AMERICAN DESCANTS
American
Descants
by
Gregg Glory
[Gregg G. Brown]
Published by BLAST PRESS
324B Matawan Avenue
Cliffwood, NJ 07721
(732) 970-8409
gregglory.com
amazon.com/author/gregglory
A Golden Ticket........................................... 8
First Descants............................................ 15
I..... ..................................................... 17
II... ..................................................... 19
III.. ..................................................... 21
IV.. ..................................................... 25
V.... ..................................................... 30
VI.. ..................................................... 37
VII. ..................................................... 41
NORMAL POLAROIDS
The Tradition............................................. 55
Herr Professor.......................................... 56
At 34.......................................................... 57
Kitchen Interview...................................... 58
Skin-Heads................................................. 59
Third Generation....................................... 60
Immaculata................................................. 61
The Movement............................................ 62
Affluences................................................. 63
The Candy-Counter................................... 64
Atthis, Etc................................................. 65
Display Against Society............................. 66
Historic...................................................... 68
INTERLUDE
The Trombonist of Noon............................ 71
At the Gate................................................ 72
Dardanelles............................................... 73
Vivid Aftereffects..................................... 75
Terms.......................................................... 77
On.. ............................................................ 79
......
...... II
St. Louis Mourning.................................... 80
A Vacant Harlot........................................ 82
Homage a la D.B.D...................................... 83
PROGRESSIONS PAST
Blank Generation: A Modernists Progress
Blank Generation or, the Death of
the Muse. No, Hardly................. 88
II... 90
III.. 91
Black Orchids on the Red Door....... 93
Mon Hypocrite Lectur:....................... 94
Even When Im Down, I Hear Symphonies 95
How To Write a Victory Instead
of a Tragedy 98
Deconstructing the De- constructionists 100
ESSAY
Punk Rock, Eternal youth, and the Bacchanalia of Liberty 103
NOTES
Decadent Notes for Descants.................. 111
Little mattered, and much pervaded
The antique living room too much sunlight had degraded;
A little heartache burned beneath his cassock,
And holy daybreak shattered at the blinds.
If Christ defied the
fashions
And strode untemplated
and rude,
If Hitler really
killed them all
Then how dare I
intrude?
My voice imparts and falls, toils and tolls,
Its happenstances and romances, its passions
And trances of certain evenings in a certain loll
On into dawn, which prepares some further wrong—
Inconsequent, yet beckoning, an ecstatic
Lark backspread against dispassionate clouds.
(I have stood upon the Arctic zones and poles
Of certain yellow unlighted rooms.)
Among the wasted cigarettes and torn pornography,
(Gilt at its crinkled edges, or numb where the burn was)
I have sifted and resisted so many
Facts and truths that harshly glare in so many
Wasted one‑time afternoons.
Holding, holding
Our hands beneath the spiders pall were golden.
The hackneyed painters ennui endures
Formulas of snow and absence, building sets;
Nailed in the auroras tonic light, and stiff,
My red shoes stand steadied on a cliff.
(I sew my fingers backward that sew my shroud.)
And I have wandered lost and wondered found
And in a crossed broken shadow drowned.
(I have lived my life while floating upon the rood.)
Chastized eyes
Chastized eyes
Glare no more on inward wars,
Accreted dusts that sharply crept
Down the pale defiles at midnight,
Or assembled dust tumbled from untouched dresser drawers
Spilling golden dirty light over all.
(I have seen them all, and touched them all
And thrown them all away already,
Golden crowns cascading to a wastebin.
I have touched the molten blots that blot within.
I have rearranged my clothes upon a hook.)
Heres some arguments half‑misapprehension,
There, the moronic posture of a gesture
Gilding the broken indices of fate.
A look, a moments condescension
Gazes back above a moth‑eaten bureau
To fall upon the blankness of a wall.
And I have longed and I have lounged,
Taking nights apart to tack the day together,
And still the terrorist dawn arrives, inflicts
Green and golden, and obliterates my weathers.
O fol de rol de rolly o
My bloodless feet are skirled in skeins of snow
Daybreak snaps the blinds. Bored, it leaves
Out through exhausted windows where I have thrown
How many tired glances into airs unknown?
And they are tired, emptied by seeing,
Glancing netherwhere, seeing, recoiling,
Seeing the thousand toiling hours of neglect
The glazed eyes of weary aspect,
Hollow yet disdainful, and rolled upon a bulb
Or blindly churched in the long, squared
Eternity of a ratty book that blazes
Trashed Byzantiums in footnotes obscure;
Or restless finds itself still climbing
To some even more forgotten shelf
While a quaint, antiquarian transcendence
Cool and numb
Floods moldy light upon the moldy carpeting.
And still the snow inquires
And still the day expires
Answerless, if my foot shall daedalus the fresh.
(I have killed and I have died for less.)
—No, no I haven't been. Is it near here?
Whats it like? Is it extraordinary?
Oh, its full
Of quiet shades, thoughtful darknesses.
—My, theres no end to things in the heart.
Is there now? Now is there?
No, no truly;
There is never any end to things.
And the squeeze of nights, the evenings
Where so many eden days sank entranced,
Collapsed so charmingly about an aborted heart
In so many unheated ochre rooms alone!
Oh I have seen and mourned the fabled light
Disastered in a rucksack crease of dirty pants.
And yet, how shall I begin, and how beget?
I have looked through ochre eyes and hollow rooms
Undeceived, and yet, and yet....
I am scarred and I am mastered in the garden,
Near the wisteria, iced by the moonlight's
Porcelain glances. How many years and days
Has it been, how many, since first, in moonlight,
We traded sudden glances?
Roses had maddened us, and we were glad.
Here, balancing the wisteria on a fingerend
Pointing past my agile nose to oblivion,
Cold leaves rustle in the ruined fountain;
Waters memory in the concrete bowl
Scratching over the waters ancient course.
A thousand points of light conflict
In a thousand parted dooryards;
Conflict, flicker, and then resolve
Focused into a single momentary glow.
(My eyes and I contain
A thousand portions of a thousand parted souls.)
O fol de rol de rolly o
My bloodless feet are skirled in skeins of snow
Adonis flopped in the clearing.
And Cythera,
marble goddess among wing-beats,
descended tearing her hair.
Crest of light, the light going;
Gold sunk into crimson,
Leaf-whirl as feathers circling.
Full-hipped in her grieving
Shaken breasts above ribcage,
Shaken breasts above blood-stain.
ADONAI, ADONAI,
all beauty goes with your going;
pale eyes amber in adoring,
features straight as oak-grain.
Each year shall men make
boar out-flank spears edge,
and
women redden with wronged cries;
wails risen above grove-top.
Night
swallows sun-disc,
Flies
falter the wound-mark;
Swans
restless in darkness
Revolve their webs,
swatting
the dark.
And she, lips drawn forward for kissing,
In the not-light, cave
Without ceiling, shadow thick as mascara,
No skirr of bat moving, nor leaf moving,
in her hands white nectar
sheds the life-pulse.
Clear bubbles rise from the mud-bank,
blossoms smooth as blood-hue
Lift among twigs and the bird squalls;
tense balance of petals, globe,
Startled by fresh weeping, half-fallen,
crimson scattered in blackness.
Newark arranging the sew-a-a-ge in a heap:
The softened stones of Troy,
A possible disaster.
Well, yes, said some governor, if they WORK hard enough...
But I cant see who wd take an interest
In conquering the wreckage.
Grey smoke in smoky sky,
Abandoned of Neptune, the green-going.
Anthropologists scuttle like beetles among the buildings,
Curious as to their past use.
Grey smoke in black sky, film
Of sun setting, across the river-banks
Gold and deep water together in one image.
Across the broken docks, thick odor
Of salmon rotting, silver, silver,
exuding ichor,
Arranging the sewage in a heap,
A possible disaster.
Abandoned of Noah,
Lacking the altitude of that rock (Araraat),
The comeliness of its wilderness.
A possible disaster,
If properly arranged.
And the swallows (swallows!) ordered as buoys in
a vacant lot,
Tacking between blown paper and tin cans
Copper and empty, in the small light, pivoting,
Drawn circles in dirt,
Alluring no Copernicus.
Earth
the third daughter of Helios;
Helios, swallow-colored,
Rolled by the weed-bank
Like an amputated dolls head.
Itys, Itys!
If...
But to finish? At the first pant?
All autobiography (the secret of the greats)
—As invented, not lived.
Dafne was breathless before she knew,
O leaden Muse,
How to spurt laurel-leaves from her hair.
Sprouting like a turnip in a ditch,
Pollos passion plucked
Her hunters insouciance.
And the streets ran gold, molten, cool lava,
Along the east-west transversals,
And kids fiddled with marbles and speedballs
To know what it like,
Aching Paradise.
Asbury Park is not the center, not, assuredly not
The centre. Dawn scuds the sea.
Io
Ran in the meadow, fearing love
Io, Io!
Shifting locale, outline of horses, woods,
Distant Nile her Ladon, bramble
And the first switch-back branches of the trees.
In the collective dark, terror,
terror of the god upon her,
Pale wrist flashing over oak-leaf,
The god upon her, in the wood-dark,
Inachus bundled away with weeping, weeping...
Aeas attendant to a dads tears, single laurel
In the forest.
And above her,
light,
Light
formless, lacking shape, lacking claritas,
Pale against oak-leaf,
Turning in the wood-dark, seeking Ladon.
Nile, Nile, bursting at the flood-banks,
And Sahara full, full of sand.
Beachcombers dawdle in greyness—Io!
Looking for Osiris,
disjecta membra among mannikin parts.
Seeking unity, dissolve
Of camera-work his sorrow, invisible limbs
Twirl on river bed,
the color of sand.
Gentle Amphrysis, the smooth-flowing,
Repair their sharpness
with thy sowing.
Inconsolable,
the river wept
For anothers daughter, glitter of mists.
Procession, multiple feet starting from darkness,
And cloud-wrack full of rain, rain,
Wide as a bruise, bruise-purple
Over forest, trunks long under torch-flare,
Crimson petals scattered in blackness,
Boat-lights by sea-shore, night, night,
The god upon her with bird-cry,
Scarlet women tearing their hair, man among them
Horizontal as a card-deck, docks rise
From nothing, discernable.
Paideuma
Lifts from the sea-wrack: APPODITE!
As in that picture by Botticelli (Venus
On a clam-shell) in air above protoplasm,
Jellyfish secondary as ghosts,
silver-white and cobalt,
Tacking in sea-foam by moon as thin
As a night-gown full of wind.
Smoky dawn,
Trunks barnacled in sun-light, glittering,
And the calliope falls unaided, by a secondary effort.
Pipes wail in the dust-heap, Syrinx
Selling her body by the big face full of laughter
Painted on the Palace. Aqua
clear as in Italy;
Horses spin by the curb-side.
HYMANAEUS IO!
Vidal pawed in the brake,
Bare flanks warping the wolf-skin,
Human hands crooked beneath cubs feet
To touch the god, inside,
get claw-curve beneath the mask.
Ab lalen tir vas me laire, and then out,
singing,
Belh Dompna, God walks where you walk,
In that body.
Actaeon scrambled in the pine-leaves
no needle would bother his feet
His feet into hooves were made.
There is nothing sinful in loss
loss of ones way
WAY.
Sd. Ovid, lolling by the Gargaphian pool,
Toga-hem nipping the water-top;
Clustered light beneath pine-boughs.
This is where we stand:
tossing
under the strain of the bridge-head.
.
.
.
.
ACTAEON
Put does head to the dog-tooth.
Ab lalen, by breath, breath I draw to me
the air,
Under a canopy of birch-leaves, silver-dusted,
The water broke on the splay shape of the rock,
countlessly broken,
The flowered bank lively as stars, we walked
Across the stars, extinguishing them
one at a time,
Having stepped beneath the clear dome, not sky,
half-globe, unpocked by stars, crystal
Shedding light, as students
of a light
(As to which, we didnt know)
but students, of a light
(Not our own) but of a light, clear
crystal on crystal, high as cliff-face curving
We have, he said, a bond—
United by one beauty—
A bond,
Indestructible!
Eh! Dissolvable in alcohol, it later
Appeared.
The Count of Foix instructed:
Let no man nod amid flower-tops
Lest
he sleep on the head of an axe.
Bohr taught atoms the waltz-step,
Maxwell and Planck undid it:
It is this ground that shakes me.
Oloscoe recorded it:
Savage wit
is beauty.
. . . .
Earth at each end, ground-swell, by bridge-head,
Bucking above the tide-mark, earth shallow
Where water has left it, stiff mud
chiding the crab-grass.
No longer as the furies left it,
Bearing leisure. Orestes again in a bind,
dry dust has closed his eyes.
And Vidal the same, mad,
Mad as a March hare;
Mangy hair slips by the scrub-brush.
And Lady Loba put hand to the
glass-pane,
Translucent hand, mixed with clouds passage,
And then clear, clear as sunlight,
White ivory, transmit of the heavns.
Between sunlight and skin-light, husband,
A third post to her beauty.
Slow features allegro in sunlight, she spoke:
Poor Pierre, poor, poor dolen....
Well, you go ahead and save im, honey,
Hes miserable thin.
Vidal pawed in the brake,
Knowing God. The windows on the castle were mirrors,
Blue dust in sunset,
Pierre huffing through leaf-must, squinting...
Miss Loba moves behind that window, crystal
Direct as sword-cut, seen through no arras,
That body, portion of snow, shaped, white column
Moving; sun edged the eyelets,
turrets sharp
against sky-sides,
He howled at his heavenly needle.
Leaf against leaf in the half-light,
Small leaf stutters against cheek-bone,
Fainting among acorns in the birch-stand,
Slender against sun-flame, men about him,
Ankle-high in anemones, bending west,
Peeling the wolf-skin, these thorns are hard
On a mans hand, peeling;
he was dragged thirsty into clear light:
Water and bandages in a meadow.
Down from the hillside, slide,
and the slope ending;
Small rocks the color of pearl,
Unwashed pearl,
jump under foot-petal:
Sound as of hail, and a wedge of cloud advancing,
Rubbing white over hill-top, pearl
And white alternate, as after rain,
And the clouds dry, empty, sucked white,
Casting what brightness over water;
Unmoving water,
Steel surface, flat, unmoving, sheeted,
As at Nemi. Heaven has its policemen,—
Not for any man, peace of the lakes,
Gargaphia, Pergusa, Salmacis, be near me;
And Garda saved one mind.
Slowness, lowed Binyon, slowness
gainst Oloscoe.
Not for any man
sky by the cupful,
That stillness.
And beneath a few birds scattered as buck-shot,
Water, always beneath the rabble,
Water.
And the shavings of light curved upon it;
Leaf rocking leaf in the gilt-flow,
And over the trees
in cadenced abandoned calling
rook cries as the willow-limb;
fallen
notes over wave
Translucent with the lights brunting
Quail start from the wade-stream,
Quail slant into the rushes.
Oarlock turning with the arm-slash,
Jade-struck the oarblade;
petal in water, luminous
Ere the sun sets.
Carp like a cobalt shadow
Trace domes above the stream-face,
Branches silver in liquid
Trunks mellow with light,
Half black against the yellowing;
Wild fowl will nest here
when the lakes edge is dryer.
Bluegill, sunny-fish, and carp,
A trout in the high season, caparisoned;
Dragonfly perfect against the hull,
Scirr of motion, stasis of outline,
Splayed in steadiness
light a cirrhus upon it,
perfect against the hull.
Orange clouds dive by the horizon,
Flagrant beside the sky-page;
Geese flock toward the hell-flame,
Brown dots lost in nothing.
And over the trees
gone green as deep algae,
slime heavy with darkness,
rooks croak as locust-trees
hanging
Shadow-limbs black motion
suave
upon the hull.
Churn, churn by the grassbanks
And over the river
silence,
Stars glassy in the dusk-film,
Broad sky caught in melting, shade into shade—
Spectrum, lodged as if in filter,
Terse questioning in violet, crows
Fill the hummock-base; cold;
Sun-tilt on the pine-trees,
Lemon sheen over newness;
Wind-drone scattered as wasp-noise, cupped buzzing
Flagrant under blueness—
Amber the ducks bill, triangle over water,
Yellow-jackets gather to the flowerhead,
Small activity like a bomb-burst;
Gelid the waves passing, pustulence
in repetition.
Sounds crack in tranquility, shushed
Sliding of fresh paper, prow
canters to the bankside;
Briars haunt the slopes edge, sweet with berries,
Gauze the waters spillage over sand-crust,
Cinnamon palms bother the bridge-head,
Restless motion over void
Molten pearl rises under the water-skin,
Bubbles mirror suns action,
red pendulum level the horizon;
And sun, sun great as a walnut bole—
Bulge without context, thorned by the goarse-bush,
Blinks as with whales eye; slow;
Sun-glare lowered to the treetops
setting blaze in the ice-air,
Blood-wax against carbon:
flare
Speak, what have you seen?
Flare
As the cicada dying
And then the great dark.
Gold scattered as shale
abundant over the meadow—
Mist pale, as faded marble the grass
Attendant to the wind;
Trees far, dim behind the mist-light,
near, delicate as the unleavened;
Shingle on shingle of leaf,
Unavoidable slope, midnight trunks out of glory;
spider, spider, ceaseless design in finitude,
Spoked web by the still wall
—contrived silence thy claws hallmark.
Now first current in the mist;
Leaf in the treble scale,
rudderless skiff,
First bird starts its plaint,
Harsh cry through paradise,
Winter rye soft as barley-ear;
Holly gathers its dews,
bronze leaves in the sun-fall,
Swirl of metals, copper
Intersect of the pewter mist-weave;
Oxen taunt the field cows past ridge,
No bell making tone to mar serenity;
Crickets stir in the ear,
Grackle-rasp in the tall oak distant;
One frog blurs sass, undulant in littleness.
The birds shift their weight
along the alder-lines
beside blank rustle only quietude
Light taking grain from the meadow-grass,
Mist recumbent under white sky,
Landscape stiff as porcelain in daylight;
Radiant the serried crag-tops,
Daylight poured as if plaster, slick
stillness in misery
silence.
Halogen
dawn:
shells
embed the cliff-face.
Small fish make against the current, unceasing current,
Water-flop diminishing past tide-mark.
Sun arcs the sky in one movement.
Su Sung
made a bronze world, without comment.
And 500
years later
they tore it down to make dog statues,
Unpetalling the globe, dog statues
To guard a dead king.
Stars were indicated by holes in the bronze.
The world speaking English and forgetting the past,
Forgetting the past and digging diamonds
Or powders of an industrial use.
Above the Congo, a little to the left, that nameless place,
full of weeds and people indifferently.
A black
crew goes down in shaped metal, yellow,
to the cat-calls of Belgins,
The smooth
tones of Dutchmen, a German,
French and
British administrators, laughing behind glass,
hyena-like,
tink of smiles;
An American engineer drinking Brazilian
coffee, not the best,
As wheel
the diameter of cathedral dome
spins
in reach of his hand.
Adams praised the dynamo, but saw the Virgin winking
Past the invisible spokes, silence
As of sepulchre or prayer, under new iron wrought with cupids
minted sleek as cars by art-deco.
Draining the gold out of Persia,
the
eagle squawked on a pole-top:
Stunned by the electrical current of events,
Diocletian remedied the reverse flow of coinage
w/ lead slugs,
good for two centuries, or thereabouts,
Exchange unnoticed by the machine,
Tied by reusable purse-strings. The soldier, Severus said,
must have a stuffed wallet.
Contracting the barbaroi to save a buck.
Montesquieu perceived: They had not
the pretensions of Roman foot-men, neither luxura
As fur against old age. A gelid wind
Confused the pines with Autumn, bending lower.
The base of a sound economy is not gold.
filial
piety
mother
A boy upholds a man with a stick and white hair.
And on TV, after the radio, luminescent dusk,
a strident man talked his throat to bust
during
air-time hed paid for.
Ego high in ignorance
past remonstrance.
A dove batters at the
window. Sky-chimes.
No living face on the money, as guard.
The tapped bronze falls from clutched pliers,
Wire model of a globe, the blue insulation off;
Carriage upright past Whitmans eye-hole,
the gaunt sufferance.
The tin world rolls from my desk
As bird and sea beat on
against
a bullet-proof glass.
Up from the sandpit (sunset)
Rose Elijah ranting with his hair in ice,
voca tinnula
at Horeb. The still stars
revolve a world beneath them, on a string.
Over the Alaskan pass, to hell
single file towards Klondike
20% custom on the years food
digging chthonos with a steel pick,
mother. Ice cracks the rocks.
Chaplin put his eyes to the moon-frost;
spent a year
with little luck
Trying to film the purgation. Alpine
The gates on the sanatorium, to Kashimas I/O
Gateless gate, black robe like wave-stem
About him, ivory ankles above blue jays;
carved plaster clots the corner molds at the insane place,
love tokens hacked w/ axes
and a little skill
and less luck. Names, or dwarf alphabets,
connected by crosses
in a surface both arctic-white and icelike.
Hans Castorp in the dead room, cold,
kicking the ceiling chunks.
no foreign god in the film can.
No mind that loves wisdom
and human children a little,
knowing devastation as a quiet hail,
constant, among lost grass,
without prevail
Kore fell face first into the dirt hole
Dragging the Sistine heaven with her,
Where earth (chthonos) is black
And charcoal trees are lying down to learn themselves.
Rats eyes
Wiped the slates, in smooth descension
Gradual as the seas slope, green
under
grey.
Justice established through correct perception
of need, not consequence.
Cythera clearing the undergrowth, for light
Red dots amid pine needles
Light, collected at the eye
as insert
Luminous mind to penetrate w/out bumping (Paradisio)
Nor sharp jostle
Death delicate as ether
lies low in the slant vales
Grey sunlight
descends to Grendals level, mixed—
the wine and the grain-gift both
to descend without neck-break.
Safely to Hades, Plutos place:
neon and stuffed leather (empire) unchanging
But as to our own hell ??
White oxen pull the cart.
the markets are fat w/ new produce.
women bear happily children;
their angst is glad, and thoroughly modern.
<<O
cerveaux enfantins!
A man and a woman, tied beyond helping
as the anchor laughs.
<<La femme, Lhomme... one
a vile slave, sadorant et saimant
sans degout;
the other, tyran
goulu>>
Transmission of Vulture Peak with no radio set to receive
the gold lotus upheld, in emptiness
and the 3rd eye traded off
for a steal at homeplate.
Sisyphus axed Marx in half. Not labor,
But achievement, the sack of grain.
Chaos is not hell, for it repeateth.
Hell does not repeat. Each torture is a city.
DeSade to label the streets, at a later pleasure
Devils jumping ant-thick over Dante
With his visitors card and Latin guide
Translating the stock exchange to years
Or millions ($) alternately (eh, Boesky?). Evolution
Leaves its chalk marks. The letters were of bone,
Walking straight ahead
Cave,
and the tethered dark, moving about him
slithered coils of absence.
No noise of footbeat in the blackness.
Apparve luce? At Trovaso
Pearl
among oysters.
Et puis, et puis encore?
Water came over the raft edge
tipping brightness,
light accurate in scattering,
and a little chaos, noticing the slag moisture
ripping itself into colorful bits
for the mere insane pleasure of it.
A snag
trebled in the rigging, heavy ropes wet with the nights rain
and the dry storm-salt still stinging the mens eyes
an entire week after the event. Acid baths
washed the antique sea-shells from the rock
(Scientific experiment, the shells
were whittled spires,
classic aftermath of cells growth,
stone-white).
The
compass put us north by a three month.
Huck and Jim off balance in the red flood,
Charyon slips by the wine jugs.
No mirror knows its face.
Unshaved clouds make the sky
Steel. Modcearig
Dives with the gulls plummeting.
Tucked wing, and no fan.
Ennui measures our ships cell, pacing,
pacing.
Hail sifts the brine. Cold shuts off lungs.
It started
just snowing, snowing lightly
until we were up to our elbows in it.
(Empire, that is.) Claudius conquering the Brits,
and not liking their small chariots and fast ponies
—could unscrew a wine cork w/ trained turns
and spill not one drop.
Golden hellblood
a necessary complement
to sun intersect of the leaf-dome
in tense light, falling
—gathered thus in autumn time, to burn
Without
eye
no light to see
the motion of the leaves, and the
abrupt dismemberment
of season from season, according to sun-tilt
Deep in the dream, the pretend U, (of A U M)
an Indian extravagance, granted, ghost controlling ghost
in the stone dark,, but Lascaux!
Drawn in color of torches, half-glint, slurr
of linework, sudden out of midnight, held chant of owls,
stalactites drawn down by time, drawn down.
Time a contributory factor, via form, the clasped shape
moving among nothingness
And the old dog shivers// in the shadow
knowing gods by the pawful, dreaming them
simple as clouds, in a light
KALON, for man
Demons sweating angel-hair, in the right context
Invented, invented, swelled cinnamon or thrown scarlet
the failed day and fallen.
Out of this to build Paradise?
or assemble the world a little?
A few places with clean rooms, Sugers choir, as instance,
to stay in the mind, as foodstuff; outside
a field of lilies, awash in plain light, inedible
a solid nodule to think upon.
Reason rises in the rose-light, a political garden
like the rest, ambiguous
Light stepped as action
and the mind moves, by perception
Grosseteste hefting the steam-swirl
as
the hart panteth
a stammer in the break
panteth in a white breath
leaping
above the snow bank
And some
knew that love was measure
or 1/2 measure
Compassion : humanitaS
E quel remir, a subtle light, distinctest at its vanishing
not to shame man, notch on the horizon
Nyssa and Chrysostom abusing the perspective
gainst Reason,
lifting their shadow,
surfeit of pain in a lotus-pill, the tense light
How comes it then thou art out of Hell?
Why, this is hell
nor
am I out of it.
And light
swirled as if creating
ex nilho, yet clear, mauled glass in water
inviting the fish to sample it
stasis, unclimbing, fixed in the days melt
intransient and eye-long
a dark fin stands above whirlpool, curved
unmoving light
Erigena knew, the conferred form
known as the light allows
unmoving
And so what, then, of chakra five?
Chuck it.
REASON
mediates
after the bout.
Straet waes stan-fah
stilt wisode
To Avernus,
no bird on the ice-cliff.
steam splits the rock-face.
polygon tensegrity of molecules shifting their footing.
Cracks the wolf-cliff , mid-howl.
wind as nails
in the flame mist, reed-wraith
dancing under cliffs dark, never departing
where stands the black lake
bearing
into
Hades
(light)
torch singed the knuckle-growth (of hair)
put bent sun-rays over thick ice,
the low trees and pines perfectly encased...
deep wood rooted fast
in grim frost groves. Baleful beauty spied,
Wonder, past the broken branch-ends.
Ice like paraffin on the peach buds
denying spring
in the earth-heat, the water burning
Clouds befoul the eye-slot,
denying access (to a Federal institution:
The Land of Unbelief
)
Who has been here previous
Warm in blind landscape,
unscrubbed bears puncturing the
waste tins,
as discipline, to conquer life
by hating it enough?
White paw and black underneath, gamboling,
at the directors insistence
Gamboling death.
Penguin director, stalled in the stiff snow
with
a cane and a notion, an elastic intuition of evil, as before
Worlds sorrows in his sardine tin
Spinning the globe like a vacant jenny, twisting
empty
in the paused hands of a girl
No mind that loves wisdom
and
human children a little,
Said no one:
The landscape dropped from under me.
In his pocket, novelle di sospiri,
After his return, a blank (he fainted)
Snapping his sandals to, tromping the dust dale
NIS TAET HEORU STOW!
KA!
dopo la morte, poscia,
pianto e novel dolore.
That is justice.
Normal Polaroids
I, I am part of it. I am carrying on the
tradition. I am in the stream—
eleusis discernible in the
gas-light
of modernity.
What is there in all this wreck of ages?
A few dollars at the right shop,
a paid
curio for the mahogany shelf, near Flauberts upright;
lost among the tone of things.
Perhaps this is a more desirable form of monologue,
able to be shut off in an eye-blink,
or with a cold hand
turned away entirely.
And somebody swapped an eye-patch for a jade eye
by the double gates of Chou. The dog rabid, howling,
that we fed from our plates yesterday.
Civilization is not a cafe. But a few lights
gathered, gathered
an unsteady voice against the nothingness
The stars
revolve on darkness.
A green moon thaws the black sea.
And the beautiful regular young
women
pat and pat their hair
In anticipation of the spring.
But none of this interests him.
He drops his eyes. He has
Sorting an additional pile
Of the Yankees latest fashions, on cards,
He recalled that as a boy he had cried
Shamefully,
At the thought of Don Mattinglys grave.
Having produced a litter of 12 (they raged
In the yard) she lit a cigarette and sighed,
In delicate Floridian air,
Who was, in childhood,
A television personality.
Slouched in the folds of a deckchair,
She talked
Of the flamingoes that daily crossed her lawn.
Each shaved head vaunts an eagle-stare;
Each feathered foot,
A boot.
He had thought to change stations
With his parents
By a careful dispensation
Of high-rate municipal bonds.
He sought,
Among shaped shells and sunglass parts
To invent
A discernable art, he said,
To shade love from disaster.
His portfolio creaked like a stuffed croissant.
And this year again the skirts
Of the beautiful young women
Sigh and grow shorter.
Some others sell aluminum siding
Who once grew hair like vines to their waist,
Proclaiming the indelible root.
Some watch dawn vault the ocean
For the 10,000 time.
Some melt into middle-age.
They have no wind
In the endless waves of their speech.
They are all for Wordsworth,
The pasty mumble of millions,
The dribble of regular talk.
They carve
No notes from the length of their reeds,
No song from the random canyons
Of wind.
They have no wind
In the unendurable waves of their speech.
They exit the bathroom breathlessly.
A man of infinite delicacies, 6 cars, 4 mistresses,
And who abhors tattoos,
Has married a girl with broken teeth
And unexpected odors
In spite of his mother.
Rows of glass jars with peppermint sticks
Regular as rifles, or tangled,
Grow pale and lessen.
In other respects,
The humidity has made them changeless.
They clatter in a lump
As the opinionless girl, hermetically sealed,
Unwinds one for herself.
She is underpaid and bored.
Meticulous in her boredom, she dreams
Of shifting winds, perpetual storm,
Cobalt voices out of nothing
Pyramids filed to dust.
Stiffening with saccharine, her perceptions
Pale and lessen.
The cash-register rang with her dime.
Unembroidered, your soul
Casts errant rhythm
In errant air.
Your steps
Are gathered by the leaves they crush,
And savoured,
And made small.
Green, the
pure prismatic color
left its little stalling footprints
Refined to
a clarity, to one colour
as
with a wall,
The famous international explorer,
Saint Jacque, to escape the strictures of his race,
Leapt (formally dressed)
Off of three bridges, leaping
With triple-reenforced rubber bands Celastics)
Gripping his British African ankles.
I go to save all men, indignant, jumping,
After the manner of the Afriks.)
His tux-tails catching the airs wings, he went.
Be pulled up just short
Of the water (or the rocks) whichever
Was appropriate in whichever case.
And after, when
I proposed:
Why why (the background sistrums sheathing
Sounds with sounds)
His teeth cried out (smiling):
NOTE: The ritual described here is taken from a
reclusive tribe in the Congo where it is a rite of passage for young boys
intended to make them independent of the shrewdness and courage of women, the
story being that a woman ones, to escape from her husband into the arms of her
lover tied vines to her ankles and jumped from a cliff; the husband was too
scared to follow, thus making good her escape and happy her life. (Now a common
sport in North America.)
As if we should commemorate the event
A small, arsenic-colored sign
squawks in the wind.
To the left, the hills are scattered almonds.
As if we should want to commemorate
Joshua Something, the patriot,
Who was killed like a cow in the indicated field
(Crooked to his plow, alone),
The decorous rain beats down the more decorous wheat.
The birds drip seeds from their beaks.
As if we should know how to care for the buried,
The dedicated guide
Xs the spot with her shoe.
The eye-like hills blink at the rain.
The weak wheat sinks.
And there is a dead man there,
white sand stiff in yellow teeth.
Interlude
Mournful-vital, wry and fitful,
The trombonist of noon approaches,
Extruding tones in lazy fistfuls
Contented as a cockaroach.
Nearby, moody rapt contemplatives
Hold themselves alone, intense, profound:
Wet ashes of a disheartened
Ovation littering the stairs.
Such giddiness is sin!
We cannot finish, so why begin?
The trombonist honks a long report,
Gutting the usual day with sounds.
The kibbitzers consider as they stare,
Mooned beyond yawned windowpanes in pairs
Until a moaning starry eve of sorts
For a bourbon nurture comes around.
Beyond the bland suspension of a moment
(still and queer and empty)
We sip our tea and take our toast
drained of life and envy.
A drunken angel at a harpsichord
suspends upon a cigarette
Some tattooed prayer of the Lord,
some blank mystery as yet.
An opal in a teardrop
confers what grief would keep;
Purpure absolution drops
in gutters at your feet.
Starlight in a candle
reddens the intruding hand,
Restless on the icy mantle
With midnight vigils at a busstop
So that our suffering might be destroyed
We sit and drink our coffee, adjust the lamp,
Shaving patient corners from the void.
The
hustle of suits dressed in deceit
Prepare
a face to meet the faces that they meet
Black tears trysting on an empty cheek,
An aerialist suspenseful above the clouds,
Meet dead center, a past and future,
In the stagnant tension of the crowd.
Individual luminescence has decreased—
A sulfur spotlight pins the penitents
Restless shifting feet.
The body like a flower, mildly drunk,
And flooded with the memory of love,
Drinks and waits til the tightrope trips,
A strangled grieving scream above.
A
streaked resemblance in the rain
Recalls
the pallid ghost again
Beyond the abstract silver circle
Where our impatient senses sit
A splinter of a finished soul
I turn my visage in the fog
To the scene of my demise:
There, in the nothing, I was wise;
Here, in eternity, I am fog.
Absolute and contemptible
My whim now wanders witless space,
A focus in idiot vagueness,
Temporary and discreditable.
Such is the sum of human worth!
A self-involving wheel that grinds
Nothingness to the end of time.
Look to yourself and know its truth!
A shudder in a whisper,
A spinal chill beside the tomb,
Cues music in another room
No dancer ever enters.
Everything I am I fear,
All I was I disrespect;
A skeleton of acid aspect
Pins me with a glance to here.
Vaguely ceremonious dust
Sweeps corners of an edgeless plain;
To feel at all is to feel pain;
Incapable judgment,
Charmless incoherence,
Damnable indolence,
A welcome internment.
Happy are we who rot and look
Neither to the left nor right;
Directionless uncentered sight
That sees like a remembered book.
Here and now and gone
Each page of my prison singes,
Turning edges, mirrors, mirages:
Burnt promise of smoky beyonds.
An incapacity as soft
As mothers flushing infants eyes
Ends each blind alley that I try,
Suffocates with wings of moths.
Exits dissolve in fur or foam,
Every gleam reveals a worm;
Each ending of a timeless dream
Inaugurates a longer term.
Here I wait in wetness
Disconsolate and endless,
Penetrant and airless,
Beyond the paper moon
and past the plastic stars
Lurks a lump or troubled wisp
of what we really are.
Behind the pantaloon, the canvas and the grease,
beside the green stage door
Lingers a loveable stranger
whose tenor urges us to more.
Although the lights are out, are out
and the sets gone burning down
Still we ache to traipse the stage
and immortalize the clown.
The grave is but a keyhole
and we ourselves the key
That into clay or on to flame
Around the corner and down the street
A dixieland funeral saunters,
Colorful and lingering and usual
Toward the graveyards nightmare encounters.
The band is blatant, pure and loud,
Hesitant and impudent,
Symptomatic of the crowd.
Punctual despair! Martinis at five.
I cannot afford to stop a clock
Or otherwise improvise
Eternities ad hoc;
Times unmoored,
And grinds along the street.
I repeat the bony, frozen syncopations
That continue, with the usual
Dividend of derivations.
Time hangs heavily in the ratty eves,
Losing teeth, losing leaves;
Sturdy human habit seeks reprieve.
Spanish moss that darkens the darkest hour
Wets the bold wisteria climbing there
Twisting like the dying
Aria of Guenivere.
I glance below
Lowbrowed eves and stare:
Nothing moves and nothing cares.
Outrageous and depressed,
Alert on taut animal haunches
(And somewhat overdressed
Despite the summer and the butane heat),
The whore expiring across the street
Proceeds to her appointment, cool and cautious,
And carefully repeats:
Anonymous anodyne of pride: defeat.
Life does not hold together—
A soggy cardboard box, abused and ruined,
Silted with liver pills and moldy feathers,
The last illness of a fatal afternoon.
Life lies purged of hope and gloom,
A crumpled paper romance white fire withers
Beneath the disappointed siftings of the moon.
Life retires in the grass, expires in a room.
And here the harlot, hot and rapid,
Danced thin instants upon a checkered floor.
And all she touched was overripe, or rancid,
A ribbed theater of pain and gore.
Homage a la D.B.D.
Perhaps these venomed essences seem obscene,
Half-realized dissolutions,
Blank dissuasions of half-solutions
Leaking moonlight leans down to send
Into desperate, intemperate heads.
Desolate beneath a fading moon
That invades
The murky modesty of a rented room
My unmended melancholy still compels
—Or, merely serene, serenely seems
To spell both sky and sea,
Rampant tree and vacant well,
Into the broken order of my soul.
Paralytic flowers of the chilling moon
Dose dead medicines
From silver skins; they edge
The blind compliant mouth
Tumorous June once brought to life.
No, no, there is no need to ask—
Among such colorless anarchies of the air
Divinity rarely lifts her mask.
Processions Past
Blank Generation: A Modernists Progress
Blank Generation or, the Death of the Muse. No, Hardly
Defeated by the paraphrase, or
nearly,
He puzzled out a dwindled life, in
poetry,
Who, perennial importunist,
assessed
His era unfit for the best.
Defeated by the paraphrase,
The inexact guesswork of sleepy
heads,
Eyes closed and empty mouths upraised—
Fit for execution or their
communion of lead.
Spackled cadavers in mottled light
Recite lines of despair, never
knowing another,
Never sensing, in their ages
indifference, another
More enduring light.
No longer
The Ariel feeling
Or whipping spirit stronger
Than an evenings reeling.
Untouched by the amorous,
Stripped
Goes Eros, incomprehensible
To the masses.
Hieratic verse,
Each head limned in light,
Suffers the obverse,
Blotted rummagings of a blotted sight.
Yet still they felt, with a saviors amour,
Neither drugged hedonist, nor yet a bore,
Limitless possibilities
Like so many leaves
Clinging to the ancient portals wetted door.
The percipient shall rule, discerning
Neath modernitys fractious overlay
Here an emerald, there a ruby, thing:
Sustenance enough for poets in the ruby day.
The age demanded an image,
Bland, unthinking, dull scrimmage;
Never the descent of Angelic fate,
Making impossible their unwaking
retreat.
Not a mirror to the muses face,
Not Ariel, limitless in grace;
Never divinity, never the light
angelus,
Nor any, still ephemeral, sublimities.
The age demanded an image
Rapped in cellophane or bandage,
A brain of eaten hates, or laughter
Soulless out of deadened waters.
Villains are feted in peeling shoes, and garlanded
Is Ginsolds, the great damaged head
Thrust into the atmosphere,
Impercipient, the small eyes dead in their spheres.
Seeing in earth neither paradise, nor fit habitation,
The Ginsolds of his fathers scabrous generation,—
Monumental dinosaurs of the heart,—
Researched dung and drugs for their start;
At first, a religious pre-occupation
Made them stare at Sunflowers and feces,
Purporting maculate Bhudda in the rose
Of an anus in dilation.
Tarry pools
Accept their coral bones,
Steeped in excesses
Of the incorrect and religious.
And no one left to give a damn about the Graces,
And the reviewers live on, indifferent;
Slaughtered Beauty shot in the face;
Apollo and Bacchus hanged in the
neon marketplace;
Cold feet under etherial faces.
When all the world shall kneel
At this bright whisper,
Striving with unapt paws
To strip the golden spirit down, or
unpeel,
No heaven shall listen;
Silence shall be their first
reparation;
Paid or unpaid, the souls
discourse discloses
Itself, thrumming after no
repatriation
To a nation, clotted, with whores
and doses.
Black orchids on the red door;
Fitfully the raconteur
Consigns the ownership of elegance
For a few hundred dollars, for a superior glance.
Black orchids on the red door
Mark the poets stipulated habitat.
Depression afflicts; he begins to yawn....
Stretching away from the world with a bored eclat.
Exhausted by his meditations on the black
Orchids on the red door, of a few, niggard, dark,
Striations intermit with rose;
Guilty only, in his ichorous lair,
Of a certain
Kempt Baudelarian repose.
Ginsolds of the foetid spawn
Patched with no forgotten
pulchritudes—
Vulgar paucity faintly echoed
In the weak light of decline.
Mr H. (insert your name here), possessed of
an anesthetized soul
Blathers his useless abstraction,
A tongue-tying of half-felt
immolations—
Unendurable! if not so falsely
done.
Enslaved imbecility defiling life,
A sycophancy supremely mired,
Never to ring in celestial essence,
Or inhere, in patches, to glorys
sculpting light!!
The age demands an image,
The image that we give it!
Chiselled tongues of thunder rung
In rising airs rained innocence!
We demand the eternal image,
Absolute, inscribed, violet,
blessed,
Suffering only self-made Gods
bleeding divinities—
Intensities of existence
intensifying infinite!
Even When Im Down, I Hear Symphonies
Apollo and Bacchus hanged in the neon marketplace;
Cold feet under etherial faces.
Bore-ed by the lack of temerity,
Slack desire suborning the bandannaed faces
Of hippies contented by Peace, and not Energy;
Marijuana leaves placidly
Shading the crib and high-chair.
Bored by the lack of passion
Expanded bank accounts conferred upon their elders
Lacking still the capacity, it seemed, messrs,
To cope; they craved the indelible in action.
100 punks, or fewer, or one,
Concoct out of impossible desire impossible reality:
Burning ambitions in Waldorf St, or SoHos zone,
Shed from the aether
These symphonies.
With a tongue of justice,
With an eye of fire,
With an ear made fabulous
By beloved minds one wept flame:
desire.
Rottens masquerades,
Sids pinioned victory,
The burboned
voice of Hell establishing blankness
as priority
In a world floating valueless;
incisive,
the eye of ice.
Aching faces brave the astonishing
light,
Asserting TRUTH in ecstatic
sanction;
Our redemption was individual,
London our capitol.
Our decade compressed to 77!
We acknowledged, as aftereffect, a
fey, uneven
inheritance of reticence.
Youth as a remembered depravity
Gives no living soul satisfaction;
relentless
Sojourning away from their parents
questioning
Consigned to them the aridity of
bliss.
When dust hath hushed the roses,
Unmeditating silence
This crimson-cerise splinter of song
Encloses
On times blank slate
Lick this, and relate:
Here twists,
with upraised fist,
An Anarchist!
How To Write a Victory Instead
of a Tragedy
Indelible bloods
Arise heroic rose,
Each love a sung
Sempiternal sun.
Exile first the inconsequent,
The casual hand,
Speech procured at secondhand,
Opinions possessed for an effect.
Recast ANAKE as the actors whim:
Vital eyes
Outweep all that tragic
circumstance,
Lear and Cordelia locked in paradise.
Catastrophe hacked at Hector
In his skirt, but the Eumenides
Themselves were mild when Antigone
died,
Singing at a string-end in the tombs lee.
Become Promethean, to this purpose:
Amid lesser qualities, personalities and such,
Swimming in unexamined idolatries, personalities
and such,
Inscribe what I equate: Man = universe.
Deconstructing the Deconstructionists
Philosophers of stone
Ungainly shift,
By loves bright drift
Undone.
Of unbodied air
Came spirits enhancing;
Never a Dunciad
But angels hearts made glad.
Impeccable sirs
They discerned
Exegesis
Spit in sand.
Punk Rock, Eternal youth, and the Bacchanalia of Liberty
A contextual note for the poem Blank Generation
Yknow its
fascinating the difference between those
who have...
Theres those who make it and those who never make.
And yknow its fascinating because its really very clear
Either youve got it honey, or you aint!
~~The Rich Kids, Ghosts of Princes in Towers,circa 1978
Punk rock tore an ascending arc over the 1970s.
It is an arc that does not falter still, emblazoned in the permanent whirl that all imaginative exertions trace. Often mistakenly labeled nihilists, they instead codified an era of the individual more unerringly than any tribe of artists since the flaming Romantics. There had to be some reason, some real reason, why, in the cynical innocence of seventeen, when some anonymous hand put on the Stiff Little Fingers Gotta Getaway, I was trapped, smiling into the darkness.
There was, in all this ecstatic and angry utterance, no damning naysaying of the nihilist, but rather an essential stripping down of all that could not become, or sustain, the single individual in his fierce pride and abject plight. And once all extraneous distraction of status or erroneous feeling is stripped out of a man, or falls into the dust—as with Lear on his bald heath or Richard Hell in the elemental landscape of Downtown—a man alone must extinguish or soar.
It is only the assertion of self among the destruction of all else that can allow or compel the individual to then ascend, alive for perhaps the first time in the Credent Regale of his imagination, smiling into the darkness. This is always the inviolable work of the imagination, commanding each of us to make real the moral infinity of our individual possibilities—that we draw fire from the dross of this existence. As the lyricist says, among our chances theres a chance we can choose.
So these ghosts, these princes in towers,
It seems to me they got it made:
Because they sulk, and destruct, for no reason!
Well maybe they aint afraid!
When Shelley, in his Defense of Poetry, talks about the invisible effluence sent out by the great perceptive individuals of antiquity reaching into contemporary minds and thus sustaining the life of all, he is NOT taking the Platonic line about how some immensely distant Ideal Realm is accessible because permanently unchanging in any epoch—what he is talking about are self-created men asserting an ethical effulgency of unimaginable strength: the strength of an individual. Shelley is asserting the fact that the ethical efficacy of the individual, as literally embodied in poetry, can never be negatively estimated. No limit to its effects can ever be measured because that which is beautiful will never stop having an impact; it will keep effecting things for as long as things continue to exist. As old Ez has pointed out: Literature is news that STAYS news. This is why punks were never nihilists, and never could be, alive in their asserted shiver of selfhood. No limit of the individual is assignable. Poetry and the individual are, in this sense, indivisible.
Theyre ghost of princes in towers,
Theyre the sharp ones, then and now.
And its ONE: that were one of them.
TWO: and its true
that THREE: its free and easy that
beFOUR too long, [theyll] come back to THIS!
Its as simple as the song: before too long, come back to this. Only those who truly live and exist as individuals can move in any direction at all, take any direct action, or have any effect on either history or themselves. The history a true individual makes, or creates out of the infinite moral imagination of his mind can never fade or fail to have its effect; we must, if sincerely asserted, come back to THIS. Only when executed sincerely is the infallible returning to THIS—the ascendant assertion of the individual over the context of history and into the creation of it—a creation of that returning self as well. Each man must, with noble and self-loving divinity, consecrate himself to this awesome task. To return to the sacred assertions of others without the supremely conscious intent to undertake the creation of oneself, is merely to read and not to do. This is the ethical nullity of the archivist, and not the victorious ascendancy of the Credent Regale.
The assertion that is necessary to make the undying return to the permanent words of an individual, and to truly touch those words and let them pinch yourself open, is itself an assertion that is in accord with the initial assertion that resulted in the creation of the selfhood of the recording poet in the first place. This is reading with intent. The recording poets, or Credent Regalists alive only in the assertion of their imaginations over the universe, are the sharp ones [who] got it made,—which is to say, they built themselves; they are asserted individuals, created as individuals by the grace of that assertion. How did they come to find that grace and build themselves? Well, maybe they aint afraid.
Just a singing bout the ghosts of princes in towers
Said some boys, and how!
The princes in towers are ourselves, when, and if, created by the gilded assertion of selfhood.
These princes are the self-created individuals of every clime and time talking to us in the permanent poetry of their consciousness recorded. And that poetry documents that consciousness self-creation. But, it is more than a document—that poem is an object of beauty that calls on us to create ourselves anew so that we can experience the beauty that it talks about firsthand.
And it is the act of saying, and thus seeing, in the trim minute of the poem the boys speak—that makes them princes of themselves. To know and create oneself the first time is the model of all other returns to or re-experiencings of that act of creation. Any such ghostly visitation of the past (or recurring assertion of infinite self over the dim universe), costing not less than everything, the individual necessarily stripped to his skinny essence in order to even understand the creation he is witnessing and participating in, is itself a recognition of that divinest self the erring world perpetually masks and plunders.
The boys saying, or singing, about the princes in towers, is the HOW of the princes in towers as well; it partakes of their principle of self-creation. The doing, the saying, the singing, and the recognition that demands not less than everything, is itself the ethical act of creation: the observation, understanding and act of creation co-occur in this single action all at once. It cannot be divvied up into heavens of elsewhere or dim dreams of afterdeath. Everything must happen in the individuals undying instant of self-recognition. Time is the illusion that we cannot shake, and the one challenge that lets us take a chance on dying forever or truly existing as deathless individuals in the moment. Without time, which undercuts us all, all actions would carry an equal value; there would be no way to sequence or prioritize anything at all; having nothing happen would be exactly the same as everything happening at once; in fact, there would be no at once. Any Zen now would be equivalent to the Apocalypse. Each thing and every experience would drift effortless and defunct, a wasted day at the beach immortalized in unpurchased acrylic—the picked shells arranged for easy remembrance.
Time is supreme over us in this way. In this way, as Richard Hell would say,
Only time can write a song thats really really real.
The best a man can say is how its played or did
this feel
And he only knows as much as time to him reveals.
But once man is aware of time, beauty is made possible because a large part of beauty is expressed in the sense of beautys own perfection passing away. As Wallace Stevens defines it, beauty is the fitful tracing of a portal, the immortal memory of inextinguishable glory alive again for an instant in the brain of an apprehending individual who knows that he must die, and that his death will shatter his perfect apprehension of that still vital perfection.
Heroic suffering is beautiful because the sufferer, asserting himself over the universe, is beatified by this assertion. The hero then embraces the voluntary inevitability of this new beautys death heroically, in time. This final act of embracing volition serves as icing on the cake of asserted selfhood, proving, beyond doubt and beyond time, that the individuals case, or assertion, is TRUE.
Johnny Rotten—and later John Lydon—made this same vital assertion twice under two names: an unrehearsed man knowing himself individual and capable against anything the world could throw at him. His burning theatre prayed for the audience to create themselves alive—one self-creation insisting on a myriad others. This would reveal the original creators regale as real, so that he might then ascend and never dissipate. To exist enough as a self-asserted individual that another person creates themselves as an individual in order to meet you or your creation in the Credent Regale of your rational liberty, proves that you have truly lived, at least once, as a self-created individual. The only social community that such self-created individuals can possibly share is the community of beauty. It is only through the individual perceptions of beauty that they share a mutual world of beautiful objects—which includes their own self-created, self-asserted individuality. Any of Richard Hells fabled performances are equal to this test. And to the degree that each performance was a creation of self, the audiences reaction could be dropped as an insignificant afterthought. Only those who re-invented themselves to be more capable of appreciating and responding to another individual were really able to witness anything at all anyway; so, at least, I would assert. W. B. Yeats created himself as an individual by having his living creation Red Hanrahan respond to him within the bounds of yet another creation of his, the poem The Tower.* This is how Yeats ascended into the second heaven of his imagination, his asserted individuality, to never dissipate.
Punk music is beautiful because in it is encoded the actual ACT of individuals asserting themselves over the universe. The music was never it. As Sid said: Who cares about the music?
I am always held in awe by the tortured furies of such modern ascendance.
Adonis flopped in the clearing—
Venus/Aphrodite is also known as Cytherea (Lady of Cythera) and Cypris (Lady of Cyprus) after the two cult sites, Cythera and Cyprus, which claimed to be her place of birth. Myrtle, doves, sparrows, horses, and swans were said to be sacred to her.
The story of Venus and Adonis comes from Ovids Metamorphoses, Book 10. Ovid tells how Venus took the (too-young) beautiful Adonis, who was solely interested in the manly pursuit of hunting, as her first mortal lover. They were long-time companions, with the goddess hunting alongside her lover. She warns him of the tale of Atalanta and Hippomenes to dissuade him from hunting dangerous animals; he disregards the warning, goes off hunting on his own after a love-making session, and is killed by a boar.
Venus and Adonis is also a poem by William Shakespeare, written in 1592–1593, with a plot based on passages from Ovids Metamorphoses. It is a complex, kaleidoscopic work, using constantly shifting tone and perspective to present contrasting views of the nature of love.
Full-hipped in her grieving—
Κατθνάσκει Κυθέρἠ, ἄβροσ Ἄδωνισ, τί κε θεῖμεν,
Καττύτεσθε κόραι καὶ κατερείκεσθε χίτωνασ.
Katðnaskei Kuðerh?, a?bros A?dwnis, ti ke ðei^men,
Kattuptesðe korai kai` katereikesðe xitwnas.
Gentle Adonis is dying, O Cythera, what shall we do?
Beat your breasts, O maidens, and rend your garments.
Quoted by Hephaestion and presumed to be written by Sappho from a passage in Pausanias. Hephaestion was a Macedonian nobleman and a general in the army of Alexander the Great. He was ... by far the dearest of all the kings friends; he had been brought up with Alexander and shared all his secrets.
Pausanias (c.AD110–c.180) was a Greek traveler and geographer of the 2nd century AD, who lived in the times of Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius. He is famous for his Description of Greece, a lengthy work that describes ancient Greece from firsthand observations, and is a crucial link between classical literature and modern archaeology.
The grief of Cythera is as profound as the overwhelming desire that led her to pursue the young hunter in the first place. Life and love are brief, but desire is eternal. Mortal man is caught between these two worlds of limiting time and god-eternal desires, and is often perplexed to his death. The fatal wound the boar admisters to Adonis is in his thigh, demonstrating a connection between love and vulnerability. Man is often unprepared to play with godly things—eternal desire, etc.
Swans restless in darkness—
Recalls the rape of Leda by Zeus after he had transformed into a swan. The cycles, shapes, and terrors of love are endless. The fascinating beauty Helen was one the results of their pairing.
Clear bubbles rise from the mud-bank,
blossoms smooth as blood-hue—
Little red anemone flowers sprang up where drops of Adonis blood sprinkled the earth from his fatal wound. For centuries in Europe, according to Erasmus, women grew gardens of Adonis in the spring—annuals doomed to fade after a brief blossoming. The women would then turn under the dead plats in the fall to renew their efforts the next spring.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Greek anemōnē means daughter of the wind, from nemos the wind god wind + feminine patronymic suffix -ōnē. The Metamorphoses of Ovid tells that the plant was created by the goddess Venus when she sprinkled nectar on the blood of her dead lover Adonis. The name windflower is used for the whole genus as well as the wood anemone
tense balance of petals, g l o b e—
Tensegrity is the characteristic property of a stable three-dimensional structure consisting of members under tension that are contiguous and members under compression that are not. The term tensegrity was coined by Buckminster Fuller in the 1960s as a portmanteau of tensional integrity. The most famous example of tensegrity in architecture is Buckminster Fullers geodesic dome.
The half-open petals of the red anemone, balanced in an organic tension with each other, are implicitly compared to the cup-shape of a geodesic dome. This image slides through time by tying even the latest architectural, design and science innovations right back to mans oldest legends and myths. We are in the one world of imagination and desire, and always have been. That the sequence of First Descants opens with a cautionary tale of Cythera and Adonis is an indication of its didactic and educational intent for the reader.
Sources for this note:
Spensers
Garden of Adonis and Britomarts Quest by Humphrey Tonkin, Wikipedia, sacred-texts.com
Newark arranging the sew-a-a-ge in a heap—
The Passaic Valley Sewerage Commissions 152-acre plant in Newark was crippled during Hurricane Sandy as a 12-foot storm surge pushed across the property, flooding critical infrastructure. Power outages left key pumping stations inoperable for 48 hours, forcing the plant to dump 840 million gallons of untreated sewage into Newark Bay to prevent raw sewage from backing up into thousands of homes, officials said.
The sewage plant was the site of a possible eco-terrorist assassination as well—the crooked idea of saving the world by punishing mankind:
Shards of glass—the remains of a beaker for taking water samples—were scattered across the concrete floor. This was in early February 2005, in a state-of- the-art water purification plant in suburban New Jersey.in the PVWC tank, the sensor designed to warn of any change in water displacement wasnt working. So when Geetha Angara fell, or was pushed, into the water tank, no alarm sounded to warn that something weighing 175 pounds had entered the water. It could just as easily have been 175 pounds of cyanide, or a biological weapon, as a body.
~~excerpt from The Ripple Effect: the Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century, by Alex Prudhomme
Abandoned of Neptune, the green-going—
Neptune went to war with Zeus so that he could rule over the land as well as the water. Neptune lost, and Zeus condemned Neptune to build the walls of Troy. Troys topless towers were impregnable until the Trojan war when Neptune (figuratively in this case) abandoned Troy. Newark seems to have suffered a similar fate, abandoned by the god that failed of modern progressive orthodoxy.
A possible disaster—
The tragedy of Newark is meaningless—farce, not tragedy—unless the elements of the story can be arranged to give a greater meaning to the mess. This is what the modern poet attempts to do, even though he only has a pyramid pile of offal to work with arranging the sew-a-a-ge in a heap.
Earth the third daughter of Helios—
Helios is the Greek name for the sun. Words like heliotropic (turning toward the light) come from this root.
Who set their heart upon a hope
That never comes to pass,
Droop in the end like fading heliotrope
The suns wan looking-glass.
~~In The Willow Shade
by Christina Georgina Rossetti
Itys, Itys—
In book VI of the Metamorphoses by Ovid, King Tereus escorts his wide Procnes sister Philomela to their kingdom. On the way, he rapes his sister-in-law, threatening her after the rape and advising her to keep silent. Philomela was defiant, which angered Tereus. In his rage, he cut out her tongue and abandoned her. The gods transformed Procne into a swallow and Philomela into a nightingale. Subsequently, the gods would transform Tereus into a hoopoe.
The Greeks traditionally find the cry of Itys, (the name of Procnes son whom she served up to her phiandering husband in a cannibalistic dinner) in the song of the nightingale.
Childish and weak is he
Who learneth to forget
The parents that have perished miserably;
Far better pleaseth me
The wailing one who Itys, Itys, mourns,
The bird heartbroken, messenger of Zeus.
~~Sophocles: Tragedies and Fragments
by E. H. Plumptre
One of the most famous mentions of this myth is by TS Eliot in the Waste Land. Some commentators say that Eliot employs the myth to depict themes of sorrow, pain, and that the only recovery or regeneration possible is through revenge. I can agree with the depiction of sorrow and pain, as in the despairing tragedy of the city of Newark (New Ark), NJ, ruled by a corrupt cabal of Democrat party hacks in a one-party state for nearly 30 years.
The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king
So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
Jug Jug to dirty ears
~~The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot
A consistent theme is regeneration. Troy, however, was not renewed after the Trojan War, and it seems unlikely that Newark will be renewed by the new sewage plant. The modern world in this section lacks transformative vision—either of gods or man. Newark, the contemporary Troy, allures no Copernicus to re-center the conscious attention according to a greater vision reality, rather than the petty lies of left-wing party politics.
Alluring no Copernicus—
Nicolaus Copernicus was a Renaissance mathematician and astronomer who formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than the Earth at the center of the solar system. He took on the prevailing paradigm, and opened the future to new directions, aligning vision with reality. It is this kind of vision/reality recalibration that is needed to renew the contemporary world so that it might again achieve the potential greatness of a Troy.
Sources for this note:
nj.com, villageofnewark.com, The
Ripple Effect: the Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century, by Alex
Prudhomme, Sophocles: Tragedies and Fragments by E. H.
Plumptre, The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, Wikipedia
Dafne
was breathless—
Dafne was chased by the Apollo, the God of
poetry. But rather than submit to his advances, she was transformed into a
laurel tree. Now a laurel crown is the symbol of poetic achievement, a
symbol of desire unfulfilled but encoded in language. The business of
desire is never finished. All autobiography, the secret of the greats.
And
the streets ran gold... Aching Paradise—
The modern denizens of the resort city still
have unfiltered access to nature, the sun and the sea, sources of endless
renewal for humans, however barbaric they have made their spiritual lives.
Now drugs, speedballs etc., provide a short-circuit route to an ersatz
enlightenment; one of the more persistent vicious lies of the liberation
generation of the 1960s.
Asbury
Park is not the center—
Asbury Park, another down-beaten NJ locale,
this one a place of seaside revelry abandoned after race riots in the sixties,
leaving the famous carousels to a shameful decrepitude. Will this be another
portrait of attempted urban renewal? Or something more personal, more
autobiographical?
Io
Ran
in the meadow, fearing love—
Another gods story of desire and
transformation. The most beautiful daughter of Inachus, the first king of
Archos, where a river is named after him. Zeus enjoyed visiting the
beautiful Io and carrying on a dalliance with the beauty. Zeus wife, the
godess Hera, discovered his infidelity and transformed Io into a cow to
frustrate Zeus ability to find the girl. But Hera could not destroy Io
beauty, either in grief or as beef. Io was the most beautiful cow that
ever was. So Asbury Park remained a strong reminder of the frolicsome
innocence of old New Jersey for many years after its wrecking--although no one
wanted to make love to the cow any more.
Distant
Nile her Ladon—
Through many adventures, Io eventually
escapes to Egypt where do is transformed back to her human form and marries the
king, becoming the ancestress of Hercules. Ladon is a river in Greece
that empties into the Ionian Sea. The Ladon is a symbol of Ios eventual
redemption, since when Poseidon assaulted Demeter, she washed
away the insult in the waters of the River Ladon.
Io is also the innermost of the
four Galilean moons of the planet Jupiter. Io played a
significant role in the development of astronomy in the 17th and 18th
centuries. It was discovered in January 1610 by Galileo Galilei along
with the other Galilean satellites. This discovery furthered the adoption of
the Copernican model of the Solar System, the development of Keplers laws
of motion, and the first measurement of the speed of light.
Aeas
attendant to a dads tears—
Aeas, a subsidiary river of the Inachus.
The fathers grief over the transformation and loss of his daughter is
seen as embodied by the river in this poetic conceit. The sound of the
river are his confused cries, the water his tears.
Beachcombers
dawdle in greyness—
Inachus, himself did not know her, but
she followed her father, followed her sisters, allowing herself to be petted,
and offering herself to be admired. Old Inachus pulled some grasses and held them
out to her: she licked her fathers hand and kissed his palm, could not hold
back her tears, and if only words could have come she would have begged for
help, telling her name and her distress. With letters drawn in the dust with
her hoof, instead of words, she traced the sad story of her changed form. Pity
me! said her father Inachus, clinging to the groaning heifers horns and
snow-white neck, Pity me! he sighed; Are you really my daughter I searched
the wide world for?
~~Metamorphoses, book 1 by A. S. Kline
In the same way as Inachus, the citizens of
Asbury Park do not know what beauties they possess. The golden beaches
are abandoned to greyness.
Looking
for Osiris,
disjecta membra among mannikin parts—
In Egyptian mythology, the godess Isis sought
the dismembered parts of her brother Osiris in the swirling Nile. She
eventually found all but his phallus and brought his spirit back to his body,
but not back to life. Osiris became king of the souls of the dead.
So the desire for renewal lives on even in the modern wasteland of manikin
parts. the sexual organ had been eaten by a fish, the Oxirane, which
became an abomination for the Egyptians.
Were covering Pvt. Valley from small arms
fire in the Afghan mountains when an enemy mortar impacts right next to him. Hes
there one second and then a geyser of dirt and fire occludes him and hes down
and there doesnt seem to be enough of him anymore. The MEDEVAC chopper is
already inbound as we crawl over to him. Everyone else is returning fire from
behind a bunch of skinny trees. Were trying to gather Pvt. Valley together and
lift him onto the stretcher. Its like trying to gather the limbs of Osiris.
The MEDEVAC chopper is closing in and now is hovering above the mountain and
now is settling lower....
~~The Limbs of Osiris by Brian Patrick Eha
The limbs of Osiris are often invoked as a synecdoche
of the African-American diaspora. Asbury Park is a center of black
cultural life in NJ.
Crimson
petals scattered in blackness—
Recalls the story of redemption in the first
descant of Adonis blood turned into red anemone blossoms.
The
god upon her with bird-cry—
The rape of Leda by Zeus while he was in the
form of a swan.
Scarlet
women—
Asbury Park is renowned for its petty lives
of protitution and drug abuse. Here the women weep around an
unressurected Osiris, his body horizontal as a card-deck.
Pipes wail in the dust-heap, Syrinx
Selling
her body by the big face full of laughter
Painted
on the Palace.—
Syrinx, a river nymph and follower of
Artemis, best known for her chastity; also a set of pan-pipes, which are made
by cutting river reeds into different lengths to give a scale of notes.
The grief, the music and myth of the past are transformed into just
another degraded good on the market, another item in the garage sale of Western
culture that proceeds apace.
The big face full of laughter is Tilly, a
macabre grinning totem with a slicked-down center-parted 1890s haircut.
It is the unofficial symbol of Asbury Park. Stephen Crane wrote
stories set in the summer shore town that mentions the amusements that could
once be found there.
The Palace is the defunct Palace
Anusements, a place of bumper cars and skeetball. An ironic modern echo
of the old royal and mythic tales.
Paideuma
Lifts
from the sea-wrack: APPODITE!—
Paideuma, a concept originated by the German
anthropologist Leo Frobenius, is defined by Ezra Pound in his Guide to Kulchur
as "the tangle or complex of the inrooted ideas of any period. It
is the total pattern of behaviors, stories, and concepts that give rise to a discernible
period in any kind of history. Here we have a moment of clarity lifting
from the seaside at Asbury Park. Aphrodite (APPODITE!) herself rises
from the surf, an undying emblem of beauty and desire.
that
picture by Botticelli (Venus
On
a clam-shell)—
Famous painting of Aphrodite by Renaissance
artist Botticelli. Check your fridge door, you probably have a magnet of
it just hanging there.
Aqua
clear
as in Italy—
Implicitly, theres no reason Asbury Park
couldnt be the site of a new Renaissance.
HYMANAEUS
IO!—
Greek. A shout of celebration for lost
virginity, often part of wedding poems. Used here perhaps because as a
succinct reiteration of the themes of innocence lost, and an indirect
invocation of the story of Io by the punning use of her name in the cry.
At the end of this descant, Dafne has still not had time to catch her
breath!
Sources
for this note:
The Limbs of Osiris by Brian Patrick Eha, Metamorphoses,
book 1 translated by A. S. Kline, The Astronomy Encyclopedia by Patrick Moore,
In a More Prosaic Light by Daniel J. Weeks, Wikipedia
First Descants IV
The theme of this descant is being mislead,
or lead astray, by following an ideal too urgently. This is the opposite
problem than the one we have seen in the preceding two descants, where neglect
and willful ignorance lead to modern disunity of spirit and desuetude.
Several stories are told in an overlapping manner, imitating some of the
splicing techniques of high modernist poetry, and high-action cinema.
Some secondary themes involve get[ting] claw-curve beneath the mask, as it were, and demonstrating the compelling verity and effect that ideas have in individual human existence. Many ideas are no more than the idle doodlings of dictators and socialists, with a minimal relationship to either genuine human experience or economic reality beyond the grand vision of a system. Ideas such as communisim are essentially meaningless wastes of time, doodlebugs that rat-trap the brain into investing in their ecumenical lingo—and when they inevitably fail the test of reality, or are descried by the expressive force of individual voices, they, at most, can result in real hells as their doodlers try and at least make everyones rhetoric comply with their vision of new Soviet Man.
Real ideas are like that of the Renaissance innovation of individual love. This changed conception had a biological
basis in both the family imperative of procreation and the psychological
narrowing of focus between lovers, who create their own tribe of two between
them. There are also many
scientific ideas, implied or supported by mathematical insight, and other
discoveries made by the curious biographers of earth and the physical
heavens. Such ideas can give their
finders the eureka moment that had Einstein wander around on a serotonin high
for days after a full eclipse of the sun showed how gravity bent lightbeams and
confirmed his theory of relativity.
Vidal
pawed in the brake—
The controlling story of the descant, Vidal
is
Ab
lalen tir vas me laire—
Into me I draw the air Drawing a
breath properly before singing the next phrase of a song. One of the main
points is not to try to hard, a repeated warning in this descant.
This line is from a poem
by the Provencal poet Pierre Vidal, who is the main character of this descant,
transformed by love and moonlight into a werewolf. He said of one of his
mistresses when I look on your naked body, I see God. Provencal poetry,
and the love cult that rose up around these wandering troubadours help change
love a marriage from a financial exchange into an imperative of individual
consciousness and romance. This is the wind, the air (in the sense of
changing breeze and air as in song) that came from Provence in the Middle
Ages. These troubadours were using Christian mysticism in an almost
heretical way—except that the most ideal romantic liaisons were supposed
to be completely chaste. This is one of the great turning points in the
Western imagination—a sexual, individual zen meditation on love with a
specific physical object, but no consummation other than in song. And the
troubadours were also fiercely competitive in their song-making, brooking no
other craftsman to be their better.
Ezra Pound
posits that these restraints (of chastity, of elaborate rhyme forms in song)
voluntarily submitted to by the troubadours, knights errant of amor,
produced tension sufficient for results, in the Provencal
poets—i.e., a revolution in consciousness that paved the way for the
Renaissances emphasis on particularity and fact. But in Provence, God
was not forgotten, and the mystic realm was harnessed to the carcass of a
mistress—living space was sacralized, rather than the heavens made
mundane.
Ab
llen tir vas me l'aire
Quen
sen venir de Proensa;
Tot
quant es de lai magensa,
Si
que, quan naug ben retraire,
Eu
mo escout en rizen
En
deman per un mot cen:
Tan
mes bel quan naug ben dire.
Breathing
I draw to me the air
Which
I sense arriving from Provence;
All
thats from there energizes me
So
that whenever any word comes from there
I
laugh to listen, then right away
Demand
for each word a hundred more:
So
beautiful to me are such speeches.
You can hear this song on You Tube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ag6MdPGrC-M
Learn
to Sing: Breathing
1.
Breathe
deeply from your lower lungs - imagine a rubber ring around your waist (your
diaphragm)
2.
Breathe
in and try to push the ring outwards.
3.
Breathe
in through your nose and out through your nose and mouth.
4.
Avoid
raising your shoulders as you breathe in - keep them relaxed and level.
5.
Relax!
~~http://www.bbc.co.uk/sing/learning/breathing.shtml
This
is where we stand:
tossing
under the strain of the bridge-head—
The poet and his interlocutor walk and
discuss the ways of their friendship and the world. The whole descant is what bounces around
in the mind of the poet while they walk.
What is the meaning of love, of friendship? This friendship was severely strained by
the interlocutors relationship with alcohol.
Actaeon
scrambled in the pine-leaves—
Actaeon was a great Greek hunter who saw
Diana (Artemis) bathing naked in her private pool—a transgression which
demanded his death...
the only certainty is in what Actaeon
suffered, his pathos, and what Artemis did: the hunter became the hunted; he
was transformed into a stag, and his raging hounds, struck with a 'wolf's
frenzy' (Lyssa), tore him apart as they would a stag.
~~Walter Burkert, Homo Necans
Ovid,
lolling by the Gargaphian pool—
The Vale of Gargaphia, thick with pines and
sharp-pointed cypresses, was sacred to short-skirted Diana. At the far end of
the valley was a woodland spring which had not been improved by the hand of
man.
~~Ovid,
Metamorphoses, trans. David Drake,
http://david-drake.com/2013/metamorphoses-actaeon/
Ovid, in Book III of his Metamorphoses,
writes of Actaeon violating the private pool sacred to the virgin goddess
Diana. Here I have Ovid, who was
himself exiled for displeasing the emperor Augustus, on the edge of defiling
Dianas sacred precinct, speaking words that would suit a Chinese sage. Enlightenment is the road, and the
changes we undergo on that road, seems to be suggestion here. Or, as many a snotty college housemate had
told me in years gone by, its the journey, man, not the destination.
students,
of a light—
The author obliquely intrudes his own story
into the cautionary tale. Friends with another poet of high ideals, they
became carried away with a high-brow sense of mission in their youth.
Part of this excess involved floating on the intemperate bubbly
inspiration of champagne. Their tight-kinit bond dissolved when one of
the pair lost himself to drink.
The
Count of Foix instructed—
Germain-Franois
Poullain de Saint-Foix (5 February
1698 – 25 August 1776) was an 18th-century French writer and playwright.
(Wikipedia)
Bohr
who taught atoms the waltz-step,
Maxwell
and Planck who undid it,
It
is this ground that shakes me—
The Bohr model of atomic structure, in 1913,
shows what is still commonly taught to kids about how atoms are put
together—the nucleus and the rings of electrons at their stationary
orbits of discrete enerygy levels.
In the poem, its described as a watlz-step, a little old-fashioned
maybe, but an example of the orderly world as once comprehended. Maxwell and Planck is a reference to the
quantum mechanics that replaced the simpler model of Bohr as more correct and
complete. Nobody knows how to talk
about this new relativistic, indeterminite universe where we swim through waves
of probability rather than stand on the old, solidly watlzing atoms of
yesteryear.
Oloscoe
recorded it—
Orestes
again in a bind,
dry dust has closed his eyes—
Orestes, in Aeschylus The Libation Bearers, is chased by the Furies after murdering his
mother in revenge for her murdering her husband, his father. The Furies return the earth to peace by
exacting punishment for wrongdoing—they even the score in a primitive
way that isnt what we would think of as true justice. There is no consideration of the reasons
for the initial crime for which the Furies exact revenge. They operate like a see-saw, up-and-down,
rather than a scale, balancing many factors to arrive at equanimity.
Lady
Loba—
Lady Wolf. The woman Vidal was madly in love with,
transforming him metaphorically into a wolf. In his madness, he ran aound like a
werewolf, howling at the moon.
Vidal thought love overbalanced the fact that Lady Loba was already
married and the lady of a castle.
This was the beginning of the Renaissance individuation of the idea of
Amor as person-to-person rather than simply a force of biological reproduction. As Vidal said of his desired, Good
Lady, I think I see God when I look on your delicate body.
Vidal
pawed in the brake,
Knowing
God—
The passion of Vidal has had him recreate the
total pattern, or paieduma, of meaning of his culture. There is a sacredness in a world that
includes personal love. Vidal
asserted this truth, changing how the old world worked by re-envisioning it.
He
howled at his heavenly needle—
The sharpness of his self-perception that
gods (and, for Vidal, goddesses) walk among us. Theres more than a
touch of mordant modern lycanthropy in the selection of this story as the
embodiment of ancient unity between the worlds of humans and gods. The
heavenly needle prefigures Galileos telescope, while casting us back to
Egyptian obelisks known as Cleopatras needles—which represent in
carved stone a pure ray of sunlight touching the Earth. A mention of the
astronomical context of the human story is usually somewhere in each of these
descants—always pointing out that we live in a larger world than we can
fully know.
Ankle-high
in anemones—
Recalling the story of Adonis transformation
from the first descant.
Water
and bandages in a meadow—
Like Icarus flying too close to the sun,
theres danger in going to deeply into the god/man unity on ones own.
Vidal, pitied by the distant object of his amours, is attended to by her
servants after a night spent howling and prowling. Transformation is a
project for a whole culture, not a solo explorer—that way lies madness.
Sources
for this note:
http://david-drake.com/2013/metamorphoses-actaeon/,
Wikipedia, Ovid, Walter Burkerts Homo Necans
First Descants VI
The theme of this descant is primarily
economic. But economic in
the largest sense—the ordering activities civilizations undertake to
increase the overall well-being of their subjects and citizens. The cost of losing a wider
civilizational perspective after the insane speed and wealthy success of the industrial
revolution is shown in a sad series of images juxtaposing past cultural
greatness with its modern impoverishment.
We can disaggregate the entire earth in a nuclear holocaust, but no
longer comprehend the Tao Te Ching. We can call forth our own newborns from
the cultivated wombs of rented strangers, but no longer linger over the
cupid-stapled love of Juliet and her Romeo.
Su
Sung made a bronze world—
Su Sung created one the worlds greatest and
most accurate water clocks, circa 1100 AD, which turned a model of the
constellations and the earth. Taoists came into power, and the clock was
no longer maintained. After the Tartars invaded, the clock was melted
down to make dog statues for the invaders tomb, who had crowned himself emperor.
A copy of Sung's instruction manual for the clock was discovered in the
17th century, to the marvel of this later age.
The
world speaking English and forgetting the past—
After the Industrial Revolution, which
started in Britain, English became the lingua franca of the globe.
wheel
the diameter of cathedral dome—
In earlier times, mans greatest works had
revolved around a religious impetus—the great cathedrals of the Middle
Ages, St. Pauls, the Acropolis, the statues of Easter Island. After the
industrial revolution, great earth-movers, the Eiffel Tower, the Panama Canal,
the greatest works of man were not in service of religious feel but material
advancement.
Adams
praised the dynamo—
Henry Adams, descendant of presidents John
Adams and John Quincey Adams, in his autobiography The
Education of Henry Adams, records his struggle to come to terms with the
technological dynamism of the dawning 20th century. The power that had
once been a description of an inner state of mystical union and insight, has
begun manifesting in mans physical mastery of globe.
The true American knew something of the
facts, but nothing of the feelings; he read the letter, but he never felt the
law. Before this historical chasm, a mind like that of Adams felt itself
helpless; he turned from the Virgin to the Dynamo as though he were a Branly
coherer. On one side, at the Louvre and at Chartres, as he knew by the record
of work actually done and still before his eyes, was the highest energy ever
known to man, the creator four-fifths of his noblest art, exercising vastly
more attraction over the human mind than all the steam-engines and dynamos ever
dreamed of; and yet this energy was unknown to the American mind. An American
Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist.
~~Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams,
chapter 25, The Dynamo and the Virgin
the
eagle squawked on a pole-top—
The standard with the Roman legionnaires carried
into battle bore a carved screaming eagle (aquila), wings
outspread, holding a bundle of hay which represented the soldiers gathered
under the eagle's aegis.
The eagle with its keen eyes symbolized
perspicacity, courage, strength and immortality, but is also considered
"king of the skies" and messenger of the highest Gods.
~~Wikipedia
Diocletian
remedied the reverse flow of coinage—
Emperor (284 to 305 AD) after the
assassination of the previous emperor, Diocletian introduced many reforms that prolonged
the life of the Empire, which was on the verge of total collapse before his
reign. One of these reforms was to alloying gold coins with lead
centers—an early form of monetary inflation. His reforms,
however, eliminated most personal freedoms and turned much of the population
into hereditary serfs. Diocletian was also the first Roman emperor to
voluntarily abdicate. He retired to his palace on the Dalmatian coast as a
gentleman farmer, tending a broad array of vegetable gardens.
Severus—
Septum Severus was Roman emperor from
193 to 211. After deposing and killing the incumbent emperor Didius
Julianus, Severus fought his rival claimants. On his deathbed, he is
reported to have said: Be harmonious, enrich the soldiers, scorn
everybody else. (Cassius Dio, Book 77, Part 16.)
Contracting
the barbaroi to save a buck—
The Roman Empire in decline, instead of
returning to the civic and personal virtues that had made it great in the first
place, turned to various expediences as crises began to eat at its authority
throughout its extensive provinces.
Montesquieu perceived—
Montesquieu, a witty Frenchman of letters and
political philosopher in the Age of Enlightenment. As the Encyclopedia
Britannica puts it: [Montesquieu thought that] Rome's decline was the result
of its conquests. The waning of public spiritedness in distant Roman generals
and soldiers, the growing inequality of wealth and power, with extremes of
luxury and poverty, the exacerbation of faction, the loss of a sense of common
identity among Romans as citizenship was extended to other peoples—these
made it impossible to preserve the republic.
filial
piety—
The images that make up this ideogram show an
old man with a cane being carried on the back of a young man (his son).
As in Berninis first important statue where Aeneas bears his crippled father Anchises
away from the configuration of Troy in its vivid defeat, it is the next nearest
image of that no greater love has man than this—to lay down his life for
another. A good economy is only built out of a good society, which
starts with good families, and good, or moral, individuals. Morality is
economically efficient as well in high-trust societies. When a man is as
good as his word, you can trust a business deal (or a battle) on a handshake:
you can fire all the lawyers, and shoot all the bureaucrats without any loss in
economic activity.
mother—
The solid square of the mother ideogram in
the body of the matron, a firm base on which to build. The breasts, which
provide nurture, are indicated by the two dots. Stability and sustenance,
which are the foundation in Maslows hierarchy of needs, are honored in good
societies.
Carriage
upright past Whitmans eye-hole—
Abraham Lincoln passing Whitman on his way
through DC.
I see the President almost every day, as I
happen to live where he passes to or from his lodgings out of town. He never
sleeps at the White House during the hot season. I see very plainly
Abraham Lincolns dark brown face, with the deep-cut lines, the eyes, always to
me with a deep latent sadness in the expression. We have got so that we
exchange bows, and very cordial ones. Sometimes the President goes and comes in
an open barouche. The cavalry always accompany him, with drawn sabres.
None of the artists or pictures has caught the deep, though subtle and
indirect expression of this mans face. There is something else there.
~~Walt Whitman, Specimen Days
Sources
for this note:
Su-Sungs Clock uh.edu/engines/epi120.htm, The
Genius of China: 3,000 Years of Science, Discovery, and Invention by Robert
Temple, The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams, Specimen Days by Walt Whitman,
Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia
First Descants VII
The theme of this descant is Hell, and the
seeking after paradise, or what is often thought to be its earthly equivilent
or representative: justice.
Elijah ranting—
voce tinnula
at Horeb—
Ringing voice. From Catullus, used by Ezra Pound in Canto XXVIII in the same way to denote something being said that should be paid attention to. Elijah ran away to Mt. Horeb and heard Gods voice asking What are you doing here, Elijah? Elijah, having despaired of finding meaning, said I have had enough, Lord. Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors. Then he lay down under the bush and fell asleep. All at once an angel touched him and said, Get up and eat. (NIV)
single file towards Klondike—
Prospectors went single file up and through the Chilikoot Pass to reach the area where gold could be panned and mined.
digging chthonos—
Digging in the earth, as if in preparation for a purgatorial purging or inward journey.
Chaplin put his eyes to the moon-frost—
gates on the sanatorium—
The sanatorium to which Hans Castorp retreats in Thomas Manns novel The Magic Mountain to discover who he is before graduating into full adulthood and the world of work. Perhaps the Hotel Schatzalp, the only sanatorium mentioned by name in the book.
Kashimas I/O
Gateless gate—
Bashos A Visit to Kasima Shrina from Narrow Road to the Deep North, a travel journal interspersed with haiku. Bashos Narrow Road is seen as a high point of self-reflective introspection, and is brought together with the sanatorium of Manns The Magic Mountain, the input/output pass-through of computer lingo, and the Yukon heights of Charlie Chaplins great 1925 film The Gold Rush—the film for which Chaplin most wished to be remembered. The ideogram resembles saloon doors.
Before the Kashima shrine
Even stags kneel down
To pray,
Raising pitiful cries.
~~Basho
Really, the gateless gate is less about arrivimng at salvation or some other final state of being, and more about reducing the drag on the flow of consciousness to what is—things as they are. Its more a zen state of mind than a final enlightenment. But, unless this step is taken, there can be no further progress (toward justice, in this poem)—real or imagined.
Hans Castorp in the dead room—
no foreign god in the film can—
Kore fell face first—
Sistine heaven—
Michelangelos painting of the Last Judgement on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel.
Cythera clearing the undergrowth, for light
Red dots amid pine needles—
Again, the anemones grown from Adonis blood. Transformation (and hope) are everywhere is we start looking for them.
Luminous mind to penetrate w/out
bumping
(Paradisio)—
To spprehend without distortion—it is a success of ideas and mans comprehension that defies the limitations of Goedels theorem and Heisenbergs uncertainty principle.
Grendals level—
Down into Grendels underwater lair, where the famous beheading takes place.
Hades, Plutos place:
neon and stuffed leather (empire)—
A reference to Sartres play No Exit, about what would constitute ones personal vision of Hell. In Satres play it is being stuck in an unfashionable living room with the people who aggravate your own personal, petty, indosyncratic and useless penchants—making you a worse and more miserable human being by the minute.
<<O
cerveaux enfantins!
A
man and a woman, tied beyond helping
as
the anchor laughs.
<<La
femme, Lhomme... one
a
vile slave, sadorant et saimant
sans degout;
the
other,
tyran goulu>>
Paraphrase from section 6 of Baudelaires Le
Vouyage:
O childish minds! ... The man, the woman
one a vile slave, adoring and loving herself without disgust; the other a greedy tyrant
Vulture Peak
The Buddhas favorite retreat in Rajagaha and the scene for many of his discourses.(Wikipedia)
Sisyphus axed Marx in half. Not labor,
But achievement, the sack of grain.
This ideogram means new. It shows a hacksaw (on right) next to a pile of cut wood, indicated by a tree (lower left) and hand (upper left). Marx said that labor imparted value to production, but if that were true then all the red tape in Washington would make bureaucracy a source of value, rather than a drag on the economy. The ultimate example of how Marx is mistaken is the myth of Sisyphus, who rolls his boulder up the hill again and again—to no profit.
DeSade
Marquis de Sade was a French aristocrat and philosopher who became notorious for acts of sexual cruelty in his writings as well as in his own life.(biography.com) From De Sade we get the word sadism, and the notion of sadistic pleasure.
Devils jumping ant-thick over Dante
With his visitors card and Latin guide
Dante Alighieri, medieval poet who wrote the Divine Comedy, which includes a trip to Hell in the Inferno. He was guided on his mystical christian journey by the Latin poet Virgil, who had written his epic about men at war, The Aeneid.
Boesky
Ivan Frederick Boesky, a former American stock trader who is notable for his prominent role in a Wall Street insider trading scandal that occurred in the United States in the mid-1980s. (Wikipedia)
Apparve luce? At Trovaso
Did light appear? Ezra Pound's San Trovaso Notebook is a collection of Twenty-three early poems that Pound dismissed as his chocolate creampuffs of youth. Here, they represent an early vision of pure art and innocence against the worlds wrecking ball.
The phrase, without the question mark, is part of a poem by Guido Gunicelli: Dolente, Lasso, Gia Non MAsecuro
Dolorous, black, already I lack safety
for you attack me, Love, and me combat:
straight contrary to you I stand (and totter),
my maintenance on earth I debate
until like the thunder that strikes the wall
and the stiff wind tilting trees, you fell me.
Chants blood-heart to guilty eyes: though you
my death. And eyes: you us destroy.
Appears light, rendering splendor,
via eyes the heart wounding:
and I, at my condition:
these are the beautiful eyes full of love
that cut white my heart with one desire
even as the bird strikes the arrow.
Et puis, et puis encore?
And then, and then what? The short entirety of section 5 of Baudelaires poem Le Voyage. The repetition and isolation of the phrase underlines the extremity of modern mans boredom with things as they are, the usual state of quotidian affairs. Without a deeper moral compass, all of life becomes an enervating passing parade where one is only thrilled by the new, some new experience or sensation, since no particular experience has any inherently deeper meaning.
Huck and Jim off
balance in the red flood,
Charyon slips by the
wine jugs.
Modcearig
Worry, literally mind-cares. Old English, from the poem The Wanderer by an anonymous author. The poem is approximately 110 lines long and is spoken by the sole survivor of a shipwreck floating at sea for days, his great ring-giver gone, his drink-mates muted by times waves, their battle-cries busted.
Spoke the wanderer, of WOES MINDFUL,
of fell slaughterers, death-fall of dear ones:
Daily at dawn-rise I am doomed alone
to bewail my breast-cares. Not one is alive
that I to him freely dare to say my mind.
Claudius conquering the
Brits,
Roman emperor who invaded Britain successfully, but was delayed for several years by the disciplined use by the natives of small chariots drawn by ponies that out-manuevered the Roman troops on the foggy landscape, vcausing much havoc to Claudius imperial plans. Represents the unflagging perversity and persistence of reality, working against the personal will of some, and in concert with the will of others, to which must be sacrificed little bits of mind-time in the process and effort (golden hellblood) of interpretation—a dose of reality therapy requiring the individual to recalibrate his actions and vision to be in greater congruence with the facts. Salvation (or paradise) is the result of of successfully navigating the effort to interpret what is without distortion. This involves the sacrifice of personal will (in the form of useless fantasy) to the god of application—AND the enlargement of personal will by swallowing reality itself into ones enlarging definition of it—ones devisng an equation that places the world before a question-mark of ones own production.
... [skipping many
references]...
NIS TAET HEORU STOW!
Not is that a healthy place! A description of Grendels mere from Beowulf:
That unknown land
possesses a wolf-cliff windy cliffs
led to a dangerous swamp a fiery stream
under cliffs darkness thither departing
flood under earth. Its not far hence
by mile markers that the lake stands;
over them hangs frosty groves
wood rooted fast overhanging like a helmet
there each night you may baleful wonders see,
fire on flood. None who love wisdom,
o child of man, knows that ground.
Though heath-steppers [deer] shiver with sweat,
their hart-horns strong seeking the forest-wood,
far-fleeing rather your life sell,
keeping soul on shore, before you decide to go there,
head bowed. Thats no healthy place!
Sources for this note:
Narrow Road to the Deep North by Basho, Cantos of Ezra Pound,
Flowers of Evil by Baudelaire, prose
writings of Walt Whitman, Biography.com, Wikipedia
About the Author
Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown] has devoted his life to poetry since happening across a haiku by Moritake, to wit:
Leaves
float back up to the branch—
Ah! butterflies.
He runs the micro-publishing house BLAST PRESS, which has published over two dozen authors in the past 25 years. Named in honor of the wild Vorticist venture by Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, BLAST PRESS is forward-looking and very opinionated.
He still composes poems on his departed fathers clipboard, which hes had since High School.
Author may be contacted at: gregglory@aol.com.
Some more details:
Author of approximately 50 books and chapbooks, including poetry, novels, criticism, YA literature, and childrens illustrated books.
Published in, among other places: BlueLINE, Exquisite Corpse, Blunderbuss, Monmouth Review, Middlesex: A Literary Journal, Asbury Park Press (60K circulation).
Co-Host of the long-running River Read reading series in Red Bank, which features NJ and national poets.
Associate Editor of the literary magazine This Broken Shore.
Founder of BLAST PRESS, a literary mirco-publisher that has published over a hundred poetry and literary titles over the last quarter century.
Two-time Asbury Park Poet Laureate awarded by the Asbury Music Awards.
My Amazon Author page: amazon.com/author/gregglory/
BLAST PRESS is always looking for chapbook-length single-author poetry book submissions (30-70 pages).
Whys & Wherefores
Meet Me in Botswana:
What Is Blast Press?
A speech for national poetry
month about BLAST PRESS.
Ab
li dolen in lair [look up:
beauty falls from the air]
A book should be a ball of light in your hands.
~~Ezra Pound
As we all know, April is International Guitar Month. But my heart twangs for poetry, and I was invited here to tell you a little bit about a tiny poetry publishing company called BLAST PRESS.
Description of BLAST PRESS
BLAST PRESS is what I would call a micro-publisher. We usually publish chapbooks—booklets under 100 pages in length. Our print runs are usually under 100 copies per edition. And BLAST PRESS has published over 100 chapbooks from some 20 authors in its career. The entire cost is assumed by BLAST PRESS, so we are the publisher, and not a vanity press or service.
BLAST PRESS has been sustaining its small operation—in the black, mind you, no small feat—for about 20 years now. We have had a few more ambitious titles where the book itself, the author, and BLAST PRESS decide to dedicate the extra resources needed to make the event a success.
Part of the BLAST PRESS ethos is to keep the authors in charge of their work so that they can maintain maximum control of their creative material in the out-lying years and dont need to be writing to BLAST PRESS for permission to re-publish snippets or poems.
BLAST PRESS
324B Matawan Avenue
Cliffwood, NJ 07721
(732) 970-8409
gregglory.com
Our Credo
Do not dispraise the light
That, singing whatevers brightest,
Undoes the theft of night—
—Touch to caress, or move to love,
As this thoughtless rhyme does prove.
From
Ascent
Niggling addendum to Meet me in
Botswana
Magazines, published with a weeks, months, quarters or even a years
date grow elderly on the shelves in a way that a collection of one individuals
work never can. What year does
Shakespeares book expire? Horace
is renewed year by year, no matter how worn his saws may wane. But a magazine or casual collection of
miscellaneous artifacts, no matter how august the individual members of the find, retain an interest
for us mostly as a time capsule.
Even the Egyptian tombs of the pharaohs hold more interest for us
because of what they reveal about the era of their creation than for what they
say about their putative occupants.
Old poetry quarterlies are no different, although they may contain an
Endymion.
This is why BLAST PRESS is
dedicated to publishing single-author volumes and stand-alone essay collections
almost exclusively. Unless a poet
is unknown, there is no point in his publication being undertaken by a small
press. And if an author is unknown,
he is best presented to an unacquainted public in his own exclusive
company. It is always wisest to let
a guest unroll at least a few of his favorite tales before we escort him from
the house. What is characteristic
and worthwhile in the poets voice will quietly assert itself over the course
of his varied pieces much better than if we merely heard his alba or evensong
in isolation, let alone in the cacophonous squawk of a miscellany. To the marriage of true minds, ours and
the authors, let not serial publication admit impediments.
Only appearing in magazines and periodicals is like never having a
final resting place—a poet
without a plot.
