perfect, yes, but so what. so what? so what you say. after perfection so what you say. it comes down or up to this, for this, and me, for me, such an eye in this web of eyes, before the face, what and so come also quickly or prolonged. not anxiously, neccessarily but hinged with buts. okay, there is a perfect form, already, let's say. it's there. let's call it a landscape, what we can say, what i can say i love. she fills the horizon, is the horizon, and all that exists between this and that. i look at her and all is well, brilliant, perfect optimism. anything is possible. because there is this one being, this, that, her or me, the me silent and happy with that silence. she is perfect, lovely, form. why she? oh, because. because there is no psychology to explain it. because as so what? no, not yet. let's say i am like a gas and when i look at her i am contained in what i see. let's say i am fluid and when i look at her...you get the picture. the full smile of the room, the window open. combing hair, just in ear-shot, i can murmur, she can hear. birds whirl in the sky whirls the clouds and there are children, down there, courtyards across, screeching merrily, a radio, blast it, off. yes i love her, all is perfect. just dont think. but. when she goes away. what? also perfect. at least for a while. prolong it by discipline, meditation, then...eventually, then, no. don't break concentration. then, yes, you know, it happens. the question of form. my own. what or how it is. so-called personal history, itineraries autocircumscribed and perhaps vectors of will. i cannot graph them. there is a precedent, maybe even a "carreer"---the old meaning, as path. the form that it be unbroken. not a lie neccessarily, although a lie can come in, stand in, surrogate or sublimate the feeling of form, the "onward" etc. always against, working against, it seems, the other feeling of being not yet finished, unformed, formless, broken. there comes then yes almost a feeling of being broken or flawed. i emerge from being happy, contented, content, filled to being folded, failed, flawed, formless again. what? rather let me ask why. there cannot be two of me without an amputation of sorts, one i have not achieved. this is where the limitless atrocity of imagination stands in, surrogates, sublimates, cuns and connives. it is too easy to call it a lie because the lie was "truth once upon a time" even prospectively, in the future i mean because, well, time, dilating, contracting, blooming or withering on all sides of...what? doesn't matter yet...time is only of the essence in this perpetual prolificacy, this enduring flux in which even time is timed out occasionally or which my heart clocks not. try by breathing to correct it and that methodology can work, for a while. being connected to one's forms in the formlessness, faced with one's former faces and no i dont mind and even maybe love those faces that attach to my face, my or their half-faces, making the beast with two backs, two backs of the heads rather. an idea wherein one is what one wants to do and does and in doing so becomes the form of that. and also, this ends in so what. and you keep doing it until there comes a time you cannot. one says it doesnt even matter what it is one does and that even beyond politics is anyway going to get you in trouble eventually. formalism vs the atrocity of imagination. this also doesnt wash. the so-called society doesnt appear multi-disciplinary enough. one can't accept such limits. the fact i am writing music now is not recognized by musicians or those who listen to something they call music maybe. or it wont matter, suddenly (strangely enough), to the reader, to know this is music and not an attempt to warp the boards for noah's ark. enough. it is entriely personal and i say so what because i must say that this entirely personal declaration is also not wholly what it says it is. and from that point, i will go on. i must. because maybe i am wrong and in saying i am wrong maybe i am not. no, no. wrong again. tear it up.
July 29, 2009..............
Saturday, November 5, 2011
when as yet no poem had any title as such
when thursday is yet untainted by friday's determining owls
when the cylinder yet unpowdered stands gently at attention
when morning means one full day is yet unused
when friday is not yet fooled by saturday's orgy in sunday's dumb sublimity
when there is as yet no bed made for abraham's isaac to be slain in
and a word like pesach is no different than niedziela
before one knew what one was doing so well it could be taught like art or murder
before we tried to buy something that hadn't yet been invented nor ever will exist
when i could do anything to my body knowing it would be healed miraculously
before it lay in the dust forgetting knowing nothing was something,
despairing that knowing nothing is nothing
before i glanced over my own face and saw how boring i must seem
before yesterday's flower formed a shadow over your angel's left shoulder
and the third dream's bite lost it's tail in the sun
and woke beside you who is ever what i wanted more than any dream
before any of this i was sleeping and turned from your face
and saw the divine ridges of Java's central garden
these green upon green steps for an unmanly heaven
and turned back to see a valley of rusty roses stumbling into bloom
april 21, poznan
Insomnia! An automatic essay
INSOMNIA, AH!
an automatic essay...
wideness, emptiness, silence---how relativity is so relative that relating it to "my thinking" only arouses horror that its just me thinking it--the strange feeling of responsibility that I shouldn't wake up anyone to tell them because it does really seem abnormal, not a place you want to take someone, at least not on the first date---78+ hours was my longest stretch---how often it happens the first night i am sleeping with a woman no matter how nice it was and precisely despite the fact i am exhausted physically, there it is, the moon descends and sits on my shoulders, a lidless eye for a thoughtless head, a cyclops that sees and does not know why, the relativity of it so irrelevant because I sense how illusory time is itself---that all the vast arrays and observatories and particle accelerators seeking to measure time back to something forever "behind" even this "blind-thinking" eye I seem to be is really all too late---that the begining of anything is now but the future of it is hard to see without falling asleep again, that the future is hard to see without falling asleep again, that the future is really on the other side of the break from insomnia and that sleep is the problem, yes, sleep itself, it is so, so stupid, sleeping...and how yet i would like to sleep...i lay down, lights seem to flash across my closed eye-lids the images rise, faces, forms, visions, the voice of someone "inside" me---
then a memory of another insomniac bout, lasting merely 38 hours---these bouts are never the result of all-night parties or work-sessions, mind you---one wherein i discovered i had tinnittus: i was thoroughly convinced i heard a throbbing bass line from some reggae dub-upstart basement club in berlin where i was "living" and as i went from window to window several times (there were only two windows), it took me an hour to discover the source of the sound lay somehwere locked in a self-perpetuating, resonant loop of neural cilia, between the two inter-lacing fringes of these nerves which fire and vibrate in response to one another's messages---one fringe transmitting the air pressure pulsations fom the tympanum and the other receiving it, transmitting ito the cortex for deciphering of the brain, "data integration"---and how, in the case of tinnittus, the cause is an a random firing of a series of internally consistent messages that were, in this instance, extremely convincing, that had comepletely convinced me that " i was correct" in assuming there was an outward source for this sound... when in fact, to my horror, it was a bundle of errors, a sickness, a bundle of errors that was me, my body, this perceptual apparatus, this empty-chambered gun in a russian roulette of consciousness, seeking desperately to ground its charge in a some external objects...
to be at least as accurate about this "ear business" as i can possibly be: the inner ear recieves vibrations, transmits them further into the cortex: the cortex administers a re-send, a message back across the same path, a message indicating the length of the vibration, to verify the vibration or to measure it, let's say, against what is still being transmited from the tympanum into the inner ear. the result is that both of these nerve fringes vibrate together, resonate, the oscillation frequency being thusly coded (mnemotechnics), so that those of us who have learned the divisions of the code, can distinguish different levels of pitch and other sound qualities. in the case of tinnittus, the message comes only from the inside, and the outter fringe of nerves is stimulated and vibrates, this vibration is recieved in the tympanum: the illusion is that there is a "sound".
add here citations from zarathustra...
insomnia, classically: how often it happens when i am in love or think i am in love or thinking i wish i were in love or that i wasn't...how often it happens sleeping next to someone i think i no longer love because if i were awake and in love and could stir the slumbering beloved insomia would be slain and slaked by fucking...how it "dawns" on me occasionally that i have been awake too long and that i live in fear of the insomnia begining again, this endless road stretching out in front of me without drama, without any causation that does not seem prone to delusional thought, that threatens me with infinity even while i convince myself it will surely come to an end, sooner or later, this highway filled with transport vehicles 24/24...pick your own prefered symbol of monotony...
insomnia before the internet was an entiely different love affair...because the net is always, seemingly, awake, robotically at the ready, there is almost always, seemingly, someone else awake and how a chat-session, with a known or unknown other, restores discursive and rational normalcy, creates an exchange, a breathing that becomes unconscious again, a heart that does its job without being monitored...for when i am truly alone, unsleeping, i am become hyper-aware of my own body's functions and begin to travel inside the layers or interfaces of my being.
cage's experience in the anechoic chamber also seemed to be divided almost mystically into extreme frequencies, one the "high" brain funtioning and the "low" blood pulsation while anyone who was not a composer might register such an experience in a very different way, as I did once, noting how my visual field was simulataneously distorted by the small size of the anechoic room: tunnel-vision, the claustral feeling. insomnia does occur, like a very small chamber, a false vaccuum, and jar of artefice in which my consciousness appears but also paradoxically disappears into the other horizon, that of the wideness, the horizon itself appearing on the edge of a cup, on the window-sill, on the row of tenement, on the empty dark or cloudy starless city sky or murky moon or milky wherein i am waiting not-knowing i am waiting and if i am alone and i cannot read---and here, i enter the most frightening dimension of my own insomnia: the inability for consciousness to hold onto aything at all for any amount of time, whether because the pervasive lack of neuro-chemical presences destroys the short term memory and language cannot be made to cohere in my mind or because the insomnia is a hard, lonely diamond-like and jealous god who will not permit any distraction that will lead to drowsiness---for whatever reason, the words hang on the page like laundry on a line blowing in the breeze, each word a rag on a wire and how and why did they became strung together i cannot decipher. and there is no way to be entertained it seems. everything seems like flotsam and jetsam and even my own thoughts ride on the flow of...what?
it does not even flow...it just hangs, a cosmic limbo...
one would almost prefer a war be raging in the streets than this and this nihilistic thought haunts me only for a split-second because i know in this state how utterly impotent i am to bring about such a war and even if i knew mechanically how to bring it about would not be able to carry through the step-by-step instructions to assemble such a machine.
if i were to situate my senses in a quincunx, debatable as these divisions are from the point of view of science---knowing as "we" do, how closely interwoven the visual and auditory nerves are, for example, so that in effect one sense is always refering to data gathered by the other sense or, knowing how tasting and smelling are difficult to isolate from their mutual complementarity---if i were to put them nevertheless into four points and draw them into a central point, it is in the case of insomnia that the acute awareness of the inexistence of the point of so-called integration becomes painfully evident and hopelessly open. and it is from this repeated experience i claim now that i can make no conclusion? i beg the reader to take me seriously and yet i must indicate that i am somehow yet unable to lend myself any credibility. i am trying to be as honest as i can possibly be, writing as quickly as i can, not searching endlessly for mot juste, because i do not believe there is one word that is right, no one modulus for the experience of the static and undying disturbance of the shells of existence.
insomnia and substances. like smoking or drinking or pills, if you have such luxuries. they never work in the case of a real insomniac episode. i can drink unto stumbling and fall dizzy into bed and of course i am then too sick to be able to sleep for the convulsions of nausea. any barbituate solution puts you at risk of over-dosing and although i have thought in these insomniac states all the permutations of suicidal possibilities that "gets one through many a night", i am not confident in death as being different enough than this, than this insomnia experience itself, to count as a real alternative. i have smoked a pack of cigarrettes and it only increased my heart rate to the point of utter panic and the need to just stop, take a rest, just lay down and....nothing of the not-nothing...no...somnia in veiled robes of fleece does not come and wrap my mind in downy visions or enigmatic morphean plasmas...
on one insomniac night in particular, while smoking, i was seized by the determination to do something useful and hauled out the vaccum cleaner and, with the cigarrete clamped in my mouth, running the nozzle over the floors, enjoying at least the power of this machine made for sucking and inadvertanly bumped the door in such a way as caused the ejection of the light, the cinder or pharos, the burning bit, from the cigarrette itself and i watched in a suspended moment as it or I fell through the air, like a pilot ejected from a nose-diving plane, and the cinder fell on the floor near the snout of the vacuum cleaner and poof. it was gone. it is funny: i saw myself in the mirror and the look on my face made me laugh. i shut off the machine immediately and sat down looking at it. what, now, will happen to this red silent domestic robot that, in belgium at least, one calls a "hoover". of course there is not enough oxygen for a fire to burn in there. and indeed, it stated to emit fumes and my imagination was captrured inside this enclosed infernal microcosm. and the fire inside its belly turned to the plastic and rubber detritus and started to stink and i hurriedly dragged it by the neck to kitchen sink and while reasonable enough to not want to pour water on a plugged-in electrical appliance and yet unreasonable enough to open the burning machine and pull out the bag, which burst immediately, flames and smoke blossoming and yet fortunately falling from my unscathed hand directly into the sink, i was able to slap the faucet up. and in seconds all but the rotten fumes had passed. could i call this the poetry of insomnia in action? i cannot tell.
there is of course the widespread and creeping thought virus that insists insomnia can be cured my some kind of meditation. but i am convinced that they are mostly other forms of insomnia themselves and that it is only the style of dress that changes as we pass from land to land. and while i do find certain mantras to be pleasurable to practice and still recall with wonder the tibetans compressing their deep overtones into golden pills, i have been so often accused of spiritualist pretensions that i cannot stand before the scientific community and deliver any kind of report that does not seem like a long and complicated dream: that is, a kind of narrative salve and balm to work into the muscles of the over-active mind and bring the opiate of sleep to englobe us, especailly since all while it does occur to me that capitalism itself thrives on our insomniac innovations like a vampire, sucking the ideas for more functional systems out of the combinatorium the mind becomes during such pointless demonic wrestlessness. if this in fact were to prove to be the beneficent side of insomnia, then it will have maybe redeemed itself in the "spirit of progress". but i remain largely untouched by such luck and my sleeplessness rests apparently in no detectable marketability.
April 1, 2009
Poznan
an automatic essay...
wideness, emptiness, silence---how relativity is so relative that relating it to "my thinking" only arouses horror that its just me thinking it--the strange feeling of responsibility that I shouldn't wake up anyone to tell them because it does really seem abnormal, not a place you want to take someone, at least not on the first date---78+ hours was my longest stretch---how often it happens the first night i am sleeping with a woman no matter how nice it was and precisely despite the fact i am exhausted physically, there it is, the moon descends and sits on my shoulders, a lidless eye for a thoughtless head, a cyclops that sees and does not know why, the relativity of it so irrelevant because I sense how illusory time is itself---that all the vast arrays and observatories and particle accelerators seeking to measure time back to something forever "behind" even this "blind-thinking" eye I seem to be is really all too late---that the begining of anything is now but the future of it is hard to see without falling asleep again, that the future is hard to see without falling asleep again, that the future is really on the other side of the break from insomnia and that sleep is the problem, yes, sleep itself, it is so, so stupid, sleeping...and how yet i would like to sleep...i lay down, lights seem to flash across my closed eye-lids the images rise, faces, forms, visions, the voice of someone "inside" me---
then a memory of another insomniac bout, lasting merely 38 hours---these bouts are never the result of all-night parties or work-sessions, mind you---one wherein i discovered i had tinnittus: i was thoroughly convinced i heard a throbbing bass line from some reggae dub-upstart basement club in berlin where i was "living" and as i went from window to window several times (there were only two windows), it took me an hour to discover the source of the sound lay somehwere locked in a self-perpetuating, resonant loop of neural cilia, between the two inter-lacing fringes of these nerves which fire and vibrate in response to one another's messages---one fringe transmitting the air pressure pulsations fom the tympanum and the other receiving it, transmitting ito the cortex for deciphering of the brain, "data integration"---and how, in the case of tinnittus, the cause is an a random firing of a series of internally consistent messages that were, in this instance, extremely convincing, that had comepletely convinced me that " i was correct" in assuming there was an outward source for this sound... when in fact, to my horror, it was a bundle of errors, a sickness, a bundle of errors that was me, my body, this perceptual apparatus, this empty-chambered gun in a russian roulette of consciousness, seeking desperately to ground its charge in a some external objects...
to be at least as accurate about this "ear business" as i can possibly be: the inner ear recieves vibrations, transmits them further into the cortex: the cortex administers a re-send, a message back across the same path, a message indicating the length of the vibration, to verify the vibration or to measure it, let's say, against what is still being transmited from the tympanum into the inner ear. the result is that both of these nerve fringes vibrate together, resonate, the oscillation frequency being thusly coded (mnemotechnics), so that those of us who have learned the divisions of the code, can distinguish different levels of pitch and other sound qualities. in the case of tinnittus, the message comes only from the inside, and the outter fringe of nerves is stimulated and vibrates, this vibration is recieved in the tympanum: the illusion is that there is a "sound".
add here citations from zarathustra...
insomnia, classically: how often it happens when i am in love or think i am in love or thinking i wish i were in love or that i wasn't...how often it happens sleeping next to someone i think i no longer love because if i were awake and in love and could stir the slumbering beloved insomia would be slain and slaked by fucking...how it "dawns" on me occasionally that i have been awake too long and that i live in fear of the insomnia begining again, this endless road stretching out in front of me without drama, without any causation that does not seem prone to delusional thought, that threatens me with infinity even while i convince myself it will surely come to an end, sooner or later, this highway filled with transport vehicles 24/24...pick your own prefered symbol of monotony...
insomnia before the internet was an entiely different love affair...because the net is always, seemingly, awake, robotically at the ready, there is almost always, seemingly, someone else awake and how a chat-session, with a known or unknown other, restores discursive and rational normalcy, creates an exchange, a breathing that becomes unconscious again, a heart that does its job without being monitored...for when i am truly alone, unsleeping, i am become hyper-aware of my own body's functions and begin to travel inside the layers or interfaces of my being.
cage's experience in the anechoic chamber also seemed to be divided almost mystically into extreme frequencies, one the "high" brain funtioning and the "low" blood pulsation while anyone who was not a composer might register such an experience in a very different way, as I did once, noting how my visual field was simulataneously distorted by the small size of the anechoic room: tunnel-vision, the claustral feeling. insomnia does occur, like a very small chamber, a false vaccuum, and jar of artefice in which my consciousness appears but also paradoxically disappears into the other horizon, that of the wideness, the horizon itself appearing on the edge of a cup, on the window-sill, on the row of tenement, on the empty dark or cloudy starless city sky or murky moon or milky wherein i am waiting not-knowing i am waiting and if i am alone and i cannot read---and here, i enter the most frightening dimension of my own insomnia: the inability for consciousness to hold onto aything at all for any amount of time, whether because the pervasive lack of neuro-chemical presences destroys the short term memory and language cannot be made to cohere in my mind or because the insomnia is a hard, lonely diamond-like and jealous god who will not permit any distraction that will lead to drowsiness---for whatever reason, the words hang on the page like laundry on a line blowing in the breeze, each word a rag on a wire and how and why did they became strung together i cannot decipher. and there is no way to be entertained it seems. everything seems like flotsam and jetsam and even my own thoughts ride on the flow of...what?
it does not even flow...it just hangs, a cosmic limbo...
one would almost prefer a war be raging in the streets than this and this nihilistic thought haunts me only for a split-second because i know in this state how utterly impotent i am to bring about such a war and even if i knew mechanically how to bring it about would not be able to carry through the step-by-step instructions to assemble such a machine.
if i were to situate my senses in a quincunx, debatable as these divisions are from the point of view of science---knowing as "we" do, how closely interwoven the visual and auditory nerves are, for example, so that in effect one sense is always refering to data gathered by the other sense or, knowing how tasting and smelling are difficult to isolate from their mutual complementarity---if i were to put them nevertheless into four points and draw them into a central point, it is in the case of insomnia that the acute awareness of the inexistence of the point of so-called integration becomes painfully evident and hopelessly open. and it is from this repeated experience i claim now that i can make no conclusion? i beg the reader to take me seriously and yet i must indicate that i am somehow yet unable to lend myself any credibility. i am trying to be as honest as i can possibly be, writing as quickly as i can, not searching endlessly for mot juste, because i do not believe there is one word that is right, no one modulus for the experience of the static and undying disturbance of the shells of existence.
insomnia and substances. like smoking or drinking or pills, if you have such luxuries. they never work in the case of a real insomniac episode. i can drink unto stumbling and fall dizzy into bed and of course i am then too sick to be able to sleep for the convulsions of nausea. any barbituate solution puts you at risk of over-dosing and although i have thought in these insomniac states all the permutations of suicidal possibilities that "gets one through many a night", i am not confident in death as being different enough than this, than this insomnia experience itself, to count as a real alternative. i have smoked a pack of cigarrettes and it only increased my heart rate to the point of utter panic and the need to just stop, take a rest, just lay down and....nothing of the not-nothing...no...somnia in veiled robes of fleece does not come and wrap my mind in downy visions or enigmatic morphean plasmas...
on one insomniac night in particular, while smoking, i was seized by the determination to do something useful and hauled out the vaccum cleaner and, with the cigarrete clamped in my mouth, running the nozzle over the floors, enjoying at least the power of this machine made for sucking and inadvertanly bumped the door in such a way as caused the ejection of the light, the cinder or pharos, the burning bit, from the cigarrette itself and i watched in a suspended moment as it or I fell through the air, like a pilot ejected from a nose-diving plane, and the cinder fell on the floor near the snout of the vacuum cleaner and poof. it was gone. it is funny: i saw myself in the mirror and the look on my face made me laugh. i shut off the machine immediately and sat down looking at it. what, now, will happen to this red silent domestic robot that, in belgium at least, one calls a "hoover". of course there is not enough oxygen for a fire to burn in there. and indeed, it stated to emit fumes and my imagination was captrured inside this enclosed infernal microcosm. and the fire inside its belly turned to the plastic and rubber detritus and started to stink and i hurriedly dragged it by the neck to kitchen sink and while reasonable enough to not want to pour water on a plugged-in electrical appliance and yet unreasonable enough to open the burning machine and pull out the bag, which burst immediately, flames and smoke blossoming and yet fortunately falling from my unscathed hand directly into the sink, i was able to slap the faucet up. and in seconds all but the rotten fumes had passed. could i call this the poetry of insomnia in action? i cannot tell.
there is of course the widespread and creeping thought virus that insists insomnia can be cured my some kind of meditation. but i am convinced that they are mostly other forms of insomnia themselves and that it is only the style of dress that changes as we pass from land to land. and while i do find certain mantras to be pleasurable to practice and still recall with wonder the tibetans compressing their deep overtones into golden pills, i have been so often accused of spiritualist pretensions that i cannot stand before the scientific community and deliver any kind of report that does not seem like a long and complicated dream: that is, a kind of narrative salve and balm to work into the muscles of the over-active mind and bring the opiate of sleep to englobe us, especailly since all while it does occur to me that capitalism itself thrives on our insomniac innovations like a vampire, sucking the ideas for more functional systems out of the combinatorium the mind becomes during such pointless demonic wrestlessness. if this in fact were to prove to be the beneficent side of insomnia, then it will have maybe redeemed itself in the "spirit of progress". but i remain largely untouched by such luck and my sleeplessness rests apparently in no detectable marketability.
April 1, 2009
Poznan
Virtuous Circles CD notes (Absurd Records)
Virtuous Circles
“Noi non vediamo mai le cose una prima volta, ma sempre la seconda.” –Cesare Pavese
Ramadan 1427
I am living in Kreuzberg, a part of Berlin which is, commonly thought of as a “Turkish” neighborhood. But once you scratch the surface and wander these streets which eventually mingle with those of Neukolln, you begin to notice many diverse cultures of Middle Eastern origin are also mixed in. Neukolln has an extreme unemployment rate, numerous “unpapered” immigrants and visible poverty. One day in October, 2006 with the air taking on that onerous hint of Northern European winter, I heard a song on the lips of certain people, but never a muzzein singing from a nasally tower megaphone. Although you will daily notice the bells of Christian churches, the song that brings the Islamic world to pray five times daily is largely absent from the streets of Berlin. What you hear of course is the rumble and jog of various kinds of machines and devices of telecommunication. It would be a controversial statement if I were to say that Islam is the last vestige of Medieval culture that lives on into the world of High Capitalism. But to insist on a dichotomy between Islamic culture and Commerce would be a complete misrepresentation of the central role of travel and trade in the spread of Islam throughout the world. I found myself thinking about the adhan which I have heard in various cities, sung by so many voices ranging from a devastatingly beautiful cry of love that might bring tears to your eyes to the hilarious warbling of a tone-deaf muzzein sputtering and crackling in a hopelesly short-circuited P.A. system. If the prayer is one manner in which the Muslim approaches and defines her relationship to God and a duty paid to the religion, I had again that strange thought “what is the God of Capitalism?” If God is a limitless and invisible source of such vocal aspirations in Islam and also their direct object, one cannot grasp its core anywhere except in one’s heart. If God is the fuel of religion, what is the fuel of the secular world we live in with its litanies of transport, industry, televisions, cell-phones, sms, laptops, digital datebooks etc etc. The major cult-leaders of Capital will tell you it is “Freedom”. But I am not convinced that there is a freedom in Capitalism anymore than there is a God seated in a celestial pleroma dictating laws to man and womankind. Many people will drown the pointless work-day in a round of pints or erase their office memories with sake. Others will go to a mosque or perform a Buddhist chant. Others make art or family their religion. What motivates life in the world of Capitalsim when the daily hostilities of competition are themselves the very negation of the value of “communal” life? What drives this religion of competitive capitalism that no one dares to deviate from? And what is our relationship to the noise of our competitive culture?
This recording/performance will not answer any of these questions for you. But it will reflect the dynamic interplay between noises and trans-ascendance, between a song and the source of a song. And so, it draws a vicious circle around us. What might be done to make it a virtuous circle? A gravestone I saw in Charleston, South Carolina reads: “She done what she could”. I will leave the rest to you.
I chose a live recording of my concert in Athens as the starting point for this project probably because as the capital of Greece it represents for me the final, physical fulcrum between the west and the east. But also because in the analysis of Greek culture one can see that sea-faring and commerce are central to the expansion of that culture and forms the metaphorical basis for international relations. As Constantinople, it became the center of Christianity, then pried away by the Turks, the Saracens, the Ottomans. Whatever they were called in the Infidel story-books, they were the contenders, the ones who wanted the same advantageous port for the spread of their wealth. It was the object of a Holy War. We, today, each and everyone of us, are the objects of a Holy War but one without any Gods. It is a war instead between Freedom and Capitalism in which Islam is forced to wear the mask of the world’s worst tendencies. Instead, these tendencies are in our very own limitless drive for a contradictory Freedom that creates alienation between human beings and other life forms and a mediated inward search through nostalgia and escapism.
Phonographies used in this piece were made in Berlin, Paris, San Franscisco, NYC (all industry and transport sounds) and Java, Morrocco, Kenya, Egypt and Iraq (most of the voices you hear). It is for the last item that I owe thanks to Thomas Ashcraft.
There is God in Godless. But there is also more in less.
Jeff Gburek
October 18, 2006
Berlin
This document premiered February 8, 2007 at Das Kleines Field Recordings Festival, Berlin on the, “Tag der Klanggeschicten”, @ Klub Monty. Special thanks: to Rinus Van Alebeek for making this festival happen; to Mireia Guzman for photos and being there.
It was subsequently re-published inside the CD released on Absurd Records, 2008
Question of Re-entry series, thanks to Nicolas Malevitsis.
http://www.void.gr/absurd/index2.htm
“Noi non vediamo mai le cose una prima volta, ma sempre la seconda.” –Cesare Pavese
Ramadan 1427
I am living in Kreuzberg, a part of Berlin which is, commonly thought of as a “Turkish” neighborhood. But once you scratch the surface and wander these streets which eventually mingle with those of Neukolln, you begin to notice many diverse cultures of Middle Eastern origin are also mixed in. Neukolln has an extreme unemployment rate, numerous “unpapered” immigrants and visible poverty. One day in October, 2006 with the air taking on that onerous hint of Northern European winter, I heard a song on the lips of certain people, but never a muzzein singing from a nasally tower megaphone. Although you will daily notice the bells of Christian churches, the song that brings the Islamic world to pray five times daily is largely absent from the streets of Berlin. What you hear of course is the rumble and jog of various kinds of machines and devices of telecommunication. It would be a controversial statement if I were to say that Islam is the last vestige of Medieval culture that lives on into the world of High Capitalism. But to insist on a dichotomy between Islamic culture and Commerce would be a complete misrepresentation of the central role of travel and trade in the spread of Islam throughout the world. I found myself thinking about the adhan which I have heard in various cities, sung by so many voices ranging from a devastatingly beautiful cry of love that might bring tears to your eyes to the hilarious warbling of a tone-deaf muzzein sputtering and crackling in a hopelesly short-circuited P.A. system. If the prayer is one manner in which the Muslim approaches and defines her relationship to God and a duty paid to the religion, I had again that strange thought “what is the God of Capitalism?” If God is a limitless and invisible source of such vocal aspirations in Islam and also their direct object, one cannot grasp its core anywhere except in one’s heart. If God is the fuel of religion, what is the fuel of the secular world we live in with its litanies of transport, industry, televisions, cell-phones, sms, laptops, digital datebooks etc etc. The major cult-leaders of Capital will tell you it is “Freedom”. But I am not convinced that there is a freedom in Capitalism anymore than there is a God seated in a celestial pleroma dictating laws to man and womankind. Many people will drown the pointless work-day in a round of pints or erase their office memories with sake. Others will go to a mosque or perform a Buddhist chant. Others make art or family their religion. What motivates life in the world of Capitalsim when the daily hostilities of competition are themselves the very negation of the value of “communal” life? What drives this religion of competitive capitalism that no one dares to deviate from? And what is our relationship to the noise of our competitive culture?
This recording/performance will not answer any of these questions for you. But it will reflect the dynamic interplay between noises and trans-ascendance, between a song and the source of a song. And so, it draws a vicious circle around us. What might be done to make it a virtuous circle? A gravestone I saw in Charleston, South Carolina reads: “She done what she could”. I will leave the rest to you.
I chose a live recording of my concert in Athens as the starting point for this project probably because as the capital of Greece it represents for me the final, physical fulcrum between the west and the east. But also because in the analysis of Greek culture one can see that sea-faring and commerce are central to the expansion of that culture and forms the metaphorical basis for international relations. As Constantinople, it became the center of Christianity, then pried away by the Turks, the Saracens, the Ottomans. Whatever they were called in the Infidel story-books, they were the contenders, the ones who wanted the same advantageous port for the spread of their wealth. It was the object of a Holy War. We, today, each and everyone of us, are the objects of a Holy War but one without any Gods. It is a war instead between Freedom and Capitalism in which Islam is forced to wear the mask of the world’s worst tendencies. Instead, these tendencies are in our very own limitless drive for a contradictory Freedom that creates alienation between human beings and other life forms and a mediated inward search through nostalgia and escapism.
Phonographies used in this piece were made in Berlin, Paris, San Franscisco, NYC (all industry and transport sounds) and Java, Morrocco, Kenya, Egypt and Iraq (most of the voices you hear). It is for the last item that I owe thanks to Thomas Ashcraft.
There is God in Godless. But there is also more in less.
Jeff Gburek
October 18, 2006
Berlin
This document premiered February 8, 2007 at Das Kleines Field Recordings Festival, Berlin on the, “Tag der Klanggeschicten”, @ Klub Monty. Special thanks: to Rinus Van Alebeek for making this festival happen; to Mireia Guzman for photos and being there.
It was subsequently re-published inside the CD released on Absurd Records, 2008
Question of Re-entry series, thanks to Nicolas Malevitsis.
http://www.void.gr/absurd/index2.htm
astra disastra digitalis
The old and broken doll with twisted digits
drawn through a gap in the heart or the sky
sits in a cornered clump in rusted rags;
tilted head, half open, mannequin’s eyes
mourning a dead lover’s muted sperm
a silent squawk-box buried in her belly,
limbo of robotic baby-speak---ah, what went dead
inside you first? Your double d battteries? Corroded
triple-a, excremental, chemical cylinders of charge?
Who put your throat’s papery violin to sleep?
When did you put your eyes in your pocket, again?
And you, ancient doll, who threw herself
in the throes of the dance and broke her spine,
“il se prend pour un star”
yes, there are stars, too hot to handle, and stars
too far to be seen by the blind, signed
Mr. F. Lubbard, yes, stars, collapsing the yes,
virgin aureaolae, depths upon steps of
depths, skin deep, vanishing
at the universal boundary of information
seen in this coal-dark basement
in a broken tarnished mirror
on a bright and empty chair
when I was 5.
You, red and fair daughter of distant Danes
and Liths, remind me of all the girls and boys
swirling in the pockets of resistance, fighting for the freedom of islands,
the two fern-green, lime-green
planets of vanity and fertility
set in one skull’s orbit, crooked teeth
signature, suture, singularity.
Have I taken the small things growing larger with time seriously?
There is a dead television screaming
an ingenuous formal pornography, dull grey
cyclopean consumerist identity, saying
go lick the cock and balls of money
handled by many
take the disease
your dreams by the ounce
permit you to buy.
Love is not a trial, can’t be won
by any lawyers
and there is no judge of it.
Love’s only god is love.
And there is no love but love.
It is not a moral issue at all.
It is Elan. Succulent paradise, promised.
Go towards your heart’s goal.
Go through my gate.
Or through the gate of others.
Or remain inside your dark house of memory
And pass through yourself.
Hold me so I can love you.
Or free me to love others.
Without love, being unable to love,
I am dead, dumb fruit withers. I want to live
And yet I am dead? Or hanging, drooping
Earthwards, wishing, I were, already?
This is death’s spurious circle.
I want to step outside it, for now.
With you or without you.
Come, let me go.
“and on the night of their departure they noticed burning a star”
in a crystal quiver
I see symphonies of eyes
shot out from me
some spectacular night
on the fringes of time
March 14, 2009
10.28 pm
Poznan. Polska
drawn through a gap in the heart or the sky
sits in a cornered clump in rusted rags;
tilted head, half open, mannequin’s eyes
mourning a dead lover’s muted sperm
a silent squawk-box buried in her belly,
limbo of robotic baby-speak---ah, what went dead
inside you first? Your double d battteries? Corroded
triple-a, excremental, chemical cylinders of charge?
Who put your throat’s papery violin to sleep?
When did you put your eyes in your pocket, again?
And you, ancient doll, who threw herself
in the throes of the dance and broke her spine,
“il se prend pour un star”
yes, there are stars, too hot to handle, and stars
too far to be seen by the blind, signed
Mr. F. Lubbard, yes, stars, collapsing the yes,
virgin aureaolae, depths upon steps of
depths, skin deep, vanishing
at the universal boundary of information
seen in this coal-dark basement
in a broken tarnished mirror
on a bright and empty chair
when I was 5.
You, red and fair daughter of distant Danes
and Liths, remind me of all the girls and boys
swirling in the pockets of resistance, fighting for the freedom of islands,
the two fern-green, lime-green
planets of vanity and fertility
set in one skull’s orbit, crooked teeth
signature, suture, singularity.
Have I taken the small things growing larger with time seriously?
There is a dead television screaming
an ingenuous formal pornography, dull grey
cyclopean consumerist identity, saying
go lick the cock and balls of money
handled by many
take the disease
your dreams by the ounce
permit you to buy.
Love is not a trial, can’t be won
by any lawyers
and there is no judge of it.
Love’s only god is love.
And there is no love but love.
It is not a moral issue at all.
It is Elan. Succulent paradise, promised.
Go towards your heart’s goal.
Go through my gate.
Or through the gate of others.
Or remain inside your dark house of memory
And pass through yourself.
Hold me so I can love you.
Or free me to love others.
Without love, being unable to love,
I am dead, dumb fruit withers. I want to live
And yet I am dead? Or hanging, drooping
Earthwards, wishing, I were, already?
This is death’s spurious circle.
I want to step outside it, for now.
With you or without you.
Come, let me go.
“and on the night of their departure they noticed burning a star”
in a crystal quiver
I see symphonies of eyes
shot out from me
some spectacular night
on the fringes of time
March 14, 2009
10.28 pm
Poznan. Polska
the jar beneath the star artaud foresaw/as having already exploded
the jar beneath the star artaud foresaw/as having already exploded
it was cruelty to laugh at, not with, the man laughing at cruelty itself
he saw the blink and black-out, the thread consciousness was not, but must
evolve out from...it was like the golden lid of a wandering jar.
where-ever the lid was placed, the jar would form, beneath it,
no matter what size, perfectly fit, screwed tight
and each jar beneath it like a drop of transparency,
the jar always empty, the whole star, his star
the collapsing and rising foal...
in the vivid looms of consciousness,
the thread of not-seeing, not-feeling, not-perceiving,
the binary and bipolar gloom --so-called--
is repeatedly woven, as the unwoven
or the unweaving, Penelope's trick
against these vulgar suitors of singular Time
her hand is woven into the scarf, the glove
her eyes are woven into the shroud
her breasts are woven into the dress
memory of the flesh wears
i feel i know well now Penelope's loom
weaving and unweaving the cloth,
seeding and salting the earth of thought by turns,
doubting and redoubting death's shroud
until my true love, my truth, comes home...
I could call her Odysseeus.
Fair and red and blond at her mons.
Am I not seeing blindly like Tiresias,
inverted, converted, the liver
of Prometheus, whose day chained
to the rock of Poznan
is only slightly unlike nightmare?
while somehwere on the steppe
sun shines newly on the next foal
of Przewalski's horses
Poznań, 10 march 09
it was cruelty to laugh at, not with, the man laughing at cruelty itself
he saw the blink and black-out, the thread consciousness was not, but must
evolve out from...it was like the golden lid of a wandering jar.
where-ever the lid was placed, the jar would form, beneath it,
no matter what size, perfectly fit, screwed tight
and each jar beneath it like a drop of transparency,
the jar always empty, the whole star, his star
the collapsing and rising foal...
in the vivid looms of consciousness,
the thread of not-seeing, not-feeling, not-perceiving,
the binary and bipolar gloom --so-called--
is repeatedly woven, as the unwoven
or the unweaving, Penelope's trick
against these vulgar suitors of singular Time
her hand is woven into the scarf, the glove
her eyes are woven into the shroud
her breasts are woven into the dress
memory of the flesh wears
i feel i know well now Penelope's loom
weaving and unweaving the cloth,
seeding and salting the earth of thought by turns,
doubting and redoubting death's shroud
until my true love, my truth, comes home...
I could call her Odysseeus.
Fair and red and blond at her mons.
Am I not seeing blindly like Tiresias,
inverted, converted, the liver
of Prometheus, whose day chained
to the rock of Poznan
is only slightly unlike nightmare?
while somehwere on the steppe
sun shines newly on the next foal
of Przewalski's horses
Poznań, 10 march 09
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
