A Remarkable Economy of Means

She was made with a remarkable

economy of means.

Part of her was chair,

and parts were head and torso, hands

and feet and knees.

She lived amenably on pinto beans

and frozen peas.










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Existential Pragmatism

This morning when he sat down at the table to consider

the absorbing question of what confiture to choose

to spread upon his whole wheat toast he heard,

or thought he heard, the softest plaintive sigh behind him:

and turned round to see a ghost. The ghost seemed more

surprised than he. But he accepted everything: he was

the devotee of existential pragmatism: things are what they are

and what they have to be. So he resumed his pondering –

this time about the strangely vexing possibility that coffee

might not be for him, today, as much a treat as tea.

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That Shape Am I

I've come to think there's a sort of staticky chaos irrevocably in the center of the human psyche which we each know privately more than anyone else ever will - not least because we hide it at all costs: it's too anarchic, unacceptable, monstrous: it is completely oblivious and remains forever immune to our most cherished, foregone notions of reason or decency or ideology. It is therefore untouched & perhaps untouchable, but it does touch us, and exists because we do: it's not a kind of autism persisting defiantly in face of the 'human.' No, it in some ways makes the human, if not the 'human' we like to acknowledge. Like Freud's imaginary Id, to talk about it at all (like trying to name God) is always to miss it.. However although it cannot be tamed or altered, knows only its own explosive force & substance, it takes place in us, and may be the most intimate dimension of consciousness we know.

But it is horrifying; we guard it like a terrible secret. It is the thing that wakes us at 3 a.m. in a deep state of bewilderment - out of gravity and time, beyond form; it's the swizzlesnitch that for a moment makes us want to murder the redhaired woman in front of us in the post office line. I think William James probably knew what this was better than anybody - maybe  his whole family did (since they each seemed to have kindred separate experiences of its horror - Henry Sr. called his a "vastation"): to me it's suggested by William James who reconstituted in his Principles of Psychology his own terrible experience of a 'presence' into the form of a mad man in a French asylum. Referenced here from an article about James in the New York Review of Books ("The Most Entertaining Philosopher" - http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/10/27/most-entertaining-philosopher/ ):

'...when suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic…. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other.That shape am I, I felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him.

After this glimpse into the horror rerum, James writes, “the universe was changed for me altogether” and he was left with “a sense of the insecurity of life that I never knew before, and that I have never felt since.” Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, he concluded by professing to believe that “this experience of melancholia of mine had a religious bearing.”

He was not the first in his family to be thus afflicted....'

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Why do I feel I have to jump in now and say this is not a negative thing? It's so centrally part of what existence smells and tastes like.

So that's my eve-of-my-65th-birthday news.

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Tastefully Kissed

Elegant affection –

circumspection in the heart –

insists on symmetries of art.

This too makes lips part.

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The Wisest Creature in the Room

Funny how you probably imagine

that the old guy with the beard must be

the wisest of the trio you see here.

Assessing psychic sizes of the heart

and mind by how we find they manifest

in flesh – in how its muscular appurtenances

press up tight beneath the skin – causing

something to appear we’re certain constitutes

an outward sign of clear igniting wisdom –

amounts perhaps instead to some far greater

quizdom we cannot discern so easily. So

somewhat queasily we dare to stare down

at the foreground at the rounded greenish

alien and entertain the possibility that it or he

or she may possibly amount to whom we ought

to query on the truest nature of reality. But

neither bearded man nor alien have much

conversance with that sort of thing. Let’s bring

the yellow fellow in – perhaps he has a clue?

Honestly, my friend, the wisest creature

in the room is none of them. It’s you.

.

Artist Contemplating Sex

Vexed, erect –

perplexed –

suspects biology

is hexed –

and yet elects

to have and do it –

draw and sing

and paint and act it

into spectacle

and speculation –

skeptically sculpted –

fretted into frame –

and sometimes

into fame.








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A Bloody Rage

A bloody rage

appears to have

just landed on her head.

At least

it hadn’t burned

into her heart instead.












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