Image:

No, let's really sit down and think through this, and let it not make sense. Come forward, you ambiguous, you answerless realm, the best direction to something. I seek you.

First, a hand reaches into a dark box and produces a photograph. In the hand: a tissue of something we designate a reality, but at a [remove]; somehow lacking in something, restrained from an experiential potentiality. The photograph is now pushed into my hand. I can look at it, describe it, write about it, it can illicit an emotional response in me, I can engage in it in many ways, save one--the reality of the photograph does not surround me. I am not present spatially/temporally. Either the image or I am a corpse, out of sync with the clock, motionless. I cannot alter, manipulate with the real subject of the photograph, nor can it do the same to me. I cannot touch the shallow waters and stir ripples, I cannot pull the posters from the wall. Only phantoms, without all sense. I hold in my hand a translation, an echo of what reality appears. I am victim to this tyrant. I gnaw on these dinosaur bones.

Or, counter-intuitively, does the photograph hint at a greater potentiality? The experiences produced from photographic image-engagement are merely projected towards a different vector. But are the experiences really different between the thing and the image of the thing? After all, isn't everything we experience image? Are we then all at a remove from reality? Suppose our reality is mere image; what, then, is a photograph? Just another element of that image, meta-image.

Moving forward, into celluloid, quickening the pace of the still, even closer to the experiential world that surrounds us. Motion pictures, a series of images moving at great speed: how are these not reality? The time traveller sees into a past: "real birds" "real children"--how is he seeing? How are they to be called "real"? Images pour out and mix.

How do we define reality? How do we define image? Consider that all we have is image: all five senses are image-based. Lacking image, we are not only blind, but devoid of all other abilities. Image is the grammar of the mind, the fundament; even the word is subservient to it. Language is our best method of image-translation, of picture-communication. An examination of language in tandem with image is the best way to come to an understanding of language, thought and the nature of reality. Here comes forth an awareness of the contingencies of language, human thought and our relationship with the "outside" world. Amazingly enough, the humble, unassuming discipline of composition navigates best this direction--invites philosophy in the most profoundest sense, asks deep ontological and epistemological questions, and overlaps into disciplines as foreign to English departments as theoretical physics and neuroscience.

I pause here at the devoid point.

August 16, 2008.

A forecast of rough work, rough beast, the scaling chisel of the bones. The vanguard dusts of something momentous are bursting through the air; sawdust, sand, chalk, blood, the consummation of the ancient wastes and the cosmopolitan streets. Old soils, new dirts and stains: painting into something to become so beautiful and perfect.
Looking, uncovering, excavating: a liver-light in a collapsed corner of a forgiven city; promoting a confession between citizens, looks between lovers, eyes, hands, mysteries: touches with only sight. The clasping hands of strangers, always with that special vigour, to keep the chance contact from turning wholly to vision, the desperation of that tenuous lust. Back to dust, always back to the dunes of sand spinning in the wind.

My jaw is red, a colour i don't recognize until i come to understand the tincture of my own blood, a burst mouth, a wounded voice. The sound coming out of me is new and it frightens me.

Cities

that i enter into, signing the contract, doing the business, watchful eyes. things follow: one after another--past then present then future, but then mix: mashing out the present irrevocably. Building or dismantling, that is this present, where these streets rule, mouths of streetlights, alley-puddle moist, reflections and winds.

Things, maybe in the shapes of animals, move slowly on the plain, insisting, coming forward, not belonging. This, the difficult thought that comes before the thinking begins, the image mouthing out the knowledge, scraped out hollow in the letters. The cities, streets mere carvings, decor in this living room. A citadel of words, electricity and speech. I write this city out: it comes out, I make it happen.

Photos

every last one torn apart by furious determined hands, leaving nothing behind, cutting your hair and changing your name, crossing a sea and beginning again, tearing up even the photos left around the heart, and the cold wind in your lungs. To be half-ghost, to die a mimetic death, to suffer the insurmountable mercilessness of it; ashes in the eyes that never wash away.

Maps

Finding direction where the paths of old ways and new ways meet, crumpled in the glove box of a forgotten car full of names, fallen sick off the road. light of a distant carnival ferris wheel, laughing screams on the wind, lovers wandering. here, in the dry dark, under a blistered tree burdening the weight of time, watching the sun come up, and falling helpless beneath its wheels.

Tuesday June 10th 3:34 am

Fire in the gardens. Electric light reflecting on the undersides of leaves, producing a florescent flickering of green, delicate veins silhouetted in the heavy contrast of darkness.

Someone hidden in the brush is shouting to put out the flames, and the rusted pinch of a squeaking pulley comes out of the trees, louder than the sounds of fire.

Secret wells, black water in the dark. Bucket handles passing through the palms of ghosts.

The wind moves and so does my memory of things. Images of the past disperse, bringing history to the present, all pasts entirely available, reconstituting themselves, following his hands as he raises them across his face. A masked man, no name, a presence that skims beyond the eyes of the curious in the dark, fires and waters; a man, instead, embodying all of history, a gate in an inaccessible hall, a shape of a thing named human.

Walking along a river, fire, water, red and black, damaged memory and the bickering of ghosts in the robust weeds.

Saturday April 05, 2008

Here we have the beginnings of a spring sun; the pavement is warm on my palm pressed down, pressed down; the light through the glazier's trade, the stiff chill of waters, some above, some below, way below. {And S. talking about New Orleans and ghosts, and again ghosts, thinking about a dead man there again, who I loved like a brother. Way down south, coffin alone now I guess, corpse solitary and soaking, spread out along the waters, loose perhaps, out in the Bay. Those were, perhaps, the days.} (Back to work)

Discovery: In a Library.

I found this written somewhere:

in the dream there is always the terror of discovering your own image in the mirror; while awake the terror is replaced by pleasure in the double, comfort in the other, and recognition of the fact that there exists a me reflected back onto another who operates like a me. The mirror, the terror and the dream all shatter in this waking world: life begins to follow the transparent shadow-law of dream.
Consider the images dumped out of the head like firewood from a rusted wheelbarrow. These are the basis for fire, for sustained heat.

That was all that was written.
The rest of the page is blank.

4am Sunday Morning

Let me tell you about jinx. It works like this: it perhaps begins with a casualty list, things that suddenly die or are about to die. They get hemmed in, start to cough perhaps, distract us, remove us for long periods of time. Jinx is crisis of faith, a first attempt to swallow a void that needs to be digested to move on. But then, the right angle of attack, the void shifts from negative to positive charge, it become you, starts a foundation greater than ever. Jinx is the beginning of the path.

Light.

In this moment of generosity, give me this opportunity to share this knowledge with you:
Imagine a morning and a morning that never existed except for in my experience.
Imagine me in the image, tied into a morning that you create. Nothing there but me and your imagination.
Let me then remind you that light is. This is what morning is. Turn your imagination into light. Turn your imagination into morning.
So there was: first me, then your imagination, then imagined me, then imagined light. Each the genesis for the other.
The imagined light hits my imagined face and crosses over onto my real face, the face that you are trying to touch with your imagination.

What games we are playing!

Your imagination is suppressing the receding chill and the moistness under the soles of my feet that were mine. The sense that was only sensed by me with no one else in the world to sense along with me. But that's not a matter for anyone's imagination. In a silent way, a revolution rumbling, a battle for true sense. Can an imagined image resist, overthrow without a sound?
The song on the radio which was meant for me, your imagination gives it to me, as I play it in my head the way I was meant to hear it.
A voice that was mine, dispersing out, generous: a voice that is everywhere, belonging to others, stretching out beyond anyone's imagination.
A curve in the road, bending sound, making shadow, challenging memory. We can only see ships' lights drifting past the bay in the dark. But we keep seeing them, again and again.

Smoke on the hills. Imagination can't compete against memory that is dying but wants to live.
Night comes back, the moistness in the grass pulling down at us.

Everything is on Fire.

Maybe we can all come to this understanding.
And a heat so strong it dries our tears, burns our tongues when we try to laugh.

From the windows we hear music. And, as friends, we clasp our hands together,
a solidarity, a public sorrow in full view of an enemy that covers pain with pain.

Sun and Lion.

Sun and Lion. Sea. And now some new strange image that comes forth. Never eventually falling asleep, only progressing through images to get there. Crowding image upon image until the light is finally blocked out. Sleep, the images don't stop, only change modality.
But, yes, now consider the sounds. A particular voice says a particular name in a certain way. And then nothing but light. What is the sound of the dream? Retention, reverberation; dust, a hollow quiet. The very bottom of the glass where voices don't go.

Truly, the light of a voiceless projector, on a dense, white screen.

Pianoforte

"Le piano, c'est moi."
--Liszt

The body of sound. Gaping mouth, swallowing, embedding, embodying. A living thing, a history in sound. Voice, a voice, voices, the closet of the throat, opened, sound from wood and wire. Liszt, a "smasher of pianos" she said. Expanding the limits of the echo. The history, histories, boundless. The smashing of vaults, dismantling of the sarcophagus.

"The piano used for this recording, a 1903 Hamburg Steinway model D concert grand, was originally owned by the town council of Hull, in Northeast England. During World War II, Hull was extensively bombed and the town hall in which the piano was housed was severely damaged. The piano, however, survived intact and was used in a series of concerts after the war to restore Hull's spirit. In 2002, it was restored by Klavierhaus in New York City, in time to be used at the re-opening of the World Trade Centre's Winter Garden, playing the same role it had in Hull over fifty years earlier."

Ghosts.

The dead. There comes a moment when we invite them. Leaves fallen, everyone seems to want to provoke them to rise, when all I want to do is put them to rest. Finally, silently, a mere place to look at in the grass.
Smoking a cigar on a grave in another lifetime. Who was I? Have I myself become ghost?
Here are the terrible distinctions of my past, brought to life by a poet long a ghost himself. That damned cypher-poet. A cursed swastika, spinning in the sun. Pisa, a cage, where it should be buried.

name

Name it.
Name this thing that is all teeth, and rain. Chill.
How about a phantom? Locate the crypt, looping images. The dead, the dead. Back and back again, the source of a mania to come.
There is a sound coming through the receiver, but interference.
We can sense a Crossing, a seance with something beyond our knowledge, beyond the edge of image.
Describe, transcribe, translate; seek a fidelity. The sound, the sound. An esoteric language, translated into something otherworldly, a tongue more foreign, a voice of the dead.

Frequency. A repeating, a tuning, the tightening of a piano string, the dash of a chisel across stone. The sound, the image, lost to time, frozen in a motionless posterity. A voice, lost to time, a rigor mortis. A traitor, betrayed by time, betraying for a future generation.

Pound on the Radio

Italy in the Forties. Mussollini in Rome and Ezra Pound reading his Cantos on facist radio. What are you thinking at this point in time, man? Can you be doing the Goebbels rant on air? Surely you are more subtle than this? Are you feeling the pinch of your ideals here? You poetry speaks of the far reach of interpretation but also the hate you drudge up again and again. Mr. Pound, I am having difficulty confronting your contradictions. You are/were a madman, locked up after the invasion, locked in a cage. Sure they'd execute you, you thought, and you would've been, had it not been for that one strange intervention.
I'm confronting your image, both of your face and your poetry. Is it mere ideogram or something much more rudimentary? Can we put the cantos on display?
Somewhere you confused yourself, thinking yourself as the ethical tudor of some great liberator, but lost your way. Lost at sea, no periplus to guide you, lost and, at last, wrecked.

Kundera etc.

"The brotherhood of man [sic] on earth will be possible only on a basis of kitsch"...the boundaries of discourses enlarging, whole communities swallowed up by their own voices, voices reverberating from the interiors of their retention-walls. Can anyone cross the lines? Liberating who from whom? Does the intersection of praxis occur in this cursed land? I miss my country. ". . .that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. . ." wrote Milton in the manic turmoil of the English Revolution; so we have untested boundaries, unexplored meanings in these foreign discourses of our modern culture. But why bother? The anxiety of the unknown holds us all back, except in times of battle. Perhaps we were made to war upon ourselves, always, for to do otherwise would be to deny the "shit" of existence. Is kitsch the best we can hope for? Is this "democracy" kitsch now? Are we so close to totalitarianism? Can we teach ourselves out of it?

Is critical consciousness coming to the U.S.A.?

Sleep.

At work, he spends hours watching the homeless men wandering up and down the street, gathering sour beer bottles and sleeping under yellow newspapers. At night, nothing waits for him but an uneasy stirring; 4 a.m., waking up in a dreary sweat, foul dreams scouring his memory. These are nightmares that belong to him, he gathers them in the morning, a jealous ownership. Little else to claim, he thinks, adjusting his tie.

The Double

Two hands unfolding and the movement goes through and outward. The Double. Crossing over one another. Two becoming one, one extending into two. The repetition. Replaying of the same images in rapid succession. Mass production. A mirror, dividing an object into perfect symmetry.
Tricks: moving towards the end, but then coming back, scribbling all over oneself, building density, re-interpreting what has come before with what has been reversed, repeated. The waves come heavier and heavier on every return. Two hands crossing over each other, movement tightening inward. Density. Unfolding and moving outward. One dividing into two, two subtracting itself into one. Reversal. Responding to new images thickening in weight. Mass destruction. A mirror, imperfect symmetry, too heavy here, too dark where it should be light. Old images die and new ones twist out; grinding the sight and knowledge into alien dusts to be inhaled. Nothing will ever be the same again, the images keep coming, always foreign, always unsettled. Peering into nothing but scattered leaves, over and over, leaves becoming so bold that a new leaf is formed. Solid, dense, frightening--and new.
I am going to continue, now, keep going, to pursue and be pursued, rubbing my hands together for fire and images. I am going to continue, now, keep going, incantations and curses each taking an opposing side of my tongue, an instrument that operates just like a mirror.
{never forget that "I" am not I; we are talking about mirrors here, never forget that. I hold up a mirror, leaning it outward. Never forget that.}
But beware: the triangle becomes the square, three becomes four, the mirror adds another, smooths out the tension, divides the power. Where the triangle is a blade, the square is a dull old tooth. The mirror can be a tool to divest an object of its power.
Or: walk into the mirror. The person disappears. The mirror, like the tongue, is a tool to precede swallowing. I open my mouth wide in the mirror; what was once there is now gone.
I bite my tongue and, in the pain of the moment, I forget two and recall one again.

Middle of June

Here we are, we've nearing the middle of a month, June, in the middle of the year. So now we need to begin, making a voice that moves forward and back. Sound a voice that both seeks comfort and shuns it. First, settle your larynx--you can do this--then talk about something, someone, a feeling that is coming close but never appears. But always be careful when speaking of apparitions that you do not create one out of nothing. The voice has always been a powerful thing: be cautious.
Start walking along the river with your voice, you know the sun is out, you can feel it on the water and the skin of your voice. We know too--we can feel it in the walls, it shakes below our feet. We are always startled by the force of the sound. This is a voice that seeks to walk, to walk until its feet ache and burn, until it dries out, dead.
The voice can create spells because it is a spell in itself. So, in the middle of things, the voice is at its peak. It pushes apart the two halves but also seals them together.
Be forever cautious.