“If there is progress then there is a novel.”
William Carlos Williams
You wait for it to come, grow, become. You may be waiting forever. Like love.
Perhaps it will visit, pass by. You’ll notice, probably feel hopeful, or inspired. Forlorn.
You’ll keep trying, as in waiting. Wanting and waiting are such wrestlers.
From time to time you’ll dream. Fantasies and nightmares.
But language will twist your words.
“Today I wrote nothing.”
Daniil Kharms
The month of March, in Kansas, can be almost anything, like most of the other months of the year, almost. Tonight it is moisty, breezy, there is wetness hovering like a redolent air, nearly a fog. I am killing myself. You are feeding me. I sharpen your knives in the kitchen. From the top of my throat toward deep in my belly is an acidic ruin caused by far too many liters of hard alcohol in far too much volume, too often, for too many hours of too many days over too many years to not be transforming my internal landscape into a ravaged terrain of destruction. So though I’m unable to breathe, speak, lie down, or work without unignorable hurt, I am still useful. I am sharpening your knives in your modest kitchen. I am reading and writing sentences. I am trying to keep myself from you. You are preparing a meal for us, and I find it so difficult to stay away from you – to not breathe at your ear, kiss or nibble your neck, grasp at your bottom, finger your elbows, hover, caress, overwhelm.
Boundaries are reduced in mist and wind. In motion it can be hard to tell where the lines that mark objects begin or end. In cloaks of obscurity finding shapes or sounds, edges or entries, can be, well, con-fusing (over-mixed, blended, woven)… as perhaps any “thing” we try to think apart ‘in fact’ always is… “inscrutable,” “indivisible,” “unclear.”
If you extricate the ginger from the garlic from the cabbage from the chicken from the oil, the rice, the salt, the pepper, the lime and ancho, the butter, the liquids and oxygens, thicknesses and scents… where is the meal? If you separate “me” out from “world,” relations, surround (like a theory, a concept, a logic…) how might I then live, or “be” what you presume me to be? I will not, cannot, am not (removed from my surround) and so it goes… limbs and flesh and organs… dissect… to cells and fluids, molecules and motions, viscosity and energy… to atoms… to subatomic ‘particles’ and/or ‘waves’ – and at each dismantle you will have lost the entity you proposed or pursued.
Division does not equal.
You’ve quoted out of context – neither copied, reproduced, nor plagiarized. Simply failed. Missed. Lost.
The burning rot, corrosive erosion of my body by the maladies of my preferences, pleasures, and habits…
…erasure of letters, terms, phrases, meanings…
…excision and surgery, atopic autopsying of…
…are things already dead, deceased once de-cised, as ‘identifiable portions or pieces, ‘things'”?
These written marks with definable shapes and spaces… yet if disjoined… no sense can be had…
What might “it,” “I,” be… apart-from?
I lay on a ground I cannot stand up without, cannot jump, move, fly or float away without…
I address you – impossibly – unless we’re inseparable… otherwise address and interaction cannot…
The gesture recognizes the necessary collusion as a dream of a fictive repartee, a figurative gap which – if there really were a break or breach – would have no effect or recognition – no reach, no contact…
Relation is repetition of conjoinment, actions without function if connectedness is not always already…
…as if drawing attention toward redundancy.
And so we kiss, we eat, we call out, we listen, as repercussions of contact… reassurances of inseparability. You reach for your phone, I fall to sleep, unable to be undone or we would not be able to know
…and so we think. I do not say we must think, for I do not think that is so – it is simply a kind of capacity we have, apparently related to external pressures and a possible pleasure, or unknown effects involving desire – a torsion, disturbance, a stirring unsettling perhaps necessary to our living continuance, like pain, like lust.
An activity we call by many names and nuances – reflection, perception, analysis, intuition, sensation, theorizing, dream… but all uncanny practices of turbulence as if trying out invisible options on our world, imagining alternatives, inventing holding frames for experiencing that must constantly and continuously alter and adapt and reorient as living never stills. Like language, like longing, like living. Such things show no signs of resolving, their solutions are their ongoing instrumentalization, their habitude.
Someday maybe, someone will say of me that I “tore up language,” made it useless.
Maybe, someday, someone will “feel” that. That I destroyed something precious. Something necessary. Like oxygen, or water: something we could not live without. And I ruined it. Like meaning.
That would be something. Something I could do, with nothing.
Simple undoing. To sequester and burn. Try or experiment. Atomic bombing atoms. Untangle into knots – vacuum emptiness, so to (un)speak. Rather ask than say. Rather ponder or wonder than postulate or state. To query, not question. Change, not challenge.
Disorder and dismember as an alternative to reordering and remembering. Dissolute versus dissolve. “Me.”
.
How significant that would be! How real and present I might become! How impossible to ignore! Then ‘I’ might come, be-come, cum-cum… be undone, finally.
.
De-ranger opposing A-rRanger. The chaos, disturbance, tremor and volatility… the tension pulling on the only bottom we can conceive… the bottomless. Topless. Beautiful that way. Exposed. Denuded. Open. Available. A fresh take. Lake. Like. Lack. Unknowable. Perhaps deep or infinite. Perhaps uncontained.
.
Let’s say “language.” Let’s say molecules, atoms, cells. Let’s say “space” or “time.” Let’s say “let us say.” (i.e. let’s assume something).
.
Like hallucinogenetic drugs without purpose. Instrumentalization. Meaning. Like feeling too cold or too warm. Like grief or ecstasy – any of these experiences we don’t understand.
.
Disjunctive dysfunction. The uncanny. Morphology. K would call it (maybe) “infinite possibilities of infinities without numeration – perhaps most of which are empty” – and how would we know (or be able to know) what that means? Like this here = that.
.
Suppose you could “see” it (imagine – image-in) – I use language. I’d use language. I would. To “see” it. To image-in, to imagine the impossible…compossible.
.
To love. To be. To live. To try.
.
Apparently (according to K) that doesn’t “do” anything – doesn’t instrumentalize or operationalize the unknown potential, even though I compare it with sound or dance or computers or nuclear war – as physical.
.
Whatever. (Exactly!). The vague potential of supposed infinite possibilities we cannot possibly comprehend, uncover, dis-cover, realize (as far as we know, at our scale of experiencing) – but how is it not part of these possibilities? Actualized, instrumented (pen / paper / sign), operated-in or upon or with or for…
.
Whatever.
Exactly.
.
Here is your possible result: an 100th Monkey.
.
Water moved all over me – a bath, a shower, the rain… I broke my skin stumbling on a curb, and bled… a knife, a table… Ha! I have a body. Yes, there it is. Maybe I’ll make love – what will be discovered then? Yes, “we.” I have a porous body.
.
Another reason writing is an instrumentalized “reason.” Eat this. Peace among worlds. Going on a manhunt for a woman. A particular ‘one.’ Watch me (if you want).
.
I can pull at the hair on my face. I just gathered my child in an embrace (a ‘hug’ we called it). Ha! I have a body, it is porous. Operationalized by “desire” (we call it).
.
Part II: Language (we call it).
.
Floor (feet feel). Hair (hands hold, harry, hank). Skin (sentences slit, suckle, sense, susurrate, sing). Grass (gander, gaze, grab, grackle). Oh the things you can do! Meaningless, morbid possibilities.
.
To prove – ? What? – “I” hear? “I” touch? “I” see? Taste? Feel? Encounter? Interrupt? Intrude? Act with and upon? To what purpose?
.
Proof of possibility? Infinite (unknown) potentials? What do “I,” am “I,” wanting?
.
“Desire” I wrote (instrumentalized) earlier. Ha. A word. An action. [I have a porous body]. “I” (what I call) “love.”
.
In other words, this was the day K hobbled away. You wouldn’t understand. [meanings].
.
I’ve written other words, even what might be called “assemblages” (markings in accord with other ‘possibilities’…infinitely (?) variable).
.
In other words… the spread of the tree. This one sends its branches this way into the world… (porous)… this one yearns vertically… these at certain angles… sentences… reactions…
.
I am thankful for Kansas… for sex… for her… for elsewhere…
.
For Pakistan. Where she first appeared… from California… I “love.”
.
It’s, she’s, notable. Noteworthy. I mark them.
.
The refrain: I love. I have loved. I will. [“desire”]
.
“I” say “yes”
.
Yes, M. Yes D. Yes A, T, H, H, J, M, T, J, M, J, S, R, R, R… yes almost anyone almost anywhere… yes.
.
Yes.
.
Let us try this out: language. Touch. “Yesterday.”
.
And something becomes. The unknown (unknkowable?) – K’s infinities paralleled and interwoven. What is liminal.
.
The liquid between every book on my shelves, every line, the air and its waves, the light and hard matter. [porous].
.
G, D, K, M, Lispector… what do we see? Le spectre. The specter. What we see. What can (not) be seen.
.
The visible and the touchable – “the Prose of this World.”
.
“You.”
.
Trees sprout branches slantwise.
.
Language.
Silence.
.
Whatever.
Exactly.
.
And there… the name “Steiner.” A Viking. A Spartan. A Cherokee. And there is “rain” (we call it). And I: love. And that can be its own end. The German. The Thai. The Nubian. Each native as The World Goes On in The Physics of Sorrow… selected, selected, selected…
.
Selah.
A gold, glaring like sunlight, like foil paper,
glints out of the hands, gathered to plead,
like tears with their measure of salt, gleaming
an eye, like the viscous reflecting residue
of pleasure – piss, blood, the living sweats
and leaks, we run, we water the dying.
.
You there. You. There.
Far cries (moans, wails, echoes) from here.
You here. You. Here.
Murmurs, whispers, gasps, and laughter.
Breath upon an ear.
.
Blue radiance from the heart, red running out the vein.
The wheeze that squelches exhale.
Stuttered stumble – each mistake…the trial being
to sketch, to trace, erase.
Once we waved at one another.
Each goodbye a beckon.
And all digress.
.
Too often, once more… for Thucydides…
.
Feathers, flowers, for Filbert,
little donkey he must be,
ass-braying poems – silt and muck of muddle,
collecting stones and eyes and sunsets,
almost any gaze. Almost an acknowledgment.
To be. For. Anyonething. Anywhere.
Once necessary. Once.
.
And then more…
I’ll map it out for you.
No, I’ll inscribe it.
47 cuts (myopic) in everything.
Unfinished. Inability to understand apparatus. Has not accomplished death.
Librarian, parent: attempts to track, preserve, and access – things precious, silent, useful.
Pseudo-scholar (any otherwise?), thinker: an inability to avoid pollution when considering or engaging relics of world.
If desired sexually, probably will… it depends.
Begins halfway.
Sometimes only in pieces.
Life is hard to figure. Mostly illegible, as well.
47 marks on anything.
Read what you can, listen.
Smells are.
Skin-shaped textures. Walks on land. Occasionally tree or canyon. Mountain, river, ravine.
As easy to trace as wind.
Whatever being.
Kiss for kiss. Breathing.
Something (someone?) called “melody.”
Hurts too.
.
Intimate uncertainty? Certainly not. Perhaps. She would know.
Maybe furry, fuzzy androgyny.
Offspring reveals: “Crow’s a Decomposer.”
.
Decomposer.
.
What is poet?
Said all things grow, cannot hold, to dust and such. Singing.
Some might remember.
Touch. Taste. Trying.
.
Loves deeply. Expects nothing but passing, passage.
Fabricates patterns.
Dances. Slowly. Grasslands. Prairie.
AND. OR. NOT. (every day. moment) +/-?
What equals?
.
Like erasure. Accumulation. Obscurity.
Sometimes.
.
Decomposer. Lover. Friend. Everenemy.
Anonymity.
.
“Love” (used, spoken, felt, lost, wished-for, pondered).
.
Language, landscape, living organism… perhaps that equals.
.
Sing “You Fucking Did It”
When does death arrive? Why?
.
Glossy haze = language, landscape, living organism.
.
Children. Music. Language. Elements of play.
Emotion.
Sex.
.
Stretched out. A boy and a girl (E. Whitacre). A boy and a boy. Girl upon girl. They and them.
Exchanging foam.
.
A poet working a way to an underworld.
Death is. (a “thing”). Exists. =.
.
Kansas: what gives silence for silence.
As easy to trace as wind.
.
Igloo. Cabin. Family farm.
DNA. Bacteria. Cancer(ous) cellular cell’d activity.
.
The living. The dying.
.
Unfinished undoing.
.
47 paces toward the dark.
.
Re-membering foam.
.
How life gets made. A ratchet, a sprocket, an engine and a wheel. Add water. Fuel to the fire. Desiccate.
.
Perhaps it will rain. A slight ritard. Some sounding quiet. Remediate.
.
Take 47:
Watching flowers blooming to dissolve. A capture.
Sight slated to dim. Shuffling ensues. The stoop.
In a chair nearby, another. More better for company. When alone.
Exchanging foam.
47 paces in the fog.
Take three, four, and so on.
.
Circle round. Loop back. Never again.
Erasure.
Easy to trace as wind.
.
Leaving lights on.
Reading words, far from men.
Lost facilities. The stakes.
Dwindle toward final.
The effort, the offspring, the progeny.
Prognosis.
.
47 accounts of the night and the wheel-well thickened with road.
Splashes the mill. Grinds crank. Pressures to turn,
turning back, away, toward.
Another.
47 gaps in the shawl. Inconnu.
With something like delight. How to stand before them.
Poeting down for underworld.
Looking back.
Slows.
Was there ever progress?
Thinks over.
Takes the hand.
Strikes the key. The 47th.
.
Saturate for stupid. Loses steps. Must wake.
A happy mess. Weighted results, dependencies, accumulation.
As easy to trace as wind.
Utilizes snow too much. The rain.
Abandoned places. What removes. The melt. What remains.
The unfinished. Undoing. Become.
.
For ‘I’ is a thing that breaks.
.
47 footprints from the hands. The notable.
Swirly ways of working. Feels like – .
Inspiration hopelessness. This language.
This living organism. Landscape.
47 miles to go. All the cracks and divets.
Bolt after bolt unscrolled as flesh. Laid out. Stretched out. Smoothed. Sagged. Ironed. Smelt.
Felt for quality. Caressed and examined.
The lonely wonder. Represent.
47 X x = ?
.
Confusion persuasive. Revelation / insight. Chords resolve. Dissonance.
Language + landscape + living. 47 measures.
Months go by. Chairs and couches filled by others’ beds. Warmth weighs.
Waits on wisdom. Depletion. Adventure as excited strain.
.
Poison intravenous. Copulating cells and fluids.
Ends of the guilty. Interpret unfinished systems. Dis-ease.
The long whine wail across the prairie. Animal manual. Wind wires rain.
What gets whispered and transcribed.
Stumbling toward the underworld. Looking back.
Eyes up, ocean bottom.
Some things are out of hand.
Like danger.
The grey and black. The dimming.
47 warnings. The morning comes.
.
Making it. Happens.
Diagnoses and analyses.
Shuffles, stumbles, strikes the keys.
Easy to trace as wind.
Chorded coagulation, confounding,
comprehending (very little, almost nothing)
language, landscape, living,
another note tunes the swing on the porch –
inconnu –
what’s wide open, open wide
.
Shrewd and undiminished.
Minimize = understanding.
A matter of scale,
for I am a thing that breaks.
.
47 slices of nothing.
Once again Jean Lee (https://jeanleesworld.com/) digs up an old post of mine that was useful for me to revisit… Thanks!
Part the Ninth: At the Thresholds: Afraid
“the torture of meaning is the vain and interminable agreement between what there is, on the one hand,
and ordinary language, on the other”
-Alain Badiou-
“Fear is the original and basic feeling of man; from fear everything is explicable”
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
“Fear is the basic condition, and there are all kinds of reasons why we’re so afraid.
But the fact of the matter is, is that, is that the job we’re here to do is to learn how to live in a way that we’re not terrified all the time”
-David Foster Wallace-
“Only reality has frightening us as its goal”
-Helene Cixous-
“We produce imaginary causes because an explanation of a thing helps to alleviate the fear of it”
-H.L. Hix-
“Our culture likes to think of everything as true or false – this is…
View original post 729 more words
To try.
Try to
re
member.
Stitching together the dismembered, again.
It is “us”? “That”? A substance? A trajectory?
A subject? A story? (Fable)?
.
What might re-member, and re-member what?
Sensations? Who? Events? When? Experiences? How?
Is re-membering an aspect of Why?
Moods?
Times?
Being?
.
Where are the members to be re-stored, re-gathered, re-composed, or freshly constituted?
.
That pre-(before)-fix (secured, pinned, stayed) “re-“. To do over, again, re-peat. Peat is a furry humus, a difficult detangling. Nigh impossible to dismember without caveat or faith. Some belief in categories or divisions, de-cisions, parts and wholes, composites and particles, atoms, scales, cells, waves or functions… no longer “peat.” How would one forge that again?
.
Moist and messy tangle, eons into bog…
.
I thought.
Thought “it” – “I”.
Knifeblade activity.
.
Peat. Re. Member(s).
.
Desire. (Mood? Emotion? “Drive”?).
.
Prompted to thicken. The caked, flaky, dry – toward some humid, muddy moor. A memory.
.
To re-member one must pre-fix. In order to carve members to append and rivet. Desiccate to gather. Continuous forgetting forging together. Organic? Decomposition’s ritard?
.
Where does one go for the matter of “parts”? Ingredients for concoction, for the rotten mixing and blend. A meaning dependent on decay.
.
What is it we spoil in re-membering?
.
Experiencing. Out of – perceiving – in to. Wherefrom, wherefore, this ‘out of’? And the in-to flows – ? The membering limn. The meeting-joints. The fields of grave. Are there objects? Is it obstacle? In-to-eruption? Happen-stance?
.
Vivisection for autopsy – our arbitrary blade. Figures cut. Marking the joins, indivisibly. Perception. To sieve-for. For what? For whom? In the mire.
.
Try.
Try to re-member without division.
Immersively, immanently, experiencing… without within, within without.
.
Re-peat.
stumbled across this old composition… and realized how little I’ve changed…
This post does not occur formatted as I have written it, but near enough. The inserted quotations are actually sidebars in the original text, not inserted, but I couldn’t find a way to do that here. Let me know what you think!
![](https://manoftheword.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/no-fear-frank.jpg ""Fear-No Fear" by Robert Frank")
“Fear – No Fear” by Robert Frank
“Experience teaches not to trust experience”after Robert Frank
-Lynne Tillman-
“It may be that to understand ourselves as fictions,
is to understand ourselves as fully as we can”
-Jeanette Winterson-
The “Talking Cure” they called it.
Fear
It occurred to me to talk to myself again.
“Finally, after five months of my life during which I could write nothing that would have satisfied me and for which no power will compensate me, though all were under obligation to do so, it occurs to me to talk to myself again”
-Franz Kafka,
Diaries 1910-
I’d gotten lost. In images. In…
View original post 947 more words
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