from "On the Road to What We're Tempted to Call Heaven" by Bernadette Mayer

I'm not being bitten
by heaven or by hell by god
but by the no-god's rain on the world
that my friends the moths hate
& so they stay away
old poets
so few & far between
leave so soon as visitors
without waiting for either the rain
or most of the fun
I go up to my room
if I have one
assuming the feel or sound of the rain
could be heaven
as if there was one
but I'd rather wonder how come
no such perfection
or knowledge of everything
from the beginning of the day
or the beginning of history
or the histories of everyone
beginning to end
or no end could be

DFW

"What looks like the cage's exit is actually the bars of the cage" 222

"The encaged and suicidal" 224

"Dealers, sirens of the other, second cage" 224

"Joelle's been in a cage since Y.T.S.D.B." 227

"Set free the encaged rapacious thing inside" 229

"The difference between suicide and homicide consisting [...] in where you think you discern the cage's door" 230

"The blind god of all doorless cages" 231

"[Cocaine] had been not just her encaging god, but her lover" 235

"A foreign academic with an almost Franciscan bald spot has the swirling limp of someone with a prosthesis" 229

Mother-death-cosmology 230

Entropy: fans - 233 "everything falls off the wall sooner or later" 235

"Putting ? after THE END" 235

"Entertainment is blind" 237

"These are facts. This room in this apartment is the sum of very many specific facts and ideas. There is nothing more to it than that" 239 (Wittgenstein)

"The Prize" 239

Iona 273

Morris Code 275

Individual v. Group 82-83

Without a thought 27, 44

- from index to Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace. I'm stunned at the sudden loss of this fiercely intelligent and laceratingly funny writer.

from "The School of the Dead" by Helene Cixous

Writing is this complex activity, "this learning to die," that is, not to kill, knowing there is death, not denying it and not proclaiming it...Our crime isn't what we think, it isn't the crime in the newspapers, it's always a bit less and a bit more. In life, as soon as I say my, as soon as I say my daughter, my brother, I am verging on a form of murder, as soon as I forget to unceasingly recognize the other's difference. You may come to know your son, your sister, your daughter well after thirty, forty, or fifty years of life, and yet during those thirty or forty years you haven't known this person who was so close. You kept him or her in the realm of the dead. And the other way around. Then the one who dies kills and the one who doesn't die when the other dies kills as well. Surviving is not what we think...

Field

What was it now? History was a black glass. Time was a black glass. The island was curved, the hand was curved, the middle wasn’t there anymore.

The Kling lobby

If you can imagine a tone, vibrating at a particular rate. This tone spread from the lips of one boy, a solar systemic dust-bunny, settling into the air, freely absorbing every particle caught in the summer sunlight.

The city is vast, and threatens to overwhelm this tone, although it also vibrates in response to it. We won’t call these vibrations harmonies, for that would be too easy a description. No, we will call them sympathetic, although they are, by their nature, ambivalent. Being vibrations, they have, for the longest time, stood outside of the political process.

The city balanced on the edge of vast abyss that stretched over a black lake. So that the buildings of the city, many of which were cloud-shrouded, would not topple into the lake, every building was tethered to the ground with strong cables made of steel. We entered the Kling lobby as it was being destroyed by the tone. Having known of its onset for quite some time (years, in fact), we were surprised only by its forceful insistence. Frankly, we blew it off for a while. And then we were worried; could feel our cells shift, a micron, a pixel, an electron displacement.

The Kling lobby is a series of planes and fabrics. The fabrics include velvets, and others, more space-age and cleanly. The fabrics shuffle against our skin, sloughing off dead cells. The cells collect, shed moisture, consider, then reconsider themselves as mite-food, and squirm at the very thought of it. In short: utter consumption. Instantaneous.

The glass in the Kling lobby is vibrating so as to be invisible.
The structural supports crumbling.
Survival!
Limited from dust clouds.
Overheard against the open mouths: “Cover your eyes!”

Now here’s a funny story; you’ll laugh at this: The body swung itself over the stairwell, swollen to twice its original size. Fat cells reproduced until skin split. Arms growing out of the end places - punctuation. No preciousness here, just survival. The waxed floors shone, and our shoe leather couldn’t get a grip. Abrupt floor covered in something, and then, the usual: bright light, white-flash-what-have-you.

A cashless, armless people move through the streets. The snow falls, like always, on the armed and the armless. The people join in harmonies.

"A fat photograph..." by John Wilkinson.

A fat photograph

about to be cropped


where what is incidental

bloats an incident


with light or dead space

The elements

will say Ah

drawn close


the moles & needles

drill unpractised flesh


She dies less

for points of their


invention, solid caps

over points of entry


than a quick–to–the–jaw

reasonableness


without waste or

overlapping


idly ripping

incidental blossom
off

-from Proud Flesh.

At a loss

Now,
if only he placed his thumb
salted or
part-knurled
on newsprint next to my ear
I could ink it.

Fight

MK Ultra and MK Olsen circle each other warily, sweat beading on the dry parts of their skin, but not on the elbows, which remain dry, and are not formerly dry.

Further excursions

My loves,

This excursion into what they are calling quiet space has been unlike others.  The air was duller, maybe the grafts have flattened, the mountains are no longer the kind of music I had grown used to hearing. There are too many folds, and some are blaming the hypoxia in the oceans on demons; I can't help but think of the stupidity of our own recent demonology. I suppose these sort of stratifications are inevitable. I am unable to write much more at this time; both of you should take care not to mention any of this to R_______.  He has his ears to the speaker, but is unable to graft from there to there.

Yours,

H.

Habilitation

My Dear Fortune,

I have thought of writing to you for some time now.  The evenings on the island have been humid and unpleasant; the curvature of the earth here is such that I have felt like nothing more than a tuning fork for suffering. The only news I have received from the mirrore realm was a very desperate letter from your dear father, and there were no details, only that you were up to your neck in politics, or at least its consequences.  

I hoped to avoid the conventional lines, but it seems that those suspect words are all that I have with which to write. Not to evince melodrama, in these crystalline times, but I am very upset by your, and Ljuba's, behavior, that you haven't found time to write a line since our meeting in Vienna. I know, my attitude towards life is increasingly petit-bourgeois, but with that dreadful scare still in my bones, I wonder if it wouldn't have happened had you written. I shall return to the sanatorium this eve, and am hoping against hope that you will be able to join me again. There is a village nearby where the fever has not yet touched; it is no floating-world, but will do for the moment.

Under some duress from the assembled martyrs, I have begun writing again, starting with a portrait of Max Weber (you know his achievements in some forms of quiet space travel). I think often of our past together, your image a song, the grain of your voice with me late in the night. My exile to these hotels and swamps has led me to further consider the difference between the concepts Gelten and Sollen (there may in fact be some useful gesture there). Although, as you know, perhaps better than I, we are each no Leo Naphta, caught deep inside magic mountain.

Although I don't wish to keep you from your studies, please let me know if you have thoughts on the colloquium. P____ has expressed his distaste for my politics, but then again, he was the first to decry quiet space, and that has gotten our cause nowhere. Don't forget about the machines, or the sites of prophecy! Without maintenance they, also, will be lost. Be secure in your feelings towards E_____. Her love affair with that musician is imminent. The three of us are living together, although with physical proximity comes inner separation; the only real solution seems to be a friendly parting after the war. I am suddenly aware of every fold in my skeleton; my own capacity for balance seems to be growing.

I affectionately embrace you.

Until then,

H.

Haiku 18

- From 'Mostly Sitting Haiku," Allen Ginsberg.

0 to 9

-Sunrise, a song of two humans. F.W. Murnau. 1927.


Midsummer mix here.

/moonpatrol/tetine/ellen allien/gui boratto/zoo brazil
/butch & amir/traffickers/rhythm & sound/the field
/djosos krost/the presets/m83/apparat

How much it matters?

|___this much and no more___|

Six Lines

In late capitalism

guilt becomes technology.

Technology agrees with hunger.

Desire is part of being drawn.

Being is difficult to tell.

Speaking is compared to seeing.

Pastoral reprise

The hills were alive with music,
but more like living
with singing.
In the sense of:
that hand is a particle,
this, a
mechanical sound, almost,
but hollow.
In the sense of:
turtles
Being emptied from their shells.
Into the soup
was the rule.

God, he says, we've filled our hills
with this shit.

That's not polite, she returns,
scratching her shoulder against the bark.
Which, then,
unsuprisingly,
fell to the dirt.
That's just not polite.

I can remember discussing Engels,
and certain utopian metaphysicians,
but that was always
beside the point.
Hills, meadows, the like,
were beside the point.

The point was to think like rats.

Not hum
Beethoven.

She gestures:
I like that one that ends with cannons.

At hospital

Bones are unlike other
Bones, less rigid, perhaps.

I watched the others unfold
their vacation stiffness through the
tram station gates.

It only occurred to a
grasshopper (i thought)
to fly through
that brittle crowd,
checking each point
for mass and temperature.

Some anxieties about evolution

This morning, while showering, I noticed a single scale on my leg. It was iridescent, primarily on the green end of the spectrum, and pulled at my skin as I inserted a fingernail under its edge. I bent over, water forced my eyes shut; I could still make out the flashing scale behind my closed lids. A little breathless, I reached to turn the water off, blinking at the sudden brightness.

Psychological State

"There are no psychological states." Her voice drifted out over the crowd, her eyes edged with red effort. "What can you assume from language gifts? Our electrons are charged - that has to be enough." Her arm raised for emphasis, she noticed the frayed end of her suit jacket. Funny to have not noticed this before, she thought, her lips suddenly dry. At that moment in Oklahoma, two young girls were shot in the head, and left at the side of the road, their hair laced with dust. Early the next morning, the sun showed no signs of accelerating its pace, as if acknowledging an impossibility. Thinking - that sounds too much like a poem - her old worries returned, and she erased the line.

Quality of Life Czar

b:
how is it?


a:
quality of life index: magenta
happiness index: attachment to existence
banana index: several
sunglasses index: grey gradient
science fiction index: stalker
secondary science fiction index: solaris
name of g_d index: eight
parasite index: vigorous protozoa

Political pictorialism

Cats' looks are often
in the direction of mice,
it's said.
This transposition -
some brain-stem hope for blood -
fails as a measure of desire,
as cats are equally moved by the sudden
slope or the still pulse of grass,
simply put, for rolling,
or licking underneath a tail.

Why argue for slaughter, then;
there is no ancient marble of,
say, Democritus or some other
molecular heir,
that has not given way to
gentle haemorrhage,
rapid or not.