Wearing my heart on my sleeve like it's the new fashion

Must I go home filled
with a bad poem?
And they say:
Who can answer these things
till he has tried? Your eyes
are half closed, you are a child,
oh, a sweet one, ready to play
but I will make a man of you and
with love on his shoulder—!

from "To A Friend Concerning Several Ladies" by William Carlos William

These abstract objects

The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real. ~ Lucian Freud

Meanwhile Baudrillard has this to say: 
 
The technological plane is an abstraction: in ordinary life we are practically unconscious of the technological reality of objects. Yet this abstraction is profoundly real: it is what governs all radical transformations of our environment. It is even--and I do not mean this in any paradoxical sense--the most concrete aspect of an object, for technological development is synonymous with objective structural evolution.

from The System of Objects

On Brains and Beauty

The most compelling beauty isn't on the surface. It's a beauty that comes through experience and intensity of observation. Sometimes the beauty that is on the surface becomes rather problematic because it's a beauty that knows it is supposed to be beautiful. Consequently, it is ugly inside.

Loose paraphrase of Yusef Komunyakaa.

"I do not know whether we can be saved through the intellect, but I do know that I can be saved by nothing else."

~ Dorothy Sayers

On Being Human

Man is much more than a "rational being," and lives more by sympathies and impressions than by conclusions. It darkens his eyes and dries up the wells of his humanity to be forever in search of doctrine. We need wholesome, experiencing natures, I dare affirm, much more than we need sound reasoning.

~ Woodrow Wilson

Today

I lit a fire in my mind. A photo of you had fallen into the flames. When I reached out to retrieve your face from the blaze a voice said, "no, don't."

Not sure yet...

It's still a work in progress; but I might have written this for you, TW.

Superconduction

for TW

Penetrating eyes, Blue ELECTRIC
                           Green

Pulsing

Ocean

Wave.

Cultivated.

Soul
searching

smile; concealed
in revelation
masked and unmasked

simultaneously.

This mask is a screen for desire: overwhelming desire!
Oh how the fans cheer!
Project undulating ego

here.

Unobtrusively strolling
(being is being to be)
Humming ELECTRIC.
Paradoxical

Dancer in midair

Seeking: lost
found
for once then
something?

Poets, Artists, and Madmen

Are the very best kind of people to be because they understand this simple truth:
 

“Humans believe so many lies. Some of these lies are so subtle and convincing that we base our entire virtual reality on them without even noticing that they are lies.”

 ~ Don Miguel Ruiz

To be a poet

A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessences. Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes all men: the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed—and the Supreme Scientist! For he attains the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone! He attains the unknown, and, if demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them! So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnameable: other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one has fallen!

~ Arthur Rimbaud

Random Shakespearean Sonnet

Here's mine

Nor double penance, to correct correction.
O! that our night of woe might have remembered
Nor can I fortune to brief minutes tell,
When I was certain o'er uncertainty,

Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Crooked eclipses gainst his glory fight,
That have profaned their scarlet ornaments
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

The most sweet favour or deformedst creature,
For, if I should despair, I should grow mad,
On whom frownst thou that I do fawn upon,
No, it was builded far from accident;

Wherein I should your great deserts repay,
Perforce am thine, and all that is in me.

To make yours, go here


Who knew writing a sonnet could be as easy as pushing a button?!?!

Another Cut-Up

 for H.D., Imagiste

sometimes resonance 
image 
starts to symbolize sense. 
head sense, 
handwriting, 
this presence refuses

Sense. In physical space  
no page, the words 
the process 
the product
physical resonances 
sound.

Before and always, yes!
words enter
an entirely physical moment. 
this refuses the symbols
against A and not A
refuses heart. nonsemantic sound 
Not feeling 
no sound
the aural answer--you.

Alicante

Alicante

~ Jacques Prevert

Une orange sur la table
Ta robe sur le tapis
Et toi dans mon lit
Doux présent de la présent
Fraîcheur de la nuit
Chaleur de ma vie

An orange upon the table
Your dress on the rug
And you in my bed
Sweet present of the present
Cool of the night
Warmth of my life

Alas the translation is inadequate in its expression of the ephemeral and slightly detached quality of the captured moment, the sensual tension between presence and absence, and the fleeting moment that is so joyful precisely because it is fleeting.

On my evening walk

A gypsy moth flew into my eye as if it were an open door.

Which reminded me of this

7-Sentence Short Story

The Muse

She was filled with his words, his thoughts, his visions. They blew out of her in stale puffs of hot air, filling the sky with cloying disdain. Until one day she found her own words exploding out of her finger tips. She could finally breathe. Her lexicon lit into the atmosphere with the uncontrollable creation of a dream. A dream vision of the palm tree in her mind. She knew what must be done.

"Give me miles and miles of mountains and I'll ask for the sea"

And so it finally happened, just as he said it would. The Beautiful Girl found herself alone in the desert, dying of thirst, searching for a cool drink of water; finding nothing but grains of sand and mountains. Mountains, mountains... roughly hewn, metamorphic, igneous, sediments of geologic time. Trapped and choking on the granitic indifference of impervious stone. Drowning in arid air with no path to the sea! Desperately she pushed her flaming tongue against the sharp shards of sand. The words swarmed around her brain with the force of prophecy: “Quod amo me delet.”

A seduction poem

Oread

By H. D.
 

Whirl up, sea—

whirl your pointed pines,

splash your great pines

on our rocks,

hurl your green over us,

cover us with your pools of fir.

The poem is process

"A production process. But not a process toward some final product. The poem has no final answer--you cannot say what it means in the end--because the poem always moves along before you can say it. In a sense, the poem is an act of refusal. Before producing sense, the poem refuses sense. Not entirely (or sometimes entirely) but refuses sense for the moment. The poem puts sense in its place, semantics in equal measure to the nonsemantic aspects of words, the abstract grammar of language and the concrete presence of the words themselves (typescript, handwriting, voice, digital image). The poetry of the poem resides not in its meaning, but in its musicality: the aural resonance created by the sound of one word next to another word, words on top of words. The spatial resonance of marks and symbols set against the page, the screen, the sidewalk. The physical resonance, the way the head rings, the way the poet holds on to the time and space of the audience, the way words come through the stereo speakers and knock on your chest. And yes, the erotic, emotional resonance, the feeling the poem leaves on your skin or in your head or on your heart. Only at this point does the semantic sense of the text reenter into context: amidst the multiplied resonances of the poem one finds sense, creates new sense, starts making sense where no sense was before....the poem is the process by which all of this comes to pass."

~ Justin Read, Modern Poetics and Hemispheric American Cultural Studies

Passion versus Detachment

I read once that "only really passionate people know anything about detachment because they are forced to learn it or die; no one comes willingly to detachment" and I agree, to an extent, but I am slightly more compelled by Anaïs Nin's assertion that this detachment has a price, because inevitably there comes a day when the risk to remain tight in a bud is more painful than the risk it takes to blossom.

“Ah daddy, I wanna stay drunk many days”

Instant coffee with slightly sour cream
in it, and a phone call to the beyond
Which doesn’t seem to be coming any nearer.
“Ah daddy, I wanna stay drunk many days”
on the poetry of a new friend
my life held precariously in the seeing
hands of others, their and my impossibilities.
Is this love, now that the first love
has finally died, where there were no impossibilities?

~ Frank O’Hara

Writing about love

You see, that's what I'm supposed to be doing right now.

It's more difficult than it sounds. The task always reminds me of Raymond Carver's story, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love."  It's a difficult topic because you want to treat it meaningfully without becoming so subjective that it loses all universal appeal. There have to be some universals, right? But what could be more subjective than love? How many of us even speak the same "love language"? Maybe we even define the word differently. So why read what someone else has to say about it? I'm not sure that I have answers to these questions. So I write what I know. The current story is a mishmash of my own experience layered with stories I've heard and strange daydreams of "what could have been." It might even be good. I don't know. I've received great feedback, still, it needs more readers. But that's not what I want to talk about here. Not exactly. The thing is that this process has resulted in a state of sort of reliving of my old love affairs. This experience hasn't been pleasant. Which is a terrible thing to say. But there it is. My past affairs have mostly been miserable failures. I've only known the roller coaster kind of love, the ecstasy that can only result in agony. Once, I had what one might call a "normal" relationship. It was nice, but rather boring. I was always "too much" something for his taste. I was too loud, too exuberant, too beautiful, I thought too much, felt too much, I wanted too much. I think I exasperated him most of the time. So how can I possibly write a short story about love? So you can read my dirty little secrets? To provide you with a terrible warning? What was it Aristotle said about the catharsis of tragedy? Going back to Plato's Symposium is no help either. Well, it helps a little. If you've not read it, I recommend it. But I'm not sure that it helps me with my current endeavor. Divine love is what I search for but I only seem to find the other kind and Plato's blatant misogyny always depresses me a bit. Plus it doesn't answer the primary question: what is it that we talk about when we talk about love? Desire? Passion? Need? Bliss? Contentment? Security?

What about adventure? Discovery? Are there new frontiers on the field of love or is there only love? Do you choose who to fall in love with? How? Is it better to be the lover or the beloved? There's always an inherently unequal dynamic in that relation. At least if we agree with Plato (which many of us do whether we know it or not). What if we seek equanimity in an equal partnership? Does that even exist?

You see, I have far more questions than answers and my own limited experience may only prove to be a terrible warning rather than provide a good example. "Messy love is better than none, I guess. I'm no authority on sane living."

The Etymology of Ecstasy

This is what a suitor once thought comprised the essence of a love note... maybe he was right. I do love to play the etymology game.

--------------------
Subject: ecstasy

quoth the OED

Etymology:  < Old French extasie, (after words in -sie, < Latin -sia) < medieval Latin extasis, < Greek ἔκστασις, < ἐκστα- stem of ἐξιστάναι to put out of place (in phrase ἐξιστάναι ϕρενῶν ‘to drive a person out of his wits’), < ἐκ out + ἱστάναι to place. The modern English spelling shows direct recourse to Greek The French extase is < medieval Latin or Greek. 

The classical senses of ἔκστασις are ‘insanity’ and ‘bewilderment’; but in late Greek the etymological meaning received another application, viz., ‘withdrawal of the soul from the body, mystic or prophetic trance’; hence in later medical writers the word is used for trance, etc., generally. Both the classical and post-classical senses came into the mod. languages, and in the present fig. uses they seem to be blended.

 OF. extasie, (after words in -sie, ad. L. -sia) f. med.L. extasis, a. Gr. to put out of place (in phrase to drive a person out of his wits’), f. out +  to place.

1. The state of being ‘beside oneself’, thrown into a frenzy or a stupor, with anxiety, astonishment, fear, or passion.

1382   Bible (Wycliffite, E.V.) Acts iii. 10   Thei weren fulfillid with wondryng, and exstasie, that is, leesyng of mynde of resoun and lettyng of tunge.

?a1400   Chester Pl. (1847) ii. 113,   I knowe‥ That you be in greate exstacye.

1592   Marlowe Jew of Malta i. ii. 217   Our words will but increase his ecstasy.

a1616   Shakespeare Macbeth (1623) iii. ii. 24   To lye In restlesse extasie.

1634   T. Herbert Relation Trav. 201   With a great and sudden Army he entred‥In which extasie the English Factors fled to Bantam.

1834   B. Disraeli Revol. Epick i. ii. 2   The crouching beasts Cling to the earth in pallid ecstasy.

2. Pathol.†a. By early writers applied vaguely, or with conflicting attempts at precise definition, to all morbid states characterized by unconsciousness, as swoon, trance, catalepsy, etc.

1598   J. Marston Metamorph. Pigmalions Image 3   Beames‥shoote from out the fairenes of her eye: At which he stands as in an extasie.

1600   P. Holland tr. Livy Rom. Hist. xliiii. xv. 179   The principall person of the embassage‥fell downe flat before them in a swoune and extasie.

a1616   Shakespeare Othello (1622) iv. i. 78,   I‥layed good scuse, vpon your extacy [stage direct. to line 42: He fals downe, 1623 Falls in a Trauncs].

1702   Clarendon's Hist. Rebellion I. iii. 160   The Ministers of the State‥like men in an Extasy‥had no Speech or Motion.

 b. In modern scientific use. (See quot.)

1866   A. Flint Treat. Princ. Med. 628   Ecstasy. In this condition, the mind, absorbed in a dominant idea, becomes insensible to surrounding objects.

1882   R. Quain Dict. Med. , s.v.,   The term ecstasy has been applied to certain morbid states of the nervous system, in which the attention is occupied exclusively by one idea, and the cerebral control is in part withdrawn from the lower cerebral and certain reflex functions. These latter centres may be in a condition of inertia, or of insubordinate activity, presenting various disordered phenomena, for the most part motor.

  
3. a. Used by mystical writers as the technical name for the state of rapture in which the body was supposed to become incapable of sensation, while the soul was engaged in the contemplation of divine things. Now hist. or allusive.

a1652   J. Smith Select Disc. (1660) iv. vi. 100   In such sober kind of Ecstacies did Plotinus find his own Soul separated from his Body.

1656   H. More Antidote Atheism (1712) iii. ix. 171   The Emigration of humane Souls from the bodie by Ecstasy.

1690   J. Locke Ess. Humane Understanding ii. xix. 112   Whether that which we call Extasie, be not dreaming with the Eyes open, I leave to be examined.

1696   J. Aubrey Misc. (1721) 181/2   Things seen in an Extacy are more certain than those we behold in dreams.

1843   R. W. Emerson Transcendentalist in Dial Jan. 300   He [the Transcendentalist] believes in inspiration and in ecstasy.

1856   R. A. Vaughan Hours with Mystics (1860) I. iii. ii. 65   Ecstasy‥is the liberation of your mind from its finite consciousness.

1879   Lefevre Philos. i. 29   The Chaldæans and the Semites let loose on the West these wanton rites, the intoxication of the senses, and by a natural transposition, mystic ecstasy.

 

 b. The state of trance supposed to be a concomitant of prophetic inspiration; hence, Poetic frenzy or rapture. Now with some notion of 4.

1670   Milton Hist. Brit. ii. 63   Certaine women in a kind of ecstasie foretold of calamities to come.

1682   G. Burnet Hist. Rights Princes (new ed.) iv. 125   Eucherius, Bishop of Orleans‥being in an Extasy, saw him in Hell.

1751   T. Gray Elegy xii. 7   Hands‥wak'd to extacy the living lyre.

1757   T. Gray Ode I iii. ii, in Odes 10   He, that rode sublime Upon the seraph-wings of Extasy.

1813   Scott Bridal of Triermain iii. xxxv. 188   [She] leant upon a harp, in mood Of minstrel ecstasy.

 4. An exalted state of feeling which engrosses the mind to the exclusion of thought; rapture, transport. Now chiefly, Intense or rapturous delight.

If Truth is what you seek,

Try this.

I can't make myself work today.

I have an article to finish, a short story to finalize for submission, and five poems to send off. Why can't I make myself work today?

Also, I'm out of whisky. (I think I just answered my own question.)

Maxfield Parrish Designs my Dreams

No really, the world in my head looks like this.

Wisdom from MLK

"Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted."

The Evil Queen--A Cut-up in Two Parts

for Ben Perez

Part 1

This holy environment 
empowered desire 
would die for you.

Unconditional need
needs devotion,
hearts,
unconditional thought:
"In me. Live only who dies."
Desperate
lies spoken in desire,
passion:
Only I can live for you. 

Part 2

Tall thin tears thrust trapper teacher
her heaven hooker hours hint hesitation
evil engenders enemies emerging

Each eye expanse equipment (re)enactment
virgin visions voices venery
idea immorality incredible
lips loving little life lightening

Queen queerly
utters unspoken unusual unconscious
each elite earth eats
experience excess! excess! excess!
noctambulism

A is for Apple J is for Jack

and too much light makes baby go blind.

Wisdom from Paulo Coelho

"No seas de esos que buscan, encuentran, y después huyen con miedo."

Some days are like this

When the doors between the worlds opened

I ceased to be a ghost, I became

the blood in my fingers in the veins of my hands

I felt the world under my feet

with its nails and its splinters I felt

the salt the red water in the loam of my chest I was

no longer a ghost, the vapors were gone,

I was solid, I hurt, my wings could be broken,

it was joy, I was living in it,

I bled, I cried.

Dana Levin, In the Surgical Theatre

Someone has discovered my secret

writing method.

Writing Exercise for 7/16

Dream work: record dreams daily, experiment with translation or transcription of dream thought, attempt to approach the tense and incongruity appropriate to the dream, work with the dream until a poem or song emerges from it, use the dream as an alert form of the mind's activity or consciousness, consider the dream a problem-solving device, change dream characters into fictional characters, accept dream's language as a gift.

This means something...

"Why should Shalimar attract kraits. Why should a coral snake need two glands of neurotoxic poison to survive while a king snake, so similarly marked, needs none. Where is the Darwinian logic there. You might ask that. I never would, not anymore. I recall an incident reported not long ago in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner: two honeymooners, natives of Detroit, found dead in their Scout camper near Boca Raton, a coral snake still coiled in the thermal blanket. Why? Unless you are prepared to take the long view, there is no satisfactory 'answer' to such questions."

Joan Didion, Play it as it Lays

The Nymph's Reply

"But could youth last and love still breed,
Had joys no date nor age no need"

The endless refrain:
write me a love letter
Perhaps that's what she'd say;
you write in vain.

But write me a love letter,
and I'll sing my siren's song,
to stir your frozen lake
with the ache of eternity.

At the gelato shop

Guy behind the counter: You want me to open that for you or are you going to use your teeth?

Me: Stuff like that is bad for your teeth.

Guy behind the counter: So is riding in cars with boys.

Me: Eh?

My Cut-Up Machine Poem

You are information.
Learned example
perpetuated consideration
reproduction of 
spurious
constant information condition 
lacking system.
Reproduction
Self-absorbed, culture; ideology
Repetition


Ideology rewards worse metaphor,
perpetuated problem 
educational endeavor
productive down
slow habit brains
encourage 
slow 
Construct spurious scholar.

Go here to make yours.

Oh that Shakespeare

Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
      If this be error and upon me proved,
     I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Happy Birthday, Gustav!

A detail from one of my favorites:

I want to paint this detail from Danaë on my bedroom wall:

Trying to write

a dedication poem to HD but so far it's just not working. Maybe I need to read more of her poems written on Greek epigrams.

Epigram
By H. D.

(After the Greek)

THE GOLDEN one is gone from the banquets;
She, beloved of Atimetus,
The swallow, the bright Homonoea:
Gone the dear chatterer;
Death succeeds Atimetus.

Crazy... lining up little ducks!

I'm currently going a bit crazy. I have lots of writing deadlines with the big ms due August 1 and I'm attempting to line up a bunch of little ducks so that I can become ABD by next August, apply for a research fellowship, finish an ESL training workshop, and prep for a new honors course I'm teaching in the fall.

I'm also out of whisky.

Wisdom from St. Theresa

Remember that you have only one soul; that you have only one death to die; that you have only one life. . . . If you do this, there will be many things about which you care nothing. 

~ St. Theresa of Avila

Wisdom from Uncle Buck

For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.

~ Charles Bukowski

"How can we know the dancer from the dance?"

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

~ William Butler Yeats

Composing my own adaptation of this excerpt

"I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,
and I have been circling for a thousand years,
and I still don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm,
or a great song."

~Rilke

My version:

Circling an Idea, around Yeats' tower,
Circling and circled for two thousand years,
Notion of the widening gyre.
Still don't know:
Falcon or falconer?

Not sure yet where this is going

But it seemed important today...

In the end there are no simple answers, no heroes, no villains, only the crushing silence of cosmic emptiness. Our spiritual disconnect quelled beneath the scientific logician's theory of survival of the fittest. An ideology drummed into the brain. Its simplistic code mapped onto everything we perceive. We spend our lives anxiously bored to death just waiting & wishing for something to happen. What happens next? Oh, right, the hero. The hero, of course, there's always a hero, and, in this fantasy, he finally steps onto the scene to save us. We know that story. It's the oldest story. Oh, bright bringer of our salvation! The hero is always there, at the brink of destruction, ready, in his gleaming bright shiny whiteness, white teeth, white hat. So blindingly white and shining in his hand of God chiseled perfection. He comes to show us the way, via his journey. He is god incarnate on Earth. We do not question this narrative. We never ask ourselves about the other stories we've lost in favor of this one. And so we wait for the hero to step onto the scene. We no longer know how to save ourselves.

A Symposium

A Symposium

for the other half of my soul

My alter ego
port key to an ideal,

reconciled dichotomy
to interconnect.
A new entity:
To be or not to be. Adaptation

Reflect what each lacks. Together
I'm beside myself,
I concede.
Reciprocal vulnerability,
'me and thee consummate we.'

All else a Cinderella dance on the sidelines,
Pandering or prohibition,
A Bermuda Triangle of lies
provocation, promiscuity, peccancy.

But here,
at the gate of impasse,
I still have a choice.

Dreams of pomegranate and seaweed

Galatea Resurrects 

for H.D.

-->

A dream,

of pomegranate and seaweed

and Galatea;

a supreme fiction.

Flesh encased in stone. Every curve
A heroic gesture,

his artistry.

Revive Ophelia!
Bring back those brides,
Wilted flowers in hand,
condemned to hell;

-->

six pomegranate seeds,

a lover's backward glance.