Thomas Lowe Taylor -- Shooting Doubles

Thomas Lowe Taylor
Interview by J Lehmus

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You told me previously about your photo work, that you expose each roll of film twice, so that each frame is transformed into a kind of “meta-image”... For how long have you been doing this kind of photography?

there have always been mistakes, but about 5 years ago, i found myself bored by the images i was making and one day said, oh well, i’ll shoot the film again to see what happens, and so i did, trying to pay some small attention to what was covering what. at first, i couldn’t line up the frames at all. the earliest images were fascinating, like little visual poems without even trying. they are on the website [http://anabasis.com], even some black and white images. after many rolls of film i began to get a feel for what i was doing, like having a kind of double memory strain going on all the time. my lady friend gave me the mask which had been made for her by another potter, and in a piece of writing called Horndog (on site) from about ten years ago, there was a piece called “The Mask of the Beloved”, and eventually my brain put the two things together, along with “The Hand” which has been a theme for some time as well, so i think the exotic quality of the images comes from what i’ve invested into them by way of these two thematic threads, which as you know only generate more variety as you pursue them. i don’t try to consciously layer these images, but i’ll always shoot one or the other (the mask or the hand) usually after the first layer has been made. i don’t know if anyone else is pursuing meta-images, or images beyond imagery. i find the black and white images are more doubled but less exotic.

And your camera equipment, please tell something about it.

at the start, some forty years ago, a friend gave me an old minolta autocord 2-1/4 twin lens reflex, and i was off and running, same as you, getting other people to process my stuff, until i found out how simple it is, and at the same time worked with a student (this was on my first teaching job) who’s dad was a kodak representative, and who himself went on to become a producer of advertising film as well as a shooter. i had boundless energy. he showed me how to print, and gave me hundreds of sheets of outdated paper, and i’d go on these marathon printing sessions, sometimes making a hundred prints in an evening. just a few months ago, i rented time in a darkroom at the art center where my lady friend lives and in four 4-hour sessions made about 250 b/w 5x7 prints, which i can then scan and tweak variously, but you’re right, it’s kinda mindless, and i get very routinized and go as fast as i can, trying for mid-grade prints. i generally try to shoot for the machine, that is, do work that the photolabs can handle at a minimum of expense, and so i go to mystic color lab or photoworks and get double 5x7 prints for maybe ten dollars for a 24 exposure roll, and when put into a large mat, say, 4 inches around the image, they look quite cool

but i’ve had a bunch of cameras, a minolta sr101 i loved, an old beater i can’t remember, lots of point-and-shoots, and now the olympus om10. i have two bodies, one of which needs some work, and i use a 50 mm, 100 mm, 17-28 wide angle and a doubler. it’s interesting to mix lens values when shooting the doubles, wide angle around close up, and so forth. the eye/mind scoots back and forth trying to read the image.

i think the film does the work, the camera is almost unimportant, as long as the lens is ok.

the key is how to deal with the asa of the film. i was told to just double it, and set my meter at 200 if i had 100 film 800 for 400 etc, but that didn’t blend right for me, so last winter in a brainstorm, i set the meter at the max at 1600 for all film and had the best results with 100 film with decent light. the answer lies in the great lattitude that print film has. no results with slide film worth mentioning, although i can send my film in to photoworks.com and get prints and slides back and so can digitize the slide images (positive images) etc. this is very important-to max out the built in meter. whatever the film.


Have you ever been asked why aren’t you doing this photo manipulation work with a computer? Modern photo editing applications with their seemingly endless possibilities for combining and layering images may appear very suitable for the kind of thing that you do, but I have the feeling that there’s some really vital element missing in the computer-based work. It is very difficult to imitate chance with the computer. Also, the magical instantaneity so inherent with the traditional cameras plays only a minor role in the digital creation. Do you agree with this?

it’s almost impossible, in my limited experience, to achieve the blending digitally that i can achieve with the negative, and i don’t fully understand how light competes for space within the negative and i don’t really want to. another big part of it is that i’m a lazy dog, but i expect to take what i’m doing into the digital realm when i can get time invested into photoshop.

plus, i’m a shooter. i love walking and shooting when its texture pattern and corners and edges, focii of attention, like i said, the image is an event, and the event of the shooting is magical and lost and reaching into the void and all that.

i started with a technology and it’s hard to give up what gives you results. i had migraines and tears over learning to use the beginning word processing programs, i had to leave the page which was conceptually infront of me and with which i had an almost thoughtless ease, even to throwing the carriage back and forth, and then ten years later, i got my old smith corona portable down out of the attic and i could no longer hit the keys hard enough, but that’s not about digital photography and the manipulations you can get with it.

also, i spent many years playing on the copier machine, and find that a lot of the scanner skills carry over. i find the programs for manipulating images a little cumbersome, but i think this really gets back to foot-dragging over moving ahead and still being able to get results with the procedures i’m currently using. i wait to grow and expect to.


There's two recurrent themes in your photography: the mask, and the hand. The mask is turned towards the viewer, yet she stays mysterious and reluctant, never returning the gaze. The hand, your left hand, is reaching out into the distance, into the image, reaching out to touch the mask? there is also a severed hand in some of the images -- it looks like a double of your real hand -- abandoned, alone, lost somewhere in the image. I have observed that there's a tendency for the mask to fall in the left part of the frame, how controlled is this? I’m asking this because I imagine that there must be some technical difficulty in realizing this composition when the frames by necessity do overlap at least in some degree.

i try to shoot the masks before or after i shoot the other pass. some times i’ll make a conscious effort to shoot it both ways straight away, no hesitation. last year, though, i shot about 12 rolls, and then added the masks after, with no recollection of what was where. results mixed. right now i have 4 rolls of 400 film i preshot out west, the mask and the hand and the american flag wrapped around the hand. i’ll try to shoot them in coconut grove florida next week. treatments were varied. sometimes they’re not. mask on left side is my lack of control, lack of concern for control, both. there has to be plenty of room for what pynchon calls ‘leakage’ or ‘error’ to others.

the mask and the hand i try to take right out of my studies of depth psychology and ancient symbols. we all wear the mask, the beloved especially wears the mask of our self and of who (she) is. the hand is the ancient sign for the self or the soul. the rubber hand is from a mannikin, my lady friend bought for me for $1.50 from a mountain man who worked for her at her pottery. i’ve pursued other themes. in the sixties i made around 300 b/w images of windows. (i was on the inside looking out). the window is the world. but the mask and the hand seem to have come to me out of my poetry as well, since in some ways these are no longer the kinds of images i’ve found in my perusal of photographic art history, the big names and all that jive. i shot my ass off and tried even to make bad photos, but just shot shot shot, just as i wrote 875 pages of couplets over a period of 3 years, as you pursue a theme, it seems to open out into its own mythology and content/intent which you only discover by repetitious exercises (when the pursuit becomes mechanical). the i ching says ‘repetition is the teacher’, as we all know. but repeated treatments of a thematic ikon or focii only attenuates it into all of its variety and it becomes a mandala of potentiation and hopefully a visual equivalent of one’s self realization, perhaps even as a visual subtext, an invisible teaching.

About the "emptiness" of your photographs. In my own experience, viewers usually react differently to pictures with people and pictures without people. The ones without people are seen as "empty" pictures, and thus uninteresting, except when the scenery etc is so outstanding or beautiful that it is accepted as a "valid" subject in itself. I have the feeling that the people featured on most of your double rolls are strangers, is this correct? I think that this intensifies the emptiness of many shots. Can you say something about the symbolism involved here?

my long-standing feeling about occupation is as follows:

there are compositions which fill and compositons which by their very nature "empty". when confronted by a moment of "occupation" or attachment of interest by a composition which by its very nature is "empty", it is the nature of the beast to "fill that void" -- that since "nature abhors a vacuum", that the unconscious, when thus engaged, will provide its own information to that end. thus, syntaxes and compostions which are of an emptying nature will only provoke the unconscious (or that part of the response-mechanism which is initially appealed to) to provide its own information, to 'fill that void'....

two afterthoughts: not to confuse emptiness with absence. And (I Ching) if you want to compress something, you must first let it expand.

Do you believe in God, Tom?

after all the drugs and reading everything i could find, i go back to an experience during my last ‘episode’, whatever you want to call it, breakdown...in 1994

i was dragging around like a sack of nothing, and was moving my furniture into a garage in vancouver WA. going along on the freeway, i said to no one in particular, ‘if there’s a god, give me a sign’, and seconds later i felt something twinge inside INSIDE my heart, something unasked for. now that’s no paul on the road to tarsus, but it amounted to something coming out of nothing, which is what i go back to, matter emerging from the void.

all the bookish stuff led to the notion that the monstrosity of the universe cannot be a solipsistic mirage which will evaporate upon my demise, and i am an evolving evolutionist. joseph campbell radiates a kind of uncomfortable wisdom in his televised lectures, so i’m not sure about him, and the ’experience’ of seeing my own death during my vision quest (if so it was) put me into a kind of sympathy or parallelism with established info, as i had come to it, but the spirit in the poetry, (it speaks and i write it down) as well as All Of It Added Up Together leads me to a kind of faith, informed however by a steady dose of skepticism and fear, all of which makes me ‘feel’ human in the face of the absolute, which we call spirit or consciousness.

You have talked about getting ideas or themes for your photography from your writing, or through the writing. But you have said nothing about the effect or inspiration that the photo work has had on your writing.

this is correct. it’s like an omission in my behavior, now that you point it out. i’ve always noticed that the poetics inspired the images and that the poems had no images (or so i thought), and you make me realize that this is a shortcoming in what i’ve been doing.

you see, i felt like i’d made a commitment to myself as far as my artistic work went, and that i had to make a choice and therefore treated photography like a hobby, though i never wanted to use that word, it’s like trivial.

nonetheless, the image-making was and is strong in me, and i made drawings, made xerox images with overprinting, and now you’re making me think differently about the whole thing.

images of emptiness and photographs of emptiness are two different things, maybe. surely, emptiness and silence are two spiritual states which precede understanding or ‘passage’. i think i felt in myself that images were beyond lingo and that lingo was beyond interaction with imagery, and so the business of integrating the two (which is what ‘visual poetry’ wants to be about) has come late to me.

at the start i was filled with the ‘history of photography’, like, looking at ansel adams and robert frank and virtually all of them, i didn’t want to be a primitive about it- i wanted to fit in. now that’s less important as i see that we’ve all entered a phase where the past is unimportant, to a certain extent, and that we’re the living artists and we’re the ones who are making our ways to something that embodies our experience. just read edward weston’s notebooks!

i know i’ve kept text matters and visual thought separate for some time, but i think there’s been a crossover about which i’ve been (or pretended to be) unaware. the more i’ve focused on imageless texts, broken sentences, odd juxtapositions, i would always say in the back of my head, oh well, when i want to do images i’ll get out the camera. that’s not too good an answer, but i do remember the thought and the process.

only now do i try to integrate text and image. writing text over an image is not an integration.

we have image in text, image on text, image through text, we can have it any way you want and it’ll still be of a different character, but visual poetics wants a newer manifestation to take place, if that’s not too glib a point. i thought for some time of image with text beneath it like a caption, totally unrelated except by the chance of their contiguity, will still interact to make a new whole.

You have used your photographs to illustrate your Anabasis chapbooks. Have you had your photo work published or exhibited elsewhere, along the years?

in the mid sixties, i was involved with 4 other photographers in a short lived co op gallery, in the course of which each member had a one man show. mine later traveled to rutgers university where it had a month in a building hallway (some 50 prints); i published a few in a midwest university art/lit mag.

later in missoula montana i had a one man show-'74 i think, in the basement arcade hallways adjacent to bitterroot film processing, early doubles, with one next to the other.

in the 80’s i won several ribbons at the oregon state fairs 3 or 4 years running; and a first place in a los angeles show with a $100 prize.

in the nineties, dan raphael printed 5 photos in his magazine nrg along with accompanying text (later reprinted into “relimn”)

here on the peninsula, i was active in the local art club and got several ribbons in their shows until i got bored with them.

i’ve sold a few over the years. one man shows here in two ‘better’ restaurants

a modest resume, not entirely inactive. a closet with thousands of drugstore prints (4x6 size) which can be scanned and i hope will be at some time. thousands of slides in notebooks.

i’ve spent the last 2 years researching art/craft fairs for a market for the photos and have been in one show this year (2002) and two more at least coming up-where i have a couple of hundred from 5x7 to 20x30 matted and wrapped. mostly it’s over their heads-all Mask of the Beloved stuff.

In my own experiments with double exposure, I wanted to be led by chance as much as possible, trying to get rid of conscious guidance like "there was a good shot somewhere around #15, I want to keep it intact." Do you feel sometimes that a great shot is "ruined" by the double exposure?

i think i've tried every way of going about it. one of the best experiences was also one of the first rolls. i was in canada visiting a friend, and went out to try shooting an ancient gnarled tree that everyone in the town revered as a spiritual presence, as much as they could, and i shot the first pass with the 17mm lens and the second with the 50. the results were truly exotic, "itself through itself", as olson put it, the same coming through itself in a fusion rather than an overlay. dog at the film eventually, but i have prints of most of the roll in my possession. also on that trip, i shot a landslide of fragments of granite from an immense rockslide from the past, a momentous event which left these slides of small slivers of granite about ten inches long and 3 inches thick. there, also, it was a confusion of things coming through themselves.

at one point, i tried to shoot without looking through the viewfinder at all, no framing! i calculated (sort of) the focal length and the depth of field and shot within those parameters, and got good results.

after i figured out how to rewind the film and rethread it so that it was starting on the same frame, i got better coverage, but there was (is) something interesting about having the black bar down the middle of the image where the two frames don't meet, but i wanted to get more fusion than distance or separation. it's best when the two images or passes create something which is in itself a single image beset with depths and suggestions.

now i have a 2-1/4 mamiyaflex on which one can simply recock the shutter without advancing the film, as the more expensive cameras will let you do, but i don't even try it. that size film doesn't lend itself to cheap mail processing labs, which is ok with me, i just want it to be common and simple as a technique.

what i've decided to do is to just go out and shoot what i'm shooting in the old way, but FAST, bang bang, they're called grab shots, cause you just trust your machine and bang away. what i find is that i shoot a whole list of personal preoccupations, like leaves textures intersections patterns and so forth, as well as images with centers and images without centers (detail found in the corners, for instance).
i try to use a personal zone system that i've figured out, in which i imagine the 35mm rectangle (i usually shoot horizontals) with an x from each corner to it's opposite, and a fairly large circle (target) in the center, so there are within that schematic various zones of interest or focus (nope unintended) so that the center receives interest (it's usually where the eye falls) and the corners, which are matters of interest created by the rectangular format of the camera itself, as well as matters which find themselves into the corners.

for instance, when shooting flowers, it's sometimes difficult to distinguish the separations as one flower flows into the next one. really, when i'm shooting, it's just like the poetry, it's jazz composition and i hear some kind of music in my head.

mainly, i've decided, i'm just coming back to familiar preoccupations and familiar compositions and when the result is seen (always a surprise, believe me), there's a kind of enrichment to the meeting of preoccupations, you might say.

when i consider your last question, is a great shot ruined by doubling, you've got to ask yourself what you mean by a great shot, it's something that fits into a specific aesthetic, the single point perspective which is a single thought aesthetic. what i'm trying to do is escape from the single point and work from two moments which is exactly what creates the "meta" quality of the images, and which gives them their poetic quality. and since i'm always shooting my own preoccupations or geometries (simply following what feels comfortable or elusive or engaging), the opportunity for a "higher" unity is always presenting itself.

when i shoot purely by chance, like, turning and snapping, trying not to frame anything, etc etc, the results are true to That aesthetic. even "noise" is interesting when it's contained within some sort of framework. using the mask or sticking my hand in is just another leitmotif. i'll tell you this, it's getting difficult to look at single point perspective images, they're so precious, you know.

again, there's been some occasions when i'd shoot the mask first, 24 times, and then go out and look for stuff to stick onto it, under it, whatever. i think they're still good, but to me they have less vitality.

and finally, i don't think it's possible "to get rid of conscious guidance" as you put it. remember tzara and company staying up for days at a time to see if mere exhaustion could provoke the unconscious into bursting through the exhausted screen of conscious attention? it's something like that, but you can never take the divine out of the present, even though you try to absent yourself one way or another, getting drunk, taking drugs, whatever, still a choice has been made which reflects something back upon yourself.

finally, the more you fuck around with this idea, the more experimental you become, the medium really suggests itself. if you don't get too serious, then you're on the way. still, i want to work with a nude model, flesh upon flesh, flesh inside the landscape, and so forth.

i could go on

Thomas Lowe Taylor -- SUBSTANCE: THE MEANING OF THE SHADOW

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The Serial: That there is out of any initial or
point of contact, origin of the line of travel
and where compromises of language, even,
extend through the area under review to
the open space. Which is to say that by
reference to that point of origin, distinction
effaces toward the value of the choice through
an inherency of data; beyond the area of
remembrance or complexity, the strand of what
it is penetrates or rather extends from the
material. So in following necessities via move-
ment, the selection of information (capacity, etc.)
removes to the completion of the set always
ion an ease or strenuous direction of attention.

As of the taxonomy of acts toward their
occurrences, toward meaning, that initiation, rather
than memory occurs in that space assigned to
the term "area", a designation which is throughout
both a purpose and a solitude, and so
what is most refreshing, there, out of being
told where one is ("you are there", or, "there"),
is not quite accurate to the machinations (if
that's ok) of the precise relation of acts to events
in their magnitude, e.g., flight & location, both.
Through the patrimony of direction, and in that
fused toward the wholeness and distinction
of a movement through special choices, and to
have contested that design, by moving, there
is that which comes to rest, throughout, like
"speech" and is in its place and moment
that bridging to event by which the allowance
omits its presence, a-catalytically, and then
goes on by

The arousal to form: A perpetual and insistent
resolution to density and specific intrusions
gives character to the indications of the act as
its clamoring style of attention focuses through
medium to its actual charge and diminishment. So
to arise or enact "image' in its constancy
would define that specific effacement to which
one is subject and object. Beyond calculation,
which is included here in posture and claim,
the excitability of regard provokes the content of
the design to its charge & propriety. There, and
moving on, like reading, where the light lies
to hand (specific), including the moment of
contact within the area or enclosure, e.g.,
"lighting that space" (Olson).

I mean, simply, subcategories of attention, lesser
in magnitude, actual to light & space through-
out, then, as the one & singular attributes
of detail emerge, Consequences! but speech
reminds through passion and discourse, and
especially as they are mutual, a voice declares,
and events to their communion, so it is
really both ways, in their simplicity, that
it is known already, as a specific passion
(Boredom, for instance) arrives through its imagery.
There we have it, Acts composed (sic) to their
space and read, moved, out of dialect
and the renewal of what is permanent
not by agreement but by enclosure, embrasure,
contact & charge, as sequence and its
inherent interference with itself gives
way to a specificity of feeling or transmission.

Relation to the Absolute: Centering to the power of
the good. Sub-category of intensity. In turning,
to pass on through to the immensity of that
space in which "designing" occurred, as a
strategic description, causal, as one is outthrust
in the dimension of his acts as they are come
upon, as that special and redemptive cleverness
to which one is subjected. Tha(t). and no
following.

"When one says that a symbol has to be 'interpreted'
it means that one has to ascertain the existential
contents which fill the structural container, the symbol."
(Rudhyar) Two items, here: That immediacy with
which the above occurs and, from that, the obvious
relation in sequence of image-->behavior-->symbol
by which a sentence is given its place in the
paragraph, causally necessary, by which we are
thrust upon the truth of Tucci's statement. & the world.

Encrustation & Lesion: Or specific instances to their
content, entrusted, as they are, toward a monument and
archive, within entire, but off and one through a particular
of passage (initiation) and what that is, to a special
dialog or relation. No move too slight. The occasion of
plenty and an active design; through her place and
name of one and light to the time of her air's place & name
of the one to its special place and light, you, as a tune
or harmonic, wherein distortion, etc., sure, as the
light and time of her place to special disturbances
there and ongoing, as she is, to touch & special
Knowledge, as that which is curious, out of rescue,
his special powers, finally, emplaced, whereon and
the rest to words (they are) and on and on through
its particular space of passing, and said, too, to
have touched at all points, moving, to her
actual time & dying, as one is cast, aloft.

Buttressed up among, but the actual and
precise valuation by being, where it is light
and noticed, through her place & name (here!)
and the rest, of course, "yes", for instance, the
actual pressures to which laughter, even, is given,
or thrust out upon, open, to be or say that,
often, as one does, to touch or be her open place,
(that!), as is the rest or resting and on her
time gained to the time & place of her acts,
bent, bent, and going aloft from resolution to
the finest flight & song from pleasure gained
from the reference ("curiosity") and quite simply,
the eyes all but closed to that, but first,
to transit (transmission) thrust, aimed, scanned
down as one is, projective (a verse), and
on in, aimed out to light & pace, there to
review, reinstate song & its voice to a
center, Me!, and then specifically letting out
& down, letting off that for this, as a review
of pronouns can signal in the head-thrust
wanting after image that any contact is
made in subject only to the one & center of her
place and name and calculation after being
to which one is sent, sent, but made
after the manner of one's consciousness, There!

Santa Barbara, California, 1971

Thomas Lowe Taylor -- Psychology, language, and the history of culture

“…beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all….” Breton, Nadja



ONE
Language, culture, & the politics of romanticism

So move me into manner sent, to below belong, as my scale doctor sent as my tongue selling, from scans to her to tell, as I am about or totaled, beyond my mirth bent in nostrils of relief. To and in these seasons I measure THUS, and bend to be assigned, where a conscious point of deference.
Is this equal and reminded? I get it down, so where these elbows get away, into terms, ah. Let these rough terms melt, so you to heavy ears, to be inert or into tales of overloaded, Eagle. Health to deny, as tomato ear so so so, muscle day, Ah, to!
Or, has means to evidence in thrust of air-to walk to work from to melt, I’ll see that voice going, where there is no sentencing, synapted in style, in executio, alert to rough pads, TEXTURE, I’ll get it there, where I met it going away with what was so unnecessary.
OK, let these rattling arrows be so defended, at least by their powers, those facilities I measure, but where I came to language, they can have it in print, or from the livers sent
(ah the model, where is the model, at least in series, where that opens into time, to be relieved Beginning, middle, End, where I came & came in to be myself
Pick at the center as soon as it begins, where there is less than color to this reality. I don’t know anyone here, there are no colors. Even that has changed. I am less told to because of what I brought. I’ll pick it up at stride, to tell the other elastic fringe to….
Numinous, my Father’s voice.
to add ease, from this cold , uh, air, air to be
So what I get is a tangent reality, described, or rather, proscribed in random configuration, which is not the same as saying “all is variety.” There are showplaces to be known, & the means thereof. Sub-chord-a: Stockhausen is absolutely correct, that he unquestionably does what he does. And Cage, that he do what he do. Ya! Why go on about it, so pungently? I’d rather music. Show me yr elbow. Patch. Or dumping ground, to swell, plastic (in side the balloon…words.
i.e. collage/plastic est real. Enough, or real enough, & as-such, contained, but to Blake, it was more than context or defense to Be so, it was in his being which was (born/dead) in each moment. Even old eeCummings, diffident & impersonally personal, came to wash him self in his last poem. (luminous tendril of celestial wish)
So even though this is a fictional voice, here, it is the quality of the act which gets it out & down, and it is a quality of intention to say that much, even though one defends what he has to offer.
Thus:
My own scale diminished in act. To succeed is to meet it all head on. Beckett runs. Ya.
Whenever I get a hold on her, wherever she occurs, it is still the rage, unsubdued, which gets expressed. & who is that? or where.
So communion manages, at least as a device, un-named.
To mark and carry it down. Ah! The monologue, she said. What could I do but give away my books. More than touch. She came to see me once.
Such evidence, at least of avatars questions whether one will ever be her hero. Not because she won’t be satisfied, but because of where in the spectrum it places you. Ah! Of acts. & to act is to be. It is with sacred hesitation that one leaves the room of myth.
July 15th. Went to town today to see Morris. He was as vain as ever. & told.
And this, not to ease what can’t be eased; I see them make their marks well. Even monkish Charles, in whom I found so little, finally, so little to respect. Marvin holds, but where is he? Locked away. Better to have nothing. Ever.
Write me a letter, send me your name. Ah, whatever the act was! And whose, it came to me as an apology. “Nothing has changed.” Yeah.
One is, than, has come to consciousness, but at what moment did it occur & was I so very diligent. Surely that is the highest vanity I could permit myself. I might begin again. I caught in some postures last night an indication of being and purpose, not that I was relieved to notice, but that there was there, an indication of what it might be. I was almost disinterested // like my neighbors, inasmuch as they exist to define, then, to keep at these lines, where the line is out.
I don’t mean this.
Separation of self & will, leads to distrust of purpose, what is my purpose. Just wrote that it is hid. If I am as I said writing about self, then to make it his is to have it hid, & to leave it so is to perpetuate.
Focusing attention seems to be profitable, whether it is eminent or tangible. Whomsoever look, therefore he shall see. The sea is my original home. Three journeys out, the rest within.
This beach, this loss of favor with myself doesn’t seem essential. I am no more than that. or less. These empty tournaments to last so long & be so labored.
I should be more than that, as effusive as I may be. My own representative is before this, and I have begun what you represent, as voice, as what I focus on. To end.
Focusing your attention seems to be a profitable experience. To Look : to see “ to have a vision “ to Be/come metaphoric : to be Imagination / to legislate, to presume, not to be anonymous, do declare, to represent in one’s being, the quality of others. To be so, alert to these tunes, wherever they come from, in my own presence welcome. Be that & more. You are to me sent, to these axes ordered. Where we are welcome is in time, where we make and move. To be alert to my own meditation and making-in-acting.
To be so, and alert, and focusing. Intent & worshipful in all respects
There I am certain & experimental. There might I move.

It is as I thought or said. That in time there is place, where it relates to seeing. I am seen, I have seen/no difference. To the extent that one moves he has direction / anything said has meaning or meeting.
All the same I am lonely, and miss her, since she has just left. What can I do.
If I would only examine that, it would have solution. I would do. I don’t believe in this incapacity / yet this distancing is profound. More theoretics. It is in doing, my undoing. Or in wanting anything that prevents.
To be pithy. To know pith. Surely one couldn’t…I can’t count that, that to sustain a voice / anything, has plastic merit, has construction, that a line, any line, as one follows it, goes to the center, hits, strikes, & immediately without hesitation.
What have I done? What/ever/ it is familiar, I mean it is.

Night’s contour the same. Investigated last night, found release partway through, in the images which disclosed (through, the same straight line, all intersect at Being. One is, now as before. The silence and speechmaking take it up, the energy, deflect. This is the authentic voice. This here.
I mean the rites of inclusion & the ceremonies seem antithetical, that as one does, so he is. I find comfort & being in the present. Is this right here, avoiding the necessary line? We are each momentary and eternal, what Casey was bounded by. In these announcements, then, reminders of scale. Remains.
Break it loose: walking away, hit this scheme tight and loose. I get it together like apples at noon. Moved. Spliced / all connectives release scale and series. And is active on-going. But a stutter, a hesitation though elevating, one goes on-to. In twine one sees manipulation. Another familiar capital, the posts, angle for light, what residue.
And favorite words seem too like muscular habits, like the familiarity of containment. New words: neoplasm/occlusion how gleaned? Sought electrified, made known by sorting. The barrier of the intellect, getting the mechanics together; finally, in the way.
From this authority maneuver an entire style of conversation diminished energy, is a part of what is separate at least as it comes to me (me: there where it comes / to get, that to have the conversation in the first place relates to the words which are available, as soon as they have been certified / so with this vision of the body, where its parts come together, & Descartes’ ruin. To be slow that conversation in the first place carried with it demands & processes & the final compromise was in not being silent.
Thus I get that the function of speech is to waste or leak & that directly from that, conversation has a quality of admission rather then style, its purpose to obstruct. Then this design of communion, or having-shared is after the fact.
Or: in culture, as relation, there can be no awareness of what is inherent; to be aware is to perceive the atrophied limbs of the corpse. Culture is that which binds, as in ritual or song, & precisely that which binds is invisible.
Red dust catalog coach diminish shadow ear catalog, to catch up to remind to be in contact with, to scale, as metaphor, as line-out internal:
This, too, then, where my blood falls away into conversation, how it is arranged. From the forms, from the model & RELATES: that the movement appropriate to 2 is inadequate to three, and passing time (in glass, from resistance, as it is fostered / to observe, not to observe in thought or act but to remind, & then to ride, to rid, to arise to become in
Where it follows, in certain or concrete terms, at least about secrecy, to (have it all set up, or make plans, is recessive. The situation, finally is what werds are, & they come as they will, from time to time and over occasional motions directed:
I am not fooling : I know what I am doing, that expectation raises the question of pace personal; head heart arm diaphragm, kinesthetic that the word is the muscle & the word gets in.
No surprise there, I’d hoped for more.
It is, of course, to show how we are moving toward the same center or converging line, back to line.
So the desire for speech is constant & admissive. To prolong the pressure is to make the act more certain & more direct. If the line always goes to the mark, however it be, then one might accumulate (more) in restraint than profess in execution.
Not, as I said, that it be hid but that it be covert & inductive.
That one move from this moment to this moment, or not move but profoundly stay at rest; if motion is the measure of life, then, as microscope, it is random, & & so field converges, or acts. Not to terms & not to syntax, inasmuch as that (syn-) is the same old contract but contact.
Then to move rain these displays to be seen as air dropping through the tubes, to be designed as I am words, to resist these tendencies of doom, to find my fleshwalking to ease through time, sliding & muscular, to identify as these catwalks.
Who speaks for us? This anonymous prophet, the lungs, has the design of light penetrating in consular doves. I am frequent. Not to provoke crisis in myself or others, to be available to be available to find where movements come from I am alive with sensation or yarn.
She’ll know / & then I’ll guess. What the rest does.
So to check it: paper envelop and move, that phase deduced, the residue of process, where I am deduced, to find style available and to remind myself that I meant what I said even when I said nothing.
Here on the line there is no darkness, and no inclinations beyond what I had or did, and there in what got left, I see the shape of the moon a relief from eloquence. Another enterprise relates to color as color relates to anything else, perhaps to seeing. Where structure gets it off, off the rest anyway, or off resting, only that one do, and that one do as one is, quickly now, that to tell myself otherwise is to tell myself nothing.
So if I remain fixed on this one point, settled where I am uncomfortably, perhaps, but settled, these rhythms become known, & where is that, in notice?
I feel about like that with respect to you, where I have made my own announcements about poetry and clay (media that they can carry the rest beyond what they are.
I mean quickly and with some urgency, before the door closes tomorrow: where else would I begin but, Ron, with words & the present & with Being, that one is not flawed in any sense, or to say “we are all perfect” is to remove all restraint from the others.
What “others,” where are they sleeping tonight but in my bed.
Which says, finally, that words have value as locators of motion (at our static point) and that one does not necessarily “mean” what one “says”
It is all of a piece, it is all notice or elevation or channeling, to find & use them: I saw a man walking around in his yard, asking himself where he had left it. It was me of course, but then how did I see it & how did I get caught watching? By “you” of course, though even to possess these words is to have it all available.
Sequences. A young man comes to that later & shows the others how. A fallacy, but how to deal with it. Why, then, to deal to contend to extemporize to show.
I’m not afraid, if that’s what you mean, that any union would be removal, since one is “in-field” to begin with. So it is not a matter of feeling or of response, since they are contiguous in act. It is that one begins there, & that what follows is residue. Danger, what do you do with that? Communion, I said is after the fact & to be confined is to have the time to write, hardly “irruptive” from Neumann, but that vision is always an indication of first what was there to quibble over. In that direction there is presence.
Energy-trust: the machine (qua) is so undependable precisely because it runs out of gas & is therefore not a metaphor but an idea (fallacious): some urgency here, that I might not get it down. My measure. The conspiracy, he said is directed by or from the elders, but why? Certainly they are not afraid of the young. “But it all might slide back into the sea. Here we have daily evidence in our newspapers…” which are also suppressed, I guess. The source of this antagonism is…where. I have missed the point. I have missed the point!!
And that is so astounding as to minimize value. They come around not through trust or distrust but through error, what was not considered in the design, & in that minimality, that failure to consider, did one fall behind one’s own capacity to act/ so it becomes the elders who are jealous of themselves, of their presence. It is precisely because the young are right, as far as that goes, which is not very far, and that there is truly nothing to be done. Hence Theater. Hence the Symphony. But I must find good in that, too.
To find good not in all things, nor necessarily in some, but to find, to find and in finding, of course, to know. Not either to know but to be, there is where good (is)
Is, then, as active or activity; I mean is, get that is-ness (Istgeit), suchness, as was the case with culture, that the thing described is beyond description and that there is no tension in that, but where one finds it after waiting (in speech, the notion of the air in motion, past muscles & surfaces, surely a pagan notion of projection or of a squeezing out some vegetables / from the bag. I find these flavors down and hear the water burning in my eyes no more than that, & by doing to receive calm / to receive calm-ness from one’s own being, to be calm from one’s sources
Calling up through those silent voices, or that where there is struggle there is (laughter (alien force (potential which is to depend on others for one’s purpose, when, when to be known is to retain purpose in motion and in the exercise of language to find that direction alters, purpose sifts the position of the elements, has response, as I am available, to be known, it then depends on how one is approached, how one becomes a part of his acts, how these “others” are a result of definition:
A quality of focus or of, finally, seeing : to be seen to see to have seen all take place at the same locus : language. There : what you do & who you are in the preparation of your defenses.
I can give you these arguments and let you function on your own assumptions, since that is (from-what) they they have been drawn or secured.
That if one do, if one is to know what he can do, he should find himself in circumstances he has chosen and on ground with which he is familiar : one must have a location, and the flesh and evidence, sensation, & these must be possessed if one is to move; one does not move & then ask himself why did I move? First one is, is born, then asks why I am & then becomes in-motion
From in-motion to emotion is a reduction of one letter these hesitations are neither alarming nor unprecedented, but that one has his means about him, focused in his acts, responsible in the presence of others; uncertified, indefensible, absolute, alarmed, in turmoil, in active observation: that one’s need to do as he is might be defended against all others, & thus to find, in purpose, I suppose, that these “others” have come to be unsacrificed and collectively are the members of one’s community of spirit.
Now, the whole question of what exactly the community of the spirit is refers again to culture & priority
& the assumption that the business of culture is to make us known to each other as we are and that this information be actively shared and that the entire relation between the elders & the young is to make us known to each other , and that
the entire relation between freedom and imagination become clear (clear, to see, to be seen as it takes place, in the present.
And finally, as mystery is the quality of all inquiry, that one must pursue what he is after, that the desire to know who one is and how he came to be who he undeniably is is the basis of the relation between freedom and imagination which underlies culture and which is the business, what gets passed on & what gets the elders into trouble. Not laying the blame, but in learning how to build.
Of course the ultimate priority of culture is not perpetuation but the mystery and that management and information are the very capacities of sharing which become community. What one does has purpose, that one be and that in being one become visible, just that, and that as he comes to language he comes to his own, comes to speech, comes to conscience, comes to awareness, comes to being, comes to himself.

If in a free atmosphere we cannot experience free exchange we are faced with a philosophical problem to define. The quality of experience should be of sufficient clarity to make the assumption and the appropriate course of action known.
The existence of “therefore” in the language should be of sufficient force to eradicate all such boundaries between the elders and the young: I should not find it necessary to make this statement & I do not


TWO
the spirit of recovery

I’ll go along that deeply shaded street again, perhaps in the morning when she sleeps beside me, along/side ourselves with love. I know the rest less voices, and in that shady street I heard them calling to me (oh oh oh …. from a long way, like like ----------- >>> distance AAAAAAAAAAAAAAL……….LLEGGGGST
Air waves came her crashing nonsense, I caught it getting out, to panic less, at the moment when I got it, not to tell, I’d guessed, and heard sights moon movie these guys scaled me in (which hangover to voice, I began to relax my head & settle in to the smells of the Turkish village even though it was her metaphor, that we slept together, not fucked but sacked out in the car seat when the red fabric came colorfully & my my head went down & in & caught it, but, I forgot the rest when I came around, to seal that turn-up, oh, her navel maybe, and on the floor, my own memory, of drinking alcohol, oh years of that and ease ease ease ease her down, to sent mental notification (of
But doing, what I do, shall do, where color has me reeling through doors & mirrors, but here the bare bulbs kneeling, that it takes twice as long, to to cover the material, oh, easily I’d say say stuck, HERe, why he is as blatant, and inn (Browning’s Spanish Cloister
REPLETE

I’d wait it out I said, and make my tracings, to us who know nothing and spend less time on advertising our faults. Oh no ---- it would be watching her habits, moving neither to gain or lose, only honest in my
Finished, we we are we are all all allll al all all moving right along; as voice, as waiter, as astronaut, oh be plain. Pancake, apple, sauce, comma, focus down, ear soup, aloftness, I am sincere, state ment of intent. In---------tent-------canvas. Skip it, one more does it, one more hangs fire, I hope it’s me, at least to hear & sort event. Man notation
The relation of events (in reconstitution flash flash has the beginning on edge, so as I admit that I am ‘sore’ or ‘cross’ that I make or do : that even as I am on shore, on pace, lined up, that I relax and tone down, slight off. Skill her and saw away, oh shoot----that voice that common sound.
PRAYER FOR MY MEDITATION my house is an eneless celebration of the works & days of life. My love is carried after, like paternal ceremonies in the autumn of my father’s life. Thus is my life an endless repetition day on day on day of endless celebration, never unto end. – ing. ing
Or after that, that location and stillness are not near, nor do they relate; or that if discovery precludes the activity or recognition of process, then to induce or to be is not necessarily ‘to have language,’ nor is it necessarily ‘being mute’ insofar as these are public ceremonies.
Thus the notion of phallic reality is inseparable from (a) the void (b) multiple reality.
Or, to recover from my memory, the reality of objects does not relate to perception as-such, that perception or seeing as-such are phenomenal, ie Named activities, & precisely one is integrated as he is un-named. Or to expose what would be patently contradictory about any document: ‘that to speak is to violate the law of silence,’ that one is become not as he speaks but as he means, & that he means as he is, which is where meaning (is-ness) and manifestation go off.
Journal, or daily record, has separate focus, that to exhaust one’s self is not to lose direction (as Ron went directly from ‘why’ to ‘how’) to speak & to organize visual elements is/are differentiating functions of the descriptive sensibility, that to be ‘in a position to’ observe or describe, one must be in-relation-to (language.).
What I’m working on is still


AS
Series relates to serial to change
Field relates to relation to chance
Or, cross referent reality, contiguity, placement, location = ideal. Which implies some loss (cf Pynchon’s ‘leakage’) at the moment of experiencing. Not to parse, but to slide off from Krishnamurti’s ‘perfect stillness’ or ‘cessation of thought’ or relation of form to syntax:

Neumann in ‘Art & the Creative Unconscious’

Which would place syntax at a point relating to consciousness on the lateral axis
Form is hardly, then, an extension or an achievement of consciousness, but rather a warp of its very plasticity, a reduction of its horizontality: that to speak is to get-to form (to be in speech just as one may be said to be in silence.
That in objectivity one is ‘lost in one’s work,’ not even to a point of identification (that is, so it must be with living)
That one has become an object, in-field, in-series, in relation to other objects, relations, series etc. that the ladder is infinitely up and down.
AND
In conscious observation one is most highly subjective, that as one removes ‘to see’ ‘to watch’ he becomes subject, watcher, watched (the thing, seen me, my watching)
This all relates to her, to feeling & to one’s sexual being insofar as he does not participate in his acts but is rather initiator, creator of his acts, beginner of series, or that as one os object he is born (& dead) in the moment. And that to finish, to become, to speak, is to come to birth, come to object, come to series / Release.
From her reparations, the fabric crushed and wrinkled; she left much too soon for regard or for surprise to measure; what I thought
Was release came to be sensation: wooden door, symbolic eagle. That it wasn’t words at all, more like a note : something carried around like the pattern created by cracked plaster.
I’m tired, and light comes through the room, solitary light evading its source. Moved. To read this. To ‘have solution’ or to move this and read solution.
Unnamed. Well, I’m tired of that. one has a voice & so forth. Or, being tired like fog, and naming with what there is.
More to be settled: to argue over policy, perception, to so organize response as to make ‘wishing’ inevitable. This focus on the act (of composition) is also fallacious; where I came from, we thought less about Action than about Birth. Sound, ‘it,’ is a high pitched, nearly hysterical panic. ‘It!! It!!’ etc. The meaning of acts is their completedness.
If I were less dutiful about ‘event’ I might make better use of my time. The same holds for ceremony. Crossing the river, for the mountain, twinges; I can feel my eyes working, or for here and for her benefit. That I might simply look back once in a while, or gather some words together to make beautiful directions possible. As it is, ah! Eyes which are counter, where the spirit gets out, pours forth like water, sure, dodged. And singled, never rescinded. Held firm, the descriptive energy finds its way through balance, the cloud & mountain named, to move ease to be taut, to come from come from emerge.

BREATH, VOICE, TRANCE
Breath: inspiration, earth’s entrance PULSE
Voice: expiration, spirit’s exit, to link, in-speech (‘in silence’)
Trance: transpiration, intermediary, state, muscular, not necessarily stillness

(Voice and act) magic = relation, definition

The shadowed corridor has value; I found her in the corners everywhere I looked; what I remember not from the excitable but from the other, removing clothing never the same place twice, or to write it out, steadily, for ever not the same when there is no motion, sea-birds, temporary visions, from satisfaction to objective in one smooth stop-and-start he has not sent anything back, and the quality of trust:
Oh, to use the most commonly available instruments, if only to decide what in those circumstances would be available, and where I find posture, position of tubes perhaps, or where those trees were located, the cars spinning into these dull locations. It is not entirely stop and start, where the water goes along with the others in active relation each to each, or that not to remember where and when she came, orgasm-ed, and what my feelings were just at that moment, or how I would watch her face or ask about the quality of the act might tell me something of the political life of my community; or that to find it necessary to go over and over commonplace realizations again & again is not boring but, rather, despairing to have so few incidents for comparison. Not to be avoided, but again (where I meant event.
I told her I thought that it was good that she would tell me the same incident time & time again. ‘the context is always new,’ where I left detail out, and insulted no-one. Quibbling again. In relation from sense to sense.
FIRST, THE NAME OF THE ACT, MOMENT
Not burdensome material, either, nor a lightness alight ness from my senses extending, toward my me of fullness and thread or cubes managed together and after over to be and internal of blood image into her hair pencil tip of pocket & black sweater burning my eyes to relapse, oh, in fruit salad or temperamental ears, my shoes getting used to it, sweat rubbed, Ah, body tingled from the eyes the eyes the eyes. Hair over Miami, neither language nor reflections on processes are diminished by ornate beliefs, and where I stretched out laid out died out my mouth stuffed with gray rags & bones mashed pulped in death fucking my ears cantaloupe and finders to as easiness toward concrete wall come through light Bang! Bang! And cardboard layering neither a flat surface, laid upon her heaps, my flesh hand tingling my head bent alone, neither secrets nor empty sleeves nor air/borne nor watchful ever in voice in voice in the air from straight lines and patronage: be gray.
Be gray be bland no more but sour and hopeless, dead to life & color detached omniscient, exercising power willfully; mean cruel, but gray be nobody be away declined removed, send them away, hate their moons. Use their money. Be whose. Be whose. And laugh at Saturday, leave their open poems choking in the rasps & delights of scent. Have the danglers quartered, the pages offered, lights on, gray gray no one home. Lie to everyone, paper the lies with organs and Blood. Come to love, come to others. Turn around & come to love.
That to mean love is to quarter the Sun and eat the rest. Cabbage, eloquence, sudden moon storms, alligator shoes arming your heart. Ride solemn busses, exaggerate the phone book, eat no dinner ever and measure failure with your prick.
That that is what that is, or form convoluting function into INTO transformed and let to read like fashion in ‘no sweat.’
The instant before vomiting the second preceding, fallen leaves or a stick floating down stream. At dark. Heavy air trembling between her clenched thighs. Feather heads under stony pillows. Three crows roasting omen-doves.
It is still well & well enough still heaviness. The three airs to. Bleat Bleat, there are new sons to compose. I passed death, the wings of solemnity, & who drove the bus to God?
Should I speak, these lines are music are music to beware, there is balance, there is noon, there is tracing in your hair. Let go. Let alone, gray and anonymous, like oranges on the tree. Be plucked.
These, uh, overt hedgerows to smell so bad & have no time for reading black lies. In the monastery no one breathing, but tractor churches healing earth doom to blood the calf from earth womb split. Come out, away to be live, and scar too many truck motors to go on into air-force, to force & push. In the blood in, and muscle at her groaning, for there lying hair to believe blood to act toward birth bearing your heart. Final.
To hit home to speak so, to alert groan of love hit & eat so to life to eat love or hurt. To eat life and hurt love, but love, to get first and leave to be her to get to, to be to be inside her to see to flash-lights are come coming on to be in to re-con-sti-stute to be had to love to get to, to be her love, Ah, to find her down, the voice, the earth the air the moon, the House-light, the ceremony; these rollings of the earth for voice for beloved, for ever hair and scent, known so, so known, and long a long and sent down to doom, eared and tongued, ah, seed. Dead.
I pause / in act / it is no use.
Eye plastic air to I and se as high as eye. That mood has scent, has sense has be/come seen, to move mood and purse my ears to flow be flown. As she as hair my eye to listen to listen to the music and scent the air with seeing, that the mood moves and drives you back, but carries velvet cushions, enacted and re-enacted, this this moment above all others to be seen in seeing out & in, forever up & Down, in thy eye a pupil.

I suppose I mean to make some measure of what I mean, or to describe language with my self. Maybe merely to possess it for a few moments, though the writer pre/occupied with his means is less apt to restore than a conscious description might do to, also, recover. So in style I see nothing to be gained, & to move in a direct line to the matter is to write prose. It is measured & compacted. There to tell, or there to catch an instance of saying where it came to be known. This endless confusion seems attractive, seems only to make work out of clarity.
To go on, namely, is neither to follow nor to risk but to be possessed, like inertia, of habits. The imbalance of the statement leads to what a poetry is, then, the means to describe an event which is the poem, which gets actively toward simple objects, which is making.
To say being in doing, then, is to miss it, though I’m embarrassed to take so long to get there, one would pursue quality in his acts & discover there some music. That relation of voice to her is also direct and simple. So named.
In the fundamental marketplace, where there are exchanges, & where dreams are living, the flesh pursues.
…to have ‘…faced and defined the possibility of madness…(a possibility from consideration of which others as well as (sic) himself may have found it impossible to escape) and (have) arrived at a moral attitude toward it, an attitude at once defined and communicated by the poem…’ it is the ‘cracking’ I suppose, an unessential differentiating of myself and others. Or to suppose about nothing, neither in watching (at the head of it, nor the tale, but ‘it’), what became only recently, as a sound, hysterical and high pitched. Then, in moving closer, in coming to it, I have less personal means at my disposal, to come to touch: so that the isolating progress of death is seen as the isolating progress of life, that as I come to it, life, I am more and more my own, have identified only certain relations in my person. If only to have seen importance in the remainder (neither abandon nor value but only importance
so what I have to say to Shelley, at this point in all of it, is addressed immediately to his style, and that insofar as he is a slave, he is hysterical, and that I seldom believe his hysteria except as it reveals the means of his intelligence and passion: to fool with others, not as I read myself, but as I see the inability of one to defend, and of the issue of defending poetry. One might be poetry but one defends objects (strongholds, positions, statements, finally poems.
In what I find, less and less to be confounded with, there are never designs but an application to be made, on my own part, and by choice.
At a moment, defined along a North
south East West Axis, which shifted when I did, and made location less than a kind of relief. Which meant that there were other monuments to have revealed, new material to place my feeling in a determined position.
Winters: ‘…I merely wish to point out that my critical and moral notions are derived from the observation of literature and of life, and that my theism is derived from my critical and moral notions, I did not proceed from the opposite direction.’ Which intends some work, to admit to the existence of those who are mad, and to find one’s way among them. There are directions to be had and locations one might set out for.
The anti-thetical could be said to be negative & as such subject to certain arcuments about illusion, insofar as maintenance is concerned. One might not exist in the same manner and to the same degree that he might.
To move in the direction of love would be anti-thetical to the degree that one allows.
Moral behavior, then, would lie more in the direction of honesty than in consistency. To be alone, then, is subject to control, or to move from loneliness in any direction is moral, insofar as it is an intelligent position one seeks. A defense of poetry would still be just that, poised between voice & act, as I said, and to be among others manifesting loneliness, is to begin a statement on one’s own behalf.
There are ceremonies to be observed. Telling tales is no benefit. The gain (‘no error!’) lies within what one does. That condition, as a voice, or as air exploding from the body, would be to map a possession with all the care that attends the ceremonies. After honesty, there is nothing to pervade one, & to that extent, the primary virtue, the aspect of consciousness most deserving cultivation would be patience.


Appendix to part two

The poem, to be perfect, should likewise be a new word in the same sense, a word of which the line as we have defined it,* is merely a syllable. Such a word is, of course, composed of much more than the sum of its words (as one normally uses the term) and its syntax. It is composed of an almost fluid complex, if the adjective and the noun are not too nearly contradictory, of relationships between words (in the normal sense of the term), a relationship involving rational content, cadences, rhymes, juxtapositions, literary and other connotations, inversions, and so on, almost indefinitely. These relationships, it should be obvious, extend the poet’s vocabulary incalculably. They partake of the fluidity and unpredictability of experience and so provide a means of treating experience with precision and freedom. If the poet does not wish, as, actually, he seldom does, to reproduce a given experience with approximate exactitide, he can employ the experience as a basis for a new experience that will be just as real, in the sense of being particular, and perhaps more valuable.

*…the poetic line…should be a functioning part of the larger complex, or poem. This is, I imagine, what Mallarme should have had in mind when he demanded that the poetic line be a new word, not found in any dictionary, and partaking of the nature of incantation (that is, having the power to materialize, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, being, a new experience.

Ivor Winters, Defense of Reason

THREE
Mining

The intimate is the union of the personal & the impersonal
I am is Father
The hero leaves her satisified
Imposition is a definition of the times
The parallel isn’t unity of what comprehends the most ultimate division.
Who controls control?
The forms of thought are not the means, they are the content

I have seen the best and the worst, I suppose. And found myself seated at the edge of the bed. Or lying on the floor
That I had some terms arranged. Made local. I’d avoid that, if I could. But the shaman-poet consideration is still a contradictory state. That to be is not to name, only as naming leads to a certain state or quality of experiencing. Gurdjieff has it that the quality of what one says is in direct proportion to the excellence of the formation of the message within the speaker. Information, then, has the same value, of pressure or tension, that the unit, so designated has direction, force, or purpose, inasmuch as it exists in its context.
I suppose by context I mean History, or Time, or Spirit, or silence as a means or experiment as its opposite, statement, is all a matter of loss. One descends. So I get to Dante through EP, ‘a canzone is a composition of words set to music…”I don’t know any better point to start from.’ I would still get that the place to start is with birth & that the ‘experiencing’ would be cumulative, inasmuch as there is no such thing as error, & that to find Form (as-such) is neither to name nor to move, but to get-from & get-to. State or being again, or presence.
“With his work, as with a glove, a man feels the universe.’ (Trastormer/Bly) Of course, thee is yet some distinction to be made between taking off the glove and finding presence, or finally, understanding language. It is not in act or in law, but in relation. I would still like to bear some good will toward ‘the image.’ It is a plastic & so might be abandoned, inasmuch as relation does not imply event. The business of ‘being in the present’ does not contradict event but must redefine it. Event redefines present. No! It is first how one feels, how one remembers, how one gets value-words & the illusion that word reveals state.
‘In him was life; and the life was the light of men.’ (John I:4) ‘Circles and right lines limit and close all bodies, and the mortal right-lined circle must conclude and shut up all.’ Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia. ‘Before the sun was made, there was a light which did that office of distinguishing night and day; but when the sun was created, that did all the offices of the former light, and more (Donne, Sermons, St. Paul’s. Christmas Day, 1621)
Which is not to say that the peculiarity of the scriptures as we have made them lies in the culture or style from which they came, but that an immediacy of style or rhetoric as it has been called, is an important statement, and should be accessible. Style should be accessible. As it looses, it becomes mysterious, full of fear. If the mysterious is a measure of loss and if fear is its manner, the business of the work: to work one’s way through. Or that the poet’s concern will be that he achieve silence.
The direction of silence or the continuing momentum, accumulation, would lead back to common speech. In the vernacular, all forms are recovered, the means laid bare without context. The relation between the speakers, who are verbal, and the silent, who are visual, who see, is ritual. As they are dependent they are makers. If we get to culture & language again, to what becomes manifest, it is Event, Means & Relation, & how they come to be the present precisely by not existing.
In contradiction, the anti-theticsl, there is scale. As scale reduces the tension inherent in the presence of the negative, that is by pushing energy upwards; as polar forces resolve in all that is synthetic, God, so named as the unity of the earth is at once magnified y the reduction of all that is not earth. As all that is parallel becomes oversimplified in the qualities of construction, ie, if the parallel is a notion which resolves tension, it is likewise impossible to create the parallel out of states which are not of themselves contradictory. Finally, the parallel, the infinite, when it is located, say, in a notion of perspective in painting, is the intelligence which is found between the parallel lines.




The meaning of that emplacement, which supports the infinite, is to generate the pressure of what is behind, as the gap widens into a conical rushing of air, colloquial & imprecise, which allows the work its tenuousness. In its very quality of being, the work contradicts its existence. Again, I’d fix the point at seeing, how it leads in infinitely upward and downward ‘directions.’
Direction is location which is space. Event is sequence is time. Back in Time and Space is Technique. Style & how to so manipulate, to eradicate the form and get to—Form.
Work is unitive, poem is unitive & personal, the relation of the personal & the impersonal is precisely word & state, one is where one is or else coincidence, data. The law holds. The eye is personal as long as it is. Though it is, finally, impersonal and only then prophetic or silent. The visual eye is that contradiction which results in making, or the parallel. So, the silent speaker or the shaman-poet has his means in Word. Or words.
‘(Language) does not as a matter of actual behavior stand apart from or run parallel to direct experience but completely interpenetrates with it. This is indicated by the widespread feeling, particularly among primitive people, of that virtual identity or close correspondence of word and thing which leads to the magic of spells. (Sapir)
‘Poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.’ (EP)

Language : word : technique : god

‘I put into my films what I want to put into them.’ (Bunuel) who is ‘…a successful anarchist who has discovered that the greatest freedom to practice and spread his ideas may, in fact, be found right at the heart of the system which on principle would most vigorously oppose him.’
If the history of culture extends our means, that is, if to study the history of means (slang for design, control); that is, if to be academic about the present leads us to greater awareness of our bodies, then it might be worthwhile, might lead to culture. If America, as Shaw said, moved from primitive conditions to technological mastery without ever having undergone the processes of civilization, then America would be in a likely position to put the two together. We observe the African nations compacting & compressing history into decades simply by the construction of high-power and water-saving systems. And leave the sur-realists back there where they were, as priests & janitors of the unconscious. As the forms of our society have become increasingly irrelevant (government, law, public instruction) we have become ‘freed’ to activate the real. We have had the time to discover what springs from nothing, poetry. To ‘recover,’ in Winters’ terms, might be to dump intense amounts of energy into folk-forms which are inadequate to the input, simply to observe what results from this input, that is, simply to give of ourselves as the means allow.
Where this is anti-intellectual, it is poetic. We need not ‘observe’ so much as chart the details & statistics insofar as those activities are contained.
Heard the sun clamor and dig steel, means to go down and catch earth mowing. To go toward love in moving easing, and to love her less than leaving, to be her man in time, yes & yes, and heard the air move & heard. Found the senses there: found them limned & bent. The the air-ship (categories were lent for purposes of examination. This week passed too fast again & that meant hard work. That let me gain the objective. Never back to naming. What that got. What that got.
The shaman is a deer. Not ‘acts-the-part.’ IS. The shaman is/has a certain relation to the poet-king, who is hampered by his very name. He has his ceremonies to observe. The shaman is not the fool. The fool is a poet/& afraid. Shaman-king is a species of functional perseverance. Is a detail of pure consciousness, is beyond the names of things, is in a realm of muscular identity working at the meanings of animal life & awareness. He is neither a prophet nor a father, they are his close cousins; he is finally vernacular & silent, modeling air & space to lead always out. A curator of folk myths. Maker.
Vernacular: stuff fear had me going. In an automobile revolution I made my passageway out from out : and meant to stay again within my surroundings telling stories : disguised : and more : and went on and went away I had my ear turned on to listen to my ear… ‘Fuck Fear : Fuck Fear : Caress it,’ she wrote. ‘How can I fuck my fear,’ I said. How get into it, but went along away, making my way. To start and go along & go away.
We wrote it down. If culture is Fear, that is, of being circumscribed, how then shall I see? Does truth pass from eye to eye? Among us, there is truth. Love is the greatest economy from which to take or spend, as you have the means. If I have my instructions clearly, I could pass from day to night with my possessions securely destroyed. In the quality of the purpose, in the technicalities of the present, I have left all alterations entirely at the disposal of ‘others’ and made my way, ‘returned,’ on my own. I have been alone.
‘I alone have returned.’ The mimicry of what followed that statement left nothing to the imagination. Shortly after that he left. I have the air in my, ript, coming forth, exploding from my lungs in short staccato bursts. I have my hand out, scalding-nerve-end-muscles sending act & purpose into relation. That the perception of relation and awareness of existence are perceived separately in the dialog. When there is no separation, if all conjoins in act, then poetry has its Word, neither in vanity nor purpose but in being. The scale of acts has no measure. The symptoms of evening are laid out in empty detail, marking that, just that, and forging for-going, easing up & skinning out. Watch the flow of particles / bleet bleet / and oscilloscope chorizo must throat cough hurt and ease door/way through through.
The shaman-king a manager of spatial-relations, an editor of data, a research document in being, an experiment of the times, thrust in-to the open space of flame which precedes the species // explorer in the time of consciousness, intro-naut; carrier of the species, magician.

White magic → healing (Asclepius)
Sympathetic magic → imitative (Aristotle)
Black magic → destructive (Faust)

The rites & ceremonies are actual, are ‘carried’ ‘out.’ Now, to spend three evenings after work, cautiously dipping slices of newspaper into flour & water, layering them over the domed, framed chicken-wire phallus-nodule, painting the masks with bright colors & documents of chance, all of this leads only to the mastery of the craft, just as Roger the mortician, who complains about his word load, knows so much about the communication model. And does.
The management of the mysteries may not lie in Risk & Exposure, but in the hierarchy. See Hesse’s introduction to The Bead Game. I appreciated your comment, knew it was right to the point, but I was unable to do anything about it until now, only twenty-three years later.
There are all sorts of silence.
The matter: having a language: being malleable: selection & edition as functions of consciousness: emplacement within & toward the creation & discovery of a form. Oversion. In humanism, three definitions of character: (1) the obtuse, (2) the formular, (3) the static. In within poetry, three definitions of character: (1) the solitary, (2) the ecstatic, (3) the unitary. Unitary as unional, as manifesting of coming, emergence.
As an age, we are at a moment of convergence: in the medieval period, thwn the skeletal made its familiar appearance (plague : Artaud), it came on visually, in terms of characterization. In the modern period (1912-1928) when means was considered in terms of design (Bahaus), it came on conceptually. At the moment of the apocalypse, it comes in the garments of paranoia and its complement, love. Where we have the means, we are capable of both. The business of inertia is not-to-think. Hence, the monumental failure of ‘the intellectual life’ has led to poetry rather than to the poem. Had we come to the poem, we could consider craft (a boat which soars over the waters), and Winters would be the hero: precisely what he gambled on from the safety of breeding Airdales. What one does is important, it is his very visibility which gives it meaning.
If we come together in the language language of love, the total revision of our verbs is necessary. At lest in terms of the visual equivalents, ‘to come’ now reads ‘emergence’ and ‘to be’ a smiling open face. ‘Went,’ a wood-nymph, a moment before flight. Similarly, as the old culture dies, the husks of its forms are inhabited by us as caterpillars until, up to the moment of metamorphosis, they dry & wither and our own visible true feeling emerges. For instance, ‘time is money’ will be regarded only as a formula. In the sense and to the degree that the formular is only a promise for deliverance of the goods, it waits waits to become less than formula, ie, fact, and a manifestation of ‘the good.’
The good has wings; the goods have location. Finally the suitcase opens and the man flies away. I am rising through the tubes of the Post Office, circulating inside tubs of old newspaper, wrapped in clothing of visual significance. Word. Now in the moment of cats, now agencies of true desire. Now the language of charitable excess. The good is known.


if the communal is arbitrary
(which it is
can the planet
be divided
and if so,
why are there children?
(Richard Sassoon)

Measurement has its own quality of time (expense, expended. I mean you to work on this, to help me with it, since there is no dialog, since the forms are dead, we will live with only the sounds of our own voices.

The lady sitting in the chair has slumped. She is dead.
Slowly voices fill the air, chanting a colloquy of sadness. We realize that she is no longer alone. It is the others, the dead, and they have come to welcome her into the world of form.
Her form is replaced. A gigantic eye which squats in the chair, blinking, possessed with an oyster-like compassion. The eye blinks and opens. As it opens, we notice that the pupil has been replaced with a turning Ferris Wheel. From the spokes, birds spin off. We hear from Alice, the words of the song of the oystermen. It all takes ten seconds. Blank.
We see three chairs covered with newspapers. Children are crawling underneath, in the manner of snapshots. The children become a serpent with a smiling and contented woman’s face, post orgasmic contentedness, satisfaction attached.
We are enticed: we hear familiar words of warning in a foreign language and move closer. The mouth opens and opens until all is blackness. We do not fall, we are in an elevator talking about the weather. At the top of the five-hundred-story building are fourteen acres of plowed soil and a farmer in coveralls is sitting on a tractor. He tells us about Thoreau’s Walden, and recites a passage about us looking through the eyes of each other. We approach his eyes and hear Bach’s music for unaccompanied cello. Blank.
We see a table filled with food. No one is there. the table collapses.
We are on a mountain top, astride a motorcycle. We are riding under the sea.
We are gathering lock screws from the center of strawberry plants in the midst of a huge field at the edge of which we see a strange building.
We approach the building and hear a rushing of water. She stands in all her familiarity beside a cataclysm of rushing water. We are at sea with her, talking about the weather. On shore, seated at a desk, a man is writing in a huge book. As we approach him slowly, he gets up and walks to a horse, mounts and flies into a head of lettuce which then rolls away.
We approach The Book warily; when we get around and look at the pages, it is a photo album, filled with the same picture of her face, smiling benevolently. Throughout, we are listening to the piano music of Eric Satie played badly on a harpsichord. A herd of camels rushes from the sea. She is astride the leader, wearing the same clothing as she has on in the photo album.
She sings a wordless and unfamiliar lullaby. We fall into sleep. The bed floats away, through a sea of doves and frogs, toward a twenty-five thousand pound cooked turkey and two hundred roasted carrots. The last sound heard is the ticking of a watch, the last image is circular.

The vision of culture supersedes itself. It is, as we said, best to have no vision, but to have visions. All of our activity is political inasmuch as we live in a community of ourself. All that is contradictory creates an image of the good. The beautiful is our own face. She is our own face, smiling.
What the intronaut said was just the same, ‘here are my images.’ There is no longer an idolatry of means, the very act of completion implies that there are no longer any ‘others.’ We have sent the moon to us. A beating heart rises to the surface of the water. The babe, the child, walks toward us and toward us and toward us and toward us and toward us…….

NOTES

1. (page 10) ‘Creative Man & Transformation, (in) Art & the Creative Unconscious, Eric Neumann, Bollingen, 1959
2. Gurdjieff, the parable of brothers Ahl & Sez, (in) Tales of Remarkable Men.
3. Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances, & Ernest Fenellosa, The Chinese Written Character as a medium for poetry.
4. from the Family of Man, Steichen, Sandburg (MOMA) & Werner Bischof, p. 152 (c) Beggars.
5. National Geographic, V. 135, #4, April 1969, p. 512-3, George B. Schaller, two photographs and accompanying captions.
6. ibid. p. 578. Malcolm S. Kirk. Shaman.
7. Earth photographs from Gemini VI through CII. NASA SP- 171, two photographs. (1) p.150, Gemini X, Jul 21, 1966, #S66-4956, & (2) p. 151 Gemini X, Jul 21, 1966, #S66-45868.
8. (cf. #5 above: ‘But fights do occur. One dawn I found a pride mail lying on his side, breathing heavily. Golden tatters of his mane were strewn in the grass. Deep wounds covered his body. One of his lionesses moaned softly nearby. He had been attacked by three males of a neighboring pride while he guarded not only a zebra kill but also a lioness in heat. He died an hour after I found him. It soon became apparent that the other pride male could not stand alone against the intruders encroaching deeply into his territory. One morning I saw two males from an adjacent territory chase him a mile, then return to a thicket where three cubs lay hidden. The males bit the cubs to death, ate one of them, and carried another off as though it were a trophy. I waited by the body of the third cub to see what the mother would do when she returned. I expected some display of emotion when she realized her cubs were dead, but she merely sniffed at the one remaining carcass, then settled down and devoured it.
9. cf. Camus, The Stranger. ‘…one could object that Bachelard’s more recent book, La Terre et les reveries de lat volonte, extols the rather puritanical values of redressement, and hard work. He says, for instance, that if Camus had made his hero hold a rasping file instead of a useless pebble, Roquintin could have been a perfectly normal ouvrier, conquering his fixation with the viscous and the soft by a hardening of his will; he would have been a hero of surextentialisme.

El Centro, California, 1969

Thomas Lowe Taylor -- Yours was the day.

***************

What came to me, golden showers
of light reminding me of former
times, when there was no time;
and I fold across myself
reaching in two directions.

What holds is the score and tempo
of what's within, uncounted
but roughed aside and other.

the unitive hour returns and holds you
with sympathy and grace.
I reach out to you and you are there.

No flower blooms so bright as your eyes.
I see in them a being coming through my
reflection and self doubt.
I hold you close and real
You help me pull the needle from
my heart
We grow into this sentence willingly,
we say `this is the day' over and over.
What shore returns this healthy dance
we've made unto us in its own
moment. I heal and sing and
call your name, beloved. You answer.

March 3, 1994

Thomas Lowe Taylor -- YAK

***************


beyondo 'moto plenitude'
no doubt
this'ld the plumer skank

truth centered handholds
their own truth yank

fluxer paln, hers at the outer
mine at the spin, spoke

yr own futur/plud'd dist
-anced, nor even truster

apartado, nie plexus,
seethe inner tontu, hers
too, the later spin

*********

i mean, was it good for you?

a' this channel won un'un'd
there's to the tunnel due
the photo spam

immenet plun, the harder due
nor plenty pinty, scams
to due her knees deen 't

dipthong's stiff planet.
the spinky! The Spinky!
yet still in the latenced due
of her sin and captive;
i'm of the loader spin
her boot and plinty
deals the likker din

you'd Thus, maybe?
to, uh, force the issue
thence gong

**********

aiieyaahhh

th flutter boon
why do you think they call us
Yanks?

Thomas Lowe Taylor -- Now Wip It

***************


take it up against you strong, lady
i lay you back and take you off and
let you stroke it up and long into a

load links it up, mark masks a lot
the line cherry deaks her twice na
analind; doors open down watched nic

yeuw've done thice, aha, tha na scen
i've laid allowed nons awn-ton song
she's bangin her hand nice right now

nice me give right now in scents delu
to you and inner down the rub signs
ling inter due a push or slide in to

thus keeps it up the spine or finger
the pool pole reiner rains now sont
residued out upward resins glue it up

Thomas Lowe Taylor -- WILL THE WIND EVER REMEMBER

Olive U-2


what comes inside
you mouth to me
smaller than knot
but arising tide, too
the primeval goo
a saturday night;
thin
lips tiny
pointed pearly tongue
tip me tip my finger
draw my finger to
your mouth the ridge
of the roof and going
by yr teeth it feels
so good my finger
=tastes good= u say
the same i'm there again
all along the watchtower

i like the way i touch you
you bit my kiss
touched me with yr but
yrbut

i lick my finger and touch
your lips again
& again

we are there and
a long time hum
hummmm

tulips glo/turnips flo

pearly sine chrome tone
yrs at the hone and plinty....
warm at the pink
home at the

Thomas Lowe Taylor -- Where no claims are put forward, no resistances arise

***************


At times one has to deal with hidden enemies, intangible influences that slink into dark corners and from this hiding affect people by suggestion. In instances like this, it is necessary to trace these things back to the most secret recesses, in order to determine the nature of the influences to be dealt with. This is the task of the priests; removing the influences is the task of the magicians. The very anonymity of such plotting requires an especially vigorous and indefatigable effort, but this is well worth while. For when such elusive influences are brought into the light and branded, they lose their power over people. (I Ching, Wilhelm note)

In certain transactions with the immaterial, more energy is released than is actually used in the process itself; with nomadic attentiveness i'm thinking that duration of attention on one thing isn't so much what matters as duration of heightened attention in and of itself. this may be a means of getting at the decay you have mentioned. Think of writing a poem, how attention flits and leaps, is everything but fixed. That might be a good part of what we're working towards and with. i think that's it about the void. it's not void. it's full, with a radically different order of Being. sometimes something comes across, something "immaterial", almost out of reach, but not quite out of reach. what do we do with that? consciousness, somehow, experience, the sensorium, has access to that. that rattles the cage a bit. ephemerality as opposed to ethereality, yes, that's exactly what i'm talking about. palpable presence passing. no angel flakes floating in the lovely ether

Thomas Lowe Taylor -- WHA'D I SAY

***************


See the girl with the red dress on
She can do the Birdland all night long

Wing's healing
Flown of torrent
Yet skipper's in the tune
Nor realm'd no hipper

There'd been a string
Set term to tune, a slower
Rhyme than knot too soon

You'd yielded into time
And met the sooner shapes
Set in healded plinty
Nay sheen in the looser scrapes

And they'd been a door astir not rung
Nor herded there between the light,
A fool's errand in the liners sprung

This'll carry us out beyond
Or into closer lines affirmed
And at the heart's new loom
The final's term begun

For what's the nearest marker
Folded into light as the heart's
Own partner opens out tonight

Then stay, then sing, then
March the newer fern
The seed's among as
The longest tune's resung

April 23. 98

Thomas Lowe Taylor -- Weeonk

***************


surl leets no mere scin
mef torpor eels within
descent’d fanks nor told

Heisted flits, eaker-dude
nye fleasel



Naist floral eaks ear due
Knee belits him afar e

Oar’d door, her plumer span
Deaks ner fluge, the harper
fors tu du; “False Ale”


Thus t aiques n panes t
][ ordered new
slaugh tpi nix skin
Dorf’d notters

12/5/95

Thomas Lowe Taylor -- Notes from the Void

***************


Writing to stay calm rather than go into the trance. Here's a new voice which wants to connect new parts of the self which are struggling to speak. You wouldn't say that this is a self which has never opened its mouth at all. I wonder whether it's worth it to go back and unravel those autistic poems, attempts at mystification which described a persona which didn't exist except in those moments where a flight of fancy could exist. This self has spoken before, but not with authority. The panic attacks also serve to create the state in which electricity is felt coursing through the system with Bradshaw's toxic shame. But in seeking to write out of calm, there's a new encounter in the making, one seeking balance rather than the disjunct. The fragmentary parts of sentences which jumble out without reason or connection describe a state in which a hypnotic trance-dance disallows completion of juncture, disallows penetration to a core of being which is calming and recognized rather than, must I say, a false persona, an impostor. So in the attempt to integrate myself, I move my hand across the page in this attempt to communicate, not mystify, and this is new.

Suddenly (perhaps not so) I am looking back at an old style and thinking about it. The book tells me to go ahead and not look back. Can I do it? Holding on only creates tension, or a state which was there before, reinforcing its run-on go-comma go-comma style. Coma. That was the word for it. After an episode of writing, there would be a numb stasis I confused with safety. Writing should take you out and connect you to the sun, the moon, the outside; in the run-on, free association style, an area is defined, but it is not a world that leaves you out there. It is the internalized robot world we won't dwell on right now. Pages of it. Look at the serene, why not make that choice? What's so shocking, you might say, about that style is how it charges the persona with false energy. In the integrated connectedness of writing which climbs out of an inner necessity, there is no longer a turning away, but rather, a sense of safety and focus which themselves are ameliorative, and which remember. That's a clue. In not remembering the present and in creating toxic shock in my descriptions, I found myself not wanting, but somehow trapped in what I had made.


I

Everything emanates from the void.
The higher power resides there.
The external world of objects
comes out of the void,
cornucopia of things seen
have their origins there.

Comfort also comes out of dark
Light originates out of darkness
The void is paradoxically full

It's not your pain
It's her pain
& she's gone

Everyone is in the void
& the void is in everything
the space between words

II

It's your voice out there
whispering over the wires
I love you.

Here the pain recedes, does not
return. Singing with men
and a pipe and this
all return me.

Be here now
It's not your pain

and tonight I sang to him
for half an hour, soothing
my heart with a song to
God & Little Tommy--it's all right
and a song to you
now and near in my heart

III

Day's morning calm
calls out from where I am
inside me easing;
soothing senses say to hold
and grow into the light

at God's own kingdom
there are these worlds from
inside again, the easing
of a door becalms,
a window from which
light emanates

and I move toward it
from where I am today
saying here, and this.

Release me, doubt, and
call a prayer my own light

which stays within and
flows forward.

IV

Turning it over.
I join the seamless web
where I am already.

some things are put away,
contained, to be drawn upon
when required.

What is required? Being appropriate
to the moment. seeing

I call out to God to take
these moments and let me
see my unfolding, the Bloom.

Where there was a rose,
now there is a tree, beginning
to become

And here the water continues
And here the light begins
and ends and continues

March 19, 1994