created this stretched version of one of the original cd cover paintings
just to be updatish
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Monday, November 7, 2011
Sunday, November 6, 2011
Saturday, November 5, 2011
On La Monte Young's Second Dream of the High-Tension Stepdown Transformer
!(((formatting here won't permit the proper line length)))))!
long lines beaming lofty into the dark along longer lines leaning hailward into the rose of last nights beginning
long rows of the traum-tone extending beyond what seeing as i can't describe orders back oblivion and goes on to seem so or only so
runs on before me as some kind of road going onward and nowhere resolving the brim of the convexity
rays of running light or the running lights of rays riding on the ruins of aural memory
and again long lines dipping into luminescent trails or rails run off from trains the heaving of lungs bewail
lines shining starless or stars themselves unseen in the self-origin of their setting nimbus tripped into evaporation
glistening in the listening to themselves pining oracles of their over-arching senility they travel younger than time and still
as monotony slivered with scintilatiing splinters of an abiding cacophony remain emotional as in moving and unmoving
texas or new mexico where lingering rickety leans of fences hem the yellow green munch and sun-pickled sanddollars of cattle manure
there is a theory in all this that has nothing to prove outside of its practice where theory itself is the mode of seeing waves and everything just begins again spuffling
to swell over the sucking ears that sleep and vibe their eternal tinnitus jesting the brain with inconsolable mares
shooting fluted runnels or rills of air resembling or reassembling the imaginary of wires weighted with pulsar parameters
boundary nexus of multilinear gravitational pulls permitting the sparagmos of inertia and the scandalous capers of two-bit stars
spittle drip off the stem spout tensile ingnotum clasping the floor of feral algae fed upon by whales moaning lonely songs
over the mountain hump of the last expected galaxy and further without backward glance coming from behind everything nevertheless and merging into infinite slittamenti
these are the smiles of gasping through the stem to stern spiral of the lines of longing that never ends
these are the mangers of the daughter of man already eaten by the kingless queen unrealming the night's hand on day
with my brittle anthology of unhinged syllables and leaky teapot i go sit on the roof to hear you fall a thousand deaths into my small life
and i paint your portrait with wine-stained fingers on the back of my love whom i place between two mirrors
and sleep when we decide we can rise again tomorrow to decipher what it means
salva adesso salve adesso salvete line line line
(to be continued)
March 4, 2011, Poznań
The rendering of the composition I have been listening to in flac received through the kind agency of Michal Ossowksi is entitled "90 XII 9 c. 9:35 — 10:52 PM NYC The Melodic Version (1984) of The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer From The Four Dreams of China (1962)" which the Wikepedia unreliably but perhaps accurately lists as having been published by Grammavision in 1991 but I have no memory of hearing it then. When I first heard La Monte Young's works in the 80's his reputation had preceded him and any audition; and the bi-polarity between my youthful Marxism and my otherwise and beyond being transcendental-immanantist poetic cravings created a dissociation whereby I could only regard him as a crank guru to be admired at a distance. Whether or not I have any right to even describe this situation is perhaps as meaningless to the reader as it is to me. And yet it doesn't go without saying at all, if you have been paying attention up to this point. I do admire the work and also preferably at a distance, with a big bowl of gaping stars falling on my eyelids. I first had an occasion to play a regrettably foreshortened version of this piece in Warsaw in 2008 in a quartet comprised of myself, Eddie Prevost, Tetuzi Akiyama and Phil Durrant. It was a decent enough beginning. Playing a composer's work (or trying to do so) changes one's attitude rather permanently; there is no longer a feeling that any recorded version is acceptable if it is a great piece of music; you must play it again, experience it as coming though your own body; the music exists as a quality of air; it seems essential to your being and welfare; you have an unshakable desire to take a deep breath and begin again; in short, it is love and fucking and there is no substitute for it whatsoever; you find a way to do it or you die trying.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfZzz58VUaw
"i'm graphic like that"-- score and binary
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november 9, 2010, poznań, jg
'Tender in the night and the washing machine alone with you and a few of those laughing cigars whereby satyrically wrapped the ploral garment of soul
'Tender in the night and the washing machine alone with you and a few of those laughing cigars whereby satyrically wrapped the ploral garment of souls may thread forth barely',
for prepared guitar, mini-theremin, live electronics.
First realization October 25, 2010 in Poznań, Poland.
Dedicated to Stephen Ellis, Karolina Ossowska, Hubert Napiorski and YOU.
update 2012: this track was deleted and will reappear on bandcamp soon enough.
listen to other sounds
http://soundcloud.com/automatopoeia
leap emptiness (boundary), the perfect is, form set { imaginary } the 15 lateral devices & every drone between point a and b
"this book is not for reading. this book is for discovering. what is in this book to discover? This above all, but first of all, that it is only a book..."--Edward Stachura
"okay now, let's get round" -- a voice in the distance
that certain kind of drift under control tones ending specified functions by a cloyed resultant inefficiency to attend a focal nexus
"stemming through horizons"
from the rain falls badly magnetic harps another mouth all the grand parents or grand-children's teeth before the weapon announced
youth ego roamage opacity regret tender in the cuticle for heaven downs the perfect clip painstakes the agora cuts up further minimalism cries in the unofficial version cries in the official unsure of either sincerity beyond was of the crash-landing immaculate
what great tabs you have revealed the nebulous know alone suited in themselves of inner woven over suited in such selves that negligee of broken links patching as a thoroughness of hybridity melting into dozens
from these three muscles the derivation of literature sempiternally and divide the cluster behind the ear's mirror there gently tongue what's left of it after all rightness falters three sacs or more of air grown plush
you couldn't have put the sky in a better place had you tried and wore even nevertheless out the welcome of impact sybylls rebracketed and the erosions swirling all pop and no soda in just anybody's stomach
_----_ OXYGEM __---_----
in yesterday's pizza are found the projections of ever more untoward boxes no condtion original appends to
such a record the needle broke off in the groove and that machine of memory no longer figured just as clearly our kids no coulda suppressed that vowel particular to shabby saturdays and thus this thusly the acetone flower was classed out of
you couldn't weep on the eighth without tears freeze open your eyes to the ninth summons stepdown drawer and conscience itself a kind of mastication seemingly all tagged a dog number one
you wouldn't golf with a ball so bound in patterns, why patterns, why poland, why the gulf of my arms the black gold liquid the deafened bird sunken
go on to brugges and cylindrical empire weareth out cedar and wolves dank brise offen the nacre by repetitions feel empty grace embrace the vessel of your calculations drive forthe the thicke new cloud
(if the man want's it to be "enterprise" what can we do about it?")
for each gape of the gyre the vines & pedigree tra_slucent limn their iffy wedges and air is it not for them sexual partitioning the shared hydropshere by gum oaken winch or untether
disnormal and aprized music was not going into germany that year any better than privately issued circulars of breathy achievement gave the plato of corpuscles to drink in anyone's cafe
zero by remainder shall be known that votive or grain elder mellowing so and for only this step that she came she comes through would be and having so brisques the smile and ups the rumple in any line
manfred was a lousy sort of poster, a pastie, a postie
via immobile
those who in secretion have cured thy heart and drape about towns their own unshod horse withit taking they mount for themsouls wish not ash upon them or jess up other winchesters for their rut deeply coined gone paleo to whatever next sudden miscredenza
what you are free to say when you know that no-one is listening. what you could say if you were not being bullied to say something they mean but which they are too cowardly to say themselves, inwits. awareness a kind of nearness natheless gnomeliness the train whistle far down the line suddenly encompasses and blows open.
a sensible air charged with light all the dripnight long
august 8,9, 10
with friendly fractures "in between" that make it what it is and all the difference
that roundness, is around
the girl on the bike i have always dreamed of being
all the permeable surrounds of the minimum pressure point dissolve
brisque
applied
the preferable leggings
thigh deep in a pond of leaves or letters
we don't know why
embryonic sunstroke
inside the fish
the girl on a bike i have often dreamed being
whatever unshould'r'd butterfly
everywhere and nowhere
specified, pedal tones
figure deep in the most fading lines of any drawing
...this face left
the right of that
alive in the light one sees over a wall
or better yet through
the wall's aliveness
august 8, 2010
poznan (virtually)
scraps of paper typed up in no particular order until now
every people (person) is another person (people's) fantasy.
and there are some things you just can't fake
until you try (they'd've been otherwise, real enough, completely normal
without you, but there you are
in the silent stampede of eyes, eye-ocean-liners
stretching out a mile-long ghost or gist
under too many palpabrating horn-rims and arched frappeau
another mongolian throat metal populist front
a city of pretty kitties turning cart-wheels
they seem to say look and don't look.
at the tree of the unbelieving, stop, consider awhile
their positions, bizarrely arching, tangled
bursting forth from the earth and sun
spangle in their leaves a broad while searching, linger
and go on: fable cables from mythology
"make it to my office."
what's this i hear?
'bout you organizing a union?"
don't know what you mean boss.
punks just shootin' the shit
like it ain't no-body's bizness.
jimson, and aleph, telegraph erasmus,
dinner's at eight. good to hear the juice is on the vine.
here's a buck, get your head blocked.
i gotta round hole to screw you into. [Picks up the skull and dagger phone,
hears a dull buzz, downs the reciever, grim, catatonic.]
Troops had entered already this Atlantis, the shock flocks of seahorse
died and dyed the Caspian black evacuating, veins of blended black blood
woven towards Torun. Mushrooms, pinpricks
in voodoo beauty's cushion, where the head of the Hetman
falls back into his bed of flames.
I was never attracted to such sudden hot-button expulsion schemes up until that moment. double-brained boss last week spoiled bread sandwich caper, dynamite, lightening cracks an oak, bat wit twitters
lift the stone off his throat please, that way EVERYBODY
get's to sing [The classroom erupts into cheers, all will be able to scream, at once!]
The Library Heart freshened scalpel
DEVICE ON SURGE
there is no being more enlightened than on the moment of goodly death
the most beautiful woman in the room resembles this situation
fingers fathom down your feathered clouds
and into your bed-ridden details of elder fog
how small the smack strangely small creature is into everything so to say
go down on the infinite (he of the water-logged sails)
he who went home, too...
for the fragile infinite is woven into every thing we do
but I have run out of fragments for your dream
the aerth by a green hay-glow
liest engardened
find her roots
inside you now
december 2009-- december 2010, today, written mostly in
pozńan (mostly, but i'm not entirely sure...
The Tale of Fake Lake and the Man-made Clouds
The Tale of Fake Lake and the Man-Made Clouds
for Lee Foust
"One set of cut marks does not make a complete case for cannibalism," said Francesco d'Errico, of the Institute of Prehistory in Bordeaux. It was also possible that the jawbone had been found by humans and its teeth used to make a necklace, he said."
Yes, I think I too have been guilty of thinking what will become of my so-called remains and those of the others maybe the beloved whose skull I find half-buried, recognizable only by the crooked teeth, in a strange vision of departures dreams made for me, in the open territories bounded by the city, the urban-urgency keeping dreams incomplete. How the box turned inside out shares edges with the other walls of the box whose precipitous verges I climb and nature's cardboard canopy which you cannot find here, how it...I don't know. It's as if this man I am wanted either to write a sentence or sound a silence long enough that he could walk around in. While at every period he falls outside. The roars are phantasmal yet no less disturbing thereby and therefore all the more maddening. How to stop the creation again is not an option. Pigeons. Clicker lighting the stove. A faded applique cherubim on the pillbox and unlit candle its wick clean, white, straight peaking out of a small copper cup next to the stack of blank note-blocs on which there should have been written in spidery hand the angels gnarled in cataracts and fossilized rills---I could have been reading someone else's mail, maybe you are reading this too, a voyeur and a catalyst, in someone else's mail (it certainly would be more exciting than entering even the most malkevitch of minds, another persons little life so much larger than your eyes) all of which is uninclined to comment back, its head's spiked with fish-fins waving and fanning aside the resistant masses into the disappearing depths, the depths of do and the depths of do-not, the depths of know-nothing-about-it still captured up in the slipstream and storming down several millenia of monsoon, a godawful smelly hopeless muddle bubbling with sacred hearts' barely remembered names out to seas only ideal shores prescribe and whose about-face showed clear in all the mirror's butterflied alibi's that their hacked open world wound up found in the bottom drawer of a samurai wanderer's satchel after years of east calling east in the shadowless ooze. This was the substance after all sticking my shoes to the surface of a street-paved with silver, a sky made of gold, a rainbow's pavillion structured by the heated dune turned into glass. Remarkable for how many wells dug turned dry or not. The unceasing whirlwind, the sacred becoming profane and the profane sacred and my two-cents have had both faces erased. He takes out the whole ball of wax and peels it rather like an orange and stands back holding the small orbicity of glass--what a rind it was, they will say-- into the light of the sun and his eyes burn holes into the tiny bubbles locked in ages ago. The earth seems like such a memory. The bubbles stand separate far-flung and hanging like dots in a dark sky there is no hope to connect. There is no hope but to stare long and hard and watch all the things flow through once again and repeat every action the exact same way as before with a small shift in emphasis that upsets the hand and downsends the unlikely orb rolling, imperfectly round, on its own, just as Jack, setting down his lanterns, chalks up his cue, and steps to the table to break.
24 sierpnia 09, poznań-dębina
perfecting, withstanding, inoperative, grace
precision, virgilian candelabra, thrust of the evaginated relic
hoist within the cauliflower, coffee-flower
fathoming a lark's tongue
an acrid
thread
more into the weeping depths the mourner plunges
ever on the gaps and tremolos
fruited and fruitless murmurs grow
and still the web gently fingered trembles
into the crumbling wharf of the tree
extended darkly into darker waters
not without puss, snoring, sputters or wormed turntables spinning
incantible dribbles and tokes
mensural smears and a pinned-down clamoring
not without rails untenanted, mossies here and there
and sandwiches fragmentarily
bonsai at whatever rate
it unfolds
the leaf around which
its tail turns
and of course it doesnt make sense,
the phone won't work, too far from civilization, i guess.
i should have access soon
though
precision, the incidental incursion
perfecting, withstanding, inoperative
grace
poznań
july 29, 2009
formless formulation
perfect, yes, but so what. so what? so what you say. after perfection so what you say. it comes down or up to this, for this, and me, for me, such an eye in this web of eyes, before the face, what and so come also quickly or prolonged. not anxiously, neccessarily but hinged with buts. okay, there is a perfect form, already, let's say. it's there. let's call it a landscape, what we can say, what i can say i love. she fills the horizon, is the horizon, and all that exists between this and that. i look at her and all is well, brilliant, perfect optimism. anything is possible. because there is this one being, this, that, her or me, the me silent and happy with that silence. she is perfect, lovely, form. why she? oh, because. because there is no psychology to explain it. because as so what? no, not yet. let's say i am like a gas and when i look at her i am contained in what i see. let's say i am fluid and when i look at her...you get the picture. the full smile of the room, the window open. combing hair, just in ear-shot, i can murmur, she can hear. birds whirl in the sky whirls the clouds and there are children, down there, courtyards across, screeching merrily, a radio, blast it, off. yes i love her, all is perfect. just dont think. but. when she goes away. what? also perfect. at least for a while. prolong it by discipline, meditation, then...eventually, then, no. don't break concentration. then, yes, you know, it happens. the question of form. my own. what or how it is. so-called personal history, itineraries autocircumscribed and perhaps vectors of will. i cannot graph them. there is a precedent, maybe even a "carreer"---the old meaning, as path. the form that it be unbroken. not a lie neccessarily, although a lie can come in, stand in, surrogate or sublimate the feeling of form, the "onward" etc. always against, working against, it seems, the other feeling of being not yet finished, unformed, formless, broken. there comes then yes almost a feeling of being broken or flawed. i emerge from being happy, contented, content, filled to being folded, failed, flawed, formless again. what? rather let me ask why. there cannot be two of me without an amputation of sorts, one i have not achieved. this is where the limitless atrocity of imagination stands in, surrogates, sublimates, cuns and connives. it is too easy to call it a lie because the lie was "truth once upon a time" even prospectively, in the future i mean because, well, time, dilating, contracting, blooming or withering on all sides of...what? doesn't matter yet...time is only of the essence in this perpetual prolificacy, this enduring flux in which even time is timed out occasionally or which my heart clocks not. try by breathing to correct it and that methodology can work, for a while. being connected to one's forms in the formlessness, faced with one's former faces and no i dont mind and even maybe love those faces that attach to my face, my or their half-faces, making the beast with two backs, two backs of the heads rather. an idea wherein one is what one wants to do and does and in doing so becomes the form of that. and also, this ends in so what. and you keep doing it until there comes a time you cannot. one says it doesnt even matter what it is one does and that even beyond politics is anyway going to get you in trouble eventually. formalism vs the atrocity of imagination. this also doesnt wash. the so-called society doesnt appear multi-disciplinary enough. one can't accept such limits. the fact i am writing music now is not recognized by musicians or those who listen to something they call music maybe. or it wont matter, suddenly (strangely enough), to the reader, to know this is music and not an attempt to warp the boards for noah's ark. enough. it is entriely personal and i say so what because i must say that this entirely personal declaration is also not wholly what it says it is. and from that point, i will go on. i must. because maybe i am wrong and in saying i am wrong maybe i am not. no, no. wrong again. tear it up.
July 29, 2009..............
July 29, 2009..............
when as yet no poem had any title as such
when thursday is yet untainted by friday's determining owls
when the cylinder yet unpowdered stands gently at attention
when morning means one full day is yet unused
when friday is not yet fooled by saturday's orgy in sunday's dumb sublimity
when there is as yet no bed made for abraham's isaac to be slain in
and a word like pesach is no different than niedziela
before one knew what one was doing so well it could be taught like art or murder
before we tried to buy something that hadn't yet been invented nor ever will exist
when i could do anything to my body knowing it would be healed miraculously
before it lay in the dust forgetting knowing nothing was something,
despairing that knowing nothing is nothing
before i glanced over my own face and saw how boring i must seem
before yesterday's flower formed a shadow over your angel's left shoulder
and the third dream's bite lost it's tail in the sun
and woke beside you who is ever what i wanted more than any dream
before any of this i was sleeping and turned from your face
and saw the divine ridges of Java's central garden
these green upon green steps for an unmanly heaven
and turned back to see a valley of rusty roses stumbling into bloom
april 21, poznan
Insomnia! An automatic essay
INSOMNIA, AH!
an automatic essay...
wideness, emptiness, silence---how relativity is so relative that relating it to "my thinking" only arouses horror that its just me thinking it--the strange feeling of responsibility that I shouldn't wake up anyone to tell them because it does really seem abnormal, not a place you want to take someone, at least not on the first date---78+ hours was my longest stretch---how often it happens the first night i am sleeping with a woman no matter how nice it was and precisely despite the fact i am exhausted physically, there it is, the moon descends and sits on my shoulders, a lidless eye for a thoughtless head, a cyclops that sees and does not know why, the relativity of it so irrelevant because I sense how illusory time is itself---that all the vast arrays and observatories and particle accelerators seeking to measure time back to something forever "behind" even this "blind-thinking" eye I seem to be is really all too late---that the begining of anything is now but the future of it is hard to see without falling asleep again, that the future is hard to see without falling asleep again, that the future is really on the other side of the break from insomnia and that sleep is the problem, yes, sleep itself, it is so, so stupid, sleeping...and how yet i would like to sleep...i lay down, lights seem to flash across my closed eye-lids the images rise, faces, forms, visions, the voice of someone "inside" me---
then a memory of another insomniac bout, lasting merely 38 hours---these bouts are never the result of all-night parties or work-sessions, mind you---one wherein i discovered i had tinnittus: i was thoroughly convinced i heard a throbbing bass line from some reggae dub-upstart basement club in berlin where i was "living" and as i went from window to window several times (there were only two windows), it took me an hour to discover the source of the sound lay somehwere locked in a self-perpetuating, resonant loop of neural cilia, between the two inter-lacing fringes of these nerves which fire and vibrate in response to one another's messages---one fringe transmitting the air pressure pulsations fom the tympanum and the other receiving it, transmitting ito the cortex for deciphering of the brain, "data integration"---and how, in the case of tinnittus, the cause is an a random firing of a series of internally consistent messages that were, in this instance, extremely convincing, that had comepletely convinced me that " i was correct" in assuming there was an outward source for this sound... when in fact, to my horror, it was a bundle of errors, a sickness, a bundle of errors that was me, my body, this perceptual apparatus, this empty-chambered gun in a russian roulette of consciousness, seeking desperately to ground its charge in a some external objects...
to be at least as accurate about this "ear business" as i can possibly be: the inner ear recieves vibrations, transmits them further into the cortex: the cortex administers a re-send, a message back across the same path, a message indicating the length of the vibration, to verify the vibration or to measure it, let's say, against what is still being transmited from the tympanum into the inner ear. the result is that both of these nerve fringes vibrate together, resonate, the oscillation frequency being thusly coded (mnemotechnics), so that those of us who have learned the divisions of the code, can distinguish different levels of pitch and other sound qualities. in the case of tinnittus, the message comes only from the inside, and the outter fringe of nerves is stimulated and vibrates, this vibration is recieved in the tympanum: the illusion is that there is a "sound".
add here citations from zarathustra...
insomnia, classically: how often it happens when i am in love or think i am in love or thinking i wish i were in love or that i wasn't...how often it happens sleeping next to someone i think i no longer love because if i were awake and in love and could stir the slumbering beloved insomia would be slain and slaked by fucking...how it "dawns" on me occasionally that i have been awake too long and that i live in fear of the insomnia begining again, this endless road stretching out in front of me without drama, without any causation that does not seem prone to delusional thought, that threatens me with infinity even while i convince myself it will surely come to an end, sooner or later, this highway filled with transport vehicles 24/24...pick your own prefered symbol of monotony...
insomnia before the internet was an entiely different love affair...because the net is always, seemingly, awake, robotically at the ready, there is almost always, seemingly, someone else awake and how a chat-session, with a known or unknown other, restores discursive and rational normalcy, creates an exchange, a breathing that becomes unconscious again, a heart that does its job without being monitored...for when i am truly alone, unsleeping, i am become hyper-aware of my own body's functions and begin to travel inside the layers or interfaces of my being.
cage's experience in the anechoic chamber also seemed to be divided almost mystically into extreme frequencies, one the "high" brain funtioning and the "low" blood pulsation while anyone who was not a composer might register such an experience in a very different way, as I did once, noting how my visual field was simulataneously distorted by the small size of the anechoic room: tunnel-vision, the claustral feeling. insomnia does occur, like a very small chamber, a false vaccuum, and jar of artefice in which my consciousness appears but also paradoxically disappears into the other horizon, that of the wideness, the horizon itself appearing on the edge of a cup, on the window-sill, on the row of tenement, on the empty dark or cloudy starless city sky or murky moon or milky wherein i am waiting not-knowing i am waiting and if i am alone and i cannot read---and here, i enter the most frightening dimension of my own insomnia: the inability for consciousness to hold onto aything at all for any amount of time, whether because the pervasive lack of neuro-chemical presences destroys the short term memory and language cannot be made to cohere in my mind or because the insomnia is a hard, lonely diamond-like and jealous god who will not permit any distraction that will lead to drowsiness---for whatever reason, the words hang on the page like laundry on a line blowing in the breeze, each word a rag on a wire and how and why did they became strung together i cannot decipher. and there is no way to be entertained it seems. everything seems like flotsam and jetsam and even my own thoughts ride on the flow of...what?
it does not even flow...it just hangs, a cosmic limbo...
one would almost prefer a war be raging in the streets than this and this nihilistic thought haunts me only for a split-second because i know in this state how utterly impotent i am to bring about such a war and even if i knew mechanically how to bring it about would not be able to carry through the step-by-step instructions to assemble such a machine.
if i were to situate my senses in a quincunx, debatable as these divisions are from the point of view of science---knowing as "we" do, how closely interwoven the visual and auditory nerves are, for example, so that in effect one sense is always refering to data gathered by the other sense or, knowing how tasting and smelling are difficult to isolate from their mutual complementarity---if i were to put them nevertheless into four points and draw them into a central point, it is in the case of insomnia that the acute awareness of the inexistence of the point of so-called integration becomes painfully evident and hopelessly open. and it is from this repeated experience i claim now that i can make no conclusion? i beg the reader to take me seriously and yet i must indicate that i am somehow yet unable to lend myself any credibility. i am trying to be as honest as i can possibly be, writing as quickly as i can, not searching endlessly for mot juste, because i do not believe there is one word that is right, no one modulus for the experience of the static and undying disturbance of the shells of existence.
insomnia and substances. like smoking or drinking or pills, if you have such luxuries. they never work in the case of a real insomniac episode. i can drink unto stumbling and fall dizzy into bed and of course i am then too sick to be able to sleep for the convulsions of nausea. any barbituate solution puts you at risk of over-dosing and although i have thought in these insomniac states all the permutations of suicidal possibilities that "gets one through many a night", i am not confident in death as being different enough than this, than this insomnia experience itself, to count as a real alternative. i have smoked a pack of cigarrettes and it only increased my heart rate to the point of utter panic and the need to just stop, take a rest, just lay down and....nothing of the not-nothing...no...somnia in veiled robes of fleece does not come and wrap my mind in downy visions or enigmatic morphean plasmas...
on one insomniac night in particular, while smoking, i was seized by the determination to do something useful and hauled out the vaccum cleaner and, with the cigarrete clamped in my mouth, running the nozzle over the floors, enjoying at least the power of this machine made for sucking and inadvertanly bumped the door in such a way as caused the ejection of the light, the cinder or pharos, the burning bit, from the cigarrette itself and i watched in a suspended moment as it or I fell through the air, like a pilot ejected from a nose-diving plane, and the cinder fell on the floor near the snout of the vacuum cleaner and poof. it was gone. it is funny: i saw myself in the mirror and the look on my face made me laugh. i shut off the machine immediately and sat down looking at it. what, now, will happen to this red silent domestic robot that, in belgium at least, one calls a "hoover". of course there is not enough oxygen for a fire to burn in there. and indeed, it stated to emit fumes and my imagination was captrured inside this enclosed infernal microcosm. and the fire inside its belly turned to the plastic and rubber detritus and started to stink and i hurriedly dragged it by the neck to kitchen sink and while reasonable enough to not want to pour water on a plugged-in electrical appliance and yet unreasonable enough to open the burning machine and pull out the bag, which burst immediately, flames and smoke blossoming and yet fortunately falling from my unscathed hand directly into the sink, i was able to slap the faucet up. and in seconds all but the rotten fumes had passed. could i call this the poetry of insomnia in action? i cannot tell.
there is of course the widespread and creeping thought virus that insists insomnia can be cured my some kind of meditation. but i am convinced that they are mostly other forms of insomnia themselves and that it is only the style of dress that changes as we pass from land to land. and while i do find certain mantras to be pleasurable to practice and still recall with wonder the tibetans compressing their deep overtones into golden pills, i have been so often accused of spiritualist pretensions that i cannot stand before the scientific community and deliver any kind of report that does not seem like a long and complicated dream: that is, a kind of narrative salve and balm to work into the muscles of the over-active mind and bring the opiate of sleep to englobe us, especailly since all while it does occur to me that capitalism itself thrives on our insomniac innovations like a vampire, sucking the ideas for more functional systems out of the combinatorium the mind becomes during such pointless demonic wrestlessness. if this in fact were to prove to be the beneficent side of insomnia, then it will have maybe redeemed itself in the "spirit of progress". but i remain largely untouched by such luck and my sleeplessness rests apparently in no detectable marketability.
April 1, 2009
Poznan
an automatic essay...
wideness, emptiness, silence---how relativity is so relative that relating it to "my thinking" only arouses horror that its just me thinking it--the strange feeling of responsibility that I shouldn't wake up anyone to tell them because it does really seem abnormal, not a place you want to take someone, at least not on the first date---78+ hours was my longest stretch---how often it happens the first night i am sleeping with a woman no matter how nice it was and precisely despite the fact i am exhausted physically, there it is, the moon descends and sits on my shoulders, a lidless eye for a thoughtless head, a cyclops that sees and does not know why, the relativity of it so irrelevant because I sense how illusory time is itself---that all the vast arrays and observatories and particle accelerators seeking to measure time back to something forever "behind" even this "blind-thinking" eye I seem to be is really all too late---that the begining of anything is now but the future of it is hard to see without falling asleep again, that the future is hard to see without falling asleep again, that the future is really on the other side of the break from insomnia and that sleep is the problem, yes, sleep itself, it is so, so stupid, sleeping...and how yet i would like to sleep...i lay down, lights seem to flash across my closed eye-lids the images rise, faces, forms, visions, the voice of someone "inside" me---
then a memory of another insomniac bout, lasting merely 38 hours---these bouts are never the result of all-night parties or work-sessions, mind you---one wherein i discovered i had tinnittus: i was thoroughly convinced i heard a throbbing bass line from some reggae dub-upstart basement club in berlin where i was "living" and as i went from window to window several times (there were only two windows), it took me an hour to discover the source of the sound lay somehwere locked in a self-perpetuating, resonant loop of neural cilia, between the two inter-lacing fringes of these nerves which fire and vibrate in response to one another's messages---one fringe transmitting the air pressure pulsations fom the tympanum and the other receiving it, transmitting ito the cortex for deciphering of the brain, "data integration"---and how, in the case of tinnittus, the cause is an a random firing of a series of internally consistent messages that were, in this instance, extremely convincing, that had comepletely convinced me that " i was correct" in assuming there was an outward source for this sound... when in fact, to my horror, it was a bundle of errors, a sickness, a bundle of errors that was me, my body, this perceptual apparatus, this empty-chambered gun in a russian roulette of consciousness, seeking desperately to ground its charge in a some external objects...
to be at least as accurate about this "ear business" as i can possibly be: the inner ear recieves vibrations, transmits them further into the cortex: the cortex administers a re-send, a message back across the same path, a message indicating the length of the vibration, to verify the vibration or to measure it, let's say, against what is still being transmited from the tympanum into the inner ear. the result is that both of these nerve fringes vibrate together, resonate, the oscillation frequency being thusly coded (mnemotechnics), so that those of us who have learned the divisions of the code, can distinguish different levels of pitch and other sound qualities. in the case of tinnittus, the message comes only from the inside, and the outter fringe of nerves is stimulated and vibrates, this vibration is recieved in the tympanum: the illusion is that there is a "sound".
add here citations from zarathustra...
insomnia, classically: how often it happens when i am in love or think i am in love or thinking i wish i were in love or that i wasn't...how often it happens sleeping next to someone i think i no longer love because if i were awake and in love and could stir the slumbering beloved insomia would be slain and slaked by fucking...how it "dawns" on me occasionally that i have been awake too long and that i live in fear of the insomnia begining again, this endless road stretching out in front of me without drama, without any causation that does not seem prone to delusional thought, that threatens me with infinity even while i convince myself it will surely come to an end, sooner or later, this highway filled with transport vehicles 24/24...pick your own prefered symbol of monotony...
insomnia before the internet was an entiely different love affair...because the net is always, seemingly, awake, robotically at the ready, there is almost always, seemingly, someone else awake and how a chat-session, with a known or unknown other, restores discursive and rational normalcy, creates an exchange, a breathing that becomes unconscious again, a heart that does its job without being monitored...for when i am truly alone, unsleeping, i am become hyper-aware of my own body's functions and begin to travel inside the layers or interfaces of my being.
cage's experience in the anechoic chamber also seemed to be divided almost mystically into extreme frequencies, one the "high" brain funtioning and the "low" blood pulsation while anyone who was not a composer might register such an experience in a very different way, as I did once, noting how my visual field was simulataneously distorted by the small size of the anechoic room: tunnel-vision, the claustral feeling. insomnia does occur, like a very small chamber, a false vaccuum, and jar of artefice in which my consciousness appears but also paradoxically disappears into the other horizon, that of the wideness, the horizon itself appearing on the edge of a cup, on the window-sill, on the row of tenement, on the empty dark or cloudy starless city sky or murky moon or milky wherein i am waiting not-knowing i am waiting and if i am alone and i cannot read---and here, i enter the most frightening dimension of my own insomnia: the inability for consciousness to hold onto aything at all for any amount of time, whether because the pervasive lack of neuro-chemical presences destroys the short term memory and language cannot be made to cohere in my mind or because the insomnia is a hard, lonely diamond-like and jealous god who will not permit any distraction that will lead to drowsiness---for whatever reason, the words hang on the page like laundry on a line blowing in the breeze, each word a rag on a wire and how and why did they became strung together i cannot decipher. and there is no way to be entertained it seems. everything seems like flotsam and jetsam and even my own thoughts ride on the flow of...what?
it does not even flow...it just hangs, a cosmic limbo...
one would almost prefer a war be raging in the streets than this and this nihilistic thought haunts me only for a split-second because i know in this state how utterly impotent i am to bring about such a war and even if i knew mechanically how to bring it about would not be able to carry through the step-by-step instructions to assemble such a machine.
if i were to situate my senses in a quincunx, debatable as these divisions are from the point of view of science---knowing as "we" do, how closely interwoven the visual and auditory nerves are, for example, so that in effect one sense is always refering to data gathered by the other sense or, knowing how tasting and smelling are difficult to isolate from their mutual complementarity---if i were to put them nevertheless into four points and draw them into a central point, it is in the case of insomnia that the acute awareness of the inexistence of the point of so-called integration becomes painfully evident and hopelessly open. and it is from this repeated experience i claim now that i can make no conclusion? i beg the reader to take me seriously and yet i must indicate that i am somehow yet unable to lend myself any credibility. i am trying to be as honest as i can possibly be, writing as quickly as i can, not searching endlessly for mot juste, because i do not believe there is one word that is right, no one modulus for the experience of the static and undying disturbance of the shells of existence.
insomnia and substances. like smoking or drinking or pills, if you have such luxuries. they never work in the case of a real insomniac episode. i can drink unto stumbling and fall dizzy into bed and of course i am then too sick to be able to sleep for the convulsions of nausea. any barbituate solution puts you at risk of over-dosing and although i have thought in these insomniac states all the permutations of suicidal possibilities that "gets one through many a night", i am not confident in death as being different enough than this, than this insomnia experience itself, to count as a real alternative. i have smoked a pack of cigarrettes and it only increased my heart rate to the point of utter panic and the need to just stop, take a rest, just lay down and....nothing of the not-nothing...no...somnia in veiled robes of fleece does not come and wrap my mind in downy visions or enigmatic morphean plasmas...
on one insomniac night in particular, while smoking, i was seized by the determination to do something useful and hauled out the vaccum cleaner and, with the cigarrete clamped in my mouth, running the nozzle over the floors, enjoying at least the power of this machine made for sucking and inadvertanly bumped the door in such a way as caused the ejection of the light, the cinder or pharos, the burning bit, from the cigarrette itself and i watched in a suspended moment as it or I fell through the air, like a pilot ejected from a nose-diving plane, and the cinder fell on the floor near the snout of the vacuum cleaner and poof. it was gone. it is funny: i saw myself in the mirror and the look on my face made me laugh. i shut off the machine immediately and sat down looking at it. what, now, will happen to this red silent domestic robot that, in belgium at least, one calls a "hoover". of course there is not enough oxygen for a fire to burn in there. and indeed, it stated to emit fumes and my imagination was captrured inside this enclosed infernal microcosm. and the fire inside its belly turned to the plastic and rubber detritus and started to stink and i hurriedly dragged it by the neck to kitchen sink and while reasonable enough to not want to pour water on a plugged-in electrical appliance and yet unreasonable enough to open the burning machine and pull out the bag, which burst immediately, flames and smoke blossoming and yet fortunately falling from my unscathed hand directly into the sink, i was able to slap the faucet up. and in seconds all but the rotten fumes had passed. could i call this the poetry of insomnia in action? i cannot tell.
there is of course the widespread and creeping thought virus that insists insomnia can be cured my some kind of meditation. but i am convinced that they are mostly other forms of insomnia themselves and that it is only the style of dress that changes as we pass from land to land. and while i do find certain mantras to be pleasurable to practice and still recall with wonder the tibetans compressing their deep overtones into golden pills, i have been so often accused of spiritualist pretensions that i cannot stand before the scientific community and deliver any kind of report that does not seem like a long and complicated dream: that is, a kind of narrative salve and balm to work into the muscles of the over-active mind and bring the opiate of sleep to englobe us, especailly since all while it does occur to me that capitalism itself thrives on our insomniac innovations like a vampire, sucking the ideas for more functional systems out of the combinatorium the mind becomes during such pointless demonic wrestlessness. if this in fact were to prove to be the beneficent side of insomnia, then it will have maybe redeemed itself in the "spirit of progress". but i remain largely untouched by such luck and my sleeplessness rests apparently in no detectable marketability.
April 1, 2009
Poznan
Virtuous Circles CD notes (Absurd Records)
Virtuous Circles
“Noi non vediamo mai le cose una prima volta, ma sempre la seconda.” –Cesare Pavese
Ramadan 1427
I am living in Kreuzberg, a part of Berlin which is, commonly thought of as a “Turkish” neighborhood. But once you scratch the surface and wander these streets which eventually mingle with those of Neukolln, you begin to notice many diverse cultures of Middle Eastern origin are also mixed in. Neukolln has an extreme unemployment rate, numerous “unpapered” immigrants and visible poverty. One day in October, 2006 with the air taking on that onerous hint of Northern European winter, I heard a song on the lips of certain people, but never a muzzein singing from a nasally tower megaphone. Although you will daily notice the bells of Christian churches, the song that brings the Islamic world to pray five times daily is largely absent from the streets of Berlin. What you hear of course is the rumble and jog of various kinds of machines and devices of telecommunication. It would be a controversial statement if I were to say that Islam is the last vestige of Medieval culture that lives on into the world of High Capitalism. But to insist on a dichotomy between Islamic culture and Commerce would be a complete misrepresentation of the central role of travel and trade in the spread of Islam throughout the world. I found myself thinking about the adhan which I have heard in various cities, sung by so many voices ranging from a devastatingly beautiful cry of love that might bring tears to your eyes to the hilarious warbling of a tone-deaf muzzein sputtering and crackling in a hopelesly short-circuited P.A. system. If the prayer is one manner in which the Muslim approaches and defines her relationship to God and a duty paid to the religion, I had again that strange thought “what is the God of Capitalism?” If God is a limitless and invisible source of such vocal aspirations in Islam and also their direct object, one cannot grasp its core anywhere except in one’s heart. If God is the fuel of religion, what is the fuel of the secular world we live in with its litanies of transport, industry, televisions, cell-phones, sms, laptops, digital datebooks etc etc. The major cult-leaders of Capital will tell you it is “Freedom”. But I am not convinced that there is a freedom in Capitalism anymore than there is a God seated in a celestial pleroma dictating laws to man and womankind. Many people will drown the pointless work-day in a round of pints or erase their office memories with sake. Others will go to a mosque or perform a Buddhist chant. Others make art or family their religion. What motivates life in the world of Capitalsim when the daily hostilities of competition are themselves the very negation of the value of “communal” life? What drives this religion of competitive capitalism that no one dares to deviate from? And what is our relationship to the noise of our competitive culture?
This recording/performance will not answer any of these questions for you. But it will reflect the dynamic interplay between noises and trans-ascendance, between a song and the source of a song. And so, it draws a vicious circle around us. What might be done to make it a virtuous circle? A gravestone I saw in Charleston, South Carolina reads: “She done what she could”. I will leave the rest to you.
I chose a live recording of my concert in Athens as the starting point for this project probably because as the capital of Greece it represents for me the final, physical fulcrum between the west and the east. But also because in the analysis of Greek culture one can see that sea-faring and commerce are central to the expansion of that culture and forms the metaphorical basis for international relations. As Constantinople, it became the center of Christianity, then pried away by the Turks, the Saracens, the Ottomans. Whatever they were called in the Infidel story-books, they were the contenders, the ones who wanted the same advantageous port for the spread of their wealth. It was the object of a Holy War. We, today, each and everyone of us, are the objects of a Holy War but one without any Gods. It is a war instead between Freedom and Capitalism in which Islam is forced to wear the mask of the world’s worst tendencies. Instead, these tendencies are in our very own limitless drive for a contradictory Freedom that creates alienation between human beings and other life forms and a mediated inward search through nostalgia and escapism.
Phonographies used in this piece were made in Berlin, Paris, San Franscisco, NYC (all industry and transport sounds) and Java, Morrocco, Kenya, Egypt and Iraq (most of the voices you hear). It is for the last item that I owe thanks to Thomas Ashcraft.
There is God in Godless. But there is also more in less.
Jeff Gburek
October 18, 2006
Berlin
This document premiered February 8, 2007 at Das Kleines Field Recordings Festival, Berlin on the, “Tag der Klanggeschicten”, @ Klub Monty. Special thanks: to Rinus Van Alebeek for making this festival happen; to Mireia Guzman for photos and being there.
It was subsequently re-published inside the CD released on Absurd Records, 2008
Question of Re-entry series, thanks to Nicolas Malevitsis.
http://www.void.gr/absurd/index2.htm
“Noi non vediamo mai le cose una prima volta, ma sempre la seconda.” –Cesare Pavese
Ramadan 1427
I am living in Kreuzberg, a part of Berlin which is, commonly thought of as a “Turkish” neighborhood. But once you scratch the surface and wander these streets which eventually mingle with those of Neukolln, you begin to notice many diverse cultures of Middle Eastern origin are also mixed in. Neukolln has an extreme unemployment rate, numerous “unpapered” immigrants and visible poverty. One day in October, 2006 with the air taking on that onerous hint of Northern European winter, I heard a song on the lips of certain people, but never a muzzein singing from a nasally tower megaphone. Although you will daily notice the bells of Christian churches, the song that brings the Islamic world to pray five times daily is largely absent from the streets of Berlin. What you hear of course is the rumble and jog of various kinds of machines and devices of telecommunication. It would be a controversial statement if I were to say that Islam is the last vestige of Medieval culture that lives on into the world of High Capitalism. But to insist on a dichotomy between Islamic culture and Commerce would be a complete misrepresentation of the central role of travel and trade in the spread of Islam throughout the world. I found myself thinking about the adhan which I have heard in various cities, sung by so many voices ranging from a devastatingly beautiful cry of love that might bring tears to your eyes to the hilarious warbling of a tone-deaf muzzein sputtering and crackling in a hopelesly short-circuited P.A. system. If the prayer is one manner in which the Muslim approaches and defines her relationship to God and a duty paid to the religion, I had again that strange thought “what is the God of Capitalism?” If God is a limitless and invisible source of such vocal aspirations in Islam and also their direct object, one cannot grasp its core anywhere except in one’s heart. If God is the fuel of religion, what is the fuel of the secular world we live in with its litanies of transport, industry, televisions, cell-phones, sms, laptops, digital datebooks etc etc. The major cult-leaders of Capital will tell you it is “Freedom”. But I am not convinced that there is a freedom in Capitalism anymore than there is a God seated in a celestial pleroma dictating laws to man and womankind. Many people will drown the pointless work-day in a round of pints or erase their office memories with sake. Others will go to a mosque or perform a Buddhist chant. Others make art or family their religion. What motivates life in the world of Capitalsim when the daily hostilities of competition are themselves the very negation of the value of “communal” life? What drives this religion of competitive capitalism that no one dares to deviate from? And what is our relationship to the noise of our competitive culture?
This recording/performance will not answer any of these questions for you. But it will reflect the dynamic interplay between noises and trans-ascendance, between a song and the source of a song. And so, it draws a vicious circle around us. What might be done to make it a virtuous circle? A gravestone I saw in Charleston, South Carolina reads: “She done what she could”. I will leave the rest to you.
I chose a live recording of my concert in Athens as the starting point for this project probably because as the capital of Greece it represents for me the final, physical fulcrum between the west and the east. But also because in the analysis of Greek culture one can see that sea-faring and commerce are central to the expansion of that culture and forms the metaphorical basis for international relations. As Constantinople, it became the center of Christianity, then pried away by the Turks, the Saracens, the Ottomans. Whatever they were called in the Infidel story-books, they were the contenders, the ones who wanted the same advantageous port for the spread of their wealth. It was the object of a Holy War. We, today, each and everyone of us, are the objects of a Holy War but one without any Gods. It is a war instead between Freedom and Capitalism in which Islam is forced to wear the mask of the world’s worst tendencies. Instead, these tendencies are in our very own limitless drive for a contradictory Freedom that creates alienation between human beings and other life forms and a mediated inward search through nostalgia and escapism.
Phonographies used in this piece were made in Berlin, Paris, San Franscisco, NYC (all industry and transport sounds) and Java, Morrocco, Kenya, Egypt and Iraq (most of the voices you hear). It is for the last item that I owe thanks to Thomas Ashcraft.
There is God in Godless. But there is also more in less.
Jeff Gburek
October 18, 2006
Berlin
This document premiered February 8, 2007 at Das Kleines Field Recordings Festival, Berlin on the, “Tag der Klanggeschicten”, @ Klub Monty. Special thanks: to Rinus Van Alebeek for making this festival happen; to Mireia Guzman for photos and being there.
It was subsequently re-published inside the CD released on Absurd Records, 2008
Question of Re-entry series, thanks to Nicolas Malevitsis.
http://www.void.gr/absurd/index2.htm
astra disastra digitalis
The old and broken doll with twisted digits
drawn through a gap in the heart or the sky
sits in a cornered clump in rusted rags;
tilted head, half open, mannequin’s eyes
mourning a dead lover’s muted sperm
a silent squawk-box buried in her belly,
limbo of robotic baby-speak---ah, what went dead
inside you first? Your double d battteries? Corroded
triple-a, excremental, chemical cylinders of charge?
Who put your throat’s papery violin to sleep?
When did you put your eyes in your pocket, again?
And you, ancient doll, who threw herself
in the throes of the dance and broke her spine,
“il se prend pour un star”
yes, there are stars, too hot to handle, and stars
too far to be seen by the blind, signed
Mr. F. Lubbard, yes, stars, collapsing the yes,
virgin aureaolae, depths upon steps of
depths, skin deep, vanishing
at the universal boundary of information
seen in this coal-dark basement
in a broken tarnished mirror
on a bright and empty chair
when I was 5.
You, red and fair daughter of distant Danes
and Liths, remind me of all the girls and boys
swirling in the pockets of resistance, fighting for the freedom of islands,
the two fern-green, lime-green
planets of vanity and fertility
set in one skull’s orbit, crooked teeth
signature, suture, singularity.
Have I taken the small things growing larger with time seriously?
There is a dead television screaming
an ingenuous formal pornography, dull grey
cyclopean consumerist identity, saying
go lick the cock and balls of money
handled by many
take the disease
your dreams by the ounce
permit you to buy.
Love is not a trial, can’t be won
by any lawyers
and there is no judge of it.
Love’s only god is love.
And there is no love but love.
It is not a moral issue at all.
It is Elan. Succulent paradise, promised.
Go towards your heart’s goal.
Go through my gate.
Or through the gate of others.
Or remain inside your dark house of memory
And pass through yourself.
Hold me so I can love you.
Or free me to love others.
Without love, being unable to love,
I am dead, dumb fruit withers. I want to live
And yet I am dead? Or hanging, drooping
Earthwards, wishing, I were, already?
This is death’s spurious circle.
I want to step outside it, for now.
With you or without you.
Come, let me go.
“and on the night of their departure they noticed burning a star”
in a crystal quiver
I see symphonies of eyes
shot out from me
some spectacular night
on the fringes of time
March 14, 2009
10.28 pm
Poznan. Polska
drawn through a gap in the heart or the sky
sits in a cornered clump in rusted rags;
tilted head, half open, mannequin’s eyes
mourning a dead lover’s muted sperm
a silent squawk-box buried in her belly,
limbo of robotic baby-speak---ah, what went dead
inside you first? Your double d battteries? Corroded
triple-a, excremental, chemical cylinders of charge?
Who put your throat’s papery violin to sleep?
When did you put your eyes in your pocket, again?
And you, ancient doll, who threw herself
in the throes of the dance and broke her spine,
“il se prend pour un star”
yes, there are stars, too hot to handle, and stars
too far to be seen by the blind, signed
Mr. F. Lubbard, yes, stars, collapsing the yes,
virgin aureaolae, depths upon steps of
depths, skin deep, vanishing
at the universal boundary of information
seen in this coal-dark basement
in a broken tarnished mirror
on a bright and empty chair
when I was 5.
You, red and fair daughter of distant Danes
and Liths, remind me of all the girls and boys
swirling in the pockets of resistance, fighting for the freedom of islands,
the two fern-green, lime-green
planets of vanity and fertility
set in one skull’s orbit, crooked teeth
signature, suture, singularity.
Have I taken the small things growing larger with time seriously?
There is a dead television screaming
an ingenuous formal pornography, dull grey
cyclopean consumerist identity, saying
go lick the cock and balls of money
handled by many
take the disease
your dreams by the ounce
permit you to buy.
Love is not a trial, can’t be won
by any lawyers
and there is no judge of it.
Love’s only god is love.
And there is no love but love.
It is not a moral issue at all.
It is Elan. Succulent paradise, promised.
Go towards your heart’s goal.
Go through my gate.
Or through the gate of others.
Or remain inside your dark house of memory
And pass through yourself.
Hold me so I can love you.
Or free me to love others.
Without love, being unable to love,
I am dead, dumb fruit withers. I want to live
And yet I am dead? Or hanging, drooping
Earthwards, wishing, I were, already?
This is death’s spurious circle.
I want to step outside it, for now.
With you or without you.
Come, let me go.
“and on the night of their departure they noticed burning a star”
in a crystal quiver
I see symphonies of eyes
shot out from me
some spectacular night
on the fringes of time
March 14, 2009
10.28 pm
Poznan. Polska
the jar beneath the star artaud foresaw/as having already exploded
the jar beneath the star artaud foresaw/as having already exploded
it was cruelty to laugh at, not with, the man laughing at cruelty itself
he saw the blink and black-out, the thread consciousness was not, but must
evolve out from...it was like the golden lid of a wandering jar.
where-ever the lid was placed, the jar would form, beneath it,
no matter what size, perfectly fit, screwed tight
and each jar beneath it like a drop of transparency,
the jar always empty, the whole star, his star
the collapsing and rising foal...
in the vivid looms of consciousness,
the thread of not-seeing, not-feeling, not-perceiving,
the binary and bipolar gloom --so-called--
is repeatedly woven, as the unwoven
or the unweaving, Penelope's trick
against these vulgar suitors of singular Time
her hand is woven into the scarf, the glove
her eyes are woven into the shroud
her breasts are woven into the dress
memory of the flesh wears
i feel i know well now Penelope's loom
weaving and unweaving the cloth,
seeding and salting the earth of thought by turns,
doubting and redoubting death's shroud
until my true love, my truth, comes home...
I could call her Odysseeus.
Fair and red and blond at her mons.
Am I not seeing blindly like Tiresias,
inverted, converted, the liver
of Prometheus, whose day chained
to the rock of Poznan
is only slightly unlike nightmare?
while somehwere on the steppe
sun shines newly on the next foal
of Przewalski's horses
Poznań, 10 march 09
it was cruelty to laugh at, not with, the man laughing at cruelty itself
he saw the blink and black-out, the thread consciousness was not, but must
evolve out from...it was like the golden lid of a wandering jar.
where-ever the lid was placed, the jar would form, beneath it,
no matter what size, perfectly fit, screwed tight
and each jar beneath it like a drop of transparency,
the jar always empty, the whole star, his star
the collapsing and rising foal...
in the vivid looms of consciousness,
the thread of not-seeing, not-feeling, not-perceiving,
the binary and bipolar gloom --so-called--
is repeatedly woven, as the unwoven
or the unweaving, Penelope's trick
against these vulgar suitors of singular Time
her hand is woven into the scarf, the glove
her eyes are woven into the shroud
her breasts are woven into the dress
memory of the flesh wears
i feel i know well now Penelope's loom
weaving and unweaving the cloth,
seeding and salting the earth of thought by turns,
doubting and redoubting death's shroud
until my true love, my truth, comes home...
I could call her Odysseeus.
Fair and red and blond at her mons.
Am I not seeing blindly like Tiresias,
inverted, converted, the liver
of Prometheus, whose day chained
to the rock of Poznan
is only slightly unlike nightmare?
while somehwere on the steppe
sun shines newly on the next foal
of Przewalski's horses
Poznań, 10 march 09
excerpt from an italian tour journal 2006
"you my friend have put too much thinking in your hearing
and all the skies are drying out.
let things get wet.
mud is good clothing.
if anything is wrong, ask yourself in ten years time
if you will have any new devices.
this is no different than small mall town America...
everything is made of symbols. Bergamo? this deck is missing
quite a few cards. the real lost card is the same as any other lost card.
things that remind us of other things are wrong.
things that make us forget others things are wrong.
things that make us remember other things
that make us forget other things that rob us of our time
and burn our lives in the furnace of commodities. Don't cry
about it, there are many many sheep in the fields of Treviglio
just as there are beautiful women with cellphones
full of unwanted messages. If the tax people audit me
it will be proof at last I have existed and made nothing from it.
Instead of my own nap
I have taken yours and stolen your dreams
which I know you yourself have acquired by impure means.
I should rather have used my mental acid
to have penetrated my own devious machines. No matter how many times you open the door
she is not there or at least she does not appear...no Santa Claus...
instead its Milano itself arriving on track 5
none of us ever have moved in the late afternoon lambent light
of patent leather shoes, prosciutto cotto
and the deglassing salt of the tracks
that sprays in our eyes"
december, 23, 2006
and all the skies are drying out.
let things get wet.
mud is good clothing.
if anything is wrong, ask yourself in ten years time
if you will have any new devices.
this is no different than small mall town America...
everything is made of symbols. Bergamo? this deck is missing
quite a few cards. the real lost card is the same as any other lost card.
things that remind us of other things are wrong.
things that make us forget others things are wrong.
things that make us remember other things
that make us forget other things that rob us of our time
and burn our lives in the furnace of commodities. Don't cry
about it, there are many many sheep in the fields of Treviglio
just as there are beautiful women with cellphones
full of unwanted messages. If the tax people audit me
it will be proof at last I have existed and made nothing from it.
Instead of my own nap
I have taken yours and stolen your dreams
which I know you yourself have acquired by impure means.
I should rather have used my mental acid
to have penetrated my own devious machines. No matter how many times you open the door
she is not there or at least she does not appear...no Santa Claus...
instead its Milano itself arriving on track 5
none of us ever have moved in the late afternoon lambent light
of patent leather shoes, prosciutto cotto
and the deglassing salt of the tracks
that sprays in our eyes"
december, 23, 2006
A Dinner Dyadic
A Dinner Dyadic
A restauraunt
tells a certain story
about food
to the person
eating it, a sauce
of discourses & condiment
accompany the raw
or cooked fable
and one can’t tell a convinced
Emperor his new
clothes are not
in fact fine.
But the one outside
the restaurant, the one not eating this narrative
eats instead a silence
surrounding it all
and adds salt from memory,
speculative pepper, deducing
in the heat,
sensing something’s not quite right,
knowing she’s not sure what.
Upon the window of the restaurant,
a code of sweat pearls
or maybe it just rained.
On one side the rain-drops are flat
against the plane of the glass.
On the other side they bulge out,
round and fat.
6.03.09
Konin, Polska
A restauraunt
tells a certain story
about food
to the person
eating it, a sauce
of discourses & condiment
accompany the raw
or cooked fable
and one can’t tell a convinced
Emperor his new
clothes are not
in fact fine.
But the one outside
the restaurant, the one not eating this narrative
eats instead a silence
surrounding it all
and adds salt from memory,
speculative pepper, deducing
in the heat,
sensing something’s not quite right,
knowing she’s not sure what.
Upon the window of the restaurant,
a code of sweat pearls
or maybe it just rained.
On one side the rain-drops are flat
against the plane of the glass.
On the other side they bulge out,
round and fat.
6.03.09
Konin, Polska
silent other, sideless mirror (2008)
silent other, sideless mirror, gaze through which sabled murmur
pulls the threaded feathers, to dress the wedding dummy
her own hands, her flesh velour
she who gowns the world and drowns sorrows
with her alien eyes fixed to impenetrable beauty, gnarled,
and tightens the fine frailties of voice into raucous mesh
our nerves, the carnivorous spool, the light trapped within
the web, our teeth, the mind, the eating that is not eating, not eaten
and the great trails of color left by wandering hands
across the phantom hours and dours of night
i follow the wind-scattered pulse
across the grey scintillant gunks of the Meuse
to the tree-trestled street where the tombstones shine and whistle
deathless tunes of the Miners, the hill-men
who see you sewing the dresses of the one's ever glinting
on the border of the unborn
i walk again to your stainless window
to see the red leaves and castagne
laid by your hands in the lace of the sun
and recall your bifocals, intent, bent,
simply working mundanity
i have never been able to understand
Juin 11, 2008,
Liege, Belgique
notes:
The Meuse is the river that runs through Liege
where, walking one day, I recalled vividly a scene from Berlin.
The graveyard is in Berlin on the Bergmannstrasse.
"Bergmann" means "miner" or "man of the hills"
There is timeless shop there, a wedding dress,
a woman who clothes the brides, working alone, at times.
Her name is Milena Geburzi. Her last name, they say, means
"midwife".
pulls the threaded feathers, to dress the wedding dummy
her own hands, her flesh velour
she who gowns the world and drowns sorrows
with her alien eyes fixed to impenetrable beauty, gnarled,
and tightens the fine frailties of voice into raucous mesh
our nerves, the carnivorous spool, the light trapped within
the web, our teeth, the mind, the eating that is not eating, not eaten
and the great trails of color left by wandering hands
across the phantom hours and dours of night
i follow the wind-scattered pulse
across the grey scintillant gunks of the Meuse
to the tree-trestled street where the tombstones shine and whistle
deathless tunes of the Miners, the hill-men
who see you sewing the dresses of the one's ever glinting
on the border of the unborn
i walk again to your stainless window
to see the red leaves and castagne
laid by your hands in the lace of the sun
and recall your bifocals, intent, bent,
simply working mundanity
i have never been able to understand
Juin 11, 2008,
Liege, Belgique
notes:
The Meuse is the river that runs through Liege
where, walking one day, I recalled vividly a scene from Berlin.
The graveyard is in Berlin on the Bergmannstrasse.
"Bergmann" means "miner" or "man of the hills"
There is timeless shop there, a wedding dress,
a woman who clothes the brides, working alone, at times.
Her name is Milena Geburzi. Her last name, they say, means
"midwife".
dreaming machines for karolina maria konstancja ossowska
gazing into the reality of desire
i only see you again.
and when i cannot speak to you,
it is as if my own ear were torn off.
the taste of your voice before sleep, precious metal, liquid,
fantastic resource. red streaks on the inner thigh of memory.
these are the hormonal enchantments of life.
the child, the key to inner reality, it all comes forth,
through you, for me. and when not...nervous nightmare,
i am hooves faltered in mud.
my flower of mind throws you desperate spore.
drawing myself in again, the pale
doctrine of my own perplexed necessity,
fair, like your flesh, grows flush, brightens, glows,
subtly beating wings of a moon,
frothing the oceans of sleep, silently.
6 lutego 2009
poznan
i only see you again.
and when i cannot speak to you,
it is as if my own ear were torn off.
the taste of your voice before sleep, precious metal, liquid,
fantastic resource. red streaks on the inner thigh of memory.
these are the hormonal enchantments of life.
the child, the key to inner reality, it all comes forth,
through you, for me. and when not...nervous nightmare,
i am hooves faltered in mud.
my flower of mind throws you desperate spore.
drawing myself in again, the pale
doctrine of my own perplexed necessity,
fair, like your flesh, grows flush, brightens, glows,
subtly beating wings of a moon,
frothing the oceans of sleep, silently.
6 lutego 2009
poznan
after glancing back over pasolini
for lee foust
from the first words, "solo il amare, solo il conoscere/conta..."
"only loving, only knowing/matters
not having loved, not having known.."
i see my old friend, he, my old friend, you
arrives in an image, inside an image, of the poem
at once announcing the moment, the eternal break with(in) "history"
(that repeats itself in unbroken successions
of miserable bastard cacophonies, wars for peace
and fleshless dreamers---like skeletons dug form the rubbles of gaza---
and yet faces into the world, benjamin's angel, the mouth of klee
"set at the margin", so to speak a foregone apocalypse
in which survivors scrounge in dirt and rubbish,
the ones who carry history nevertheless like a senseless bag
full of deposit bottles, in exchange for a future
repetitious, anxious, yet brimming with the possibility
knowing thirst unvanquishible, the tongue yearning,
replacing their teeth in advanced age, limping and smiling forward
(with whatever backlashed dreams and dead families
those same smiles mask over)
reminding me all again this morning
on my kasprzaka street stairs
the old lady descending, one slippered foot swollen, unbootably
the other boot cautious, testing her step
hand glued to the gleaming railing, eyes on a distant goal,
did not betray seeing me
as i was out into frigid air and
already whisking back again, she was only out the door
moving so steadily, barely--where-ever--
into that wind
i was coming from...
that i thought myself
so much weaker than she
02.2.09-------------- Poznań
from the first words, "solo il amare, solo il conoscere/conta..."
"only loving, only knowing/matters
not having loved, not having known.."
i see my old friend, he, my old friend, you
arrives in an image, inside an image, of the poem
at once announcing the moment, the eternal break with(in) "history"
(that repeats itself in unbroken successions
of miserable bastard cacophonies, wars for peace
and fleshless dreamers---like skeletons dug form the rubbles of gaza---
and yet faces into the world, benjamin's angel, the mouth of klee
"set at the margin", so to speak a foregone apocalypse
in which survivors scrounge in dirt and rubbish,
the ones who carry history nevertheless like a senseless bag
full of deposit bottles, in exchange for a future
repetitious, anxious, yet brimming with the possibility
knowing thirst unvanquishible, the tongue yearning,
replacing their teeth in advanced age, limping and smiling forward
(with whatever backlashed dreams and dead families
those same smiles mask over)
reminding me all again this morning
on my kasprzaka street stairs
the old lady descending, one slippered foot swollen, unbootably
the other boot cautious, testing her step
hand glued to the gleaming railing, eyes on a distant goal,
did not betray seeing me
as i was out into frigid air and
already whisking back again, she was only out the door
moving so steadily, barely--where-ever--
into that wind
i was coming from...
that i thought myself
so much weaker than she
02.2.09-------------- Poznań
apparition between memory and forgetting
if there are dandelions left
growing in winter
it will certainly be
an all night affair
i said to myself
just as you closed the door...
somewhere between
house and home
some missed destination
between brain and bone
some combination
between nowhere gone
and nowhere to go
comes
in an apparition
a bright leaf
on a once broken bough
somehow
a veined leaf--falls--
an apparition
or a chemical
cloud
a wave or tickle
between memory
& forgetting
calls
an apparition
a face
knowing nothing
and more than that all
a worm of spring
a touch of gold
once a shadow
an apparition
between memory
& forgetting
it could be that
just that
an endless more
between rouge and soot
between the shoe and the boot
it could be that
and nothing more
everything to share
and i said to myself
as you closed the door
if there are dandelions left
growing in winter
it will certainly be
an all night affair
25.1.09
poznan
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