so language is an architecture for open?
–
they make their way to the mountain.
wait.
up there you make your way too,
waiting
.
i’m a man of too many words
but silent ones, written noise
i’m no good with others,
i always say too much
Category: nature
Cabin Reflections (July 2022)
Between
(sky and birds), between
(enclosed and contained),
between the not existing and the sleepless
there are no obstacles.
Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Xenia
it’s hard to make sense
outside of the world
or in a larger world
things don’t register
in expected ways
.
the pace is all different
and nothing is counting
time, space, and motion
do their thing as one
the human happenings
.
don’t make sense
or seem separate, divorced,
a frantic scale
the earth holds quietly
.
even words dissolve
and transform
like breezes
and bird-calls,
not meaning the same
.
passing, passing, held
passing, passage, hold
i imagine at Heidegger’s hut
he was murmuring
these things, being
.
hard to make sense of it
with reason or belief
a stance
but easy sense
outside
.
Where do you listen?
What are you listening
with and for?
How do you listen?
Silently, with wing-beats
aflutter
water moves
.
i move
out of my head
into the rest
of me, my skin
an open passage
my organs trudging
patiently, waiting
blood moves
.
accordion chest
filling my limbs
hands holding
feet touching
grounded
.
lay back
all in
an other
with / in / of
this world,
here.
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”
Cloud Fragments 1
Within the lip and loom of limbo. Limb lazy, almost unperturbed, but living still, slightly shaken, a subtle stir.
Difference scarcely scored, imperceptible is not worth mention. A canny kind of collude. There (might be) this, (might be) that – too hard to say, and who could do it? Only one driven to be wrong, reductive, defining. Only one agitated or alarmed by the way of things – that there were no way.
Indiscernibles. Indeterminate. Impossible to compute: is how it is. These signs erase, and we are there. As if in front with, as if of face and gaze. As if event. As if participant and become. As if no one might tell apart.
Why tell apart?
Wrangled together in wrestle, why choose? If breath must mingle to say, why delegate, select? Cloud moves over, under and through, toward, into, and away – to no one’s noticeable chagrin. Why we?
Tender spots trace gentle rain, in river, barrel, lake, exempt of rage or reason. Only a sprinkle, a feed and possible weal, so glance and touch, brush and care, a slightly stumble, a cell’s conceive.
Misremembered, but no mind, flavor, sight, the wind through trees. Nothing is without. Nothing alone, should it perchance to be. Mysterious, illogical motive of undoing. Prepositional violence. Pre-positions, a tearing apart.
Muscle, scent, and fur. The various forms of water – cloud, drizzle, flow. Flesh with flesh and whispered angles. Breath with sound and ear. A thought.
Inseparability and subterfuge. Had never been, may not be, unstill it is…the way….questionally unquestioned, sifting in drift, conjunctions of convergence, some impossible begin.
Badlands #1
I didn’t come back. Something stayed on in the far. Apart from the wires and the noise, “connections” and net-works. Somewhere away. No mistaking it was I who drove home, unlocked doors, and arrived. I who functioned and served as a placeholder. Yet I’d stayed in the cold and remote, the far reaches. Away. I haven’t returned, though something sure did – no one noticed but me.
It’s alright, there is room. Space to breathe and to think, space to listen. Apace like beyond or forgotten, the lost, misremembered – like that I was left or retained. On I wandered, as wondered; I pondered and roamed, but I did not come back, that I know, not this time – too much risk without safety to “be here.” I don’t want to – not here – no where, no now, no sure thing – not “that.” I’d like to be other, undone, in the wild, separate, immersed, and another. Not me. Not this. Not here. Not now.
So I stayed and I didn’t come back. No one noticed. Alone, I began to combine and consider. Correspond and co-question the side of the world the world was on. Difference side, or an other, not a me or an ours or an us. Just a world. I renamed there, all one, even while I returned and took care of. I escaped. Not me, only them, not I, just the others, who cares? – perhaps no one, not me and not them and not elsewise. I am gone. Gone unnoticed. It’s okay, for who cares? As long as I’m holding my place, and fulfilling – a father, a worker, a lover, a friend – no one cares if I never came back from the forest and sky or the wind and the cold. The dark places. No one knows, no one cares, nor do I, just I know, that is all, that I didn’t. Return. Rejoin or sync up. No, not I. I’ve stayed far even while it’s my body or figure that fills up the places and manners I was. I am not. And it’s fine, doesn’t matter, why would it?
I blink with the breeze o’er the road. Lodged in swift crannies and caves, dropped in canyons, and spread through the clouds. Now I’m rain, it’s okay, now it’s snow, no one knows, no one cares, reconsidered: as long as someone is caring for them (or apparent) no one cares where the person has gone – that including – the spaces the person has gone – no one knows neither cares, nowhere for nothing – simply not – sweetened absence – of care or concern – just a void, a caesura, an erasure, amiss, like palimpsest or scrimshaw or paste, and a cut.
I am cut. Paste anything there. They won’t notice, not them or there or any thing or one. There’s no matter, no wave, energy or particle, there is nothing – that’s any and every for them – what they need, that is all, what they need. What they want. I’m not here, for
I didn’t come back, from the cold, the remote, and the silence, the spaces, the less. It’s okay, no one noted, but me, for I functioned, appeared, held a place – however emptied – of me. It’s okay. I am cut. Paste anything here.
I have not returned. No one knows this (but you now, and I – keep a secret). It’s an absence I will not reveal.
There is wind.
There is no one.
“It is hard to seize what is” -Laurie Sheck
Out of the Woods
“Why did you come out of your place in the woods?” I was asked.
“I guess so,” I replied.
So what?
This I find I cannot answer. It is irrational. Perhaps to stir and sense? Dis- or un-cover? “Strife” (from Ancient conceptions of the term). Turbulence. That something rather than nothing? Not to have one’s hands folded on one’s lap? (Dostoevsky). How should I know? It’s irrational.
Unreasonably, I’ve begun.
Of course beginning will destroy things: my stasis, comfort, stillness. Family roles, relationships, profession. Any beginning changes everything before (prior) to it. Friendships, rituals, schedules, habits.
To START (anything) means to RUIN.
And also…BEGIN.
In other words, if I (one) reach out – lash, swipe, caress, call, correspond, text, touch, encounter or engage – an Other (one)… all will be disturbed… it’s the nature of contact between living beings: landscapes, art, humans, animals, spaces, times, words, events. Everything alters at encounter. Period.
If I (or we) are available (or needy) and therefore present ourselves (vulnerably) to a reality (actuality, happenstance, opportunity, occurrence) everything changes.
Past. History. Future. Meaning. Understanding.
So “Why did you come out of your place in the woods?”
What was my ‘place in the woods’?
Repetition. Familiarity. Habitue.
Security? Comfort? Compatibility with my environs?
I must have desired DIFFERENCE.
And how to account for that?
This is something we just do.
Clothes, taste, touch, belief, surroundings, movement – variance, dissimilitude, change – this signals in some way to our mechanistic (apparently) methodology of ‘survival’ – that we’ve ‘still go it,’ still HAPPEN, to-be… we live. Are a-live. Existence. (See how the noun – the naming/defining – kills it? Stills and destroys it?). Existing.
Out of the woods I desire – not to be “existing”, not to crave “existence.” I do not want any THING. SOMEthing. I am simply wanting to be-ing… indefinable, indescribable, occurring, happening, all-live – not staid enough, locatable or timed enough to be characterized, apportioned, described and named. No! I (for one) am wanting to be happenING, impossible to capture, occur-ING, become-ING, vital not repeatable, unique not typified, tabulated, calculated or classified.
And thus, and so, I change (again). Again.
Again I come out of the woods.
I be-come. Out from the woods.
I say, I write, I speak, I act.
I am.
Already Alone – Norway, October, 2016
ALREADY ALONE
Norway, October, 2016
Far from.
As near as I can be, as near as I can tell, I am far.
Far from. And already alone.
So long I dreamt this cabin, this hovel, this cave.
Some safety, a distance – ‘solitary’ space.
*
Who ever would I be – were I alone?
What am I – alone?
Where is one – alone?
*
Silence quickly transforms into noise. One’s ‘self.’
Alone.
These window cubes, cut from concrete.
These thick and stony walls.
Such noisy fire.
*
I am far.
Far from.
So very long – already alone.
And yet I’ve just arrived again.
*
It is cold.
Often, always, winter.
Sheer, spare, space.
Hardened, austere, edges, boundaries, shapes.
We are separated. Blocked. Reaching…
I am. Here. Alone.
Always.
Already.
Alone.
*
But not really quite.
Not really quite – all one.
Alone, never seems to actually equal – all-one.
Even though it’s used as stand-in.
Words.
*
I write.
Here in this far-removed, distance-sequestered solitude.
I AM.
Yet I only AM…
…in relation to.
I am not, not ever, NEVER ‘ALL-ONE,’ ‘AL-ONE,’
‘I’ am all-ways, al-ways, IN-RELATION-TO
in order…to BE…even ONE. Even singular
demands plurality.
And so forth, and so on…
*
I…am UN-ABLE to ‘BE’ without an-Other, another,
TO-BE-IN-RELATION-TO –
a note, a chord, a color…
a line, a shape, a term…
some weather
*
‘Language’ as we’ve come to consider, think, imagine…it…
‘simplified’: NOT ONE BIT W/O THE OTHER.
*
NOT ONE BIT W/O THE OTHER
*
My youngest son (10 years old) has heard
a strange, elaborate, convoluted and contested myth/story/fiction/fantasy (hypothesis)
about the “Origin of the World”
involving particles, waves, heat, light, sub-sub-sub quantum symbols & movement –
all sorts of scientific (& notably human) inventions
from Professor(s) AZIFF…
“as if”
these might declare, or describe, inscribe or explain
SOMEthing, ANYthing
about…EXISTENCE…EXISTING… (EX-is-tence, EX-is-ting…’out of’)
*
I heard stories as well (as-if)
that A god (or many) breathed, touched, loved, crashed
SOMEthings, ANYthings into be-ing…
that there ‘likely’ (or MAY HAVE BEEN – according to human conjure)
a “Big Bang”
another Big Daddy of heat…of particles…of waves…of sub-stance…of light…
or MORE,
or LESS
*
Wavesparticlessomethinginmotionimplosionsexplosions WORDS
InthebeginningasfarasWE’reconcernedwastheWORDlogossymbolmarksign
SOMEthingOTHER-thanwhatIS-AZIFF-asifperhaps
[how might it be ANYthing other than ANYone’s guess, among us, pray tell? WHO or WHAT might qualify – among US – as arbiters or judges, experts or prophets – and by what measures or standards (or WHOSE?) as each of us species-specifically WE?]
inotherWORDSinod,bow,listen…WHOtellsthestorythatMOSTaccordswithME?
andsoitgoes…WORDS
*
and it alters – it changes – the stories – generation to generation
depending on the rulers, the beliefs, the ‘logics,’ the ‘sciences,’ the ‘mathematics,’
the tools, the techniques…
and it alters…from season to season…
depending on the ‘outlook’ or ‘prognosis,’ ‘fellow-feeling’ or ‘concern,’ – survival needs
Some call Physics, others Philosophy, some Religion, others S.T.E.M. or art or politic or publicsocialpolicy…some Business (nearly all)…das capital
Each and every DIFFERENT time
a ‘this is how it is,’ a ‘this is what we know’
i.e., a ‘THIS WE BELIEVE.”
*
Our creedal species.
And I…
I say…
Some say…
“No Matter,”
“No Substance,”
“No Essence”
…”WHATEVER.”
*
Always a begin – always a play of language (nigh-universal) and power (universal). PERHAPS –
And so it goes (or so ‘I’ imagine…or ‘so it seems’ to – ‘ME’) and so forth, and so on…
…the playing field remaining species-equal betwixt athlete and artist, philosopher, scientist, politician and doctor, worker and ruler and indigent intelligent…so far as ‘I’ can tell of it…
*
HERE NOW I. NOWHERE ME. Language – experience – meaning – species: HUMAN.
“All the Same?”
Equalists all, at fundament.
Inequalists all, at experience.
Thus: equations.actions.creations.obstructions.thoughts.languages.behaviors.codes.might.
“Might”…a PERHAPS…a possibility…a WE (species-specifically): DON’T KNOW.
*
It is thus I invent and inscribe.
Posit.
Create.
Detract. Distract. Distrust. Conjure. Conspire.
Attempt a BE-come…becoming…convergence.
Attempting to BE.
And another is able to write “Why the World does not Exist”
And another “Being and Time” and still more “Being and Nothingness” and still more
all kinds of SOMEthings and SOMEones and ANY’s…
with their WORDS.
and mine, and ours, and we
*
I write.
Far from.
As near as I can be, as near as I can tell, I am far.
Far from. And already alone.
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.
On Being Other
On Being Other
(after Heidegger, on Holderlin)
Broken off from origin: gods, family, homeland.
Early switched direction – turning back, against, since.
No belonging. No church, no community of mortals.
Reliant on the peaks and the abyssal.
No lasting love, but efforts toward convention –
when giving up –
even offspring, domesticity,
varietous employment,
almost friends.
No lasting commerce, always in-between,
feeling resistance and restraint,
constraints of discipline and need,
of longings, love, and lust.
Searching Other
fueled by others – across the times –
creators of the peaks and their abysses.
Oscillation.
Not yet rational, it commences –
undone in the unknowing, uncertain constant flow
generates turbulence toward an opening
or a gap, some kind of fold –
“run up hard against the unsayable.”
the closing line is a quotation from Heidegger’s
lectures on Holderlin’s poems “Germania” & “The Rhine”
Fierce Splittings
Mountains.
At the base of them, miles and miles into Montana, lay Laramie. Laramie’s horse Sensei is uncertain what to do. A storm is rolling in.
Lucy knocks at Alias’ door. “Going for a walk,” she says, “you okay? Need anything?” Alias ponders. “I’ll be taking the dog,” she adds to the nerve-troubled silence. “You’re welcome to join.”
The fierce splittage that occurs. Rife.
- I always want to go, and madly. Tromp nature, move our bodies in time, together. Hear you, explore, see the muscles work your thighs, your calves, their clench and stretch. Peer at what your eyes respond to, share what registers in your ears. Be privy to what physicality, adventure, novelty and motion unwind and unravel in you. Want you as much as myself. Want to touch and observe, share and protect you. Crave you.
- I need to stay with these thoughts, stick at these questions, interrogate myself, my loneliness, my ecstasy, my want. I am remiss, longing, wishing. Forever turning aside for another (spouse, friend, vocation, pet, children) – NO! – I must stay here with myself, plumb some illusory depth, a hell, potential potency. Must keep scribbling, keep ‘taking up and reading,’ until the moment occurs that seems revelatory, meaningful, significant.
YES / NO
Silence. She goes.
And Laramie’s lain still, a long while.
Sensei turns and trots, after houghing along his body.
Lucy goes. Exchanging kisses and assurances, both of them wishing, both of them aware, both of them happy and sad.
Alias moves to the piano.
Wanting to extrapolate a sense – but there are far too many senses and sensings. Children: infants to adults, jettisoned and on. Sensual aches and lustings – the million maneuvers to orgasm at every angle and scale. Big Pictures and Miniscule Mundane all wrapped up. A blooming iris. Pregnant decisions. Salivation for vodka, for book, for solitude and quiet. Augmented chords, then rolled, then extended, then simply a single note. Promised to language, yet full of sound and fury.
He plays, he drinks, he writes, he doubts, he fears, he wishes.
As if it were imperative.
As if fierce splittings of rationality or cognition and confused whelmings of senses and emotions were condemned toward disruption. As if it were unknowable. Could not be known. Could not be said (or written). Could not be true.
Human axis. Axis of being. Overloaded and irreducible.
A swoon, a swarm, an agony and ecstasy. A finite loop and laugh. A tangle.
Alias loves and longs his Lucy, Laramie, children and books. Alias loves and longs a self that makes sense. He loves and loathes that it does not.
Lucy goes. Dog in tow. At the mercy of externals. The risk of world and other. She heads to the Outside.
Alias turns in.
Laramie’s turned in. On himself. On the world. On ‘in.’ Plumbing the depths. A hell. Of ending. Of being. Of moments and instances.
Sensei breaks to a gallop.
There are the mountains. Fierce splittings. Here we go. Everyone at the mercy of. Inside/outside. Too many tenses and senses. Everyone and the mountains, or for some it might be sea. Or both, or any. What happens there.
Lucy in woods with dog. Alias at desk in plains. Laramie lying at the foot of the mountains, still. And everyone else at their everywhere.
Polysemic Stupor 