Yesterday morning I couldnt find my sponge. And it turned into a sign, from mayhem to love. 

Barnacle babe. Its a reference to Joyce’s wife. Whose name was Nora Barnacle. Joyce had a thing about onomancy. Divination by name. Mine’s more logomancy. Words sinking into enchantment, when lost to the wondrous crawling vagaries of oceanic hell.

Had a Thing Very Bad about ancient Irish myth Sweeney Astray that led me up the World Tree, shaking and wild with treachery, an espionage I now refer to as The Unbeing, in excess of present tense, which when incalculable, is like a wall that is falling – and suddenly everything goes full Coyote button. With irredeemable terror.

I’d “of” never hit those numbers – she is sighing now, cooing even – god only knows where I’d be without you.

Reading Finnegans Wake like its the I Ching, opening to any page, any day of week for its “visionary thinking.”

Joyce’s boney Spirit shows up Picking His Nose or Tipping His Hat. Only one person I ever met that I told that too – nodded his head, looked at me as he thought about it, his face leaking a smile. Fell in love on the spot, and we drank at local dive where poet Robert Creeley drank. God only knows where I’d be without you. College days.

His beauty ovewhelmed me. Fucked that up too. . .

Surging merging lately are “radical new ideas” about tragedy and the pastiche. Beckett with straw in mouth, of course of course, shooting spitballs that fall at my feet so I look down like Chinese fortune cookie go-round go-round, and he says: slime rhymes with the sublime! Fate and late, with Spirit Vertebrate.

Lovely day for a duck. Why “my heart” irrupts into cartoon scrambles with torrid factions steering me over the Falls for that “wicked” breach – 

Going “in” after the breach? more jesus on a stick? than bunny down a hole? 

Something could not have calculated, other than trying to avoid at all costs! At all costs! Fucking Egyptian Furies “one day in every way” ye old gods, overtook my bone-drenched Spirit Space like Hawks Hungry for a Kill, Priests who Own slave girls, they would stop at nothing. They would stone to death as love that is criminal!

The emergence of heart-bleeding heart-scaling Bountiful dread that has no name can affix for it that stays affixed, except maybe Death by Rotting Righteousnessz.

But its not good enough. For therein also resides oracles of la chambre noire, Gloom Bloom & Doom that ring like Royal Romances, who Bataille & Joyce helped quell down off of Tragic Miracle Mining after the Lustrous (needy gullible unscrupulous) Moon?

French Revolution incendiary, has my name my number at Bridge of Signs a wicked French witch la Forage – hurt so hatefully by what is life, she knits “death” into progress – 

A girl whose fascination lingers over death as a magnifier since 7 yrs old.

New character “she-bop” that falls out, falls out out out of my heart. Lies (very near Desperation) – lies beyond me, she-bop falls through ravenous thresholds of rangy irrepressible incantation – a shocking porn of logomancy.

But it is categorically a be-witching, a Tragic Hold, a Capital sin. Dogs surround it seething at falling bodies, waves of naughty bird hell.

How can we get in at it, the Mystery tingles – it is forbidden.

There is a cult circle and they all smoke pipes, leaning heavily over knees. Mackereled in cordoroy and tweed.

One suggests, pull at whelms of meaning and seduce up the mourning peat like its yeast, another: finger the details as though a rapturous corruption of miracle Beauty, all mine nod at all theirs – Proust walks in, in a Masked Ball costume, carrying a Red Pail, posing as Audrey Hepburn as a Museum washer woman.

Colette (who goes on in her book about “freedom” of washer women as compared to her Tragic Mum), sick in bed with “the death of it,” eyes glistening with Mona Lisa love, that angelic smirk of knowing she’s toast but what the hell, its so extraordinary, gotta love him –  

One of my first, my very first was a dreary cherished vesicatory fascination with words the Falls – obviously goes way back.

But Names – Cartoon Names always come up as zippety-do-dah, as cartoon head cases – Its a protection racket? “Rhonda who dreams in Suicide screaming for satisfaction” – 

Making cartoon traces into a “Pipe: this is not” as if to protect  from the audacity of “my sins” with a name that sings itself into consideration, then furrows into a beating the bounds search for heavenly category –  

Veiled in ruins, the tragedy burns through something that is of the real (as opposed to in the real – in philosophy it turns out, that makes a difference – between “god types”) – even the real is a fixative, somebody cackles luridly while stirring carrots into a meat stew – 

Head burrowed down in between jeans diving in at skin level whose evil purr is oddly cureless. Fitfuls of the implacability that is treasure of sorrow wading ferociously through whatever the crash, the appliance, whatever the indifference –

Paradoxically equivalent to a resilience that somehow finds the “conviction” to turn Mummy Walking into fish head and hook!

A Gape of the Jaw

WHAT is reasonable to stealth and Beauty enchants as fulcrum of nostalgia and desire, the heart wags with outsized virtue and hunger, after spitting distances – just beyond what is possible to define –

Falling into Les Impossibles is a Liars lovely impotence, wretched blessed Imps rage and fury over The Likes of me, with profound iconostasis, beauty and horror as baptism tunneling after open-cut lucidity, irrupt with devout mischief, accost with divine elements, of holy rolly moly – devotion, I call the Gaseous Clay, migrating for sacred killings of criminals like in the old  days, Gods Blood on a Stick (is a stick? oo lala), destitution, the finales the marplots unholy down your Pants Pee Boy sacrifice.

L’impossible is charged with fallen relics of the sacred, being a notion of profound lonely bizerk giganticide, of yet having been born out of the Romance of the Rose noble reckoning and the Beauty’s larceny, a heart ferocious, pricey is noble defiance glaring down at The Tomb –

When “spiked” with transparency Like This writing feels as if its keeling (wondrously) out of control awash with a mystical horror, and yet how the Graft seeks its Stolen Maps, Treasure Maps, Dante again – exponentially the layers the levers the Mope Heads – as terror dances in a drainage of the Bank of Hope dangling for the Let Go, the Nothingness, that blooms into raining epiphany.

And the Mud which flies – lost to love – nostalgia de la bou – 

La Bou, boo who? has for moi to do with the potency of its impotence – when love occurs as a mysterious curse – exorbitant, ungovernable, violent – raising the stakes – higher and higher –

Nonbeing is something some of us must learn how to fucking deal with – its beckoning having such a tyrannical resolve, since small very small – the heart digging where buried, where mysteriously buried across the eons of Beauty, death & loneliness –

The body of hunger born at night of the Harold Child a blessed confetti, so wretched a tool for love – any and every love, All Hands on his deck – its prehistory laced in crash and burn turns against Parents fighting through a confrontation of insincere deaths.

Deathbed statuaries are a roust burdensome reliquary to the copious of horror of Little Girl time – just time just time Nothing but the Nonbeing and Time, a sorry angry you’ll hate it when I am Dead relic to growing up in a darkness of the “void” – La Bou, a spider where shadow is haven, is birth right, is light enforced & divorced from clinging pow-wows vows of adamantine virtue.

3.24.18

New Tru Con, spun off of reading Zizek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology. 

3.21.18

Edited Glow & Yeux, Body of H8. Rim running usual topics.

Letting character names ruse & dote – without stopping it – as if sucking dopy up against PynchOn’s trial balloons for a humorous take at pronoun toppling, and yet still many ways all it does is massage death.

Effort is to transform pirate into reckoning with allures – and let that rotary seduce me as it turns almost of its own accord. That was the assumption.

Instead ended up tossing up as jokes. Somehow, f*ck*ll – working thru jokes that are affectionate and sometime stinky. Cant shake off stinky. Stinky initially gives me structure. Tho the “person” writing is different every time.

Am feeling theatre and schisms where language bends in after itself – stroking the divine. Temptations surge through others dial-it-in hose hairs – but its my absurdness. 

For me rhyme is equiv to a tender coffin. Like I am working in a dead language – and it fits the crime.

3.20.18 

Fingers whose weathervanes wag at me – enuff with the little girl lost routine. But its no use.

Babylon Burrows as a snapdragon, open and shut, open and shut, and little love hearts float float floating out of a heart-shaped lip-lined girl-in-heat prehensile-enchanted jaw. 

End of summer do I send a Chapter to Special Branch  – ?? OO la la. Suddenly there is nothing nothing.

Figure somehow some way to push through emptiness – as a lush boozy froth, froth of brutal riotous yearnings, as a question of faith, complete as a whole book True Confessions of a Subliterate Dork –

Manage construct unt contract a REAL deadline. Maybe even publish a bit of it elsewhere too – Thru a publisher where it makes sense! I cant even go to a reading or a concert how do I get to a publisher. Think Think. Gurr. Write. “U fucks.” Rectitudinous overreaction  – blatantly tiresome sitting duck.

Bury for a summer she dreams every night god damn it these trembling bones institutionally among belongings of Cal Lowell‘s right-up-to-the-line  where kisses the pole – knit fits geographically aligned with his Garden of Angels – rough housing, snowballing.

Again and again he’d fall off, again and again, got back up on that hefty horse, often with aid of compassion – 

No one to blame but myself for tadpole shrimp and ivory gull, for hibernaculum’s overwintering interrogations, she cries she cries for Sakakawea to arise. No help for a dead horse.

The dead horse stomps off, suffers a rebellion of fruit. Damn. Drinks gruel cruel cool funnel of blood to last of its bang on drop.

Hangs out sign at door by light that swings for you swings for you – 

Simon Blue Niles, Greet Nation of Migrants and Strangers. Poke Ho Hauntus, speaks –

Pub rub grub sub hub flub dub stub – off you art to the philosophers tub, oo lala. Love stinks. 

3.17.18 Happy Saint Bats

New Tru Con called Kissing the Wall. Is “hitting the numbers.” Up “at the top.” Its a gesture of freedom and yet – blasphemous. Captures the emergence of a brandy new stock – one who miraculously calls herself Glow Weeny. Very dear to me.

One must get it while one can! As between highly developed Descenders of Love – always – Love, License, Impossibility of the Absolute, Never Ending Death of a Salesman, Beauty & the Perseverant, Method & the Mind.

Down to the last drop. Ordered Sublime.

2.20.18

Instructional Videos. Getting used to hearing my own voice think. Oddly, its kind of marvelous, becoming entranced by the walkthrough of your own voice again and again till it doesn’t deviate.

Am up to second series, #6. 

2.9.18

Finished 2nd translation from Perfume/Lacan Ink. Regnaut on l’autre parole. 

2.8.18

Yesterday read Bowser the Hound by Thorton Burgess. Received as gift.

2.6.18

Reading bios, a cross section of 1) Vincent still & 2) Love life of Byron. How hunger grumbles and kneads, manifests in different greeds, creeds — luffing lyrical suffering holy roll-y does not heed.

Rhyming Lordy how I feed — 

Byron! laid down, he laid right down, was it on Dante’s(??) grave in exiled Ravenna — have shared that need, where strikes deaths ransomed pose — succumbing as a violent rose and splendor casts its wake upon the feeble silence.

If only my heart to yield — 

1.21.18

Updated piece called Funnel Cloud. Sketch & Fetch immediately started jumping up and down: they say its publishable. Yaddo. 

1.3.18

Stinky and Pinky. Sketch and Fetch. Agents: double. Add dimension. Dont want to limit to two –

Things deflect into notes on violence, especially gun violence, as an image feed. Gun violence very big politics here. Sketch and Fetch are standins at the moment, at Neptune’s Grotto. Sardinia & her famous sardines.

Crash/scratch test dummies. I mean out in the farm-ecology of fiction. Wondering if I have the chops.

Early spindrifts are oft bleeding self conscious. Sub-lately, I wanna I wanna call them all triggerfish, for the tremble. In mist of Penny Dreadful. Instrumental under red sheet of Chinese Dragon. Caw caw caw –

In different keys or something.

Caw

Discussion with Brother Lowell turns to beauty of falling into chaos, what draws us there, that feeling of being out of constraints and a mind slipping into havoc, how at outset is a dalliance with weightlessness.

Also reading very hot Vincent Van Gogh Bio. Illusory, he had illusory relationships again and again that were his passion and his undoing. Along with everything else.

Translation Work!

Provided translation into English for a short piece by François Regnault, about his long friendship with Lacan’s daughter Judith.

V.I. Philosophy Journal called Lacan Ink. Honor they let me do it.

Checked means its been 1) translated literally, 2) restructured as per English, and 3) meaning and structure reviewed & finalized.

A young girl’s eyes pierce the night. checked.

In a long white chemise, illuminating, a corner wrapped in shadow, my noctabulant kneels half asleep mumbling before crucifix and Virgin. Pious images cover the walls, the kneeling sleeper readies herself for anything, glides off between imminent sheets. As a livery of phantoms also no less real takes full rights over me, the bedroom reconvenes its intransigence heavy with premature nightmare. checked.

There is a terror that arises between four walls like wind on the sea. A crone bent in two, menaces at me with her walking stick, a man rendered invisible by rings of fame his watchtower awaits at any instant, God “who sees all and knows all thoughts” gazes down severely. A curtain of white detaches from its window, planes across the darkness, closes in, carries me away, slowly I traverse its pane and mount the sky – checked.

A thousand glowing traces loom up from out of the abyss, dance in the round, wander away with the nightlight, have a go at me. Rainbow dust composes itself into arrays, colors slip from one to the next. Conic, circular, rectangular, ancient pyramids turn liquid and luminous, a forge of curvature and color, a prismatic sun. The sky is my tears. A prisoners cinema, jiggling in the round – the bed pitches under a sea-swell of dreams. checked.

During the days, for these nights, there spent a childhood sordid and anxious, haunted by the sin of being mortal, Friday’s saint and Wednesday’s ashes. Growing up under a crush of heavy sails mourning, a childhood stolen from itself. checked.

Doesn’t begin to cover it. How outlaw hands gripped the wheel of destiny : so much is lodged there, neonates vigorously strangled by cordon umbilical, still persist, “insist they live.” checked.

Listening, the night is full of their cries: long heart-rending cries interrupted by windows slamming closed, cries raucous and fluid muffled by a gag, dying between lips, calls strident, the names of men, of women thrown into empty eternity, avenging laughter falls from on high, in a cascade of contempt, complaints vague and diffused, from the wails of children to the voices of men. All these cries melee like falling leaves in autumn, mounting in a garden as would pink odor of dew, of humic compote and the cut of hay. checked.

It’s a well known garden in Paris where I am stashed. A man all pale, tilted over, a hand squeezing in the void, emerges from behind a group of charcoal-ists, he travels a few little steps on white stones, tilted, his hand crotched at the absent, then starts off again with a caution across the lawn – Another appears, his face enflamed with ruby lips, surprised at my refuge in the wall there, cached in behind a frightful mass of fuschia. It is full of ivy and soot, begonias dirty fingers, signs of hopscotch traced with chalk. The man makes an obscene gesture and approaches, but there are many well known detours. Another who is distraught, straddling a window, batting at the air like a windmill, foam coming out of his lips: “they robbed me the bastards,” one masters it. Now a woman, hands clutched under her chin, she runs from all, her body shapeless, flabby and clumsy. These passing visions snatched with a half smile just as soon paralyze, as above appears a pallid face who is trying to introduce himself between the bars of his cage, he tries at first face front and then at an angle, but in vain. Alas a white bony arm crosses and slowly hangs up against the evening like linen in the wind. checked.

A lying, smiling pack (parents and doctors) rotate around this pit of fools from the garden of my childhood. checked.

—

Poor insipid beings, grief that surrenders, rears up, pain that gets beaten, powerless, crushed, idiotic. Listening to it: a b c d I don’t no anymore how to speak, 1 2 3 4 don’t know anymore how to count. 

Have you imported the village innocent or neighborhood crazy, are streets not full of consciousness sold out, backbones broken? Others doomed, near death, a better life run aground in fairs, in harbors, in squares, under bridges. 

What misery, despair remains for those alive after coming off shipwrecks – astonished at finding themselves on friable edges alongside. Astonished meeting one to one, from man to man, as with brief looks, exchanging all purpose words, without any sense or depth of meaning. Those who return alone from far off, to hear themselves so speak. . . of rain or good weather.  And it seems that the earth responds to the sound of voices harder under foot. Rivers flow greasy waters, carrying along a heavy stench. Above city bridges, above the countryside. And in the city and in the country, a moving sea of human glances.

Not one, that does not shelter a secret history. That does not call for a response, an explication. Regarding through purity undiluted their spotty net, backdrop of troubles. Algae and detritus. Humans strewn, with protruding looks, dark and cruddy-eyed, voiceless visions further elucidated, looks that know hate and scorn, looks loving and confident, looks that reveal one goal, one wish, looks that desire sail in blood. I glimpse all this through an insistence lost in colorless hunger, seeming to demand account of all impotence, all human defeat, other than its own.

I was not living life but death. Knew most of corpses rising right before my eyes – “as much as you turn away, to hide yourself, deny. . . you will attend to for the sake of your family.” Discussing it tenderly, kindly if not sardonically, else at image of Christ eternally humble, insane piece of work, as they held out to me their arms.

From west to east, countryside to countryside, city to city I marched between tombs. Soon the sun lost me, whether it was grassy or paved, I was floating, suspended between sky and earth, between the ceiling and floor. My sore eyes, toppled presenting to the world their stringy lobes, my hands hooked and mutilated carrying a senseless heritage. I rode the clouds with air of disheveled folly or friendly beggar. Feeling somewhat the monster, didn’t recognize anymore people I used to like. Finally, slowly I became as petrified in place as a perfect accessory of the decor.

For a longtime wandering around the city from place to place, from top to bottom. I came to know it well, that it is not only a city but an octopus. All streets parallel and oblique converging toward a liquid center, suckers clutching. Tentacles of the beast, each carrying houses on its own  two sides: one of small panes, another of heavy curtains. It is there that I heard from the lips of Vérax, the good news about Notre Dame de Cléry, there that I saw the beautiful gaze of Violette injected in black ink, finally stars Justus and Bételguese, Vérax and La Chevelure, all girls whose names stars absorbed through magnetized doors set by powerful currents. Darkness instantly traversed by invisible rays a space revealed of their own reflection. Only the incandescent transparency of skeleton and shape of heart. Deaf triggers alternately animate flashes of breath and combustion of methane, halos of mercury, their bodies automatic. How they see each other go purple then green.

The time for attractions having passed, streets are dismissed by the same complicated regularity. Its face purified, regains its crown, believed reborn. (The trunk of man gone away to think in its own quarter.)

Day to day, people fill like sand then leave no trace of these expansions and convulsions, one can set a course on it as a beach by its sun. 

—

At such a beach I discover the sky, an immense cloudless sky to lose oneself in as a kite. Faithfully to follow as my eyes could not to leave it, I ran without end to try and meet it. Breathless, I threw myself on the sand, sand so fine between fingers with a warm caress, that made me laugh. 

The inevitable procession: women in black bring me back to the streets and now, of an icy air, towards a gothic villa whose windows reflect the house-trained sun. It is the first day of my life that I see the light.

Leaving behind the Memories, the avalanche and scaffolding of a stillborn life, the bronzes and plaster casts of all civilization and trusting myself to an angle blue as slate, I took a place in the beautiful sky in a flight of pigeons in the heart of the City. The heavy bird voyagers came flocking down not far from a place where, always devoured by the demon of curiosity, I melt into a crowd.

I saw they were holding a parade.  The standards and flags of feeble boys and bony old men (cane in hand); the banners and faded finery of sweaty clergymen (armpits stinky and green), the holy scapulars and filthy rosary of young sisters, children of Mary trembling: “My father I have had bad thoughts.”  All yammering, breadth rotten : we are espoused to France. Three greasy haired hunched over old men discovering between their rack of mustaches a hostful of rancid wafers. 

There you are in your place under the flag, insane with holiness. Why not smile disillusioned or burst out laughing with amusement… But no I stay to spit at the blood of my ancestors, who all take after you. Will I soon enough not end rejecting this sinking burden? Yes, it is not so long, la Véronique was smiling at me in saintly line with Christ, the Virgin and crown wavering under the incense, large as nails fixed to the wall, trainees of blood, the Saintly Face crying oily tears under a single red lamp lighting the “chapel of Seven Sorrows.”

It was a retreat, an hour of meditation, I was seven years old, on my knees trembling.  Forcing myself to invent sins, as mine seemed insufficient, sins little in relation with the gravity of my own, arms and legs broken, the severity of the texts, the invocations. So I invented…  The priest welcomed me into an obscure room where I will  horror and he will confess to me on his knees. They took me back to a cab. The house was far away : “between Saint and Safety” explained my mother to the coachman as I trembled through the long ride on upholstery of damp velour, dreading death at every turn, street streaming with rain, horseshoes slipping out of control.

I had to swallow the host also, shame in not knowing how to go about it, posing these questions. “Especially do not make him have to touch your teeth,” said my mother to me. What a frightful debate of language, the goodness of god ensalivated. It was so long and messed up that I began to doubt it was composed of…God. The idea would not let go, became impossible to think of anything else : I began sobbing. Seeing my emotion, the priest and parents congratulated themselves of my utmost piety. Would I say – could I confess the horror of what was happening? Was it not already a state of mortal sin? One speaks of fervors… For the first time the blissful smiles, superior airs of the grand appeared to me strange, doubtable. Meanwhile, I was so proud to be an only child of a first communion that would happen to, but like my mother wished, without any material rejoicing that would trouble the sanctity of the day.

And another time sanctity had lodged itself in the attic. A storage room full of trunks and old junk. Where the window was never opened, condemned by a heavy curtain, leaving only a filter of light thru stained glass. Would stay there for hours, escaping their tedium, plunged in a body lost to it. It happened one day that we had to move the clutter of objects to make a crossing to reach the window; it was the only place where one could see a captive dirigible that had fallen in the garden next door. One could  see its nacelle at 20 meters coinciding between two walls, a half deflated orange envelope, striated heavy ropes, sprawled over the rooftops and branches of a tree. Finally I saw the pilot emerge from the diverse mass; his smallness to have fallen from heaven appeared to me a strange disappointment. An incomparable event, its puff of air in my punctured attic.

—

I was without friend. All were reproved by my mother as “too good” or “not pious enough.” Poor, little girl – only to find her scope innately, to seek out neighbors who might have lent a hand, to be at leave to play with other children on the street, to speak with tradesmen, to be acquainted with the stories of the neighborhood! But her situation would not permit it, instead we were locked in, by a distrust of all that were not Family, in complete ignorance of all in the world that could be gay, active, lively, vibrant, productive, same to say simply human. “To have relations” or “to receive” threw my mother into a state of solemn panic and forced our submission to its withering backlash. My brother alone would pull us through the malaise with his abandon, bursting into a whirlwind of crazy sacrilegious giggles, that we were forced to contain in living room or church.

The house had always the characteristic of being dreary and unchanging. The impossible arrival of a letter filled me with passion, a letter that would be very rare, written from Africa, America or China by some uncle faraway. Though one never appeared on the bronze decorated tray full of bills, announcements, L’Écho de Paris – still I awaited the mail every day for such a thick envelope, adorned with an extraordinary stamp, writing of something fantastic. 

Despite domestics, mother was constantly preoccupied with household chores, preoccupied with anguish over the dust, mothballs and polish. Not a day went by without a new stain to absorb her, her countenance put out by things and people. She was called “to arrange” and was never finished. All the world became under her foot, its only active part being to contribute to the general bouleversement. Children and domestics, tight faced at the sight of each other, coming and going, mounting and descending, nothing was saved. Lonesome, the storage room remained unchanging, an atmosphere confined in stained light.

It was my refuge, there to the horse of an old moleskin trunk  or crouched in a frame of chair bottoms, I retold myself tales without end mostly of those from before I was born, of a time where I inhabited the sky. Or else, contemplating with fervor sweet sallow Jesus and blond Joseph, images blue, rose-colored, golden, stars wrapped in silk, knotted with favors. Or else, would wash my doll and partake in the discovery of my own body, that one was ordered to ignore. The curiosity of a child, toward her belly, at the same moment where she learns God sees all and is following her into the storage room. Curiosity then terror. Life being made quickly to oscillate between these two poles: the one sacred and venerated as must be exhibited (my mother’s enlistments after communions), the other dirty, shameful that must never be named. How together more mysterious, more enthralling, more intense than a life dreary and unchanging. Thus was I to rock between the infamous and the sublime, over the course of many years, where true life would always be absent.

—

Laborers on their way to work after having proudly wiped the kids and hurried them, with a rude tenderness that did not mince words, “blow your nose, wipe your ass, good-for-nothing.” In front of them at least children could unbutton their panties without believing themselves in hell. With them would they share an air of goodness? Not like mine, holier than thou pretentious. “My poor girl?” Send them with a wallop running out onto the sidewalk.

Where I imagine fiery laundresses hands soaking in the Siene for hours “Are you good & done, you, with your piles, get off on the shit in these napkins? wouldn’t it be doodled by his eminence the boss?” and they burst out laughing that gets lost in the reeds.  

1927-2017

9.4.2017 – John Ashbery passed away this week. Met him at a National Book Award ceremony I think it was 2005. He was there to receive a lifetime achievement award, at film center in Tribeca I think. He came in late – after lights were already turned down. I was sitting on the window ledge, by hallway to the door. Too full of it. Hung in back by wall of windows circling my drink (in my head) – John came in just as it was about to begin, sat down beside me.

I did not know who he was. But sensed he might be a poet by the way he walked up the hallway. Poems prowl and wander – rather than say, narrate a line of thinking. And I could sense from the way he sauntered in – that he might not be particularly of the ilk linear.

(Its just a dialectic attempting to find a cut between loon and rune. Shadows of the same gaseous clay cross all ilks & pathways – )

He must have whispered something to me, about they’re not having started yet? In any case, it didnt take long for us to cop on to the fact that we both had copies of Arthur Rimbaud in our pockets. Which for poetic snakes, side winders language wise as a profusion, SUCH coincidences are a most beauteous SLAM.

Turns out Mr. Ashbery was writing a translation of Rimbaud’s Illuminations.  I guffawed with delight. What a relief suddenly at his being there. An ally in the “register” of congruence over and above accordance –

And for my sweetie (in early drink), to meet his before any demons could eat his couplets for their startling meat on the skewer of life, or sink like hunger into the mud in his eye, and steal his musicality from out above his humanity – like Dante and a monster (to my ardent horror – giddy, sublime mystification) – was very sweet & nice. He asked who I was. I said “oh, stray cat.” This is before Cave of the Winds was kind to my goonies – where madness lurks after itself like a prized wild turkey there r no words but death. 

Laure, 1903 – 1938 

Stage left. There is a book of collected writings called Laure, written by Georges Bataille’s once girlfriend Colette Peignot. For a time they lived together. She had tuberculosis, died in his house at 35. And had by that time, it is said, destroyed much else of what she’d wrote, though some of it she’d published already under various pseudonyms.

Colette was abused as a kid – by a Priest and had suffered through death after death of close loved ones. That all!? made her fierce, a radical, by the din & skin of her aggressive sexuality. Her writing was (and still is) considered shocking and yet appears to be filled with strains of astonishing beauty & resilience. Kathy Acker it is said colluded with the history of Colette’s life in her book My Mother Demonology which many consider a master work. (Am saving to read that till after.) 

After learning of Ashbery’s passing, found myself being visited by a bird with a blue head and a purple neck on my fireplace landing who paced, back and forth, several times – this I marked as coincident with his passing. Demons engage thoughtfully in such age-old conspiracies. And then a cloud darkened the room into shade –

It was right after having contrived suddenly as a reflection of love – for their existence – to try my hand at a translation of some chapters of Peignot’s work. (Laure has been translated once already in the late 70s – early 80s. The thinking being that like Rimbaud – the more the better – for her.)

Like beautiful John Ashbery took to translating the wildly implacable and transformative Arthur Rimbaud. Only to drink in replete sweet heat of his bold and thorny-crowned moil, impudent and (now) divine, indomitability profound & lavish betrayals – that poetry rides as hound after hell like a thief’s night rider in the sky –

Alas – red-eyed this dark and windy, mournful ejulation. ♠♥

BE FORWARNED: pursuing two voices here. And they dont quite match. One is a Book Reviewer who tho jokes is plainly on target. And the other is My Lovely Hysteric. Whose ostentation is loosely based on One of Poe’s. Though not as “together.” Doesnt quite “weed” well, but is I believe still interesting enuff to keep up “as is.”

Reading Gaston Bachelard‘s The Philosophy of No: A Philosophy of the New Scientific Mind – (1940). And the word NO is barely mentioned – at all. A book called the Philosophy of No, and 3/4 thru still the word – NO – has only been mentioned once! Blinky (the Partisan) is sensing a Flip, a beta flip? Flipping the bird, oncoming.

Beta Flip is 0/1. Symmetrical Flip allows for more, say -1, 0, +1. Science & Maths do this a lot. Spin is reckoned as states of Symmetry. Its one of the ways how science gets around No when they mean Not. It is but it isn’t – as one of two states of No, and of course that doesn’t mean it can’t rearrange to positive.

Bachelard ascribes 5 phases of rational thinking, can think of simply as: 

1.   naive realism: Quantity
2.   positivist empiricism: Equations
3.   classic rational mechanics: Calculus 
4.   3D+, Relativity
5.   discursive rationalism: Probabilities, Vectors, Mobius Patchworks, etc. 

And, adding in intuition and/or conjuration, he allots one more. Bachelard’s very own: The Surrational. Seemingly formed after word surreal (surreal shows up around 1930, shortened from Surrealism: Diaghilev, Cocteau, Breton, Apollinaire, etc. circa approx. 1913) but instead it’s sur + rational. Isn’t he lovely. (Sur means over and above.) 

Not I

Adorno’s Negative Dialectics (1966) lines up dichotomies of reasoning as unending. Thought as language trying to establish its Negative, a possessive negative, the Not I (Beckett’s monologue), is unable to find with exactitude any end of being – as thought – and beginning of another that is opposite of it, without reverberation extension echo, its unachievable – all you can do is talk your way into a kind of gradient to wall – with death as the Wall (and most say even that fails – in Science and Religion). 

Inspired use of Surrationals led to the discursive rational – engendering Symmetrical Flips, Image Jumps, Positive Negatives (something that isn’t but if it were to come about would have to be positive, because of its broader state. Meaning 0 is not just 0 any more, it can have preferences).

Blinky says if it helps Haute le Couer contend with madness burning through as beauty: What the hell? 

What the Hell

Deepening presences essences prevalence of horror as hunger & beauty, where mortal shock over an Edgar-esque scavenger hunt for love & truth went spinning off into hell.

Call it a quasi-absurdist play on “devout” radical realism – that fell under to ominous spells of endless havoc over “killer” shadows of love. Like someone walking around beaming/screaming, with a knife in her eye, and hole in her bucket, drowning in a flood of adoration-bending “love-you-to-the-end” fish.

As annihilation as art as beauty lurches along, in sync with a treasury of death. (The Waste Land, Decline of the West – which didn’t lessen anything. Hegelian potentialism effectively “popping” to a new information age of living with media, beginning with Baudrillard’s Simulacra & Simulation.)

And none of it – in the least – negates or neutralizes feelings of being deeply haunted by affection & beauty. The heart (however wickedly stuck in a wild wallow of hell) never gave up on being kissed! What do you call that? when the heart is incapable of giving up on the importance of something, to the point of sheer even errant out-&-out obstinance – 

Alas. Coinciding with endless language still about “crossing back” William Blake’s beautiful bridge-to-excess. Imprinted on my soul is this country fence that got “jumped” over with other artists (like Blake and Poe and Joyce and MacGowan and Burroughs) holding back the curtain. “Logic” as beauty caged like a beast that wants to break out, in language of poetry, emerges from the “discursive” like ghosts in the machine. Ghosts in a machine of sorrow horror tragedy, oh theatre – it having led to a miracle madness of ethics exceeding belief!

Meanwhile – adoration flowed around it as religiously unutterable enchanting defiant astonishing storming vivid disruptive, etc. As a dire uncanny presence in heart – of meaning & desire.

Miracles stem from an excess of hunger for beauty. Hunger for more. And something about it never lets go, however lowly descend into traumatic spirals of hate & hell – Suicide after all is martyrdom. Adoration (even for death) pops back up again and again in presence of its beauty and meaning – non obstante. 

Double U Goodness

Bachelard’s Philosophy of No – is actually a double, is No overturned. Philosophy of No is effectively saying No to No! Scientists exclaiming about new maths – NO you can’t use that – that’s not real!

No to your Not! Brothers’ keeper. Scientists who could – used Leibniz’ “ghosts in the machine” – which is what he called the discursive rationals that were emerging in maths as capable of new measurement. And scientists explored using them until they could no longer be denied as, well – really useful, despite methods lacking any form of classical substance, despite its “exceeding” real.

How excess works with measurement – gives it its meaning. Bachelard was pushing back, up against a negative dialectic not giving up till it reaches a wall that can’t be reached –

Militance

Religiously head was in a noose – being brought up “to-ends-of-earth” for love, basically a militant monotheistic Medieval mentality!? Do or die romantics. Are lovely.

Caught in a rip, there imposed hope beyond hope: a seal of wretched beauty and dying undying dying undying faith as a sailing wailing baling mailing wretched treasure of innocence. Haute le Couer, means wretched in French: High on the Heart. She blasted the blessed pot (beyond all known reason) ha ha HA: why because it had a divine crack in it.

And they all (my sevendust – genesis dust-to-dust 2:7 – and the misery index – of theatricals, eccentrics, etc.) riotously slipped out (unmediated) in excess with a thirst for beauty and its rings, its Rings of Saturn, rings of fire & camp.

Sums

Bachelard’s making his way through Le Bouleversement – The Great Reversal, which is The Secret Sur-title for theme of my (work-in-progress) books.

Rationality as it succeeds through stages, over course of history, is delivering ever more refined depths to rational facilities without necessarily neutralizing out of existence anything what came before – that’s basically Bachelard’s broader outline.

Swell little book!

Haute bleeds out horror and beauty to no end. LuLu my Frenchy who adores French Philosophy, follows Negative Dialectics back to NO in Philosophy of Science and Maths, a la Bachelard – just to see what happens.

And as it turns out – no not just doubles back, but quantifies, turns spectral, symmetries of no, not, yesz – circumnavigates its way thru visions of “hell.”

Apologize. Confess. Sacre coeur! over relish here for peepee kaka humor-slash-signage, oo-la-la.

Penile humor helps me laugh at myself – over sublime “weight” of terror, “going live” here with working excerpts from my horror-does-not-forsake-beauty books.

Pee boy. P for precious plowing holy poly through sanctums crash cupid, wild and lonely for its depths – 

Apologize, must apologize! language sticks at me, flutters & gutters through, in purlieus of fascination, that are fraught with religious embellishment.

Confess

Mythomatic violence – I fell under a casting of enchantments, sniffing after Burroughs and MacGowan rocked my world, took me over, monster & roperipe & spinning spinning – startling kerfuffles awakened from depths of lurking dormant architecture that would captivate & sabotage, astonish enrapture terrorize mortify mystify inveigle transfigure seduce.

Confess weakness for Irish voices, French poets & philosophers, Emily Dickinson’s endings – she slips off from poetic line on the image and eclipses it, sinking in after depths. Also Pound’s cracking liberty bell, Nietzsche’s discussion on religion – and its blowing up then: swamp insidious perverse/religious delicious in wild man philosopher Georges Bataille’s head.

Thank!

Thank. Thank. MUST THANK (beyond measure) Shane MacGowan, Nick Cave (without whose foisted guidance probably would not have regained footing), and ghost of William Burroughs, sincerely apologize to all for having to put up with me during The Crazy Years. Monsters came home to roost, blasted by a fury of Fears.

Without their medicine, have to wonder whether ever would-a could-a wagered species everything to rover over the borderlines with Achilles Jar – cum bats, like a holy lovely feud with hair of angels, heap-a steep-a deep-a with Procrustes – in the rack?

Point

Books on site are all works in progress. If you are interested in, for whatever reason (like publishing – ), see link on comments page for Book Interest.

The Rent

Beauty, la belle, cracked up into a collapsing litany of fire and desire, Joyce speaking angry French somehow always in background like shoots and ladders going down down down to the beachhead for a wire – Trickster’s sooty pale eyes luminating the rent, wretched stupid cupids diz knees – digging out from “source” labors of hell.

Looty Poe lute-y is your beauty. Tak tak tak – many thanks.

John Ashbery – ♥ your postcard collages.

Still have tons of it – boxes of files & photos from Creem Magazine’s last gasp. The dream of doing a collected book, called The Creem Chronicles, died for me as victim of a roaring quavery sadness – sanctimonious and eruptive.

Crates of it still stuck in brothers basement settling for less – bit smelly – but basically in tact.

Snot Guilty

Would again and again push for a book – of uncompromising Piss Boy beauty – when wild gestures began to accumulate.

Suddenly I’d get lost, out at edges of righteousness and meaning, and would descend into petulance –

Quizzically, at depths of religious beauty – what purifies also terrorizes. P Boy Purity? Well that’s a Monster Cookie – clandestine monster in heavens larder who with angels screaming, would hit a breach!

Poetry had let loose a monster whose mystery was self devouring.

Had to teach myself how to find “lines” – which is what I do now – use drawing to help define edges with specific purpose, as a matter of surface and in a community where search-for-beauty is meaning.

Must apologize to: Dorothy Sherman, Louis Ginnelly, Jimmy of Jimmy’s Corner, Russell Galen, James Fitzgerald, Thomas J. McCormack, Hank Bordowitz, Marvin Jarret, Marsh, Christgau, Bangs, Altman, Arnold, and everybody else at Creem.

Who, What shd I do (w/ it) – ?

Tinkle Report though a spoof – is subderiv! (ahold with homage to – ) Patti Smith’s great gnash-ville hollar: PISS FACTORY.

Alackaday – what what what to do with 20+ crates of files from the original Creem?