Thomas Lowe Taylor -- BUENOS AIRES

A style is also a behavior

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Timing is everything. Here we are with our millennial gloom intact--this is the hour of which we have spoken, assuming, that is, that we have met and have spoken. If we had, there would be no doubt about it, we would arrive at this juncture after only one or two drinks. This IS the hour of which we spoke. The global poetic has collapsed, there is no world order, no rules, no clues about where to go and what to do, no indications about what the extent and possible rewards for the work even are, no reason to extend one's self beyond rote behavior, the existential fart. "Exposing myself/I create myself" (the sudden fart of billy childish, x-ray, San Francisco, 1996).

When the canon has collapsed there is nothing left beyond the personal statement. The Personal has the force of the Global by abdication of any sensory rule beyond pain and pleasure, and that's up for discussion too. Attempts to relate one field of behavior to another are equally doomed by virtue of a seclusion-within-specialization (eg, refuge) which schools out various models of persuasion from any potential of combination or extension. In the post post-modern era, turf has been defined and stands have been taken. A territorial imperative is latent within the sense of disorder.

That's good, you say, that's just the way it should be. Perhaps you have finally penetrated to the pineal gland of your own poetic, perhaps an ourobouric loop has implanted your own conscious mentation into itself as both cause and symptom of what must follow. And surely, a lot of happy-go-lucky fanciness has lately filled the air about what will happen and what will not. But surely, under the sign of the experimental, some luck might burst the knot, might indeed skin the cat.

The primary color of the personal is expressed under the sign of free association, not that it is a particularly "free" method of composition. Indeed, the composition itself (as a goal that is, as a composition is the result of intent) becomes the clue to what a statement is, and in the ebb and flow of the energies of the associative, in the collaged sensate of the right of being there at all, and in the course of being at all, a self is intimated and shown, not evaded nor spoken, not even included in the act itself, it is a consequence of the act, a mutation toward redemption.

Not to belabor this, but Rumi's love poems and the work of the Sahaja poets of India tie free association to the discovery of love within syntactical structs; in the free choice of language sounds, love must become intimated as the enabling energy of the choice process, one cannot choose down into the dark without some great effort, the natural surf is up and into the light. And as a style is also a behavior, the work done cannot but indicate the path outward, into the light and into and toward love.

What of the whip, you ask, what of the cruel, what of the boot and whip and the sadistic master enslaving the queen, what of the dishoner of the evil ones? It's a mission and a cause too, but not so much left alone as abandoned as imperfect. In the scan-choice of the indominant, only light will rise. Nowhere in evidence at the moment. Well, somewhere. Nonetheless we see artists at the end of the period struggling to create the new era with its success and its evolution of love into something political. Poetry comes in the guise of its sadness, what it carries before itself as a warning and a cause.

So when there are no longer any rules to break, something emerges with the necessity of the very doubt which gave rise to its confusion with the bold as a way of life. There are no structs really but the linear and the absolute which have evaporated. And while it might be commonplace and a bit romantic to image that out of every chaos some new order declares the phoenix story to be borne out in the random. The positions to which loyalties are gathered are themselves delusions of the chaos itself. Why else does the "free" sound of the human voice now deliver itself in the guise of the pontifical and the anthemic?

Better you say than the old bullshit, the old theocracy of intents and seriousness, Iron John in the john. Let it go, you say, and fall into history with hammer and tong, bleating the wilderness into shadow or partitions of change. In the "broken sentence", what passes within struct is neither laid nor tended, said perhaps to be less serious than its diagram, but nonetheless a petitioner at the gates of reason which is no longer significant in its carrying forth of the reason itself which countered the breadth of the act within its sentinels and seasons, got it? Behavior that, you say, and let it go.

Nor a journal statement, the names just do not matter, it's the juice, you say, we need the juice and it becomes the substant which it has replaced, leaning forward, spitting into the gloom. Like a virgin. But the anthemic comes as a surprise, since what gets out is what sells and must therefore strike a responsive nerve in the body politic, is how I think it goes. And as "youth is wasted on the young," the anthemic becomes a cause of its own seriousness, too much so, really. Leaving you, just, out there, making things like [emMerCormer-litePinTer/dude] though the faith that the same energy would, might, leak through the screen, the screen of attention, that was an unspoken goal and assumption of what was Not co-opted in the late sixties into the marketing plan for the Millennium we recently see in the Olympics' commercials. The Millennium is for sale.

So it's a kind of bitter derision which abandons art to its detractors, or sells its futures off to designers and perhaps to leaking dogs. The insubstantial range of possibilities is not necessarily extended by "the experimental" nor is it even a description of what is (may be) actually happening. Of course we hope to be seen as "in control", but of what?
Our own decisions are blunted by what we assume to have known about what we might have done somewhere, sometime, to some one. But what we know is too elusive in itself to describe, so it is in the passions which we bring to the topic that the stuff begins to be done at all. And it is not "teacher training" that is taking place in the gymnasium, it is not even basketball. It is poetry. When all else has collapsed and failed, still there is poetry. In fact Only Then is there poetry, and what preceded it seen as exercises in folly which only perpetuated various forms of expression, not anything which might have given rise to its contents or, perhaps, some necessity to its energies.

So it is motive and stain which pursue the residues into inattention or composition. And now that the sub-text has finally been stumbled upon, it's high time to consider overtones as important as the combinations which give rise to them, as if the tonality of a piece were more important than its lingo. All these things are easily read but seldom noticed, but then that is their potential, their impetus toward the cosmic, for if it doesn't try to get through that door it is stalled in traffic waiting for the sirens to pass, and that's it. We will not elude a history of our own making nor detain possibilities which the work reveals as occurring within us, it is no longer possible to hide what we are, and that is the main detail of free choice made eloquent in the experimental itself, not some kind of "scientific" process of hide and seek, of definition and deformation, of the twinning absolutes of beauty and disgust each with the other for having existed at all, no, it is more like a sunset in your heart, no eloquence has been determined and yet something has moved. That is why the past has abandoned us. Ouroboric present. A detail.

It all smells of a cargo cult, wicker airplanes, coke bottles, Close Encounters and all that other worldly tripe resounds like wish fulfillment when there really is no evidence that there is anyone here but us. The radio antennae have not brought in star trek from another dimension, itself through itself, you might say. Rather a little more brave and, uh, respectful to acknowledge that we're it. It's like that in poetry. Comparisons are made, lists are made up, names added and others penciled out, when really, Really, there's none here but us, the others are all dead and we're the only show in town. So what we do, or better yet, what gets done is what is there at all and what might have been or what ought to be are simply polemic.

In looking at the evidence, we note that certain liberties have been taken and that the consequences of our acts, of our positions, is that we are in danger of eliminating the audience in favor of our right to do what we wish. I mean, try money, its cheaper than credit. Try something, the alternative to nothing. How an entire cosmos can be induced from the choice part of "free choice" is beyond me. "Freedom is expensive", Bill says.

What we invent is already there, it's the discovery that counts.

Hubris takes control, or tries. And we Have been sentenced, syntaxed, whatever. So we change the modus and work at the detention of the absolute, enervating chance into its perspective on love, that she would come to you singing, again and again, in your dream made perfect, and then discovered in the light in the room itself. Innovated. Brought up in the style of the song of the moment of the breaking away itself. And so no one asks what it is about, avoiding being strained onto the rock, heart ripped from you daily, no, we avoid that like we avoid unpleasant confrontations in restaurants, and so we avoid them altogether, we think either by not eating or by not noticing what is there.

So what? Like, "keep up the good work" rings, hollow. We do what we must because we must, and that's about it. But do we remember, anything, and is anything worth remembering? We have this emphasis on making it new each time starting from the nowhere we came upon. Is that a truth? The blood pumps and sucks us inside out, blood upon our leanings and fervors, blood upon the white light of our innocence and youth, blood in the fabric of our making. You would become translucent to me and sing to me and touch me, you would make life into the season of which we dream, you would be real in those choices which inform your magnitude and severance from the cult of what follows. That's it. Linguaphonic and obverse, the tool of the rites of passage we inherit and promise. After the clever games, delivery and renewal, tones of light.