Gerund of the “F” Word

Who’s the you who says you've had enough?

We're made exactly of the same blunt stuff

as infants, always, sleeping to rebuff the injuries

of our unknowing, dreaming to make urgent sense

of something – anything; then, dragging thick

and slow behind the body, comes the wordful mind:

conjuring up reasons for its causes and effects –

resorting to the shocks, release of laughter,

crying – or surrendering to sighing when it can't

remotely find its bearings, clocking impasses

with howls or swearing or a frozen shutting-down:

a disingenuous deployment of façade: since

nothing shuts or opens, ever, only flows,

and so it (add the gerund of the “f” word) goes.

A late baroque concerto grosso in F major does

the momentary trick: distracts you into thinking

corseted amusements might cut through

the thickness: Handel’s gentle fugue and melody,

so much less taxing than Herr Bach’s, allow

you to imagine stimulation doesn't have to

irritate. But ha! – tough (add the gerund of

the “f” word) luck. The sweetly intertwining strings

remind you of your yearning for a certain kind

of touch, and everything is once again too much.

.

They’ll Know What to Do

Your limbs know every role they’ve played:

they know from first to last where they have been

and what you made them do and what they made

you do and what their grand relation is

to that strange trick you call your consciousness.

You are more real to them than they are to the thing

you think is you. And yet today the thing you think

you are awoke inclined, resigned, consigned

to welcoming some new alignment with those arms

and legs and thumbs, big toes, and wrists and knees

and ankles, elbows – you got the news: you’re theirs

more than they’re yours. You are their fact; they’re

what you use: the dream components of your next

collective contrapposto pose of sex and art:

the props of your next act. They and you repose

in one shared certainty: your sole available resort

is to react. You’ll react as usual: factitiously,

enacting fantasies – to which they have been long

exposed. They’ll know what to do with those.

.

Callahanna and Coercia

Counterintuitively, as it might seem to you and me,

Callahanna and her stepsister Coercia’s strategy

today to counteract inertia was to set themselves

into a sort of trance-tableau. Coercia sat in profile

with her eyes fixed straight ahead; Callahanna stood

with folded arms and stared at somewhere else instead,

similarly statically immobile and against quite any flow

of air or thought or impulse that might prod expulsion

of the least somatic reflex, like a hiccup, burp or fart.

The tension that it took to cook up and preserve this art

of statue-stillness, to retain their poses in a muscular

refusal to so much move a fingertip, might well have

tripped into a panicked manic mental illness had this

sister and stepsister not been asked to do the task

(outwardly to look like pictures of inertia while, inside,

Vesuviusly on the brink of spewing gas). But Callahanna

and Coercia would much rather look inert for an eternity

than flirt or chat or make a pass. Plus, for their display,

they’d been well paid. In and of such circumstances,

temperaments are beckoned to, lives are made.

.

Queen in the Crook

I’ve a queen in the crook of my arm, my arm,

a queen in the crook of my arm – who is not

now evincing much charm, much charm,

since she’s feeling no little alarm, alarm

claustrophobically crammed in that crook.

This wasn’t the look to which we’d both agreed

when I took her away with a promise to heed

every clause in her creed, to be treated

according to strict protocol, always laudably

shown to her own best effect. I forsook her,

displayed disrespect in the way I waylaid

and portrayed her: subordinate player to me

and the bend of my late-middle-aged-naked

elbow. I might just as well have discarded her,

carted her off to a dissolute barn in a farm.

But queen, oh my queen! I do plead with thee

please to be seen as I see you: the pulse

at the heart of our magical kingdom, less mine

than it’s yours: in the pores of my nakedness –

yes! (and oh no) – not remotely disarmed

by deodorant. Comme vous êtes francaise,

I had hoped you’d be pleased by the unmasked

aroma of man-on-his-knees to the ruler he’d

move flesh and soul to appease. Then, of course,

that tight squint and un-ladylike sneeze.

I’ll clean up and get out the Febreze.

.

Milk Dreams

Milk dreams overwhelm.
Too deep a realm.
No one at the helm.

You'll waken (if you do,
some do not) suckled out
of any certainty you've got.









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Kaleidogram Parthenogenesis: Single Parent & 19 Kids - Bluebellz & Blueboyz

Parthenogenesis -- reproduction without fertilization (doesn't require two sexes) -- metaphorically works for how Kaleidogram babies come about: one progenitor pic, an iPhone camera with Instagram photoshop maneuvers and -- look out. 

Here's the progenitor pic, a random tangled bit of loopy blue skinny packing ribbon dropped on an East Houston Street New York City sidewalk -- and its remarkably gussied up Park Avenue-worthy progeny. Oooh what a little moonlight will do...  Bluebellz and Blueboyz

On Kaleidogramming "Assemblages Like These" or, We're All Orgasms After All

 

Kaleidogram is the exactly descriptive word my friend & brilliant wordsmith Reed Woodhouse gave me for what I do to my photos and drawings via the Layout App I discovered through Instagram. On the principle mostly of juxtaposing mirror images, in part or in toto, of the 'progenitor' photo I start with - the permutations of which can be startling -- it symmetricizes (like a kaleidoscope) the progenitor pic into untold varieties of WHOA! To put the intricate filigree of bare tree branches in winter through this Layout App mill is instantly to create a panoply of baroque and rococo symmetries which recall adornments on and in everything from Rome's St. Peter's to London's St. Paul's to virtually any wall in Versailles - not to mention all kinds of what are surely J. K. Rowling's dreams. 

But lately it's been fun for me to run my creatures through the Kaleidogram mill. I've just subjected the drawing in my aptly named "Assemblages Like These" -- 

http://guykettelhack.blogspot.com/2017/03/assemblages-like-these.html

-- to varieties of Kaleidogramming and you'll perhaps agree they've come up with some memorable turns on the dance floor. The pics here start with the progenitor drawing and its photo-shopped-darkened twin (see above) from which darkened twin the kaleidograms proceed -- after which we go on a romp through Kaleidogram-Land (see below) to watch each child of the parent pic have its transgressive fun. 'Transgressive' because this whole business still feels slightly shameful somehow -- it's such a blatant imposition of 'mechanics' on a defenseless drawing ("you call this art?" sneers the mealy-mouthed critic in my head) -- but then, hey, the Universe is arguably a blatant imposition on itself, so maybe this is just another maneuver of the ever-disseminating Big Bang - which is eternally ejaculating and germinating into something terribly beautifully newly shocking. We're all orgasms, after all.

 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Assemblages Like These

I cannot understand – much less affect – one fleck

of sentient motive in the dimmest being in the Milky Way

but I create assemblages like these to make

me think I've got some sway. Faces emanate like vapors,

racing fluidly away, perhaps to keep bewilderment at bay –

as if what they were undergoing were okay.

.

To Dwell Among the Dead

Is there somewhere else

I’d rather dwell instead?

Than to dwell, as I dwell now,

among the dead?

Wouldn’t it be nightly

hell to go to bed

where I’m defenseless prey

against a graveyard’s spell

at every end of every day?

Why do I love to live this way?

Perhaps because both love

and life are never more

excited and requited

than by prospects of their

imminent demise.

Perhaps that’s why those

phallic obelisks delight

my eyes.

.

Androids in the Void of the Sea

Are there androids

in the void of the sea?

Unalloyed with the ennui
we've deployed, you & me?

.

Curb of Sleep

Park close to the curb of sleep
& creep as deeply as you can
into the heart of its enumerating
secrecies, my dear.
All will soon be clear.








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Wolfpack

Rounding a bend.

Got your back! cracks a friend.

Why does hearing that gratify down to the bone?

Wolfpack pact: we don’t do this alone.

.

Eighty-Three Percent Complete

She was iconizing. When I met her she was

eighty-three percent complete. They had finished

mixing thirty shades of purple, blue and lavender

with gold, the color of pale wheat, into an orange

porridge of cement, whose crucial part in turning her

into immobile art she had at last relented to accept

and lend assent. As she neared the full extremity

of being placed so unextractably – immaculately

and exquisitely positioned into the invention of her

own meticulously measured space – to encase

her in posterity – she had a moment, while she still

could breathe and speak, if not quite blink or cause

her cheek to blush, or eat or drink, to tell me just

what she had come to think about her destiny. Had 

she wanted it? Not at first. But it had slaked her thirst

for an identity. At last she could be fixed. To iconize

effectively meant to homogenize into a steely, known,

describable, unparalleled exactitude, a singularity

whose moral etymology and sense could be ascribed

religiously to myths of her as mistress of far greater

powers than had been imaginable in mortality.

She’d have a provenance that everyone would know.

She’d be admired and remembered and invoked

and undergo a transmutation from the flesh back

to the word. As that word, she would be heard.

.

Guy's Cavalier Approach to Life

Guy’s Cavalier Approach to Life

Not least because I've every right to do so, I have carefully weeded out of my pic stash almost every photo taken of me during several of my life's porky periods. The one remaining horror (as I had come to think of it) is the pic you see on the top right of the first quartet of images. It was taken in 2011 in Amityville where I was born & - is 'raised' the right word? I was standing next to my lifelong buddy Don Thomson, in on one of his rare trips east from Wisconsin. That swatch of floral print shirt shoulder is all that remains of him in this cropped photo. On the day the photo was taken, I probably would have clocked in (had I dared to stand on a scale, which I hadn't for who knows how long) somewhere around 215. When later that year, after my 60th birthday, I went for a full medical checkup, my doctor pronounced me amazingly healthy although suggested it wouldn't be the worst idea if I took off, say, 20 pounds. Somehow (I'm guessing) the requisite complex synaptic shifts for 'hearing' this news zapped into a configuration sufficient to get me on a low calorie diet for the rest of that year and the rest, really, of every year since then. I now average about 155. I don't know why I did it. 

That is, I like having done it. But any of the obvious reasons one might have expected me to give, had one asked me, didn't obtain. They just weren't true. It wasn't because I 'wanted to be healthy' or "wanted to look good.' I don't know why I did it, other than to say that "it was time" (which is up there with "it is what it is" as the most idiotically unhelpful observation human beings make) or equally WTF: "I don't know, I just did it." The benefits were tabulatable: mostly related to vanity, by the way, not health -- & while after the fact I enjoyed that something in or about me was evidently at work to keep this new regime going, I couldn't saddle it with any of the self-help premises or strategies (however Jungian or otherwise palatably non-cliché) it had once been my job as literary agent, editor and writer to know the value of and wield in appealing ways. (I used to write those kinds of books - books that purported to be 'self-help' as that category is usually understood). I didn't feel I'd finally learned 'discipline,' or began to value life in a more complete and open way. I loved existing! But I pretty much always had, fat or not. 

I don't feel I'd reached some exalted state of awareness in any of this. I simply no longer was able to link cause and effect in any of even the most obvious ways. True, the blunt force of if you're hungry you'll want to eat or if you spend all your money you'll be broke or if you jump off the top of the Empire State building you'll die by splatting on the sidewalk still held credence. But what did that explain about motive? Nothing, really. The more I 'looked' at motive, the more the only interesting way to start seeing it was playfully. I'd been writing long dense poems every day for a number of years. On April Fool's day 2009 I started added drawings. And the poems quickly became less dense. They had drawings to play with! They didn't have to be so all-out serious. But as to "Why did you start drawing then?" as I was & am sometimes still asked, I had no idea. It's gotten to a point now - I'm not proud of this - where I'm annoyed not at myself anymore for being unable to come up with even the simplest explanations for why things are what they are, but at other people for thinking that such a thing is possible. Again, this doesn't make me 'better' or more evolved. Just frustrated, like a baby must be when she sees a purple dragon in the sky and everybody else sees flotsam & jetsam.

Thankfully, the annoyance doesn't last. Because what drawing, and its attendant consequences, as I'm almost able to call them, offer -- sex, laughter, playing Mozart, walking out of the Lafayette Avenue subway at Fort Greene up into the glories of 1870 Brooklyn brownstones and their regal canopies of Sycamore trees, etc. -- are constant distraction & activity. Everything is distraction, by the way, because it isn't something else. You were brushing your teeth and then, distracted by the sight of your razor, you shave your face until distracted by the pressure in your bowels which will shortly get you to sit down... and on and on through the day. There's no underlying 'thing' to know. Anything worth knowing is completely in front of your nose. The whole bounty of the feast is always, always before you.

There's more to say - oh there's an infinity to say! - but I think that's enough now. Except perhaps to add that one of the prods for coming up with my breezy & rather arch title - "Guy's Cavalier Approach to Life" -- was (on the face it) its appalling contrast to the tone & the accomplishment of an extraordinary thread on Facebook initiated by one of my dearest friends with a plea for information about whatever means of keeping themselves healthy her friends and acquaintances could name - from diet to exercise to whatever else they'd learned from experience. This unleashed responses from many other of my dearest friends (many from childhood) - all of them gorgeously clear and articulate about what had worked for them - across the board from the emotional to the medical to the dietary - and in such great specificity! They were doing what I find myself incapable of doing: giving advice. And it was good advice. And I know much of it helped both my friend who'd begun the thread and who had been battling long disheartening stretches of ill health - as well as helped each of the advisors to give that advice, or maybe better put - the results of their own experience. It was beautiful and human and completely true for the participants.

But I could think of only one thing to add: Get your crayons out.  

There are three quartets of images here. I think they can sort of tell you what they're about directly. I hope so. God knows I can't.

----------------------------

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Déjeuner sur “Curb”

Ditch all tepid sympathy - "poor didda thing” won’t do.

Empathy which shocks. That’s better. Find whatever cracks the glass

to flood you with the view. Break the locks. Wed spirit to unwitting letter.

Bear the brunts. Here's the touch one wants. Lavish days in languor: bend

your being toward vestigial pulses of its genesis. Settle only for what would

intolerably anger you if you did not receive it. Listen to the clangor,

love whatever just has flown into the hangar: be deceived by thieves, why not.

(They’re almost always hot.) Jot and doodle, don’t conclude or if you’d like,

conclude. Then let us collude in Tompkins Square and see where

there might be a perfect bench along a walkway’s curb to sit on

to eat lunch. (I’ll bring the sugar-free Hawaiian punch.) Let’s

spend our time defining that egregiously annoying word

which makes me murderously grumpy, which despite the lumps I’ve given it

from all the looting and the plundering I’ve tortured it with for so many years

will not admit a single certainty about itself. Let’s grab it by the ears.

Threaten it, if it will not succumb, with the “or else” of its worst fears, its hell:

evisceration of its spell. Find out if it’s true. This “hunch” – this fucking “hunch” –

what is a goddamned hunch? – I can’t stop having about you.

.

Frère Jockstrap and The Rutabaga

“Frère Jockstrap!” “The Rutabaga!”

That’s how brothers Jacques and Rudy make

their greetings every morning to each other right

before they set again into their lucrative set-to:

get underfoot and over-thigh, beyond this elbow

or that knee or ankle, therefrom to an ear or nose

or chin, thence to the bumps upon their stumpy feet

that pass for toes – all those and other body parts

now inexhaustibly resume their arts of tangling back

into whatever Gordian knot they’d disentangled from

the day before, a set-to at which they are whizzes

at sustaining new extremities of stark intractability,

so photogenically alluring they’ve become a “thing”:

and more, the single sight sight-seers snap a photo of

on Comte Le Cocq Archipelago where they happily

reside in the LeVance Merganser Sea just off

the coast of lovely Southern Bummersby.

And yo! Physicists are wide-eyed at the calculus

implied in the exertions Jacques and Rudy daily

now abide! The equations of entanglement in

the fraternity of Frère Jockstrap and The Rutabaga

irrefutably have proven to explain Eternity!

.

 

Guy & a bit of the Mozart e minor sonata 

Guy Kettelhack

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oah_aR4aAAI

 (dupe of facebook post:) 

https://www.facebook.com/guy.kettelhack/videos/vb.604217898/10155173523622899/?type=2&theater

 

Published on Mar 21, 2017

What a joy this will be for me. Turns out I will be able to contribute something to the Broadway Bach Ensemble chamber music concert on Thursday March 30 (starting at 7:30 pm at Presbyterian Church on 114th & Bway where we play our orchestral concerts) - a short tender poignant 2 movement violin & piano sonata in e minor (kv304) Mozart wrote in Paris in 1778 when he was 22 - right when his mother died. It may be the most direct musical expression of mourning for his mother he was to make. It's the only instrumental work he ever wrote in this key. I get to play it with my good friend & wonderful pianist Arlene Hajinlian. It's such a gift to me to have this chance to play it. With luck I hope we can make it a gift to those who hear it.