a river of interactive stimuli and response moving forwards and back and in circles at random like sparrows and twice blooming wisteria.
2.
I have been unable to penetrate to the truth of this but come down on the side of Faulkner making a choice to ignore what he must have known which is that birds respond to scent and movement and that wind and scent and response are not random but rather manifestations of a sublime order often dimly perceived.
Yet, what if he was wrong and made a mistake and he was drunk or hung-over or he knew it was wrong but thought about it and decided it sounded good and reworking it would have slowed him down too much?
The answer becomes, of course, that I can not know, but can only guess. The mind of another being unknowable.
3.
For several years I found myself unable to reconcile Darwin and Freud. I had reached a point where I could find no reason, biologically, in a Darwinian sense, for the existence of insanity and its persistence in human events and its constancy in human action. The obvious answer would be, in a Darwinian sense that abnormal behavior ultimately cancels out reproduction and such strands of DNA are in the process of being selected against or, they shall predominate and the species will die out. But, what troubled me was the constancy over time of irrational and counterproductive action that results in reproduction of strands of DNA that pose a clear threat to themselves and the survival of the species. If neuroses is a common condition and one of enduring normalcy ( as Montainge puts it men being naturally insane to not be insane amounts to another form of insanity) then either Darwin is wrong, which I don’t believe, or Psychoanalysis is wrong and insanity, ala Foucault, is a fabrication, an adjustment for the purposes of power to the vast tide of interconnected pulses – economic-class-genetics-biology-psychology, etc.
To approach this from another angle: Why would nature bother, in its evolutionary method, to create a one-off strand of DNA that not only has the capacity to eradicate itself, and the rest of life, but a continuing habit of attempting to do just that? In other words, what evolutionary purpose does “insanity” serve if it has the habit of bringing its host to the brink of extinction? As a potential spur to adaptation it is counterproductive because of the amount of damage it causes.
A zebra develops camouflage to give it an edge against lions and lions adapt by developing through violent methods of reproduction a higher yield of muscle and scent in a strand of increasingly superior cats (or a continuity of cats that are good enough to catch zebras and do not need to evolve and produce cars with which they would then chase all zebras to extinction) but, there is an essential equilibrium at work in that the lions have yet to develop the habit of eradicating themselves in their pursuit of zebras and the zebras have yet to adapt by developing missiles. Thus, why is there only one species that has produced the ability and the habit of self-destruction and having done so what purpose does it serve if we assume there is an evolutionary drive behind the process of adaptation?
4.
In his book, The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes suggests that the great leap, the moment of individuation that has seemingly propelled humanity into its present state of self-awareness (the emergence of the “I”) was the result of the development of the corpus colosum – the mass that connects the two cerebral hemispheres, and that prior to this, when one half of the brain “thought” the other perceived it as an external voice of command and authority – the voice of god and thus, god’s “disappearance” from the later stages of the Old Testament correspond to the evolutionary leap forward in which god is brought within the conjoined hemispheres and becomes "I".
At one point, Jaynes discusses the advent of language some time immediately after or close upon the end of the last ice age. In passing, he mentions a particular quality of this phase – the Halo-Centric Thermal Maximum – the point at which the earth’s orbit brought it again closer to the sun causing the ice to begin to melt. In this period, which occurred over several centuries, Janes mentions that it must have rained for something like three centuries and that it was after this that speech appears and humans begin to record themselves as being recorded self-reflexively through the agency of words that are themselves mirrors of words reflecting the human minds reflecting in and upon its own existence.
5.
Within this though there is another issue that has received less attention than it might deserve. It is well documented and there is a vast corpus concerning the emergence at this time – circa 9-13,000 BC, of totemic figures depicting female forms holding shafts of wheat and barley and this is added to the growing archeological record that has revealed ossified remains of wheat and barley and other bread-stuff that were gathered and consumed.
Reading Jaynes I thought about this, and Faulkner’s sparrows and Darwin contra Freud and the following occurred to me: After three hundred years of rain barley was bountiful, and, being highly susceptible to ergot, became thick with ergot to the point of being a platform for a supra-form of the toxin, and that when consumed, attached itself to the new host; the human brain and there, in what became Broccas and Werneke’s Area, ergot became a mutation upon the DNA of the human form and created the illusion of “I” and came to be passed on both through the consumption of barley and through reproduction and as a result, the adaptation of speech and consciousness is an evolutionary mistake – not the great leap forward, but, at best a giant step to one side, and at worst, a leap backwards; an evolutionary mal-adaptation leading inexorably to extinction.
6.
Why women? Why female figures holding wheat and barley? Because the men were hunting animals and the women were gathering close-at-hand food. But more still, the dark heart of the matter and the emergence of tropes of fearing and hating and worshiping women.
Hera, mother-goddess of the past has a name that means, throttle…to choke, or strangle. Why? Her totemic animal par-excellence is the sphinx, who, of course, asks three questions and if the challenger can not answer them, is choked to death.
Why three questions? The answer of course is contained in the form of the riddle – what walks on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon and three at night…man…the child becomes the man who becomes the old man who dies…three corresponding to the sequence of the tripartite biology of gestation…nine months…divided into three periods of three - three becoming one of a series of magic totemic numbers used repeatedly in stories that reflected the experience of living in a world ordered precisely as a vast mechanism.
But why choke? Why so many snakes in and with women? Medusa, and Eve and cults of snakes and Apollo strangling the python…
Because umbilical strangulation utterly confounded and traumatized the ancient mind. Women contained snakes. Failing to observe rituals could and often led to the turning into stone (still-born or stone cold dead on arrival) of newborns who died for the original sin that predated their birth and was committed by the parents who had violated a taboo, which, a priori, must have been committed, because the strangulation would not have occurred if the rituals had been properly observed to begin with. The very earth was itself a fulcrum of incestuous interwoven catechisms that could not be avoided but were often violated resulting in necessary catastrophes.
So, ergot in barley and women with snakes and hallucinations and the voices of gods and demons and the rise of cults and the shock-trauma of umbilical strangulation and a miasma of word-consciousness and cults dedicated to barley because barley and women and birth and death and sex did not come and go in random gusts but came and went with design and precision and the great flaw in the design is manifest in consciousness which is a sterling example of evolution and evolution produces that which works and that which fails and in failure, dies out; choked off into evolutionary oblivion. Unless, it adapts. And transforms itself.
Faulkner’s Sparrows
An Interlude in the form of a Brief Essay
1.
At the beginning of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom, we are told that the sparrows were coming and going in a random gust. I have found this an odd and mysterious and perplexing statement.
There are two competing ideas at work in the gesture of the sparrows’ movement. The first is that, Faulkner is correct, the birds, without purpose in their movement, drift for no reason other than in response to random stimuli which cause them to go from one place to another. The second is that there is a reason and either Faulkner did not perceive it or did but chose instead to deploy the movement of the sparrows as a sign of drift reinforcing the drift of the burdensome heat and the weight of time both present and absent and contained in memory and memory itself reflecting time and the idea that time being both now and past is never what it appears to be but rather a river of interactive stimuli and response moving forwards and back and in circles at random like sparrows and twice blooming wisteria.
2.
I have been unable to penetrate to the truth of this but come down on the side of Faulkner making a choice to ignore what he must have known which is that birds respond to scent and movement and that wind and scent and response are not random but rather manifestations of a sublime order often dimly perceived.
Yet, what if he was wrong and made a mistake and he was drunk or hung-over or he knew it was wrong but thought about it and decided it sounded good and reworking it would have slowed him down too much?
The answer becomes, of course, that I can not know, but can only guess. The mind of another being unknowable.
3.
For several years I found myself unable to reconcile Darwin and Freud. I had reached a point where I could find no reason, biologically, in a Darwinian sense, for the existence of insanity and its persistence in human events and its constancy in human action. The obvious answer would be, in a Darwinian sense that abnormal behavior ultimately cancels out reproduction and such strands of DNA are in the process of being selected against or, they shall predominate and the species will die out. But, what troubled me was the constancy over time of irrational and counterproductive action that results in reproduction of strands of DNA that pose a clear threat to themselves and the survival of the species. If neuroses is a common condition and one of enduring normalcy ( as Montainge puts it men being naturally insane to not be insane amounts to another form of insanity) then either Darwin is wrong, which I don’t believe, or Psychoanalysis is wrong and insanity, ala Foucault, is a fabrication, an adjustment for the purposes of power to the vast tide of interconnected pulses – economic-class-genetics-biology-psychology, etc.
To approach this from another angle: Why would nature bother, in its evolutionary method, to create a one-off strand of DNA that not only has the capacity to eradicate itself, and the rest of life, but a continuing habit of attempting to do just that? In other words, what evolutionary purpose does “insanity” serve if it has the habit of bringing its host to the brink of extinction? As a potential spur to adaptation it is counterproductive because of the amount of damage it causes.
A zebra develops camouflage to give it an edge against lions and lions adapt by developing through violent methods of reproduction a higher yield of muscle and scent in a strand of increasingly superior cats (or a continuity of cats that are good enough to catch zebras and do not need to evolve and produce cars with which they would then chase all zebras to extinction) but, there is an essential equilibrium at work in that the lions have yet to develop the habit of eradicating themselves in their pursuit of zebras and the zebras have yet to adapt by developing missiles. Thus, why is there only one species that has produced the ability and the habit of self-destruction and having done so what purpose does it serve if we assume there is an evolutionary drive behind the process of adaptation?
4.
In his book, The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes suggests that the great leap, the moment of individuation that has seemingly propelled humanity into its present state of self-awareness (the emergence of the “I”) was the result of the development of the corpus colosum – the mass that connects the two cerebral hemispheres, and that prior to this, when one half of the brain “thought” the other perceived it as an external voice of command and authority – the voice of god and thus, god’s “disappearance” from the later stages of the Old Testament correspond to the evolutionary leap forward in which god is brought within the conjoined hemispheres and becomes "I".
At one point, Jaynes discusses the advent of language some time immediately after or close upon the end of the last ice age. In passing, he mentions a particular quality of this phase – the Halo-Centric Thermal Maximum – the point at which the earth’s orbit brought it again closer to the sun causing the ice to begin to melt. In this period, which occurred over several centuries, Janes mentions that it must have rained for something like three centuries and that it was after this that speech appears and humans begin to record themselves as being recorded self-reflexively through the agency of words that are themselves mirrors of words reflecting the human minds reflecting in and upon its own existence.
5.
Within this though there is another issue that has received less attention than it might deserve. It is well documented and there is a vast corpus concerning the emergence at this time – circa 9-13,000 BC, of totemic figures depicting female forms holding shafts of wheat and barley and this is added to the growing archeological record that has revealed ossified remains of wheat and barley and other bread-stuff that were gathered and consumed.
Reading Jaynes I thought about this, and Faulkner’s sparrows and Darwin contra Freud and the following occurred to me: After three hundred years of rain barley was bountiful, and, being highly susceptible to ergot, became thick with ergot to the point of being a platform for a supra-form of the toxin, and that when consumed, attached itself to the new host; the human brain and there, in what became Broccas and Werneke’s Area, ergot became a mutation upon the DNA of the human form and created the illusion of “I” and came to be passed on both through the consumption of barley and through reproduction and as a result, the adaptation of speech and consciousness is an evolutionary mistake – not the great leap forward, but, at best a giant step to one side, and at worst, a leap backwards; an evolutionary mal-adaptation leading inexorably to extinction.
6.
Why women? Why female figures holding wheat and barley? Because the men were hunting animals and the women were gathering close-at-hand food. But more still, the dark heart of the matter and the emergence of tropes of fearing and hating and worshiping women.
Hera, mother-goddess of the past has a name that means, throttle…to choke, or strangle. Why? Her totemic animal par-excellence is the sphinx, who, of course, asks three questions and if the challenger can not answer them, is choked to death.
Why three questions? The answer of course is contained in the form of the riddle – what walks on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon and three at night…man…the child becomes the man who becomes the old man who dies…three corresponding to the sequence of the tripartite biology of gestation…nine months…divided into three periods of three - three becoming one of a series of magic totemic numbers used repeatedly in stories that reflected the experience of living in a world ordered precisely as a vast mechanism.
But why choke? Why so many snakes in and with women? Medusa, and Eve and cults of snakes and Apollo strangling the python…
Because umbilical strangulation utterly confounded and traumatized the ancient mind. Women contained snakes. Failing to observe rituals could and often led to the turning into stone (still-born or stone cold dead on arrival) of newborns who died for the original sin that predated their birth and was committed by the parents who had violated a taboo, which, a priori, must have been committed, because the strangulation would not have occurred if the rituals had been properly observed to begin with. The very earth was itself a fulcrum of incestuous interwoven catechisms that could not be avoided but were often violated resulting in necessary catastrophes.
So, ergot in barley and women with snakes and hallucinations and the voices of gods and demons and the rise of cults and the shock-trauma of umbilical strangulation and a miasma of word-consciousness and cults dedicated to barley because barley and women and birth and death and sex did not come and go in random gusts but came and went with design and precision and the great flaw in the design is manifest in consciousness which is a sterling example of evolution and evolution produces that which works and that which fails and in failure, dies out; choked off into evolutionary oblivion. Unless, it adapts. And transforms itself.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Photography
I started shooting photos around 2000. I had no training and started with an already old Cannon AE1...I shot black and white...(I have found Sontag's notions on photography to always have the faint whiff of the jackboot http://www.susansontag.com/onphotographyexcrpt.htmt))
(...I usually find the less said about what art should do, or can do, the better...of course I violate that notion in the post below (Notes on the Novel in Progress)...Photographs of course tell a story...that is the image is a narrative; a story...and slowly we can begin to see that except for limited and limiting technical discussions, these categories of form (Story vs Poem vs Novel, etc) lose their meaning...so, here are a series of poems...stories...novels...photographs...(go to: myartspace.com in the search box type: charles talkoff)
(...I usually find the less said about what art should do, or can do, the better...of course I violate that notion in the post below (Notes on the Novel in Progress)...Photographs of course tell a story...that is the image is a narrative; a story...and slowly we can begin to see that except for limited and limiting technical discussions, these categories of form (Story vs Poem vs Novel, etc) lose their meaning...so, here are a series of poems...stories...novels...photographs...(go to: myartspace.com in the search box type: charles talkoff)
Notes on the Novel in Progress
These are musing and assorted notes on my Novel in progress: The Love Song of J.Edgar Hoover. Excerpts from the novel will be posted both in order and at random.
I am currently conducting and interview about William Burroughs which will go on line around the end of January and will concern several issues including Burroughs' notion that language is a virus, (see:http://realitystudio.org/) various methods of narration and the effects/impact of jazz on writing.
Non-linear narration is essential to the story, Mad Rush Love Number 3 (as well as the novel as a whole) and especially in regards to my view of John Coltrane who in his later music was doing the same things as Faulkner in the Bergsonian notion of time being always a current sensation "devoured" by the past. For information on Coltrane's approach to narrative see Ben Ratliff's John Coltrane a History of a Sound (http://www.amazon.com/Coltrane-Story-Sound-Ben-Ratliff/dp/0374126062)and:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/books/review/Mishra-t.html?ref=review
In particular I am fascinated by Coltrane's comment to fellow musician Wayne Shorter that he (Coltrane) wanted to make music as if, "I'm starting a sentence in the middle and reaching the predicate and subject at the same time..."
This strikes me as Bergsonian (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Bergson) and Faulknarian (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Faulkner) and as the genius of Coltrane.
Contemporary American writing is, it seems to me, dominated by the Raymond Carver school of so-called minimalism with its antipathy/reaction towards meta-fiction which would be a minor footnote in literature if not for the general miasma of writing in which actually knowing about literature (let's say History in general - an umbrella under which we can include writing) is frowned upon.
(see:http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/will-the-humanities-save-us/) -
Fish is of course an idiot and a thug masquerading as a freewheeling anarchist who wrote a sophomoric text years ago called Is There a Text in this Class the premise of which is authors have zero authority over their writing and the "meaning" of the work is always in flux and dependent upon the reader - in other words, Roland Barthe's s/z on speed as filtered through the flaccid post-left reactionary stance of yet another gutless American Academic and then turned on its head to denote a pseudo-intellectual parataxis)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S/Z) which is exactly in its structure similar to "everyone is equal; but some are more equal than others".
The chilling effect of the dominance of the Carver-school is its antipathy towards any sort of flare or spark as Italo Calvino describes in Exactitude (http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/calvino/calexact.html) and the result is that plague of which Calvino speaks goes on and on towards god knows where waiting to be born.
Given the general levels of ignorance one encounters in writing what one finds being produced are bad copies of bad copies of...bad copies ad infinitum with no one able to say why the thing in question is bad to begin with and any and all questions about method informed by any knowledge of science, history, music, painting, - in short - the entire spectrum of human knowledge - being ignored you have the dead-on-arrival-literature of a dead-end culture struggling to overcome the paralyzing grip of its political asthma (http://www.harperacademic.com/catalog/excerpt_xml.asp?isbn=0060930810).
But of course, it's not the end of the world and culture isn't dead but rather always in a see-saw between one impulse or another...after all, where would Picasso have been without the Nazis (Guernica is a parasite that thrives on barbarity and a masterpiece - it is both this and that vs only this vs that...); where would Joyce have been if he hadn't had the Church to spit at?
(see:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernica_(painting)&:http://picasso.tamu.edu/picasso/)& http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Joyce)
So, what can be done?
Hopefully a spark...a flash that ignites some feeling and passion for the world. Or as Pablo Neruda phrased it: "I want to do to you what spring does to the cherry tree..." (http://kugelmass.wordpress.com/2007/02/05/love-poem-xiv-nerudas-sublime/)
More to follow
C.T.
Baltimore, 1-13-8
I am currently conducting and interview about William Burroughs which will go on line around the end of January and will concern several issues including Burroughs' notion that language is a virus, (see:http://realitystudio.org/) various methods of narration and the effects/impact of jazz on writing.
Non-linear narration is essential to the story, Mad Rush Love Number 3 (as well as the novel as a whole) and especially in regards to my view of John Coltrane who in his later music was doing the same things as Faulkner in the Bergsonian notion of time being always a current sensation "devoured" by the past. For information on Coltrane's approach to narrative see Ben Ratliff's John Coltrane a History of a Sound (http://www.amazon.com/Coltrane-Story-Sound-Ben-Ratliff/dp/0374126062)and:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/books/review/Mishra-t.html?ref=review
In particular I am fascinated by Coltrane's comment to fellow musician Wayne Shorter that he (Coltrane) wanted to make music as if, "I'm starting a sentence in the middle and reaching the predicate and subject at the same time..."
This strikes me as Bergsonian (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Bergson) and Faulknarian (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Faulkner) and as the genius of Coltrane.
Contemporary American writing is, it seems to me, dominated by the Raymond Carver school of so-called minimalism with its antipathy/reaction towards meta-fiction which would be a minor footnote in literature if not for the general miasma of writing in which actually knowing about literature (let's say History in general - an umbrella under which we can include writing) is frowned upon.
(see:http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/will-the-humanities-save-us/) -
Fish is of course an idiot and a thug masquerading as a freewheeling anarchist who wrote a sophomoric text years ago called Is There a Text in this Class the premise of which is authors have zero authority over their writing and the "meaning" of the work is always in flux and dependent upon the reader - in other words, Roland Barthe's s/z on speed as filtered through the flaccid post-left reactionary stance of yet another gutless American Academic and then turned on its head to denote a pseudo-intellectual parataxis)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S/Z) which is exactly in its structure similar to "everyone is equal; but some are more equal than others".
The chilling effect of the dominance of the Carver-school is its antipathy towards any sort of flare or spark as Italo Calvino describes in Exactitude (http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/calvino/calexact.html) and the result is that plague of which Calvino speaks goes on and on towards god knows where waiting to be born.
Given the general levels of ignorance one encounters in writing what one finds being produced are bad copies of bad copies of...bad copies ad infinitum with no one able to say why the thing in question is bad to begin with and any and all questions about method informed by any knowledge of science, history, music, painting, - in short - the entire spectrum of human knowledge - being ignored you have the dead-on-arrival-literature of a dead-end culture struggling to overcome the paralyzing grip of its political asthma (http://www.harperacademic.com/catalog/excerpt_xml.asp?isbn=0060930810).
But of course, it's not the end of the world and culture isn't dead but rather always in a see-saw between one impulse or another...after all, where would Picasso have been without the Nazis (Guernica is a parasite that thrives on barbarity and a masterpiece - it is both this and that vs only this vs that...); where would Joyce have been if he hadn't had the Church to spit at?
(see:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernica_(painting)&:http://picasso.tamu.edu/picasso/)& http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Joyce)
So, what can be done?
Hopefully a spark...a flash that ignites some feeling and passion for the world. Or as Pablo Neruda phrased it: "I want to do to you what spring does to the cherry tree..." (http://kugelmass.wordpress.com/2007/02/05/love-poem-xiv-nerudas-sublime/)
More to follow
C.T.
Baltimore, 1-13-8
The Fox
She called her father Bulldaddy and they were from the south; the impoverished south, the south of fact and the south of fiction, myth and movies and television and her father was the kind of drunk who drank but showed no signs of the booze and was a small quiet man married to a behemoth of a woman who talked, and talked and talked some more after that and their daughter called him Bulldaddy and if you couldn’t laugh at that and if you weren’t scared to death by that then you were a fool and life was going to step on you in one way or another and hard until you were broken but functional like a piece of old furniture sitting on a back porch with patches of rust and the seat sagging and the mesh hanging down like strands of something sad that no one had the energy to cut away or just get rid of and you would become a fixture in the parade that started with whatever it was that made those two the kind that they were; him with the drinking and the whatever-pain of his diminutive stature and her, with the stigma of her height and her size and his epic silences and the not-knowing of what it was he was doing (but knowing all the same) when his daughter called him Bulldaddy and she came and went to parties you attended reluctantly because of obligations and affection for someone who knew her and said they had once been friends before she (of the bull and the daddy) had begun the impossible paradoxical climb up the social ladder in which the more she advanced the more she fell as she wanted what she’d never have which was her father’s approval and her mother’s transformation and that was the story of all of that contained even in the faint clinking of melting ice cubes at the bottom of a glass of vodka she was drinking at a party where you all sat outside at a nice table on a beautiful early summer evening in the town that was the foyer of the empire across the river that was an open vein of history churning hard and still slow like blood seeping into everything as a reminder and a fetish of memory.
That was in a quiet place in the proper neighborhood in which one of that crew had found a home and it was a nice home with a long back lawn and a place under a tall tree for a table and the women were encased in drink and bitterness and wanting – wanting to climb and have power and status and the ability to flaunt their status only by saying, this is where I had dinner, and this is where my friends spend their time and they turned their eyes on one another saying, without words but only in gesture and look, I’ll abandon you and let you bleed if it will get me ahead of you in this line, and there was laughing and bottles of wine and there was a man who had been in the Carolinas and been called up to perform Guard Duty in the capital and he spoke of the scraping of the bottom of the barrel saying all the men now were in their forties and nothing, with broken this, and ungainly that and low minds and seeking just some money and the relatively easy duty of looking to radar screens that looked over the city and they all raised their glasses to the troops but not the war which was as hollow a ritual gesture as any other for you could just as easily have belched or dropped your pants and mooned the silky night sky for all the matter it would have made and they spoke on about money and property and sometimes, out of a sense of what they perceived to be polite, they asked you about your plans and your goals because it was the language they spoke best and they could understand goals and accomplishing goals and checking the days off their to-do lists so as to have a tool to beat down their anxiety about failure and death and shallow nights in beds without being pressed down hard by the weight of a lover or touched with any gentleness which if they had it true and genuine scared them and awoke in them every fear of betrayal and they watched television shows where women of mysterious chemical composition proclaimed that they did not need a man to feel whole or complete but were happy with their sisters and themselves and late that night, alone staring into the small front yard of your friend’s small home, you felt the universe spinning; spinning faster and faster as a ball on a fingertip and then, as was always likely, it wobbled off the point and fell, bouncing to the ground but that was just a metaphor and the yard, secluded in the dark of the late late sacred night, was just the yard and from within the small wood near the rise of the freeway, there came the strange yelping of the resident fox, who moved as if he were his own tunnel burrowed in the dark and full of knowledge that only he would ever posses, of how the earth beat as a heart and the drum of our time was sounding without let-up but full of the terrible mercy of all true things.
That was in a quiet place in the proper neighborhood in which one of that crew had found a home and it was a nice home with a long back lawn and a place under a tall tree for a table and the women were encased in drink and bitterness and wanting – wanting to climb and have power and status and the ability to flaunt their status only by saying, this is where I had dinner, and this is where my friends spend their time and they turned their eyes on one another saying, without words but only in gesture and look, I’ll abandon you and let you bleed if it will get me ahead of you in this line, and there was laughing and bottles of wine and there was a man who had been in the Carolinas and been called up to perform Guard Duty in the capital and he spoke of the scraping of the bottom of the barrel saying all the men now were in their forties and nothing, with broken this, and ungainly that and low minds and seeking just some money and the relatively easy duty of looking to radar screens that looked over the city and they all raised their glasses to the troops but not the war which was as hollow a ritual gesture as any other for you could just as easily have belched or dropped your pants and mooned the silky night sky for all the matter it would have made and they spoke on about money and property and sometimes, out of a sense of what they perceived to be polite, they asked you about your plans and your goals because it was the language they spoke best and they could understand goals and accomplishing goals and checking the days off their to-do lists so as to have a tool to beat down their anxiety about failure and death and shallow nights in beds without being pressed down hard by the weight of a lover or touched with any gentleness which if they had it true and genuine scared them and awoke in them every fear of betrayal and they watched television shows where women of mysterious chemical composition proclaimed that they did not need a man to feel whole or complete but were happy with their sisters and themselves and late that night, alone staring into the small front yard of your friend’s small home, you felt the universe spinning; spinning faster and faster as a ball on a fingertip and then, as was always likely, it wobbled off the point and fell, bouncing to the ground but that was just a metaphor and the yard, secluded in the dark of the late late sacred night, was just the yard and from within the small wood near the rise of the freeway, there came the strange yelping of the resident fox, who moved as if he were his own tunnel burrowed in the dark and full of knowledge that only he would ever posses, of how the earth beat as a heart and the drum of our time was sounding without let-up but full of the terrible mercy of all true things.
Mad Rush Love Number 3
She came in with the extra weight of two failed marriages and too much fried food, which she had eaten to hide from the two men she’d married and all the years that had accumulated and she believed had gone nowhere and she came in and talked and I talked and she was charming bright and brittle; the bar tailored well for people who had just discovered they had money and others who had made enough to pretend they had always had it and it was upscale for low-rent the food good but overpriced the sullen Nascar boys hanging low in the back against the wall drinking beer and talking amongst themselves while lawyers and lobbyists came and went (as might a smug cherub with credit cards instead of wings) and officers too but always below full bird and people knew each other but barley and the conversation was mostly shallow rude and proscribed, the laughter coming on cue, while on the wall above the smooth cold granite bar a vast flat screen showed football, baseball,basketball, and cars, each a marker of the season and progress without change and it was there at the Delaware, that I met her for the second time and people knew her and she knew them and knowing the same people in the same place always created a false but useful familiarity and her name was Patricia though she went by Samantha for reasons that were never explained and she was small except for the weight made jokes about the Round Table and called me Benchley but in the end (and even at the beginning but unknown to me) it was false because she could not make it real but touched it the way you might fondle an expensive richly textured fabric in a store you were certain you could never afford and she flitted nervously between want and fear and the fear of wanting to be witty and tragic in some sort of interesting way, without the burdens or the discipline of the work actual but still shimmering electric and the center of something that mattered and everyone drank because this was Alexandria after the cataclysm and they were afraid and they drank and her friends asked if I was in recovery because I did not drink and I said, no I just did not want to drink and she spoke about her marriages like failed businesses and the ledgers of recrimination and guilt were lopsided and imprecise as there was the one she showed for the purposes of payment and the one she did not show for the purposes of concealment and in Jakes in Old Town we met people for cocktails and in the bars darkening dim and loud she would steal to me a wide-eyed look of knowing and that was a language hidden from view shared, intimate and suggestive, of a turn away from all of that, (as if to say, luscious midnight brings ferocious tables and broken paint) and she had rescued two dogs wrote a column for the local paper on the care of dogs, knew people who knew her as the girl who did things with dogs for other people who had to be away on business and needed their pets cared for and once along Monticello Avenue early in the fall of that year (when everything was already two-thirds gone) we stood near the café across from the wine store and she saw a little girl jump and laugh about an ice cream cone and she Samantha said (I Samantha of long ago but just yet a moment ago small-town-anywhere) am really only five; five years old; the last good moment when the world was possible and there were all the things that she needed and her mother was not yet glimpsed as a failed harpy and her father was magnificent and not yet revealed as a balless suburban wonder consumed food as a fetish (which later would consume Samantha who ate from loneliness sadness and anger and a hatred of her own self and denied her body and was serially promiscuous because her mother hated sex in an air-tight even hermetically sealed twilight Catholicism that burped periodically like a plastic container releasing locked-in gas before being stored in the freezer) and she said it about being five only really five and she revealed herself and then she hid herself away and that was all there was about that and still I might remember saying that tired oranges can not sing to me of any ocean departed but instead whisper weary tales of things lost and in describing this (and the cat’s habit of dipping one delicate paw in my water glass) I find Samantha amused and pulled to love and to flee, as an army routed in every direction at once though for a while we did truly speak about things in every corner of every moment and I wrote her as every strand of the river remembered sing down night and the cathedral of your hands for a grace not of my making has enfolded me in your eyes vast and sometimes tender and it was a late snow, after the false spring when she said, I am un-reading the not-lectures by cummings (comma) suddenly taking us surprisingly to the Frank L. Wright house, the house itself closed yet open so we in the near silence could look in and see space opened sincerely and precisely the snow deep, we walked within it, ourselves becoming of an instant no longer who others wanted us to be (for themselves only) only I said, Samantha no, I do not want a suburban icon of servitude to become but to escape emptiness and fear but she only nodded, retreated as if touch itself had fled permanently and did not acknowledge truly (with fragile honesty) anything and I did not leave her there, then, though in the perfect snow I left all the same and staying, joined myself to false foolishness; we laughed when I
Fe
L
L
iN the freshly fallen surprising snow; the quiet snow already melting and the trees bent (most silently) even truly with joy did tumble I, the days unfolding out of darkness, as any acrobat of love only to see what we could not be, as when at her house-warming (for the inevitable house-not-home she purchased after the dull monotony of the rituals of divorce, in a complex vast, and each street named for a tree or a town in an England that never was) her friend-not-friend, just full enough of wine to have an excuse, leaned over me and whispered no words but only her breath heavy and warm and full of nothing, her eyes full of cost, and exhausted, I went down into dreams (pleasantly) and I alone touch your shadow (vanishing ferocity of love’s banal end) like kissing warmly a statue (true) and always (sometimes) tender I listen to Coltrane play Naima and it is like listening to time cry about love or it is like listening to Coltrane sing about god or it is like being stalked at three am by a woman with rolling waving black hair that is a mighty net of sex and wanting yet she never finds me or perhaps it is like nothing at all and late at night when I think of a happy moment and Samantha is standing in front of a great Degas at the National Gallery and there is no future to be poisoned and no past from which to run and only everything that might happen and love is forming brightly like the birth of some great star, I will take off my happiness and place it beside my cat for safe keeping and the music will have turned off and the street will be quiet rolled inside itself, as a chrysalis waiting for the day to emerge with moist wings struggling to give rise to flight
Fe
L
L
iN the freshly fallen surprising snow; the quiet snow already melting and the trees bent (most silently) even truly with joy did tumble I, the days unfolding out of darkness, as any acrobat of love only to see what we could not be, as when at her house-warming (for the inevitable house-not-home she purchased after the dull monotony of the rituals of divorce, in a complex vast, and each street named for a tree or a town in an England that never was) her friend-not-friend, just full enough of wine to have an excuse, leaned over me and whispered no words but only her breath heavy and warm and full of nothing, her eyes full of cost, and exhausted, I went down into dreams (pleasantly) and I alone touch your shadow (vanishing ferocity of love’s banal end) like kissing warmly a statue (true) and always (sometimes) tender I listen to Coltrane play Naima and it is like listening to time cry about love or it is like listening to Coltrane sing about god or it is like being stalked at three am by a woman with rolling waving black hair that is a mighty net of sex and wanting yet she never finds me or perhaps it is like nothing at all and late at night when I think of a happy moment and Samantha is standing in front of a great Degas at the National Gallery and there is no future to be poisoned and no past from which to run and only everything that might happen and love is forming brightly like the birth of some great star, I will take off my happiness and place it beside my cat for safe keeping and the music will have turned off and the street will be quiet rolled inside itself, as a chrysalis waiting for the day to emerge with moist wings struggling to give rise to flight
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