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.

.

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.

.

Without Death (Sex with a Ghost) video performance

Without Death (Sex with a Ghost)

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

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.

.

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.

.

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.

.

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.

.

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.

.

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.

.

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.

.

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








.

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.

.

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.

.

Oak Leaf Progenitors, Kaleidogram Progeny

 

 

.....................................

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.

.

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.

.

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.

.

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.

.