Rest in Poetry & Remain in Light: Alice Notley (1945-2025)

   Below you will find a poem that Alice Notley sent to me a few years ago when I was in the process of gathering material for a new journal that never got past experimental stagings. For the moment, I'm too shattered to say anything more than to put these few momentoes together. One of the poets I've read my whole lifetime and who always surprised and often confused me and tested every known and unknown boundary (see poem below for instance). You have to hear one of her poetry recitals from the last few years to get the whole picture of how she bridged into shamanism and declaimed verses with true bardic intensity and bubbling cauldron of mind. In our correspondence we talked a lot about dreams, lucid dreams, premonitions and clairvoyance as poetic resource. 

Many will miss her and my condolences to Anselm & Edmund Berrigan and the extended family. 

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Notley

          You are          human                   Shat-
        in-between bodies of                tered Dawn
       this life. All the files seem to be ruptured, good. The
      light, magenta and yellow won't cohere I can't remember
   . . . the name of what I was calling these almost unstable isles
                        previously, sometimes cubicles, floating but
                        there are no strict geometric forms, here in
                       reality. Or lines of swastikas or star shapes
                      are you washed in the blood enough yet. You great
                     big beautiful doll, faceless and free. Accusations tre
                  mble, maybe you face fuckup. In transition winds
               where cubicle crumbles. I know some people are dying. I break off
           pieces. The room doesn't have to beg you not to leave it expands to
        be big enough for your souls expands within and keeps
       'we want you to know us a                                       going
       gain' is being said. You nev
      er know who you'll bump in
     to the white doves coo and crows
       caw soft as
         ghost caws
                                                                                calling me
                   I                                                        what you all
               call here                                            made. You defend it
            beckoning                                         beyond a medical report
           with air. How                                      because you like waking
           are you Pretty.                                 up, really. Another of lily
      Words don't sti                                   he said Lily died last night
       ck together she be                          did he I didn't write it down
    speaks somehow say                             I can touch your centur
   ing. We can float. I once                             ies here in an instant
  dreamed I flew with Uncle                            holding it's the holdin
 Taylor high high above the earth                      g that makes us souls
higher than an airplane or any                        O you're a strange god
thing next to wispy clouds would                   I go there still into the
you like to see my heart? Is it                       beloved action. Have you
broken she says. It stopped bleed               always? I don't know. I
 ing. Be that I can carry and now I'm         don't know if anything stops
  Hold the holder the gravity that             Human suffering, though, is
 is known as the expanse of Death.          only one example of the
 I am carrying you to freedom                    cosmos. Everyone has al
  Are you the old man? I am the good          ways been free but a
 The part they don't get, is how it is d           fraid to choose freedom
  on't understand. Because from                   I hold you free you keep
    Point Zero there are no Ways.                  choosing the pressure of
    Like music can be any way. I               bodies. I chose as a human
      know she says Keep me com           to slip through the micro-hole
     fortable. I'm trying. You'll ne             into the other mode I am as
    ver leave. I always come back.      everywhere. It is a beautiful day
  Where will your head be. I have       in the lace. grace palace. Your
  heads everywhere. And me? You'll    face is pretty and shining again
  sort of have them everywhere too.         (real words)

-- Alice Notley

        

        Here's Alice reading from the book she gave to me in Paris in 2017 (picture below)

https://alicenotley.bandcamp.com/album/alice-notley-live-in-seattle 

  This is a link to a whittled down version of the 2017 interview I did with Alice and which was produced by Marjorie Van Halteren.The longer discussion is worth hearing and I will try to post that as soon as I find it in my archives. But I think it's 3 hours!

https://exchange.prx.org/pieces/316593?m=false 

 "What we need to do is explain to people that difficulty isn’t difficult."

               -- from the Paris Review interview 2024 

 https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/8263/the-art-of-poetry-no-116-alice-notley

 

Photo by Marjorie Van Halteren

 

The Bridge of Many Shapes: Release Notes

 Work in Progress. This post will be updated as the CD goes to press

 

 The Bridge of Many Shapes 

(CD and Digital Release on Mahorka, June 2025)

The idea for the title came among many dream phrases on the night of November 11, 2024

"crossing the bridge of many shapes, we will meet again, when the months grow longer, discussions going on for weeks, the Hindu and the Muslim boys carry baskets of corn, any basic coverage is universal, the girl child leads an elephant, her hand held by the elephants trunk, in her other hand five roses, there is a kind of sheep with cobalt stripes, the mango pit once peeled turns out to be an almond"

  This album is a dreaming of a Trans-Eurasian Balkan psycho-archeology by means of sound.  Dreaming is meant here in terms of the songlines of Aboriginal Australians who while walking sing the tribal ancestor creature's dreaming into the geography of their own activity, communing with landscape, ghosts, spirit animals. This is an act of decolonization and a dissolving of the present moment and an entry into oneiric antiquity, an imaginary return to and travels within the homeland of my ancestors once adrift in the Cucuteni-Trypillian corridor. A shamanic journey in sound back through the mirror of the earth. 

 The aboriginal dreaming of the totemic spirit of the land however is not enough. My ancestors removed themselves from the corridor of Ukraine, Moldavia and Romania over a century ago, moving to the USA, while now my own soul has drifted back across the ocean, again inside the strange and weathered boat of my own body, searching out harbors. In this respect, I have been able to put wind in my sails and oars into the waters via the inspiration of two Carribean authors whose works trace the double life they led as people of Africa and people of the Americas. Kamu Braithwaite who charts inside his body of work the shared border of two continents ripped apart by geological time and yet experienced from both sides, after his people were forcibly carried from Africa to Barbados. While his life took shape on a distant island far from Africa his ancestral story comes from afar to an island that appears to him like a boat sailing not only ocean but dreamtime cosmos. 

Guyanese writer Wilson Harris also traces an awesome asymmetry, living in many places and displaced from many, wandering in a body tossed by chance operations and historical impositions. "Mind has ancient sorrow it does not understand, fabrics of sorrow that reach through rational experience, Mind has sadness, joy, tragedy, comedy, interlaced in indescribable ways, Mind has vestiges of everything as it longs to return to the end and the beginning of things. It longs to return to a ground of truth, in which justice lives beyond all reasoning, absolute barriers. Mind longs to return in sacred ships, to the promise of wholeness on a distant shore which is still there when an age collapses. There is a ladder between the shore of earth and the Artist's painting. We are astonished to see there a curious solidity to grief painted in solid lines, a nervous solidity to joy..."   -- from The Ghost of Memory

 Among the Kogi people there is said to be a series of energy line between sacred places of resource and ritual in their seasonal life cycle. They too inspire me in the concept of an Eastern European and Balkan sense of songlines. See the bibliography for more in depth descriptions. Thanks for reading and listening to The Bridge of Many Shapes and thanks to Mahorka for making the CD happen 

 

Bibliography

 -- On the Kogi concept of dark energy pulsation threads -- Aluna -- an Ecological Warning by the Kogi People https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftFbCwJfs1I&ab_channel=Aluna-TheMovie

-- Spinal Catastrophism by Thomas Moynihan

-- In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

 -- Songlines by Bruce Chatwin

-- That one poem by Kamu Braithwaite that keeps writing itself

-- The Palace of the Peacock by Wilson Harris

-- Marija Gimbutas  https://www.academia.edu/31735390/The_Goddess_and_Marija_Gimbutas

 

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucuteni%E2%80%93Trypillia_culture 

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%87atalh%C3%B6y%C3%BCk

 

 

  The culture of the Peoples of the Sea is a flux interrupted by rhythms which attempt to silence the noises with which their own social formation interrupts the discourse of Nature. . . . The cultural discourse of the Peoples of the Sea attempts … to neutralize violence and to refer society to the transhistorical codes of Nature..  The culture of the Peoples of the Sea expresses the desire to sublimate social violence through referring itself to a space that can only be intuited through the poetic, since it always puts forth an area of chaos. In this paradoxical space, in which one has the illusion of experiencing a totality, there appear to be no repressions or contradictions; there is no desire other than that of maintaining oneself within the limits of this zone for the longest possible time, in free orbit, beyond imprisonment or liberty.

—THE REPEATING ISLAND: THE CARIBBEAN AND THE POSTMODERN PERSPECTIVE

-- Kamu Braithwaite 

 

The Plane Tree Anamnesis Magic Trick, May 11

 

    May 11

 

 Every day I go to the park I touch the trunk of the large plane tree standing just inside the entry gates. I believe the tree is over 300 years old because it's big enough to sense by the girth -- perhaps 20 or more average sized adult humans can fit within the column of the trunk -- and maybe I even read somewhere that it is that old. By placing my palms on this tree I am connecting not only with the tree but with the cosmos. The tree is like a medium. I connect to the cosmos via the tree as a ritual confirmation that goes in two directions. Of remembering and forgetting. My need to re-connect is a an act of anamnesis. My amnesia stems from the fact that while I am away from this tree (or any tree, since I dwell in a brick apartment building) I forget my connection to the wider universe as I become concerned with all those details that cluster around my life and cling to this part of my consciousness associated with my individuality, namely my ego. During my daily and nightly life my consciousness steadily drifts away, forgets the cosmic tree that links me to my actual ancestry among all beings living and even those who seem non-living and motionless or whose motion is not apparent to only 5 senses although I have witnessed in extraordinary moments that rocks do breath and participate in some cosmic intimacy I need other mediums to allow me to access. By touching the tree at least, I recover momentarily what gradually gets lost on my journey back to the building and up the stairs into the room with the table, books, instruments and computers. This writing is a special moment where the tree is commemorated because while the internet can take me many places the cosmic tree becomes tacit and/or I do not heed it directly. Even if that tree is taller than any buildings. The tree builds the air along with the oceans. The tree generates its own sky, its layered spheres and surrounds itself with its own canopy, its own dome, its heaven. It maintains its quiet conversation with its sacred extended family and is perhaps unforgetting and at least for this moment unforgotten.

 

 

 

Light sculpts the day before eyes

 

   May 10

 

 music has always been about listening

and maybe not wanting to hear yourself think

a living suspension of disbelief in the platonic ego

even aristotle came closer to spirit through phusis

and embodied idea now come to us as vibration

in the so-called language of the birds

and the serpents -- but whatever comes through

human language now is suspicious

our systems have been tainted and compromised

it's poetry not god that died

 

  -----

 

Portrait of the Heron's Eye

  ---------------

 

     "If thoughts are alive and if that which lives thinks, then perhaps the living world is enchanted. What I mean is that the world beyond the human is not a meaningless one made meaningful by humans. Rather, mean-ings—means-ends relations, strivings, purposes, telos, intentions, functions and significance—emerge in a world of living thoughts beyond the human in ways that are not fully exhausted by our all-too-human attempts to define and control these. More precisely, the forests around Ávila are animate. That is, these forests house other emergent loci of mean-ings, ones that do not necessarily revolve around, or originate from, humans. This is what I’m getting at when I say that forests think. It is to an examination of such thoughts that this anthropology beyond the human now turns

       -- Eduardo Kohn

 

 

Henri Michaux and the Cartesian Dose, DMT and the chemistry of Intolerance

 

  Apropos a certain well-known author's (and former FB contact's) adverse reaction to the view that Michaux never really did a heroic dose, nor ever had any really profound "trip" that would constitute visionary experience -- & that maybe the microdosing Cartesian control freaking artist Michaux only dabbled, overly concerned with potential madness, worried about his ego retention, rather than finding the fourfold of Blake, prefered to tease and to tantalize his own intellect and entertain the paranoiac Western bias that insists on industrial and technological control of the free winds of consciousness ---- long breath pause------  I found this rather conducive and fair minded account (link below) of the psychonautical crisis in hypercapitalistic anthropocene to be quite relatable. 

 

 Very sorry Mister David Toop, I have admired some of your rambulous scripsi but this time you stumbled into a puzzling dismissive and thoughtless arrogance which I had imagined you were capable of -- a  reflective incapacity that seems quite out of character politique or maybe we got played by the algobots --- but you deleted my (much milder) comments and blocked me on FB, wow....

 

 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10236947/

 

"Michaux speculates about a strongly hierarchized technocratic political future in which psychedelics will have become part of the curriculum for training an elite destined to govern by moving the masses with carefully administered doses of charisma.

 

"How can this distinctly authoritarian vision of the future be reconciled with my earlier claim that Michaux's drug writing inaugurates a “molecular” conception of politics according to which psychedelics tend to undo organized political authoritarianism? Like many artists and intellectuals preoccupied with their own creative activities, Michaux had what might be described as solipsistic or even, in his case, autistic tendencies: “Evil is other people's rhythm,” he wrote in 1949 (Michaux, 2001; p. 342, italics original). When he imagines the possible advantage which psychedelics might give to the leaders of a hierarchical technocratic state of the future, he, like some of today's oligarchs, pharma entrepreneurs, and “psychedelic pundits” (Devenot et al., 2022) and some of their critics, does not pause to consider that others with very different political viewpoints starting from much less privileged positions could also enjoy a similar benefit but to different ends. He does not imagine, but his readers can, the effect of such a boost in political self-belief on the undermotivated and quietly despairing multitudes who might lack the basic self-esteem and self-confidence which, according to philosopher Axel Honneth's recognitive account of autonomy, for example, are essential proto-political conditions for the exercise of this and other aspects of political agency: “molecular” conditions, even though Honneth does not use this term (Honneth and Anderson, 2005). There is good reason to believe that without quite being above the threshold at which they might be diagnosed as clinically depressed, a sizeable proportion of the world's downtrodden lack the motivational means and self-belief to engage in projects of individual or collective transformation: they are held captive by their situation, beaten down by economic hardship and social deprivation, caught up in flows of information, “guidance,” and “entertainment.” Reading against its grain, from the perspectives of radical democracy and recognitive theory outlined here, perforce briefly, Michaux's anticipation of a psychedelically assisted technocratic future suggests that there would be a considerable transformative benefit in the psychedelically assisted self-raising of their self-esteem and motivation by a despondent global majority, indeed that this would in effect consolidate the force of their political will..." 

 

 "There is one respect in which Michaux's drug works are politically problematic: as mentioned (Section 1.1), their orientation is resolutely toward Western technoscience and biomedicine and engages only very fleetingly with indigenous cultural practices. In this one respect, Michaux's approach is rather narrow and ignorant and I would not wish to suggest otherwise, though at least he is transparent about this orientation and, as the following section establishes, he is to some extent consistent or evenhanded in the sense that Christian mystical experience is also subordinated to scientific explanation and translated into secular naturalistic terms. Had he been questioned on this point, I can imagine him responding along these lines: however significant indigenous practices may be, like it or not, Western technoscience is now the hegemonic paradigm and unless indigenous experiences can be translated into its terms they are destined to remain of largely antiquarian interest. They can certainly be “recognized,” as many scholars in the psychedelic humanities tirelessly demand, but whether much follows concretely from earnestly felt rhetorical gestures in this direction is a decidedly moot point. Of course, Michaux's approach contrasts markedly with that of some scholars in the psychedelic humanities, who wish to envision a future that “respects the lineages of the knowledges that are essentially and not accidentally bundled with these plants—Indigenous and counterculture wisdoms” (Devenot et al., 2022). However, Michaux is less interested in “plant medicines” than in synthetic chemical forms... "

 

 After getting through this study, even into the fine details of the footnotes, I feel that the issues are divided along colonialist lines. Western conquistadors learned about some plant medicines of which indigenous people alone had gnosis. It still scares them that stuff eaten direct from the jungle belly ombelicos makes you smarter more energetic and healthier than those lost in the supermarket shopping. But the Europeans of the West are alone in this amnesia about mycelial intelligence. All throughout Eastern Europe, the Steppes and the Balkans the amanita wisdom is implicit. It does all depend on trees having natural growth cycles of forests... and it depends on you being there as an intelligence among other intelligent beings -- animal and vegetal -- in process --

 

 Michaux had a highly regulated and art intelligentsia approved experience and his books and drawings circulate in the bourgeois culture zones because it was all made palatable and mild mannered. Perhaps the cautionary tale of the Artaudian extreme precedes and conditions and curbs the enthusiasm. You can be a "creative" person having anxious existential encounters on the buzzed out edge and the yet the salvific normalizing western ego comes back and makes every thing safe and cozy. It is only clinical microdose experiment afterall not a the whole cloth experience of being taken to the roots of phusis and bios and maybe encountering G-d or even a revolutionary encounter with the cloud of unknowing

 

 

 

The First Day of the Rest (of Your Life) = new album and poem

 

https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/the-first-day-of-the-rest-of-your-life

https://soundcloud.com/jeff-gburek/first-day-of-the-rest-of-yr

something of a door remains

in the detritus of interpassage

and the poetry of non-existence

something of a broken door

that just won't close

(hang all that spiritual bypassing

that shusuma is without obstruction

right or wrong, we are never

outside the contraries

& no money makes any hipster

sacrosanct permanently)

something of a door

of its hinges remains ajar

other critters, creatures

features of the creation within us

hold the space open

this open space, for/by

the other of others,

absence itself

wherein potential as spirit

seeps or flows in thru cracks

when you see what is not there

within what is there

somewhat like what remains of your life

which you know nothing about

yet vaguely anticipate

dip toes into with caution

or walk through obliviously

when not practicing mindfulness

because, you know,

who has time for mindfulness

in the mindless lumea

after all, right?

we kind of do & kinda

don't while the whole earth

thinks and gives signs

 

 

"Don't get too involved

with the nightingale or the peacock.

One is all words

and the other all colors."

-- Rumi

Before the Anthropocene (a short poem) & some links to newish tracks on SoundCloud. Worlds beyond the Human (including the Human!)

https://soundcloud.com/jeff-gburek/ror-april-22-op-667-pt-1

 

 Before the Anthropocene

There were no names but things

Knew themselves

For what is true

In any name

Comes from the origin

Here now

Before even us

Departing

Without speaking

To one another

Conjoining

In the surrounding all

Tacit

 

 

 https://soundcloud.com/jeff-gburek/exalted-carrier-mix-4

 

    https://soundcloud.com/jeff-gburek/ror-april-22-mix-op-673-pt-2

 

 

     Link below to an essential documentary about faith, healing, rituals, sacred spaces, the celestial and the earthly mothers -- for those who do Italian or have some intuition about gestures and contexts -- icons, indices and symbols -- songs -- there is something you can pick up with the attuned third eye and ear --  

un documentario di Luigi Di Gianni   

"La Madonna in cielo la "matre" in terra"   

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8r4g9ffGvc

 

 "Dreams too are part of the empirical, and they are a kind of real. 

They grow out of and work
on the world, and learning to be attuned to their special logics and their fragile
forms of efficacy helps reveal something about the world beyond the human."

-- Eduardo Kohn