____OURS ARE ONLY LIVING TEMPLES___ THREE POEMS FOR DAVID MELTZER

Art Work by Kari Davis

well, David, this is going nowhere, your being gone, I mean, suppose you knew that

so I go back to the tree upended in heavenly city Earth,
the forests again blazing through the very nerves I bet you hear the crackle

Bernie Krause nearly lost the catalogue of sounds of species being lost through

negative science maybe mere negligence human too, so many wild exponential curves

heading now back am I to kether through da'at secret garden pertugio back of helter

skelter slide to the origins of all poetry in say-what say-da'at, lights a candle

for whose name comes up in the wheel of words within wheels of worlds

mixoldelic micromashups my world according to the spell check bee buzzes

old buzzards, felt-thought of Joseph Beuys, sculptural etiolates of buy-buy-culture,

even these words these tinders of tinsel old tannenbaums fizzle but news arrives

in the form of black-holes which are everywhere now in all particles

so that people show up daily and nightly in my mind oh wait you there too

green tara green tea green twilight nautical eye-brite the jolly-green giant

the back-in-the-jeans talk of days by-gone running forward in sun's froggy tongue

slapping out a long string of coronal ejection mass to heal or at least clear the fog

                       12/31/2018

*
shortly after learning about David Meltzer's passing in 2016, confirming the news, I went to his website and in the guest book wrote the following poem:

when I was a poet.
David Meltzer was 1 too.
rarely missing a skipped back-beat trained the M vein
long into forgotten, the D
shyly peacock'd known things in clouds of unknowing
nicholas berdayaev kopernickus tesla avadanta mandala
he took the BART for the price of a hardback kabbalah +
I paid him forward, even then now
double nickels of your diamond eyes, old mole.
taint wise rivers with your grizzle
& virgin minds keep themselves
drunken therefrom

+ David had published an anthology of Kabbalistic writing called In the Secret Garden and it was used in his Kabbalah studies class & he sold copies to students at cost for 5 USD and that approximately what the ticket cost from Mission & 16th to Richmond station.

here's a link to the poem in the guest book:

http://www.meltzerville.com/cgi-bin/guestbook/guestbook.cgi?start_number=10

**

Here's a poem by David Meltzer that I turned via looping pedal into a song...
https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/track/keep-night-company-by-david-meltzer

***

OURS ARE ONLY LIVING TEMPLES
(for D.M.)

One infant frowne
down the fair air of heaven
ours alone the living temples
alone ours they them us
one infant grown
into stone stamina
gone down river
to get the stem tasted,
once, twice, the charm (that is abyss-baptismal)
thrown between fast
radio burst channels'
signal Hermes of the trellis
of the Milky Waves
brought ashore for
Amrta's churning.
Tether not there hoofs,
the moon peals, but make wine of morning light
rays bequeath rays bereaved,
light shit dawn.
Marvel and open wide:
those columns
have withstood the night
those columns
now withstand the day
however they did so
built up bent slightly inward.
Many the paths in the air Graves' bird
quoted, dipping, swerving.
Light & darkness indifferent
woven in the raven's wing.
The Sufi knows not the path of the Sufi,
not in the ways of men nor women, the proven,
neither in following nor in transgressing.
The artists concern with society
brittle, marginal, personal, tribal
if spiritual accidental
there is no cure for it
you are not bipolar, not exactly mad,
& yet pretension makes the artist political, the deadline
hath spoken, the other river above the human
beckons, not simply Cro Magnon river
drowns the Neanderthal
Homo Sapiens asphyxiates the former
etc through our memory of pike spike & strange fruit
weeps
or whips with the willow,
the light & darkness
never noticed any of it
barely know themselves but how
the eye sorts them out:
ours truly ours
alone the living temple,
with the river, some invisible, above it,
sanctum sanctorum
is the method of,
the horns of, depiction

I have reached the speed limit of life humain
and hope to cruise for a fuse
more years

All my footnotes, for you, infinite reader.
 
Jan. 6, 2017

Cornelius Cardew's Treatise: Encounters at the Horizon of Absolute Uncertainty

For those of you who wonder what a graphic score might be, at it's most enigmatic, this is perhaps the emblem and icon of graphic score indeterminacy. 193 pages, no instructions. Author: Cornelius Cardew. This score formed the spine of my weekly activities one day a week from some time in September 2018 until just recently. This post is here to tell you about it.

 My evolving study of, and work with Cornelius Cardew's graphic score, Treatise, is best thought of as an attempt to "sound" the work, in the double sense of measure the depth, make sound and sense of the thing. Since it's evolved over the last 6 months as a workshop at Kołorking Muzyczny, Poznan, I've decided to present the ideas in the form of a journal, a bit fictive, after the fact, but incidental enough to present ideas and reflections that occur day by day, in layers, over time and without formal conclusions and ever with an ellipsis ...
(for introductory materials please see the links at bottom)

Here is one on my own earliest interpretations of a 20 pages stretch, played on acoustic guitar.

https://soundcloud.com/jeff-gburek/contemplating-20-pages-oct-3

 The extremely subversive nature of Cardew's score "Treatise" is such that it transforms the performer into a composer. It even transforms the self-cosvious improvisor into a composer. After contemplating the score long enough before playing and/or keeping the score before me while playing, I experience that my improvisations are more intentional, achieve greater clarity and precision, in short, Treatise has allowed me to access the composed-ness of my improvisations, their unconscious perhaps, the pages became an invisible partner in the work.

 "Bear in mind that parts of the score may be devoid of direct musical relevance."
- Cornelius Cardew, Treatise Handbook

           Laying all 193 pages of it out on the floor...
one day, October 8 --

10.08.2018, in fact

   I walk through the entire range of gestures and eventually find patterns, inversions, mirrors, fun-house palindromes, and other periodic symbols that show me the composition cleverly respects certain traditions of form and-- despite the fact that it seems to want to have consigned all that to the dust-bin of history -- it's not as random a sprawl as one first imagines it to be. That there just might be a mysterious coherence lurking beyond all these seemingly centrifugal trajectories. Like a flow of white lava...

  And it creates gently and silently a sense that the freedom it offers also comes with the responsibility for the choices one will make during one's interpretations. This makes it a unique score, and ethical statement, one more stubborn, standing apart more radically, than almost any others, including his own earlier and later works... although I should add here a caveat that I cannot class myself as an Cardew expert, not exactly, and if anything, I am innocent, ignorant, lacking presumptions when I stand before such an enigmatic planet like Treatise. And yet I have entered more deeply into a relationship with time and try to even go further in writing about it here. The score is in fact an extreme challenge to an individual and the society at large since the work depends on introspection and a will to change.

  An aspect of Treatise that confounds expectation and transcends most standards for music since music had started to be recorded: there can be no definitive version and even if some people find they prefer, for example the "Cardew Trio's" youtube version (they never specified exactly what pages they played) there's nothing within the score that suggests the "intention" of the composer is being more strictly "obeyed" -- giving a strange twist to Boulez' neutral, objective idea of interpretation  "just what the score says," as the Dragnet detective insists, just the facts, maam but the "facts" in Cardew's Treatise are so many traces that lead only back to the person who looks at it carefully) . So, while there are enough literal notes written out in most of Cage's pieces for people to argue about the best placement or accent or dynamic, in Treatise, there's none of this. It's generative of a more absolute difference with identity itself, more firmly following the vector of time and becoming, approaching infinity, radically other. But one has to do something in order to make a difference...

Throughout most of October I will play/create various segments on the piano or guitar and stare at the pages until a revelation comes drifting through the ether or a more urgent desire but I turn the desire back, train the attention on the score and imagine these as brain-waves, absolute waves. People have been coming and going over the weeks. (Their comings and goings are part of the score, I start to imagine). I have heard people ask repeatedly how on earth do we determine the tempo of any reading, so that all players will be at the same point in the timeline. It was in response to this very question that I realized there is no indication that you must read in a linear manner and/or that linearity of reading is dependent of your culture of origin. While most people read western music right to left like they read their novels and news papers, other people go the opposite way or up and down, other people scroll. Why should I not feel free to allow the eye to wander over pages of Treatise as one does a painting or a natural landscape, for example? And interact with the same fidelity of action. An electronic rendering of the piece would only be a recording. The alterity of the score is never undermined. And yet, there is the thing, the score, that resists, that tests what you say about it remaining in the realm of that uncanny silence...

     11/21/2018
 this week is a special edition in which I will try to talk about why timing is both so important but also irrelevant as determining parameter based on some observations I've made, partly communicated to Fryderyk Szulgit who might never come again ;)
   because one does not really need to read left to right
one does not need to treat Treatise as a traditional score leading the performer
by the nose from one sound to another and there is no reason to assume every line has to correspond to an action you play on your instruments (each line is
1) a potential path for another player (collective possibility of enaction) or another sound source (laminal reality, multiple dimensions: a sound as background that you "tune into")
2) a path for you to play when you want to use that energy directing sign
3) up for revisiting if you wish to and as soon as you wish to

 Reading Treatise out loud...

    I suggest that each page is a form feeling that represents an imagination of a music one must enter into, as if walking into a landscape with one's own sound.  I ask people to narrate what they see when looking at several pages. I record their voices as they speak about the score.

  Dominika Szelazek observed there was "a walk with two characters represented by two lines" converging then departing, in a squabble, then they entered into something like a castle (zamek, she called it, in Polish) which is also the name of the art museum in the old castle across the street, a kind of art "destination" for some and for some others like Kafka's castle which one never can approach. Well, you can read the score as you like, tell your story in your own sounds, your own words... 

I moved to working with the prepared piano. Here's the culminating video of the sequence.
   https://youtu.be/V8mnspeDnfE

Only a few moments before, the mood I discovered on electric guitar was radically quieter.
   https://youtu.be/lIRvQJ5HADM


    11/28/2018
 I met someone at the Cardew/Treatise meeting who told me he couldn't understand what he was looking at... and the I remarked that occasionally "Treatise" is like walking in the mountains alone and I followed that through Wittgenstein, of the Tractatus, which Tilbury points to in his own essay about Cardew, but I used the reference to Wittgenstein to say that we walk through the silence of primordial questions we must pass over in silence. (Treatise, the graphic score, only makes sense the way nature makes sense: by fitting together the way it does even when we don't understand it -- by building a relation to the unrelatable, the raw physicality of nature is available to us, the earth even has form of intelligence, just as Treatise. there is a undercurrent of Taoism in Cardew's work and it is perhaps in Treatise the best expressed. Maybe Treatise is a kind of late 20th century Taoist scripture or every performance a mystical Tao scultpure, blown apart like sand? Well, that's a leap. But we feel forms through absences, the memory of forms, transmitted by mediation of the abyss. Every lack of reference is being informed (if one is calm) by all the senses. We see vistas, horizons, convergences, structures, geometries. Even the forest is a gapped space, a scale of scales, fanning out in all directions, will-nilly, in secret underground family connections, every line a potential crossroads in a totemic geography. Our freedom to work in that space depends on our ability to sense, sensually, the forms vacillating between, flickering between states formed even by the way we breathe and think, so we slowly bleed forward through time into the future. Treatise is a bit like walking through an abstract forest or the forest as if it's abstract. They fractalize in frictions against one another, these two states (something/nothing). One relates to Cardew's Treatise in much the same way we all probably do when wandering the woods, with some peace, excitement, calm, some trepidation -- we listen and use all our sensory fields, weave ourselves through "the wildnerness we are" (Marcella Durand). And trying to read and play treatise has been for me  a surrogate for the wandering in unknown landscapes, deserts, outbacks, forests, mountains, where each decisions brings me to the next revelation of nature's creation in the vast arc of time. And this also seems to me on par with the liquidity I have been contemplating while building the sound palette for the Zygmunt Bauman memorial composition: a connection weaves together Treatise, fluid mechanics, Heraclitus, Paul Klee and Bauman also -- and you, the reader, following perhaps up to this moment, as I acknowledge with that regard, for you are with me always, even in your absence, as memory, as flesh. My partner in these travels.

There will be more audio upcoming. Follow me on my soundcloud sites:
 https://soundcloud.com/jeff-gburek
https://soundcloud.com/automatopoeia

 "Bear in mind that parts of the score may be devoid of direct musical relevance."
- Cornelius Cardew, Treatise Handbook

The Young Person's Guide to Treatise
http://www.spiralcage.com/improvMeeting/treatise.html

 A very fine essay about Cardew and Treatise
by British pianist John Tilbury

http://www.users.waitrose.com/%7echobbs/tilburycardew.html

Full Treatise Score pdf 
 https://monoskop.org/File:Cardew_Cornelius_Treatise_1967.pdf

The Hum Blog essay on Treatise
 https://blogthehum.wordpress.com/2016/02/29/cornelius-cardews-treatise-1963-67/

Pink Smog

there is a pink fog rolling the tolls to the twilight of the idols
the glow in the lamps electric sallow, jaundice, mysterious
draped in vapors, cigarette smoke, like a club in Casablanca
happy transform of the daily life into the cinema noir
the nightclub of our dreams, choke-cherry-cheeked
the fingers of the leafless trees arthritis bent clawing sky
oh melancholy brooding and dove-shiver under covers
telling the bed-time story the lullaby and blue fumes
raindrops jewel the brims of hats, the rose-water,
tinkles the air with bells of jingle and rosary bead crystals
the day that heaven opened upon the shepherds
two, no three, one hidden in the murky pallor
three kings in a whisky jar clearly uncorked, lightening
strikes, fiat lux, tesla-coils, hacked cosmos sputter
those air-planes roaring purely powerfully, three cheers
for the red, white and pink flamingo feathers
our world standing on one skinny leg flying flags
over our great plastic reefs & space junk basins
now comes the hour before dark, lets drink our tea
stirred by the stolen tcheringas and clove sticks
lets roll out the steel rails for all to see the flower of power
let's bask in the revolutions mudless freedom to run
ice rings around the earth, show our lotus faces
play the gods whose redirected light we've almost
grown to feel we humanist exceptionalists believe we really own
this artificial light our artificial dark our labor, alien, alone

Port Cigacice, September, 2018

Cigacice [t͡ɕiɡaˈt͡ɕit͡sɛ] (German: Tschicherzig) is a village in the administrative district of Gmina Sulechów, within Zielona Góra County, Lubusz Voivodeship, in western Poland.^[1] It lies approximately 6 kilometres (4 mi) south of Sulechów and 13 km (8 mi) north-east of Zielona Góra. 

The village on the banks of the Oder River was the scene of one of the final battles of WWII.

These days there is a peaceful recreational boating culture, outdoor restaurants, and I played a concert on a ship moored there in the channel. At night in the twilight between summer and autumn I would listen to the boat creak and bubbles rise and acorns falling on distant metal roofs

 & that something extra of voice that summons the poems

      1
  it was a chilly night dawning
where the sun sinking bubbles
finally over the waters' ripple
nothing ever moves but the waves
& there seems no sense  in estimations
overstepping the undulations
the people sense what they will
& the light falls where it may
 

    2

 water hears everything
that galleon at the bottom
sings the science of the loom
thread-barren boundaries
riddled molecules
ringed ever the dance,
whatever spins the tenda
known inside the mind's
silence beckoning
the world's shut mouth:
that is the faith saying:
I believe nothing
in particular, I await
that which in music
makes silence greater
which the godless alone
waking to their own
disquiet fathom
greater than faith
and worthy of
further silence still
 

  3

water hears you

again the un-listening
shimmer with arrogance
and curse the deception
that matter has nor ears
nor reason yet frozen
in the fluid flux
rain will scatter as
petals of indifference
that float the hereunder
pull of force truth
begs ever to differ
by every plangency
the secret washer
of the souls soothing
off cooling the passion
assuring the distance
remains the same
between us

 
  4

it was a blinding and yet so un-blinding light
to be drawn beyond the boundaries of one's own language/ yet reside in none
-- you cannot beg to offer blindness
"there won't be any war with a face, I'm afraid"
said Kashyat, speaking to the lamp
by way of advance complaint, retrograde
 we have in common those things which people see not
yet no concord about the unseen
you may have been Papusza, grandamme
mother of my grammar
born within the wary
yet never alarmed

   5 

a head of flame
on the verge of the water
 this campfire
reflected in the stir-less burden of mist
weaving multiple
horizons into one, clear stench
like the small bear
matted fur, sweat & shit,
all inverted, rises
on the horizon then arches
like the old bear mother
and the river between the wars
shines like a beacon
in the eyes of the gypsy, alone
haunted and waiting:
these things appear
linked, unique
the head of the flame out there
on the German side
like a drop of water
inverted, sinks
upon a stem, a neck
the tear-drop of the gourd
and sputters out with steam
droplets, fireworks
and the lute or the oud, yes
the oud, waves, summons,
my oud now like a barque
emerges and floats
in search of strings
seeking tether insubstantial
 to stars, the tones
the 9 spirits

 6

the more stars one sees the more the light becomes a cloud


 fine

 

After Afternoon Musings & Other Poems

Near Sofia, Bulgaria

A sequence of poems written after a poem by Charles Whittaker & some Other Poems 

Afternoon Musings
by Charles Whittaker

On a projected
Reality—the sensible—
I can’t take credit for—

What makes it so
Funny—what fictitious power
Dreamt it up,
As in a time without
Beginning or end? As I am
Sensible, too, I wonder
About my place
In it, how subject to death,
I know nothing but panic
At loss of the literal,
While yet preserving something
Of the dreamer in me.

Sofia, Bulgaria, Train Station

After Afternoon Musings 

by Jeff Gburek

they go drifting

ahead of us, leaves
glowing yellow,
pushed by air
force of a fan
held in the gloved
hands of orange-clad
workers with head-
phones, silencers,
clamped over
their ears as they
yell loudly perhaps
about the beauty
of those pesky

leaves, I think not.

*

in the ambulance whelping by

dread defibrillators

stoke the border-line

passagero -- why --

enough to know

emergency reasons

alone with silence,

skill & thought

saturated with necessity

unless truly entranced

the dancer leaps

a choreography

through light

merger of moth-wings

imaginary finer

than any particles,

soul-dust

of it's

inside

turned without

the brim

of the bell

chings

*

that tram, what number

ever again another

cycle passes

13

they go looking over

shoulders into

other people's

i-Phone screens

and I muse

Je est un autre

i-Phone

on the blink

*

heel spur

keeps me here

not Achilles

in the least

I ashore

myself

*

Fine


Other Poems, 2018

In Krakow grey against green oak, 

(August, 2018)

 In Krakow grey against green oak,

the leaves, the acorns bleed rain,

only under trees form puddles

 Someone is not ringing a bell physically

but the sound of the bell fits like wire rims

wound around my ears the bells

 The desk lamp belongs to whoever

turns it on thanking the light

clasping and cusping the invisible tassles

 The ripples in the pool never touch one another

The oud strings buzz like bottle brushes

Quill snaps to wood

 A poet being only a thing of legend

Charles Olson exaggerates the line length

encompassing the equator.

Saturn, that fat-man in the far sky

loops of ice fingering

Van Allen, his belt

Tying shoe-laces

one creates the Ouroboros.

My book of poems, an ant-hill, other people's poems,
 broken shoe-laces, etc

  Gypsy girls down to the wedding grounds

down the hill in high-heels

 red dresses meaning they're married

while greens means a something else

  The next image does not seem

 disconnected enough and skids wheel

over to the margin, drops off.

Voices of pleasure through the ventilator's

grill merge into foggy mirrors.

 The candle burns down and the flame

rises up but the flame follows

the candle-path also, the oddly

hardened pool of wax, perfectly
describing the oblivion

 The thoughts one has wearing

a hard-hat as if magically hats

conferred upon neurons

directing vectors or norms.

 A mint plant, roots and all,

trapped between door

& sweep, scented now.

How long will it be

until I know what to do?

Until I know how to bring the horizon

into my own heart

throwing a song my throat

melts, between teeth

Staring into the central-split

in the fox's skull,
Bulgarian canine bone...

So keres? Looking into the missing

eyes of the fox's skull,
the Bulgarian frame
for absent optics

still looking into me,

I fathom the blood journey:

the split, a joining seam,

fissure of a fearful symmetry

in everything we see.

--

Rough Timbre
(after looking into Whitman's Collected)

This wood torn down shrieks

chain-saws, raw entanglements, branches, limbs,

laws, logs, circular saw, mill-saw, hand-axe

the hacking and splitting machines, industrial

mulcher of stumps, snipped off

human ears amassed in a dumpster

missing concerts in galleries and pubs

the music of mangled forests

surrounds us with particle board

& the silence of birds no longer breeding

as the lynx paws the margins

of this once-our-world, searching the last pine

to talon-step into cloud-beyond, hunting

--space fathomless wide as deep--

clawing after celestial game

& lynx eyes like asteroids, fly

fade into dwarf stars mocking, googling

oogling, grazing, musing,

through the sockets of my poem, ever
 not so kindly upon the cities of hew-men

--

Gili

 the little song, the diamond

(from the Polish Romany of Papusza
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronis%C5%82awa_Wajs
Papusza writes at the end of Romany experience of the tabor culture
and her name in Romany means "doll" & she speaks
not of poems but of "songs out of the head of Papusza)

the forest girls are going into

the forest, the Gypsy girls

young & pretty 

as blackberries

going into the forest, 

the forest girls, singing

we would like to wear earrings

golden ones,

all the while their eyes go shining

like true gold

the teeth white like pearls

little Gypsy girls singing

pretty as blackberries

where are those earrings?

have those earrings flown

into the forest?

& will none of the city-smiths

here forge

earrings of gold?

will no one make

earrings for them?

they run, calling

 "great golden earrings!

great golden earrings!

where are you today"?

my black eyes are looking for them

in the darkness now

 & the fires almost gone

ah, wind don't blow

so fiercely... please, don't blow...

and still the songs grow

 ever more silent

while the forest

more silent

took their songs

off into the world

& brought them back again

 & whenever the oak leaf falls

on the girls' knees

the Gypsy girls

 with eyes of true gold

fall upon the oak's leaves

on their knees & they run, crying:

we will make of golden

oak-leaves

our earrings

shining like diamonds

and she makes the oaken leaves

their golden earrings

which they sing about

in turns

*