Elsewise

Is death our fault? A corporal

punishment? Admonishment
from some vast mystic Moral Board
that we have failed the vital test?
.
Is that why we’re remanded
to the maw of death? If we were virtuous

exemplars of some cosmic law,
would nothing sever us from breath?
.
If we, say, ceased our wanking off,
would we be spared that final spanking?

Soft! What light through yonder
window then would break?
.
Would it invite us to be good
so we not only could but would
live on the Earth eternally?
Then let’s go out
.
and fuck things up infernally.
Promise me nonbeing
or at least a little coma in a b’n’b
before careening me
.
into another change
of scenery.
Elsewise I’m-a quit

this beanery.

.

.

If You Heard Another Word

Thou hast done it now, so thinketh I of thee.

Thou mak'st a bow and vow, in front of me,

to aim a chuckle, like a gun, in my direction.

You love fomenting insurrection –

.

caressing floating bits of ambient geometry

to animate new stratagems of that psychometry

in which you are adept: feel up psyches from inside

to see what you can get to fit to you so you can ride

.

with it into that inner pyrotechnical expanse

that wants you – waits to swallow your first glance

at it: that sentient and voracious atmosphere:

think famished Santas jonesing to eat deer –

.

all their deer! – tonight! And then a tasty stew

whose basis, they are praying, might at last be you.

‘That’s it? A crock.’ Oh no: the shock, my dear!

If you heard another word, you’d disappear.

.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wn6G8yc_b5g

.

Clara Schumann’s 3 Romances for Piano & Violin - prologued by a poem, "When Women were the Order of the Day"

First a poem about nothing in particular except that I wrote it - well, something in me wrote it - for Clara Schumann and her half-sister Marie Wieck. Marie was 12 years Clara's junior, and she was a pretty amazing musician, too. Otherwise the poem has no particular aim except to distract you a little, so that you'll forget that music is coming. 

When Women were the Order of the Day

.

A Poem for Clara Schumann and her Half-Sister Marie Wieck

.

They came from watering the horses

And regaling them with hay.

When women were the order of the day.

Sisters were the siblings whom we looked to

For the balance of regard that seemed most

Human in the shadow play

Where love imbued you without effort

To assume you had a place here

.

In the world. Anyway, two girls unfurled

Into two women who sat down

In front of me and talked

About what they could see

So unselfconsciously

It made me want to sit with them

And look at me as well. And so I did!

The three of us conferred about the self

.

We saw across from us

Then lost our train of thought.

They changed the subject to the vagaries

Of hay: which to a feed a horse, legume

Or grass? Their knowledge of the horse

And hay was vast. I felt lonely for the fellow

I’d once been who sat across alone, alone,

an un-played violin.

.

So I went back to him,

And there I’ve spun and here I spin

The business of me out and in

Which hasn’t changed since Eve invented sin

And made the world as wonderful

As it has been. She was the daughter

Of the Morning and the Mother of the Way.
When women were the order of the day.

.
=================================
Clara Schumann's 3 Romances for Piano and Violin,
Arlene Hajinlian, piano & Guy Kettelhack, violin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DocUImo8k8

. 

Played by Arlene Hajinlian and Guy Kettelhack

for a wacko passeggiatta of untoward admirers.

. 

.
If there’s any enterprise designed to reassure you of the rightness of your conviction born of many years of inarguable (in my case not infrequently humiliating) evidence that if you are a musician, even a creditable one, you will never in your life know the state of performing anything perfectly, it’s, well, just that: playing music. Arlene Hajinlian and I assayed Clara Schumann’s 3 romances for piano and violin and I think we did a fine moving heartful job on it; as far as I’m concerned she was perfect but oh boy is intonation a bitch on the violin for the likes of imperfect me. Still, all in all, in the recording we made of the run-through we did a day before the Broadway Bach Ensemble chamber music concert where we played it – Arlene had recently found out about & had plumbed the mysteries of using the iPhone voice memo to record it (don’t always have to video it! yay) which worked just fine – I think it turns out to have been a pretty wonderful take on these exquisite pieces: we played from the heart and, although it bared all my violinistic sins mercilessly, we managed to do Frau Schumann’s compositions some real justice.

. 

An unmet technological hurdle was how to transfer the voice memo to something you could put on YouTube or Facebook – I got an app called “Splice” which I read on google was recommended for the purpose, but although I searched for step-by-step guidance on how to effect the transfer (to an portable MP4 thingy, someone suggested online) I couldn’t find it. So I ended up returning to video mode and recording it from my laptop, which fuzzied the sound a little but managed, I think, to give it a worthy run nonetheless. I couldn’t think what to put as a visual, so I resorted to showing a sort of wacko passeggiatta of my creatures in the form of the drawings I post virtually daily as profile pics (since I draw one pretty much everyday and have since April 1, 2009, I don’t lack for promenaders). I think it ended up being fun, though there was and may still be a risk for many who watch this to think the point is the creatures. The point is the music: the creatures were just really eager to listen to it, and I hope you’ll agree that they didn’t not like it. I hope you don’t not like it, too. (Either?) In fact I hope you really like it!

. 

What a joy to play with Arlene!

. 

Cheers, from the lot of us.

Further Punditry...

Further Punditry on the Nature of #@+*^!

as it Relates to the #@+*^!

of Art.

(here’s the link to the first one:

http://guykettelhack.blogspot.com/2018/03/art-real-truth.html\ )

As is almost always with the case with my little manifestos, this part 2 of the part 1 of my musing about the wellsprings of Art emerged from a two-way email confab with Reed Woodhouse, whose very fine mind always prods mine (or so I fancy) to be a least little finer than it would otherwise be. But/and the impulse in all this burrowing not so much into ‘what art is’ as where it comes from in me very much feels native to me. As I fall more regularly into what W.H. Auden I believe called “the habit of art” – which became the title of a play I saw some years ago in London which detailed an encounter between him and Benjamin Britten – a phrase by which I mean, as I regularly find myself doing my version of what my mother did throughout her life – sit down daily at her drawing table to paint – I more and more experience not as the product of discipline or even exactly intention, but as something the animal of me insists upon, as biological as sex or eating. It’s out of my wonder at and curiosity about this that I keep massaging the skin of this animal to see what reactions I can get from it about what’s going on in it. Odd to attempt to watch an act of creation you’re doing yourself. But sort of riveting in a Jamesian way. (It’s what the James brothers William and Henry did every day.)

.

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

.

I have to keep the doors and windows wide open on this all the way. The exciting thing for me has been to recognize more fully than ever these days that the processes of attraction and selection and applying whatever tools or skills I have to give them expression probably characterize every moment of my thinking and feeling and expressive life. They seem to me now in no way different (except in degree) from what I bring to bear on a drawing or poem or email or musical effusion on the fiddle or singing a song than they are when I open my eyes and look out the window in the morning: all are acts at least of proto-creation, the looking-out-the-window part only proto- because it hasn’t yet found expression.

.

To me this doesn’t level all perception and apprehension of the world into some meaningless undifferentiated mass of plasma nor does it suggest that there aren’t different degrees of noticing, liking or disliking what we apprehend, nor is something we’ve good reason to call intention uninvolved in what we may decide to do, say, write, perform or talk on the phone about it (though ‘intention’ to me remains loaded with the imponderable), and certainly it doesn’t address the realms of achieving excellence in that expression, indeed discerning for ourselves what excellence even means, or the specificity of what skills are needed to achieve it: that is, it doesn’t explore critical thinking: it’s really just about what accounts for art happening at all - but not only art. We exercise a majority of these discernments any time we take in anything.

.

That’s the excitement for me, which seems simple and profound: to recognize that human sentience in the very nature of how it understand things and expresses them employs a heterogeneity of often exquisitely honed responsive abilities the achievement of art depends on. We’re hardwired for it. I can see how this might seem fatuously self-evident (I hear echoes of HG Wells excoriating the late Henry James’ grandiose smallnesses), but it’s rich stuff to me.

.

I even think it’s fun! - although I probably haven’t made it sound very fun. In fact I may well have created the horrible jolly bunny you see here that would make a child cry.

.

.

Greasing Our Palms

A sideways glance at gods on Palm Sunday

.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF8IqrKvqNQ

.

Gods are souls for whom the usual varieties of life

will never do. They must refuse to choose our miracle:

they recuse themselves from having any sway in any way

in our empirical attempts to navigate mortality because

they’re implicated at the heart of why we had to take it on.

They are prime movers in a force amounting to an irresistible

.

persuasion that death must become the pivotal recourse

for incarnation, because without it there would be no flesh

or breath. Mortal beings are the sole anointed ones upon

whom gods bestow the influential rhythms that we know

of anguish, love, suspense – boredom, sadness, joy, discovery

and disappointment – lassitude and irrepressible desire

.

with its lusts and musts: the trust that blesses us when

spoken, and eviscerates when broken, so at last we grasp

what more is and what less is. Death is central to the engine

we call life. But gods make sure we’ll never be inured to it –

we never will catch onto the subversiveness of evening

and of dawn, even when we’re told as if right out, as we are

.

told in fables such as this, that evening, dawn and gods

and we are phantoms: myths which fog the truth. Will we

ever know the truth? We are the truth. What could it mean

to know it? Being it, how could we not? To know is not

to say it. Gods grease our palms, liberally sacrificing starring

roles, giving us mortality so we can play it, remanding their

.

obliquities to fairytales beyond the portals through which

only mortals can gain entry, to work out ways to die and to be

born that can be borne. That’s the deal with Jesus: his self-

erasure frees us: reveals forthwith that he’s a myth so

we’ll believe we’re real. Gods and their glories are stories.

Don’t expect to see one. Unless it is your turn to be one.

.

.

Art: The Real Truth.

Why Everybody’s an Artist and Everything’s Art.

.

When I think of the pros and cons of what Facebook’s use is to me, I realize I’ve made it do the same bidding that I require of pretty much everything else in my life: to be my forum and my canvas and the wall upon which for a moment I affix my framed – oh fuck, I’ll just call it what it never wants to be called but probably grudgingly would have to admit in some dimension or other it is – “art.” Actually the world isn’t just the place I put my art. The world IS my art. Or anyway is after I’ve had my way with those parts of its body my lusts compel me to tart up or rearrange to my liking.

.

I don’t think I’m any different in this from anybody else. It suggests a commonplace truth about perception. We don’t ‘see’ anything until our perceptual apparatuses make sense of it: which means we don’t see anything until we decide what it is.

.

We’re always making up what we perceive. It’s how we’re constructed. Is this a priori “art”? I think so. That is, I don’t know what distinguishes any product of perception from another categorically: how we feel and what we think and our modes of expressing it interiorly or out there in the world require exactly what any art requires: 1) assessment 2) identification 3) sorting out its emphases (focusing on what we like and ignoring what we don’t) 4) ‘seeing’ (choosing to see) color and shadow and light and composition in whatever the way the brain directs us to see it 5) expressing it in words we choose to describe a finally indescribable (ineffable) reality. “Reality” can never be described, certainly not ‘objectively’ and only imperfectly ‘subjectively’: we can’t put an equals sign between experience and any word we may want to stand for it.

.

Art is just what human beings have to do if they’re sentient. It’s like breathing.

.

What about an audience? Oh, an audience is everything, everyone we see – i.e., everyone, everything we ‘make.’
.
.

Perilology

.

I am a perilologist – my dreamlife makes this sure:

for every crisis that besets, I always find the cure.

Perilology requires loving messes: shoving each

malign Medusa-squirming spilling killing tress

.

into benign collective flow: making obduracy turn

from red to green to go. As a perilologist, I suavely

dive through mental tar: panic-blizzards turn out

not to be exactly what, awake, one thinks they are.

.

With somnolent assuredness, I wield my muscled

soul, re-coalesce the Universe into a blessèd whole.

Oh, lovely lessons of the purple greeny deep! Thanks,

Big Bang, for so resourcefully insisting upon sleep.

.

.

Things People Get Up To Late at Night

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5zMERm54_8

.
Let the vagrant sifting quantities of tune
that pale March light suggests as it begins

to tumble towards the night bestow their

strange alluring modal breaths – occluding

.

expectations – framing inner sight: so that

what starts to fill you up is something like

the brightness that the blind might conjure

in the mind as they begin to find that

.

somewhere in the Universe exists experience

of seeing. Is the soul a thing that hauls up

psychic sludge, transmutes the blob into

a lucent being? Does it always do its job?

.

.

guy plays bach for bach's birthday - first ave entrance F Train Second Ave Stop 2-3 pm March 21

TODAY - 2 - 3 PM - my violin and I will wish Bach a happy 300th birthday at the F train Second Avenue Station - at the First Avenue & Houston Street exit/entrance area (where you buy subway passes) - not on either the Brooklyn or Manhattan bound platforms themselves (where the trains actually arrive). (There are two exit/entrances on on First Avenue & Houston and one on Second Avenue & Houston - again, for me, go into the First Ave one.)

http://bachinthesubways.org/performance/guy-kettelhack/

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

come hear & see & hum along!

ADDRESS

2nd Avenue, New York, NY, United States - Second Avenue Subway Stop Platform

ADDRESS DETAILS

subway platform - entrance either at 1st avenue & Houston

TIME

Wednesday, March 21, 2018

2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

PERFORMANCE

Solo

INSTRUMENT

violin

PROGRAM

see above.

WEBSITE

https://www.facebook.com/guy.kettelhack

I’d like to play various parts of Bach’s unaccompanied sonatas and partitas – just those movements I CAN play (well) – a sort of sampling of the bach I love best. I may also play movements from the keyboard and violin sonatas. Just a sampling of what Bach did for and with the violin.

I’ve played professionally, taught the violin, now play as an amateur in various capacities, most regularly in the Broadway Bach Ensemble. Contact me if you’d like on Facebook or at GuyBlakeKett@aol.com.

Ye Gods!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doYEPQYY-qc

 

.
Ye gods, there’s no time! ‘It’s a figment, a not,’
ran the plot of the play in my head. Tossed me right

out of my bed. ‘Instead all we’ve got steaming out

of the pot is a lot of invincible rhyme,’ they said.
.

It turns out the cosmos evinces one fashion upon

which the whole business rolls – a dash and a curve

and a flash and a swerve which begat what begat us:

our rhythm and verve. Rhyme, not time. The pure

.

rhyme that you’re, and the rhyme that I’m. Our

queries are these: Please! Does anyone have

the right rhyme? What rhyme do we get into bed?
What rhyme of the day or the night will we die?

.

It’s about rhyme we knew. We now got the clue 

that rhyme waits for no woman or man: we’re 
rushed into lissome departures: to watch archers
of tongue-in-cheek chic the way Emily Dickinson’s 
.

fits fix her feats in a pique that permit us a peek into

genius – where would we see so much heterogeneous 
bliss of audacity anywhere other than in the dark

lark of the mother of her heart’s inscrutable art?

.

But to make it our own in a song not a groan –

that’s what we’re roaming the cosmos to find –

that’s the task here in the gloaming. No fiction

of time anymore: now it’s all simultaneity – the sea

.

to the shore, an orgy galore of the assonant word –

often absurd, sometimes sublime, or a viable crime

out of hell in the grime of an untended zoo of the fun

stuff in you – there are rhymes for that, too:

.

amid all of the rest of the worst and the best

of the profligate need to make verse – eternally

busting our asses with assonance without which

we would not be. And oh dear, as you see, it appears

.

a great deal of the fate of the Cosmos has fallen

to me. But soon, I am told, I’ll be granted asylum.

Where I’ll strive to supply ‘em with rhymes such as

“phylum” and “xylum”: rhymes that will keep us alive.

.

Facing Faces

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtqId7jwBN8

 

Steam-surging out of their factory,

rising up high from their genesis spot,

four of six faces look right into me,

the other two clearly will not.

.

This is as close as I’ll probably get

to what brings on this onset of faces

who daily beset me so I might beget

their effects on a white paper’s spaces –

.

I’ve as much clue of the what and the who

of the four who looked into my eyes

as I have of the psyches of those other two

who will never give up their disguise.

.

If a disguise it is, in fact: to think

I could know a damned thing but what I

might decide in a poem might blink

in their presence and not be a lie –

.

you can see why my mind goes numb.

And when I reflect on the spirit and letter

Of people I know, I’m equally dumb.

I don’t know any of them any better.

.

.

(entièrement de ne pas entre nous)

Sometimes, not often, I’ve said this before but this time i really mean it. Ya gotta watch - listen to the vid. It really comes alive when you hear it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__kwsdLhM2w

(entièrement de ne pas entre nous)

.

Thanks but I won’t be attending. 

I’m afraid I can’t, at the brink of the age of 67, 

find much interest or purpose in what amounts for me 

to paying transmogrified homage to having navigated 

.

the fleet blur of four years of late adolescence near 50 

years ago (with people I now mostly barely

recall) to jump, as if I couldn't 

imagine anything more fun to do,

into a tug of war with other ‘classes’ 

(encouraged to behave like competing 

intramural teams) similarly engaged 

in what for the college is surely 

the motive force: to see what 

clutch of alumni donates the most dollar signs

to it. I don’t begrudge them this. Colleges

need lots of dough. And I’m graced

.

with the riches of unfathomed bliss

of a life in New York, skidding thrillingly

over the thinnest thin surfaces of a “fixed income” –

so fixed it has rendered me cleanly unable

to fit any niche which depended on

spending more than would

procure me a split,

grilled kielbasa, boiled sour-

cream-dabbed pierogi, Ukrainian

sauerkraut (misnomered: it’s a bit sweet)

at Odessa (at 7th street, Avenue A). In the odd way 

I register lessons from life, though, I have to confess

that the high-handed forced shrill-toned snark which

slits under and into these over-wrought lines –

.

(oh do beware markedly visual strict-driven

grids clamped on "writing":  as deadly

a march through the desert as college P.R.) –

.  

bear the un-pretty tracks of defense scared of threat.

It resides in the fact I suspect I must here to the point

now espouse - I don’t like Christmas for just the same

.

reason I dislike the press of a college besieging us all

to love it. They're for people who barbecue chicken 

and make love to those of the Alien Sex. 

People with children.

.

I neither barbecue nor much like to fuck, but 

I very much warm to, indeed am by rep held 

by those with legitimate claims to a firsthand 

experience, as a candidate rather more likely

than not to be placed at the head (the word

pointedly used) of the queue of things having

to do with the come-hither faux-pouty moue 

.

of the Mouth. 

From here it goes South –

.

as shall I go mid-May, 

for a scatter of days, far away 

from collegiate maneuvers,

august weights and measures –

to quite other pleasures: 

.

to go,

oh to go! 

go to, oh! - 

Mexico.

.

where what I will do

my sly eye apperceives

(entièrement de ne pas

entre nous)

.

I won’t tell anyone (not even vous) 

nor even the who whom I'll be apperceiving -

and who anyway needs no apprising of any 

uprising, re-sizing, down-sizing or moue.

.

“Yo!

People don’t speak French in Mexico, Joe.

You forgot to learn Spanish, you twit.”

(Oh, shit.)

.