Wave Propagation//Resonance// Off the Grid Listening

     "without vision one sees only this world"
       -- john wieners

   thanks to charles whittaker for the reminder.
the reminder goes a long way towards reclaiming the idea of vision, snatching it from the materialist concept of just imagining things could be different. many are the theories and critiques of capitalism, for example. but no plan emerges from all the bickering about how to create a new system. this is where the problem of lacking vision comes into play. without a vision the idea of a new plan itself flounders in variation and when the variations don't satisfy us an new enough, there's a falling back, degeneration, depression

  but i have an alternate plan. i realized something out on my walks today.

  sometimes there's a feeling of wanting to delve deeply into experience, a sense of fascination or beauty, a curiosity for what is unknown, the science of which is more gnostic than objective. and the medium I find most accessible is the practice of stillness while listening and widely taking in the environment helps to create a stronger resonance of the person and place through a propagating of concentration. i will have more to say later about this bilateral wave propagation, and the manner in which it perhaps creates what is normally thought of as external and pre-disposed towards being, but later, when the time is right. for the moment, i am concerned with how to cultivate this practice. off the grid listening is what i am all about here.

the tree speaks *see note below

    when something is interesting, fascinating, unusual, intriguing or unknown, the sense of curiosity guides us toward making connections with these entities that attract our attention. it must be that they are intrinsic to ourselves or already resonate and summon us towards them and vice versa. the search for a communicable plane of transcendence in the medium of sound and vision has been a huge part of my daily life for many years now. the desire to expand perceptions and awareness of the beings we share the planet with has been my preoccupation. the idea of an inter-species communication (not a language, but a communication). the medium dawns to me through the art of improvisation and the spontaneous aspect of butoh's immediatist and materialist shamanism, where the body is the spiritual vehicle and perception the ultimate vessel of transformation, which has also deep roots in yogic and tantric backgrounds. when i do my work it can be with instruments or without any set ups or parameters. my first goal is to guide myself into the space between the known strata of cultural meanings and dwell in this capacitance zone between charges of physical energies. the desire to go deeper has it's price in terms of time. one must take on the gradient of evolutionary forces beyond the normal frames dictated by ideologies of business. and yet, this does not mean the sense of the eternal is not accessible in small frames of time. we only need to access the consciousness of our continuum. when one wants to go further into the heart of matter, one becomes frightening or unbearable to many others in human society, because the slower gradient symbolizes the pace of the nature which moves with inexorable slowness or sudden spasmodic energy. both unpredictable. and is not also true that the deepest experience of material existence is when we lose the grasp of the ego-consciousness and approach our own transformation into our constituency of particles and approach the horizon of death? this too is the source of the fear in some to the work of slowing down the pace. but there is no danger for those who experience and understand their limits as these limits emerge.

we go into the "sense" of indifferentiation as limitrophe
experience/aside and what is found rendered to intelligibility
 the neutrality of the binding causes
we appear when best trying to disappear
the notion of civilization returns to me when i feel most
in contact with what civilization leaves unregarded

In this film, the wave propagations of that particular concentrated form.

Video of Wave Propagation Study, Rusałka


 * The tree stump in the photo "spoke" with the voices of two or more Eurasian blue tit chicks. I was unable to see them but after some minutes of observation the parent birds arrived on the scene with worms and other delicacies. For a long time they would not descend to the stump's mouth and I had an intuition it was perhaps because I was too near and indeed when I withdrew a few meters more, they made their air-drop of food supplied to the youngters inside.

 

The Duncan Affair

  Incipit, the first of the Installments in  Being Jeff Gburek, the life to death entropic attenuation myth of the material being of the person I was, or have been so far; and which I, while continuing to be the writing appendage of the aforementioned, draw from the residues of my internal Mnemonic Productions, presenting, nevertheless, Something Like A Life I Keep Trying To Lead But Instead Get Led Into or Misled About... this installment, on the disillusion of social poets & social poetry... set at the tail-end of the Reagan/Thatcher era, the tale ending not there.. but in the Ouroboric slipstream of the same Neo-Conservative build-up to contemporary ruins --

    A life story, how it hurts (sometimes) to not be able to move, (or how it feels good to wander aimlessly) or to feel snared by low birth, high testosterone, mercurial passions, ideals and a morality that prevent one from being Machiavellian enough to be ruthless, & yet how staying behind others moving sluggishly, feels like slavery, how sometimes this all bursts open and flowers everywhere make one forget what we need not remember. My story is for anyone a bit like me who never wanted to be a hero but got stuck with the role defending himself against the onslaughts of irascible unprincipled and nefarious jerks, idiot demons, bad luck (and good luck leading to bad situations, heraclitean topsy turvey). The arch enemy is usually capitalism, for lack of a better term. War, poverty & profit from the earth's natural resources that no one actually owns but actually does anyway. I started out nobody and then created the various versions of myself some people encountered and chose to know as versions of themselves, inescapable shredded fragments of the narcissus flower, that remain pure, friendly and lovely communions, until turned into broken mirrors that cut every which way but loose in the battle for destroying the other that one no longer allows to speak.

"...some people people work very hard 
but still they never get it right...
well, I'm beginning to see the light..."   

Let me speak. Let me self-mythologize a bit, here and now, so there will be a history written by a defeated person for once. Let me tell you a story about a young poet who sought the guidance of an elder poet in a distant land far from his place of birth.

The story will use the names of many real people whose names some of you may know and who resemble actual persons living and dead or undecided. The story has not been changed to make me look better (insert your critical hyper-links here ________ ) and in fact I will only paint myself in the colors I know how to use from the way I experience my own motives. I will attempt to be excruciatingly clear. The first chapter shall be called "The Duncan Affair". It is a myth in the sense that it focuses on the idea of being something or someone and relating to people in (social) positions in life that are imaginary, out of reach, even sometimes collectively recognizable figures of social importance, but for the young person just waking into the world, the figure is an imaginary one, like a Davd Bowie (the man with many faces), who maybe, for example, embodies more substance for to some people than their own peers.

"here we go again, acting a part again..."

The name Robert Duncan creates often a great stir of emotions both negative and positive in those who hear the name pronounced. Among certain people, any praise of Robert Duncan for his achievements as a poet, teacher, thinker, speaker, generates no little amount of disgust or resentment, especially if you have been the butt of one of his tirades or ugly turns. Let me tell you I have been on both sides. Disappointed, humiliated, shocked, disillusioned, deeply pissed-off & also thrilled, inspired, awe-struck, humbled, educated, supported & confirmed in my beliefs. I know people who loved him unconditionally even though I never did thoroughly, being at heart an anarchist, & un-leadable, what the New Age people call Sigma transiting Omega personality type (barf!). I wanted to perhaps embrace him but could not entirely while being unable to deny (by the evidence of my own senses) his vast knowledge and obvious wealth of experience and when certain friends (who usually, along with not liking his personality, don't have an ear for his poetry) who complain about his grand-standing, cutesy performativity -- working his audience, with that perfect conversational balance between jester, sprinkling in profanities (with maybe passive-aggressive self-deprecatory/self-bloating tendencies), and the serious lecturer, serious message, with verbatim quotes flying, catering to a public which, after many years, he knew quite well -- we can maybe see diva in effect. But also, it must be said, he was an orator, a keeper of the flame of oral traditions, a story-teller, a bard. And above all, Robert Duncan, I think we can say, was a community-oriented person. He didn't need to teach because he had a trust-fund but he taught anyway (maybe this is a myth). He went to the readings of other poets in the community. And even those of us who hoarded books and haunted the stacks of libraries and seemingly read most widely found ourselves being given further information, names, titles and ideas from his readings and quick imagination and versatile speech skills that let arrows fly often straight into the heart of what you were thinking. He had in a certain sense a kind of clairvoyance that many of his generation did seem to have. He did then, when he was indeed so, and remains to me now, a figure from another century. I remember finding the San Francisco Chronicle on the door-step with his face on the front-page on February 3, 1988. and I cried out loud. My flat-mate of the time, cracked his room door, said, hey, what's wrong? I said, Robert Duncan. he died. Mike, his name was Mike, slammed the door. I heard him say to his girl-friend, Amanda, " Oh why is he waking people up?" Mike too had been a student at the New College with me and had learned to dislike Robert Duncan. Such is our life.

One cold Buffalo winter day of either 1984, I took a plane to San Francisco. In another chapter about Buffalo (The Bridge I Wanted Cross Ran Right Over Me), I will explain the impact of Jack Clarke upon my life but in short, I decided the most important thing in life was to get closer to these minds who had something, anything to do with Black Mountain College. Mythology pure and simple: I wanted in fact to go to Black Mountain but that was already only myth that we called already the history of education in the USA. Being a poet, like being a musician, back then, was seen as either ludic or ludicrous behavior. But my head was full of muthologems. The fact was I had been in two near fatal car accidents in Buffalo with reckless drivers (my first meeting with the idea that death is linked to "place" --that death can reach you, if you don't know when to move out of reach) and been apprehended by the police a demonstrations against the funding of the Contras and for rushing the limousine of Ronald Reagan (if one can ever find the archives of SUNYAB's student paper called The Spectrum, you should find a photo of a cop twisting my arm behind and slapping on the cuffs. I spent the afternoon in a holding cell and they released me without charges. Because I had been photographed. The secret service now had me on record. I achieved a degree of notoriety in the anarchist community but there was nothing in Buffalo for me. No love interest and nothing left to do but watch my ideals crumble into conformity or stay chained with the Tapeworm gang in the squats. Although it was Jack Clarke and Bob Creeley who fed me the intellectual line I bit on hard to yank me out of the swamp there, it was the anarchist squatters and their community connection in the Bay Area that made the move to seek out Robert Duncan thinkable as doable. And so I dressed up my mind and body in myth, closed my bank account, formally --a procedure which demanded I meet with a higher official, some Kafka or other, and sign the papers to close out the account -- dramatically telling the bank's vice president that I am withdrawing my money because, your bank funds Apartheid in South Africa (she blinked several times, I wondered if it was a tic or not) and I went West with 600 bucks, back-pack of clothes, some Levertov and Olson/Creeley Letters, Bending the Bow). On the plane I met someone who was getting picked up at SFO and going to Berkeley where I went looking for a collective house on Ashby Avenue that I couldn't find for a few days. Thusly I encountered homelessly the situation at People's Park and met some traveling punk girls who let me share the roof-top of a dorm they'd found to be secluded and safe, accessible by fire-escape ladder. There I saw the stars for the first day of my life from the other side of the North American continent and while astronomy tells us there are just as many stars on the East Coast, I had never seen so many, in one place, in one mind. So many lost givers of light still shining in my eyes. It wasn't as a warm as one might expect but I would not die of frost-bite.

Eventually I hooked up with Ashby House and stayed at first on the couch in the back-room while looking for approval to enter the San Francisco squat, which location was not shared openly. Then I was befriended by George who allowed me to stay as an uninvited extra house-mate, with the assumption that it was temporary, although George cut me some keys. With luck, no one would complain that I was crashing their party. I and George bonded over what we called The Movement and he shared information with me about the hacking community and the other people organizing the shanty towns in Sproul Plaza. I had just enough time to get oriented and found myself next crashing the New College, where I'd heard it was cool, to sit in, as it was a tradition, to keep lectures open to the community. By that time, I had culled together a sheaf of type-scripted poems, modest but coherent lyrics, most of which I have forgotten, although fragments come to mind. Although I had been told it was not permitted to introduce your work at table during the Basic Elements of Poetics meeting, this round-table style lecture, with the whole core Poetics faculty, there was a moment in the first meeting where, for some reason, I was bidden to speak and said well, I have nothing to say right now but I have these poems. So I read, with a lump in my throat, hands trembling somewhat.

The only one I recall

About
an eye

around
a corner

in a mouth
--so to say --
(here my memory of the verse is faulty
in a few days, I should have
the files from archives)

Was it love?
near that bend

Then gone

And I suppose it was at the end of my reading, with this poem, that I saw one of Robert Duncan's eyes looking at me with a peculiar sense of poignancy. As most of us who have read his poems with care know, there is a great sinking sense of loss and mourning in the works and perhaps this renders them insufferably maudlin. Perhaps after some time those who read him overmuch or felt his stinger during his tantrums felt less inclined towards sympathy or compassion. After I concluded my short recitation, it was rather amazing to hear the poet Robert Duncan commenting on my work after having just heard it for the first time. I was stunned. Never had anyone really seen straight into the writing as he had. Then he looked at me with one of those eyes. (I suppose this was one of the hypnotic aspects of his person, he was perhaps also not looking at you. This left you guessing, whereas with other people, you know when the gaze is direct, you return it or shift your eyes away, obeying ancient instincts). In those times, I had shaved the hair away from one side of my head around the ear, because I thought mohawk style wasn't my kind of thing. While he regarded me he announced, apropos of nothing (I thought) : well, you know, Schoenberg said that in his music the asymmetry was just as important as the symmetry. It took me a while to get the joke. I suppose other people might have felt insulted. On the way back to East Bay on the BART train one of the people in the class saw me and introduced himself as Hal (Halliday Dresser) who would become a major friend in my life. We met later to play guitars at a flat in North Beach he had sublet from Brion Gysin.

The theme of my poem of course brings up an image of seeking for or imagining the look of love (or more aptly, that it disappears). The myth of love as entering through the eye. Little did I know my little eye in the poems was looking out or being looked into, that this look could get you in trouble, that looking out one's window in some cultures is considered an invitation to look inside . That the look that was sexually promiscuous was not new particularly but the cultural context had shifted. Duncan had a certain reputation as a dandy, appearing in the hyper-sexualized mythos of the Anais Nin circles. Certainly he took what he could get, as the song goes. Recently I've read that Duncan has been characterized as predatory, that there's even a biography written that seems to support this concept from various angles. Difficult to know what predatory means exactly since the Duncan I met was an old man, attached to a IV drip, and even if he should become infatuated with me, I wasn't doing guys. While San Francisco and California in general had the reputation of being sex-positive-ville these were also the times of the greatest number of AIDS related deaths and I had other fish to fry. The first months after my arrival in the Bay Area coincided with the mounting tensions in Anti-Apartheid movement in Berkeley.  UC Berkeley Anti-Apartheid Movement

For the newbie in the Bay Area, reading Robert Duncan's Up-Rising, The Multiversity etc. during these times of student protest created a kind of time-warp. I was walking near Throckmorton Manor, all the old haunts, as if walking inside his poems (but none of the people in the movement knew him). And while it was clear that the U.S. had pulled troops out of Vietnam, the war behind the declared war that seems to only serve to nurture capital and the arms-industry rages on in various places and the excess guns get used by home-spun terrorists to shoot up high-schools in the present century, in the contemporary moment when I write these reflections and I wonder how we shall ever overcome all this. Duncan's break with Levertov over the nature of the impulses to war leave bitter tastes in the mouth even now. Was he correct in assuming, condemning even his own creativity as part of the unconscious rage for domination? If he is wrong then indeed he is guilty of a great exaggeration built upon the assumption that the Freudian Id knows not what it is doing and it is perhaps this error that allows his reading public to refer to such poems as having great significance. Perhaps they are hysterical or even a kind of black magic to keep the minds in fear, the paralyze the people. And yet, there is something evident in the culture we live in wherein drones are built to murder faceless alleged enemies of States we do not elect, because the corporations are not elected and they, despite everything we know about how they operate, continue to manipulate the moves of governments and militaries throughout the world without our consent; and while we are unable to hide from our impotence to change these conditions, we adopt other thought strategies and self-serving philosophies to cope. We crave escape. Yet the earth's most pristine and beautiful areas are being destroyed. Our paradise depleted in species diversity. We have critiques of capital and media and the conversion the internet to a control mechanism but we have no movement to preserve outdoor places to feel silence and nature's neutrality. 

In the middle of  a discussion Pound one day during a lecture Duncan breaks down, weeps and says the spirit mends itself of it owns sins we hope one day... but Pound certainly must have suffered knowing that he had misled his people. These are the kinds of things one can't really forget. Maybe I heard him incorrectly. The scene from Kurosawa's film Dreams called the Tunnel springs to mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreams_(1990_film) 
Pound, a misleader of poets, perhaps. Or Duncan himself, misleading himself and others?

Forever I will probably be unable to condemn properly or curse this man. I don't believe he was deliberately cruel to anyone. But my knowledge extends not so very far. And yet, I can aver that he slighted me and I felt rather unjustly criticized and that it hurt. It's taken some time to realize that we were experiencing Duncan in 1986 in phases of the dementia associated with his illness. This is what I recall. He hadn't appeared for lessons one whole semester already. By then I had become enrolled officially in New College Poetics program and I was happy to learn that Duncan would be back to teach a seminar on H.D. and it would focus on Trilogy. But something was amiss. There were too many people enrolled, 40 perhaps. It appeared that for reasons of preserving his health they would be forced to reduce the amount of students. Protests went around and no one seemed at happy about the need to trim attendance numbers. More tragically, the process of elimination took the form of a particularly bizarre ritual wherein we were to be judged fit for the table based upon our reading a passage from The Walls Do Not Fall and subsequent interview/grilling. I had the feeling like it was a mock contest set up to scare people away but it back-fired and I don't scare that easily anyway. The various people around the table read and Duncan commented variously and obviously I was nervous and concerned about what would happen despite my generally cavalier attitude. The book is passed around the room but I have my own copy. My canto turns out to be

An incident here and there,
And rails gone (for guns)
From your (and my) old town square:

mist and mist-grey, no colour,
still the Luxor bee, chick and hare
pursue unalterable purpose

in green, rose-red, lapis;
they continue to prophesy
from the stone papyrus:

there, as here, ruin opens
the tomb, the temple; enter,
there as here, there are no doors;

the shrine lies open to the sky,
the rain falls, here, there
sand drifts; eternity endures:

ruin everywhere, yet as the fallen roof
leaves the sealed room
open to the air,

so, through our desolation,
thoughts stir, inspiration stalks us
through gloom.

He interrupts here
there, again, the stranger
I almost knew

Hard to hear his words
slightly slurry
they curl out --
it's

as if the distance
cannot be bridged by sight,
his head sunk
into his own book,

it is not a post-
modern poem, he says
this is not projective
versification...

I don't remember the rest because of course my face's aflame, struggling to bear up a man, and yes it's rather true, I am student, after all, I guess I had no clue how to truly strut out her stuff, I swallow, letting it flow over me. So, who knows what will happen.

It was on the next meeting we learned what will happen and he read down the list of people.

Coming to the name Gburek, he said
"bumped"

I should have told him off or launched into a defense saying I had in fact come long way to apply for audience in the court before this... King.

But by then, I had discovered a vita nuova living in San Francisco. Not always perfect but freshly scented let's say. Eucalyptus. I took Meltzer's Kabbalah course and Diane DiPrima's Hidden Religions. The Pacific Ocean, the Mission District, City Lights. There was a lot going on around us. Susan Howe came to lecture and read from Articulations of Sound Forms in Time. One of the first truly "musical" readings I ever witnessed (because of the silences). Creeley came to read and Bob Kaufman sat on a couch. H.D. Moe passed around word salads of great delicacy. Victor Hernandez Cruz. Leslie Scalapino. Poets were everywhere everyone was writing something. I published the first editions of Aql magazine. We did readings. There were concerts everywhere (Sun Ra? 6 times!) and woke up one morning and went to Point Reyes an slept our on a cliff over the Pacific to watch the stars turn for no other reason other than I could just do that. This time they danced and formed into figures of totemic animals and ludic or ludicrous names until I woke up just slightly chilled in my sleeping bag with the surf crashing somewhere below me.

Coda.

Years later, after I had done some of the things mentioned just above, then left the USA to study in Italy for 2 years, I passed through to Buffalo on my journey back to SF where I should've written my thesis. I was delighted to find Susan Howe had accepted a teaching position at SUNY@B and I dropped into her seminar on the works of the poet H.D. The first person I saw in the room before Susan had arrived was Elizabeth Willis. When we read aloud the passage from The Walls Do Not Fall, the exact same passage I had read in front of Robert Duncan almost 10 years before fell to me that day. Resist superstition, not the mysteries. Somehow, I managed to read it without any stumbling and made my comments & observations which were associated with noticing some strange associations with the Grail Myth, some way of reading that was completely esoteric, perhaps, qabbalistic (I will explain my exegesis in another post one day), not obvious, but not ridiculed by anyone in the room, the others seemed intrigued. I don't recall why but I felt I understood the poem. But I am sure that this silent feeling that one understands is not enough for the present world. This world of the Canonic Poetry and Poetry Wars wants noise and conflict of disagreement, misunderstanding, the rage of assessment. Either that, or, there really is a deep flaw in the vessel of poetry itself, that Grail is Gone, and can carry nothing inside of it without the slow leak of meaning being lost as the commentary dissipates, drains into social disorder. The law in the flaw of the bowl of crystal cries out the wind cries Mary there is no result

    End Note: This writing was triggered by the recent controversial exchanges between Nathaniel Mackey and Barret Watten which brought my attention this youtube upload of a lecture tape on the work of Louis Zukofsky (1978!). It was hearing Robert's voice again and paying close attention to the strange social dynamics surrounding the presentation by Barret Watten that allowed me to contemplate my own experience from many years ago. Listen, carefully, here:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HwPtByxxzs&t=5517s

 "In order to write well about something, one shouldn't be interested in it any longer. To express an idea with due circumspection, one must have relegated it wholly to one's past; one must no longer be preoccupied with it." -- F. Schlegel, fragmentarian

 "sometimes the muse has something to say and sometimes the muse just has to say something"
   -- Robert Duncan 

For Sun Ra's Astro Black Birthday, 104 Hidden Spheres Dance of the Cosmo Aliens, This Day Was Brought To You By Being Alive

 Astro Black (music link)

 in other worlds the sun also rises in different regions new quadrants spin lattices of regenerative communication jazz tips the tongue off scattering moths and top-hats whole civilizations pulled out of a mosquito glee club comes with a caravan nudged outta mud by dedicated elephants dating back to when all the protists gathered under the toe nail of the reptilian dove whose coo coo sent your shoes on fire and the synthesizer drones discuss in the sky espied lonely planet guides being written on the backs of the exploited penal colonialist and the squeal of the squabbly seals those aspirant angels in their own fossil fiction forming my future maybe yours because inside what we say there's an ear

unicorns... I come from the land of unicorns... there is danger in the land of unicorns my friends, your brothers and sisters, their horns removed, their wings heavy as lead, their back beaten with the saddles of burden... let us help shake their manes free...

 Hidden Spheres (music link)

 though I have come very far to this alien land, I have come through an alien land, and alien among aliens, adrft and adroit, all at once, with the power of long periods of movement in my limbs. yet an alien whose language not merely of words but of strange sounds born the one's my motherfathertransparentals learned me up from root-works in the horns of the worms that bring the robin joy to be eaten by the hawk. i see the new when the new are born therefore with the marks of our travel and those mushrooms grow on either side of the head of many lobes to listen dearly deeper digging and diving down under your aquaphones spiraled molluscular gently goes your jetty rear officer smithson down to dust of smithsonian ressurection: high fives or sixes meet your freed slaves feed selves free salves to balm the nation of point missers cutting themselves in vain to reach out to others or the god they'd put to shame that ain't watching

 galaxies, worlds, how many flip from the fingers like tears of vishnu dry-docked viking ice-wings condensing liquid oxygen, how many words flicked from fingers fire-crackers over somewhere's rainbow blown bits of asteroid forest depleted the coal resources of the van allen, who puts a comet in the fuel tank affixed venus cowries on the design of mayan kabbalah & throat sings lava & has anyone dared ask how the fourth arm grew from the fingers'fingers (that warrant no typo, Joe, you gotta believe, Steve, you better not ignore the aura comes in folds poems reaction-cores love gone wild beyond styles wherein even the dug graves turn themselves inside out and the ghosts of my loves haunt the words the tones & let the earth play me the instrument of her peace, no time for the legislation, the bills, the worries or flurries of filibuster doubt-drunk tools of the state, wake up stumble out your slumber and cup the photons in your green palms and drink the air fresh from the heart of the matter

 Dance of the Cosmo Aliens (music link)

 after-thoughts, post-thoughts

inside what we discuss there's an ear. when you say nothing, it's not a sign of listening deeply. this will all sound dumb at first. many ways possible. dear friends without poetry: wish you poetry, wish you the wishing well, wish you logic to convert irrationality to blossom and groove, why does the water cling to the glass, the harmony of transparency begs wonder, this will all sound dumb at first, that won't be much consolation until the outline forms of the daemon dressed in photosynthetic gowns strike the strike anywhere match and lights the glow out-lasting firstness for these are the poems, look at them 

Spring Time Again (music link)

bleeding on sheets bleeding on streets bleeding on parchment on the white shirts of beginning with nothing keep the blood locked within and convert the angel otherness trip to time, scatter grammar, I'm not being rude, but the manners of the mannered don't matter when eyes lie daily, there is no message for society, no lesson to learn except to be siempre less and unlearn studiously. we can teach no one who burns not within themselves to aspire, so leave the likes of the public in the publick urinals and flow through frames and blame the names of deep state hate spreading the disease of I can't do anything but smoke, drink, eat junk and wait. a penny for your thoughts, a dollar, a 500 euro bill, a pocket for your thoughts, a new onslaught, a grotto for the turtles holding up the earth to chill, look & see what's in the ice and imagine what paths have been leading up to you on the top of it all as you skim cream of the crop

 these are poems come down not out of orpheus of cocteau and the dead-pan forest of sexual mourning: you never had a place in society but by the margins, called heyoka, you will not thrive in their offices for your office is within the effort of your tool to cut diamond and spread pollen between the keyboards & sprachgitter whose veils these words wear unto devastation. these are the found feathers of your years combined into the one wing in search of the prayer that unites your other to the marriage of seed to blossom that turns gravity into levity; the ground full of air that bubbles auspicious aroma & care

 did it matter once that he or she did not see you, then nor now?
then enjoy the magic invisibilty and walk between all desires
where the wind whistles songs no human ear avows.
blend your hands with the sage-brush smoke of the fire.
see that one, Venus, whose path alone is clear, the educator
let it be known how slowly any knowing evolves,
keepsake revolutionary voices, let memory grow loud,
anticipate action vine-stronger than speech or scripture bear

 ---------------------------------------------------------

 listen to some music played by a band that lives forever

  lived by a band that plays forever

 your bands don't know how to play forever? 

  but forever is a standard... like mary had a little lamb... 

whose fleece was like, forever...

 Door of the Cosmos

  Other Music I've enjoyed listening to recently:

 Ilir Lluka

 https://selvaelettrica.bandcamp.com/album/sel-99-r-sonance-tre

Manrico Montero (RIP)

 https://soundcloud.com/manrico-montero/manrico-montero-sweet-dusk

Tatsuya Nakatani, live video at Silo

 https://vimeo.com/271302927

the brilliant essay that is the sun...

 

 
Whoever does not fight against visible evil,

               loses the protection of the invisible.   

-- Paul Celan, Microliths (tr. Joris)

 

read the brilliant essay that is the sun

 for nothing is darker poetry
than my true desire
which I forgot to know/reveal
or maybe left on the train
in the rain -- to dribble
sentimental onion
almond or carcoffio

pomegranite, withered swill

rainbow sparagmos

--who wound the clock?

(whose) apparel is the differential

in every tree between

gibbet and cello

(remains undecidable)

fire-brand or boat's lantern

-- a hidden ship-lord's slander

beggars to receive

yet what is left but heart's schrapnel

for it is rather the heart that's been cut out

in discourse, blown to bits

smithereen'd

(speak from the heart they say

follow your heart -- this is what they say --

hopping onto the 3rd person --

but what can this heart say to the post-

cartesian social media/medea

other than to speak as the insane

the validity of mad truth has been lost --

which remains for the heart

(the post-social conscience)

to retrieve

in the silence of...

  there's that Prussian Garrison

& the garbage-filled moat around it

-- the theory seems to be: leave as little as possible

for the imagination of Europe

let the impressive ruin of the enemy who built it

rot further, moulder into mire

in the gloominous shadow 
of the glory football stadion

 the girls come out of their Starbucks

at Bałtyk to chain the tables for the sea-surge

I look at reflections of one

 group of corporate building's

windows reflected into set of windows behind

while the tables of black metal

get chain-ganged to sculpted tree.

Jet flies over the Sheraton

whose rooftop garden

still doesn't touch the sky

Heaven is below us somewhere

 

Ravaged Matzevot, Rusałka. Photo by Jeff Gburek

Lake Rusałka Water Walk

Michal Giżycki

We used fb to announce the event. 

https://www.facebook.com/events/2059639967583361/

If the link no longer works, this is what it once said.

 

Rusałka Water Walk: Call for Musicians/Volunteers 

"This is an event with many events: a meeting with visiting Native American composer Raven Chacon, Friday 27 April (at Kołorking Muzyczny); an exploratory sound-walk, of lake Rusałka area on Saturday 28; a performance for 2 groups of musicians to send musical messages across the lake, into the water, on Sunday 29. Details will appear in the Discussion section of the event page. This is also an open call for musicians who would like be involved in the performance and recording the event and volunteers/helpers."

 

Raven Chacon in Poznan

     Prior to Raven's arrival by train from Berlin (where he has been resident composer at the American Academy), we had discussed various plans for adapting a percussion piece of his to be played around Lake Rusałka but the adaptation turned out to be a new composition entirely. I would not have done it alone so, the score, is either a collaborative score or one deeply inspired by the presence of my old friend. Indeed, we discussed doing various versions of his Drum Grid piece but in the end another concept evolved. I spoke to him about my personal motivation for performing around the lake by describing various aspects of the history, involving the water itself, the building of the fake lake during Nazi occupation by combined Jewish and Polish slave labor, the laying of the foundation of the lake with matzevot, gravestones taken from cemeteries nearby, and the numerous massacres of the prisoners there.

    Although named after the water or tree nymphs of Slavic mythology -- the subject of a an opera by Antonín Dvořák  -- the romantic version itself is creepily Gothic in that the once beneficent nymphs of fertility and pure water filling the fields became glassed over -- for soon the stories emerged of drowned, attractive young women, Ophelias, the ghosts who would lure men into the waters and drag them beneath, never to return.

Bilibin's Vision of a Rusałka nymph, 1934

 This shift of the folklore towards the macabre drew my attention and caused me to dig deeper & when I dis-covered that a 23 year-old student named Sara Radwan drowned herself in the lake in 2016, I took a further plunge into the waters of the internet to find the story of the fake lake and the earth-works as they were called. It was then I realized that although there are two monuments mentioning murders of people in 1940, there is no indication that the lake itself was dug and fortified by the people massacred there, when they could no longer lift their tools, en masse, buried there, then disintered later for cremation, when Nazis' started to erase traces of their atrocities. As blogger Erik Ross point out, the massive concrete barrel one finds on the south-eastern rim of the water seems too large to be a drain for the gentle Bogdanka stream.  

  On April 27th we met with musicians & other interested people at Kołorking Muzyczny, in order to discuss the score, pictured here in the earliest version.

 Musicians who ultimately took part in the composition's realization on April 29

many thanks!

 

You can listen to a mix of the sounds recorded on location while the two groups moved around the lake and called to one another across and through the water.

https://soundcloud.com/automatopoeia/rusalka-water-walks-mix

 

 

 thanks to everyone who assisted and devoted energy and attention:

Raven Chacon, Kołorking Muzyczny, Rafał Zapała, Piotr Krawczyk, Piotr Delimata, Michał Giżycki, Krzysztof Kuśmierek, Stas Aleksandrowicz, Agnieska, Ola Hausner, Maciej, Karolina Ossowska, Kacper Antoni Hepner, Waldek & all the people who witnessed.  

Superimposition

Superimposition
 
 a freeactionary poem
about an imaginary city
West of where I
presently (re)ply

    for/ Anselm Berrigan

"look, up in the sky..."

 

 "... give up verse, my boy,

There’s nothing in it." -- E.P.

facing the wall

or what's left of it, the pissing floor

rises the glee-club of the gutter

& the ganja breakers

flare pockets of their hoodies

not in Gulhani but Gorlitzer

where wild roses over-hang the canal

the crossroad query of mental jogging

goes unabated & the circus of blood

pumps up to the surface of the clock-face

in the window beside the Ecke

where a machete hews kebab.

we take black olives & flat-bread

at Maibach Ufer, plan the half-day of sun,

rolled and smoked then sat on the lawn

by the Spree without knowing

how many films, like soap-bubbles,

had been shot there, tap of the toes,

there's no place like home

and the bottle already

floating downstream submarine

periscope up, look at the sky

which is grey like bone, motionless,

picture of nowhere

everybody knows 

 

May 8, 2018

 

 

 

Berlin 2016, jeff gburek, famous mistakes with ghosts

tradition whispers...

tradition whispers there is bird in the sky as blue as the sky
 & the whisper grew as large as a cloud...

tradition whispers there is bird in the sky as blue as the sky
  & the whisper grew as large as a cloud

Chestnut Blossoms: Poems in the Present Dense

   1

the first time I've noticed
chestnut blossoms, the cone of orange-yellow
 there ought to be a poem
which covers everything
.

flowers of mud
or flowers in the muddle
weave my melancholy existence
or failing to be romantic
would mean what?
a kind of phantom lethargy
 in this rough age and day
where every other person's
hopeless inversion is dialectical
 (to catch a thief of substance itself )
trying to insure better health care
or educate children
futures for art's security
dances like a forest on the air
thick with our signals
seeming self-canceling charities
petals of sub-atomic
particles not so much fallout
and Being Fallen
through the basal ganglia
into the shoe box of death's obscenity
rattled for the tell-tale
heart in the earth's watch
of consequent snails
so much whiter for the wind
whipping the red hair
over bare shoulders
 or barren shoulders giving
rise to obvious thoughts
 (like what?)

2
 this writing which is similar to reading
living forms blossom and wither
in the midst of 60 million refugees
barely 1 % of the quota
taken in, given shelter
to remain a multikulti entity
riding on the back of Europa
I sit in the deluge of dim-witted lies
and fake new free for alls
flavor of the moment, kielbasa-head, bald
(in this writing which is similar to reading
 the reader must make the poem)
another day, another dullard
pulled up in that series of mercantile
mercedes got the bends of me
cotton candy religions in the schools
criminalist trigger happy TV
where the spoils of glamor cover
over the spills of oil we in scattered unions
gather to podcast political outrage
once in a blue moon
 (how to get the reader to write the poem,
to take their authorship seriously)
Yes, your life must become art
so there is nothing to buy
 Prehistoric flashbacks
track mystery up the mountain
 Yes, your life must become art
so there is nothing to buy
and everything to live for
Look at the flowers, hear the sirens,
mangia the rough cloud carrier of
Post-delirium demons
This is seriously similar to living
 writing from ethereal unpredictable spaces
seeming voices
as they flit by, the ears surprised
hearing it all nevertheless
it is that for which they alone exist
& this is your life
whether dream zone or full corpus
this is your life
riding the arc of full air

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
after all, you have to wonder, why, 
since the medium seems to be the message, 
& all instruments and intention exhausted 
(serialism = the exhaustion of all combinations = I-Ching), 
the insistent thing happens, anyway, 
no matter what you say about it

________________
___________________________/

 “Whereas a ‘sound’ was really within the midst of this intense engagement with everything: with all the noise that you’ve ever heard, you struggle somehow to make a difference, so to speak, within that noise. And that difference isn’t necessarily about you as an individual, it’s much more simply about trying to augment and to differentiate what’s around you. And that’s what a sound is for me.”
  -- Fred Moten