“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
I close one eye as a hint or signal. Almost-gesture of complicity, alliance. Miniscule nod of knowingness. Nearly clandestine. We are accomplice.
Subtlety. In the colors of sunsets are moments. Light in trees, precipitation, breeze and wind. Occasions, occurrences. A brush, a jolt, a catch, or slip. Just there, just then, just whom.
Sum of an enormous fund of letters, sounds, marks, and inferences composing a confused and compossible khora of language actuated haphazardly in discourse, and conversation, a dated letter, an exclamation or response… one might say the signsea winks or glimmers. A squinch or sparkle of potential affinities and conflicts, affiliations and consorts. Then gone. A breath. A…
Glance. A glimpse shuttered quickly, asymmetrically. What does it mean? Something. Something of nothing. Like accident, collision, like misreckoning, mistake. Like harmony, accord, or intercourse.
“in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, as a trumpet sound… the dead shall be raised, and we shall be changed”…(I Cor 15:52, changed).
Happenings, emergence, inceptions, conceptions, decisions, decease…moments, blinks, glints, such tiny gestures…
…and all shall be changed.
Picture, if you can, if you will, a spill of sonority, funneled through lung, through throat, whirling the mouth cavity, battened by teeth, and leaving the lips as a word… now whispering air as smoky exhalation… mingling and woven in the voice of another… such breaths, these terms, these inscriptions… how they collide and collude, coalesce and caress, commingle and pass on…
Moments, instants, mishaps or miracles…and all shall be changed…or so it is written, supposed, and declared…
In the Wink of an I, there is difference.
for Jean Lee
FROM MY OLD NOTEBOOKS
It is beginning to appear that this Autumn-Winter season will not afford me many, if any, chances to compose writings or work beyond those necessary for school and work. Gradually facing this fact – with reluctance and resistance – yet not wanting this forum simply to cease, I have decided to grab notebooks and loose pages stacked and scattered about my now-dusty attic writing cavern and cull them for writings I don’t feel ashamed of, and which would otherwise most likely never find opportunity to be engaged, read, criticized or perhaps even enjoyed. As always, for what it’s worth… writings…
(IF) I AM A BLIZZARD
He/I/Writer hadn’t mentioned her (you/it/women) before, she had not factored in the memory because the hole was so deep there. Like being from Kansas and not mentioning that you live on the planet Earth. Constituent context.
His four-year-old used words like “conundrum” and “paradox;” said “I’m a particular kind of guy and I need my space.”
Literature, music and art invented Writer.
When snowing it had a way of being everywhere at once.
An infinity of points-of-view. The angles of things.
Language like flakes, like droplets, ice forming on dust, on grains of sand. Memories. When they come back, as they came back, a fuzziness and quiet formed on everything. Accrual of haze. At times difficult to see through. Uncertain. Otherwise unknown. Like prefacing everything with “I am finite and everywhere,” like mentioning (aside) that you are alive on planet Earth.
Like evaporation. What seemed to be there just moments ago.
Concocting one way, then another.
Possible to build with what appear to be concrete blocks, distinct and limited, occupying a space with heft and hardness. Or the voices of birds cawing out over air. Vibrating, in motion, unlocatable like the dark, or “love,” or “fear,” or “joy.”
If I am a blizzard I occur over and across. I extend and then fall (Winter might think). (How “Writer” mimics “Winter”).
A “bird,” a “plane,” a dolphin leaping. (Can/does anything really “leap” without legs?).
“Whiteout.” Dust storm. Memory. History.
Writers’ progeny and progenitors.
Has anything ever really happened? “Occurred”?
The Mimicking Birds are a Message to Bears.
So what (if anything) is known?
First thing, third thing, ninth.
Building a world from “facts” (shape, color, sound, size). What the senses misrepresent or make guesses with: blowing wind. Emotion.
In the midst of the blizzard. What expulsions massive ambiguity. As if blown from a mouth the size of a sun. As if an arrangement that would craft The Great Depression and give birth to someone’s father.
As if Kansas, on planet Earth.
As if the word “me” ever even made a kind of sense.
The dark vacuum of “she,” “her,” “It,” “Other.”
Always an unsolved equation. What holds pursuant consideration. What moving from absence to presence might be like. Things to consider and observe. To take in. Ruminate. Decide. Finitude and consequence (such fearsome things).
How a spoken word thuds a gargantuan typewriting arm onto air. Like thunder. How you are stuck with your language. You open your mouth (Writer thinks) you are shoveling a grave. The chink and thock of it. The bite, the thrust, the throwaway.
The unlocking and the liftaway that sound and sense tend to be. Spoonfuls of soil.
These are very small things. Bitesize or microscopic. Amino acids, molecules.
But we also possess imagination – webs and blankets. Musics from spheres. Scintillating overlays of networks and digitalia. (What the mind can imagine! thinks Writer).
Let’s invent some All-Encompassing. A Universal Meteor Shower, a Snow, a God.
((IF) I am a blizzard).
At times the word “love” feels this way.
Grandiose and miniscule.
Silly play of interaction. Every single movement that person + person might be (is).
Writer lost in invention: what the mind is capable of: dream, memory, imagination, logic.
Spread it out. Fly away. Expand. Contract. Escape. (Writer tells himself: “let go,” “set it/them free”).
Parachutes and sparrows.
There are scars on Writer’s hands.
And what of scars?
Below her ankle, beneath the eye, down the chest between her breasts, across the hip and back and thigh. The hollows punched into the backs of knees (science must have named it),
How evaluate the residue of wounds?
If I forcibly spread her beautiful nakedest body out over this dining room table, askew and akimbo, that I might insert myself passionately inside her or press and pound into – (what does “physicality” mean?).
Flitting thoughts, mimicking birds, back and forth, to and fro – snow.
**** Interruption. Interference. Intrusion. ****
A blizzard means static. Windstorm. Mindstorm. Deletion and chaos.
Expectation. Writer awaiting. Awaiting letters in mail. Music and language, experience. To breathe is expectancy, anticipation. Another child en route.
Something to live for.
A seven-mile-journey.
In the hopes that someone might read (some fine day) that someone might care, or, after encountering find that they “needed” (or something like it) to continue. Art for the Writer: discovery or uncovering of met needs never known until fulfilled and then absent = Art.
Things human people can give.
A blizzard (words, tones, and touches).
Blizzard – that we are, can be, may
“Person,” Writer thinks.
Person as inherent isolation (or Death again – the Unmattering – the Opposition to meaning). The Void.
What haunts as forever, but actually is “never,” an End.
So go with it. Flow. And then die.
This brief burst of being.
With inevitable conclusion.
Children / Ideas / Actions / Creations / Labor / Life
What is: “Masterpiece” (Absence. Void. Boundary).
An insufficient multiplication. An equation that will not figure. We came. We saw. Deleted. The system crash an accident. Fini. Sweet promise of tomorrow.
This is the arabesque, the frivolous gift. The Enormance – beginning and end. The all that in-between. What is NOW.
All that “then” that is “now.”
Absorbency of blizzard. Precipitate Earth. 6 billion lives falling like snow. Beliefs and experiences, experiments, emotion, hatreds and loves. Veritable shit storm with strange little gusts. Enormity.
A blizzard. A torrent. A wind and a whiteout.
A “blank.”
An ever-approaching storm…of void…
Finitude. Fact.
Limitation.
To begin.
((IF) I am a storm. (IF) I am a blizzard).
07/09/2010
If I possessed the capability of remarking, I would. Indeed, in that term resides my life’s work. I am a Remarker. I attend, scrutinize, mull and vacuum the world around me for occurrences, things, and events that are “remarkable,” and then I make every attempt to re-mark them. Sometimes I succeed, and my re-marks trigger stimuli for re-marking in others; often I fail – both in the assessment of what (in fact – in a special – species/al – sense) is remarkable, and, in my ability to effectively mark something in relationship to itself.
What “prompts” us?
A pain. A joy. Surprise. Loss, meaning, something that crashes, crushes, alerts or in some way causes blurts or blasts to our system that create cross-connections – surge energy / electricity / pulsings between links and channels that otherwise run their own course. Unexpected. Expected. SIGNIFICANCE.
I am intrigued by what “catches” us, “moves” us, CHANGES us. As many times askance as head on. What gathers and whispers behind us. What we are confronted with. Explosive, erosive, evolutional. You could call them “shocks to the system.” Sometimes cumulative, sometimes immediate. But they effect change, and attention. Design, and process.
I’m thinking of them as prompts.
There are a few works of literature and art, throughout my life, that ALWAYS “prompt” me. A few authors. A few painters, sculptors, musicians. I do not know why this is, but it is so – some voices, some styles, some appearances and sounds unfailingly “move” me, by which I mean continuously change my orientation to the world. Often subtly, sometimes radically, but surely.
Macedonio Fernandez is one such creator.
His writings NEVER FAIL to alter me.
I could query my analytics to find how many times I have quoted him, referenced his “first good novel”
and today I am passing the PROMPT that this novel is – and IS contained in it – on to you… from Fernandez himself – I have lived with it, considered it, dreamt of it… a prompt he left us that haunts and inspires me… an ultimate sort of prompting….
I recognize that I hunger for poetry – periodically I canvas new poetry books and the old on my shelves to be STRUCK – to be wakened – charged – re-membered – into some leaping alive sensibility awareness delight sorrow grief ecstasy – that the vividness and risk of well-made poems incite…
for me, anyway.
Thus, the Bolano. A beginning.
Thus, returning to Nooteboom, a certainty.
Thus, the new arrivals shelf – Wichita Public Library.
and then…today…BOOM.
Bob Hicok, tested favorite, “new arrival,” Elegy Owed
the jump-start.
the activation.
something like recognition and instigation at once.
what poetry does.
and having no idea where to begin to share it with you
to recommend
to commend to you
I’ll just offer the opening poem:
and the closer…
Good-bye
and to tell you that everything in between is every bit as good
and some even better….
Good-bye
Small white church at the edge of my yard.
A bell will ring in a few hours.
People who believe in eternity will sing.
I’ll hear an emotion resembling the sea from over a hill.
One time I sat with my back to the church to give their singing
to my spine, there’s a brown llama you can watch
while you do this in a field if you’d like to try.
I don’t think even calendars believe in eternity.
Beyond the church is a trail that leads to a bassinet in a tree.
Someone put it there when the oak and sky were young.
I’m afraid to climb the tree.
That I’ll find bones inside.
That they’ll be mine.
I want to be with my wife forever but not as we are.
She’ll become a bear, I a season: Kodiak, spring.
Part of loving bagpipes haunting the gloaming is knowing
the bloodsinging will stop.
Beyond the church I pulled a hammer from the river.
What were you building, I asked its rust, from water and without nails?
This is where I get self-conscious about language,
words are love affairs or séances or harpoons, there isn’t a sentence
that isn’t a plea.
This is where I don’t care that I’m half wrong when I say everything
is made entirely of light.
This is where my wife and I hold hands.
Over there is where our shadows do a better job.
– Bob Hicok, Elegy Owed
This week marks (for me) an exciting new release from Explosions in the Sky and David Wingo – they’ve composed the soundtrack for the recent film Prince Avalanche (I’m also a fan of Paul Rudd).
although I haven’t viewed the film yet (I fully intend to) – I was unable to wait to acquire the soundtrack, in fact it was a primary plus in returning to Kansas from the Rockies of Colorado (after the books – see prior post).
Beyond that – it would appear the film offers a sympathetic example of quest in another mode – and the soundtrack definitely does… So, entering a new semester, a season of changes and re-established routines – finding our way forward – quest – here is a sampling of the soundtrack: Prince Avalanche by Explosions in the Sky and David Wingo:
In the midst of the compression (oppression?!) of semester-concluding projects, papers, and presentations…any soothing, nourishing gift or break is welcomed – and Gregory Alan Isakov’s very new album is just such and intelligent and refreshing, soothing blessing…PLEASE SUPPORT HIM! – here are a few early favorites:
For Orthodox Christian Men Discerning A Vocation
Capturing Moments in Life Infrequently Since 1995
Fine Artist
output
An Independent Non-Discriminatory Platform With No Religious, Political, Financial, or Social Affiliations
Gospel Word Gardening in the Age of Decay
Polysemic Stupor 