Handiwork

interlinking fingers think
of space and time as
locked embrace,
one Homespun fabric:
lonesome restless tattered lace

Lesson

Sweet air of night
Who comes remote
Horizon, bled
In yellow drops
As sunset
Stripped
Until the naked
Eve revealed
Your shrill uncouth
Forgotten smells
God love me how
Romance has fled
Though in her wake
Is this instead-
The lilac grinning
Peeled of purple
Stark as bone
Untouched and steady
Rose as shadow, underbelly
Wind of lover sleeping
Puerile legs in curl
Night comes in dregs
Like coffee slosh
Through windows
Agitating dreams
To dervish, so-
Approach!
Teach tired hearts to seem
And seem again
And seeming steady hold their pens
Make threads of meaning meet with threads.

The Philosopher’s Retirement

Now to best observe these fading verities
I shall incessantly orbit a rock
{of relatively significant table salt}
Over a cracked and tasteless spread
On the back of a singing silver spoon

Things Melt

Guatemala City

Boarder Awareness

One Time is Added Where Almost Dying on a Sidewalk is Concerned

Sometimes time is thin
only change the brain
a little, stir the body
it melts together

Like evening stars
through thin silk
blown and tossed
it breathes, or seems to be

Irregular- only look
and look directly
at the pigeons bathed
in muddied puddles

pull it back to watch
the grown or frozen face
of wretchedness
or glutted fleeting pains

(or is it beauty after all? and how to stay and who to call?)

these things evade
and look- just look
or peek and all abandons
all discharges

you, or even laughs
to see the looker’s
scrutiny, or hoping
for the heated orb

But touch, or even speak
and it confirms
the seconds, hours and minutes
turn by turn

Waking

In the glittering morning gaze
ligaments and arteries rearrange around
in itchy lanes, and roundabout the heart
a traffic of irritated blood, ready

The bones stick still, encasing
still reminding organs
of their hymnal cadence-
senses leaping in the pews

A music known by some mad sparrow
quivers towards this stretched-out being.
In the routine ordering of systems
both imagine a fluttering edge.

There is no sun yet, no current
save these candles’ thin frayed satin
in her eyes, a self-seeing
through bleary and unfiltered shadow

before this stark strange light
the world unmade by contrasts
blessed a budding printed
play of semblances: the dust, the dawn, her body

her birth-splitting silence
rendering up to the earth and air-
both forms of self- the body and-
inflamed and anxious recognition move.

Five Characters in Search of an Exit

broadcamagnetfitzgasticerald

Animal Collective

A Reading and Images

http://thelawnchairsoiree.9f.com/

Restless Winter Poems

1)

Outside Longing Inn:
a lithograph
The pool is full of dead leaves
lying in sun, wrinkling
words hemorrhage faintly
till dawn

Temporary currents take turns
taking off
each other’s
modern bruised and muddled costumes
dumb luck-
fingers

Brought them face to
mouth with nature:
raw inebriate
gesticulate
gritty grey
facts

unprinted,
the water dyes
by ink swirl

2)
saṃsāra bed

perpetually waking to dream
of bed, tossing, to move
great waves of white and shadow

I feel my gravity in lines of linen
unbroken

parting, returning to die
constant
drugged, adulterous

there must be some steady pulse
or backbone
to rise again at early light

3)
Skin

Skin is the present
canvas
us ourselves, cannapaceus
stretch

Renaissance buried in clay
we muses paint red moods’
ceramic copy

into each new day with powder
in picker-pinched lards we
trundle off to bake

to show or not to show is
not the only mode
we joke

and in the laughing, veiled details
disclose this brush
or line all
fleshed in imitation

there is in this accentuated
absence, caked and caramelized
the hidden green or bluish terms:
outrageous shadow
of our landlocked voices seeping through

4)

Winter

Surrender yourself, she sighs
to the long evening doze of
puddles fossilizing cigarettes
and time impertinently frozen
in soundless steaming bedspreads
petting shut your urban eyes

I will show you all the places
Where your shadows softly lope

Your cheap green velvets purged-
lie between my porcelain breasts-
and sing the song of setting time
sing the song of time dissolving
into silent unlined margins

While your blood beats raw against me
like a river wrestling ice
I will win you over slowly
I will show you what you are
sing the song of time congealing
sing the song of time undoing
with your heartless adult breath

Sing until your stomach freezes
Sing until conclusions clot

I will seal you up and take you
As the spider takes the fly

I will slowly crystallize you
I will suck you waterless
I will seize your blue-veined logic
expunge your dreary premises
dry didactic fool-fleeced reasons

Till you plead and shriek for mercy
Till your buds blush tendered back
to the bone-dry essences
all-but lost to Summer slack

language lab

Are you bilingual?

Between Worlds (Words)

Our recent philosophical temperament is primed for a healthier response to mind-body dualism. However, this is possible if and only if we have an appropriate understanding of what language is and does.

Western Metaphysics has answered the mind-body problem by treating the individual as irrevocably isolated: first, empiricism explained that it was all in our heads, then we discovered that it was all outside of our heads (in structure, contingency, social conditioning, etc). Now, we find ourselves reducing individual creativity to formulaic renderings of person-as-chess piece. Regardless of what side of this equation we are on, we are “cut off” as it were from the world. The assumption is that we have two choices: subjectivity or objectivity. We’re either a mind in a vat dreaming up a reality (as Borges or Berkeley might argue: the world disappears when consciousness disappears- history dies with me) or we’re automatons enacting a complex game (we are only discovered through hermeneutics, through psychology, through language, through behavior, etc).

In this analysis, human beings are witnessed externally, as atoms are viewed through a microscope. Language stands for us, replaces us. At best, the self is conditioned by the world. At worst, the self is swallowed by its’ own mysterious, semi-mystic, “silent” spirit (the invisible subject). In this analysis, art is negation: it is creative, but it does not “add” to what already is- it simply says no. Language is objective and universal- it is a substructure to reality, or a ‘meta-narrative’, or reality itself, or a complex network of relationships between grammatical atoms (early Wittgenstein, Hobbes and Chomsky) that dictates the course of meaning (meaning is use). Suddenly, language is a “thing” that stands between the person and the world. The book is a person (see Derrida) text lives and breathes. Language “acts” in these theories as a human being acts because we wish to understand the self as objective. This is personification on vacation and can only lead to the “death of the author”. We have finally made ourselves receptive to the Eastern temperament and come close to meeting it midway.

Eastern Metaphysics has historically lent itself to annihilating the individual altogether. In other words, Eastern Metaphysics prefers the world to the mind. The mind is one with the world only by removing the “I” from the equation. Language is necessarily violent- silence is better. Zen theory emphasizes the negation of the self, or the “no-self’ in poetry by implying the presence of the subject through personification of his/her natural environment. The Chinese poet Hanshan, for instance, bears the name of the “Cold Mountain” which is where he lives, as well the name of a state of mind he wishes to convey. The “he himself” disappears (though it resurfaces often in his poetry). Beckett picks up this theme in his plays (see videos). Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Woolf, Joyce, and the rest of them all harp on this theme: the individual swallowed alive by objects, by society, by language, by expectation, by the failure to exchange the self accurately.

Both of these perspectives are fraught with inaccuracy, precisely because they do not see language correctly. Both assume that language stands as an object between objects. If language is “objective”- if it is a complete formal rendering of universal meaning, then it is necessarily inaccurate (in so far as we do not all use it the same way). “Accuracy” here relies on the assumption that human experience itself is universal- hence the craving for metaphysical truth. But our experience is universal only insofar as it is similar, and where it is not similar we cannot claim to have attained understanding. That is, language is relatively accurate (relative to us). As Nietzsche explains “Every word instantly becomes a concept precisely insofar as it is not supposed to serve as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual original experience to which it owes its origin; but rather, a word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases–which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal”. Our laws of equivocation, of identity, and of concept-formation are based on assumptions about experience. If we are not using a tautology, to put it frankly, we are not designating something strictly. Every description is “more than the thing itself” because we are part of the process of meaning (I mean this! Your expressions are meaningful! Your attempt to approach the world is meaningful!)

Language is not inevitably linked to lying. The reason language fails the universality test time and again (the reason we will never live in Frege’s universe) is that language is not a complete system. It is not a closed set. When we speak, we do not designate universals, we reach towards them: we fit our personal meanings into “meaning boxes” (words) which are both objective (in that they designate meanings) and subjective (in that we designate based on our meaning). Meaning is not predictable. In terms of causality, meaning precedes any given speech-act. If we fail at speaking universally it is because we have individual experiences, not because we do not know metaphysical truth.

If we see language accurately, we see that it is just as we ourselves had said all along- a medium- something that helps us extend outwards towards the world. Thus, it is itself “neutral”- it relies on us like a puppet relies on a voice and a hand. History and grammar give us contexts- inferences, connotations, (a face/a frame) but we create the sentences as we please. Meaning is more than words, more that structural pieces. The sum (meaningful communication) is greater than the parts (words+ structure)- it includes our active participation. Words come alive in context, and context is infinite. Speaking itself is medicinal for the isolated individual. Art molds the subconscious and makes it obvious- our dark and unknown spirit (the seeming threat to our social projects, all the things we find ugly, strange, unusual, sexy and fierce) is justified, and we overcome ourselves. We bring out what is unknown and make it known through the act of creation. We can create new meaning by rearranging structure.

This is not to say, however, that we cannot speak of universal truths. Consider the metaphor. When I say “love is snow” you may or may not believe me. Whether you do relies on your experience. If it is a very good metaphor (if it synchronizes your experiences of the two terms) then you will accept it the same way you accept that Justice is Blind and God is Dead and You are Here and This is There and Red is a Color. Domains belong to each other for as long as we think they belong to each other, and then they don’t.

What They Say

There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.
George Orwell

We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things--metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Metaphors are much more tenacious than facts.
Paul de Man

There is no non-metaphorical standpoint from which one could look upon metaphor, and all the other figures for that matter, as if they were a game played before one’s eyes. In many respects, the continuation of this study will be a prolonged battle with this paradox
Paul Ricoeur

The instant a metaphor becomes real it ceases to be a metaphor, which suggests a disconnect between truth and what’s commonly referred to as reality. This is a pivotal point—that the real world probably isn’t what you believe it is, or rather, that it’s precisely what you believe it is—which, if you still don’t get it, I can only trust someday you will. Sol Luckman

Part of being a rational animal involves getting what you want without subjecting yourself to the dangers of actual physical conflict. As a result, we humans have evolved the social institution of verbal argument.
George Lakoff

The greatest thing is style. . . a mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.
Aristotle

The metaphor is~ an origin, the origin of an image which acts directly, immediately
Gaston Bachelard

All those Theories in Philosophy which are expressed only in metaphorical Terms are not real Truths, but the mere products of Imagination, dress'd up (like children) in a few spangled empty words .... Thus their wanton and luxuriant fancies climbing up into the Bed of Reason, do not only defile it by unchaste and illegitimate Embraces, but instead of real conceptions and notices of Things, impregnate the mind with nothing but Ayerie and Subventaneous Phantasmes.
Samuel Parker in 1666.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Walt Whitman

Kids Will be Kids (two of these things are not like the others)

Oh, Onion

Onions have long been heralded for their symbolic meanings. Modern expressions like the “layered personality” lend themselves to poetic renderings of human identity. Ancient Egyptians worshiped the onion as a symbol of infinity (the concentric rings stood for the rings of eternal life). Ironically, the Egyptians used for labor in the building of the pyramids were fed onions for sustenance (in other words, so they wouldn’t die).

The onion is one of the oldest vegetables known to humanity- traces have been found as early as 5000 BC.

Onions will grow in practically any kind of soil but soul that is rich in decayed organic matter or humus is best.

The reason onions make you cry is that they release gasses when you slice them open. Their Sulphenic acids are unstable and spontaneously rearrange into a “volatile” gas- syn-propanethial-S-oxide. When it mingles with the water in your eye, it creates a sulphuric acid that is also used in oil refining and fertilizer (in other words, the source of most of our modern life’s energy).

Onions have shallow roots.

Onions have “tunics” (this is also the name for the watery cell membrane around your eyeball) as well as a higher density of cells in their outer skin. This allows them to retain moisture and nutrients (in chemistry terms, their dense cellular wall retains certain molecules- without the peel, an onion’s moisture would dissipate into the earth, instead, it attracts what it needs from the ground and prevents it from escaping).

Ancient Greek athletes ate onions because they thought the viral vegetable would lighten their blood. Roman gladiators rubbed onion juice onto their tawny sportive muscles. Renters in the Middle Ages used onions to pay rent and gave them as presents. Onions have been prescribed to facilitate erections and pooping (or as I like to say “passing a motion”), and were used to relieve headaches, coughs, snakebite, hair loss, and infertility. In 1492, America met onions and imperialism at the exact same time. This fascinating history ends here but hopefully explains why I wrote this poem.

Onion

Oh infinity- how you bite
at my inner eye
sighing for some crimson
sap to permeate

Sizzling, steaming
you are cheap
but threaten epochs
with spicy gasolines

which is less than I can say
of myself, stirring you
into a single taste

I can't pay tribute
for lack of time

TV on the Radio: embrace the indie rocker in you

TV on the Radio (often abbreviated to TVotR) is an American experimental rock band formed in 2001 in New York City. The band's music spans genres as diverse as post-punk, free jazz, a cappella, doo-wop, soul, shoegaze and electro.[citation needed]