The Circus Blog

Remember to Check Your Shoes for Spiders . . .

2012-02-16T11:28:00.002-05:00

. . . (don’t worry, they’re not THAT poisonous)

Better yet, like the geckos and everything else that doesn’t automatically, bite, sting, swarm, or generally feast on you, spiders feast on those that do those things. Put the sweet potatoes in the dying coals so tomorrow . . .

The Ejido communal landownership system is rooted in the agrarian ideals of Emiliano Zappata and the Mexican Revolution, instilled profundity between humans and land, practiced through sustainable agricultural and promotion of local cultural heritage. Any ejidal history spans centuries of conquest and colonialism, and asserts the richness of Mexico's resources, and the peasant population’s inherent right to control land use (Gibson 1964, Stern 1981). Contemporarily, the position of the ejidatarios has shifted considerably from this ideal, filling a semi-reservational role wherein populations occupy arid land, and rely on other economic activities besides agriculture (Holden 1990, Domínguez 2004). The role of ejido ownership changes as land becomes scarcer and internal fissures resulting in partial or full privatization combine with pressures of state and international political economy. However, most ejidos remain incorporated and undeveloped, belying large-scale socioeconomic trends via a subaltern counter hegemony exhibiting the oft implicit salience of land, as opposed to the anachronistic Marxist dichotomy of labor and capital. Once again, the triad trumps the dyad, exploding Claude’s house in its wake.

The Ejido Isla de la Piedra spans some 600+ hectares covering an ‘island’ like peninsula southeast of the city of Mazatlán, to which it is connected via water taxi or gravel road (35km from city). It has a population of 8500+ people living in some 1250 houses. Founded in 1933 by 84 individuals through the efforts of social activists, including Jesus Moreno who gave his life in the struggle, it is part of a larger system of social landownership, which includes various interpretations of Article 27 of the Constitution. Originally subsisting on an agricultural system based around fishing and fruit growing, without electricity or fresh water supply, the community relocated to their current position on the hill next to the canal after a malaria epidemic (Mendoza, Dantiela; Parra, Samuel 2009:1). The post-1994 reforms to Article 27, motivated by a state level assertion of purported inefficiency in ejidal land use, has put tremendous pressure on the island‘s ejidatarios, they have maintained relative autonomy even being so close to Mazatlán’s embedded tourist industry. Now, plans for a mega resort named Amitlan (the home of the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl) flounder and gain ground under the various leadership of the local leaders, the exmayor of Chirutiba, Brazil Jaime Lerner, and the NGO FIPP.

I arrive on the island with rucksack, duffel bag, and a folded up news article about the completion of the Durrango highway that will connect Mazatlan to the north over the Sierra Madres via some hundreds of bridges and tunnels including the largest cable suspension bridge in the world (you can fit the Eifel Tower underneath it) and cuts the drive from 8 to 2 hours.

This place is not like many others, but it shares character with our preconceptions. The first nights of tropical island life do not easily pass. There’s much to do to make a home. Shove cloth in holes and ground level door slits to keep out mice. Sweep up existing mouse poop. Sweep in large, sweeping motions until you sweat. Take the towel away from a saucer sized spider and escort it out. Take a shower. There is no hot water. You don’t need hot water when the world is so hot now, hugging in the daytime, blowing through the night.

Do not stay in the house. There is night and stars, darker and brighter both than in cities. The basin of the sky is turned inside out, yawning up beyond imagining. Amazing that over lull pounding surf you can hear everything: Woodstockian snowbirds next door in their porch shaped editing nest, working out a ten year documentary on the Nimbin utopia on Australia‘s Eastern Coast. Sputtering reptile feet on rooftop. Wind through palms (a close synonym of wave-speech). Hum of fridge. Hum of brain, why still inside?

There will be nights of loneliness and nights of exuberance. Days of solitude, and days so hot and humid you cant breathe. There will be days of rapture and movement. Days of errands. Nights of talking. Times when you wish to go back home, where you will flail yourself raw on what Cohen called in his tidy first foray, a Bildungsroman titled The Favorite Game, the “many murderous plateaux of indifference where you wont even own your personal despair” (1963:95). There will be times when you cant remember what it was like not to be here, and the sum total of your memory will condense like milk stored in cans of brain, containers of thought simpering on the shelves in the ashen dawn of the end of your world. There will be time to think out crippling things inside you save the flesh. There is here, where all coincides with your selfness as the end¾the ocean¾the final coda drone of Pan over Apollo. There is here without you and you and you. There will be life here past no one.

That which we cannot make for ourselves: a world without end.

You hear the mouse crying outside, most likely because you have blocked his doorway, made it my doorway in true American fashion by putting a barrier only you, or something like you may lift. You wonder where inside its children nest, but you think you’d hear them too, right? A rooster crows and its not even midnight. Twice it dies out in the night as if rabid for the day. Others fall in chorally, four, five and maybe dawn will burst with their cries, prematurely competing with the waves.

Learn mislearnings of language. Pelicula is not movie, its film; hence, you wrap your half papaya in pelicula autoadherente and stick it in la refrig. Mineral oil for the locks and here’s a Jackfruittree in the front, and a tree from India (the only one on the island, whose ripe fruit smells like strong cheese) all powerful medicines. Enough cures down here to make you not buy paper anything. Flies that spew acid if you crush them when they’re busy sucking on you. Here Pomegranates originating in the Jordanian rift valley take root. A tree in the garden has one reaching maturity, and you support the branch over a palm’s low frond.

Kids run singing pop music. Leaves fall from bamboos with a breeze’s encouragement, and vehicles leave the beach for coming dark. Feel exposed at a crush of life unlike any congested thoroughfare. A pulsing far from stress, more relax and less reactive. Here the French-Canadian yell tabernac! at the dogs, and you feel how it sounds in your mouth, laughing for you don’t know what its doing there.

Stars belie immensity here for you city kids. Night sky more than ever hoped for, unless you’ve grown up under one so pure. Its Billie Crystal here away from the city, and despite solar flares, you cant imagine it being more so. A comfortable naked sky, and with Magdalena pastry memory of this morning’s café visit with your friends, you remorselessly log today in a special place for days like it. Not entirely¾the days in that place govern their own space. A nonrational (as opposed to irrational) governor of special memory land warps them at whim, without right regard to their immediate refraction of now at hand. Reflection deepens difference, and such synchronic portals emerge memorialized in diachronic specters of invisible performance.

By the way, dancing under stars is a here-now panacea for fear of future, and before you fall asleep remember to countdown to nothing the I love you stored away.

Zev Gottdiener

On Movement (Between Art and Capital)

2012-02-13T12:20:00.005-05:00

A few words, this week, on the vagaries of hanging out our shingle once more. We’ve encountered setbacks, delays, challenges, and so on. But we’re still dogging this startup—this conglomeration of our assets into publication, incubation, and focused curation—and it’s time to share what we’ve learned so far. Here’s to the phoenix, in all its flaming feathered courage. You know where to find us with your response—or leave them here, below.

Let us assume, for the moment, that the great movement of twentieth-century art (modernism and its codicils) comprises a vast coming-to-terms with capital.

I will not stress this assumption other than to demonstrate its plausibility. The differences in encountering works of art from 1912 or 2012 remain both vast and mundane, and I do not seek to oversimplify them here. Aesthetic changes over time scarcely deserve more attention, but I wish to point to the development of the production, distribution, institutionalization, reception, and—oh, hell yes—definition of art and its works today. So, for the moment, let us agree that art now enjoys an uneasy truce with capital. We turn to their systemic interaction.

Capital affects the work of (making) art in ugly and definite ways. It defines and structures art’s possible conditions of production, for one thing. In other words, one cannot produce art unless one can afford to. If a person has the time, skills, and resources to engage with art’s materials and practices, whether sanctified or otherwise, they can make some—this is basic stuff. And I’m not suggesting, here that one’s self-naming as “artist,” or the sources of time, materials, training/practice, etc. are fixed. No, but there are some recognizable patterns at play.

This leads me to art’s effect on capital. As work—as labor, if you want—art moves and generates and changes the very forms of capital. Invested in products, the work of art gives artworks part of their value. Invested in their institutional trappings, the artist and the agent and the dealer and the gallerist and the curator and the critic and the teacher and the visitor and the collector and the goddamn subway sweeper pass their judgments, shake their hands and cry the value of authenticity, originality, impact. But as expression, art maintains space to critique capital’s patterns, none the less.

How does our art move now? It moves unashamedly in concert with the capital that sustains it, even when dissonant. Our art does not divorce from business: as the poet says, “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man…”, and if we learn nothing else from hip-hop we must learn how hard to hustle. If we want others to see, hear, read, smell, feel our works of art, then we must also work to bring that work to them. Art was never a pastime, or a hobby. To create regularly takes deep investment, and sacrifice. As practice and craft, our art stands unflinchingly before the spectral horrors of income, expenses, cash flows, taxes, and the rest. Fuck bohemian pretension. We’ll stay irrevocably interesting and powerful and affective and beautiful despite our fiscal constraints. Indeed, we’ll stay this way because of those constraints. Our need to sustain art through art means we forsake banal insistence on the authenticity (and thereby value) assigned to the romantic ideal of the lonely genius artist creating masterpieces out of vacuum, inspiration, and sacred truths. Our art does not grow in vacuums. Collaborative work, open source processes and licenses, freemix and converged cultures swing swords. Some art dilutes into Content, into mediocrity ensconced in echo chambers and relegated to the dustbin of Twitter. But networks, institutions, habits deep entrenched in tradition and canon still all quake when other ways to bring art and artists together arise. So we cut to quick: the Circus Book demands art in and despite capital.

This is art as craft, the choice of both our necessary and persistent beauties. When we publish writing, we publish across reading platforms. When we nurture artists’ growth and development, we do so inclusive of the businesses of art. When we root and establish creative communities, we adopt the conventions of the commons, though we do not bind ourselves to commonality. In short, we recognize this movement for its own truths. Between art and capital, we stand together to thrive and create.

lewis levenberg

Benjamin Nardolilli - Only With Myself

2012-02-01T08:37:00.001-05:00

OnlyWith Myself

Itwas the priest who brought us together,
Weboth laughed at him,
Whenwe went to the water without his cross
Andwhen we walked back to the hotel
Torest without reading his Bible.

Inthe morning I woke
Andnestled up to you, momma bird,
Youhit me, I hit you,
Untilwe were hungry broken branches
Andhad to eat breakfast.

Theairport above the smog,
Wecame there with everything we brought,
Afterwailing in life with each other,
Ienvied the detectors and detectives,
Theywere close to you with better sight.

Benjamin Nardolilli is a twenty-six year old writer currently living in Arlington, Virginia. His work has appeared in Perigee Magazine, Red Fez, One Ghana One Voice, Caper Literary Journal, Quail Bell Magazine, Elimae, Super Arrow, Grey Sparrow Journal, Pear Noir, Rabbit Catastrophe Review, and Yes Poetry. Recently, his chapbook Common Symptoms of an Enduring Chill Explained, was published by Folded Word Press. He maintain a blog at mirrorsponge.blogspot.com and is looking to publish his first novel.

Poem/CounterPoem: Whitman

2011-12-05T13:00:00.000-05:00

After hiatus, always nice to ease back in with poetry.

Poem/CounterPoem takes an out-of-print, public-domain poem and responds to it, also in verse.

Today's comes from Walt Whitman:

Poem:

Once I pass'd through a populous city imprinting my brain for future use with its shows, architecture, customs, traditions,
Yet now of all that city I remember only a woman I casually met there who detain'd me for love of me,
Day by day and night by night we were together -- all else has long been forgotten by me,
I remember I say only that woman who passionately clung to me,
Again we wander, we love, we separate again,
Again she holds me by the hand, I must not go,
I see her close beside me with silent lips sad and tremulous.

Walt Whitman, 1819-1892

From "Children of Adam" (1856-1865) in Leaves of Grass.
Oxford Book of American Verse (1950).
Emory Holloway, Whitman: An Interpretation in Narrative (1926).

Holloway was the first to notice a revision from the original manuscript, that changed the lover from a man into a woman. How much would it change this poem, or editions of leaves of grass, or whitman's status, to revert the poem to its original orientation? Consider that "Children of Adam" in Leaves of Grass deals with sexuality in general, while the section "Cadmus" deals with "manly love." Would these lines then deserve to move?

Counterpoem:

when he left, i could not speak:
my mind grew numb and i forgot my name as i stared at the fringes of the city.
his hand lingered on my nape though his gaze wandered restless past my face, past the hive of the skyline
with its distant dramas, hustle, pomp, shivers, past faded stars, past memory, past lilac branches hewn in shadow
past bare nervous fraction of raised down -- his tender calloused touch floats still, we do not shift, my toes clench,
i release him, chest from cheek, breathe sigh of solitude, rise, pace the city's streets alone again
in lasting absence, pull my mouth taut and forget his passions.

Notes On Occupy Wall Street 9/29

2011-09-28T21:24:00.009-04:00

I've been vaguely aware of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement since its first sighting on September 17th. Actually, I'd picked up The Post the day prior to find a little information on the coming weekend of football, and found something more alarming than Eli Manning's sullen face. In that issue, Mayor Bloomberg -- who speaks not only as Mayor of New York City, but also as the second richest man in New York (second to David Koch) -- warned of possible rioting in the U.S. due to unemployment and stagnant job-growth. He says, "You have a lot of kids graduating college who can’t find jobs. That’s what happened in Cairo. That’s what happened in Madrid. You don’t want those kinds of riots here ... "

As a recent college graduate I felt compelled to share the good news with a few friends, and during my scouring of the web for an attachable article found to what Hizzoner Bloomberg may have been alluding -- Occupy Wall Street.

I'm in a weird place when it comes to this sort of thing. By "this sort of thing," I mean protests and civil disobedience at large. I was not alive for any of that most decadent and celebrated decade of the 1960s, but I've heard the stories. And in many ways, I am how far we've come. That is, I've seen various forms of racism, economic inequality, elitism, plagiarism, sexism, etc. first-hand. As for my freedoms, as I said, I've heard the stories. I may have even participated in a few of those. Who knows? I might be doing it right now.

But that is only background, and its purpose is to tell you this -- I am both an enthusiast and a skeptic of "Occupy Wall Street."

What has been and is being accomplished here is no small matter. I spent this evening in Zuccotti Park, or Liberty Square as it is now being called. A well-organized and well-maintained show of public disapproval for our current economic situation is exactly where I want to be. And make no mistake, Occupy Wall Street is a tight-knit crew. Liberty Square is home to a generator, wi-fi, and team of professional activists. Occupy Wall Street is now an active protest in sixty-six American cities. Cardboard protest signs line the Northwestern parameters (closest to WTC, oddly) of the park, and passers-by are invited to make their own. Free food and water are offered to even the briefest of guests. A drum-circle was had by all, to include: a tuba player, a chess player, Captain Jack Sparrow, several able-bodied white men, a black man in a tie, a white woman in a tie, a few babies, pieces of granite and quartz and sage, a woman dancing with a rat, a hula-hoop, a Muslim with a trumpet, hand-clappers and tamborines, and a sight-seeing bus, among others. All under the name of occupying a foreign land -- the Financial District. Thus, if you are willing to look closely, this movement is striking a balance between free-love and free-market.

And that is part of what worries me. To mine young eyes, Occupy Wall Street is looking a lot like Long Island -- 1/2 business professional, 1/2 Cherry Garcia. My apologies. Poking fun. But as a person who works, I need to make it clear that I resent the fauxhemian knee-jerk trend of liberal politics. It isn't my can of semiotics. What's more, this form of activism appears to only be viable under a tricky stipulation -- previously acquired wealth. But maybe that is my prejudice. Someone, for the love of Ground, correct me.

But there is more of which I am dubious. Adbusters, a magazine known for confrontational liberal politics is the primary stakeholder in this protest. Tell me if I am wrong, but is Adbusters a business? What? Is this protest then a matter of trading their politics for ours?* By this I mean, is this then not a matter of power simply changing hands? What then? What after that? Are we working against power or are we working against the clothing it is wearing?

*For chrissakes we're not communists. ;)

Occupy Wall Street's very campaign stinks of last year's politics. Do you remember all of the catch-all, hot-button slogans used during the 2008 Presidential Election? Change -- whose change, what change, why change, how change, pocket change? Maverick -- so you play for Mark Cuban? What does "Occupy" mean? In its most recent contexts, I know it from the war in Iraq and Afghanistan; not really wars, but rather, occupations-of. So, are we planning to have the same positive effects we did in Iraq? Kill the leader and then stand around for a few years? Even out of the context of war, "Occupy," as defined by Merriam-Webster, is to engage the attentions or energies of. So what do we do with Wall Street once we have their attention?

Part of this is entirely Occupy Wall Street's fault. For all of their efficiency, which can be underrated, there has been a seemingly deliberate attempt to blur the mission of this mission. Is the goal purely to raise awareness? To generate political sympathies? Is Adbusters on a national tour? Is this a worker's revolution? Is this a revolution of compassion? Are these the riots Bloomberg was talking about?

And why should I support you? Because if you're not going to be clear, my break is up, and I have to get back to work.

Young Cretins

2011-09-25T22:16:00.009-04:00

But youth is also that fragment of existence when one easily imagines oneself to be quite singular, when really what one is thinking or doing is what will later be retained as the typical trait of a generation. Being young is a source of power, a time of decisive encounters, but these are strained by their all too easy capture by repetition and imitation. Thought only subtracts itself from the spirit of the age by means of a constant and delicate labour. It is easy to want to change the world - in youth these seems the least that one could do. It is more difficult to notice the fact that this very wish could end up as the material for the forms of perpetuation of this very world. This is why all youth, as stirring as its promise may be, is always also the youth of a "young cretin." Bearing this in mind, in later years, keeps us from nostalgia. -- Alain Badiou

As we shake off a few days of dust and begin once again to move this examination around, pretend I am a serialized television program and that I must fill you on a few of the details, because you do not care to follow my story. You prefer the cleverness of an episode, and the overarching narratives are secondary if not tertiary. I am fine with this. As a matter of fact, I encourage this practice. It hides that I make it up as I go along, in accordance with the fan-mail.

On Wednesday we briefly peeped into Samuel Beckett's career, and a described certain aesthetic linearity in Beckett's work, beginning with Joyce's decadent training, and then a trending toward aesthetic subtraction of ornament. The reasoning behind the Joyce-Beckett break is oft-speculated. Some site a personal decision in Beckett's life to give-up alcohol, drugs, etc., and that this led to an aesthetic asceticism. Some point to 'the dark' of Krapp's Last Tape and the general degradation endured by Beckett's characters as devices which highlight and reinforce the poverty of language; its inability, whereas Joyce would instead flex its ability.

There is much that I am leaving unsaid about Beckett's middle period, but as mentioned on Wednesday, the purpose of my mission is not to reexamine the terms, conditions, and consequences of Beckett's work, but to use Beckett as an example of a writer who notoriously precedes himself; meaning: according to Alain Badiou, Beckett's pubic identity has a habit of over-determining the reading of his actual work. Later in the course of this essay I will do some more dynamic thinking about my topic of reputation and publicity; for now, I will continue to use my examples to tweeze-out thought.

Last week I provided a link which excerpted "Tireless Desire," an essay by Alain Badiou on the overall worth and substance of Beckett's oeuvre. The block quote above is from this essay; it provides a frame of reference for Badiou's Beckett (ie. a delicate, constant labor(er)), but also for the way Badiou reads his own reading of Beckett-- an encounter marked by the fervor and passion of youth. Yet in the quoted passage Badiou holds a warning over our heads, "It is easy to want to change the world ... It is more difficult to notice the fact that this very wish could end up as the material for the forms of perpetuation of this very world."

How is this relevant? Why have I allowed these ramblings about age to infiltrate an otherwise perfectly organized document? My answer: Badiou's answer:

When I discovered Beckett, some years after the beginning of his French oeuvre (that is, around 1956), I was a complete and total Sartrean, though I was possessed by a question whose importance I thought I had personally discovered to have been underestimated by Sartre. I had yet to realise that it was already, and was going to be for a long while, the abiding obsession of my generation and of the ones to follow: the question of language.

Notice here that what is important is not only Badiou's public identity (a
"complete and total Sartrean"), but also how he anticipates his personal contribution or alteration to that identity from within its parameters. More from this paragraph:

From such a makeshift observatory, I could only see in Beckett what everybody else did. A writer of the absurd, of despair, of empty skies, of also a 'modern' writer, in that the destiny of writing, the relationship between the endless recapitulation of speech and the original silence - the simultaneously sublime and derisory function of words - was entirely captured by the prose at a distant remove from any realist or representational intention. In such 'modern' writing, fiction is both the appearance of a story and the reality of a reflection on the work of the writer, on its misery and its grandeur.

Later in the essay, Badiou will consolidate the above description, naming it Beckett's 'caricature.' Here, allow me a moment to think. What do we know? Badiou enters Beckett as a Sartrean and thus a scoundrel materialist. He notices that Sartre's system has disregarded Language as a philosophical object, and believes himself to be the guy to investigate. Armed with his new tool, he comes to the same conclusion about Beckett that everyone does. How does he amend his error, and was he in error? For some camps of philosophical discourse, Badiou was not necessarily wrong, rather, he was young; his circle was a small one. Badiou thinks otherwise, "It took me many years to rid myself of this stereotype and at last to take Beckett at his word.... The lesson of Beckett is a lesson in measure, exactitude and courage."

On Wednesday we will be sitting through that lesson.

Word for Word-- Beckett as Beckett

2011-09-21T22:22:00.014-04:00

The object of my analysis is not a reinterpretation or any revelation about Beckett's body of work, although as writer I am tempted to travel in that direction; rather, my focus is on the nature of reputation, the public nature or publicity-factor of a writer, and how this can be contended-with, examined, thought-about, and whether these modes are at all useful. I am using two links; one diagram charting the whereabouts of several writers' thematic drive, and one "monologue" from French philosopher Alain Badiou, in which he describes his initial encounter with Beckett's work, and then his rearrival (forgive the creative impulse) to this work in later years.

Tonight, a plunge outward into Beckett's career, up to How It is, published in 1961. We may as well know who we are talking about, and Samuel Beckett, despite being the most written-about figure of the 20th century is notoriously difficult to schematize. Derrida himself resolves to remain largely silent on Beckett's writing, and this, considering Derrida's work, is surely the highest of praise. Derrida does write:

"How could I write, sign, countersign performatively texts which 'respond' to Beckett? ... Given that Beckett writes in a particular French, it would be necessary, in order to 'respond' to his oeuvre, to attempt writing performances that are impossible for me..."

First though, I want to briefly rehash. In Sunday's post I postulated a dominate understanding and approach to Beckett. I argue that Beckett is largely perceived as a veritable 4th horseman of the apocalypse, probably Famine, maybe Death. And, to be fair, these rumors are not entirely unjustified. In terms of Beckett's "texture," all of the elements are there-- characters are unanimously infirmed, place is all but, and eventually erased, the text itself becoming the only scenery, the narrator itself even becoming an aspect of the slush. Beckett's 'trilogy' (although written sequentially, Beckett never referred to them as a unit) of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable feature what is a dissolving and finally eradicated (or nearly) Cartesian subject. Thus, subjectivity loses its base of operations, and is no longer eligible to pronounce what seems to be a personal traumatic experience as its own. The absence of paragraph-breaks alone make these a bit daunting to read, and if you are in it for plot, hold your breath. Yet the language of these books is woefully and meticulously beautiful, to say nothing of its humor. The Unnameable famously concludes:

I'll go on. You must say words, as long as there are any-- until they find me, until they say me. (Strange pain, strange sin!) You must go on. Perhaps it's done already. Perhaps they have said me already. Perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story. (That would surprise me, if it opens.)It will be I? It will be the silence, where I am? I don't know, I'll never know: in the silence you don't know. You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on.

But this is not where Beckett started, nor is it where he ended with his death in 1989. Beckett's early career, aside from a few poems, was hugely influenced by fellow Irish-expatriate and one-time employer, James Joyce. The majority of Beckett's early writings fall squarely within the limits of Joyce's lineage. By Joyce's lineage, I am referring to a tradition in which language is harnessed exactly for its propensity toward possibility. The author assumes God-like (big up Stephen Dedalus) creative control, and as in the case of Finnegan's Wake, meaning is expressed through its power of multiplicity.

Beckett's break from this approach is of the utmost interest, and it is oft-speculated that the moment of this break is sited (almost!) explicitly in Krapp's Last Tape:

What I suddenly saw then was this, that the beleif I had been going on all my life, namely--(Krapp switches off impatiently, winds tape foreward, switches on again)--great granite rocks the foam flying up in the light of the lighhouse and thw wind-gauge spinning like a propellor, clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality--(Krapp curses, switches off, winds tape foreward, switches on again)

We can make an assumption here about what "the dark" is for Beckett, namely a great ally, but notice that Beckett doesn't even grant us this much. This tactic is often where he is confused for a cheap-skate and a solipsist. A cheap-skate because we know where he is going with meaning, and yet he does not even grant us his implications, and a solipsist because no conclusion is permitted to be a communal resource. Basically, he refuses to communicate.

Where Joyce was plentiful, Beckett became absent, concerned with what could be taken away, what was the Bair-bones of the literary mission. This is the mark of his "middle period," which contains the bulk of his well-known material. Notice the congruence between scenery in his plays and novels during this period. Waiting for Godot and Molloy take place on abandoned country roads. Endgame and Malone Dies feature all of a single room. Beckett's world is shrinking. If his career had ended with The Unnameable or Texts For Nothing, perhaps the accusations of solipsism would not be so ridiculous.

Yet this emptying of ornamentation will prove not only capable of rendering "prose at a distant remove from any realist or representational intention, [...] a story and the reality of a reflection on the work of the writer (Badiou)," ie being qua being, but also served as the manhole into which the cesspool drained, and from which, Badiou will argue, an honest and courageous attempt at writing "for people," will emerge.

On Sunday I will be writing about Badiou's relationship with Samuel Beckett.

Cross Examination: A Whiff of Beckett 9/18

2011-09-18T18:33:00.014-04:00

"Cross Examination" is a weekly article from our Tom Bair, in which Tom will examine an article/op-ed/essay, and respond, not only to the subject examined, but also to the subject examining.

This week, Tom is working on a multi-part article, beginning with an examination of Samuel Beckett and his reputation as a bleak post-existentialist. Buttressed by Alain Badiou's comments on the Irish writer and a fun Venn diagram, Tom will begin by loosely sketching the context of these readings articles, their readings of the Beckett, and how they interact with the ouevre and swag of Sam Beckett. Then on Wednesday, Tom will use both sources to explore the nature of "reputation" itself; how it reflects on an artist (if at all), whether public persona has any relation or consequence to or on a private person (in this case a very private person), and how, if at all, any gap between persona and person are reconciled.

The mentioned sources are:
I Love Charts

and

http://www.apieceofmonologue.com/2009/05/alain-badiou-on-discovering-beckett.html

Early in the week I was sent "I Love Charts" from a friend, with a subject line reading, "You'll love this." I opened the email, glanced and glanced quickly at the Venn diagram, scoffed, and went back to proofreading Tao Song and Tao Dance. My friend and former professor asked me to pay close attention to the placement of Samuel Beckett, who is a common interest between us; she is a scholar on Love in Postmodern Lit, and I am a sucker for Beckett's aesthetic sense of filth; computational, compassionate, and deliberate inertia; humorousness-- slapstick, ironic, bleeding; and above all, Beckett's thoroughly unpretentious and still ambitious approach to poetry.

Now, I'll ask you to look and the diagram, find Beckett, and come back to me. Beckett is toward the center of the diagram, but firmly and exclusively found in the Mouth. I am reminded of a skit from the Ghostface Killah's Fishscale album, but this is purely tangential. I am here to make a point, whether or not I find one (--ha it seems I am invoking Beckett sufficiently.) My final digression I promise-- here is a quote from Beckett's The Unnameable, "Under the skies, on the roads, in the towns, in the woods, in the hills, in the plains, by the shores, on the seas, behind my mannikins, I was not always sad, I wasted my time, abjured my rights, suffered for nothing, forgot my lesson."

First of all, wtf is Mouth?? Maybe whoever made the diagram saw "Not I" and thought this was a clever little trick. John Wilson, if you're reading this, the only character in "Not I" looks a lot like The Thicke. I could also see where, if the only experience a reader had with Beckett was Waiting for Godot, one might arrive at this toothy conclusion. After all, Didi and Gogo remind us, "It is not enough to have lived. They have to talk about it."

These clowns are helpful in deciphering the category of "Mouth." As overtly suggested in "Not I," Beckett's work thematizes a certain talking without reference. That is, a mouth without a body or mind; a yammering that "can't go on, must go on," belonging to no one, caused by nothing, uttered by the limp or the center incapable of pushing-off, or the slave incapable of leaving, the homeless, the grotesque, the abject, in a scene without scenery; wasted and barren, no ocean, dreaming of yesterday.

But let's look closer. What is being assumed? Does this approach, like Badiou's initial read, " ... only see in Beckett what everybody else did. A writer of the absurd, of despair, of empty skies ... "

More on Wednesday

On The Subway 9/14

2011-09-14T21:49:00.004-04:00

My favorite border of the year is stalling, the snake has swallowed and digested its tail as it were, and I am in a city without leaves. I guessed that the weather would be tepid, dressed accordingly, and so now (as far as a day goes) I am prematurely fatigued and my eyebrows are waterlogged, forcing me to lean forward and stare at my toes just a bit. {Stage direction: I unbutton my collar as though I am still decent, slouch purposefully, give up a little. No sigh is recorded.} This is a concession I make quite often; I guess on something that need not be guessed on, force myself to adjust, and do the work for the guessing later.

For instance, I am sure that later in our moments here (the plural of moment is correct) I'll be doing some dancing, maybe playing a little game of charades, miming, anything to yank your attention from the rope of serial commas to which I have tied myself, in order to avoid making an entrance. Like my autumn!

I am good at giving up, and I can teach you, but I've heard some Greek guy say that metaphor can't be taught. I'm not sure. I love the movement of invertebrates; octopuses and jellyfish in particular. They are water creatures, they take advantage of their situation. Do you see what I have learned? Even now my connections are dangling. They are there. It is a matter of giving up.

I've begun reading Don Quixote. Last night I drank a Guinness for the viscosity, which is the same reason I occasionally smoke cigars. My family has told me I am Spanish, so when I read this book it is a romantic occasion. I treat the Irish similarly, and the English, and the Swedes, and the Americans, especially Black Americans. I'll explain myself on another day; suffice to say, I am trying to rework a knot. I give up and I also mind where I commit my labors.

What Donald does for me is not simple, but I am learning something or other. I am convinced that the outline for his project was vague, and that he, for lack of a better term, bullshitted through most of it. It strikes me as improvised. Notice that the first part ends and the action is incomplete. How does one play and at the same moment remain rigorous? Melville is the same. At least, Moby-Dick. {Stage direction: an octopus inches into our car through the subway doors. Di-doo. The doors close. The octopus falls asleep. I hear a homeless man cawing, " A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-color, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach. No perceptible face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life. As with a low sucking sound it slowly disappeared again, Starbuck still gazing at the agitated waters where it had sunk, with a wild voice exclaimed - 'Almost rather had I seen Moby Dick and fought him, than to have seen thee, thou white ghost!'"

Poem/CounterPoem: Dickinson

2011-09-08T11:42:00.000-04:00

Poem/CounterPoem takes an out-of-print, public-domain poem and responds to it, also in verse.

Today's poem comes from Emily Dickinson:

Herself - 1830-1886

There's a certain slant of light,
Winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.

Heavenly hurt, it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.

None may teach it anything,
'T is the seal, despair, --
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air.

When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath;
When it goes, 'tis like the distance
On the look of death.

Another version, better reflecting her original manuscript:

There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons – 
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes – 

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us – 
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are – 

None may teach it – Any – 
'Tis the Seal Despair – 
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air – 

When it comes, the Landscape listens – 
Shadows – hold their breath – 
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death –

I'll leave commentary on these versions of the poem,
including on "internal difference, | where the meanings are," to others.
Instead, I'll provide each version in a chain of revisions to the counterpoem.

Here's a first response:

    there's punctuation over
    and above whatever
    changes you had made
    to your own script

    loopy and unrenounced
    shorter in line and dashed
    and slashed and swoops
    and overall less tight/controlled...

    elliptical revisions
    in between your hand
    and friends' for publication
    anyway, emily dickinson,

    "there can be but the one"...
    formal and stiff response
    to death: empire, positive
    and measured assassination.

A revision:

    anyway, emily dickinson,
    "there can be but the one"...
    elliptical revision
    to loopy emdashed hand

    one formal, rigid count
    tightened renunciation
    punctual declaimed empire
    so there's the seal

    on distant horizons, winter
    light blows in (a curlicue)
    (a concept, even) more like
    distraction than despair

    at least, today, surrounded
    by dead streets
    polluted slant of rhyme
    grows dim, affection dulls.

once more:

    emily dickinson!
    "there can be but the one"
    renunciation
    slant of light or or or...

    on elliptical horizons
    winter (curlicued) (emdashed)
    (conceivable) blows
    distraction/despair

    revision: punctual
    rigid declaimed air
    crumbles unsealed
    empire's landscapes

    only this affliction --
    dun polluted blood, dead
    sky / dense untaught music
    linger after defeat and day

so, finally:

    emily dickinson!
    "there can be but the one"
    renunciation
    slant of light or

    or elliptical horizons
    winter (curlicued) (endashed)
    (conceivable) distraction/blows
despair revision:

    punctual, rigid
    declaimed air
    crumbles unsealed
    empire's landscapes;

    only this affliction --
    dun polluted blood, dead
    sky / dense untaught music --
    lingers past defeat and day

-lewis

First version: from The Oxford Book of American Verse, 1950.
Second version: from poets.org, 2011.
Image: from MOLT, 2008.
Response poems: lewis and the circus, 2011.

Onward and outward

2011-08-12T00:03:00.003-04:00

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, and to die is different than from what anyone supposed, and luckier. The Circus Book would probably had a few sheepish words with Whitman, but kept it light. The conversation would be in the sweeping details, where things can be forgotten, obviously. The splotch on someone's cheek. The necklace you thought about wearing. A hand gesture once practiced, and suddenly resurfaces.

I am thinking about the Circus Book as a stage that the audience watches from. Where will the show take place? In their house. Let us let them. Can the Circus Book become the art itself? That is the rub. Can there be opinions and theories and voices and the like, all together, under the same tent?

Say, perhaps, a character introduces a topic. And then another reimagines the topic. And a heckler chimes in. Or a housemaiden proselytizes from a soap-box? The freaks are hard to please. You can't ignore them and you can't look at them either. What they want is recognition, but not the sort of which I am capable. Like Daniel, the ringleader just stands around with the lions. And the other animals are well trained too. God save the clowns, and the trapeze artists. Some one almost dies or laughs or both.

But also a circle. And if I am having trouble with a circus I don't think I could unpack that buggy of 30 clowns.

In one object is there space for fiction and nonfiction, for poetry and prose, for review and opinion, for the margin and the masses, for the blather and the details, for the controller and the controlled, for the audience and the stage, for the home and the destination?

-Tom

What is Circus Book?

2011-08-11T13:29:00.004-04:00

A Circus Book gathers the best writing and art into one venue. It fosters conversation on and by creative and critical minds. It makes accessible eclectic excellence. It breaks the back of coffee tables. Market, journal, outlet, insufficient movement in gestation, Circus Book rises from rubble. Crane or phoenix, salamander, concept and delivery and tangent, Circus Book trembles the hands of those who hold it. Indefinite, embryonic, certainly, but smoke rings' slow rotation, sure flotation, laughs at stasis. A Circus Book develops.

A Circus Book wreaks havoc on aesthetic analogue. Its limitations, stickiness, locations, size all fluctuate. Circus Book slinks through hyperlinks and transfer protocols. Its logic, thickness, replication, time consolidate. Others pass through, between these Books, encircle them, collaborate with, contradict them. Each ignores the obvious, attends to the ignored. Any arrives and leaves on its own time, in its own way, material, without pretension. As "a," as "the," and what it is,

so Circus Book remains.

-lewis

work song

2011-06-06T16:28:00.002-04:00

so sing
an isolated verse or two

while)

bells to silence fade
and background
city rumblings
hemhorrage
restart detailless

know)

nothing: the street
playful slash serious et cetera all

burn)

skin sloughs & bubbles
shoulders backs necks hours
break and haul to

piles)

concrete streetside
karmic compensation
free hard labor force

let)

verse remain, forget inquiry
solve for dissolution
solvent, water, concrete

trough and curb tonight
tough words tonight, a

two)

ton verse to prove tonight.

lewis

Contemporary American Subalternity

2011-05-17T14:28:00.001-04:00

This essay tries to make 'subalternity' sensible for what Gramsci called our "special American conditions." It traces the shifting referents of the concept for theory over the past eighty years. It tries to take the idea seriously, framing subalternity as an abstraction, an outcome of material conditions, and a mode of subjectivity. It details some of the embodied and environmental conditions of subalternity here today. Attending to the problems of constructing a working definition of the concept, it introduces two concepts that often disappear from explicit discussion of such topics. In conclusion and looking forward to further exploration, it raises some questions on the subject.

We begin, then, with some concepts and cognates of subalternity. Antonio Gramsci's use of the term referred primarily to peasantry, and others excluded from early capitalist formations. When Gayatri Spivak took it up, she shifted its referent to subjects excluded from industrial society/late-capitalist formations, particularly in formerly colonized, currently globalized areas, more particularly women. Giorgio Agamben's 'bare life' provides a cognate of subalternity, an extreme consequence of the same conditions (a state of exception in and as sovereign normalcy) as those of subalternity. The reduction of life to its animal, biological, non-sovereign basest inscribes an end-point (and therefore an origin) from which to think the material conditions of humanity relegated to subalternity. If subalternity constitutes society's excluded subjectivity, an embedded exception, then it might mediate between sovereignty and bare life.
As an excess and supplement of the logic of sovereignty, subalternity grounds another intervention beyond the consideration of exception, law, and sovereignty in abstraction. Consider, for example, the corporeal consequences of the marriage of law with prisons, police, and poverty. In these cases, aggregated subalternity confronts violence sanctioned and even sanctified by legal strategies to maintain a certain order outside of its chaotic function, but which relies on that very chaos and violence in order to regulate itself. In the process, legal systems that compound penalties for minor infractions based on inability to pay one's way out of temporary imprisonment or to hire competent counsel, no less than police enforcing certain laws only in affluent or impoverished neighborhoods, or along racial or other lines, all designate subaltern subjects as nominally equal under the law, but far less likely to receive equal treatment under that same law. In this context, recognizing collective subalternity and fomenting subaltern consciousness strikes at the root of such systemic disenfranchisement in a more immediate and concrete way than does the revelation of systemic hypocrisy as such.
Agamben's insistence on the conflation between 'exception' and 'rule' in sovereignty certainly attends to problems with the maintenance of the rule of law at the expense of the grounds of legality. But subalternity, deployed along Spivak's understanding, shows how social exclusion does not operate in the abstract alone, and that it does not just attack any given sovereign subject willy-nilly. Agamben assumes and implies that law can be considered a disembodied, abstracted, decontextualized, and universal figure. Even aside from systemic legal discrimination, the materiality of the law, as mediated by textuality, grounds its epistemological reach. Law can be decontextualized, but not made immaterial.
Theory holds the same problematic relationship to its codification (to say nothing of its commodification). Textual challenges to legality or sovereignty, such as procedurally implemented reforms, or theoretical exposés, can therefore take place in terms that sovereignty and 'the law' would understand. But bare life as such, and even subalternity as such, constitute supplements to sovereignty only in so far as they cannot be understood by the latter. Consequently, a massive, territorially focused, violent, subaltern uprising against the State could constitute the determinant of this supplement to sovereignty. In the meantime, subalternity makes explicit the stakes of a state of exception; it can thus be thought as an intermediate phase between sovereign subjectivity and bare life.
If theory can be held responsible to the world it seeks to describe or predict, then we must ask what material interventions might be wrought by theory on the conditions of subalternity and exception. Without such a politics, theory approaches phatic signification. In short, the conditions of theory's production cannot disappear from its pronouncements. The specific systems that make possible a theory of American subalternity - universities, publishers, academic and community venues, and so on - also contribute to subalternity's conditions of possibilities. That contradiction cannot be ignored, but it need not bankrupt such theory. Even those institutions, organizations, and systems that make subalternity real can work to alleviate its conditions.
What then, constitute contemporary American conditions of subalternity? They do coincide, to a great degree, with those of subject-formation. Race and ethnicity code non-white American bodies; whiteness correlates with privilege, not to say 'Americanness'. Similarly, cissexuality, heterosexuality, and masculinity do not guarantee, but certainly correlate with, social comforts. The many characteristics of gender and race that mark otherness also index subalternity. These embodied elements do not, however, suffice to explain the phenomenon.
Instead, other environmental factors must be taken into account. Geographically, the simultaneous impoverishment of both inner cities and rural communities helps drive the increasing expansion of suburban wealth. Over one third of the country's population still has no access to broadband communication networks, and fully one-quarter do not have Internet access. Many of these issues of a technological 'digital divide' fail to find representation by media outlets, whose information-gathering rarely extends to the rural and inner-urban disenfranchised, except in cases of tragedy, when 'human-interest' stories of victimhood in those areas abound. Most troubling, these environmental factors often overlap with the embodied markers of alterity from privilege noted above. Their confluence brings us to the question of 'class' in America.
The American version of 'class' - that is, socioeconomic rank, organized occupationally - has inhibited the development of a revolutionary class. Debates over a professional-managerial class, the question of a liberal elite as a reactionary ruling class, whether intellectuals constitute a class, and the surprising turn to the Right of the majority of laborers under neoliberalism all highlight an insufficiency in Marxist doctrines to explain how class operates here and now. Despite capitalism's fomentation and acceleration of the accumulation of wealth in this country, its potential to alleviate the problems of those without wealth remains frustratingly unfulfilled - and those most in need of such alleviation have not often or lately raised a concerted protest.
In the absence of a revolutionary class consciousness, subalternity clings to particular class-like phenomena. Lower socioeconomic strata and more exploited laborers certainly raise the question of subalternity, as does contemporary struggle over collective bargaining ability for State employees, and the long-term social effects of a shift towards an informational capitalism to follow industrial capitalism. Most saliently here, poverty in capitalism accompanies unemployment as well as exploitation. Both these conditions tend to coextend, in the aggregate, along racial, gendered, geographical, and sexual lines. Together with religious, linguistic, and national divisions, these political claims on identity mark, loosely, the territory of subalternity.
Enumerating subaltern conditions in this way risks reifying some fixed, multiply marginal, disenfranchised individual as a caricature of 'the' subaltern subject. The familiar politics of authenticity would subtend questions of who is the least privileged in any given situation. That subaltern subjects stand more at risk of the reduction to bare life remains incontrovertible. But, if it is even possible that any sovereign subject can be reduced to bare life, then embodied and environmental factors of subject-formation do not suffice to explain conditions of subalternity. A more productive working definition remains in question.
Here's my suggestion: "being beneath all others."
This definition maintains the etymological roots of the term, as well as a productive double-meaning in the prefix 'sub.' That is, in the context of society, subalternity means that although a subject may claim no power or privilege, they still exist in relation to any other sovereign subject. The least, perhaps, but at least one part, not apart from all others. This in contrast to the fully and doubly represented sovereign subject, and also in contrast to the body of bare life, who cannot even exist in relation to society, only in their mutual absences. Subalternity here stands on that brink.
so, contemporary American subalternity and its significance are fraught with contradiction. They must be represented by a certain ineffability. As the excess and supplement of the logic of sovereignty, subalternity can refer to a social subject excluded from society (in contrast to the body of bare life, an asocial subject excluded from society). Ontological destitution haunts subalternity, yet its alterity from sovereign being must be thought in relation to being. For example, subalternity can reference extreme poverty, but such poverty exists primarily as a construct of capitalism. Similarly, subalternity can refer to an unrepresentable mediation between sovereignty and bare life, admitted to by neither. Sovereignty's pretensions to democracy, and bare life's refusal of sovereignty, make subalternity (on their terms) appear by allegory or allusion, unrecoverable in language or text. American subalternity mediates between power and survival.
This framework risks foreclosing on subaltern consciousness, self-recognition, or subjectivity through the media of sovereignty or the subsistence of bare life. In order to keep that possibility open, the thought of violence might re-enter the logic of subalternity. This can be shown in three ways. First, subaltern consciousness, such as it is, must be learned and reinforced through direct and sublimated violence. Second, the possibility of collective subaltern subjectivity assumes violent opposition to violent subjugation. Third, the potentially radical realization of subaltern consciousness, whether reactionary or revolutionary, depends upon an acceptance of violent activity as the necessary precondition of organization. The marriage of violence with subalternity thus reflects the violent constitution of American conditions of sovereignty and power. But violence, however manifested, cannot form the programmatic basis of subaltern politics.
Instead, another term must re-enter the equation: poetics. A logic of subalternity that favors constructive, reconstructive, deconstructive, and destructive activity in kind posits a politics that subsumes both poetics and ethics. Political potential does not fully circumscribe the bases of sovereign thought; meanwhile the exclusion from language or society do not fully circumscribe bare life. Subalternity limns this opposition; therefore an approach that subsumes poiesis into neither politics nor power would confront the problem of liminality in precisely a creative way. Between violence and poetics, as between subjectivity and environment, subalternity makes possible the the nuanced exploration of exceptionalism's excluded.
We are daily confronted with problems that can be pursued and explored through subalternity. Three questions, finally, arise in addition to those raised so far. First, what is the status of 'organic intellectuals' in these conditions? Second, what is the referent for the subaltern - a locus of identity, an origin of struggle, a condition in itself that ought to be alleviated? Finally, most generally and most particularly, what is to be done? The textuality and inheritance of language must emerge once more. If the subaltern cannot speak, then what separates them from the animal in bare life? If the subaltern can speak, then their utterance translates into sovereignty. Thus caught between non-representation in sovereignty and unrepresentability in bare life, subalternity tirelessly confronts a tireless intractability. On the same basis, it gives us a viable framework for political interventions in these special American conditions.

lewis levenberg

the sort of changes people court and the ones they invite immediately

2011-05-04T14:33:00.002-04:00

The sort of changes people court and the ones they invite immediately. I thought of it while I was blank this morning. I had gotten out of bed and I was sitting in my chair. My posture has gotten worse. I used to be active; now I'm not active. I wear sea-gull earrings as a corrective measure, for my posture I mean. They are not real sea-gulls of course. I would never. The Garbage Men of the Sea. Those are sea-gulls. My two hands and me, we loathe the garbage and love the sea. Except and but when-- that garbage can is me! I am the preeminent poetic mind of our time. It really began when I was young and I noticed that when I was scared I could go home and tell myself jibberish. Magic is jibberish and jibberish is not magic, you get me.

5/1/2011

2011-05-02T00:42:00.001-04:00

Gentleman, ladies. I have eaten so much food in the last ten years. Not many pieces of fruit, not many salads, not much fish, and when I did eat fish, it was, most often, fried. I did try a sliced mango with black pepper for the first time. It was memorable enough to mention today. I have enjoyed several good meals. I can, though, say with certainty that I am not more healthy than I have been.

On Agamben's Concept of Sovereignty

2011-04-28T12:43:00.001-04:00

Giorgio Agamben's seminal works of political philosophy, Homo Sacer and State of Exception, contain problematic and undefined conceptions of sovereignty. His tergiversation demands, first, an explication of his deployment of the concept. This leads to the articulation of three dissents from his position, along historical, material, and geopolitical grounds. Those dissents recall the work of earlier theorists, one of whom he cites and one of whom he ignores. The argument calls upon an alternative piece of archival analysis to complicate Agamben's method. Finally, it proposes a different way of approaching political philosophy, one that refutes, without circumventing, his logic.

Rhetorical and logical negation permeate Agamben's position. Sovereignty does not rest at the capacity to govern, as it is not invested in the gubernatorial or princely body itself. Agamben insists on the absence of an origin for power, sovereignty, subjectivity, his archive... For him, none of these concepts invests in a body, and therefore none of them describes a capacity or potential to do anything as such. Foreclosed actions include decision, thought, and especially political organization.

And yet, Agamben argues that potentiality grounds the very authority to act, even as it divests from (or, more properly, never invests in) an acting subject. Sovereignty displays a dual lack of origin: it has no ontological point of origin in any body, and it has no methodological or epistemological point of origin in Agamben's argumentation. But this negative ontology and absent epistemology of sovereignty neither precludes nor concludes Agamben's deployment of the concept.

Sovereignty's inequality with authority's grounds in potential complements its inequality with decision's grounds in action. Just as the capacity to decide on a state of exception cannot alone describe sovereignty, sovereignty does not describe execution of or in that state. Execution of a state of exception involves more than the capacity to decide on it. Likewise, execution of any body (Agamben and his tutors might phrase this: 'of whatever body', singular or multiple, individual or collective, human or textual -- in short, biopower in Michel Foucault's first sense of power over death) requires conditions of undecidability, a milieu of pure action beyond potential. In this way, Agamben's originary negations of origins invert themselves into a certain (negative?) positivism.

Consider Agamben's method of textual analysis as one example of his use of constitutive negation without admitting to it. As Agamben frames Walter Benjamin's (mostly implicit) critique of Carl Schmitt's political theology, the deployment of pure (revolutionary or state) violence both grounds and excludes decision as such. Action, here, regardless of its medium (such as language, governance, cooking, sex, or whatever), is violence.

Action is the violence of a negation.

The clearest form of such a negation is the extinguishing of another's life. Exceptional action, in these terms, is action qua action, because it is self-conscious violence. In short, such violent action cannot be described merely by sovereignty. It exceeds and elides that concept in both its grounds and its activity. Agamben's concept of sovereignty must therefore refer to some other, more closely qualified relation between action and capacity - even if it does so without reference to violence as such.

The relation to which Agamben refers when he deploys the concept of sovereignty must therefore be understood as the decisive action, the very relation between action and decision. In other words, his concept of sovereignty emerges and becomes solvent through the examples that he provides of various dissolutions of governance. This is because sovereignty requires the phenomenal existence of a governing capacity that it can negate. As a relational force that makes intelligible both the forces and relations implicit in establishing a state of exception in (or against or after or or or) a governmental state, sovereignty complicates Agamben's argument. Agamben's conflicted concept of sovereignty reflects its implicit paradoxes. It quietly invests in the negating expression of the decision to negate the expression of decision.

His argument generates historical, geopolitical, and material exceptions to itself.

The historical exception glares most obviously. His description of protean states of exception presages an ongoing and semi-permanent state of exception, based on those Roman, German, and otherwise European contexts. He focuses on the relationship in these ancient and medieval settings between law and sovereignty. However, in so doing, he fails to explain how his very historiography of states of exception could either follow or complicate any sense of linear temporal (that is, properly sovereign historical) logic. One problem with the way he writes the history of an ahistorical phenomenon, his selective archive, will return later. More saliently, though, Agamben ignores or misinterprets an important aspect of Benjamin's critique of Schmitt's concept of exception.

For Benjamin, revolutionary time bears only a punctual relationship to historical time. Pure violence never returns to history. For example, revolution follows its own temporal logic. The few weeks of 'pure,' revolutionary, anarchic violence that constitute a state of exception also constitute an historical exception from the history of the State in or against which that violence takes place (takes time?). Consider any revolution that comes to mind, regardless of Agamben's privileging or exclusion of them in his semi-historical archive: France, America, and Haiti, of course; also North Africa and the Middle East these past few months -- none of these takes place within the history of the states that precede or succeed them; they constitute only an exception.

The only nod that Agamben makes to the incommensurability of a revolutionary time frame with an historical one is his discussion of the interregnum, a discussion from which Benjamin remains curiously absent. Perhaps, just as sovereignty's existence absent of a ruling body is demonstrated by the interregnum for Agamben, he hopes that his silence on Benjamin demonstrates some form of rhetorical transposition to reintroduce Benjamin's critique by its absence. Beyond this rhetorical ellipsis, however, Agamben places the concept of sovereignty in positive relation to historical states of exception. His argument admits of no contradiction, least of all of any constitutive contradiction, at work in such an opposition or relation. In so doing, his silence about the historicity of a given (whatever) state of exception becomes a demonstration, through negation, of the historical exception to his historiography of exception.

Geopolitically, a similar complication arises. Agamben remains silent on the concrete implications of his opposition between bare life and sovereignty. This silence clashes with his often supplemental and differential logic. It demonstrates, once again through negation, a Manichaean indifference to nuances of subjectivity. Neither gender nor race nor class nor religion nor political leanings nor the rest of the cultural laundry list affects his abstract dialectic. His dichotomy elides culture itself. It relegates culture to either paradoxically ungrounded sovereignty or to the destitution of bare life. This multiple reduction that destabilizes cultural identities while aligning culturally mediated privilege with abstract sovereignty holds chilling consequences for theory's responsibility to whatever destitute subject of representation.

(Speaking of representation, in both its senses of speaking-for and of demonstrating, Gayatri Spivak has already critiqued the reduction that appears here in Agamben's logic. In "Can the Subaltern Speak?," she traces just such an implicit tendency, to reinscribe sovereignty in a privileged position, throughout the conversation between Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. [The same critique appears in her own public-intellectual conversation with Judith Butler, on the topic at hand - sovereignty and politics.] In order to come to terms with the bankruptcy of the subaltern subject-position, that which Agamben reduces to nude or bare life, one must also come to terms with the bankruptcy of the sovereign subject-position. That is, the one who speaks (for or about) another does so from a position of privilege that must always be understood as socially constructed, and never allowed to rest on some ontological assumption. Agamben makes just such an assumption about his authority to speak about sovereignty and bare life. In so doing, he assumes the mantle of the sovereign subject, and without critiquing his own problematic position, marginalizes those without access to his sanctified word.)

Attention to geopolitical destitution leads on to the material critique. Agamben's evidentiary archive, as has been abstractly noted, reinscribes the tired biases of Western philosophy against the centrality of any Other subject than the (white straight cissexual Northern Western European male etc) sovereign subject. Distilled through his textual analyses, and concentrated around the deep, narrow questions of State of Exception Agamben re-presents the archive of privilege itself. In this way, he eliminates or marginalizes the material traces of those for whom the concepts he critiques are most materially dangerous. His immaterial archive makes material and literal the abstract implications of an unproblematized sovereign subject, because it only renders immaterial those Other, destitute subjects, not the sovereign subject or the subject of sovereignty itself. One could speculate on the reasons for this reinscription of sovereignty - has philosophy just stopped caring about alterity, or about privilege? Is that too banal for today's cosmopolitan thinker? Such trains of thought, without a viable alter/native approach to the same problems, remain impotent and cheap.

Conceptual labor demands material grounds.

Here, then, I turn to some archival material that Agamben leaves inexplicably unexamined -- Biblical concepts of sovereignty. In so doing, I wish not simply to challenge Agamben's selectivity, but to suggest that his gestures toward 'stopping the machine' and so on require a deeper attention to materiality, concrete geopolitics, and to an even only slightly deeper history.

To illustrate what an attention to the Biblical scriptures might have generated for Agamben's deployment of sovereignty, consider the Book of Judges. Likely composed and codified in the 6th century BCE, the book traces a history of interregnum, during which the Israelites came to inhabit (either by military conquest, as in Joshua which precedes Judges in the Old Testament, or by gradual settlement) the land of Canaan. During this time, between prophetic leadership (Moses) and the establishment of a Kingdom proper, 'the people' bear a triangular relationship to both their own collective conduct and to the 'Holy' land as such. Throughout Judges, a cycle of sin and redemption corresponds to both leadership and control of territory.

The pattern begins with a righteous collective, who (by and for their righteousness) gain control over the land, and live peacefully, with a stable, hierarchical leadership. Such stability leads, however, to decadence. That decadence and sin leads (through a combination of divine punishment and tactical unreadiness) to the invasion and loss of control of the land by outsiders (for example, Babylonians.) In exile and in disgrace, the people turn to the leadership of a Judge, who leads them back to righteousness, and thus to control over the land once more. The tripartite cycle repeats thirteen times, as the people sin and lose their land, judges rise up during or servitude, and a newly righteous Israel establishes control once more, from after (the Books and figures of) Joshua into Othniel through Samson and into Samuel.

This highly schematic reading of an ancient and problematic text affects Agamben's archival framework for several reasons. First, it illustrates that he left out an opportunity to extend his political-theological argument about the relationship between sovereignty and exception by nearly a thousand years. In this example, sovereignty does not invest in the body of the judges but inthe collective consciousness of 'the people,' mediated through governance and territorial control, but expressed in terms of sin and redemption. Second, the text remains the site of contestation over whether an ancient geopolitical shift in populations and territorial control took place gradually or swiftly, peacefully or through military conquest, and it founds that debate through a displacement of material stakes for many peoples' lives (and contemporary claims to the sanctity and rights over territory) onto the discourses of law and of religious values.

If what is at stake for Agamben is a way of existence that ceases to play with the illusions of historical progress and recognizes the vacancy of power from sovereignty, then this text provides one example of how deeply rooted his mode of analysis remains in the discourses of law and theology without their counterparts in historical, material geopolitics. The framework of materiality made theological, exemplified in this text, highlights the immateriality of Agamben's archive.

Agamben's selectivity, rather than problematizing or supplementing a dichotomy between power and disenfranchisement, and without making any positive claims to action, ignores subalternity as well as the uniqueness of sovereignty. Reading this ancient scripture, by contrast, gives an approach by which to scale between bare and sovereign life, instead of mutually opposing them as contradictions without constitution. On the same grounds, it returns materiality to history. Most significantly, the addition of even one piece of archival material provides the very positive program that Agamben elides, through his constant rhetorical and logical negations.

That politics requires that the analyst keep attention on their own subjectivity as well as on the concept of subjectivity, to be sure. But more importantly, it emphasizes that in order to critique the problem of modern states in any significant way, one must deepen their time frame. In other words, Agamben's critique negates, even as it demands, the necessity of historical consciousness. In order to critique the modern state, one must think beyond pre- and postmodern states (of...).

Agamben reads the state of exception into banal, modern historical time. Benjamin (at, one might argue, Adorno's insistence) had already shown that Schmitt's tautological paradox, of exception as normality, dissolves when actually existing time is also considered a factor of history. Likewise, Agamben reads sovereignty as historically normative, but doesn't ground sovereignty's historicity. Spivak had already critiqued this elision of privilege as a locus of sovereignty in Foucault and Deleuze. Adopting a longer time frame in both archival method and speculative realism reveals Agamben's conflation of sovereignty with exception, and that it falls to the same critique. Violence certainly grounds and limits geopolitics, but Agamben's argumentation of that rather banal point re-inscribes the biases of elite philosophy. His ostensibly radical critique of a logic of contemporary fascism cannot escape a certain liberal humanist gesture at its nominal (logical) core. Regardless of the insistence of his interlocutors, such as Slavoj Zizek, the major problem with Agamben's logic remains at stake: he approaches a supplementary problem dialectically, but frames his discursive strategy in precisely the opposite way, as though he were approaching a material problem supplementarily. Cutting 'at will' (to liberalize and humanize Friedrich Nietzsche's work), into his archive of decisions, Agamben misses the point of his own critique. To dwell on his logical sleight of hand in the service of his or my rhetorical bombast, though, would also miss the point.

Philosophy exists materially, not metaphorically.

Metaphors and puns do not suffice to affect conditions of thought, let alone of violent inequality. In order to do more than raise sophomoric provocations about throwing a wrench into some machine that would halt the very production of intellectual labor, we must conceive of philosophy as more than a historiography of its own conditions. In short, we must plumb a deeper time than that of the modern state punctuated by exception will more honestly reveal the violence inherent in banality itself. Rather than repeat, ad nauseam, the critiques of liberal humanist thought raised by other liberal humanists who then repeat what they critique in some other guise, intellectuals must engage with the problems and lives of other people. Only in this way can political philosophy have any bearing on the material conditions of human and posthuman life.

lewis levenberg

guttering

2011-04-20T13:34:00.010-04:00

set up a ladder
carry up a bucket
muck the muck out

(sweet earth undisturbed for ages
dead leaves twigs et cetera
slowly composting without
shit trash food or bugs even)

(thirty feet above the ground
saplings sprout
tenuous
tenacious
from the loam)

(black water
silt-laden

rain water
stone-filtered
layered leaf and humus)

fill bucket with muck

(be gentle - don't destroy sprouts)

carry bucket down
release damp compost to the earth

(steal seconds to replant saplings)

fill bucket with piped water
carry up the ladder
flush the gutter out

climb down
move ladder
do it all again

(pristine guttering above
shored up, seams sealed)

lay down the ladder.
guttering runs clear.

once-elevated gardens
tossed to earth
hug gutterer's soles

- lewis levenberg

Slap Happy Endings

2011-04-16T17:15:00.007-04:00

Much has been made of ABC's latest high-gloss ensemble situation comedy, Happy Endings. The network debuted their suggestive title on Wednesday past, and boldly followed this premier by engaging the viewer with their crusty tip, or, in suit-speak, aired another episode.

The jokey-thing just made could refer to the layer of cum found on the glans of a used penis, perhaps after a Happy Ending, and the action of squeeezing the last bit of ecstatic paste from the tube. Or, lonesome paste. But enough about you. You're so lonesome you've decided to entertain yourself by reading an entertainment blog. Stop hitting yourself.

But, why? Aren't the shows enough? It's not enough to have lived? You have to talk about it? No. Talking is one of the most life-like aspects of living. And television is beautiful because it makes an attempt to talk to, with, and for many people. For profit. It's the static therapist. The format doesn't change and it asks that you don't change (the channel) either.

ABC, which is owned by Disney, will use Happy Endings in attempt to increase its stranglehold of Wednesday Primetime. This should be expected from Disney, because Wednesday is Thursday for princesses. My guess is the broadcast station offered Matthew Perry's "grand return" in Mr. Sunshine as fodder for the 9:30 slot, giving audience members a very small, but flashy, reason not to immediately change the channel after Modern Family. Happy Endings has now replaced Mr. Sunshine, and with good reason.

Happy Endings has nothing to do with massage parlors, but it does the trick. The storyline is centered on a young couple, Dave (Zachary Knighton) and Alex (Elisha Cuthbert), who are to be wed, but alas, the girl is fled. Awful. She runs away, he is depressed, she returns (from their honeymoon (ouch)), and of course, all of their friends are mutual.

This is a "hanging out" sitcom, but otherwise there are many similarities between Happy Endings and Modern Family. The cast is just diverse enough to offer thousands of possible permutations on race, weight, and sexuality jokes. Traditional roles are slightly complicated by slightly atraditional formulations. For instance, the gay guy is the "bro" of the cast. Both shows do a good job of writing for humorous characters and one-liners. The final similarity between these shows is cleavage. There is a fair amount of cleavage.

The show is funny. If you've had a long day, it's a good half hour.

Witness to What: Exploring The Genre of Witness Literature Part 2

2011-04-06T22:56:00.004-04:00

Witness Literature as a poetic movement has taken on the task of accumulating, compiling, and arranging documentation of the human race's catastrophic failures. Keeping with our example, Carolyn Forche's Against Forgetting is an expansive anthology of world literature, organized by event (ie "World War I", or "the Spanish Civil War"), beginning with "the Armenian Genocide" and ending with "Revolutions and the Struggle for Democracy in China". These sections are chronologically ordered by the date of their inception and completion (ie the Armenian Genocide and World War I both ended in 1918, but because the Armenian Genocide began in 1909, and World War I in 1914, the Armenian Genocide is the first section in the anthology). Likewise, the poets of each section are arranged chronologically.

It is thus fair to say that Witness Literature as a poetic movement (or, at least, Forche's Against Forgetting) has taken on the task, if only by consequence, of organizing. Chronological organization implies a natural organization. Things happened in this order, why would that order not apply to a book?

But by cataloguing tragedy, you create a catalogue of tragedy; you condense and concentrate, and in so doing, you falsify. You serve "tragedy from concentrate" and trust the reader to add water. You pair Neruda and the Spanish Civil War and mention nothing of love poems. How would Paul Celan respond to his work being tied and bound to the holocaust? Furthermore, if we consider the fact that literature is bound in books (or it used to be) and that books are commodities, as they are made of paper and glue, you run the risk of flooding the market with the cheap alternative. Just as many Americans consider an orange juice with 40 grams of sugar to be the healthy alternative to soda, the danger of Witness Literature is that it serves syrup as health food.

This weakness of the genre would not exist if the genre itself did not exist: there is an Orpheus and Eurydice thing here. By claiming witness, you refuse witness.

I know that I am picking hairs. Witness Literature has a place, and the Orpheus thing is only so true. But picking up an anthology of poems is not an act of good will, and I worry that it can be confused with one. I worry that the comfortability of the American middle class induces a guilt which is too easily solved by reading a poem. Likewise, I worry that Americans fetishize suffering and worship it, and are thereby incapable of empathy.

Witness to What: Exploring The Genre of Witness Literature Part 1

2011-04-06T22:39:00.007-04:00

I will concede that I am, have been, and will continue to be wary of Witness Literature. I am also aware that a part of me shrugs my shoulders to any act of poetry which attempts to disown its own witness. Well, let me be clear: I have not known a poet who claimed to overthrow their body and its receivers and consequently I have not known a poet who claims no witness.

Even Ashbery, our "Grand Wizard of the Imagined" relays the clumsy patterns of American speech, which he himself has called a "crutch" for his writing. Mimicry of the American tongue is irrefutably an act of testimony, and in the case of Ashbery, he creates the processed cheese of our language. However benign (and perhaps benign testimony is his point) Ashbery sort of points to a thing which sort of exists and says, "sort of". And this is just a concrete example.

If I could find my misplaced ambition, I would make the claim that Ashbery's content, despite its perceived lunacy, is a method of impressionism which in many ways bares a more trustworthy witness than most poets offer. It is his, and he does not claim that it is anyone else's.

Anyway, my point is that witness is unavoidable, and thus I distrust both the genre of witness and the genre of no-witness. But, before I proceed, there is an important clarification which must be made. In the case of Ashbery, I have pointed to his stylistic endeavors and asserted that he is a witness. I can feel the global advocates of Witness Literature raising their resolute arms as they prepare to beat me on the knuckles for ignoring the strength of Witness Literature; it makes no claim to style.

Witness Lit's purest forms (ie Carolyn Forche's killer anthology Against Forgetting) call upon an enormous aesthetic range. The primary concern is not to propagate or even to assert the validity of any method of writing over another. In the case of Against Forgetting, examples of war, famine, repression, and genocide throughout the 20th century are primary concerns, and the poets' duty is to catalogue tragedy, to move against indifference or difference, to look at genocide's nose and call it a nose, or call it a beak, or a shnoz, or write with a pencil in lodged in a nostril, or just live among nostrils, anything that may remind the world that it has billions of pounds of boogers.

But if witness is unavoidable, what is the point of staring at it?

A New Project

2011-02-10T21:51:00.000-05:00

Our outpost in Chicago
has begun production
of
The Decline and Fall of the House of Ending.
Download the casting call here.

Fire in my Belly

2010-12-03T13:17:00.000-05:00

The David Wojnarowicz video so recently censored at the National Portrait Gallery.
Transformer Gallery picked it up for exhibition the next day,
and the culture wars around Wojnarowicz in particular continue.

Short version:

every word becomes "and"

2010-09-27T16:16:00.000-04:00

There are many poets who enjoy disliking William Carlos Williams. He wrote poems that seem distinguished only by their adherence to the tossed off. They make no major claims. They seem jotted off. So why study the man at all?

First, it is hard to see Williams because he is everywhere, in all the schools of American poetry. He took the English conversational lyric as invented by Coleridge and developed by Wordsworth, and turned it toward American speech patterns: OK, sure,-- the sense of a self consciously casual utterance, language that was wrought from a busy life and ranged between the phatic, the cranky, the ecstatic, the overt, and the obvious. But we must pause at the word obvious.

Stating the obvious is not easy. Human beings tend to mistake mystification for intelligence. Abstractions appeal to us. We forget that even "chicken" is an abstraction. It is a word for an animal. It is not the animal. So perhaps we only believe things have meaning when they have been twice abstracted: first by word denoting thing, then by word (which is symbol) implying something else in the verbal universe (word as symbol for thing plus word as symbol for abstracted word: chicken (thing) plus word chicken-symbol-- plus chicken as truth justice, and the American way).
By this process, every word becomes "and", a conjunction, that which separates as it joins, joining and separating from the thing it denotes and the moral, emotional, intellectual, and historical meanings it connotes.
In short, our language becomes a process of mystifications which have lost their original purpose, or have revealed the hidden agenda of all mystifications: power and exclusion. All street lingo, scholastic jargon, all supposed "verbal rigor" is meant to appeal to an initiate, and to exclude the uninitiated (and this includes the language of those who feel excluded).
Williams was not against this nearly air-tight law of verbal action. He was practicing a new, or, rather, reconstituted rigor: the rigor of the obvious, contact with words for things as things made out of words-- double contact, rather than double abstraction.
Williams wanted to make contact with the thing, and then make contact with the thing made out of words. He was not just interested, as in a Haiku, with rendering a thing's thingness, but he also wanted to make contact with it as a verbal construct, as a thing in its own right. He was interested in a poem as a thing made out of words-- as an object, an actual artifact, something as tangible as a chicken.
Williams was interested in type-- in the words as they were placed upon the page. He was interested in the spatial orientation of type-- the "just so" latent within the act of typing words upon a page.
If we know this about Williams, then we can assume three things that may be important to entering into any Williams poem:

1. Rigorous attention to the obvious
2. Rigorous attention to the placement of the obvious as a "just so" upon the page.
3. The contact with the thing, and the enactment of the thing made out of words as a thing in its own right-- which is a second contact. Double contact as opposed to double abstraction.

In this system, abstraction does not disappear, but is taken as the given. Kafka wrote: "the moment you write she looked out a window, you have already begun to lie." Kafka is not being profound here. She is doing much more than looking out a window, but the artist has selected that one particular action to render in words. Selection is a lie of omission. Even when we tell a true story, we are omitting details. We call this focusing on the significant, but it is only significant because we say it is.
We have made a judgment. Our judgment is distorted by necessity. We have a story to tell. We are never in life, but always in a narration, a process of selection and placement, and applied meaning which we call consciousness.
Williams has two aesthetic tasks: one, to be rigorous about the thing at hand in such a manner that we are temporarily taken out of our narrative, and thrust into a kind of "stupidity" before the object (I use stupidity in its full sense, not as lacking intelligence, but as being stunned out of intelligence for a moment, being stupefied, disengaged from one's usual systems of applied meanings, narratives, and assumptions); two, to enact a ritual of placement that does not echo a received truth, but becomes its own construct-- that imitates the dynamic, and kinetic force of the organic, of "nature" as opposed to merely holding a mirror up to it. The natural breath Williams advocated was not actual speech, but the artistic placement of everyday speech rhythms and lingo into a thing called a poem.
Rather than the abstract twice abstracted, Williams desired the actual twice actualized-- first as something one touched through words, and then as something one made (and unmade) out of words. This double actualization has its aporia, its own deconstruction, in that one makes contact with the thing not to know it, but rather to use it as a new energy-- to "unknow" it in the most vital way possible, and to construct a thing made out of words that will contain the energy of what one has "unknown." To "unknow" chicken as word, is to make contact again with both the thing and the thing's essential energy used to construct a new thing made out of words. Not a chicken, or a chicken as symbolic truth-- but a poem that has all the life and thingness of a chicken, and must be taken as it is-- beyond paraphrase, beyond mere analysis of meaning, beyond the usual apparatus of mystification.
So, armed with some knowledge of the artist's intentions, let's apply these intentions to an actual William Carlos Williams poem.

Iris

A burst of Iris so that
come down for
breakfast

we searched through the
rooms for
that

sweetest odor and at
first could not
find its

source then a blue as
of the sea
struck

startling us from among
those trumpeting
petals

So let's apply rigorous attention to the obvious:

The title says Iris. The first line qualifies a "burst of Iris." Things burst when their energy can not be contained. So this is not an inactive iris. It is, in a sense, the ecstatic energy of the Iris-- its "bursting". Williams has made an event out of a flower-- something we might notice as "Oh look at that: an iris, how pretty... where's the orange juice?" Usually, we take decorative flowers for granted, especially upon awakening. He is drawing our attention to something we might take for granted. He is saying: "Look! Look! An Iris! Better yet...a burst of Iris!" We have not seen it yet. We apprehend it, through the implication of smell, through its essential energy as a burst of fragrance. Here, selection creates the lie of omission in the best sense: the whole house has become alive to an iris.
This is stupidity as I mean it: to be stunned out of rational priority-- to make a big thing out of something we might not even notice. To be stunned into the obvious. We are told the "we" of the poem searches through all the rooms of the house. This is a lively contact with a flower indeed! Williams's effusiveness over mundane and obvious things infuriates some. I find it delightful. Next, we get "sweetest odor--" the Iris dominates as an odor. They have yet to see the Iris, and when they do, it is not the Iris per se, but its blue: then a blue as/of the sea/struck." So this Iris dominates the house without being seen, and when it is seen, it strikes, startles with its blue among its "trumpeting petals." Smell becomes color becomes sound-- a loud and vital awakening to the obvious!

Next: A rigorous attention to the placement of the obvious as a "just so" upon the page.

Well, the first line of every tercet is the longest, the second the next longest, and the last the shortest. This does not vary. It is a formal law peculiar to the poem. In addition, there is no real sentence or punctuation in the poem, yet its clarity can not be questioned. This shape is played off against what is a sentence fragment-- no sentence at all. The lack of punctuation is not sloppiness on Williams' part here, but a vital aesthetic aid to the synasthesia and sense confusion of the poem.
Everything, including the grammatical ambiguity of this poem is intentional-- especially "that." If the poem ended at "that" we would think "that" referred to the burst of Iris, but the stanzaic break adds odor at the beginning of the next stanza. Many free verse poets do stanzaic enjambment but it is too often done for neatness and symmetry rather than for organic form's sake. Williams bleeds the sense of the previous stanza into the next, but each stanza is truly its own organic moment within the body of the poem. This is true form.

Finally: Contact with the thing and the enactment of that contact with a thing as a thing in its own right.

The whole of the poem is the contact with Iris, in all its sensual glory, as well as a mixing of the senses in an ecstatic apprehension of the flower. The poem proceeds and becomes its own thing by way of making contact with the Iris-- with the artist's apprehension of Iris. The word Iris functions then as a sort of conjunction between the thing called Iris and the poem called Iris-- the thing made out of words.
Williams says what is before us-- at this moment, and at this odd hour--is enough to make a vital poem, "by defective means." And if we surrender ourselves to his intentions, we will discover a poet as deliberate in his art, and as eager to master it, as any other great poet of the 20th century

-Joe Weil, September 2010

Dana Jaye

2010-09-21T10:52:00.000-04:00

Juniper

Here the night spreads across
the breast of day and yawns
one aching grey breath onto the river,

the ceiling swings low over
while the Parlor City hugs me drunk
between muse and rot. A juniper.

What forgives of us?
What of us can enter or be entered–
these ambitious limbs

want to know where each thing begins,
to touch even slightly the fullness,
grasp what is too large or disappearing.

Binghamton, your ripe sky!
The river once again is being rained on.
I cup my hands over it, holding
the weather up.

after a long break

2010-09-15T13:17:00.000-04:00

we're back (as if we ever left)

for now, a video.

they're little but we'll see
where they go
after these
high-school-slam clichés:

support

2010-07-06T16:55:00.000-04:00

a wonderful

starving artist

please

Something out of Nothing

2010-07-06T12:51:00.000-04:00

@pixelfeast
phil allen!

forwarded

2010-06-18T00:57:00.001-04:00

One A.M. [excerpt]
by David Young

You'll show that toad-eater who wrote Night Thoughts
what's happened in two centuries or so.

You'll make your yard the spirit's doorway
to metamorphs and comet-lit inventions.

Go ahead, walk the cathedral-volumned night.
Let Perseids stripe your eyes.

*

I read the other day
that giant black snowballs from outer space
created our oceans.

Center me, physics, keep me
from brooding too long on my fear,
on the pickup truck that rammed the school bus,
on the strange sea pastures of the Persian Gulf,
on love and its string of losses.

Now everything's strings, they say, cosmic strings
that pull the galaxies toward the Great Attractor
holding all matter together.

Microcosm, meet macrocosm.
Solace us with your kinship, make
one little yard an everywhere.

I think of Calvino's
dark, humorous mind,
another squirrel in the treetops--
how he made truth and wit
from troubling loops of knowledge.

And Miroslav Holub,
who lived alone in this house one spring
and pondered this yard as I do.
The appetite for fact
helped him survive, walk around
and laugh to himself, inside
this century's bluntest terrors--
the one that Hitler made,
the one that Stalin added.

A string may link me to them here,
and run
right through the blackened school bus,
the rubble of Beirut,
down to the toxic wastes, on up and out
to the ice ball punching our atmosphere--

Like Theseus in his labyrinth,
I stand here holding
my little end of string.

*

I caught and cupped a firefly just now
like an old miser blowing on his palms
to keep some warmth in.

I'd like that glow to be
The milky streams of star-mess overhead,
the rivulets of words below,

nacreous teeth of the speaker in the dark
words folding into the spiral that runs up

to the coiled shape of galaxies
as the brain whorls match the labyrinthine curves,

echoing stairwell, spinning DNA,
the play with nests and shrinking models,

the sidewise slide, the folding-up of sense,
the web the spider swings and spins, connecting.

*

Is this a dream?--I see my grandpa milking,
I watch my mother watching him.
The cats swarm round, the barn is cold,
the cows chew steadily and stamp
in random patterns, defecate
in flops and splatters, steaming heaps.

I'm the froth of the milk, the silvery pail,
the piles of hay, the cats
spiraling round my legs.
I am the frost-coated lightning rod.

We play with infinity, this is our luck,
measureless measuring, lot lines and boundaries
always deferred, always potential,
doing, undoing, doing, undoing,
we repeat ourselves so infinity
can make love to finity, kiss it,
dance with it all night.

I taste the water from that old farm's well.
The milk was warm. The water's hard and sweet.

*

Repetition's magic. I knew it in my bones.
Let me repeat my dream for you,
let me repeat it for myself.

Let me talk on in this starlight,
these meteor streakings of nonsense,
this chaos, these fractals and freckles.

Don't take my words away from me yet.
I'm doing my midnight weeding,
grasping the thistles close to the root,

I'm losing the dream farm, I'm
probably failing, repeating
what others have said--

but that farm, like an old brown photograph
suddenly filling the senses--
and this night, like a silver gelatin print--

and a string that runs from me to the past:
the view from the farmhouse window
across the silent fields of snow

MESA VERDE

1.
Drive up with me.

Show the way, magpie, across the invisible bridge.

Old ghosts, be near,
but not too near.

September, early morning, not a trace of haze.
Rabbit brush glows like sulphur
and the mesa dozes in sunlight.
The corner-eye specter on the trail
is a rock or a piñon stump
or a tourist aiming a camera.
Sun-shimmer and squint. The gorges
lie silent and waterless
like dreams of river valleys
that rivers never made.

Climb into me, Anasazi,
take my tongue and language,
tell how you came to farm the corn,
hoarding the snow-melt, learned
to be weavers, potters, masons
in the huge American daylight,
gathering pine nuts, hunting mule deer,
crushed juniper berries with water,
mixed them in cornmeal for our thick blue bread
-- what was our word for bread? --
and praised the gods, hunched in our smoky kivas,
singing over the soul-hole
the mystery of our birth
when first a man crawled out
from warm dark to open air.

We farmed till the droughts got worse,
the corn and squash and beans
shriveled and died, the game thinned out,
and we moved down to live
in the scoops and pockets of cliffs
where water seeped and food could be hoarded,
two hundred feet below the dizzy rim,
nine hundred feet above the canyon floor
perching like squirrels and jays
because the gods decided
(what were the names of the gods?)
that life had been too easy,
that snows should stop and water shrink
and we too nest against the canyon walls
mindful of hardship.

2.
Silence again. Silence in Spruce Tree Lodge,
at Hovenweep, Chaco Canyon,
stone and sunlight resting against each other
and no ghosts coming to converse
at nightfall when the stars spring out
and we stand on the rimrock, staring up
at the Bear and the hunters chasing him,
at the stocky women, grinding corn
among dogs, turkeys, children,
while smoke floats from the kiva
and snow-fluff crowns the sagebrush.

Silence, solstice to equinox.
Empty granaries, cold firepits, dry cisterns.
The sun walks through the canyon,
peering under the sandstone overhangs,
and the wind walks too, wearing pine-smell.
Skull-jar and serviceberry,
sipapu and alcove,
a ghostly sea of buffalo
tossing on the plains below.

And the light slips off
among the rifted mesas,
the dead are wrapped in turkey-feather blankets,
rabbit-fur robes, yucca mats,
and buried in the trashpiles,
while the living move south or west
in search of food and water
leaving it all to the sun and wind and stars
who lived here first.

The night is dreamless,
a star-chart, a crescent wrench moon,
and the air hangs quietly
a sea whose bottom you walk
looking up through the empty miles,
the rocks around you liked turned backs.

The sun cracks earth, the frost splits rocks.
Whats history if it falls away,
if the brick-colored woman
milling corn in the courtyard
isnt kin to us, cant leave this landscape,
neighbor horizon and brother canyon wren,
toehold and rampart,
the old river of belief
that pounds through empty gullies
like sunlight and moonlight
leaving them undisturbed?

Touch me. Moisten my mouth,
dazzle my eyes. Link me for a moment to the life
that wore on gently here
and left these ruins to the sun.

3.
In the swept museum,
smaller than hummingbirds
these people kneel and climb in little models
weaving their tiny baskets
hoarding their dollhouse ears of corn.

And who doesnt crouch below some diorama
while sunlight moves across a mesa.
hearing the call of raven,
glimpsing the Stellers jay?

I write this on an overhang, a porch,
against a California canyon
that runs down to the sea;
across the way the houses perch and nestle
among the live oaks, palms, and avocado trees.
Hummingbirds float through my eucalyptus
like strange little fingers, or gods,
while the ravens shadow travels the rough slop,
wrinkling and stretching,
recollection of another life.

The hummingbird comes to rest, midair,
and the mind meshes with other minds,
lost patterns of thought that hang
over the mesa, across the hillsides,
in pools of light and shadow,
and make us bow in thought or prayer,
silence or speech,
while the sun that walked this canyon
when it was brown and empty
and will have it so again
carries the day away
through dry and shining air.

-David Young

Ode to a Yellow Onion

BY C. DALE YOUNG

And what if I had simply passed you by,
your false skins gathering light in a basket,
those skins of unpolished copper,
would you have lived more greatly?

Now you are free of that metallic coating,
a broken hull of parchment,
the dried petals of a lily—
those who have not loved you
will not know differently.

But you are green fading into yellow—
how deceptive you have been.

Once I played the cithara,
fingers chafing against each note.
Once I worked the loom,
cast the shuttle through the warp.
Once I scrubbed the tiles
deep in the tub of Alejandro.
Now I try to deciper you.

Beyond the village, within a cloud
of wild cacao and tamarind,
they chant your tale, how you,
most common of your kind,
make the great warrior-men cry
but a woman can unravel you.

Blue Springs

BY C. DALE YOUNG

As if the sky during its emergence
—when it bubbled its way up out of the sand,
cooled and then sublimed into vapor
that blued the dank grey of the atmosphere—
left a residue of cobalt behind to remind

from where it had sprung into existence,
the water rising from this spring
appears unearthly, as only things
close to earth, born of earth, can:
its blue deeper than the heart of a sapphire.

Today, when faced with such a spectacle,
we have, as usual, only two choices:
the paralysis of awe, or the quick nonchalance
of acceptance. But what about the Spaniards
who came upon this spring before there was

a platform lined with inner tubes, before
there were wooden walkways elevated to slow
their impending rot, before their was a faux beach,
its sand stolen from the spring’s center?
Did they run in with their clothes on

convinced that this was the fountain of youth?
Did they laugh believing themselves
drunk, mad, asleep—dead, maybe?
That afternoon, late summer

TITLE??
(thanks to Alex B. for posting this)

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times,
in life after life, in age after age forever.
My spell-bound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs
that you take as your gift, wear round your neck in your many forms
in life after life, in age after age forever.

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, its age-old pain,
its ancient tale of being apart or together,
as I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge
clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:
you become an image of what is remembered forever.

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount
at the heart of time love of one for another.
We have played alongside millions of lovers, shared in the same
shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell--
old love, but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you,
the love of all man's days both past and forever:
universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life,
the memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours - and the songs of every poet past and forever.
--Rabindranath Tagore

ROOTS

2010-06-13T12:16:00.000-04:00

Ehrenburg, who was reading and translating my poems, scolded me: too much root, too many roots in your poems. Why so many?

It's true.
The frontier regions sank their roots into my poetry and these roots have never been able to wrench themselves out. My life is a long pilgrimage that is always turning on itself, always returning to the woods in the south, to the forest lost to me.

There the huge trees were sometimes felled by storms, blighted by the snow, or destroyed by fire. I have heard titanic trees crashing deep in the forest: the oak tree plunging down with the sound of a muffled cataclysm, as if pounding with a giant hand on the earth's doors, asing for burial.

But the roots are left out in the open, exposed to their enemy, time, to the dampness, to the lichens, to one destruction after the other.

Nothing more beautiful than those huge, open hands, wounded or burned, that tell us, when we come across them on a forest path, the secret of the buried tree, the mystery that nourished the leaves, the deep-reaching muscles of the vegetable kingdom. Tragic and shaggy, they show us a new beauty: they are sculptures molded by the depths of the earth: nature's secret masterpieces.

Once Raphael Alberti and I were walking together, with waterfalls, thickets, and woods all around us, near Osorno, and he pointed out that each branch was different from the next, the leaves seemed to be competing for an infinite variety of style. "They look as if htey had been selected by a landscape gardener for a magnificent park," he said. Years later, in Rome, Rafael remembered that walk and the natural abundance of our forests.

That is what it was like. It isn't, not anymore. I grow sad, thinking of my wanderings as a boy and as a young man, between Boroa and Carahue, or around Toltén in the hills along the coast. How many discoveries! The graceful bearing and the fragrance of the cinnamon tree after the rain, the mosses whose winter beard hangs from the forest's innumerable faces!

I pushed aside the fallen leaves, trying to uncover the lightning streak of some beetles: the golden carabus, who dresses in iridescence to dance a minuscule ballet under the roots.

Or later, when I rode across the mountains to the Argentine side, under the green domes of the giant trees, an obstacle loomed up ahead: the root of one of them, taller than our mounts, blocking our way. Strenuous work and the axe made the crossing possible. Those roots were like overturned cathedrals: greatness lay bare to overwhelm us with its grandeur.

-Pablo Neruda

"Roots", pp 191-192
in Chapter 8, "My Country in Darkness"
from Confieso que he vivido - Memoirs
New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1977

2010-06-06T11:33:00.000-04:00

via chillmilk,
which i found on craigslist.

Tom Bair - A Laundromat Drama

2010-05-20T14:46:00.000-04:00

Sir Marmalade Recounts The Fable of The Rapist

A ten minute play

A laundromat in late summer. To the far left, Sir Marmalade sits behind an attendant’s booth, counting change and talking to himself in a low murmur. He speaks in an affected English accent and wears a red feather scotch taped to his forehead. To the far right, Daniel and Danielle are folding laundry. At no point during the play do the twins stop folding laundry. Enter Grace. She loads her clothing into a machine. Enter Mike. Upon noticing Grace, he leaves his detergent outside. He begins loading his clothing into a machine.

                          MIKE

Damn it. I left the soap at home. Excuse me? Hi.

Hi. I’m Mike. I left my detergent at home. Would yo--

                          GRACE

Oh, not at all! Don’t worry. I always bring extra.

(She steps outside and picks up Mike’s detergent.)

Here you go.

                          MIKE

I-- thanks. I-- Well,

                          DANIEL

Move along.

                          MIKE

Excuse me?

                          DANIELLE

Move along.

                              MIKE

Look, I must have put the soap down to open the door.

I forgot it. That’s it. I’m forgetful. Is that ok--

                          SIR MARMALADE

Outrageous!

(Pause. Marmalade stands, surveys the room, clears his throat.)

Outrageous!

                          MIKE

Did I do something?

                          SIR MARMALADE

I have forgotten to count the change I am counting.

(Mike and Grace make eye contact.)

                          GRACE

That’s okay. It happens to me all the time.

                          SIR MARMALADE

You, however, do not posses my unflinching semblance

of diligence.

                          MIKE

You are diligently forgetting to count change?

                          SIR MARMALADE

I would prefer it if you did not place diligence

and change in the same sentence. You, however,

are striking me dully. You remind me of a pet I once had. A light-bulb. The poor thing, it never had a childhood.

                          MIKE

What? A light-bulb? What? I had a childhood.

                          SIR MARMALADE

Had a childhood? Have you broken it, perhaps?

                          MIKE

What? I don’t need this. I’m leaving.

Wait. No.

All of my clothes are locked in the washer.

                          SIR MARMALADE

See, there it is. You practically are my light-bulb.

You have such an angry glow.

                          MIKE

Is that a joke?

                          SIR MARMALADE

Yes, it is certain. You have broken your childhood.

In my line of work, I see it all the time.

Here, let me fix it for you.

(Sir Marmalade begins to approach Mike)

                          MIKE

(Backing up, towards the twins)

Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!

                          GRACE (To Daniel)

What do you make of this?

(The twins shift so as to move away from Mike.)

                          DANIELLE (To Grace)

Please move over.

(Grace shifts so as to make space for the twins.)

                          GRACE

Did you hear my question?

                          SIR MARMALADE

AHA!

(He notices a quarter on the ground. He picks it up, loses interest in Mike.)

                          GRACE (To Sir Marmalade)

Sir, just now you said that in your line of work you “fix broken childhoods?”

                          SIR MARMALADE

Yes, plenty. More than plenty, multitudes.

My only competitor is the condom.

                          GRACE

What do you do, if you don’t mind?

                          SIR MARMALADE

I am the curator of Stool.

                          GRACE

Is that a museum?

                          SIR MARMALADE

Yes, but the work is shit. Speaking of shit,

you have such slender fingers. Do you play the piano?

                          GRACE

No, but I’m a painter.

                          MIKE

Me too!

                          DANIEL and DANIELLE

No you’re not.

                          SIR MARMALADE (To the twins)

Do you three plan that?

(To Mike) Don’t listen to them Michael.

Are you a painter? It isn’t important. Michael,

is that your full name? You should use that name;

it is a strong name.

                          MIKE

Thanks?

                          SIR MARMALADE

Much better than Mike, which is more popularly the abbreviation for the device one speaks into to hear themselves loudly enough so that others hear themselves.

(Considers) In this way you have more in common with the flute than the light-bulb.

                          GRACE

Hi, sir, I’m sorry but I’m not sure that I see the connection between the microphone and the flute.

                          SIR MARMALADE

Oh hello! Good to hear from you!

The microphone and the flute have nothing in common except that they are both full of someone else’s sounds.

In this way they have everything in common except that one uses those sounds to make louder sounds and one uses those sounds to make different sounds. But not to worry, Michael! Not to worry! I also had a pet flute.

                          GRACE

Yea I thought he might have been worried about that.

                          SIR MARMALADE

And you darling, you strike me as loud more than different.

                          GRACE

Don’t call me darling, thank you.

                          SIR MARMALADE

There it is. And tell me, your grace, what is it that you paint?

                          GRACE

That’s it. I’ve had enough. I am out of here.

O no. No.

That’s right, I am trapped.

Unless, unless I abandon my clothing.

                          SIR MARMALADE

Settle down Michael.

                          MIKE

Alright man, give me a break.

                          SIR MARMALADE

Your grace, if you please, what do you paint?

                          GRACE

(Rubs her forehead) Birds mostly.

                          SIR MARMALADE

Ah, yes! The birds are things we agree with!

                          MIKE

What does that mean? Who talks like that?

                          SIR MARMALADE

Let’s play a guessing game.

I am thinking of something that outweighs you.

It leans back and cracks water like candy.

                          MIKE

I-- What? An elephant?

                          SIR MARMALADE

You are missing my point. You and I might not ever speak to one another.

                          GRACE

Oh no! That might drive us crazy.

                          SIR MARMALADE

Good show your grace!

(Sir Marmalade sits down. He pulls some change out of his pocket and fiddles. Grace and Mike survey the room. The twins are folding, Sir Marmalade is fiddling. They make eye contact, each move counter-clockwise around a row of washing machines so as to converse privately. As Mike moves, the twins move with him. Grace steps on Sir Marmalade’s finger.)

                          SIR MARMALADE

MMEEEOOOOWWW!

(He rolls around in the same counter-clockwise motion, resumes counting change. Pause. Grace and Mike make eye contact.)

                          GRACE

This will have to do.

                          MIKE

So what’s your name?

                          GRACE

Oh. Its funny, it feels like we know each other.

I’m Grace.

                          DANIEL

Wrong.

                          MIKE

There it is. Why is she not Grace?

                          DANIEL (To Danielle)

She paints.

                          DANIELLE

Not since winter.

                          DANIEL

You remember the birds then.

                          DANIELLE

Yes. They were startled in the clouds

and the clouds were faster.

                          DANIEL

Moving? You are not thinking of the birds.

                          DANIELLE

Birds? You mean the snow.

                          DANIEL

The snow, a bird fall, caught on the tongue.

                          DANIELLE

Yes, the tongue catches the bird as a spider’s skein catches snow.

                          DANIEL and DANIELLE

Then with our tongues, the birds are things we agree with.

                          SIR MARMALADE

Amen.

                          MIKE (To Daniel)

(Shouting, approaching the twins. The group resumes its counter-clockwise motion.)

What the fuck are you talking about? (Stops.)

                          DANIELLE

Birds.

                          MIKE

Who let these cryptic assholes into a laundromat?

Look at this guy. Why won’t he respond?

Stop folding you fuck. (Shouting) Who said

I agree with the birds? I don’t fly.

I don’t even sing well. I can’t paint.

I can’t even wash my socks without permission

from my pocket change.

(Pause.)

                          SIR MARMALADE

This one has

The wit

Of a rapist.

(Mike begins to chase Sir Marmalade. The group turns in a clockwise direction.)

(Humming, to the tune of “My Favorite Things”)

Bonnets and croutons and Red eye shadow stew

Day dreams and face creams and bicycles for two

                          DANIEL and DANIELLE

(Simultaneously)

I am pure I am pure I am pure

I am pure I am pure I am pure

                          SIR MARMALADE

(Continuing)

The leaves make me sneeze

and I’ll aim it at you… rings

These are a few of my favorite things

                          DANIELLE AND DANIEL

(Continuing)

I am pure I am pure I am pure

I am pure I am pure I am pure

(Mike stops and the rest of the group follow. They are in their original positions.)
                          GRACE (To the group)

What is going on here?

                          SIR MARMALADE

Fine I will tell you. I will tell you a story.

It is called the fable of the rapist. It begins

with a man, who, like everyman

was flesh of a man, and flesh of a woman. And a woman who

like everywoman was flesh of a man and flesh of woman.

When they deny that they kill each other

in the name of love.

(Pause)

                          DANIELLE

Stop!

                          DANIEL

Think it over!

                          SIR MARMALADE

You who will not be made a fool! I say

that dignity is for the birds and the birds

are for eating! We agree!

(Pause. The group is very quiet.)

                          GRACE (To Mike)
You could have just said hello.

                          DANIELLE

You would have been bored.

                          MIKE

That isn’t true. Hello is so old its new again,

the way women wore bell-bottoms in the 90s.

                          SIR MARMALADE

I say! I am reminded of the end of the fable of the rapist. A hermit with a long beard and a staff that reached his ear reminds his pupil, a six year old girl,

that there is nothing new under the sun. She responds

by asking how the hermit is so sure that the sun

is never new.

                          GRACE

I see what you’re doing.

                          SIR MARMALADE

Hmm?

GRACE

I can’t say it exactly. You try to connect

and you do because we can both see what you’re doing.

(Pause.)

Well, no. Why the feather?

                          SIR MARMALADE

Ah, yes. The feather. Well. In sum,

the processes involved in becoming a hummingbird

were written by a hummingbird, and so

they were written too quickly to be legible.

                          DANIEL and DANIELLE

That’s enough.

(Sir Marmalade sits down and fiddles with change. The washers click off.)
                          MIKE (To Grace)
Well. The clothing is done.

Thanks for the soap.

                          GRACE

I would say thanks for hitting on me

but I wouldn’t mean it.

                          SIR MARMALADE

(Raises his head, looks above the audience.)
Would you two move along with i—

Is that a blue jay?

(The entire group looks above the audience, makes elated noises. They run to the door at the same time, and collide in its pathway. The group falls.)

Drop the curtain,
the end.

splits - OUT NOW

2010-05-13T11:26:00.001-04:00

NEW CHAPBOOK AVAILABLE NOW!!!

ANGEL REYNOSO@WILLY AND FRIENDS #6 Luis Fonsi (Yo No Me Doy Por Vencido)...

2010-05-09T14:24:00.000-04:00

Pixel Apocalypse!

2010-05-06T16:58:00.000-04:00

Patrick Jean

OneMoreProd

thanks @sonorapearl

As National Poetry Month Ends

2010-04-30T13:09:00.000-04:00

What is the state of poetics today?

send your comments to thecircusbook@gmail.com

let's find out.

The Cultural Production of Mumia Abu-Jamal

2010-04-23T18:20:00.000-04:00

For smiling

2010-04-15T18:30:00.001-04:00

thanks NK

Leigh Phillips - Punk Will Never Diet

2010-04-11T13:17:00.000-04:00

"You are not me." -Sleater-Kinney, Call the Doctor

You are the archangel of Nothing That Ever

Fell. Drop an anchor past lips and you’ll stay alive

to sing in water. Set the species to strips of light.

Let them be touched by piano hands, poem

sparse as a baby grand in the palm

set to detonate the branches of trees clenched

in fist. Stigmata watercolor tips

drain thirty days of sunset because somebody

sharpened your elbows

into knives that burn there. Set the spires

of the species into shimmering belts.

Lightning bolts teach them “I Love You” in Aramaic

and thunder. Hold tight

for self-possession. A ghost enters from

behind and slips inside you, exhale

a cherry blossom cigarette in a bomb. Call the

doctor, we’re going to learn

how to love this ‘how many milligrams’ and

‘can I take this with food’,

tell me, ‘are there side effects’ of trinity?

Your primary care physician asks you

to superimpose a figure drawing on his copy

of the Body Mass Index. You are

a 29.5 and he says, charcoal. You draw like

flames. Like flames, want the body

setting off a distant mountain range. Forest

fires give you something warm

and worth the tattoo. Your breasts are interrupted

by the sirens in the street.

We’re going to learn how to love this time.

Flowers for the night. Flowers

in her teeth. All syllables join together like her

morning. The clumsy fusion

of 6 am. This is not how bodies find each

other in quarterlight. The bones are baggage.

Drag the bag of skin from church to church.

The country home used to be a funeral home

on Menarche Road

and Reviving Ophelia, not a graveyard.

“Touch me until I can’t remember your name.”

By the time you read this, I’ll be so far away.

Somewhere, I am in here. Them.

I write for them.

homework

2010-04-10T13:53:00.000-04:00

During National Poetry Month

2010-04-02T10:19:00.001-04:00

Let's have an adventure.

South Street

2010-03-25T16:35:00.000-04:00

Naked at its stomach and wrapped in power lines

the tree finds itself fixed in a pause between buildings.

Its rotting limbs stretch to collect swallows and grocery bags.

Out of its middle a whole new trunk was once born and lived and now

I can see right through it, and some of the lower branches hug it

and some reach below where a boy on his flat-tired tricycle

is rocking in the cracked slate and becomes suddenly free

under the somehow newly green arcs budding in the Spring.

Dana Jaye

Old Lady

2010-03-20T19:27:00.000-04:00

Gad Nusinov - "Old Lady"

oil on canvas, 2009
more here

found

2010-03-11T14:24:00.000-05:00

notes on Guy Debord and the Haecceity of Discourse

2010-03-04T14:19:00.000-05:00

At the end of the last post, I advanced the argument that Foucault's disavowal (of the methodological imperative implied by his "rules" about power) is precisely the grounds of philosophy. Disavowal grounds philosophy because it begs the question of what actually existing discourse is and does. To reiterate, this is the thought of thinking the haecceity of discourse. Here, I wish to compare that claim against some of those made by Guy Debord, in the Society of the Spectacle. I am working from the 1977 translation by Greg Adargo; since this version of the text is contained in an online archive, I use section numbers rather than page numbers as references. I will touch on a number of themes in this paper, hopefully sparking discussions on the topics rather than closing down the possibility of their interpretation.

To begin, then, what do I mean by "the thought of thinking the haecceity of discourse"? That is, what is it to think about thinking? I argue that in philosophy, we are one step removed from the object of thought. This is because our thought is inadequate to its objects. We can only ever approach the project of thinking; we dance around the object of our thought without ever actually conceiving of it. Of what, then, can we not precisely conceive? Of the haecceity of discourse, of course.

I submit that the difficult term to define in that claim is not "haecceity", but "discourse." The difficulties of that definition lead us to understand discourse as a metaphor, rather than something actually existing in the world. However, when we begin to think about discourse as something that exists and does things in the world, we encounter a problem of application. We cannot indicate some tangible or visible thing and say, "aha, here, this is discourse, you see?" Althusser provided the ideological state apparatus as a visible and identifiable manifestation of ideology for precisely the same reasons. Likewise, Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) claims that the speech act of dialogue is available for analysis in lieu of discourse, which our imaginations cannot grasp in its singularity. I invite the conceptual connection between Bakhtin's notion of dialogue, and what Debord calls "enforceable dialogue" (179), as a way of bringing the object of thought, discourse, into the thought of the real, by invoking its irreducible multiplicity.

Why do we need to consider discourse and dialogue as something real and not as a metaphor? Here, I refer to Debord's claim that the project of Western philosophy is decaying in and because of the spectacle; the spectacle inverts the relationship between philosophy and the real (19). Visuality, or visibility, is the critical issue here – after all, spectacle is both a performance and a lens. But if our privileged perceptual sense is vision while our privileged critical medium is textual, what does that distinction reveal about our project? We confront the series of questions that cycle back to the ontological status of the real, as we come to terms with the problematic construction of the object of our analysis, whether this is discourse, spectacle, or culture. We must also question the epistemological status of that analysis. What, in other words, are we analyzing? What does analysis treat or heal or do? We can only say: the fundamental tenet of all critical theory is that every feature of the knowable world has actual or potential critical significance.

We therefore return to remediation, here, of "analysis." For Debord, analysis incorporates both ideology and schizophrenia (217). Schizophrenia here is the condition of being in multiple representations of reality at once; in this way it seems less like a disorder and more like the experience of the real in the constant mediation of the spectacle. For Foucault, analysis is the very site of that schizophrenia, displaying the separation between rules and methodologies. As we confront this multiplicity of analyses, and bring interpretation into the hypertextual, we return once again to the spectacle. Yes, so we move as analysts, and therefore our analysis moves, nomadic, schizophrenic, with the objects of our analysis. This is the thought of an analysis that does not pretend to objectivity, and does not privilege subjectivity, but remains objectual, bound to the objects that it studies.

This is also the thought of a thought; this is the thought of thinking of an analysis - you see how we are turning farther away from discourse? And if you do see, what do you see but the letters here? Do you visualize the object of this thought? So for the turn from discourse to vision: visual culture studies becomes culture studies as we privilege vision and study culture as the spectacle. And what becomes of the object of our thought, the haecceity of discourse? Are we seeing

the transition from the stability
and absoluteness
of the world's contents
to their dissolution into motions
and relations

? If we only ever dance around the object of our thought, and never actually think it, then we only ever think about thinking about "it". But something else happens in that insufficiency of philosophy. I have used the metaphor of dance to describe how we MOVE in thought. We move. We move and this is not a metaphor, but its choreography is uncertain. Dance it may not be, but it is an actually existing and knowable movement in the world. We know it because we know the movement from thought into words. We know the movement from poetics to poiesis, and from poiesis to praxis, and the subsumption of each into the other, and we speak of something called speech acts.

We speak of discourse. Debord speaks of spectacle. And how can he speak of spectacle on a page? And can we analyze spectacle textually? And can we analyze society alone? So again the turn from discourse to vision, this time on the order of performativity - we perform speech acts, statements in discourse, and we study the performance of those statements, not the statements themselves. Statements are already removed from the ideas they purport to express. We remain separated from the objects of our analysis, and yet we must make use, we must make sense, of the unknowable object of our thought, of the haecceity of discourse, and we must therefore make sense and make use of void, and the null set. We must think without philosophy.

lewis levenberg - Georgetown University

Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas, 1981.
Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. 1967. Trans. Greg Adargo, 1977. Web: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm/. Retrieved 1 Dec 2009.
Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1990.
Polk, Jessica. "On Infrastructures & Superstructures: Production, Ideological State Apparatuses, & the Interpellation of Ideology". Unpublished seminar, 2009.
Kim, Myung Mi. "Lamenta", from Commons. Berkeley: University of California, 2002. line breaks approximate.

further reading:
Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter. New York: Routledge, 1993.
    Performative identity in the realm of sex and gender.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Vol. 1: Anti-Oedipus. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, Helen R. Lane. New York: Penguin Classics, 2009.
    What happens when you put Freud up against Nietzsche instead of Marx?
Lash, Scott and Celia Lury. Global Culture Industry: the mediation of things. Cambridge: Polity, 2007.
    An “objectual” approach to global postmodernity, its media, and its political economy.

notes on Foucault

2010-02-27T00:31:00.000-05:00

This writing represents a return to some of the themes discussed in a previous presentation on Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. That poster was designed as an overview of the book. It describes how Foucault traces the relationship between repression and confession, and argues that this binary shows how sex is constituted by discourse, refuting the "repressive hypothesis."
"Toward the beginning of the eighteenth century, there emerged a political, economic, and technical incitement to talk about sex" (23), and Foucault takes up this conversational thread while turning it on its head. The major claim of the book is that sex and sexuality, as mediated through discourses like pathology, deviance, and criminalization, have themselves been used as technologies of repression, continually reinforcing power structures in Western society. This essay appropriates some parts of that survey, and focuses on the efficacy of Foucault's theoretical project.

Foucault invites us to "conceive of sex without the law, and power without the king" (91), and in this way to construct "a different theory of power" (90) by which we might analyze contemporary relations. "Different," precisely because such a theory must not consider power as something contained in a given subject (e.g., "the king," "the government," "the teacher"), instead recognizing its immanence in every relation of difference. In particular, the notion of "biopower" (140) (literally, life-power, but perhaps more accurately termed mortho-power, since the concept refers to the regulatory and existential relation between politics and society) provides a compelling point of access from to read Foucault against himself.

If, as Foucault implies, nothing (including sex or power) is outside of discourse, then as discourse has fragmented into established disciplines, so the discourses about sex and power have multiplied. As sex becomes a taboo object in discourse, disciplines including law, medicine, pedagogy, and religion begin to constitute sex as a secret object of truth. This leads to the importance of the confession, which links sex, truth, and secrecy. Foucault then positions a modern, Western "scientia sexualis" (58) against an ancient, Eastern "ars erotica" (57). We should remember that this polyvalent division reinforces a paradigm of intellectual colonialism.

Leaving this problem aside for a moment, we turn to Foucault's argument that society regulates discourse to conceal power and its accessibility, rather than sex and sexuality as such. By understanding power as immanent in all social relations and contingent upon its own exercise (or the threat thereof), he shows how the deployment of sexuality as an historically constructed identity involves the establishment and maintenance of the normative family. Thus, he argues that as the family has become the domain of sexuality, discourses of sexuality have regulated familial relations. The social dominance of the Oedipal family complicates the argument that sex is political, because the relation between domus (oikonomos, ie) and dominus means that all intimacy is a public action, subject to the regulatory power of the neighbors.

If sex is therefore a political action, then politics are the continuation of sexuality by other means. With this allusion to the technologies of war, Foucault demonstrates the instrumentality of sexuality, drawing on the examples of four stereotypes of sexual deviance: the masturbating child, hysterical woman, Malthusian couple, and perverted adult. He argues that sex has replaced love as a desire for which it is worth dying, and since articulations of sex and sexuality have been used primarily to justify extant hegemonic force relations (which place our lives at stake in every political decision).
If we are to resist these, it cannot be by (re)claiming an illusory identity, or by seeking some synecdochic agency in sexual discourse, but by claiming control over our own bodies, and seeking the material agency that is always present, because every relation produces power. Focusing on strategic rather than tactical formulations, Foucault articulates what agency is made possible by a recognition of the mechanisms of biopower. When neither famine nor plague are as dangerous to the existence of a society as are war or car crashes, it becomes possible to critique both individuality (deviance) and conformity (the Oedipal family). We must therefore return to the absolute singularity of our material bodies, and the irreducible and unattainable experiences of our pleasures.

So we are enjoined to consider a paradigmatic shift in discursive objects. We move from sex to bodies, from desires to pleasures, from discipline to regulation, from law to biopower... And yet, we cannot seem to move outside of discourse. "Many silences ... permeate discourse," rather than marking its limits (27), and so even if we remain silent, and refrain from making publicly political statements, we are made subjects in and of discourse. What, then, are some of Foucault's silences?

Two incongruities have appeared already. First, the unexamined assumption that the West and modernity are somehow discontinuous from the East and antiquity, as demonstrated by the distinction drawn between a scientia sexualis and an ars erotica, is a silence on Foucault's part to be critical and self-reflexive about his privileged position as a white, European, male intellectual. This division also manages to conflate the West with modernity, progress, rationality, and morality, while relegating the East to a sort of mystical primitivity, reinforcing the colonial paradigm of major domination that cuts across philosophy no less than nationalism. One could claim that Foucault is focusing so closely on sexuality that questions of racism, orientalism, and colonialism are bound up inside that project. This objection overlooks the repetition of similar discursive constructions of these very questions throughout the whole book, culminating in the relegation of resistance to the "occasional" (97).

The second instance is closely related. In his analysis of sexual discourses, Foucault privileges not only white, European society at large, but takes the Oedipal family as its nuclear unit. This occludes the potential force relations made possible by other social formations. How, for example, might members of an extended immigrant family, or a collective housing project in an inner-city ghetto, or a rural religious community distribute sex, force and capital amongst themselves, or in relation to the state apparatus? These questions are left unasked, and therefore unanswered by Foucault. If we are to apply his methodologies to their analysis, we must first come to terms with his elision of their social conditions.

So we come, finally, to the question of method. A question, as always, is raised by Foucault's claim that the four "rules" for analyzing sexual discourse from the field of power are not "methodological imperatives" (98). It is the question of thought; it is the thought of thinking the haecceity of discourse. I argue that this disavowal is precisely the grounds of philosophy, for ourselves no less than for this conflation of text and medium and author that figures, for us, as "Foucault".

lewis levenberg - Georgetown University

FULL NAMES (the church billboard)

2010-02-10T13:05:00.000-05:00

& the train wouldn’t stop
& we hobos vaulted out into
her separated hair like
metal-wielding gymnasts.

speaking in tongues, the muses (bald & thin)
spotted each other for lazy backflips, wanting
to catch as much air as possible, haunted
& daunting, with elliptical paunches
for bellies, smelling medieval worlds
through dis-jointed & bloody noses,
their weakness dripping into the basin balanced on
her separated hair like church billboards
of want and wonder how many times I’ll reread
the single word, words, words, word repeating

like a train ticket-taker, thinking of
his wife fucking the anonymity of
men: neighbors & friends, forcing
the rip of the ticket to sound
like applause in an empty stadium –

I like to say your full name
under my breath in between your breaths,
to count how many times I can think
it between pressed clean towels
folded in my arms. I carry them like
a hardy stack of bibles, tipping
& leaning, a slanted court
asked to vow on holy heaving chests,
whatever messages are left in haste
as trains depart the
station, huffing rings, a cold sensation
suncopated red lights, sound to signify
it coming, as the train pulls
from the station & the old
kneels as if praying…

27 September 2007
Joel, Dana, Lewis, Sean
an artnite collaboration at the Belmar

Maytal Gross - The Abstracted

2010-02-06T16:45:00.000-05:00

In isolation i find my only solace
in words, written across the
perimeters of my body,
beating-
rythmically to the inhale- exhale
motion of a small, glimmering
heart-
isolated in a cavity, pounding for freedom,
bleeding at the limits of language;
limits of love,
awaiting return in these endless hours
of an afternoon;
watching the wind create
waves of dance between
leaves, glimmering like
tips of an ocean, (that is)
beating-
against the rocks, against the land
and its push- pull games;
A dynamic not unlike our own broken
hearts; we played
once,
and pulled away.
I inhaled, the smoke
spirals from my finger(tips).
And now in isolation i
wonder if i have ever
met you-
Who walked away to
chase a day-
dream, in distraction,
walking away from here as
i ask
Have i met you here,
before?-
All these games
began,
and these charades formed
all these people
walking
down this street with
painted masks, on
thier faceless
faces-
Staring blankly at the
wall
of empty canvas, except for
one word,
marked: ART-
As the pursuit of life.
Like Lolita, as she challenged
the limits of reality, acting
out against
the rock of an older man,
against another kind of love,
which she learned to return, as
a daughter to a father
who loves too much,
loves forcefully, loves
what will be a secret-
kept forever inside her, an
eternity of distance between
Dolores and Lolita-
as she knows herself now.
The dangers of a nickname,
for anyone who matches
a small man’s
fantasy,
in a culture keeping
secrets for
eternities.
These things remain unchanged;
As they change little girls
into victims,
into women
with no faces, now becoming
artists. Mastering concealment
masking scars with binary
colors
you can find in a
box of crayons
That melt like candles
when it gets too hot
Inside the Box,
that remains hollow,
after all (these years),
the tears still have not come
down hard enough,
to reveal how he
came down hard
enough, to break her
face-
Which is painted anyways,
to cover the scars of every
other woman this man will
meet at the nearest café
Which sells a lifestyle in different
sizes and shades of
colors-
You can find in a box of
Crayons,
to paint over an ocean of secrets
of an eternal culture-
And call it ART.

Until these walls peel away
colors,
scribbling meaning-
less words
Searching for a truth
Long ago
forgotten, Love-
You look so familiar,
Have i met you?-
Who’s touch burns my
shoulders, now covered in
tattoos,
to mark the places he
has broken-
in-
broken nights;
Like a body’s holocaust
Starved
Exhausted
Marked-
Sick,
to death, with-
The wish for an
end to this
Sick
Secret
Keeping culture, that
sells addictions
for an artsy life-
style, and points
to a blank canvas
And upon it one word
Marked: ISOLATION

Guard Dog, Pedro Ruiz

2010-01-21T11:17:00.000-05:00

photo courtesy of Jeffrey Borenstein.

Split Seven
also this.

For The Grace Of The Homeless Lady On Her Birthday

2010-01-05T21:26:00.000-05:00

In an Oak Park suburb,

a homeless lady takes our picture

in front of the Unity Temple.

She looks for the subway,

and we take a half hour journey

through these streets

because she told us

it was her birthday.

She's looking for company

and when it comes to loneliness

what choice do we have

but to panhandle

our way for a kiss or a friend?

Although she was hungry,

she wouldn't eat raw meatballs

a guy from a restaurant offered.

We admire her resolve,

not to settle on food

just because

the stomach and heart

rumble and quake.

You console her

because you walk

faster than me

in a conversation between sidewalks

and worn out shoes

where her soles comfort more

than mine.

Jennifer Diskin

untitled drawing

2009-12-24T17:07:00.000-05:00

by the incomparable Marissa Paternoster:

Nnenna

2009-12-16T17:32:00.000-05:00

Nnenna began to see all the dyads and networks fighting between one another. They exercised their cliometrics like a heteroglossia of bathhouse cherubs, contemplating the conversive virus that had so recently appeared on the scene and/or universe. There was a noticeable contamination at the engine level. From the mitochondrial level up it was all doppelganger, but down in the boiler room the game had changed. She watched them dance around the neon break pit with angel wing stumps. The brightest nodes winked at her from starry distances. She ate her simple food by for the light in them. They rose and performed, glistened by her imagination into rosy thorned light ringlets, permanent and forlorn. She thought – these are the spirals of a foolishly still-empty notebook, what a grand and profound waste of space and time.

Nnenna woke at six-thirty regular, coffee etcetera, morbid Excedrin and all about this whirlwind wept to leave, risking life and limb to reach the machine lying under her apartment to reach the door – to see the road – to be on time – to speak the code – to give all of her to the god of perfection. That said, she was disappointed most of the time. Not surprising. Work was a squat concrete rectangular prism with overhung loading docks carved into the geometry like mouths for rectal tubes to shit their goods through-and-in to the processing core. This core was located somewhere thousands of feet below the basement and her office where she scanned documents in the basement, filing each one into a spreadsheet before destroying the hardcopy. Eight hours a day erasing history.

When she broke up with Elle she figured it would be a clear slate state. She would enjoy time by herself, like a cat – yea – she thought – like a cat. But like a cat, within a few months of that she began tearing the walls for company. Two one night stands later and she knew she threw the lots crooked and luck sucks anyways, but to her it was like being back in adolescence again. You crane your neck to see the limits of everything – that’s exactly what they want – and suddenly your heads chopped off, tampered with and reattached while you were busy decapitated animal farming. Conflagrations, you’ve won surviving.

She found herself around the streets at ghost hours, looking into closed buildings and trying to taste the air. Befuddled why the people around her were speaking in a language she couldn’t place, let alone understand, Nnenna swam about like the immortal jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii in that warm old mother body of water the Mediterranean Sea. Yes piglets, the see life is nice like that racist crab stereotype said, down where it’s wetter. Wetter still Nnenna found the world, drowned and bloated. She wished for Costner gills and rat-a-tat-tat urine purifiers and pontoon boats with secret crayon stashes, Robin Williams look-a-likes screaming Paper! Have you ever seen paper, meanwhile scheming to rape the women like any good Hollywood story drifter would.

She got text messages from boys in neither verse. She pulled out her hair in clumps and it grew back by the time she woke up. She called old friends on a frayed plug rotary telephone and tried to acquiesce appearances that never had the pleasure of existing in the first place. She used to see this:

Figure 1: Symap resembling Abraham Lincoln or Pauly Shore

…everywhere she went.

Not that this was bad. Fairly ingenious considering its dot matrix transcription of space, but the question remained for her, locked away underneath a Jules Verne Earth, why this and now with everything stacked against her does she have to deal with such a limited symbology. Imagine what dating is like in this world. The idea of fun here resembles sorting old knickknacks for nostalgic purposes and drinking apple cider vinegar. Vine gar, the genus Vitis and embers of the Lepisosteus family.

She felt stretched out, thinned along a spit over flame. There were velocities behind her actions, g-forces in the tilt of her spinning hands furiously signing helix in the air. She thought of her mother without remorse or malice and it frightened her to pieces. A pure blink of look back black came about without warning. Was she passing out?

She thought she’d been Shanghai Dorothied off to a green sick-land bred beneath filthy pools in what is left of Lorax territory. She saw the peeling of the trees, the kneeling down with wrists supplicated upwards like Pauly down there. Halving the peach again and again into the bowels of eternity’s dark waterslide. Chainsaw carved effigies and Indian smoke shop drive through bobble heads, merchandise of the lost American mythos. There should be a Vegas casino to store all our venerable garbage, teams of scientists to do the dirty laundry and hot pants for all participants.

Nnenna thought about the tree people, thinned out, decimated. She thought of marphan syndrome 2, carving your name on your lover’s chess. Shitting on their board. Walking the plank. Fronting the snowy lawn, limbs cropped out of the frame. There was a bench hiding behind them with a fresh kill, skulking in the background with the hyena’s gory muzz – Laughing at everything, sein nothing. If it wasn’t bad enough as it is, there’s a million or so of their kin lining the hillside behind. They’re all there I that virginal green expanse, every bully, wondering – how did you four get in the picture? Those four can't even grin all sly and make a subtle snide accusation about the others. They’re trees, trees cant talk.

Nnenna knew this, all at once waking from unconsciousness when the static pulls back slowly and you see the person over you, hopefully. For one second, you don’t know where you are and who or what. Then it all snaps back like tar cubes. She knew something was wrong. Why am I thinking about this? - It was like asking a memory except Nnenna didn’t remember this. It was not hers to give. It is the gift no one can give anyone else because it is the ultimate gift of mystery.

You can’t give your death to anyone else. You can die in their place, but you are only exchanging your unique self with theirs. See the difference in this.

It extrudes self; gorging on the fear and anxiety we feed it to create anew. Rerun. Static. Blank verse-screen. See you on Venus. Goodbye. Inauthentic. Where has it all gotten us but to the gallows ourselves? Nnenna knew this, slowly over a period of several weeks and one feverish night. She learned what it means to be dead.

Look at them down there, at the bottom there where there’s no letters anymore. Are they dead? Trapped in history, in a history without meaning because it lacks context? Are they context without context? Are they each unique, outside of the boxes and arrows and paper? Don’t they deserve their individual moral economies, ones that break through mythologies of secrecy to authentic dissimulation of event horizons?

Imagine you know them, or some of them at least. One. Fine. In fact, it’s best to look at the children separate than the father. They lean with their personalities, each reacting to the photographer’s impose, their masques. How their flesh is presented, displayed through the darkness and contrast. The period morality of it, yes, the flash bulb and charcoal paper background. The experience was not necessarily new, but it could have bee the first time they experienced science.

Them the trees too, being forced to act dark and tree-ish not caring about you even though you’re taking a picture of them without their permission. Don’t, understand? They really don’t care and in there are laughing at us all. In fact, I bet they see the humor in that bench right nears them. But after all who cares. Nnenna learned this, everyday. She woke knowing what it was like to be dead.

-Zev Gottdiener, 2009

NEW CHAPBOOK

2009-12-12T12:14:00.001-05:00

The first chapbook by Washington, DC artist and poet Alanzo Robles-Gordon, Third Period, is available for download HERE.

sneak peek

2009-12-12T12:03:00.000-05:00

courtesy of the Future Machine

Myung Mi Kim reading

2009-12-12T11:41:00.000-05:00

Binghamton reading

2009-12-02T15:25:00.001-05:00

Binghamton

2009-11-17T14:07:00.001-05:00

Where I come from, the beach gazes back like, I like you.
Here, the Susquehanna won't make eye contact.
This place is a one-night stand, and in exercise of impotence,
Binghamton brags about his stiff cold, his too-long winter,
his back turned away as we sleep. This is why I love him better--
no apologies.

Everywhere, even here, the honeybees are dying,
all of Earth has Colony Collapse Disorder,
and only Binghamton doesn't mind.

Fuck apples, sweet cherries, and the citrus fruits.
Bring us down to bread and water.
I like it plain. I like it with my eyes closed and no remorse.
I like it worse than it has to be.
I like how close it gets to clean.
Clean like barren flowers.
Clean like this water will make you sick,
so don't bother being thirsty.
Clean like your one-night stand can't get hard
and he still won't hold your hand, not even in the dark:
looking back over a shoulder to see if he's watching,
on a mattress on the hard-wood floor,
below a sky so grey it is dark-white,
that clean, that fruitless, without I'm sorry.

--Dana Jaye

old poem by lewis

2009-11-13T01:33:00.000-05:00

(I)

to begin: becoming
be coming
come being
begin being

be in (g)
rescind
re sin
reach in
to be two
between
we be
we mean
we men
women
woman
no man
no me
nomos

nosotr(o)s
no sutures
no futures
no mas
no mass
nomads
go mad
why not go mad?

go back to being: to begin
becoming back from madness
becoming slack from sadness
trendness
tends to rend less
to lightness
toast bright darkness
twice(d)
to ice
to dice
to tries
to ties
tongues tied
I died (when they touched me
I died)

a little death
a little breath

inspired math
come back to draft

to be sketched out with pencils
to stencil repentance
in wind chimes, croissants and tea
hymns and the silent sea
humming Hosannas
beginning to end:

begin being
come being
be coming
become.

Will Parker

2009-09-04T23:46:00.000-04:00

Delaying the Flinch in the Unflinching Eye

2009-08-18T12:51:00.000-04:00

I: Defining the Terms to Oblivion

In Beyond the Shot, Sergei Eisenstein asserts that cinema is “first and foremost montage,” declaring the value in seeing what is not there^ⁱ. Yet, if the viewer is fed only hegemonic allegations, how has it seen anything of value? It has become a tradition to polarize past and present and to give them specific characteristics: the past in the negative and the future in the positive on the timeline. Furthermore, in compressing the experience of the past and the anticipation of the future into the mobile instant, the instant has no meaning because no instant can act as an element of segmentation. In other words, the instant has duration, yet it is used to segment duration, and therefore, contradicts itself. Thus, time negates itself, and yet in doing so, defines itself; the so-called instants break time into segments and lose its state of totality. Montage will always be present in cinema, but instead of representing a segmenting instant, a cut in time, it may also represent the space between the screen and the audience, or a montage of articulation. In creating a barrier that allows the viewer to maintain composure, the viewer reflects on a representation of action through the mimetic, not a representation of being through the diegetic. The long take that is the only medium in which this may occur since its goal is to preserve the duration of the instant. To endure without breaking the unity of time is to experience the streaming force of being. Beings experience no fractures in their empiricism, nor do beings ever cut from one point to another without experiencing the subjective process of continuity.

A filmstrip, unadulterated by the splice, represents an environment that is more than simply the setting for its subject, since it also represents the subjects that are represented within it. When the filmstrip is spliced, the environment is destroyed, and the viewer is presented only with action. This technique is completed through Eisenstein’s montage: two images are juxtaposed, and the outcome is an insinuation of ideas, as opposed to a plethora of potential outcomes that occur by simply watching.

To follow Eisenstein’s montage is to segment increments of image and to isolate the camera’s produced images by splicing them down to only seconds worth of the projected image. This practice is not entirely without benefit; after all, even the long take must utilize juxtaposition at some point or another. More importantly, taking moments out of the continuity allows us to study the moment in depth. In response, the cinematic long take still dissects, isolates, and juxtaposes, but by delaying the splice, the long take looks at the process of being in itself, and simultaneously, reflexively, at itself. It de-emphasizes the splice by emphasizing the juxtaposition between the viewer and the image.

As in the early Méliès films, Eisenstein’s montage theory puts subjectivity into a simple cause and effect relationship without acknowledging that all effects are simultaneously causes. Of course, most viewers watch movies in an attempt to escape into a temporary fantasy. In doing so, the viewer is suspended in the hands of the film. Yet, into what does the audience escape while viewing the montage? An illusion of an illusion? In almost all of his trick films, Méliès’s utilization of stop motion substitution is a form of montage. The astronomer never hits the Selenite with an umbrella; instead, the astronomer swings, a puff of smoke appears and the idea is insinuated. While juxtaposition relocates the viewer in both the focus of subject and space, Méliès’s tricks only relocate the subject. As Tom Gunning puts it, “Unity of point of view gives the illusion of a theatrical unity of time, when, in fact, the substitution splice creates a specifically cinematic synthesis of time.”^ⁱⁱ It seems as if Méliès is in limbo between preserving the illusion of time and dissecting it. Although his substitution splice anticipates montage, he remains grounded in preserving space.

In the Lumiere Brothers’ films, however, the cut is the beginning and the end of the shot. The Lumiere Brothers’ Exiting the Factory features workers leaving the gates of their workplace. The camera is held by an anonymous figure. The workers exit to the left and right of the screen, but never directly towards the camera, and as a result, they interact with it by trying to avoid interfering with it. Furthermore, some extroverts smile or strut across the screen. The camera witnesses the all of the exiting workers, and after barely three-quarters of a minute, shuts off. This type of filming inspired the proposal that long takes are more about space, and its relationship to the subject, than they are about duration.^ⁱⁱⁱ

Perhaps Méliès’s intention differed from Eisenstein’s collision. The idea was not to follow the subject with the camera, but to let the subject follow the camera. Throughout Méliès’s works, the camera is motionless. Its goal is to set the space, to capture the subjects as they appear and disappear to maintain an appearance of continuity. This challenges the notion that Méliès’s work is the opposite of the Lumiere Brothers’ actualities. Both the Lumiere Brothers and Méliès are regarded as primitive, or at best, “ground zero” filmmakers, due to the very lack of narrative jumps that long takes require.^{^iv} Both heavily rely on a specific moment of space within the frame. The Lumiere Brother’s goal was to bring still images to life; the illusion was the rapid succession of each frame to create the description of movement. Méliès took advantage of those gaps and furthered the illusion. Yet, far more has been written about the content within the frame than about what is outside of it. The act of viewing the screen is essential to cinema, but cinema is also the act of viewing the world, and rewriting the world with the camera. Realism is not a product of instantaneity, because even the instant has duration. The process that leads up to the click of the camera’s shutter is far more subjective than the subjective variables in painting. The camera is a means to represent being.

All of this seems contingent with the moment and the time spent engaged with the subject and the space, as opposed to the reproducible materialism of the filmstrip. Cinema is not a reproducible medium as history refers to it. The moment of filmmaking cannot be cloned, and if it could, it would only be in a manner of role-playing, thus another experience all together. In the context of the long take, the filmmaker does not settle for a portrait, but paints a mural, filled with numerous portraits and landscapes that melt into one another. It soon represents something real, but is also only the after effects of something that was. For the long take to be utilized in Neo-Realism, it must do so from a particular perspective, and it must be grounded by an immediate space. The camera may travel from one geographical area to the next, but in doing so, borders become ambiguous. There is no break from one point to the next; it is all bound by time. The transition of space must remain intact for the representation of being to occur.

In Beyond the Movement-Image, Deleuze writes of the 17^th century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz. Sequential events, according to Leibniz, are dependent on ordinary laws such as gravity, yet are only viewable in fractures. In order for beings to interact with the laws that accordingly allow for time and space, beings must break their perception into segments so that they become cognitively digestible. This dependence on the break, however, mutated into a belief in the break, or rather, that breaks in time occur. Nevertheless, these breaks in time are purely illusionary.

It is just that we have to admit that, because the linkages of the terms in the series are naturally weak, they are constantly upset and do not appear in order. An ordinary term goes out of sequence, and emerges in the middle of another sequence of ordinary things in relation to which it takes on the appearance of a strong moment, a remarkable or complex point.^{^v}

Thus, the cut is an imperative illusion within cinema due both to the technological restraints, and to the fact that cinema is capable of segmenting the representation of being. Isolating a fraction of an action fails to show the adhesive quality of time, while isolating a fraction of the state of being through the duration of time depicts the manner in which beings see into the world. The long take, utilizing time as its foundation, binds subjects, space and perspective, and thus represents existence. It segments the representative state, and is consequently analogous with a being’s lifespan. Bazin has suggested that this is why art often attempts to “embalm” elements of life. ^{^vi}

As in Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, Albert and Werther exist on extreme ends of the spectrum. Albert is at the emotionless, pragmatic end, and Werther plays the emotional, impractical role. However, isolating the elements of a being eventually dissipates it. Goethe, in exploring the modes of being through dissection, simultaneously destroys being itself, by putting it on a spectrum. By grasping and aestheticizing them, Goethe embalmed their impact but not their lives.

The moment of filmmaking is this authorship of how one perceives. It is a moment of relating perception that picks out the moments that it deems necessary and spins them into a line of events. Time is ungraspable, and yet in creating the illusion that it can be harnessed, it is grasped, cultured into identity.^{^vii} It is necessary for a being to attempt to grasp time, for in the process of doing so, the subject builds a collection of memories. The film artist enacts these memories into a culmination of the moment while filming. A being in an environment knows that no true borders exist, and that other beings do not magically appear in their view. The being and the other beings that it perceives must engage in interaction, create connections with the environment and with each other. And as Tarkovsky puts it, “that is the meaning of cinema.” ^{^viii}

But filmmaking is always the process of recording an event, turning memory into historical materialism. This especially pertains to the long take, where the expansive events can become materialized, and avoid historicism by providing a source of information that the viewer seizes. Thus, to take away the filmic historical materialism is to take away a source of self-articulation.

The long take has created the very foundation for cinema to exist as a medium by representing being-in-itself, the absolute cohesive that binds subjects to objects. It is constructed of miniscule photographs, each maintaining their own postures and space, each existing on the screen for its allotted moment. In its totality, the long take creates the sensation of duration, when duration exists only within every moment that appears to skip by like a stone across water, treading wave after wave, each slowly, inevitably melting into one another to create the illusion that they are a singular motion. It utilizes the artist’s ability to endure the passage and retention of time and to record not just what is in front of the camera, but what is in the artist’s soul, thus projecting itself into the image just as strongly as subjects and objects present themselves; it promotes the artist’s endurance by acting as a translation of being; it is analogous to life, segmented by birth and death; it knows that cinema was never born on a splice, but on an introduction of the shot; it is a perpetual process that breaks the imaginary constraints of geographical borders and personal restraint that come from the illusion that all beings are not connected through the communication of time; it is the refusal to look from a perspective, but instead to look at perspective itself, and at the structure of the relationship between what is on the screen and off. It battles against that which it knows it cannot defeat, the death of itself, but in delaying the inevitable, it becomes a summation, for the artist and the viewer, of the enduring pinnacle of being. It is, quite simply, to delay the flinch in the unflinching eye.

iWORKS CITED

Deleuze, Gilles. "Beyond the Movement Image." Film Theory and Criticism. New York: Oxford, 2004. 259-269.

Eisenstein, Sergei. "Beyond the Shot [the Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram]." Film Theory and Criticism. New York: Oxford UP, 2004. 7-23.

Freud, Sigmund. Civilizations and Its Discontents. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1961.

Gunning, Tom. "'Primitive' Cinema- A Frame Up? Or the Trick's on Us." Cinema Journal 2, 1989.

Tarkovsky, Andrey. Sculpting in Time. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989.

NOTES

Eisenstein 7

ii Gunning 8

iii Russian Ark has a ninety-nine minute take.

iv Gunning 5

v Deleuze 261

vi Gunning 6

vii Camera : cinema :: eye : I

viii Tarkovsky 65

By Zach Meyer

love song/god's work (two monologues intertwined)

2009-08-14T14:08:00.001-04:00

Mona is on one part of the stage. She wears a nun’s habit and a nurse’s cap. She holds a plain-looking canister—something industrial that holds the ashes of a deceased person’s remains. There is some kind of tag on it marked with the name, “Bobby.” Throughout the scene, she may be decorating the canister in some way—with crayons, paper and glue, glitter, beads, etc., drawing a flower garden on it—or she may not be.

In another part of the stage, Jack, a young man frighteningly skinny, sits in a hospital bed.

Mona

I’ve got to take care of these—right here. I’ve got to. “Keep ‘em safe,” he said. “Keep ‘em safe till somebody picks ‘em up.” “Well when will that be and who,” I asked, “will it be?” He just said, “Give ‘em to this queer little fellow who may or may not show up sometime.” “Well, that don’t seem right,” I said. That officer wasn’t very nice. Roy, I think his nameplate said. Well, God bless him. God bless the grouchy. God bless all policemen. And all the law abiders and breakers. God bless these right here, these remains.

Jack

If I can find ‘em. If I can. Roy said they would keep ‘em for me. Keep ‘em safe. But I don’t know.

Mona

(Looking at the canister)

Didn’t quite make it, huh? Lord took you home. Well, Bless. Bless, bless, bless the little lamb chops.

Jack

I want the ashes. I want ‘em so I can have mine mixed with ‘em when I go. I want to feel ‘em. What’s left.

Mona

You know, when I go, I want my ashes spread out in the park to help the flowers grow. That’s what I want. Help the little flowers grow.

Jack

Maybe if I take care of ‘em, keep ‘em nice—in a nice urn—and give ‘em whiskey like I used to give to Daddy, maybe he’ll forgive me. Maybe he’ll love me again.

Mona

Life is full of little close calls, ain’t it Lord? I used to be surprised when I survived ‘em. Or when I witnessed others survive ‘em. Now I just take another breath. And rejoice a little. Because isn’t life, after all, a celebration, oh, Lord? Even if it’s also a funeral?

Jack

Bobby thought it was wrong to suck pecker for money. I didn’t think too hard about it. I mean I never planned on doing it.

Mona

(Jumping back when she reads the card)

Bobby! Well, well, well. I knew a Bobby. Yes I did—no I didn’t. I had a Bobby. A Bobby. Bobby was his name.

Jack

I just think you can love a thing, even though it lives in more than one person.

Mona

I’m not really a nun. This thing is…well…I work in the catholic hospital here—St. James. They’re real nice. One of the ladies…the nurses…Sister Rose…well, the good Lord took her home (She makes the sign of the cross)...and well, they were gonna just throw this away, and I’ve always had a secret desire…my best friend from being-little was a catholic. Mary Rose. I wanted to be like her. I wanted to be a catholic. Her family was just perfection—like a perfectly mowed lawn. Like a perfect red rose, a perfect blood-red rose. They were just gonna throw this away. It’s not like stealing. They were going to throw it out. And I’ve done some things that I regret, I have. Some time ago. But not this. Jesus don’t mind me wearing this. He likes it.

Jack

I used to dream about Bobby. I used to dream I’d meet a man like Bobby back when I lived with Mama and Daddy. I used to watch my Daddy and dream about a man like him.

Mona

Bobby, Bobby, f’fobby, banana, fanna, fa, fobby. Me my mo mobby. Bobby.

Jack

I used to watch Daddy through the kitchen winder of our air-conditioned house. He’d be layin’ in the backyard hammock—weighin’ it down, stretching the woven rope until it almost kissed the dirt an inch below. He’d be coolin’ down from the heat of mowing that patch of grass back there flicking his burnin’ cigar. He’d yell for a beer and I’d bring it out to him before Mama could get it, my hand freezin’, drippin’ from the ice-cold can—just like Daddy liked it. I loved that beer smell when he’d crack it open. He’d say, “What’re you starin’ at, boy? I know I’m good-lookin’. Go help Mama in the house.” I’d go back inside and watch him from the winder. I’d tuck it—all boys do it I guess—you know, tuck your prick between your legs to look like a woman? But it warn’t a joke like my friends did it sleepin’ over. It were real.

Mona

I’m not really a nurse, but I still serve the Lord. I serve the little lamb chops and all of God’s creations on this beautiful earth that will perish into the fires of Armageddon. God bless the passing of the past and let us forget.

Jack

After Daddy took to the bed after Mama died, I’d stand there and look out at the loose hammock, all twisted and empty and imagine Daddy back in it instead of the bed. I’d be wearin’ my Mama’s old silky panties and tuck my pecker back and rub my finger over my slit, while I’d imagine Daddy’s cigar burnin’ down. “Jack!” Daddy would yell from his sick bed, coughing up somethin’ that sounded like death. “Medicine!” He wanted his pill and Old Grand Dad. Not my Grandad cuz he’s dead, but whiskey.

Mona

I wasn’t supposed to live this long. I promised God that if He let me live that I would serve Him by serving others. I’ve done the best I could. I’ve tried my darndest. And I put down the bottle, too. Just put it down. And I began to love life like I’ve never before. Love every breath. Well, almost every breath. What about that one? Ha ha! I was afraid the magic would go. But just like Sister Rose said, it’ll stay as long as I focus on what is at hand, on helping others, it’ll stay. Peace will stay right here in my heart. As long as I focus on the here and now. The passed is passed is passed is passed. I did some things before... I did things…

Jack

I’d get the tray ready and drip a little Grand Dad on my finger and brush my teeth with the stuff—felt like Novocaine. I’d imagine anointin’ Daddy’s lips with the whiskey, lettin’ it drop onto his tongue—sizzle the cigar tip. I’d rub some down under Mama’s panties—the fumes of whiskey burning my nostrils. “Boy!” So I brought Daddy his medicine on the plastic tray that Mama used to bring his dinner on when he used to sit up in the living room. Now he’s lying on the bed reeking of piss and shit. Paper tissues cover his body and maroon bedspread and spill onto the floor around him like some picture – like he’s already strewn with yellowed white flowers lyin’ in his casket. “God damn, give it t’me boy! Don’t spill it! Don’t tremble like a girl!”

Mona

Did we come from the fish? The nurses were talking about it at the center the other day—evolution. We didn’t come from the fish. Did we, Lord? I can’t remember being a fish….

Jack

He was alright till the Death-Man got inside our house. Till He took away Mama and half of Daddy’s breath and turned him into a quarter of a man gasping for air, his body seepin’ into the bed, meltin’ away onto that plastic cover wrapped around the mattress. That plastic cover cause he kept wettin’ hisself.

Mona

The water falls from heaven and washes us clean. The rain falls and washes us and feeds the flowers. It’s not so dirty as us—even with the dirty seas—the pollution—the spillings—the oil. The seas are rising up they say. Risin’ up. “If the good Lord’s willing and the creek don’t rise.”

Jack

I’d get all welled up in the eyes seein’ him lyin’ out there, remembering him all lively, how I used to grab at him, grab his hat, knock on his newspaper all the time when he’d sit in his chair, and finally he’d wop me good, and I’d taste my own blood.

Mona

The seas are gonna rise—rise to wash us clean. The earth is gonna burn. Burn away the past and make us clean. Clean as every child in America. Clean as a daisy. Clean as a lamb chop. I mean a lamb. My uncle used to call me that—lamb chop, so whenever I want to say lamb, I say lamb chop by mistake. It’s not a sin.

Jack

I’d suck on the blood from my cheek or lip and think about how it must taste

the same as Daddy’s since we had the same blood. It tasted good.

Mona

Gosh, I got so tickled the other day in the 4-year-old Sunday school. At the church. In the children’s hospital. I said the blood of the lamb chop washes us clean. Of course, I meant the blood of the lamb. Then we had snack time.

Jack

Now Daddy could hardly try and scream somethin’ without coughing somethin’ up, his body melting into the mattress, cries for pills and whiskey, and death-smell coverin’ his room intense like shit, and I had to get out before it got me. And I did.

Mona

I could eat the lamb chops but I could never eat the veal. Those poor little baby white cows who never get to see the sun—who never get to run in the grass and play like the lamb chops on the playground.

Jack

I did get out. I got out and went to town. And late one night after I’d run off, this thick arm stuck out the winder of a pulled-over cop car and just stuck there real still while I peered at it from between the rails of the concrete steps where I’d made my home on for the night. Sure as a blink, that thumb twitched and sent a burning ash sailing over the sidewalk right towards me from the tip of the smoke. His arm had that weight about it just like Daddy used to have. And when I seen George—that cop—flick his ash, my heart reached down to my gut. And then just as still as he’d flicked his ash, he signaled me over to the car. I guess I should have been scared when I think back on it now—scared that I was getting’ in trouble—but I warn’t. I just marched on over to him like I was bringin’ a cold beer to Daddy in the back yard. He asked me my age, and I looked down into his lap. He asked me how much for a blow job and I melted into his midnight blue uniform, dark as the night, just as Daddy was meltin’ into the mattress back home.

Mona

I see the children. So clean. Dirty in their britches, but clean in their souls. So clean before all that will happen to them. So clean before they know that they are cruel. And they can be, yes sir, they can be. Is see ‘em on the playground. Grabbin’ and peggin’. My lamb chops aren’t always nice to each other. They’re cruel, yessiree. But they don’t even know it yet. Isn’t that beautiful?(Frantic) God bless someone who is in pain this instant. God bless the bruised and broken hearted. God bless the children, those lost and those found. God bless all creation. God bless those who are undergoing transplants this moment—those giving blood—those receiving blood. God bless the scarred and the scared. God bless those who have lost someone today. God bless those being cremated. God, I want a cigarette. Sometimes strange things just fly out of my mouth. Sister Rose says that I channel the pain of the lost.

Jack

Bobby told me it was wrong to get paid for it, but I didn’t know him yet. I would have done it for nothin’ with George, the cop. I wanted to marry him. But he gave me 25 bucks every time. Right in the car and he’d drop me off wherever I wanted. A gentleman—not like some. George was obliged to his Mrs., so he’d never take me home with him. I wished she would die, but then she’d haunt me for wishin’ Death on her. So I stopped wishin’ it. Between Daddy angry cuz I left and Mama gone, I couldn’t get with another ghost yet. I had a power for the death-wish cuz I felt His breeze go by me when he came for Mama. And I’d breathed His air in Daddy’s room. I never should have left Daddy’s. I gave Bobby bad luck from the Death Man. I breathed his air in Daddy’s room, and I passed it on to Bobby.

Mona

My children. I love to hear them sleep. I walk the halls sometimes at night and listen to them all sleeping. My lamb chops. I used to hear my man sleep. He would snore just for a few minutes when he first knocked off. I would lie awake and smile and feel him twitch next to me—his breath hot against my neck. Smelling of beer and bourbon. You have to live with it. You have to live with what you’ve done. For the rest of your life. You have to live with it. But the Lord forgives. He just don’t forget.

Jack

George stopped bein’ in our spot where I’d first seen him parked that night. I went every night, but he warn’t there. After some hours, somebody else would pull up and ask for a suck and I’d be cold to ‘em—give ‘em the cold shoulder. But finally my body got cold and George warn’t there, so I charged ‘em $35 since I didn’t love ‘em and got in their heated car. Then I liked getting’ money cuz I got a place to stay, so I kept it up. Mostly, it warn’t bad. Only took a few minutes most times. Sometimes they’d be drunk and hit you. I tasted my blood but it warn’t the same as like my Daddy’s cuz I warn’t their blood. I warn’t’ve cared if George had hit, but he didn’t. He would sometime rub my cheek when I was down there. He was strong, too. But didn’t hit. Arms like a tree. Like Daddy used to be.

Mona

My uncle. He would…He used to call me lamb chop. The blood. The blood will wash us clean.

Jack

When I met Bobby, he made me quit with the men—said they would chip away my soul and make me hollow inside like a gourd. I said, money. I need money for my room. I want to fix it up. But he learnt me how to live outside the grid with no want for money. Just stuff and “know-how.” He was like a bat—a vampire. In a good way. That’s the way I seen him when I saw him coming at me. I was lyin’ out on the concrete seein’ dizzy—couldn’t move from too many different pills and booze and things. He swooped down like a vampire bat, velvet angel, black leathery wings. And next we’re on a rooftop looking out at lights, yellow lights shining down on concrete and the sound of a train rushin’ to somewhere and I can breathe again and I thought I’d gone to heaven.

Mona

There is shelling—somewhere America is bombing a city and men are chanting in mosques. I saw it on TV. There are explosives on both sides. Men are chanting in the mosques. The bombs, the shelling. God bless all of them. God bless the buddhas who are tortured by the Chinamen and the dogs who get eaten, too. And the horses. The flesh. The bones. The blood. The petunias. God bless me. No. Only if it be Your will, oh Lord. God bless the hookers and those boys who sell themselves for money down on 4th Street. God bless those young, skinny boys and bring them to me, if it be Your will, oh Lord. Bring me the lamb chops. The budding lamb chops. God bless those who trespass against us. God bless those who are “survived by.” God bless those who do not survive. Bless the children, oh Lord; bless all of God’s children—all of God’s lamb chops. God, bless those who want to stop smoking. Bless those with stomach cancer. Lung cancer, any kind of cancer. Lord, tomorrow, if it be Your will, let me come across that boy, you know the one, one of those boys, the small one, and let me have the courage to speak to him, oh Lord. And may he listen. Lord bless the women who are being abused in this moment. Bless the presidents of all nations and all kings and queens and all of their subjects. Lord, bless those with swollen glands. Bless the pope. Bless those who despise the pope. Bless those who despise me, oh Lord. Bless the merciful. Bless yourself, Lord, if that’s appropriate—I don’t see why not. Bless the fleas, oh Lord. Bless the moonlight and the spiders and all the little critters. Let the spiders carry away the past and all rememberances. Piece by piece, like the petals of a daisy, oh, Lord. Let them crawl away and turn the past into a beautiful web to catch little flies to eat. Little flies with just a tiny bit of blood inside.

Jack

Now I’m in hell cuz he’s gone. Bobby’s gone. But I got my pills and my bottle and memory. He’s in every brick of the house. Every floorboard. Every piece of Wayne’s coat. I don’t leave the house much. I watch from the winder—the trucks and the train and the dogs from the scrap yard—that one with the crooked tail. I feel the bricks. I lick the bricks come night. I feel the sun change, move across the sky. And at night the moonbeams tell me about a pond somewhere where Bobby used to swim. He was part reptile—he could swim good. He was hot-blooded though, like a mammal. He was like a bat. Even the dirt tastes good cuz I know Bobby’s in there now. I want to leave life to be there with him but Mama always said she would’ve done it but then you burn in Hell forever. I wonder if Bobby’s in Hell or Heaven or someplace else. Them spiders crawl and talk and tell about him but I can’t quite hear—they whisper. I can’t hear cuz the train’s screaming and sometimes I can hear my heart pumpin’ in my ear so loud I can’t sleep good and the light shines in from the moon like a spotlight cuz I lied and Bobby knew.

Mona

The first time in the hospital, I shared a room with this family. Well, with this lady. We were there—me and her—and her boy and her man came there to visit all the time. That boy’s name was…John, no, Jack, no, Jimboy. And he was a darling thing. She used to say how death got into her—into her and into her house. Crawled in like the spiders. Well, I declare, I never heard it quite like that. Well, she did pass away. That poor boy and his Daddy. She said she didn’t have the strength to fight the ghosts no more. Oh, I wish I could’ve. Well, I could now. That was before I learned. That was just when I had made my promise to God. I wasn’t strong enough in the Lord yet. But the Lord has His reasons. But I could have fought with her against those ghosts. I could have done it. I could have taken that woman’s place and cared for that boy and that man. That little lamb chop. I could have taken care of their garden, Lord, made their flowers grow.

Jack

Bobby would go out on his scavenger hunts every now and again and he’d be gone for days. They would do stuff. He’d be looking for “materials” from torn down places or “cleanin’ up the neighborhood,” like down from where we stayed was an old house that looked abandoned—well ours did too—but ours is nice. This one looked like it might cave in and had plastic stuff on the sides. Well, Bobby said those people were bad and would hurt us and would probly catch their own house on fire from the crack pipes, but I never seen any of them do nothing bad. ‘Cept one time this one fella broke in when we was out walkin’. Bobby caught him when we come back, and that man was runnin’ out the winder. He had some stuff of ours, some of Bobby’s tools, and started running out—he jumped onto the roof next to ours and Bobby chased him. Then that house down the road burned down while Bobby was gone for a while. He came back—didn’t say much about it. Said something about crack babies. This man asked me about it. The one I still got paid by at times. He was a cop like George. I’d quit cuz Bobby told me to, but I kept on only with Roy. He asked me how that house had burned down when we was sittin’ in his car. He said it was fine—better that it was gone, but folks shouldn’t be taking the law into their own hands. I didn’t know, I told him. He laughed and pushed my head down below the steering wheel.

Mona

Sometimes I touch my flower. But it’s not like Bobby. It’s not like my uncle either. It’s sweeter. And lonelier. And more catholic.

Jack

But I felt sick when he pulled it out. I kept seeing Bobby’s face and I didn’t like the smell of it, so I jumped out the car and run off and back towards home. Then he drove right next to me hollerin’ out the winder that he’d have us kicked out of the squat if I didn’t do it. He said he’d have Bobby arrested. He said he’d tell Bobby about what I did to him for money. I did stop, with the others. But he—I used to pretend he was George. I’d shut my eyes when I rode in the car and smell the leather or fake leather vinyl seat and the smell of cigarettes in that cop car ashtray and it was like I was visitin’ George again and it was like with Daddy again and we needed some money for food even though we did ok off the grid and all.

Mona

I was down by the center the other day, and some kind of evangelical group had a whole chorus out there singing their hearts out—right on the corner of the park. Not gospel exactly, but something like that. Modern gospel, I guess you’d call it. We don’t have that sort of thing in the Catholic church. It’s just not how we grew up. But it sure was nice. And you could tell that most all the folks in the group really felt what they were singing. Just singing right out of their hearts. And this couple walked by—real cool—you know, hip like. And the girl threw her hand up in praise, and I know it was a show for her boyfriend’s sake—she was making fun, but she still felt it. I could tell. She felt it. God bless those lost in the pain of cynicism. God bless the singers. God bless all missionaries all over the world. God bless the lamb chops.

Jack

Bobby didn’t seem to notice if I bought food with the money, and soap, too, even though Bobby made soap, but his soap he made my face rashed. We’d go eat at Taco Bell and go to the movies. I’d say my aunt gave me some money when I’d visited her, but I didn’t even have no aunt. Sometimes I think Bobby knew it, too. He’d always talk about how he hated Johnny Law and all that, but when Roy, the cop, came by, he’d talk all loud to him about how he fixed the plumbing himself and Roy would say how that was an awesome talent and on and on and every once in a while Roy’d look at me and I hated it. I asked Bobby why he’d talk so much with a cop if he hated ‘em so much. And he’d say how Roy was alright and didn’t mess with a man’s castle—didn’t bother into our affairs. He said he needed man-talk sometimes. “Talk about numbers,” he said. “What numbers?” I’d ask. He said I didn’t understand, but he loved me for other reasons.

Mona

I’ve learned about my lamb chops. I watch them play German dodge ball in the park. That’s what they call it. German dodge ball. They love the killing. They love to peg. To peg each other. They love to get each other out. To peg it. To peg. To peg it. Get ‘em out.

Jack

He said he felt a power run between us when he’d have his finger in my bottom and he’d be jerkin’ his prick. Or when he put it in me. Or when he shined the flashlight under the blankets up around there. He said I looked like a statue. He said he felt a power. His chest had two gray hairs and the rest were black—not thick like George’s—just a sprinklin’. His hands were strong and rough from workin’ on the building but he could be gentle at times. And when he reached for my hole, I knew he owned me.

Mona

I’ve learned not to resist gravity. Not to fight it. Let the world God made run its course. And let us serve Him through our works to others and unto Him, oh Lord, the Father. We will rise up with Him, not against Him. We will rise on His shoulders, not on our own. He will lift us up. Oh Lord God Almighty Father in Heaven and living in this heart.

Jack

I want to leave life to be with him again. He used to cry sometimes and he’d look like a little boy. He used to laugh real loud. He used to get mad about the black folks who lived in that house that burned down. I never thought they did no harm. ‘Cept that one who robbed us. I don’t think Bobby’d done nothin’ to that house if that man hadn’t come into his castle. It was like a spirit had been in the house who was evil or bad when we seen him. I don’t know how Bobby knew whether or not he even lived in that house they burned. He said you have to prove a point. I hope nobody died. But I feel their ghosts running through the house cold at times like when we seen that one man run through with our stuff. I don’t like it. Maybe Bobby was right about ‘em being bad cuz after that man ran through the house was when things started to turn bad.

Mona

I can dance. I can dance the jig. Dance the catholic jig. The fried tomato. The purple rose. The rhythm. The static. The schism. The cataclysm. Satan get behind me. That creek is gonna rise. The lie, the lies, the past lies down and dies.

Jack

Bobby said Roy, the cop, was decent, but I knew the truth after Roy made me keep on with him. He didn’t even pay anymore. He said that was our rent money. I told him Bobby would kill him. But that’s not what happened. Bobby caught us at it in the car once. That’s when I felt like he said I would. That’s when I knew I’d be hollow forever. When I felt Roy go stiff in his body and limp in the other place. I knew. I didn’t have to look. My body froze and I heard Bobby scream at me and thud on the winder and then again. I looked and the glass didn’t break and I saw his wild stare at me and then Roy jammed him with the door. I screamed and reached for Roy to hold him back. I don’t remember. I was throwin’ up on the street but nothing was comin out and I saw Bobby pinned down and I had a crushed torn can in my hand and hit Roy’s head and he fell off and Bobby rolled on top and had him by the throat and I still had the can to slice against Roy’s neck but I got the end of Bobby’s finger instead and then it all switched and Roy told Bobby to freeze—we’d go the hospital. Bobby wouldn’t freeze. Roy pointed his cop gun. I told Bobby to freeze—just freeze. He gave me that wild eye again. His blood pourin’ out of his finger—everywhere, he was still swingin the other hand and Bobby wouldn’t freeze and Roy said to freeze and I said to freeze do what Roy’s telling him—the hospital—and Bobby tried to grab the gun and punched Roy and then they rolled more and then the sound. And it was quiet. And it echoed. And I was sick and the blood, now Bobby’s face. All—the street. Pieces. I couldn’t walk. When I woke up I was back inside.

Mona

God bless the drug addicts and those enmeshed in sin—those who are victims of violent crimes. Lord God Almighty. I walk the street for money, I crawl beneath the asphault, the pavement, my face slams against the street. Crawlin’ for my pills. Oh Lord.

Jack

The pills are my friends now—my only friends are the pills and Bobby’s hairs. I get out the bowl and count ‘em up. I like to open his sock drawer. It still smells the way his socks always smelled after he’d wash ‘em with his soap. The dirty ones don’t smell like him no more. They did for a while. I kept the window closed after Bobby died to keep his smells in as long as I could. I didn’t wash his pillow or his clothes. I’d get out a fresh shirt or underwear or socks every few days to sleep with—one that still smelled of him before I wore it off. I found piss in the toilet he hadn’t flushed. I sat down next to the can and stared at it. I found some of his hairs on the bathroom floor and gathered ‘em together. I didn’t want to use the toilet—didn’t want to mess it up. So I would go back behind the house. I didn’t want to flush it. I would go in and smell it and just sit there next to it. I licked the rim in case there was any there. I hunted the soap dish and shower for hairs. I ate some of the soap he had made with his hands, but that was dumb. I seen a hair caught in his razor and licked it to get it out and it cut my tongue. I didn’t know where he’d been buried but I was lookin’. I wanted to be buried right there next to him. I wanted to get the ashes. Roy hadn’t been around since, but I thought I’d seen his car drive by one day. One day I washed in the toilet water. The rest of it started looking so nasty I finally flushed it cuz it started to stink. And then I wished I hadn’t flushed him.

Mona

I look for lost ones on these streets. I’ve seen humanity smeared out across the sidewalk—let me tell you. Their spirits reaching up, like a budding seed pushes out of the soil reaching up for the sun—for help against the gravity while their bodies below sink into the sidewalk of this dirty part of town. But I can see their spirits are clean. They, too, are holy. Walking these streets is a miracle—just to be able to walk these streets on God’s earth. God bless those who have lost their legs in war, whether or not that war is just, God bless those without limbs, those who are parapelegic. God bless the bees and the honey. God bless the hungry. The stuffed. The stuffed animals who fly. Why did I say that? God bless the children of prostitutes.

I would have liked to have saved her. That woman in the hospital. I wonder if I could find out her name and the name of her husband and that boy—that lamb chop. They looked like they lived out in the county.

God bless those who have lost their parents. And those parents who have lost their children. God help the bombs kill as few people as possible. Let the world unite, oh Lord, not under tyranny but love.

This soar deserves pickin’ at. Oooh. I just wish sometimes that I could communicate everything telepathically to the leaders all over the world. Reach out telepathically. Sometimes I try. Maybe it works. Don’t let the world win. Don’t let the devil in. Keep the ashes safe. Bobby’s ashes.

Jack

Bobby and Daddy and Mama swirling and Ol’ Grand Dad and Mema and my body floats away. When I was with Bobby I felt Grand Dad and Ma close and all the elders near. When we were together, I felt all the ghosts of the ancestors present in the hall and the room and in the floorboards. Now they swirl around the room, down the hall, they call to me, reach out. Bobby with that wild look when he caught me. I didn’t want it, to do it to him. Roy would get us kicked out. He said Bobby would go to jail. But if I had told him, Bobby would have killed him and we would still be alive together. Does Bobby know why I done it? Does Christ give mercy to the sick? Do they get wise after they cross over? Be together there. Is it forever there? Is it frozen like ice? Like the moonbeam spotlight through the winder? Are they all there? Or separate? Can we find each other like on the earth? He found me and claimed me for his own. Did Daddy lead him to me—guide him to save me from dying on the concrete? It’s cold there. Is Bobby cold? Can he see me? I’m filthy. Bobby knew it when he saw me with Roy. He hated me when he died. Does that mean he’ll hate me always in eternity forever? I seen his face looking through the winder. I want him back inside me. I want to be wrapped around each other again in the blankets. I wonder if he and Daddy hate me together in their world and make plans to destroy me. Make me suffer. Do they know how I’m sorry? Am I alive?

Mona

“Just a little bit of peanut butter will take away the smell of alcohol on your breath.” That’s what Bobby used to say when he went off to work—when he went off to work. I would make him toast with peanut butter and grape jelly. Just like I make for my lamby chops. They love it, too. Skippy. God bless the women who work in smut films. Bless the bloody babies. Bless the ones who have no diapers.

I’m one of the few—one of the only ones in my order—one of the only ones who was married before. And one of the only ones that still wears this habit. The other day that boy called me penguin lady, and I was so tickled. I would miss that if we all stopped wearing it. Sometimes I think of this pink sundress I had when I was thirteen. My aunt made it for my birthday, June 21^st. It had real big blue buttons and yellow daisies on a pink cotton fabric. I wore it at the backyard party my uncle had for me, and this boy from across the street spilled red kool-aid all down the front. I loved that dress. I felt the cool liquid on my skin. It shocked in a nice way until I realized my new dress was stained. Looked like blood on the flowers—blood on the flowers. I see some of these girls downtown wearing sundresses sometimes and I think of it. I’m not envious of those girls. I’m not. I’m happy for them. They look so pretty. My uncle used to call me lamb chop.

Jack

We used to fly together on speed, up on the roof. He had big wings like a bat. We’d run and fly. We’d walk through the village where the people live in tents and lean-tos and things, down passed the tracks up on the hill. We’d walk through and talk with some of ‘em. I was like a Queen. They all looked to Bobby with respect. They’d ask questions and share information. Some people made stuff and we’d trade soap for oil and things—wood. Bobby’d trade stuff he’d found in old houses he didn’t want for other stuff to add onto our house. One guy made shoes. Sometimes we got our pills there but other times we’d go to the Aces for ‘em.

When I were at the Aces with Bobby—that was when I was so grand cuz sometimes he’d hold my hand and pull me to somewhere else across the room or down the stairs and talk with some folks we knew. I saw some folks I used to work with on 4th street and some we knew from around town. When Bobby’d grab my hand and pull me through the crowd I felt tall and strong. I knew nobody could do nothing to me and nobody had nothing I wanted. One time all these queens were leerin at him and finally after I stared back at ‘em mean, he pulled me to him and kissed me right there in front of all those faggots, and I knew we were the King and Queen. We’d go to places in the woods. We stayed in an ol’ wooden house that was part burned out but mostly was all there. There was a creek and lots of trees. Bobby didn’t even like to take stuff from there cuz he said it’d be takin away from something pure. But then he took some brass doorknobs and stuff cuz we went there and could tell some folks had been takin’, so we might as well. He’d point out all this stuff in houses and buildings called “details.” Sometimes we’d lie in the grass or pine needles by a creek or just in the lot behind the house. We’d lay in the grass and look up and watch the sky change. In the grass he was a snake with stripes. A strong and bright colored snake. He’d curl around me. Sometimes we’d take pills and fly up on the roof. He’d wrap around me after we flew back down to the ground. We’d shake together sometimes all night on the floor and wet each other cuz we couldn’t get up.

Mona

I used to get a ticklish sensation when I would look into his eyes. God bless the bruised and broken hearted. God bless the women who are beaten. Bless the men who beat them. Please Lord, let me forget.

Jack

I licked the box clean where we kept the pills and powder. Now they all gone. I need to go out to get some more. I don’t go outside much now.

Mona

The other day down by the center on Elm, I saw the blood there under his nose—that poor boy had blood coming from his nose. I cleaned it up as much as he would let me. He’s skittish like an alley cat. I could just lick him clean, Lord, just like a mamma cat. They say it’s not good to do these days because of the diseases. The plagues are acomin’, acomin’. The locusts gonna come. The seas arisin’. The earth is gonna burn. God bless that boy and all the others. God bless my boy, wherever he is, God bless my lamb chop. My bloody lamb chop.

Jack

Bobby came to visit last night. I felt his body come across the floor and lay down on top of me. I smelled his breath and felt his weight so I know it was him. I felt his stubble on my neck and his breath. The way our bodies fit together. It was so dark cuz the moon was new. I think he loves me again. That’s what he meant.

Mona

It’s true he used to beat me. I think the Lord took him away so that I would do God’s work. I eat the snow. I eat the snow and turn it into warm water so the flowers won’t freeze. Warm water. Warm like blood.I wonder if I should get up and tell the lamb chops to brush their teeth. (Looking to the canister)

Hey boy, you better brush ‘em. Hey you don’t have to brush all your teeth…just the ones you want to keep! Can we smoke in here?

Jack

I had to go out to find pills. I went down the way to the Aces Club. Down on the other side of the tracks through the scrap metal yard. I saw Roy. He pulled his cop car into the lot where I was walking through. He told me to get in the car and I tried to run but I fell. He told me to get in or he’d take me into the station. I wouldn’t sit in that seat next to him. I got in the back. He said ok. He took me to The Pancake House. One way down the highway. I ate a pancake with syrup. Bobby liked chocolate chip pancakes but they made me sick. But I ordered ‘em this time anyway. Roy told me Bobby’d been cremated and he had the ashes. If I wanted, he’d bring ‘em to the house cuz nobody else cared about ‘em—no family. I told him I wouldn’t give him any pleasure, but I could tell he didn’t want it anyway. He said he’d drop me home and to eat more. I told him to drop me at the Aces and he wanted to know why. He said he knew why. I said it’s none of your foul business. But he dropped me at home and said he’d be back sometime with the ashes. I guess he’s scared I might tell about how he killed a man. I told him I might tell. He said no one would believe a drugged out faggot. I decided to shut up, at least till I get the ashes.

Mona

I’m not really a nun because I had a man but he ran off. Bobby. I saw him walking down Elm one evening. I ran to him and said that God would forgive him and I forgave him, and he hit me so hard I went on my knees, then he said he was sorry. Then he kicked the sidewalk. I was just crying. I didn’t want to. It didn’t even hurt right then and there. There was just a little blood—where my knee scraped the sidewalk. But I cried. And he said, “Sorry.” He lingered a bit. I wanted to talk—to say something, but I just kept crying like a baby, like a madwoman. And he wondered off and I couldn’t even stand up for some time. I just kneeled there weeping like a banshee. And he wondered off again. I couldn’t even walk—I couldn’t get up.

He beat me one last time. When we were together. That last time. And I was still drinking some then. And he was always. And there was so much blood. And my boy. My boy came out covered in blood. Came out too soon. My boy who never made it to life. God bless the children who do not survive. Bless them there with you, oh Lord. Bless the babies who are never born—who don’t survive. Bless us women who lose them, oh Lord. Bobby blamed me. He was all in a rage. He would have been put away for what he did, but he ran off. And even after what happened, part of me still loved that man. God bless Bobby wherever he is. Deliver him from hell unto you. Deliver us all unto you, oh Father, Almighty Father. So many transfusions. There have been so many blood transfusions and God has seen me through them all, so far. So many. I wasn’t supposed to live this long. After what happened. They said it was a miracle that I survived. And it was, too. I told God that if I survived I would serve mankind—serve Him through serving mankind. All the little jesuses in the world. The bleeding hearts. The little lambchops. The bloody lambs.

Jack

I went back to the Aces, gettin’ some pills, and went down in the caves, and I thought I saw Bobby walk by. It’s dark down there and I smelt this cigar and it smelt like home, like Daddy in the hammock, and I went to it. I went to the cigar and it were dark. It were dark down in there. I followed the cigar smoke into the cave and he were standing there real still like George used to do with the cigar burnin’ and smoke running off the end. And he said what you want? And I said the cigar smell and speed. And he said get down. Get down on yer knees and I’ll give you what you want. And I said are you George—cuz he seemed to look like George and almost sound like George and I wanted to find out what had happened to George and tell him all about how I met Bobby, how he’d saved me on the sidewalk and how I’d quit with the men except for Roy cuz he’d reminded me of George sometimes—the smell o’ the car—and how I’d pretend I were with him and how he made me keep on with him after I’d wanted to quit. And about everything that happened about Bobby. “Boy get down.” And I thought of Daddy. “Boy, give Daddy his medicine. Don’t tremble like a girl.” And I knew in my heart that it warn’t George, but I’d hoped he were. And I went down with his hand on the back o’ my head. And I took him in my mouth but I didn’t even feel nothin’ anywhere. And it didn’t taste right. It were all just meat. And he shoved it so I gagged and he said, “You want that big dick, don’t you, boy?” And I said “yes.” And he said,”yes what?” And I said “Yes sir.” Cuz I knew that’s what he wanted me to say, but I didn’t feel like he was my Daddy or my Sir or nothing. And he kept on with it. And he pressed his burnin’ cigar against me. And he was shoving fingers in my hole sayin’ that I wanted his load inside me but that I’d have to work for it. And I started getting his perfume smell real strong up my nose and felt sick. And I said no. And he was shoving it inside me sayin how much I wanted it, but I didn’t want it at all. And I tried to make him stop. I yelled for him to stop, but he yelled and said I was a pussy girl cunt faggot and I’d beg for it or die. But I begged for him to stop and smelled his perfume. And I got sick but nothing came out. A little liquid. I was gaggin and he was spillin his business inside me and I thought of Bobby cuz I never felt so hollow on the inside -- and his perfume smell was all over me. I fell on the floor. I couldn’t move. I hurt. He peed on me. I didn’t want to move. I said why’d you done it to me? He said, “I was just trying to play your game.” And now I can’t get clean. I can’t get the smell off. I can’t get him out of me. I still smell him on me. That cigar mixed with some kind of sweet-smell perfume. Bobby never did wear that stuff. I warshed and warshed, but I can still smell him ever once in a while. I took more pills, but they made the smell e’en stronger and stronger and I can see Bobby’s mad face again. I can’t get clean again for Bobby or George or Daddy or Mamma. I’ll never get clean….Bobby’s soap is all used up. I can’t walk right or speak right or think clear. I need to go to where Bobby is I need to get out of this body is killing me it smells like that man I hate what I need out I smell that perfume cigar Bobby please help me I need to get out.

Mona

I’ve seen many of them die. But many have been saved. Many have been saved and died. Many have lived. Some have been lost. I wonder what ever happened to that boy. The one whose mamma died right there in the hospital room with her man and her boy looking on like sunflowers after the sun goes down—drooping their heads. God bless the little lambs. The bombs. The rockets red glare. The boys who sell their bottoms. The drug dealers. The nuns and the case workers. The nurses and the doctors and the men and the women and the sufferers. God bless us all. God bless the blood that unites us. The blood that keeps us alive. The blood that is spilled in vain.

I’d like to forget that one night. That time, Lord, please. My boy slipped out of me. My man slipped away. I slipped that one time. I just slipped up and I…

Jack

Bobby said he loved the Christ. He always said he wished I loved the Christ.

Mona

(overlapping) Praise Jesus.

Jack

He has this old Bible with a black leather cover and gold letters. And it scares me. I never seen the sense in it before. But now maybe. Now I feel it—I feel the Christ in the room at times and I’m afraid it’s too late. I put my hand on the book sometimes but I don’t know if I should. I don’t want to go to hell unless Bobby’s there. I want to run, but my legs won’t work right. I’ve forgotten how to walk. I sit leaned against the wall in my own puddle. My feet are like plastic, rubber, like I’m an amputee, but I still got ‘em. The joints bend strange. My body feels hot, then cold. It’s time. And I figured a way that I think I won’t burn in hell for. If I fall into sleep by the tracks, I may get hit by a train and I may not. It may slice me or I may wake up and pull away. But it won’t be my fault that the train comes, so I won’t have to go to hell, I don’t think. I’m going to go down tomorrow. I’m going tomorrow at dusk and then I’ll fall into sleep as the sun sinks so the driver won’t see me.

The suns comin’ up soon cuz the sky has that certain strange color of warning.

Mona

I used to wait for him when he’d be out all night. I’d be so angry and still I would just ache to see him. To touch him. Smell his breath on my neck—to smell his skin. I’d be so angry waitin’—his chicken gone cold. And I couldn’t help it. Lord, I couldn’t help it—I would slip my hand down there under my skirt…and wait for him—ache for him to come home. I would imagine him inside me. Well, I was his wife. I guess I still am. Now I’m the wife of the church. I’m the virgin bride of the Lord.

Jack

The birds say it’s mornin’, it’s time. I fade in and out for hours. I see Bobby’s face angry.

Mona

God bless all the women…and all the men...and all the little lamb chops on the earth. Now I’m not so self-centered. Sister Rose says that’s important for the sisters. It’s hard to be happy or to think very clearly when your mind is focused in on yourself. Even when it’s on someone else, it can still be on yourself if you’re focused on someone else for selfish reasons. For earthly gain. But I did love him. I do. And now I love the Lord. And his little lamb chops and his little flowers.

Jack

The sun moves and burns across the room. The floorboards heat up. And cool a bit.

Mona

I walk along without pause through the dark. I know my way. I can feel my way passed the scars into the past before the scars and what I done. I can feel my way back there to the land of pure white lamb chops.

Jack

Saved just enough speed to get me there—just some pieces. I’ve got to crawl down the stairs. I can do it. I can stand. I can walk some. I feel a little rested.

Mona

I would go to the tracks. I would go and lay down on the tracks and wait for the train if it would help that boy—if it would help my lamb chop.

Jack

Hold on the banister. Legs like jelly. One last bit.

Mona

And I know they told me I shouldn’t think it, but I wish I could have saved Bobby. If only I had been stronger in the Lord. If only Sister Rose could understand about the way we were. Maybe I could have saved him from death and hell.

Jack

Pull out of the wooden door. I cross through to the outside from our world. The sun hits the back of my head like damnation knocking me to the ground.

Mona

He used to dance nice. He could dance real nice.

Jack

I’ve got to crawl past that parking lot on the other side of the street; past a place that’s now all cinder block rubble on our side after Bobby knocked it down after that man came into our house. He’d knocked a row of blocks out all the way around till it fell. It was just empty anyway and that man had gotten in our winder from that roof. Now it’s just a pile of rubble. Crawlin over to the scrap metal yard as a cop car goes by but don’t stop—that’s good. Bobby’s ashes. I never got Bobby’s ashes. Was it Roy? Can’t stop now. Crawlin on and on till I get to the fence, crawl through a place in the fence where the metal’s bent back. Lucky to be small and I’m crawlin’.

Mona

I wish I could forget. There are things I’ve done. To hurt someone. I wish I could forget. My Daddy had another woman…an adultress. I was so ashamed and angry and momma…oh momma…and I could hear them through the wall. And I reached down…and I…I…

Jack

This place is wild, hills of scrap, big machines, crawl through the dirt yard in between. Piles of metal snakes, tires, old cars, scrap like me. That old brown dog with the broke tail sees me. What’s her name?

Mona

I was never married. Only to the Lord. It might have been nice, though.

Jack

Crawl on through the dirt yard. That ol’ dog is following behind. I can’t remember. She comes up shakin’ like me. Her nose has got some pieces of pink gum stuck on it. She shakes and licks my cheek. She’s covered in dirt like me. I crawl on and she follows. Teets hangin down. Through the grass up to where the ground comes up by the tracks. We get up there by the tracks. We lie down. She’s tired too. I think she’s only half alive too. We lie there breathin’. I can hear her beathin’. I can hear the sound of the earth, taste the metal track, smell the wood ties.

Mona

The other day I was taking the short cut back from the center to the home—they told me I shouldn’t walk down there on the tracks by the scrap yard—but I did, praise the Lord, and I saw that boy laid out on the train tracks. Just laid out right there across the tracks. Some mangy dog was barking. Running in circles. Gum stuck on her nose—a junkyard dog, you know? I ran to that scrap yard—those poor men half dead working there—they called me sister. I said, God bless you men. It was just a miracle that I came along when I did. The Lord brought me there to that boy. So skinny and sickly—I don’t know if he’ll make it, but he might. “If the good Lord’s willing and the creek don’t rise.” Well that’s what my uncle used to say. He used to call me lamb chop. He used to…

Jack

When I wake up we’re on this train. Me and the dog. Or not the dog. And it’s not a train. We’re movin’. But I can’t move. Voices. Then this man, these folks are pushing pulling this cart on wheels and we’re on it and it bumps. And they look down at us and talk among themselves. And they’re pushing us through the streets to somewhere. And it’s real bright, the light is blinding now. And we’re on a train movin’ with the rhythm and sound that reminds me of Bobby. Is he here? Am I in heaven? I think I smell that dog. There were people—there are people here but it’s grey now like twilight and the folks are grey figures movin around talking something…

Mona

I lost my boy. And I was blamed and beaten and I almost…they say it was a miracle I survived. Life is full of close calls. I used to be surprised when I survived them. Or when I witnessed others survive them.

Jack

Now it’s still. I feel I’m awake for the first time in a while. Calm like when Mama was alive and I was in the grass in the backyard and I’d hear Daddy’s mower. Caterpillars. Honeysuckle.

Mona

Now I just take another breath. And rejoice a little. Because isn’t life, after all, a celebration, oh, Lord? Even if it’s also a funeral?

Jack

There’s a tube stickin’ in my arm and a window with buildings outside. Big square buildings. And people stand around in a circle sometimes and they focus on me, I think, and sometimes I can understand what they say and sometimes I can’t, but I feel calm—it’s ok and they tell me I am holy. They say I am a holy one.

Mona

(Overlapping) Ye are holy. Ye are the holiest one.

Jack

And they bow together before me. And I’m not sure yet, but I think Bobby’s here somewhere.

Mona

He used to dance nice. He could dance real nice. I can dance the fried tomato. The catholic jig. The purple rose. The rubber hose.

Jack

I got it wrong because Roy came here and said he brought me the ashes but they’re keepin’‘em for me in a safe place till I’m well enough. He said I should be grateful I’m not dead. He said I got a screw loose and that’s the least of it. I can’t understand it all. He talks stuff.

Mona

(To the remains)

Well, my boy, ain’t no one comin’ here to pick you up. We’re two of a kind. Me and Bobby boy.

Jack

George said I could come home with him. George said he’s got the ashes in a porcelain urn. He’s got this house on a hill with grass and a creek and trees. He said he’s sorry for being gone. We’re livin’ in a castle on a grassy hill and you can look out and see the creek and hear it and look out on a sea of treetops. And the sky pink. The sun sinkin’ down.

Mona

Bobby needs a nice home. Bobby needs to feed the flowers. That’s what the Lord says.

Jack

And now it’s dark and I’m alone. Big house on a hill. Castle. All these birds—bats swarming around the house and I’m alone in this big castle and it’s dark and them bats swarm and I don’t know which room I’m in—

Mona

The blood. There was blood. Boy. Bobby. Blood. I can’t…I don’t…Oh Lord.

Jack

It’s dark. And George.

Mona

I’ll take these. I’ll take these for my own. My little lamby chop.

Jack

And Bobby.

Mona

I’m just gonna take these ashes out to the park and feed the flowers.

Mona exits.

Jack

Daddy…Bobby…George.

By Troy Hill