Doggerel in the Key of D; or, Working one’s way toward ‘madness;’ or: Fading Out with a Bang. (A tininnabula)
Category: death
Untitled
Then:
pregnant with fore and aft –
a jumbled detritus
of flotsam and jetsam
and chance.
.
Like now.
But where is the body
alive?
in what chances,
for whom –
all the whens,
all the wheres,
.
here:
nothing happening
but thought and a world;
what is: being some feeling of –
circumstance – small bubble,
same as there.
.
Go on,
take your rest
and escape…
you cannot leave it.
And then you do.
The Incompletion of Words
We tried, once.
Attempted an adjoining.
No one cared or cares.
It’s not a point.
THE point.
.
I never wanted it to mean anything.
It never has.
(I never wanted it to).
Never really thought it could.
It might.
It doesn’t.
It won’t.
Hasn’t.
.
The only point I perceive
Is our dismissal.
Evolution.
Another term we use for mortality.
.
Something hopeful.
Never helpful.
Just is.
The way of things.
.
I’m not here.
I’m not anywhere.
There are birds.
Guilty: or, How Things End Beginning
(this is the last thing I find I’ve had time to attempt in writing for many weeks…)
after Bataille, Of Montreal
It began. It begins.
Damage.
What opens what humans call ‘the heart.’
.
Who is the author?
Where?
.
In the loss. Lessness.
What is…always expressed / exposed by what
CAN be taken…
What is stripped back, laid bare, stolen,
raped…
.
Then you know.
Both ‘you’ and a very strange sort of ‘knowing.’
.
THAT POINT:
[the werewolf]
that place, space, moment, experience:
HATE.
LOVE.
(=)
(equals)
.
The expansion.
Additive.
Infinite.
A mad undoing.
A ‘one’ coupled by LOVE-HATE (possible ferocities)
– angry peace –
– gentle tearing –
.
Avarice. Grace. Hunger. Gifts.
.
We get born.
We most certainly die.
(even if we never learn what ‘being born’ or ‘to die’ might be / mean)
.
Damage: how we…die with/it
: how we…end in it
.
We most certainly die.
.
This we know [somehow] without experiencing it.
Or even being able…
.
Death.
Always next.
Always next.
Always next.
(Regardless – truly regard-less)
of anything IN-between
I AM ALL WAYS DYING MY DEATH
(what might ‘living one’s life’ seem?)
I happen to be singing imagined limits
(All I do not know)
.
Questions and conundrums
NOTHING.
Ends and means:
DEATH.
-easily a kind of glory…
…inevitable
…insatiable
DECAY.
.
Guilty.
BIRTH (whatever could be meant by that) = DEATH. DECAY.
(It began. It begins).
-What opens, happens, what humans call ‘the heart.’
We most certainly die.
- Hello cancer
- Hello age
- Hello war and disease
- Welcome other
- ‘Time’
- Fact, fiction
- Truth, theory
- “Hello, human!”
DEATH.
(Most certain)
(The wonder : : : : something is born)
always
all ways
in order to…
…DIE.
Irascible, inevitable, indivisible, ineradicable ends.
Cheers Death
‘you’ (nothing)
always win.
If ‘winning’ could ever look like that, this…
…end(s).
once its begun, it began, it begins…
…endings, ends, the end.
– always already there –
always already here
“between appear and disappear”
Brief Entry
On my Deathbed
I told language:
Thanks for having my children
The language had names,
As did the children:
They were all words.
I dreamt of a door
The kind without windows
That always stands open.
I remembered some more
So I said the unspoken:
I gave them my want.
It declined.
Untitled – Fiction for Becoming
Untitled Fiction : Years of Birth, Becomings
Jesse’s working up something, so is Jon. I’ve begun working again. Beckett is still dead. Or dead, still – either way he has not concluded.
There was plenty of talk – banter, chatter, fulminations, really – to the contrary, to the effect that the ‘working up’ had ceased, had dwindled, long since dissipated or been simply forgotten…not so. Now I’ve heard from Jon and Jesse, piecemeal though it be, and my own ‘working-on’ (or UNWORKING, as MB always referred to it) is near to its inception.
Something is going to emerge. Jon repeats and repeats that “Someone is going to come” and Jesse appears to have passed beyond the silence once begun, through all his notes of suicide, toward fire and conflagration and some bewildered youthfulness. Nohow On become a MUST. And all of it inconclusive, i.e. not concluded.
I work in, on, up, and ever forward, toward – ‘toward the what?’ Jon keeps asking while Jesse scrawls on napkins – figures like cartoons, clowns and foxes, masters, slaves, and mysteries – our locations go unmarked, our whereabouts unknown. This is How It Is, according to Beckett and MB. FK in the burrow. Plato in a cave. JD taking apart each domicile, meticulously.
We are looking for a place to work at our unworking, the time and space to be for what is not. Beckett named it The Unnameable.
I took to the books and letters, while apparently the others wrote, made messages and codes, secreted the symbols into texts and silences, plays and fictions full of pause. GWFH, another spell of YHWH, foretold this long ago: “the ends are reached and reached beyond, folding under, folding through, reached again, again, and…”
For years now Jon is melancholy and therefore quite abbreviated, unable to go on, full of stutters, repetitions, and always the questions, questioning, questing, the undone. Jesse through his trials and papered rooms, sometimes near and sometimes foreign, never-know, never-mind, never-where, scraping geography and clouds in search of where No Where and Now Here meet. I’ve thus far been unable to locate him. As for Ivan, Ivan and Enrique both stopped working after the library of loss – assembling detectives, interviewing the dumb and victimized, missals here and there, mostly filled of snow and jungle.
I think: crows spread across the overcast, charred ash sprinkling fields, nothing rooted, nothing grown.
The unworking. Almost a throw of the dice. Half of each sentence erased. The subtle coterie of literate mathematicians. Reports from elsewhere. WG’s layered travelogue… in search of… The work of unworking goes on.
“Splitting on difference,” he said, the passage from mayhem to insight – WG described as “Vertigo,” the verge, the swerve, the swoon. You reach an edge or limit, what cannot be undone, begin unworking. Begin unworking there.
At the grave “I can’t go on. I must go on. I’ll go on,” Beckett decries. It’s not at understanding – “splitting on difference” – but in the going-on, turning over/under, inexhaustibly or ad infinitum – convergences coming undone.
From JD Jesse gets a Post Carte, leaves it somewhere in the margins, but we know. We know we have heard, even if we can’t re-member. All variations of death, Jon thinks, Jon writes, Jon says…assembling the book of questions…the interior distance of this fierce and beautiful world filled with women, fire, and dangerous things…keeping MB in infinite conversation.
Some things don’t make sense yet seem imperative. As if there were a realm of the unsayable, a set of stanzas wedding language and death – signifying nothing – that is to say, a world of unspeakable silence that works like clamor.
Exhausting voice and nothing more. The trouble with pleasure, with suffer, with become. None of us trust ideas and yet we generate and respond.
“He was found lying on the ground. No one had missed him. No one was looking for him… An old woman found him.” (Beckett). We somehow set out to search. “That seems to hang together.” Jon, Jesse, WG, myself, scouring the globe for more – who, what…- “But finally I asked if I knew exactly what the man – what exactly was required of the man, what it was he could or could not say. No, was the answer, after some little hesitation, no, I did not know…” and so we keep on.
“A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine.” JD post carte. Beckett’s own death, still. GWFH, WG, FK and MB’s left messages, notes, recordings. “Only a small part of what is said can be verified”…if any. We are left, bereft, full of fragments, thoughts concluded, forgotten, ignored, but still unworking – in journeys, in dramas, in fire. Hanging at the limits of ropes. To strangle or drop, and what then? What next? Splitting on difference. It comes apart, what holds together. No one knows. Nowhere, now here, very difficult to say. Meticulous dismantling, decode – recode – Unicode – uncode.
…Jesse’s working up something, as is Jon. I’ve begun working again. Beckett is still dead. Or dead, still – either way he has not concluded. Piecemeal as it may be, we are all working on (or UNWORKING, as MB liked to refer to it)…and nearing some inception.
Alias Thinks Back…On…
“To bring a work to ‘a conclusion,’ as Picasso said, is like putting an end to a bull – to kill it.”
-Francois Jullien-
from the diaries…
Woke this morning with a particular feeling. I’ve never been one to believe people could name their emotions or feelings. The best we can say are parts.
Words like a parts catalog: indicating pieces and components, but never the working, not the operative whole. Machines are full of mystery. What’s hidden.
They say you cannot know. As you age. Cannot know if it’s the end, exactly. Perhaps they’re right – I’ve surely been surprised in middle age, believing everything was lost, doomed, downhill and erosive, some slow and steady depleting – and then WOW! Who could have known or imagined! This luck, this place, this woman or experience! Perhaps. Perhaps. But maybe we do. Maybe we really know, once twilight settles. I’ve never trusted “them” – the “experts,” the “scholars” and “scientists,” “politicians” or “leaders” or “doctors,” the “speakers for” and “authorities”…i.e. privileged observers (an illusion or delusion or both – no one ever gets to be ‘outside’ existence, any more than any other).
What with Laramie gone, and a birthday round the corner, and language just a parts catalog – my experience.
I woke with a particular feeling. That things were near their ends. That I am nearing ends. Work, love, breathing, will. That the stories I’m involved with are dwindling in pages, thin and wearing out. These ‘particular feelings,’ “somehow we just know,” kinds of things: lay down, close your eyes, cross your hands over your chest and hope things are in order. Or not. Depends on inclination and values, I suppose. What one cares about, or for. Perhaps. “They” say you cannot know.
I’ve been surprised. Even wildly. Much I’ve never been able to believe and yet it seems: my children – engendered by me and of such promise; this beautiful woman that loves me; that I’m still alive. One never knows (is what they say). So who knows what? And how do “they” know that?
I think I do, what with Laramie gone, and my faulty parts catalog, and this particular way that I feel. I’ve worked too long and too much. Tried too failingly. Never quite trusted or believed. Never found my worth. Maybe now I know. Maybe now I’m certain of something.
The end is coming – for me – always concerned and consternated by beginnings – how to start, where to set out – and now, here (nowhere) the path, it dwindles away. What have I done? What did I mean to? What did I wish? Why didn’t I?
I wanted to write a scholarly work about something that truly obsessed me. Something I’d spent my life searching. Something that likely doesn’t even exist, but no matter – because Scrabble, because poems, because science. Unscramble (by scrambling) the letters – you’ll see: it can almost be said, almost anything – existent or not – almost. Parts constructing strange wholes and plugged in, eventual malfunctions, repairs – and yet “no matter, try again, fail again, fail better” (Sam Beckett – I’ve read and I’ve taught far too long).
And one solid work of fiction and some poems. That’s all. That’s what I wanted to do.
So I studied, and traveled and loved. Raised children, made music, pushed learning and literature publicly, worked and worked, and drank and drank. Took in stragglers and strays, made it work where I could, doubted and doubted, desired. Everything but what I wanted – that’s how you perpetuate desire.
I woke today with a particular feeling, though “they” say you cannot know. Cannot know for certain, that things are yet to surprise you, yet to get better. I will not argue. Perhaps. But what with Laramie gone, and all that’s undone, maybe I know, maybe we do. Maybe we’re aware when our endings are coming. Who could know? Who could tell us?
My ends are coming.
I can’t go on.
I’ll go on.
(still more from Beckett)
Related: Alias Harlequin
Alias Alive at the Ends
“Always too late. This is the message of disaster. We are too late to the scene, and undone.
Even thinking and emotion. Even love, can’t keep pace with disaster, with entropy, with chaos.
Death always outruns us. World and chance incessantly out-maneuver. We are small. Very small. Infinitessimal, as it were, in our finitude.
Thus begins our own story of destruction: we are born. Perhaps conceived (of). Perhaps even further back, before developing. Prior to evolution. The brokenness. The cracks. The destitution.
Arising of accidents. Formed of the fractures. We become.
In other words – doomed from the start. Our ends preceding beginnings – the beginning began at the end.
At the point of ‘exist’ – our last chapter.”
This would be Alias, grieving his friend, in two colors. The living, the dead, the to and the from.
Laramie dies, and is absent (if memory serves).
Alias keeps after his death – loving Lucy, and children, performing labor and sin and its necessary too much – in his office with paper and pen.
He pauses and looks to the window. Birdsong, stray cats, and the leaves.
L. is gone, but he’s not. Just inevitable.
*
He perceives it as some kind of race – but death always the tortoise that outruns the hare – and is needed.
No more.
Lucy calls.
No more.
Hears the children.
No more.
Senses purpose –
*
The pen stays on – marking the book.
Alias. Alias alive.
Laramie. Laramie ceased.
Spiders and sunlight and dust – all alone. All all-one. All “the Same” in some mystical way, called the Real. The Real that repeatedly ends – its beginning. The Ends, then. The end.
Laramie, still
Marc hasn’t approached such things in a very long time, having left ranches for cities decades ago. He’s never perceived his father this way – a sodden, curled lump, a heavy heap of human – laying not far from a dissolving and evaporating campsite. Still.
Alias ponders “still as stasis or persistence or both/and?” in his notebook in his study. “Most often I use ‘still’ with some indication of both – stubborn, persistent, continual, unmoving – obstacles.”
Son standing over his father. Father, fallen, humped, underfoot of son. A stubborn statue, status, state. Something resilient, resolute, apparently ineradicable and permanent – as far as permanence goes.
“Sons stumped by their fathers. Fathers blocking their sons.” Alias wrote as Lucy re-entered their provisional home (what “home” is not?).
Laramie lay still, sopping, weighing more than any many should, it seemed to Marc. Now fathering the labor of his unfortunate offspring, hovering over it/him like a bent tree, not quite as strong, but still stuck and rooted.
“The child is father to the man…still,” Alias jotted, telling Lucy that he’s stuck in the awful muddling middle of things, still wanting several things to be possible at once, believing they ought appropriately have right to be – including (but not limited to) both of their happinesses and satisfaction… fulfillments… but unable to see quite how, and for some strange reason thinking acutely of Laramie, wondering about him today – where he is and how – and all of their good, promising, talented grown children, and why they all increasingly feel alone, distant, farther from one another with age, in spite or in direct conflict with his feeling of the relative, mandatory, even necessary import and significance of these very few – very few consistent, momentous, continual and crucial relations – one another, their some sort of shared offspring or circumstanced charges, numbered friends, one another… handful of humans they ‘trust’ ‘still’ – and the vagaried ambiguity of all of these terms.
Marc stares: his father: a persistent stasis: there, still. His mother. What now? Himself? His wife, sister, the children? And there… here… Laramie Paul Backstagger… still. Present. Here. Present. Still.
Lucy, in annoyed concern – Alias inebriated, anxious, composing, fantastical, undone – suggests they simply call Anna or Marc, Maribel or Laramie his own self, and check in if he’s so concerned, so (“apparently”) troubled and unsettled about them. But Alias, of course, of matter-of-course, of persistent stubborn stasis, replies, sighing: “Whatever. I’m overwhelmed. Over-reacting, under-developed, undone… Forget about it. Sorry. How was your walk – your outsiding?”
Marc prods the body with his boot. His father weighs too much. Too heavy. Too absent. Too still. Sensei had startled his mother Maribel, returning to the ranch stables alone. Who startled his sister Anna, startling Marc via telephone, still. And now here, miles from anywhere, hating, prodding, regretting, wishing this sodden, sullen lump of heavy matter wasn’t his lifeless father, Laramie, his mother’s errant husband, his sister’s rugged hero, the persistent stasis of his dad.
Tension reigns, still. Vitality. Forces working upon and with forces. Matter and space and energy and time, perhaps. At the very least a conflicted Alias in tangled tango with his beloved antagonist Lucy, unaware, intuitive, confused and undone, while Marc is shoving his inert father, Maribel quivers, Anna waits, and Lucy huffs down the hall. Life keeps pressing on and stopping, still.
Polysemic Stupor 