Wednesday, February 26, 2020

 if you enjoy frightening others, you will be reborn as a centipede.



jiggly morning

pushing generator 
for a long distance response

there is a problem with the mirror
and theres no miracle people

you ask a centipede which
leg comes after which

shrugging in the fog and stiffness,
it says you have to imagine it.

Monday, February 24, 2020



Everything’s a Fake

Coyote scruff in canyons off Mulholland Drive. Fragrance of sage and rosemary, now it’s spring. At night the mockingbirds ring their warnings of cats coming across the neighborhoods. Like castanets in the palms of a dancer, the palm trees clack. The HOLLYWOOD sign has a white skin of fog across it where erotic canyons hump, moisten, slide, dry up, swell, and shift. They appear impatient—to make such powerful contact with pleasure that they will toss back the entire cover of earth. She walks for days around brown trails, threading sometimes under the low branches of bay and acacia. Bitter flowers will catch her eye: pink and thin honeysuckle, or mock orange. They coat the branches like lace in the back of a mystical store. Other deviant men and women live at the base of these canyons, closer to the city however. Her mouth is often dry, her chest tight, but she is filled to the brim with excess idolatry. It was like a flat mouse—the whole of Los Angeles she could hold in the circle formed by her thumb and forefinger. Tires were planted to stop the flow of mud at her feet. But she could see all the way to Long Beach through a tunnel made in her fist. Her quest for the perfect place was only a symptom of the same infection that was out there, a mild one, but a symptom nonetheless.



Footsteps 

I have never arrived
into a new life yet.

Have you?

Do you find the squeak
of boots on snow

excruciating?

Have you heard people
say, It wasn’t me,

when they accomplished
a great feat?

I have, often.
But rarely.

                        •
     
Possibility
is one of the elements.
It keeps things going.

The ferry
with its ratty engine
and exactitude at chugging
into blocks and chains.

Returning as ever
to mother’s house
under a salty rain.

Slave up, slave down.

diggn for worms


gummy worm lures

 wafting from underneath chinese groccery store 
is smell of gummy worm lures from dads tackle box
they want to dance still


Thursday, February 20, 2020

orca speech

observation tower nearby shamus breeching under clouds making quick circles


Monday, February 10, 2020

History and Etymology for vatic

Latin vātēs, vātis "prophet, seer" (akin to Gaulish—Greek spelling—ouā́ teis "those performing sacred rites," Old Irish fáith "seer, prophet," fáth "prophecy, prophetic wisdom," Welsh gwawd "song of praise, satire"; Gothic wods "possessed," Old English wōd "raging, senseless," Old Norse óðr "frantic, furious," all going back to Germanic *wōd-; Old High German wuot "rage, frenzy," going back to Germanic *wōdi-; Old English wōth "sound, noise, voice, song," Old Norse óðr "mind, sense, song, poetry," both going back to Germanic *wōþa-) + -IC entry 1

Sunday, February 9, 2020

tossing her head in the air


MOYRA DAVEY

 — Ultimately I probably write to forget, to vacate certain things from the psyche. But also to connect, and to play. That was the counsel of a very wise poet/writer friend, and it’s the thing I always try not to forget.

aaaaa

 I've always hoped to put over things as directly and rawly as I possibly can, and perhaps, if a thing comes across directly, people feel that that is horrific. Because, if you say something very directly to somebody, they're sometimes offended, although it is a fact. Because people tend to be offended by facts, or what used to be called truth[...]
 You could say that a scream is a horrific image; in fact, I wanted to paint the scream more than the horror. I think, if I had really thought about what causes somebody to scream, it would have made the scream that I tried to paint more successful. Because I should in a sense have been more conscious of the horror that produced the scream. In fact they were too abstract.... I think that they come out of a desire for ordering and for returning fact onto the nervous system in a more violent way. Why, after the great artists, do people ever try to do anything again? Only because, from generation to generation, through what the great artists have done, the instincts change. And, as the instincts change, so there comes a renewal of the feeling of how can I remake this thing once again more clearly, more exactly, more violently. You see, I believe that art is recording. I think it's reporting. And I think that in abstract art, as there's no report, there's nothing other than the aesthetic of the painter and his few sensations. There's never any tension in it.
--Francis Bacon

Friday, February 7, 2020





Token Resistance

John Ashbery

copyright ©2007 by John Ashbery

As one turns to one in a dream
smiling like a bell that has just
stopped tolling, hold out a book
and speaks: “All the vulgarity
of time, from the Stone Age
to our present, with its noodle parlors
and token resistance, is as a life
to the life that is given you. Wear it,”
so must one descend from checkered heights
that are our friends, needlessly
rehearsing what we will say
as a common light bathes us,
a common fiction reverberates as we pass
to the celebration. Originally
we weren’t going to leave home. But made bold
somehow by the rain we put our best foot forward.
Now it’s years after that. It
isn’t possible to be young anymore.
Yet the tree treats me like a brute friend;

my own shoes have scarred the walk I’ve taken.



Mutability ["We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon"]


                                         I.
We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
    How restlessly they speed and gleam and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly! yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:—

                                         II.
Or like forgotten lyres whose dissonant strings
    Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
    One mood or modulation like the last.

                                        III.
We rest—a dream  has power to poison sleep;
    We rise—one wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep,
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:—

                                       IV.
It is the same!—For, be it joy or sorrow,
    The path of its departure still is free;
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
    Nought may endure but Mutability.

what matters?

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
--MLK
half real, half imaginary, with boundaries nowhere

the soft hunt

Reconstructing a lost code for a humanist audience
undermeanings and undersongs
signals of myths, signals of symbols

"we are dealing with a semilogical code for expressing intention in consecrated language"


"the remains of antiquity in the Renaissance often crystallize into a coded visual language deployed as part of a works inventive processes: Images of transformation in the 16th century often stand as concentrated miniatures speaking their own language and epitomizing whole metaphoric stories."

Leonard Barkan


Nature’s Work of Art: The Human Body as Image of the World.
 By Leonard Barkan

ornaments of time perception that influence the present deed


the dramatists secret comment


Boccaccio-- to mix fable with discourse



Achille Bocchi's emblem
Cum
virtute alma consentit
vera
voluptas"

Anamorphosis is a distorted projection or perspective requiring the viewer to occupy a specific vantage point, use special devices or both to view a recognizable image.