Saturday, December 31, 2016

Life, and Time


I wonder if all life might not be unlike anno 1910,
four years before a war, when Howard's End
propended toward pronouncements about biases
and social class, and Paris boasted (on December
Third) a neon sign - first in the world - appended

to the glass of its new Motor Show - attended by
the rolling roto-motions of a slew of hips of smartly
turned-out girls which sent soft tiny seismic shocks
up through their coiffured curls, and down their
corsets to their furling street-length skirts. I wonder

if all life is not unlike the tightly buttoned suits
and blinding white stiff-collared shirts of men just
at the end of the Edwardians: symbolic gallant
phallic swordsmen striding to and fro like random
posses of spermatozoa seeking to invade an egg hid

in the mysteries above some lovely woman’s leg.
I wonder if all life is not unlike the bloom of the erotic
in a room alone with Henry James imagining the voice
of that young man he’s sure will call him very soon on
his new-fangled phone, to dissipate the terrible mute

gloom of a December afternoon in Rye: heart-ache
over tea-cake and a sigh. I wonder if you can't make
life into whatever you've a liking to. Today the early
‘teens of Europe please and tease. I get no quarrel
from my referent: life never argues, it agrees.



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More on my Kaleidograms: A wet tree trunk & its amazing children ...

The Last Dream of 2016


It disconcerted and diverted –
both alarmed and charmed
and finally disarmed you
to observe this greenish creature
on all fours, who’d somehow
managed to invade the privacy
of your most intimate “indoors” –

the precinct of your secrecies
in sleep – the deepest cavern
of your reveries – on his knees
now in the middle of the last dream
you would have before you woke
into the last day of the year: not
a joke, exactly, that he’s here:

although he had the marvelous
intractability of comic archetype:
the sort who’d wipe his eyes
in disbelief at every oddity –
which in his case would be
everything he’d ever see –
which in this case had been you.

He cocked his head the way
dogs often do, wide-eyed
in bewilderment, wondering
if what he saw could possibly
be true, this strange phenomenon
of you, he’d never seen
a thing remotely as bizarre.

Now surfacing to wakefulness –
disconcerted and diverted, both
alarmed and charmed and finally
disarmed, you grapple with what
might just be the fun (more happily 
than un-) of this distracting fact –
“bizarre” is what you are.


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Friday, December 30, 2016

Without Death (Sex with a Ghost) video performance



Without Death (Sex with a Ghost)


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Without Death (Sex with a Ghost)

I'm abjectly in lust with a ghost. Having sex with a ghost
is the most reckless bliss: unworldly and twisted
and too good to miss. And oh – can it kiss!

We rest after it with some make-believe toast & ghost tea.
It mimes drinking Oolong. I make like I’m eating
burnt rye. We happily sigh and offhandedly

muse, or – depends on our moods – intellectually settle in
to discuss what our views that day happen to be
on what teleological theory might do some

justice to why we are us. Though we both tend to end
in the same philosophical bus. If I, for example,
rhetorically query him: Isn’t it treason against

a Grand Plan for Phantasm & Man to dive into such lust?
It says don’t make a fuss. Then it will resume its
more worthy pursuit – of exhuming the thrill

of its deathless erotic finesse at undressing my heretofore
hidden, but now – since it knows what deceased  
means, and thus what release means – are

well-known excesses, & not quite perhaps what you think.
Think of taking a drink of infinity, so to amass a vast
tenderness you couldn’t grasp without death.

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Thursday, December 29, 2016

Without Death (Sex with a Ghost)


I'm abjectly in lust with a ghost. Having sex with a ghost
is the most reckless bliss: unworldly and twisted
and too good to miss. And oh – can it kiss!

We rest after it with some make-believe toast & ghost tea.
It mimes drinking Oolong. I make like I’m eating
burnt rye. We happily sigh and offhandedly

muse, or – depends on our moods – intellectually settle in
to discuss what our views that day happen to be
on what teleological theory might do some

justice to why we are us. Though we both tend to end
in the same philosophical bus. If I, for example,
rhetorically query him: Isn’t it treason against

a Grand Plan for Phantasm & Man to dive into such lust?
It says don’t make a fuss. Then it will resume its
more worthy pursuit – of exhuming the thrill

of its deathless erotic finesse at undressing my heretofore
hidden, but now – since it knows what deceased  
means, and thus what release means – are

well-known excesses, and not quite perhaps what you think.
Think of taking a drink of infinity, so to amass a vast
tenderness you couldn’t grasp without death.



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One Small Bit of an Infinity


If I could lend you one small
bit of an infinity I would.
(You wouldn't have to give
it back.) It might cast just

the needed spell of letting
you believe that all is now
and always will be well.
There is something bright –

ungovernable – volatile in
you called life. Now you
fight it,  try to slice it with
a mental knife: to split it

into good guys, bad guys,
brutal lessons to be learned.
If you could borrow from me
one small bit of an infinity

(you wouldn't have to give it
back) you mightn't think that
safety in the soul could
only mortally be earned.




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Wednesday, December 28, 2016

Genies and Their Ways


I released my genie yesterday
when he acceded to my final wish: to see
what he would do when freed from slavery.
He said, “Oh, I'd have done that anyway –

to show you genies don’t agree to be
with anyone because we’re made to:
we can't resist a captive audience to play to!”
(Apparently the captor here had not been me,

but he.) And when he left, what did he do?
He randomly made other dreams come true,
while making sure each dreamer saw just who
was doing it. I asked that one of them be you.




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Tuesday, December 27, 2016

facebook video - tour of my home!



the screen size of the original video is vertical rectangle/oblong - whose bottom has been cut off here, so between not being able to see the whole of anything I'm trying to show and the jerky handheld iPhone with which I'm showing it, you may quickly acquire something of a headache even trying to come along with me, so I won't feel rebuffed in the least if you decide to get outta here real quick. But as I say in the video, I haven't developed whatever style of narcissism suits this sort of exposure (other kinds of narcissimsm have found comfortable homes in other genres), so maybe there's something sort of sweetly risible in watching me fumble arround here. Maybe not!

anyway, b'bye.


If There Were No Cordelia


If there were no Cordelia,
would there have been a Lear?
If Goneril and Regan
had been all he’d had to rear,

would Lear’s demise
have been as harrowing?
Would it have been a wider
or more narrow thing?

Would Lear have killed himself?
How much would we care?
Here’s the only
answer we can bear.

If Cordelia had never
appeared in King Lear,
there might as well never
have been a Shakespeare.



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Sunday, December 25, 2016

From Here


I’ve been drawing many drawings
over many years and recently,
especially, have stayed awake quite
late in the pursuit of what I sense

from what they’ve incrementally
revealed to me what they require
to affect, effect, create their fate –
not only theirs, I seem to be aware,
but mine. Or so I dare now to divine

from having watched my two most
recent creatures each comport their
facial features, lift their palms and wave
their fingers in a readily decipherable

“Hi!” at me. In all the years I’ve been
the gofer, butler, plumber, secretary,
architect and cook of this menagerie
I’ve never once before detected as direct

a look – so candidly acknowledging
I’m here. All I know from this miraculous
development to do is to accept that
they waved “Hi!” at me, and then,
as amiably as I can, wave “Hi!” right

back at them. Their mystery has
changed demeanor, lost its sting,
gained some sweeter thing. From
here things may get interesting.


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Friday, December 23, 2016

No Easy Fight


At the surface right above the focus of the blast –
the epicenter of the heart – the angel and the beast
do not, precisely, co-exist: they mix and match
and coalesce and fix their gazes here and there

and everywhere: become each other and/or hybridize:
categorize them if you dare – they'll shatter into anywhere.
We want, we think, to abdicate the throne of blood
and grief: and give it to that hungry thief who thrills at

killing and at lusting over what he's killed: oh, let that
part of Soul be spilled! – like water on the wicked witch,
let evil melt and twitch to its last gasp: and let what
lasts switch to the open heart – be felt! Until we see

the skulking thief is us, and all his power-broking violent
sadistic fuss is at the core, no less or more than
breezy light. This ain't no easy fight. The beast is not
some atavistic relic: he's daily fed and wed to the angelic.




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Ballad of the Past Participles

Ballad of the Past Participles


Risen, shaken, soon mistaken.
Given, driven, thrown, forsaken,
Lorn and frozen, taken, torn,
Shown but hidden, fallen, flown,
Striven, swollen, overgrown,
Forsworn, forgiven, forgotten, gone.

Woven, riven, thriven on,
Gotten, stolen, eaten, drunk,
Smitten, written, been and done,
Boughten, beaten, spent and slunk.

Bidden, chidden, known and meant.
Graven — broken — hidden — pent.
Sown then shone then mown then fled:
Bethought, begotten, born and dead.


Reed Woodhouse








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Thursday, December 22, 2016

Stars and Us


We’re in it and we are it:
we cannot stop – despite
our manufacturing
illusions of a respite

in which intermittent
calm oases let us cease –
adopt for moments just
a little peace: we

can't for long pretend –
we have again to face
we never left the headlong
rush: just when it all

began or may at some
point end is not
the point of surf:
if a tsunami had a brain

it would sustain a single
perfect aim: to know
the opposite of no –
which isn't yes but GO.




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Wednesday, December 21, 2016

The Spirit at the Root of Things


The Spirit at the Root of Things gets moody.
It’s partly that there’s nothing much to do. He

isn’t felt or seen or known by any thing he’s
at the root of – which after all is every thing.

Things take care of things quite well. Why
they need a Spirit he can’t tell. What could care

that he was there? But there he is. Naked as
a jaybird – though despite his being at the Root

of Things, even things like Sky – he doesn’t fly,
which jaybirds, which are also things presumably

he’s at the root of, do. The Spirit at the Root
of Things feels as inert as turnip stew. Except

that turnips are acknowledged. So is stew.
If any one of us were he, we’d be moody too.



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Oak Leaf Progenitors, Kaleidogram Progeny

 
 




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It Isn’t Easy Welcoming an Alien


It isn’t easy welcoming an alien
without appearing to inspect it –
one hazards rudeness in the act.
Coelenterate, sorbet, Episcopalian?

Hard not to stare, and stay collected
while asking it its facts, with tact.






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Monday, December 19, 2016

The Story He Just Told to His Imaginary Pet


Determined to pursue the Russian army
all the way to Moscow, Napoleon fought the flu.
In the biting wind and rain he faced his future
with a fever. Levering his Enemy into the best

position to be killed, he steeled himself to disbelieve
his own mortality - enrobing in puissance-de-Dieu -
he exercised ague- and world-defying godly
autocratic will. When I'm equivalently ill. I'm drawn

to grand denial and hyperbole no less than he.
My capacity for a selective take on what the tapestry
reveals is thoroughly unbounded. I have a taste
for the unfounded. I think the paradox of being

human must contain these two perplexities:
the felt necessity of bald self-revelation and
the urgency of clinging to the lie. Amounts to this:
Plan never to know anything. Expect to die.



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Kaleidograms - The Pleasures & Conundrum Of

original

halves turned in

halves turned out


pollock 
 

halves turned in
 

halves turned out


I continue to think I'm on to something interesting with all the kaleidograms I keep posting on Facebook and Instagram. 

Kaleidogram is the name my friend Reed gave them: seems to me spot-on. Captures the enforced symmetry a kaleidoscope brings to randomness. But kaleidograms seem to me to venture into deeper territory. How I discovered them was through the Layout App on Instagram, which permits you to divide into geometrical quadrants any photo you take - photos produced in this case by my very good iPhone camera. I'm besotted with my city - New York is my muse and my lover. Her trees and tree branches especially regale, so I take plenty of pics of those. But kaleidogramming them  has been startling; I'm amazed not so much at the symmetries that ensue, but that they're almost always astonishingly both beautiful and interesting. They become such powerful, strange, sometimes harrowing Rorshach tests - the faces you see in them! Fantastical stage sets, movie extravaganzas, caverns and seas and skies: the sorts of ravishing things dreams can create.

Here's the latest disposition of my thought about it, as emailed just now to Reed, accompanied by 6 pics: 1) branches unkaleidogrammed 2) branches kaleidogrammed in half (halves turned in); 3) branches ... halves turned out; 4) Pollock unadulterated; 5) Pollock kaleidogrammed in half (halves turned in ); Pollock kaleidogrammed (halves turned out).

==================================================

Really it IS interesting, these differences we find between our visual attractions & repulsions. What astonishes some apparently constitutionally naive part of my eye is that from what it takes to be chaos (however pleasing) pre-kaleidogram always, post-kaleidogramming, bursts into instant intricate symmetry - without 'thinking' to do it - just as if it's a encoded in its template or DNA.

Maybe mostly to the point when all you do is halve the thing. Wouldn't it still seem more like two equal chaoses, instead of a perfectly aligned unity? It's as if a sudden inarguable 'meaning' dawns in it when the pic is kaleidogrammed. Again, for me, most powerfully the case as here - when the pre-kaleidogram pic is as dense with branchery as this one is. It's akin to the pull I feel in my fave Pollock painting - with the difference that Pollock has already granted his panorama a sense of balanced unity by distributing its stresses and reliefs in a composition which has to me the pleasing effect of symmetry - sort of beats with the heart of it. But what is very much the same is the feeling I have both in the Pollock painting and especially in my denser kaleidograms of being able to enter them, as if into a forest, inspect them at close hand & partake somehow of their currents of meaning - see and follow this or that 'run' of thought - not unlike playing Bach. Symmetry on this level of dense intricacy does more than please the eye: the more intricate the disposition of its 'vocabulary' the more something seems as if it's been (or being) said. It's like creating a thinking mind. and Lordy, look what happens to Pollock when you halve IT. It gives imposed kaleidogrammification the harshest test to which I've yet submitted it. But - it 'obeys' as well. Although utterly and rightly against the painting's will. Pollock defies messing with in this way, and should. But trees et al. seem rather to like it - sort of like dogs rubbing up against you to massage behind their ears again the wonderful way you did it last time.

I keep waiting to not find this interesting, but so far I wait in vain. It opens up sort of wondrous new bewilderments about the 'what is art' conundrum. How much depends on human agency in the making-of-it - and/or on human agency in the looking-at-it? When I see a tree out there just being a tree and find it art, is it art? The you-know-me wants to say, why not?

Well, I guess not exactly new bewilderments: scads of 20th century art put this notion to a test: from planting a toilet in a gallery to presenting depictions of tomato soup cans. But the bewilderments seem fresh to me here.

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Sunday, December 18, 2016

My Christmas Lady


Is there a poem in her?
I don’t know. I never know.
I watched it snow the other day.
Looking at the calendar it’s clear
it is that Christmas time of year
to which I know no gift to bring
except my own defense against it.
Why? I don’t know why.

When my mother died,
Christmas stopped, like a clock.
I know that sounds like a response to shock.
But no, I never savored Christmas.
It was for some idea of a suburban family,
not for me. The only reason for the season
I could see was to believe in it enough
to carry out whatever stuff would show
I loved that it had meaning to my mother.
Which it did, and I did.

Christmas left when she left.
Neither loss left me bereft.
My mother’s life was gorgeously complete.
Now Christmas wouldn’t be there to deplete
me. Except it does.

Drawing turns out always to be ready
with reaction to this sort of fuzz
and never an abstract one.

Just now from under my massaging pencil’s
ministrations I was favored by the confident
appearance of a lady with thick blue hair flying back
and warmly dressed for winter in a mix of hues
for Christmas. She’s staring straight ahead at nothing
I make out, unless it is the abstract angled vaguely
human-sized-and-shaped suggestion of a form,
vertical and phallic, glowing with more colors of the sun
than any other thing or one around them was.
The woman’s mittens look a bit like boxing gloves.

My large gray cat Macgillicuddy sometimes cuddled with me
on my bed when I was sick or in the quick of dreading
something I had done would be discovered and uncovered
and I’d feel the freezing gust of somebody’s disgust with me.
Another ghostly tale perhaps of buried psychoanalytic truth.
But I remember hearing rain fall on the roof and feeling
animally free with my gray cat obliviously purring next to me.

So yes, I do remember this.
What it has to do with Christmas,
I don’t know –  unless maybe
it’s refracted in my Christmas lady.

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