2.28.13

What you are willing to do is
rustle in some leaves             and find

a blistered & forthright & grubby Present.

There is no again except this again. There is some old fabric that can be sewn.
The water in the pool is
not the sky,                     as much as it seems.

The sun shone on the metal roof and
I photographed the yellow center of the             hole it made.

Someone could call it burrowing, but there was the presence of heat.
Belief is not a thing that could bear being posted.
The breaking light became a curled beak,
                                                                   uprooting eyes.

You sent me a picture
of a bag and I thought:                                      what to put in it.

This Just In (fri.2.22.13.10:50)

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via cnn.com

"The Privilege of Thinking" by Pier Paolo Pasolini, from Roman Poems

Ah, to withdraw into myself and think!
To tell myself, here, now, I'm thinking, sitting
on a seat, by a friendly window.
I can think!
In the miasma of the Piazza Vittorio
the morning burns my eyes, my face,
and the miserable sticky smell of coal
mortifies the thirst of my senses:
a terrible pain weighs down my heart,
so alive again.

Beast dressed as a man,
boy sent around the world alone,
with his coat and his hundred lire,
heroic, ridiculous, I too am going to work
to make a living...A poet, it's true,
but now here I am on this train
sadly loaded with clerks,
as if for a joke, white with weariness,
here I am sweating out of my salary,
dignity of my false youth,
a misery from which with inner humility
and ostentatious roughness
I defend myself...

But I think! I think in a friendly corner,
absorbed for the whole half hour ride,
from San Lorenzo to the Capannelle,
from the Capannelle to the airport,
in my thoughts, looking for infinite lessons,
for one verse only, for a fragment of verse.
What a stupendous morning! Unlike any other!
New threads of thin mist
over the aqueduct banks
covered with houses small as kennels,
and abandoned scattered streets
used only by the poor.
Now an outburst of sun
on fields, grottos, caves,
a natural baroque,
with green laid-on by a stingy Corot.
Now a flash of gold on the tracks
where with their delicious brown rumps
horses run,
ridden by boys who seem even younger
and don't know there's light
in the world all around them.



trans. by Lawrence Ferlinghetti & Francesca Valente

Transport fantasy

Could this be the vibration we had
withdrawn from, or caused to play? The
plane landed in Belgrade softly. We, together
in a room at last, watched Fantomas,
thinking of doors within doors, the
spirit a moveable hinge. I should not say
spirit, for you do not recognize it.
By recognize I mean see towards it, around corners.
'So medieval' you thought, a thought forced, and forced into
the top of words, but not seemed-forced;
it seemed simple. I could not drown in architecture,
but I could drown in clouds of data. Or so she
said when she left. Or so the city, stretched
forward into the yellow mist, yellowed. And
the last line was longest, delivering the
bodied mass to cubed labor.

a bit of analysis

WHAT ARE WE REPRESSING?

WE ARE REPRESSING EVERYTHING.

WHAT AREN'T WE REPRESSING?

WE AREN'T REPRESSING ANYTHING.

love and strife (in need of foreheads)

Here sprang up many faces without necks, arms wandered without shoulders, unattached, and eyes strayed alone, in need of foreheads (B 57).

Many creatures were born with faces and breasts on both sides, man-faced ox-progeny, while others again sprang forth as ox-headed offspring of man, creatures compounded partly of male, partly of the nature of female, and fitted with shadowy parts. (B 61)

For with earth do we see earth, with water water, with air bright air, with fire consuming fire, with Love do we see Love, Strife with dread Strife. (B 109)


Excerpts from the Fragments of Empedocles, "On Nature", by the pre-Socratic philosopher and poet Empedocles. 

uplifts hand

Example of sentence diagram from 1853 textbook on practical grammar by S.W. Clark.

from "My Life" by Lyn Hejinian (One begins as a student but becomes a friend of clouds)

As for we who "love to be astonished"

You spill the sugar when you lift the spoon. My father had filled an old apothecary jar with what he called "sea glass," bits of old bottles rounded and textured by the sea, so abundant on beaches. There is no solitude. It buries itself in veracity. It is as if one splashed in the water lost by one's tears. My mother had climbed into the garbage can in order to stamp down the accumulated trash, but the can was knocked off balance, and when she fell she broke her arm. She could only give a little shrug. The family had little money but plenty of food. At the circus only the elephants were greater than anything I could have imagined. The egg of Columbus, landscape and grammar. She wanted one where the playground was dirt, with grass, shaded by a tree, from which would hang a rubber tire as a swing, and when she found it she sent me. These creatures are compound and nothing they do should surprise us. I don't mind, or I won't mind, where the verb "to care" might multiply. The pilot of the little airplane had forgotten to notify the airport of his approach, so that when the lights of the plane in the night were first spotted, the air raid sirens went off, and the entire city on that coast went dark. He was taking a drink of water and the light was growing dim. My mother stood at the window watching the only lights that were visible, circling over the darkened city in search of the hidden airport. Unhappily, time seems more normative than place. Whether breathing or holding the breath, it was the same thing, driving through the tunnel from one sun to the next under a hot brown hill. She sunned the baby for sixty seconds, leaving him naked except for a blue cotton sunbonnet. At night, to close off the windows from view of the street, my grandmother pulled down the window shades, never loosening the curtains, a gauze starched too stiff to hang properly down. I sat on the windowsill singing sunny lunny teena, ding-dang-dong. Out there is an aging magician who needs a tray of ice in order to turn his bristling breath into steam. He broke the radio silence. Why would anyone find astrology interesting when it is possible to learn about astronomy. What one passes in the Plymouth. It is the wind slamming the doors. All that is nearly incommunicable to my friends. Velocity and throat verisimilitude. Were we seeing a pattern or merely an appearance of small white sailboats on the bay, floating at such a distance from the hill that they appeared to be making no progress. And for once to a country that did not speak another language. To follow the progress of ideas, or that particular line of reasoning, so full of surprises and unexpected correlations, was somehow to take a vacation. Still, you had to wonder where they had gone, since you could speak of reappearance. A blue room is always dark. Everything on the boardwalk was shooting toward the sky. It was not specific to any year, but very early. A German goldsmith covered a bit of metal with cloth in the 14th century and gave mankind its first button. It was hard to know this as politics, because it plays like the work of one person, but nothing is isolated in history--certain humans are situations. Are your fingers in the margin. Their random procedures make monuments to fate. There is something still surprising when the green emerges. The blue fox has ducked its head. The front rhyme of harmless with harmony. Where is my honey running. You cannot linger "on the lamb." You cannot determine the nature of progress until you assemble all of the relatives.

Yet we insist that life is full of happy chance

The windows were open and the morning air was, by the smell of lilac and some darker flowering shrub, filled with the brown and chirping trills of birds. As they are if you could have nothing but quiet and shouting. Arts, also, are links. I picture an idea at the moment I come to it, our collision. Once for a time, anyone might have been luck's child. Even rain didn't spoil the barbecue, in the backyard behind a polished traffic, through a landscape, along a shore. Freedom then, liberation later. She came to babysit for us in those troubled years directly from the riots, and she said that she dreamed of the day when she would gun down everyone in the financial district. That single telephone is only one hair on the brontosaurus. The coffee drinkers answered ecstatically. If your dog stays out of the room, you get the fleas. In the lull, activity drops. I'm seldom in my dreams without my children. My daughter told me that at some time in school she had learned to think of a poet as a person seated on an iceberg and melting through it. It is a poetry of certainty. In the distance, down the street, the practicing soprano belts the breeze. As for we who "love to be astonished," money makes money, luck makes luck. Moves forward, drives on. Class background not landscape--still here and there in 1969 I could feel the scope of collectivity. It was the present time for a little while, and not so new as we thought then, the present always after war. Ever since it has been hard for me to share my time. yellow of that sad room was again the yellow of naps, where she waited, restless, faithless, for more days. They say that the alternative for the bourgeoisie was gullibility. Call it water and dogs. Reason looks for two, then arranges it from there. But can one imagine a madman in love. Goodbye; enough that was good. There was a pause, a rose, something on paper. I may balk but I won't recede. Because desire is always embarrassing. At the beach, with a fresh flush. The child looks out. The berries are kept in the brambles, on wires on reserve for the birds. At a distance, the sun is small. There was no proper Christmas after he died. That triumphant blizzard had brought the city to its knees. I am a stranger to the little girl I was, and more--more strange. But many facts about a life should be left out, they are easily replaced. One sits in a cloven space. Patterns promote an outward likeness, between little white silences. The big trees catch all the moisture from what seems like a dry night. Reflections don't make shade, but shadows are, and do. In order to understand the nature of the collision, one must know something of the nature of the motions involved--that is, a history. He looked at me and smiled and did not look away, and thus a friendship became erotic. Luck was rid of its clover.

One begins as a student but becomes a friend of clouds

Back and backward, why, wide and wider. Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality. The continent is greater than the content. A river nets the peninsula. The garden rooster goes through the goldenrod. I watched a robin worming its way on the ridge, time on the uneven light ledge. There as in that's their truck there. Where it rested in the weather there it rusted. As one would say, my friends, meaning no possession, and don't harm my trees. Marigolds, nasturtiums, snapdragons, sweet William, forget-me-nots, replaced by chard, tomatoes, lettuce, garlic, peas, beans, carrots, radishes--but marigolds. The hum hurts. Still, I felt intuitively that this which was incomprehensible was expectant, increasing, was good. The greatest thrill was to be the one to "tell." All rivers' left banks remind me of Paris, not to see or sit upon but to hear spoken of. Cheese makes one thirsty but onions make a worse thirst. The Spanish make a little question frame. In the case, propped on a stand so as to beckon, was the hairy finger of St. Cecilia, covered with rings. The old dress is worn out, torn up, dumped. Erasures could not serve better authenticity. The years pass, years in which, I take it, events were not lacking. There are more colors in the great rose window of Chartres than in the rose. Beside a body, not a piece, of water. Serpentine is fool's jade. It is on a dressed stone. The previousness of plants in prior color--no dream can come up to the original, which in the common daylight is voluminous. Yet he insisted that his life had been full of happy chance, that he was luck's child. As a matter-of fact, quite the obverse. After a 9-to-5 job he got to just go home. Do you have a compulsion to work and then did you have a good time. Now it is one o'clock on the dot, but that is only a coincidence and it has a bad name. Patriots drive larger cars. At the time the perpetual Latin of love kept things hidden. We might be late to the movies but always early for the kids. The women at the parents' meeting must wear rings, for continuity. More sheep than sleep. Paul was telling me a plot which involved time travel, I asked, "How do they go into the future?" and he answered, "What do you mean?--they wait and the future comes to them--of course!" so the problem was going into the past. I think my interests are much broader than those of people who have been saying the same thing for eight years, or so he said. Has the baby enough teeth for an apple. Juggle, jungle, chuckle. The hummingbird, for all we know, may be singing all day long. We had been in France where every word really was a bird, a thing singing. I laugh as if my pots were clean. The apple in the pie is the pie. An extremely pleasant and often comic satisfaction comes from conjunction, the fit, say, of comprehension in a reader's mind to content in a writer's work. But not bitter.

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Bad Infinity

"The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction cannot so readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact. Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial."

-Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor.


"A fundamental aspect of No-Stop City is the disappearance of architecture and its replacement by furniture design, which was seen as a more effective form of urbanization because it is more flexible, and therefore more consumable and reproducible, than architecture. But if No-Stop City was imagined as the ultimate shock therapy for urbanization by its exaggeration of urbanizations' consequences, in reality, the tendency described by No-Stop City evolved not toward infinity and the final dissolution of the city, but rather toward a process of bad infinity. Following Hegel, the condition of the noncity proposed by No-Stop City perpetually undergoes a process of compulsive repetition, in which any complexity or contradiction, any difference or novelty, is an incentive for the infinite reproduction of the system itself and thus for its stasis."

-Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Possibility of An Absolute Architecture.

Archizoom Associati. No-Stop City, 1968-1972.

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the leaves and our faces

„In the summer of 2001 we spent two weeks in Cala Moraia, Mallorca. From our hotel balcony we saw locals gathering regularly in the shade of a group of trees to play boule. We would sit there for hours, in the heat of the day, not talking much. I remember falling asleep and waking up again. After sunset the lights of the nearby bars and restaurants illuminated the promenade, the leaves and our faces.“

*Katharina Dietz: Hybride Erzählformen