***************
The beginning when it is like this
where it is that and no substitute,
is or has where it will be as that
which it also is, in between all the rest
that it might be.
In a way,
to the red, but in between,
as a phase or status, there from
of other eases, but unknown
to all who remain, nor practice,
but skips around unlike anything
where the openness itself is surprising,
but after, too, in shadow, as turning around
one might see the after. So.
initial, the forward quality of a name
which is not personal nor property,
like the feeling of walking around
and around, but which is ;never
devious, but separated off sectioned off
though I too am worried about stopping
altogether getting to a certain place &
being stuck, & perhaps even later
being asked about it.
Which is a kind of
gossip,
but space, as I have it, here,
resembles nothing, is all there is,
inside which time is, getting away to
the peripheries of itself,
gravitational,
or variations in the present tense,
though this, has as its edge
nothing, and beyond that, little else,
so to speak, to say or be doing
anything "other-than" in reflex or
athletic-ally
in hesitation out of what already
is in the present / is as is, beyond
nothing and why not?
Because I already enjoy this and would
enjoy it ;more if I continued so why
stop because that too is pleasant and the
in between is too. stop.
or listening to any descent,
as if to be other, other than that,
or elongated. whaled. apart from taste
or interruption, but listening and
descending from here to here and listening
apart from all the rest, and out.
But is it verbs? But to speak in
a familiar or already familiar discourse
is not the same as its opposite.
to know that, besides.
though to be extra careful is all right.
no, it is not like listening
or, it is not listening at all.
which is how you mean it.
A beginning would be then like anything
else. or even talking about it would too,
so why not do it and talk about it,
or how could you do otherwise
than what you are doing,
anytime would be like that.
Over-hearing this.
doing it too.
thinking about overhearing it & doing it.
waiting at the same time
to keep on doing it
and thinking about that, etc.
which is nothing.
which is also space
or where it is done-around. in.
But that would be like anything
else too
even the space part,
or what he forgets, but not stopping,
or stopping. That, too, whatever.
and then in the familiarity of presents,
to remind one of one's documents & archives.
that very mixture of styles of which is speaks
"An American can fill up a space in having
his movement of time by adding unexpectedly
anything and yet getting within the
included space everything he had intended getting."
or any setting, but there as a work
would be
not to confuse a thing with its manner,
which is incomplete
as thought,
But linked as
there is nothing else to say
but what you are saying,
and in that, to cohere as a one.
to go beyond none.
to have it closely.
to eclipse modernity.
to restitute
or not. any way I look at it
it is the same, & not confining.
especially to talk like this, in this way
of speaking. Things are not so much
replaced as brought forward
through their vary qualities,
it is what is to be seen.
"I decided that if one definitely completely
replaced the noun by the thing in
itself, it was eventually to be poetry
and not prose which would have to
deal with everything that was not
movement in space."
which borrowing and the moveable left
or lights, away, to say this, that
as discourse, a composition would behave
in its manner, to accept only what it
is saying
to include here
all that is here
is a position, to take
what it is not, however, is fire
bursting from the sea or anything else
but a gradual giving in of the visual
toward what it is, and nothing
plainer or simpler, an existence of
the thing in its domain & in relation
to itself there for what it is and
not an object
but an existence
which has for itself
and nothing else
a strategy
a closeness
a peculiarity
a locale
a fortress
of quantity
any rigor of movement would outlast its
impulses, would collapse into space
with arrival and its constellation of
contexts.
1.9.72
Sacramento, California
Sunday, April 8, 2007
Thomas Lowe Taylor -- MEMORY-EVENT TRANSFER (1970)
***************
Round diagram of strength: pasted across,
these after sensations, of a wet slide, we all know that.
between what follows, the sequence of anything
to its purposes, and pausing across the acres of what
it is to its design. Image through idea: purple purple,
the idea of the range of the diagram. And then round.
Read this for that. and this for this. THIS.
Discourse on "topics". But walking through.
his airs are thorough, what passes for ideas is not
solely fantastic. What means of birds to their passage.
and all that. But new. And strong, his airs passed.
The ice went along its path. To be what it was to
the domain of pressure or calculation to which it was.
inherent. And the moon waiting in song or furtherance.
these details of the job the job of ordering the work.
to do these thins to their advantage, and study to
its solitude and peace, therein to rest and pass on the way on
through
which we all know already, it is that, saying what is manifest
what is there already manifest, to wait in the course
of the course, hearing what has already been said.
An insistent recall of detail, the pauses of time in a
schedule of motions, undirected and forgotten, unnoticed,
and these passages of chance to its law, of diagram to shade,
resolve toward light and form, what is that? What?
(what is that what). . . . . . . . . sentence.
The pauses of attention through voice and act, to the thing.
A surrounded space, of the point and line from which, from
and into which a mark of movement would describe what is
manifest to passage, the movement of the thing to its place
and mark of insistence: the topic and the topic, here, what
is a poetry of ballast, not of description but of cause.
is it only the voice of the man under way? or is it also
as dry and discursive as (this) is. . .to its space, and what
of those lines (out) of imagery, now that image has its place,
a locale of data and behavior which thrusts the man forward. . .
so it is one thing to get the image, mark, and thus! and
then to move, and to move without the picture to move with
the word, as any intelligence shifts & thrusts forward
to its place, the "there" which is "here", and on and so on.
So there is rendering & cause, and why am I saying this, is
this what a poem is, or is it not, like's Pope's Criticism, or
for us, just what it is there as it is moving & no object.
a consciousness without objects is also without subjects, is
simply centered on itself and then out to nowhere which is
what is there, as a space & place, and not stopped, so it is
that and moving on toward world: it is a position, as such,
to find the poem in the words & another to find it not there,
but elsewhere, which we all know already, and picture
to its evenness and time & place to its discourse, and
words to their strategies and images to their causes.
and picture to its act & doing. and world to its world.
Causations of gesture. Is he telling about himself?
What is the poetry of egoless states? what is the poetry
not of persons and not of consciousness but of "world"?
What are world acts and world thoughts, past primitive to
the area of our knowing, through what is there to be known
to the color & smoke of the act in its sphere, on center and
person, where gesture & word recall what is there to be done,
and where the person has his doubts spread not shared but
done out to tell and sing: past the genre of display,
what necessitates this obtuse discourse, here, to affect
that mood & gesture of time to its area, of balance & tone,
past a historical & psychological tense to the actual and
dominant place of the thing as its subject and discourse.
And as it goes down, not to watch but swim and tug, to feel
the turns of the air and lesson to their heart & doing: thus.
S E E I N G
transfer
scan
impulse
union
series
conjunction
memory
act
1970
Round diagram of strength: pasted across,
these after sensations, of a wet slide, we all know that.
between what follows, the sequence of anything
to its purposes, and pausing across the acres of what
it is to its design. Image through idea: purple purple,
the idea of the range of the diagram. And then round.
Read this for that. and this for this. THIS.
Discourse on "topics". But walking through.
his airs are thorough, what passes for ideas is not
solely fantastic. What means of birds to their passage.
and all that. But new. And strong, his airs passed.
The ice went along its path. To be what it was to
the domain of pressure or calculation to which it was.
inherent. And the moon waiting in song or furtherance.
these details of the job the job of ordering the work.
to do these thins to their advantage, and study to
its solitude and peace, therein to rest and pass on the way on
through
which we all know already, it is that, saying what is manifest
what is there already manifest, to wait in the course
of the course, hearing what has already been said.
An insistent recall of detail, the pauses of time in a
schedule of motions, undirected and forgotten, unnoticed,
and these passages of chance to its law, of diagram to shade,
resolve toward light and form, what is that? What?
(what is that what). . . . . . . . . sentence.
The pauses of attention through voice and act, to the thing.
A surrounded space, of the point and line from which, from
and into which a mark of movement would describe what is
manifest to passage, the movement of the thing to its place
and mark of insistence: the topic and the topic, here, what
is a poetry of ballast, not of description but of cause.
is it only the voice of the man under way? or is it also
as dry and discursive as (this) is. . .to its space, and what
of those lines (out) of imagery, now that image has its place,
a locale of data and behavior which thrusts the man forward. . .
so it is one thing to get the image, mark, and thus! and
then to move, and to move without the picture to move with
the word, as any intelligence shifts & thrusts forward
to its place, the "there" which is "here", and on and so on.
So there is rendering & cause, and why am I saying this, is
this what a poem is, or is it not, like's Pope's Criticism, or
for us, just what it is there as it is moving & no object.
a consciousness without objects is also without subjects, is
simply centered on itself and then out to nowhere which is
what is there, as a space & place, and not stopped, so it is
that and moving on toward world: it is a position, as such,
to find the poem in the words & another to find it not there,
but elsewhere, which we all know already, and picture
to its evenness and time & place to its discourse, and
words to their strategies and images to their causes.
and picture to its act & doing. and world to its world.
Causations of gesture. Is he telling about himself?
What is the poetry of egoless states? what is the poetry
not of persons and not of consciousness but of "world"?
What are world acts and world thoughts, past primitive to
the area of our knowing, through what is there to be known
to the color & smoke of the act in its sphere, on center and
person, where gesture & word recall what is there to be done,
and where the person has his doubts spread not shared but
done out to tell and sing: past the genre of display,
what necessitates this obtuse discourse, here, to affect
that mood & gesture of time to its area, of balance & tone,
past a historical & psychological tense to the actual and
dominant place of the thing as its subject and discourse.
And as it goes down, not to watch but swim and tug, to feel
the turns of the air and lesson to their heart & doing: thus.
S E E I N G
transfer
scan
impulse
union
series
conjunction
memory
act
1970
Thomas Lowe Taylor -- Collab statement
***************
What I'm starting out with seems finished enough for me, so I'm just messing around with it. Enclosed also is a collaboration with myself, starting with stuff lifted off TV and then interrupted and then rearranged by line fragments and then finally by sections.
In "Soul's pastured skills" I just put lines in between, so the effect is of a series of first lines, each of which could be broken out as the first line of a longer thing (?), but whatever continuity was there has been removed.
Soul's pastured skills remand
The mooter fords remission further
Into decibels of heat
Lawn's clearer wisps vie with the sails
Along hours trespassing where doubt
Warps driven places cool beside
Song's calling left alone
Astride the ceiling near the call
TT/SM 6-7/93
Soul's pastured skills remand
Where noted hours are not reflect
The mooter fords remission further
Overt floods the nature speaks
Into decibels of heat
Whom at flood, or knower in our mists
Lawn's clearer wisps vie with the sails
The flipping sentry hears your door
Along hours trespassing where doubt
Reboot and fathom, an hour bedside
Warps driven places cool beside
Or hail her hour not your own
Song's calling left alone
I'd flood and send another lingering
Astride the ceiling near the call
TT 9/14/93
Quip sweetest youth arranged in solvent places in the heart. Triangular hot cloud. Quite retreat our sound. White sacrament to have at correspondence. Mildhood secret. Drive within accepting terms. Wild lives at later flute harmonics. Neither a bathing light to sear these cross-hatched arrows. Detailed enough am speech the diastole, read into shiny things. Spawned to please. I genuine into a newer woe. As totaled yeast and oar the lake. Smooth enough to fawn a clear named pathway.The later hobby. Breathplate once, convergence. A lighter on your mists toward exhuberance.
Quip in youth solvent places arranged sweetest in the heart. Hot cloud triangular. Quite our sound retreat. White to have at sacrament correspondence. Secret mildhood. Drive accepting terms within. Wild lives flute at later harmonics. Neither sear these cross-hatched arrows to a bathing light. Detailed enough the diastole am speech, read shiny into things. Pleased to spawn. I into a newer genuine woe. As and oar the lake totaled yeast . Smooth to fawn a clear named pathway enough. The hobby later. Convergence breathplate once. A lighter toward exhuberance on your mists .
Quip-eyed in youth, a solvent place arranged sweetest in the heart. Hot cloud poled triangular. Quite our movies' sound retreat. This white to have at a later sacrament of new correspondence. Secret mildhood fallows. Drive these accepting terms within you. Wild lives derive flutes at later harmonics. Neither sears these cross-hatched arrows to an inner, bathing light. What's detailed enough, or the diastole eye-am speech, read shiny into present things. Pleased to spawn and again. I into answering newer, genuine woes. As him and oar the lake as totaled yeast . Smooth to spar to fawn a clearer-named pathway is enough. The hobby laters. Convergence at your breathplate once. A lighter hears toward exhuberance on your flaming mists.
9/l4/93
What I'm starting out with seems finished enough for me, so I'm just messing around with it. Enclosed also is a collaboration with myself, starting with stuff lifted off TV and then interrupted and then rearranged by line fragments and then finally by sections.
In "Soul's pastured skills" I just put lines in between, so the effect is of a series of first lines, each of which could be broken out as the first line of a longer thing (?), but whatever continuity was there has been removed.
Soul's pastured skills remand
The mooter fords remission further
Into decibels of heat
Lawn's clearer wisps vie with the sails
Along hours trespassing where doubt
Warps driven places cool beside
Song's calling left alone
Astride the ceiling near the call
TT/SM 6-7/93
Soul's pastured skills remand
Where noted hours are not reflect
The mooter fords remission further
Overt floods the nature speaks
Into decibels of heat
Whom at flood, or knower in our mists
Lawn's clearer wisps vie with the sails
The flipping sentry hears your door
Along hours trespassing where doubt
Reboot and fathom, an hour bedside
Warps driven places cool beside
Or hail her hour not your own
Song's calling left alone
I'd flood and send another lingering
Astride the ceiling near the call
TT 9/14/93
Quip sweetest youth arranged in solvent places in the heart. Triangular hot cloud. Quite retreat our sound. White sacrament to have at correspondence. Mildhood secret. Drive within accepting terms. Wild lives at later flute harmonics. Neither a bathing light to sear these cross-hatched arrows. Detailed enough am speech the diastole, read into shiny things. Spawned to please. I genuine into a newer woe. As totaled yeast and oar the lake. Smooth enough to fawn a clear named pathway.The later hobby. Breathplate once, convergence. A lighter on your mists toward exhuberance.
Quip in youth solvent places arranged sweetest in the heart. Hot cloud triangular. Quite our sound retreat. White to have at sacrament correspondence. Secret mildhood. Drive accepting terms within. Wild lives flute at later harmonics. Neither sear these cross-hatched arrows to a bathing light. Detailed enough the diastole am speech, read shiny into things. Pleased to spawn. I into a newer genuine woe. As and oar the lake totaled yeast . Smooth to fawn a clear named pathway enough. The hobby later. Convergence breathplate once. A lighter toward exhuberance on your mists .
Quip-eyed in youth, a solvent place arranged sweetest in the heart. Hot cloud poled triangular. Quite our movies' sound retreat. This white to have at a later sacrament of new correspondence. Secret mildhood fallows. Drive these accepting terms within you. Wild lives derive flutes at later harmonics. Neither sears these cross-hatched arrows to an inner, bathing light. What's detailed enough, or the diastole eye-am speech, read shiny into present things. Pleased to spawn and again. I into answering newer, genuine woes. As him and oar the lake as totaled yeast . Smooth to spar to fawn a clearer-named pathway is enough. The hobby laters. Convergence at your breathplate once. A lighter hears toward exhuberance on your flaming mists.
9/l4/93
Thomas Lowe Taylor -- WHIM
***************
lore of the fries
more term skies
skin the lates
yr own posterior
ester of granule
wrestling
east.
last of the flights
larks of the night
leaks of the bite
ski of the byes
i'd her heart
yet slid
my own intent
a lasting loss
but removed
and returns
the last line
lates the lore
oves
larks of the splinter
nor remoter
what's hassled borneos
the former rafter solemns
thence portuned, opportunated
whatever
where's light the spinal
fluix nor remoter, sent
sentinal
and answer asking answers
the remoter then to spell
what'd outer'd nor remote
this'll hassle you down
then tell them hour dune
doomed the namer
i'd at held the longer song
of where you met, then
another newer net
i'd at had, nor remote
2
what'd had at, nor remote
i'd at plodded skud then
nor at heart the purer stance
then relux nor haver
nor or not, the door is open'd
then at toomer skill, a light
song lingers at the well
and calls you in, to bestow
and enthrone your duskers
duties now to the knotter
drills the stupid boneheads
their own destiny alluded
but you'd said no dumber
knox the spealer due.
then at sentences cast
at other animal parts
recomb or not, then asped
less difficult than what'd not
but adrift in a mechanical sea
you don't know the way around
but held among prisoners there.
3
leadere humule poreflax
fumerd dumerole thence'd
at animal parts a voce
a spiritude -nus
lane changers delight!
a florid preposition
designate askance not true
the hearts's substances--
another posture after
perfection, honesty, even
into the bag of tactics
you go, next there.
but held inform
fluxer 3, nor back to you
they'd at had and wasn't
inert; at edges plumb
another newer shot
this particular angle
add pitcher delight
whore told / aplomb
master aslymphitic
de-noxifier intentional
thirsted inkster would'd
and but not, nor but yet
had, then spent her out
then i'd at yeilded here
then send again thus
what'd here been signed
your own heart's inner dusks
then beating when to yell
what's at skaters in the
thenced nor plumer scores;
i'm at hold in yr inner scent.
in the thunderbirds
no stilt
heaves to the lighter sign upraised
in the sea's wet effulgence not inert
heard in the emptier dues then ravened
nor intense then later down the sign
would've parted sides their own disturbs
then later knocked his puncher dubes
the lightning sign
here in the muter tense i'm at your due
lining out the marker tomes in bent
with him at the nearer mark
this was it now too far gone
to be away
or waving
in hilties pin
they'd a below northern spid
hollow goes notes there
parted speech in correct nodes
they've a world's view of itself
in thorough lingo spunts light
at fir, at the pointer food;
mixr plenty this nor outer
afar your knot the mounter flue
then bar benign nor splinter fool
heaps the foreplay, nor wrinkled lude.
thus beer, thus the inker pool. Affirm.
but peal at the skooter due. -ling sa-
to fill at have filled at the longer
destiny awake this bleating din
Afar! Your thisted plein, afenced.
whim
be'd tween
his fluxer
'a routed
neats ska
thin spin
nee harf
the blunt
ee 'bin
this'l
plint
wet insid
see bean
find
finger
slid
leap year
you'd better
) coming soon to yr calendar
he'd bent er oar
nor plinted plenty
scars the reduced
inner time suspent
nor waits them sd
this is downer due
sut next mental dune
assault at the chicken ranch
eyed yor hart, i touched
yir deeper hints, astound
and cent her deepest tho
then met the n
--strads
a monkey in a chicken suit
the funded
1.27.96
lore of the fries
more term skies
skin the lates
yr own posterior
ester of granule
wrestling
east.
last of the flights
larks of the night
leaks of the bite
ski of the byes
i'd her heart
yet slid
my own intent
a lasting loss
but removed
and returns
the last line
lates the lore
oves
larks of the splinter
nor remoter
what's hassled borneos
the former rafter solemns
thence portuned, opportunated
whatever
where's light the spinal
fluix nor remoter, sent
sentinal
and answer asking answers
the remoter then to spell
what'd outer'd nor remote
this'll hassle you down
then tell them hour dune
doomed the namer
i'd at held the longer song
of where you met, then
another newer net
i'd at had, nor remote
2
what'd had at, nor remote
i'd at plodded skud then
nor at heart the purer stance
then relux nor haver
nor or not, the door is open'd
then at toomer skill, a light
song lingers at the well
and calls you in, to bestow
and enthrone your duskers
duties now to the knotter
drills the stupid boneheads
their own destiny alluded
but you'd said no dumber
knox the spealer due.
then at sentences cast
at other animal parts
recomb or not, then asped
less difficult than what'd not
but adrift in a mechanical sea
you don't know the way around
but held among prisoners there.
3
leadere humule poreflax
fumerd dumerole thence'd
at animal parts a voce
a spiritude -nus
lane changers delight!
a florid preposition
designate askance not true
the hearts's substances--
another posture after
perfection, honesty, even
into the bag of tactics
you go, next there.
but held inform
fluxer 3, nor back to you
they'd at had and wasn't
inert; at edges plumb
another newer shot
this particular angle
add pitcher delight
whore told / aplomb
master aslymphitic
de-noxifier intentional
thirsted inkster would'd
and but not, nor but yet
had, then spent her out
then i'd at yeilded here
then send again thus
what'd here been signed
your own heart's inner dusks
then beating when to yell
what's at skaters in the
thenced nor plumer scores;
i'm at hold in yr inner scent.
in the thunderbirds
no stilt
heaves to the lighter sign upraised
in the sea's wet effulgence not inert
heard in the emptier dues then ravened
nor intense then later down the sign
would've parted sides their own disturbs
then later knocked his puncher dubes
the lightning sign
here in the muter tense i'm at your due
lining out the marker tomes in bent
with him at the nearer mark
this was it now too far gone
to be away
or waving
in hilties pin
they'd a below northern spid
hollow goes notes there
parted speech in correct nodes
they've a world's view of itself
in thorough lingo spunts light
at fir, at the pointer food;
mixr plenty this nor outer
afar your knot the mounter flue
then bar benign nor splinter fool
heaps the foreplay, nor wrinkled lude.
thus beer, thus the inker pool. Affirm.
but peal at the skooter due. -ling sa-
to fill at have filled at the longer
destiny awake this bleating din
Afar! Your thisted plein, afenced.
whim
be'd tween
his fluxer
'a routed
neats ska
thin spin
nee harf
the blunt
ee 'bin
this'l
plint
wet insid
see bean
find
finger
slid
leap year
you'd better
) coming soon to yr calendar
he'd bent er oar
nor plinted plenty
scars the reduced
inner time suspent
nor waits them sd
this is downer due
sut next mental dune
assault at the chicken ranch
eyed yor hart, i touched
yir deeper hints, astound
and cent her deepest tho
then met the n
--strads
a monkey in a chicken suit
the funded
1.27.96
Thomas Lowe Taylor -- V I S I O N A R Y E D U C A T I O N
**************************************
Thomas Lowe Taylor
"The task of the teacher becomes that of preparing a series of motives of cultural activity, spread over a specially prepared environment, and then refraining from obtrusive interference." Maria Montessori, Education for a New World
***************************************
ONE: NOTES FOR AN EVENT
"Question: Well, why do you go to another culture to get your myth?
Charles Olson: Well, you knock me out if you say that. I just thought I bridged the cultures. (He laughs) I don't believe in cultures myself. I think that's a lot of hung up stuff like organized anything. I believe there is simply ourselves, and where we are has a particularity which we'd better use because that's about all we got. Otherwise we're running around looking for someone else's stuff. But that particularity is as great as numbers are in arithmetic. The literal is the same as the numeral to me. I mean the literal is an invention of language and power the same as numbers. And so there is no other culture. There is simply the literal essence and exactitude of your own. I mean, the streets you live on, or the clothes you wear, or the color of your hair is no different from the ability of, say, Giovanni di Paolo to cut the legs off Santa Clara or something. Truth lies solely in what you do with it. And that means you. I don't think there's any such thing as a creature of culture.
I think we live so totally in an aculturated time that the reason we're all here that care and write is to put an end to that whole thing, put an end to divisions of all sorts. And to do this, you have to put the establishment out of business. It's just a structure of establishment. Any my own reason for being, that I feel that today, as much as action, the invention...not the invention, but the discovery of formal structural means is as legitimate as, is for me the form of action. The radical of action lies in finding how organized things are genuine, are initial, to come back to that statement I hope I succeeded in making about the imago mundi. That that's initial in any of us. We have our picture of the world and that's the creation."
* * *
Though it is in language that world becomes palpable, it is in utterance that it becomes sacred: in a literal focus of energy, breathed and voiced, explosions from the lungs in a mixed expiration, tongue-acted. So speech and song as a combination of act and making: word-act, what I come to see as voice-flesh-act.
That is, from the imitation of imagination, speech is cryptic. Though reminiscence rounds it off into its structural value. A syntax of this very process would yield to the actual distance of things.
Up against speech-language, in its sequences, we have laid consciousness as an open pool, set like a mirror before the ear to catch word. The empty space of consciousness as mother of will / laid within the man-organ, against the seriality of his acts.
A serial persuasion yields personal diameters; out of the choice-field would lie patterns of equal response.
Personal voice: out of process rather than necessity, a private / impersonal. Or as it becomes known (again, out of nostalgia), in the sense that knowing is rather like memory, as open processes eclipse the personal, the vocal-private-impersonal impels through relation: that is as the topics eclipse their own verbal-oral-cultural plasticity, out of one's vernacular singleness, speech-acts come to structure the growth of the conscious.
To go back, then, to the initial sequence of perceptions, rather to ride through the birth-act, is to honor the house (body), to give moment or shape to the desire for understanding: however broadly one finds his own personal spread down before him, there seems to exist another boundary, out of future-time, boundary-like. Or to get around an apparent objection to mysticism, to posit the legibility of the "passing-beyond" as a form of serial language implicit in the relation of series to consciousness, right? The thing is done, is getting done, and one knows it, has it there before him.
The true character of observation might then be understood as extensions of consciousness (rooted) though there is, located maybe, somewhere, a double vision (a re-view), more a double consciousness, an inverse of awareness, like guilt or the other way around. Our legacy, anyhow, to see it twice and have it come in between the act and process, a pornography of the forms.
The beloved, somehow personalized, and then photographed. Or our own preoccupation with medium (flesh-blood-speech active, muscular, breathed). So it distinguishes as a coherence between image and act and the poetic at its current state.
Surely the passing-beyond relieves poetry from its cryptic isolation. Cultural enterprises seem to be allowed. Now, vision, inherent in any consideration of "the quality of the act" might then consist in the manipulation of symbols. There is a suggestion (of this) in the introduction to Theosophist Annie Besant's Thought Forms.
* *
Visionary education, as it takes place, relies on event-process as a voiced convenience. A consciousness of means which does not quibble, that is an inner dimension which carries the focus down.
Where is the focus? In the parallel? Where are you placed there? No contest.
OK, no value anywhere but in acts. First, and then this whole business of the literal miscalculation (being literal about the literal), as regards acts; seems to arise from closed process and a notion of ends-as-such. Open process would carry the serial out beyond, that in each is pre-scribed the consequences of the succeeding act; therein resistance, to recognition even, though that's the point, that what is voiced is a state of being and that there are other states. To declare a hierarchy flaws the act. Into value, again, as choice.
* *
So right there, even, at the matter of word choice (the "numen" of selection), there is a hesitation at going-back-over-it, perhaps an inability. In these terms, whose monolog?
The succession of acts and successively inclusive states of response. The "new" language appears as-such, to examine the quality of the new, or of initiation, or birth. Literal act, however, in its crudest form, intervenes, almost to obscure the means of relief. I mean, the quality of acts (as perceived), both as a referent to possibility and as an impulse to memory. The dynamic of it, again, qualifies. Hence, inversion, to both succession and space. No error: allusion (to accept responsibility) is a gesture toward the actual. In acts, too, a residue.
Aphorism, too, almost like afterthought.
"So, is it not the play of a mind we are after, is not that that shows whether a mind is there at all?" (Olson)
Whose?
Now, the relation to the ceremony includes, even departure, there, into private voice (song?), to allow the overtones to define certain categories of being. After the fact, of course; the experience precedes the model. What's up, through the line and through love, is the perpetual condition of voice and relation enacted, consciousness embodied in its proper uni-verse (one song). And speech as afterthought, that lag, is only problematical.
So to continue. Through the matter of evidence and hesitation, the voice affixes itself to the person under hand, and all that precedes speech falls into its proper antagonism, the repetition of initial acts, preceded by their causes, out of such flux as continues to move away, out of "sight" in either direction. Loss. But not error; slippage, perhaps, but not necessarily means.
Energy is too vague a term, since its balance (expense) is a motion. Ok, fine, the thing cannot be described, or worse than that, can. The forces are organized. And then wait. What is that?
The condition?
Awaitment, I thought, past the cultural into our proper sphere, the top of the head, still soft. But we leave, we are always leaving, and the situation is left, expressed, its vernacular obedient to cause. Final. Context in another yearning after the sequential. But hurrying on, in a pace toward the familiar.
Foundations are behaviors, too, aligned as easily as true speech, so the problematical and quantitative means of information are expressed. Not to trouble anything, but as a temporary locus of the image, or the vision. Or the impulse of a shadow, declining into prejudice, requiring periodic affirmations.
I think this all precedes utterance altogether. There is a space present in it, identified, allowable, but which is (becomes) qualitative, and to that degree resists its own definition, which is neither self nor identifiable description. To say that it is meant would give to the speaker (whomever) more than he has offered. But an impulse to information seems important. Naturally (equivocally), it is better in a crystallized form. And the inhering of that, the distance from the subject, to drive it back, out of its own accretions, not quite to the point of control, sadly enough, but to its resistance; then, in naming, at least, there, to the exact, to the actual syntax or immediate sense of the thing, assuming (for once) that however one starts, he would head-in to the center. That is, if all points are equidistant from the center, and if all lines are (serially) straight lines.
And so on.
If it is not to presumptuous to get ahead of process, it is at least an exploration, of going nowhere. The cold point. But then, one would want to experience all things, it is said; but in what order? There must be none at that cold point. A most unsequential, unmoving location.
A notion of "mental events", however roughly it is laid out, would prescribe the center. It is visible in every of our moments. (shared) Referent, implied, assumed.
So pace delivers. The community is already there, visible. And the cold point (of relaxation) is a welcome fix, the word gets out. THEN: the metabolic pace.
Speech styles, accretion of acts, all assumed behind the methods of behavior, multi-ordered. No single declaration of distinctness, but an allowance (faith, "traditionally") that this leap across synapses was conceived originally (though that's loaded) as possible. Toward the good, with all the cynicism necessary for a maintenance of literal miscalculation. Or error (what has not yet been conceived: Otto Rank).
Participation mystique: in language, between the spoke and the unspoke, there is not much distance, and to value speech is not necessarily to honor the oral. OK, that's neat, if nothing else: contradictions of the parable reveal us (to restate it). But the oral-cultural-historical comes out of where we were, and if you trust yr memory that much, you're better than I am, the last second is rushing back from me. No pinnacle. But private speech in an impersonal setting has a drift which encounters some familiar shapes, though one could preoccupy himself with identification. The thing is up and going, pushed hesitantly along by the acolytes. They may be in it for the money, but they're pushing. Even out of the American locale, some poetry persists; certainly the vision, inclusive and temporary, initiates here, from outlasting the dialectical into the serial mode, where an accretion of detail drives the old context of muscular breath-acts back into a sharp focus. The diminished visual (the work was done, finished about twenty years ago, just go to the George Eastman House) reaffirms, frinstance, Chagall and Albers. They belong to the same age, and so to the rest of us, for that, anyway.
The free act, thanks to some reminders from the surrealist writers as against Miller's agony of separations, as against some thoughts about chanting the text in unison (reading?) and a tendency to begin to be able to notice the shifts.
The processes of transformation without idealizing time any more, would inhere within acts. A pornography of consciousness would only delay decision but not postpone indefinitely. So the terms for weight would allow passage along from the familiar through to the formulary and into the private. Which is transparent enough already.
The final act is just that: initiatory.
* * *
"A sentence is in fact a transfer of force, from object to object by verb."
But to get the matter firm, it is where Olson lodges, in the active, actual man, especially possessed of speech where it lies in, holds to and while the seeker comes to his means, the quest, and in others, communes, it is in the active man that speed commends itself to its proper relation between consciousness and the community, that in the words chosen and in those spoken that a man is, and is shown in his immediate and particular state. And without making any substitutions for myself, here, that if we have come to know this double of consciousness, that we would go toward a double vision in which the parts collide and coalesce and reapportion into the new constituencies.
But the activity, what is this proper activity itself, out of the personal and celebratory, into what context for the numen "did I choose my life?" and if so..." how, and to what advantage, if it lies in that, to know."
The retrievable, then, has its shape in what is familiar, as the guide who comes in the form of the butcher in a black apron who is going to cut you up to look for the shaman bone. Neither in Artaud nor in Cage do these new constituencies lie, but in the doubled vision and the triple sequence, or movement from voice through exploration to (into) consciousness. "That trope, man", Olson calls it.
I am the event, it goes, center of the focus, hot point and registration of all that I come to and through the event of self and process, conjunction as it were, come to speech.
"For truth is only the measure of the process thought. And thought is functional. You can't not 'think'. As you live you think."
That the law is: that has meaning which is itself to itself, as prime relation and fact of being-consciousness. And at no loss or gain to the species, by that which has us operating, so to speak, at function-levels according to state or will-to-action. But in no way diminished.
Now to work this out of the mundane, or what will I do about it, is right, exact, public sentiment about the real, inhering to some new end, inclusion. Exact. To have the series start with encounter. And what is general here is not method but complex, and (to head around) precisely that which exhibits, as "erudition", a false value which is attached to reason, dictates behaviors in proportion to the old term "blindness", as in-seeing and mute. But of that relation (of self-in-self) as a physicality, or assumption, the completeness of being presents it, the matter, as a law (way).
Thus the peculiarity of the present: What should we ask for? The turn, out of the new consciousness, having moved across, on the literal from figure to symbol, where the distinctions clarify drift or chance; anyway, there is a quality to "image" which refuses elusion, the structural persists and as evidence and means comes to strength: what there is to see has the reflected meaning of its allowances. The mirror runs in either direction.
Certainly, what we have known as cultural events retains a focus in the particular, like the residues of musical experience.
But the literalness of authority, when processed out, seems to have become less static, and as one is in motion, one can get a hold of the thing at last, to ride. The least hesitant consequences of the act. Or, like looking around.
So, I think we are least considered on the matter of speech models and oral series, where it comes to the matter, speech-active man, of relating the real, the palpable, world (out of language) and the literal fact of it, in consciousness and of the whole movement through illusion (via skill), at least in us as focused or registered participants. I mean like getting hold of the whole thing and of running, it, there's nothing to that but the doing of it, and that if in the doing of it something becomes apparent, then beyond all necessity one wants to follow it (curiosity and desire); in the union of act (speech and thought) does the permanent bond inside "that trope man", us as doer and done thing, but spoke. And to honor.
"Life is the success of a play of creative accidents. It is in the principle of randomness seen (is) its essential application, not in any serial order imposed at random on either chance or accident (the new tautologies of the old Chaos) but in the factual observation of how creation does occur: by the success of its own accident."
In speech, how the eyes focus and where and on what and to what intensity, where (also) the set of the face and the muscles, and in what event known and done but self and thing and what is spoke. "The motive, then, of reality is process, not goal."
The lag, to come through metabolism and chemistry to process, is to carry all that is weighty into an essential footrace. So to run it out, out of time, to make space, through the vernacular, as spoke, (to Wordsworth, too) would be that allowance: past style and the dogmatic. Use.
The fashionableness of light: to make the broad turn out of history, out of conscience, is to locate some of these priorities, and closely. In act in its proper sphere and dominion, and in vision where the mysteries are lodged, and in word, where patterns emerge and coalesce to newness (delight and joy). Not only simultaneous, into speech-active story-teller and image-maker, but to go through necessary silences at the will and center of the community, to be the mean point, at the center of the descent, in the free-over-backwards-falling-flight, in the loss of space which is space, there are some questions which I come to out of repetition.
"And my considered argument is, that it can only do this if it is the sensor of the set of qualities of which it is one part: that only if Beauty, Love, and the Idea are included by it, that no will can be 'free'--that is, both child and father of the beautiful, the good (as love), and the idea (as thought or truth).
"But note the rest of the thought (the other half): the infinitive of being/becoming--is neglected or left out. These four cannot be unstuck any more than the other two sets of four. And the tensor of all three sets is that one thing you are throughout: man. Actual wilful man." (Olson)
* * *
But to speak to the essential difficulty, "what am I doing", that if one takes in fully the preceding, and if the community, the commonality of the good, comes to be actually, the sum and total of its diversity, the whole business of the future and the inheritance might become more central.
And again, in terms of these transformations we try to justify or understand, what comes to be lack or emptiness (void) are seen to be, literally, matters of immense developmental significance for (even) those of us who are unaware of the degree and immensity of the unknown of which our senses are made only dimly aware in their constituency in the physical process.
Which gives the absolute its power. Our will to be its part. And as we coincide in our habits, we come to know our lives, it is this humanism which seeks expression in us.
So: first, to know, that feeling is in the realm of the good, then to speak what we are, out of all our acts toward being, always toward an always more inclusive curiosity, in recognition of the other in our acts ("other" as the not-me, the unsequential ego) and to come to the essential in our relations as immediacy, as crux and crumble, toward the factual always, in our passages and unmentionablenesses. To ring it like a bell.
The common act of consciousness, and the root exploration of it follows, unjustified, wilful and compulsive, bears our close attention, and not out of the selfish but toward recognition of the locations of the data.
The making of the universe, by my acts made. Nor any presumption, to proceed out of the a-historical, the body, into salvage (to let something through or to see in metaphor, something of the qualities of the negative).
In some seclusion, then, does this all take place. As the dream comes into utterance, takes life, there are all sorts of residues, a falling off, a skinning away to the essential nudity of a high diver, twisting past gravity, and the non-functional, to some essential twists and spasms, into the water--no splash.
The representatives of consciousness are elocution (the forms) and transformation (the states).
***************************************
TWO: CULTURE AND PORNOGRAPHY
"To act is one thing: to know one is acting is another" (Cioran)
* * *
By close and immediate distinctions, the thing becomes, discerned by focal establishing: but to bounce it back and out, the line through events, to this other kind of acting, and not hung out into words only, that would be cause.
Or, in the peculiarity of our own diminished knowing, where it parts again and again, it would be how I am set off from my own causes, or exactly where reflection lies at the heart of resolution. This sequentiality or motion I imagine myself in-the-midst-of. Vocal, then, as the act is, and where this doing comes across is different. No new language ever, but my own immediacy within, like a secretion. The timeliness of responding. So the personal is secret. A reflection is presupposed; meditation has its name in stasis. But the terrible silence of words, where are they stacked up in love?
Obscure cultural immediacies; not (exactly) how consciousness is used, more the content in which it lives, that its clarity has elicitations and extensions, that a reasonable moment has callings, too, but the persistence of the old through things, and again, where the motions are, finally, closed in seeing. That.
"The thing itself" we might say, even of silence, where it becomes exposed. To no reflection, and my own name lost in another chance or diversion. After the facts. But I know that, that beyond the name ("Air", for instance), the residues of incompleteness are not elusive, and definitions follow innately, uncaused but by our own place. Not "the times" and not simply movement or annihilation, too simple, there, that the vernacular runs out and that in presupposing renewal one commits, perpetrates "another". No, the child persists. We wonder after those necessities of the old or of the means. It is not apparent. This very act.
A loss of acts or processes, there are differences, first of attention and finally the missing element, what knowing itself has circumscribed in the doing. An expansion. So, merely to record. The presence of the act, a nullity.
A gap. That the very things we experience might be the thing itself. Which has elliptical boundaries and connotations, from which special vocabularies are made, and out beyond that, where precedence occurs, to the markings, rhetorical, to be kept. So the special distinctions adhere as well as they are made and in the act is a certain residue (mystery), perhaps the style of place.
Just as the collapse is temporal, like a figure.
A fixed image is sufficient for the material, which is attached to no thing. Historical moment of no place and attached to no thing. But that very preciousness from which our sacred privacy reacts, startled. "That very thing itself," to pile up space upon space, always toward the surety of the new, the confident, the actful.
No, it is not simply a momentary peculiarity which persists through perceptible locations, further erosion assures us of that, but an example. Closing in upon it or backing off, those are the experiences, and the nothingness of spacial relation persists defined and undefined, alternating, echoing, persistent.
My own heart-beat, that close.
However, if I were lying down, and if I insisted upon it, that I were doing so, the tour de force itself would elicit a content of process. The special observation necessary to completion is absent, and importantly so. A vital consequence, but unadvanced.
Lesser moments might become less distinct in other times, as we call them, though ours, as we call it, is certainly ours.
This explicit shape we have bears us on toward the familiarity of conscious responding, like the concept of repetition rather than its quality of security and impatient closure.
A diminished presence, prose.
No-one is certain yet, although the evidence may already be there. Our heroes "of evidence", like innovations, tests, hesitancies, perhaps it rejects us, the Dantean host, blackened out of moment, charred, processed: but left.
Possibly: a suggestion.
The doom of events has elastic resonances. That is as likely as any other. And the renewed presence of argument is reassuring, that we might lean into it, alone and simple: but I am the topic here, this invisibility I met.
"An act becomes perverse as it loses visibility." The heart of it. Who observes? What passed? When? And so on.
Still for what I am, in what I imagine to be my familiar processes, there are inclusions to which I would be introduced. A pressure from either one side or the other. A bell ringing, and light from the direction of my eyes. Followers descent.
And further on, a blocked space which causes me to turn, from inertia gaining "through" encounter to ease, there is no diminishing aspect, only that static center, as unfamiliar as feelings are, and undefined. There!
* * *
The fable and the imitation.
Or I might say that collation is active (i.e., "against"), and that experiencing is close, close against it, too.
We are after more than effects here, or even distance, or "propriety".
But the whole cause....
No longing, even.
"Was seen", perhaps, knowing and remembering, though "out of the present" occupies me too closely. I don't even know a single example; keep it going, we say, keep it up (up?).
The effect is cause enough.
Too easy.
Against the definition of what was caused as forgetting, in no position, and clarity (or a value). Rest.
Private value, personal value, reflection. And cause, and back again.
"Can it be reproduced in others" is cause enough, for vertigo, perhaps.
Purpose has an edge, too, in what is known. He seems to know what he is doing; elusive. Or eluding pressure; though for me, he has disappeared entirely in it. Not a single trace remains. No letters. Sleep, then, to rest, for reflection or an image, and for going on or back, either way.
Either way, from stasis to stasis, rest, the photograph and the story, what of that, what of the remains evoking further cause: the build-up toward and from.
Whose?
Pressure to collapse.
We grind into collection, and imitate our very produce. In acts. There is that form, that act, that name.
"One always perishes by the self one assumes: to bear a name is to claim an exact mode of collapse." (Cioran)
The obscure but precise fissure, closed as evidence, a preoccupation from the observable, another new fragmentation. relief from indistinct language: in the form of the hero, some totally inclusive error of observation which causes being, diminishing the thing-known to process or motion, and the sought category perishing by the very weight of the quest.
The fable.
Out of such lightning progress, where hesitation hangs on each claim for attention, might there be a further reliance, or pursuit, or weight, or balance....
Or loss. It hangs back.
Unobserved and unfamiliar. Where the wearing-down originates, but what of my own impatience, like an inheritance, this shift, too.
We have driven it, in some direction, clear of all boundaries, out of passing and claims, to some territorial philosophy. but words are simple and singular.
Not even problematical doing surprises. And back again, perpetually, a particular locale, or visit, or reminiscence. Qualities of bouncing.
Undiminished.
And then, after that, recurring dreams.
"...is perhaps that very thing itself." Disabused.
* * *
"My will the enemy held, and thence had made a chain for me, and bound me. For of a froward will, was a lust made; and a lust served, became custom" (St. Augustine)
Where the world, a single event, a single situation interpenetrates with the single consciousness of act. It is the one continuing through the other one, one in one combined by acts.
Through the undiminished error of the "new" place.
Posterior to the singularity of the event, the surety of one's blindness before it, and then after, the ferment, singular descriptions of the status of the process, as old as the new physics and as likely to reduce the actual into categories of control. But in saying there is no movement, and in the building of monuments, no simple accretion of space. The occupation of the boundary-zone. Like a rejoinder, not exactly a response to the senses nor experiencing of its own is the task, through feeling to space, the monument is its name only, and after that "...Love, love that holds so high the cry of my birth, how great a sea moving towards the Woman who loves! Vine tramples on all shores, blessing of foam in all flesh, and song of the bubbles on the sands....Homage, homage to the divine ardor!" (St. John Perse).
The return, sending, and the work maintain themselves as parallels of event rather than locales of immediacy. Though it is always to flavor that we respond.
At least out of some kindness to the image and its sources, that difficulty is experienced in that a reflection of the event which denies either act or process, and to neither subscribes, to nothing inhering, in no place signified but in its essential reflecting, in its doing.
There, "in alternate identification and detachment (one) is free", which is neither the condition nor the obscure act, but a description of a memory, which exists as a hope. To lose that, from the relative distinctions of attention dismissed is the drift of either act or will. Closed fable.
And heaviness within, sinking. Into flat discord, the reachable bottom, a distinction of even-ness which goes at act and seeing and the sureness with which they become values, that very confidence is suspect, out of the balancing disaster which thought becomes in its consciousness of itself. So there is no assurance, though a successful mode persists, and toward the good, to break out among the energies of will and word, a matching of sequence, act and process: though it is in this very act itself (again) that we will perceive (receive) motions accessible to consequence, that is, have laid ourselves open not to either ease or disease but to a loss commending ourselves to the one in the other one, to act and process in the immediacies of response.
Popular unacceptibility, always, where it rests out of one's own disaster of pressure, the pornographic susceptibility to repetition and extent, to define, there, where it is what it is, and no denying that, and that we might not interrupt the sequence out of the familiar by placing ourselves ahead of what we are, at least not by preceding ourselves. It is not to be relived.
But approached, without head-dresses, disguising the senses in their acceptances of their own evidence, no, but that the whole unitary mode drives the static into its parts only to have them remain there, out of all anticipation, unreminiscent and unfathomed; the impulse to observe has then become fulfilled, a horror has been re-established and from there no redress out of the actual to another actual.
The new is full of that. And faithful to it.
Which is a moment within discourse, and seems to direct itself ("itself out of itself") toward, against and through the intellectual (reason and discourse present in whatever form the speech-act takes) and seems finally to abandon it from some further enlightening. But if a quality of action, whether cultural or absolute, which distinction ought to do and out to reflect something of the tension here, it is that placement of the moment or event in some location other than itself which prohibits the event itself, which prohibits, which is the essence of the pornographic.
Where one is lead to one's initial. Where mind's ability to contradict itself becomes signal to eventuation, where a harmony of anticipations is inevitable. The pain of existence represents itself to us not as solution nor as resolution, but as "the thing itself."
Elliptical. In that solid geometry of conceptioning do we notice that the pleasure requires acting. Ecstatic configuring, where the shape of an event warps to confusing, one evidences the reversal of form.
The purpose of discourse would become a kind of functional reflection. As I address myself to the initial flavor of my anticipation, do I discover that its obscurity lies in its necessity of reproducing itself into further anticipation. The unobserved loss of dimension predicts the senses.
In the balance, some restitution of alternation. The very content of acting, where thing-seen commends itself to thing-seeing.
"Perhaps these people are expedient in the unnamables. Maybe they bargain in feelings, in pleasure, even in simple contact." (Steinbeck)
If the relapse through the guilt-of-the-new has no exchange, no reversal, no recurrence, I might make the impossible discovery that the repetition of events is not discoverable in them but elsewhere. Which leaves the matter entirely at rest, appropriate only to response. Which leaves me with the practice of activity. It is clear that the practice itself is active; in a drama, we are led out into sentences and construing, into the form of the event, and finally, into the event itself, which is where this has all taken place.
...The roll of the returning waters
over the stone stretches
remotely
reaching us. (Duncan)
((proper form of response/not discussable
in descriptive terms/but in terms of the/meaning of the act,
how it is that one did/what one did in the/way that one did it/
intention, direction,/location. what it represents./
"I just did it."))
* * *
NARROWING THE ATTENTION FIELD
all
wrong
And I am asked--ask myself (I, too, covered
with the gurry of it) where
shall we go from here, what can we do
when even the public conveyances
sing?
how can we go anywhere (the bodies
all buried
in shallow graves?
Charles Olson, Songs of Maximus #2
Out of the legitimacy of the one in the one, the first step remains, how to address oneself from the ground, from zero, into the air, into the one:
The view, that speech inheres to dialog, and to act, and that our locale constitutes a pornographic dominion of a reflection of the one into its image, the one-in-the-other, and that interpenetration of the one into itself, into the one, relieves itself out of initiation.
As the separate senses coagulate toward self is not new; multiple input primitive.
But from the law (itself unto itself), and from the data of the poetic, of the levels and striations of consciousness, one would, ought to admit to the following:
Since the form of the event, or the activity in which we find ourselves on coming-to-consciousness, is visible, is perceived, then where ought we to enter process, out of the initial imbalance, or from the recognition that, yes, we do perceive ourselves in-the-midst-of being, or out of what is seen initial as a suicidal drive toward blindness, and the assurance that the latter is inevitable is not lightly considered, though such turns out to be the case with the force of recognition and with the realization that Blind is what one is.
THE ATTENTION: as one comes to see that his attention is directed, may devolve to medium-fascination, like photography (personal experience). One may fasten upon a detail, to some remain hypnotized for the remainder of conscious life. Or one may admit that one has suddenly come to a difficult transformation in his total development.
Thus, for instance, the momentousness of the word, in our voice-flesh-act term, that has one feeling his body in speech, vibrating like a celestial drum, what song! One is still reflecting process upon act, rather than one-in-one, or speaking as act and process, as thing done, one committed, and thing described, "I am at peace" as utterance (sequence) and fact (state).
The relation of this to that: Whorf: "...that all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe."
Though if one Were universe, at the start, voice might penetrate out from the in, into the actual event, one might be heard in the other
voice outward,
one, self) ====>> the//actual
The view, or vision substantiates. What one sees is not peripheral.
THE NEW, Harold Rosenberg.
If there is a transit where to? And "what is it like", but no other? Qualities of taste to be discarded, but how and what of succeeding generations, if I abandon what is good out of what I remember about the other (the pleasure, for instance). Especially if this transit is inevitable and we bear no cues, at least to recognize when we have passed certain boundaries, when we have passed through, for instance, the successive phases of derangement into something resembling indifference, will we not still be cruel? To which one applies to all notions of self regulation; out of biology and into the spiritual with that....
So, one attends gradually to the shifts in his own attention, to work some self change. One sets his acts out like pieces of force. One receives crisis information, states of complete metabolic emergency, like the philosopher's "continual revolution".
Though finally one meets the physical father and sees the other as cause, as symbol, as truth.
Mother of acts, which receive their force, the world.
But to see across to this as even possible, hardly as valuable.....
"That don Juan's control is the power, we can't allow ourselves to doubt. Good is control" (Navajo/Gladys Reichard) as power is control, out of the literal, to see it thus as power of self to be in control of self: Odysseus.
Not the hero, but the way it comes about. "Hero", the same reflective consciousness, un-included in his acting. Hamlet, no, but Odysseus in his acts, how they are caused in where, in what they take the shape, of flesh and blood, you suitors.
No, but that the voice is spoke out into the real and that the flesh is one with the head.
****************************************
THREE: THIS:EVENT INFORMATION SEPARATION
...as against what we know went on, the dream: the dream being
self action with Whithead's important corollary: that no event
is not penetrated, in intersection or collision with, an eternal
event
The poetics of such a situation
are yet to be found out.
Charles Olson, Maximus V, the opener, January 15, 1962
* * *
nonsense
insense
outsense
As one becomes the many, to get there an image in its very constituency, as parts, as metaphor for seeing. The degree to which cultural preoccupations persist is personal.
THERE IT IS, or Spring:
has a ruffled edge,
the sap. Flow or turn out, as light escapes, toward
the new. Had a rough edge to it,
winter thought.s
Water-bell ing, the boy in the corner of the picture,
with the ocean flat out, rising up behind, in the picture,
the sun coming off the surface, though no detail of waves lost.
laid into a zone of response.
Cause separated from Event.
or, feeling: be it a stone, or wishing.
How he finds it possible,
and to have it there,
tonguing into the earth,
where she splits & cracks,
& boils up & spits,
& not with fury,
& even, how she is in that,
& gets out & in again, to make the center point
& wall.
Celebration of the event.
Straight line In & Through, as movement/as activity,
followed,
air and air whistling through the trees,
NOT: closeted (in the house,
directly,
& in thought behold as it came off
To weld, in / direct / ion, had said,
But particular, A : a
on in.
Shield, progress-ion
* * *
Meditation and Response
continual vectoring of new information /
Retrieval notes: commun-al-ist / "commune-ism" /
The rough edge of time resolves outward, into close range: attention stands, and memory holds ==>> through into the new, or laws of serial space, of being phenomenally "in-the-world" as a glyph of being, THIS UTTERANCE / the very I am of being, such as it is spoken, this thing, man, that I am, in word in language spoke, and said, of being one in things / so: outward, that begun and interrupt that it is as spoke, as serial thing, act through event
"the eternal event"
Right?
coming-mouth, and right on in, to touch, her, where she starts up, wet and well, tongued-in, and eyes open to her navel, and penetrated deep, like a hot depth.
She waits (aside, of consciousness, to get motive out, as an open choice, that thing which sends us out after death, and toward some separate and special beloved, and that is what opens up before, and this is the cause of the specific in the one. As a close recognition and special, too, that it comes of course (as a course is set, out and straight for it), to register the terminals of sensation in their proper (pro-prio-ceptive) context.
Of course, and the reproducibility of the mode in others to certain degrees (of specialty of performance), the event that is, comes to be seen as whole-ly significant; that is, "what am I doing" yields event, as conscious focus, and me, thus, here, at "verbalizing" and "energy" that is, in display of both: precisely that, and, tho, manifesting language. "We are constantly manifesting ourselves", Roshi tells us. Though he is what he is before that, before anything else, and that is the voice in operation, set out right against act, toward, but in being, my friend, in and of con-jointly.
The where "of space", signifies and rightly, where style presupposes (out of vernacular considerations), content: though that should be made more concrete: it is demonstrable that ego and self define "locale" differently under national/ cultural/ propagandistic circumstances, that is, against the enemy, material, known, falsely palpable essence, "the real." Like Ibsen & Wagner, as against the Wen Fu and, perhaps, Pound; where even Baudlaire's eclecticism is constantly informed by the essence of what he is, contradicted, even. Which is the definition, and the form of it, out of which one grows toward reason, out of repetition and accumulation. The trick is, here, of thresh-holds and biological-maturation points, like Dr. Montessori did for the kids, to chart out the ages of consciousness peaks, cf. developmental, and to get for those same offspring, an anticipated sequence of acts which is not tampering but responding to observation and the instinct to be of assistance, to help; so the question about new information and consciousness comes about for this: how do we place the tendency (toward torpor, you said) toward engagement, not choice, but the awareness, in act that, yes consciousness did engage, did reflect, yes, by (whatever)(eg. serial), means, by that mode, but it did that, did.
Yes, one remembers in the way out of (into) sequence. The mode of outward.
The image, or illusion of, preceded, how, out of, where, the neolithic? And that relation to the activity, not entirely ecstatic, and sometimes vernacular and fold, of the vision made sacred, which we usually as, now, "American Indian Art", sequentially photographed, with crude material-objective text accompanying, a material act, surely, that "way" of the book, even in those solid terms, cultural (MOMA:1948). And alterable, and possible, that is, likely, and advisable.
The notion, there, of advised action for purpose, or acts-out-of-value.
"He does not think anything is the matter with him." (Laing) Reductions of attention, such a schizoid behavior, the very image fades before response to it, that is, of coming back on the consciousness-of-consciousness into further acts. Nothing diffuse, here, that any manifestation of purpose or interpretation of (the) said, as owing to a motive for existence, and reflection is that-which-is. What is one talking about, then, is one simply aligning speech and time into some personal pace which is actual, is that song? The ear gives word its ocean.
The excesses of kitsch and the vulgar are, is, the imitation of taste: matter and intelligence separate into act and cause, from what is whole to what is a reflection, that is the of the literary or the erotic. And to turn to that and out into responding is pleasure. The told. Lived in and touched.
* *
Or, devoured, that is the message of the past, ouroboric devouring, us as whip-tail, bent around, the tail looking in, the eye ahead of the jaws. Demon teeth, dragon-sown, harvesters of the fields, silence to that, too, where it lasts out beyond time and its intermissions into the open realm. And distinguished there, as stasis-space, no movement, nor death, but nothing else, either, it has sagged open, perhaps Auden's term; the photographs will do, in combination with other things.
And "what am I doing" is swimming across from the one to the other, having birthed-out, and now, half way across, casting out. Swimming.
the form of it, then occludes / there is, in that
version of seeing (through form to event)
indirectness where it is meant, & in the term
term of it, from Response to the Contra-
dictory (against diction, or speech), silence,
then, the dichotomy. The second-glance,
that is of observation is what kicks
it through, the line through the
double-vision of the intellectual,
which is right, the line into any
mysticism is the continuity of time
into which each act penetrates.
There!
Arlee, Montana, 1972
7771
Thomas Lowe Taylor
"The task of the teacher becomes that of preparing a series of motives of cultural activity, spread over a specially prepared environment, and then refraining from obtrusive interference." Maria Montessori, Education for a New World
***************************************
ONE: NOTES FOR AN EVENT
"Question: Well, why do you go to another culture to get your myth?
Charles Olson: Well, you knock me out if you say that. I just thought I bridged the cultures. (He laughs) I don't believe in cultures myself. I think that's a lot of hung up stuff like organized anything. I believe there is simply ourselves, and where we are has a particularity which we'd better use because that's about all we got. Otherwise we're running around looking for someone else's stuff. But that particularity is as great as numbers are in arithmetic. The literal is the same as the numeral to me. I mean the literal is an invention of language and power the same as numbers. And so there is no other culture. There is simply the literal essence and exactitude of your own. I mean, the streets you live on, or the clothes you wear, or the color of your hair is no different from the ability of, say, Giovanni di Paolo to cut the legs off Santa Clara or something. Truth lies solely in what you do with it. And that means you. I don't think there's any such thing as a creature of culture.
I think we live so totally in an aculturated time that the reason we're all here that care and write is to put an end to that whole thing, put an end to divisions of all sorts. And to do this, you have to put the establishment out of business. It's just a structure of establishment. Any my own reason for being, that I feel that today, as much as action, the invention...not the invention, but the discovery of formal structural means is as legitimate as, is for me the form of action. The radical of action lies in finding how organized things are genuine, are initial, to come back to that statement I hope I succeeded in making about the imago mundi. That that's initial in any of us. We have our picture of the world and that's the creation."
* * *
Though it is in language that world becomes palpable, it is in utterance that it becomes sacred: in a literal focus of energy, breathed and voiced, explosions from the lungs in a mixed expiration, tongue-acted. So speech and song as a combination of act and making: word-act, what I come to see as voice-flesh-act.
That is, from the imitation of imagination, speech is cryptic. Though reminiscence rounds it off into its structural value. A syntax of this very process would yield to the actual distance of things.
Up against speech-language, in its sequences, we have laid consciousness as an open pool, set like a mirror before the ear to catch word. The empty space of consciousness as mother of will / laid within the man-organ, against the seriality of his acts.
A serial persuasion yields personal diameters; out of the choice-field would lie patterns of equal response.
Personal voice: out of process rather than necessity, a private / impersonal. Or as it becomes known (again, out of nostalgia), in the sense that knowing is rather like memory, as open processes eclipse the personal, the vocal-private-impersonal impels through relation: that is as the topics eclipse their own verbal-oral-cultural plasticity, out of one's vernacular singleness, speech-acts come to structure the growth of the conscious.
To go back, then, to the initial sequence of perceptions, rather to ride through the birth-act, is to honor the house (body), to give moment or shape to the desire for understanding: however broadly one finds his own personal spread down before him, there seems to exist another boundary, out of future-time, boundary-like. Or to get around an apparent objection to mysticism, to posit the legibility of the "passing-beyond" as a form of serial language implicit in the relation of series to consciousness, right? The thing is done, is getting done, and one knows it, has it there before him.
The true character of observation might then be understood as extensions of consciousness (rooted) though there is, located maybe, somewhere, a double vision (a re-view), more a double consciousness, an inverse of awareness, like guilt or the other way around. Our legacy, anyhow, to see it twice and have it come in between the act and process, a pornography of the forms.
The beloved, somehow personalized, and then photographed. Or our own preoccupation with medium (flesh-blood-speech active, muscular, breathed). So it distinguishes as a coherence between image and act and the poetic at its current state.
Surely the passing-beyond relieves poetry from its cryptic isolation. Cultural enterprises seem to be allowed. Now, vision, inherent in any consideration of "the quality of the act" might then consist in the manipulation of symbols. There is a suggestion (of this) in the introduction to Theosophist Annie Besant's Thought Forms.
* *
Visionary education, as it takes place, relies on event-process as a voiced convenience. A consciousness of means which does not quibble, that is an inner dimension which carries the focus down.
Where is the focus? In the parallel? Where are you placed there? No contest.
OK, no value anywhere but in acts. First, and then this whole business of the literal miscalculation (being literal about the literal), as regards acts; seems to arise from closed process and a notion of ends-as-such. Open process would carry the serial out beyond, that in each is pre-scribed the consequences of the succeeding act; therein resistance, to recognition even, though that's the point, that what is voiced is a state of being and that there are other states. To declare a hierarchy flaws the act. Into value, again, as choice.
* *
So right there, even, at the matter of word choice (the "numen" of selection), there is a hesitation at going-back-over-it, perhaps an inability. In these terms, whose monolog?
The succession of acts and successively inclusive states of response. The "new" language appears as-such, to examine the quality of the new, or of initiation, or birth. Literal act, however, in its crudest form, intervenes, almost to obscure the means of relief. I mean, the quality of acts (as perceived), both as a referent to possibility and as an impulse to memory. The dynamic of it, again, qualifies. Hence, inversion, to both succession and space. No error: allusion (to accept responsibility) is a gesture toward the actual. In acts, too, a residue.
Aphorism, too, almost like afterthought.
"So, is it not the play of a mind we are after, is not that that shows whether a mind is there at all?" (Olson)
Whose?
Now, the relation to the ceremony includes, even departure, there, into private voice (song?), to allow the overtones to define certain categories of being. After the fact, of course; the experience precedes the model. What's up, through the line and through love, is the perpetual condition of voice and relation enacted, consciousness embodied in its proper uni-verse (one song). And speech as afterthought, that lag, is only problematical.
So to continue. Through the matter of evidence and hesitation, the voice affixes itself to the person under hand, and all that precedes speech falls into its proper antagonism, the repetition of initial acts, preceded by their causes, out of such flux as continues to move away, out of "sight" in either direction. Loss. But not error; slippage, perhaps, but not necessarily means.
Energy is too vague a term, since its balance (expense) is a motion. Ok, fine, the thing cannot be described, or worse than that, can. The forces are organized. And then wait. What is that?
The condition?
Awaitment, I thought, past the cultural into our proper sphere, the top of the head, still soft. But we leave, we are always leaving, and the situation is left, expressed, its vernacular obedient to cause. Final. Context in another yearning after the sequential. But hurrying on, in a pace toward the familiar.
Foundations are behaviors, too, aligned as easily as true speech, so the problematical and quantitative means of information are expressed. Not to trouble anything, but as a temporary locus of the image, or the vision. Or the impulse of a shadow, declining into prejudice, requiring periodic affirmations.
I think this all precedes utterance altogether. There is a space present in it, identified, allowable, but which is (becomes) qualitative, and to that degree resists its own definition, which is neither self nor identifiable description. To say that it is meant would give to the speaker (whomever) more than he has offered. But an impulse to information seems important. Naturally (equivocally), it is better in a crystallized form. And the inhering of that, the distance from the subject, to drive it back, out of its own accretions, not quite to the point of control, sadly enough, but to its resistance; then, in naming, at least, there, to the exact, to the actual syntax or immediate sense of the thing, assuming (for once) that however one starts, he would head-in to the center. That is, if all points are equidistant from the center, and if all lines are (serially) straight lines.
And so on.
If it is not to presumptuous to get ahead of process, it is at least an exploration, of going nowhere. The cold point. But then, one would want to experience all things, it is said; but in what order? There must be none at that cold point. A most unsequential, unmoving location.
A notion of "mental events", however roughly it is laid out, would prescribe the center. It is visible in every of our moments. (shared) Referent, implied, assumed.
So pace delivers. The community is already there, visible. And the cold point (of relaxation) is a welcome fix, the word gets out. THEN: the metabolic pace.
Speech styles, accretion of acts, all assumed behind the methods of behavior, multi-ordered. No single declaration of distinctness, but an allowance (faith, "traditionally") that this leap across synapses was conceived originally (though that's loaded) as possible. Toward the good, with all the cynicism necessary for a maintenance of literal miscalculation. Or error (what has not yet been conceived: Otto Rank).
Participation mystique: in language, between the spoke and the unspoke, there is not much distance, and to value speech is not necessarily to honor the oral. OK, that's neat, if nothing else: contradictions of the parable reveal us (to restate it). But the oral-cultural-historical comes out of where we were, and if you trust yr memory that much, you're better than I am, the last second is rushing back from me. No pinnacle. But private speech in an impersonal setting has a drift which encounters some familiar shapes, though one could preoccupy himself with identification. The thing is up and going, pushed hesitantly along by the acolytes. They may be in it for the money, but they're pushing. Even out of the American locale, some poetry persists; certainly the vision, inclusive and temporary, initiates here, from outlasting the dialectical into the serial mode, where an accretion of detail drives the old context of muscular breath-acts back into a sharp focus. The diminished visual (the work was done, finished about twenty years ago, just go to the George Eastman House) reaffirms, frinstance, Chagall and Albers. They belong to the same age, and so to the rest of us, for that, anyway.
The free act, thanks to some reminders from the surrealist writers as against Miller's agony of separations, as against some thoughts about chanting the text in unison (reading?) and a tendency to begin to be able to notice the shifts.
The processes of transformation without idealizing time any more, would inhere within acts. A pornography of consciousness would only delay decision but not postpone indefinitely. So the terms for weight would allow passage along from the familiar through to the formulary and into the private. Which is transparent enough already.
The final act is just that: initiatory.
* * *
"A sentence is in fact a transfer of force, from object to object by verb."
But to get the matter firm, it is where Olson lodges, in the active, actual man, especially possessed of speech where it lies in, holds to and while the seeker comes to his means, the quest, and in others, communes, it is in the active man that speed commends itself to its proper relation between consciousness and the community, that in the words chosen and in those spoken that a man is, and is shown in his immediate and particular state. And without making any substitutions for myself, here, that if we have come to know this double of consciousness, that we would go toward a double vision in which the parts collide and coalesce and reapportion into the new constituencies.
But the activity, what is this proper activity itself, out of the personal and celebratory, into what context for the numen "did I choose my life?" and if so..." how, and to what advantage, if it lies in that, to know."
The retrievable, then, has its shape in what is familiar, as the guide who comes in the form of the butcher in a black apron who is going to cut you up to look for the shaman bone. Neither in Artaud nor in Cage do these new constituencies lie, but in the doubled vision and the triple sequence, or movement from voice through exploration to (into) consciousness. "That trope, man", Olson calls it.
I am the event, it goes, center of the focus, hot point and registration of all that I come to and through the event of self and process, conjunction as it were, come to speech.
"For truth is only the measure of the process thought. And thought is functional. You can't not 'think'. As you live you think."
That the law is: that has meaning which is itself to itself, as prime relation and fact of being-consciousness. And at no loss or gain to the species, by that which has us operating, so to speak, at function-levels according to state or will-to-action. But in no way diminished.
Now to work this out of the mundane, or what will I do about it, is right, exact, public sentiment about the real, inhering to some new end, inclusion. Exact. To have the series start with encounter. And what is general here is not method but complex, and (to head around) precisely that which exhibits, as "erudition", a false value which is attached to reason, dictates behaviors in proportion to the old term "blindness", as in-seeing and mute. But of that relation (of self-in-self) as a physicality, or assumption, the completeness of being presents it, the matter, as a law (way).
Thus the peculiarity of the present: What should we ask for? The turn, out of the new consciousness, having moved across, on the literal from figure to symbol, where the distinctions clarify drift or chance; anyway, there is a quality to "image" which refuses elusion, the structural persists and as evidence and means comes to strength: what there is to see has the reflected meaning of its allowances. The mirror runs in either direction.
Certainly, what we have known as cultural events retains a focus in the particular, like the residues of musical experience.
But the literalness of authority, when processed out, seems to have become less static, and as one is in motion, one can get a hold of the thing at last, to ride. The least hesitant consequences of the act. Or, like looking around.
So, I think we are least considered on the matter of speech models and oral series, where it comes to the matter, speech-active man, of relating the real, the palpable, world (out of language) and the literal fact of it, in consciousness and of the whole movement through illusion (via skill), at least in us as focused or registered participants. I mean like getting hold of the whole thing and of running, it, there's nothing to that but the doing of it, and that if in the doing of it something becomes apparent, then beyond all necessity one wants to follow it (curiosity and desire); in the union of act (speech and thought) does the permanent bond inside "that trope man", us as doer and done thing, but spoke. And to honor.
"Life is the success of a play of creative accidents. It is in the principle of randomness seen (is) its essential application, not in any serial order imposed at random on either chance or accident (the new tautologies of the old Chaos) but in the factual observation of how creation does occur: by the success of its own accident."
In speech, how the eyes focus and where and on what and to what intensity, where (also) the set of the face and the muscles, and in what event known and done but self and thing and what is spoke. "The motive, then, of reality is process, not goal."
The lag, to come through metabolism and chemistry to process, is to carry all that is weighty into an essential footrace. So to run it out, out of time, to make space, through the vernacular, as spoke, (to Wordsworth, too) would be that allowance: past style and the dogmatic. Use.
The fashionableness of light: to make the broad turn out of history, out of conscience, is to locate some of these priorities, and closely. In act in its proper sphere and dominion, and in vision where the mysteries are lodged, and in word, where patterns emerge and coalesce to newness (delight and joy). Not only simultaneous, into speech-active story-teller and image-maker, but to go through necessary silences at the will and center of the community, to be the mean point, at the center of the descent, in the free-over-backwards-falling-flight, in the loss of space which is space, there are some questions which I come to out of repetition.
"And my considered argument is, that it can only do this if it is the sensor of the set of qualities of which it is one part: that only if Beauty, Love, and the Idea are included by it, that no will can be 'free'--that is, both child and father of the beautiful, the good (as love), and the idea (as thought or truth).
"But note the rest of the thought (the other half): the infinitive of being/becoming--is neglected or left out. These four cannot be unstuck any more than the other two sets of four. And the tensor of all three sets is that one thing you are throughout: man. Actual wilful man." (Olson)
* * *
But to speak to the essential difficulty, "what am I doing", that if one takes in fully the preceding, and if the community, the commonality of the good, comes to be actually, the sum and total of its diversity, the whole business of the future and the inheritance might become more central.
And again, in terms of these transformations we try to justify or understand, what comes to be lack or emptiness (void) are seen to be, literally, matters of immense developmental significance for (even) those of us who are unaware of the degree and immensity of the unknown of which our senses are made only dimly aware in their constituency in the physical process.
Which gives the absolute its power. Our will to be its part. And as we coincide in our habits, we come to know our lives, it is this humanism which seeks expression in us.
So: first, to know, that feeling is in the realm of the good, then to speak what we are, out of all our acts toward being, always toward an always more inclusive curiosity, in recognition of the other in our acts ("other" as the not-me, the unsequential ego) and to come to the essential in our relations as immediacy, as crux and crumble, toward the factual always, in our passages and unmentionablenesses. To ring it like a bell.
The common act of consciousness, and the root exploration of it follows, unjustified, wilful and compulsive, bears our close attention, and not out of the selfish but toward recognition of the locations of the data.
The making of the universe, by my acts made. Nor any presumption, to proceed out of the a-historical, the body, into salvage (to let something through or to see in metaphor, something of the qualities of the negative).
In some seclusion, then, does this all take place. As the dream comes into utterance, takes life, there are all sorts of residues, a falling off, a skinning away to the essential nudity of a high diver, twisting past gravity, and the non-functional, to some essential twists and spasms, into the water--no splash.
The representatives of consciousness are elocution (the forms) and transformation (the states).
***************************************
TWO: CULTURE AND PORNOGRAPHY
"To act is one thing: to know one is acting is another" (Cioran)
* * *
By close and immediate distinctions, the thing becomes, discerned by focal establishing: but to bounce it back and out, the line through events, to this other kind of acting, and not hung out into words only, that would be cause.
Or, in the peculiarity of our own diminished knowing, where it parts again and again, it would be how I am set off from my own causes, or exactly where reflection lies at the heart of resolution. This sequentiality or motion I imagine myself in-the-midst-of. Vocal, then, as the act is, and where this doing comes across is different. No new language ever, but my own immediacy within, like a secretion. The timeliness of responding. So the personal is secret. A reflection is presupposed; meditation has its name in stasis. But the terrible silence of words, where are they stacked up in love?
Obscure cultural immediacies; not (exactly) how consciousness is used, more the content in which it lives, that its clarity has elicitations and extensions, that a reasonable moment has callings, too, but the persistence of the old through things, and again, where the motions are, finally, closed in seeing. That.
"The thing itself" we might say, even of silence, where it becomes exposed. To no reflection, and my own name lost in another chance or diversion. After the facts. But I know that, that beyond the name ("Air", for instance), the residues of incompleteness are not elusive, and definitions follow innately, uncaused but by our own place. Not "the times" and not simply movement or annihilation, too simple, there, that the vernacular runs out and that in presupposing renewal one commits, perpetrates "another". No, the child persists. We wonder after those necessities of the old or of the means. It is not apparent. This very act.
A loss of acts or processes, there are differences, first of attention and finally the missing element, what knowing itself has circumscribed in the doing. An expansion. So, merely to record. The presence of the act, a nullity.
A gap. That the very things we experience might be the thing itself. Which has elliptical boundaries and connotations, from which special vocabularies are made, and out beyond that, where precedence occurs, to the markings, rhetorical, to be kept. So the special distinctions adhere as well as they are made and in the act is a certain residue (mystery), perhaps the style of place.
Just as the collapse is temporal, like a figure.
A fixed image is sufficient for the material, which is attached to no thing. Historical moment of no place and attached to no thing. But that very preciousness from which our sacred privacy reacts, startled. "That very thing itself," to pile up space upon space, always toward the surety of the new, the confident, the actful.
No, it is not simply a momentary peculiarity which persists through perceptible locations, further erosion assures us of that, but an example. Closing in upon it or backing off, those are the experiences, and the nothingness of spacial relation persists defined and undefined, alternating, echoing, persistent.
My own heart-beat, that close.
However, if I were lying down, and if I insisted upon it, that I were doing so, the tour de force itself would elicit a content of process. The special observation necessary to completion is absent, and importantly so. A vital consequence, but unadvanced.
Lesser moments might become less distinct in other times, as we call them, though ours, as we call it, is certainly ours.
This explicit shape we have bears us on toward the familiarity of conscious responding, like the concept of repetition rather than its quality of security and impatient closure.
A diminished presence, prose.
No-one is certain yet, although the evidence may already be there. Our heroes "of evidence", like innovations, tests, hesitancies, perhaps it rejects us, the Dantean host, blackened out of moment, charred, processed: but left.
Possibly: a suggestion.
The doom of events has elastic resonances. That is as likely as any other. And the renewed presence of argument is reassuring, that we might lean into it, alone and simple: but I am the topic here, this invisibility I met.
"An act becomes perverse as it loses visibility." The heart of it. Who observes? What passed? When? And so on.
Still for what I am, in what I imagine to be my familiar processes, there are inclusions to which I would be introduced. A pressure from either one side or the other. A bell ringing, and light from the direction of my eyes. Followers descent.
And further on, a blocked space which causes me to turn, from inertia gaining "through" encounter to ease, there is no diminishing aspect, only that static center, as unfamiliar as feelings are, and undefined. There!
* * *
The fable and the imitation.
Or I might say that collation is active (i.e., "against"), and that experiencing is close, close against it, too.
We are after more than effects here, or even distance, or "propriety".
But the whole cause....
No longing, even.
"Was seen", perhaps, knowing and remembering, though "out of the present" occupies me too closely. I don't even know a single example; keep it going, we say, keep it up (up?).
The effect is cause enough.
Too easy.
Against the definition of what was caused as forgetting, in no position, and clarity (or a value). Rest.
Private value, personal value, reflection. And cause, and back again.
"Can it be reproduced in others" is cause enough, for vertigo, perhaps.
Purpose has an edge, too, in what is known. He seems to know what he is doing; elusive. Or eluding pressure; though for me, he has disappeared entirely in it. Not a single trace remains. No letters. Sleep, then, to rest, for reflection or an image, and for going on or back, either way.
Either way, from stasis to stasis, rest, the photograph and the story, what of that, what of the remains evoking further cause: the build-up toward and from.
Whose?
Pressure to collapse.
We grind into collection, and imitate our very produce. In acts. There is that form, that act, that name.
"One always perishes by the self one assumes: to bear a name is to claim an exact mode of collapse." (Cioran)
The obscure but precise fissure, closed as evidence, a preoccupation from the observable, another new fragmentation. relief from indistinct language: in the form of the hero, some totally inclusive error of observation which causes being, diminishing the thing-known to process or motion, and the sought category perishing by the very weight of the quest.
The fable.
Out of such lightning progress, where hesitation hangs on each claim for attention, might there be a further reliance, or pursuit, or weight, or balance....
Or loss. It hangs back.
Unobserved and unfamiliar. Where the wearing-down originates, but what of my own impatience, like an inheritance, this shift, too.
We have driven it, in some direction, clear of all boundaries, out of passing and claims, to some territorial philosophy. but words are simple and singular.
Not even problematical doing surprises. And back again, perpetually, a particular locale, or visit, or reminiscence. Qualities of bouncing.
Undiminished.
And then, after that, recurring dreams.
"...is perhaps that very thing itself." Disabused.
* * *
"My will the enemy held, and thence had made a chain for me, and bound me. For of a froward will, was a lust made; and a lust served, became custom" (St. Augustine)
Where the world, a single event, a single situation interpenetrates with the single consciousness of act. It is the one continuing through the other one, one in one combined by acts.
Through the undiminished error of the "new" place.
Posterior to the singularity of the event, the surety of one's blindness before it, and then after, the ferment, singular descriptions of the status of the process, as old as the new physics and as likely to reduce the actual into categories of control. But in saying there is no movement, and in the building of monuments, no simple accretion of space. The occupation of the boundary-zone. Like a rejoinder, not exactly a response to the senses nor experiencing of its own is the task, through feeling to space, the monument is its name only, and after that "...Love, love that holds so high the cry of my birth, how great a sea moving towards the Woman who loves! Vine tramples on all shores, blessing of foam in all flesh, and song of the bubbles on the sands....Homage, homage to the divine ardor!" (St. John Perse).
The return, sending, and the work maintain themselves as parallels of event rather than locales of immediacy. Though it is always to flavor that we respond.
At least out of some kindness to the image and its sources, that difficulty is experienced in that a reflection of the event which denies either act or process, and to neither subscribes, to nothing inhering, in no place signified but in its essential reflecting, in its doing.
There, "in alternate identification and detachment (one) is free", which is neither the condition nor the obscure act, but a description of a memory, which exists as a hope. To lose that, from the relative distinctions of attention dismissed is the drift of either act or will. Closed fable.
And heaviness within, sinking. Into flat discord, the reachable bottom, a distinction of even-ness which goes at act and seeing and the sureness with which they become values, that very confidence is suspect, out of the balancing disaster which thought becomes in its consciousness of itself. So there is no assurance, though a successful mode persists, and toward the good, to break out among the energies of will and word, a matching of sequence, act and process: though it is in this very act itself (again) that we will perceive (receive) motions accessible to consequence, that is, have laid ourselves open not to either ease or disease but to a loss commending ourselves to the one in the other one, to act and process in the immediacies of response.
Popular unacceptibility, always, where it rests out of one's own disaster of pressure, the pornographic susceptibility to repetition and extent, to define, there, where it is what it is, and no denying that, and that we might not interrupt the sequence out of the familiar by placing ourselves ahead of what we are, at least not by preceding ourselves. It is not to be relived.
But approached, without head-dresses, disguising the senses in their acceptances of their own evidence, no, but that the whole unitary mode drives the static into its parts only to have them remain there, out of all anticipation, unreminiscent and unfathomed; the impulse to observe has then become fulfilled, a horror has been re-established and from there no redress out of the actual to another actual.
The new is full of that. And faithful to it.
Which is a moment within discourse, and seems to direct itself ("itself out of itself") toward, against and through the intellectual (reason and discourse present in whatever form the speech-act takes) and seems finally to abandon it from some further enlightening. But if a quality of action, whether cultural or absolute, which distinction ought to do and out to reflect something of the tension here, it is that placement of the moment or event in some location other than itself which prohibits the event itself, which prohibits, which is the essence of the pornographic.
Where one is lead to one's initial. Where mind's ability to contradict itself becomes signal to eventuation, where a harmony of anticipations is inevitable. The pain of existence represents itself to us not as solution nor as resolution, but as "the thing itself."
Elliptical. In that solid geometry of conceptioning do we notice that the pleasure requires acting. Ecstatic configuring, where the shape of an event warps to confusing, one evidences the reversal of form.
The purpose of discourse would become a kind of functional reflection. As I address myself to the initial flavor of my anticipation, do I discover that its obscurity lies in its necessity of reproducing itself into further anticipation. The unobserved loss of dimension predicts the senses.
In the balance, some restitution of alternation. The very content of acting, where thing-seen commends itself to thing-seeing.
"Perhaps these people are expedient in the unnamables. Maybe they bargain in feelings, in pleasure, even in simple contact." (Steinbeck)
If the relapse through the guilt-of-the-new has no exchange, no reversal, no recurrence, I might make the impossible discovery that the repetition of events is not discoverable in them but elsewhere. Which leaves the matter entirely at rest, appropriate only to response. Which leaves me with the practice of activity. It is clear that the practice itself is active; in a drama, we are led out into sentences and construing, into the form of the event, and finally, into the event itself, which is where this has all taken place.
...The roll of the returning waters
over the stone stretches
remotely
reaching us. (Duncan)
((proper form of response/not discussable
in descriptive terms/but in terms of the/meaning of the act,
how it is that one did/what one did in the/way that one did it/
intention, direction,/location. what it represents./
"I just did it."))
* * *
NARROWING THE ATTENTION FIELD
all
wrong
And I am asked--ask myself (I, too, covered
with the gurry of it) where
shall we go from here, what can we do
when even the public conveyances
sing?
how can we go anywhere (the bodies
all buried
in shallow graves?
Charles Olson, Songs of Maximus #2
Out of the legitimacy of the one in the one, the first step remains, how to address oneself from the ground, from zero, into the air, into the one:
The view, that speech inheres to dialog, and to act, and that our locale constitutes a pornographic dominion of a reflection of the one into its image, the one-in-the-other, and that interpenetration of the one into itself, into the one, relieves itself out of initiation.
As the separate senses coagulate toward self is not new; multiple input primitive.
But from the law (itself unto itself), and from the data of the poetic, of the levels and striations of consciousness, one would, ought to admit to the following:
Since the form of the event, or the activity in which we find ourselves on coming-to-consciousness, is visible, is perceived, then where ought we to enter process, out of the initial imbalance, or from the recognition that, yes, we do perceive ourselves in-the-midst-of being, or out of what is seen initial as a suicidal drive toward blindness, and the assurance that the latter is inevitable is not lightly considered, though such turns out to be the case with the force of recognition and with the realization that Blind is what one is.
THE ATTENTION: as one comes to see that his attention is directed, may devolve to medium-fascination, like photography (personal experience). One may fasten upon a detail, to some remain hypnotized for the remainder of conscious life. Or one may admit that one has suddenly come to a difficult transformation in his total development.
Thus, for instance, the momentousness of the word, in our voice-flesh-act term, that has one feeling his body in speech, vibrating like a celestial drum, what song! One is still reflecting process upon act, rather than one-in-one, or speaking as act and process, as thing done, one committed, and thing described, "I am at peace" as utterance (sequence) and fact (state).
The relation of this to that: Whorf: "...that all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe."
Though if one Were universe, at the start, voice might penetrate out from the in, into the actual event, one might be heard in the other
voice outward,
one, self) ====>> the//actual
The view, or vision substantiates. What one sees is not peripheral.
THE NEW, Harold Rosenberg.
If there is a transit where to? And "what is it like", but no other? Qualities of taste to be discarded, but how and what of succeeding generations, if I abandon what is good out of what I remember about the other (the pleasure, for instance). Especially if this transit is inevitable and we bear no cues, at least to recognize when we have passed certain boundaries, when we have passed through, for instance, the successive phases of derangement into something resembling indifference, will we not still be cruel? To which one applies to all notions of self regulation; out of biology and into the spiritual with that....
So, one attends gradually to the shifts in his own attention, to work some self change. One sets his acts out like pieces of force. One receives crisis information, states of complete metabolic emergency, like the philosopher's "continual revolution".
Though finally one meets the physical father and sees the other as cause, as symbol, as truth.
Mother of acts, which receive their force, the world.
But to see across to this as even possible, hardly as valuable.....
"That don Juan's control is the power, we can't allow ourselves to doubt. Good is control" (Navajo/Gladys Reichard) as power is control, out of the literal, to see it thus as power of self to be in control of self: Odysseus.
Not the hero, but the way it comes about. "Hero", the same reflective consciousness, un-included in his acting. Hamlet, no, but Odysseus in his acts, how they are caused in where, in what they take the shape, of flesh and blood, you suitors.
No, but that the voice is spoke out into the real and that the flesh is one with the head.
****************************************
THREE: THIS:EVENT INFORMATION SEPARATION
...as against what we know went on, the dream: the dream being
self action with Whithead's important corollary: that no event
is not penetrated, in intersection or collision with, an eternal
event
The poetics of such a situation
are yet to be found out.
Charles Olson, Maximus V, the opener, January 15, 1962
* * *
nonsense
insense
outsense
As one becomes the many, to get there an image in its very constituency, as parts, as metaphor for seeing. The degree to which cultural preoccupations persist is personal.
THERE IT IS, or Spring:
has a ruffled edge,
the sap. Flow or turn out, as light escapes, toward
the new. Had a rough edge to it,
winter thought.s
Water-bell ing, the boy in the corner of the picture,
with the ocean flat out, rising up behind, in the picture,
the sun coming off the surface, though no detail of waves lost.
laid into a zone of response.
Cause separated from Event.
or, feeling: be it a stone, or wishing.
How he finds it possible,
and to have it there,
tonguing into the earth,
where she splits & cracks,
& boils up & spits,
& not with fury,
& even, how she is in that,
& gets out & in again, to make the center point
& wall.
Celebration of the event.
Straight line In & Through, as movement/as activity,
followed,
air and air whistling through the trees,
NOT: closeted (in the house,
directly,
& in thought behold as it came off
To weld, in / direct / ion, had said,
But particular, A : a
on in.
Shield, progress-ion
* * *
Meditation and Response
continual vectoring of new information /
Retrieval notes: commun-al-ist / "commune-ism" /
The rough edge of time resolves outward, into close range: attention stands, and memory holds ==>> through into the new, or laws of serial space, of being phenomenally "in-the-world" as a glyph of being, THIS UTTERANCE / the very I am of being, such as it is spoken, this thing, man, that I am, in word in language spoke, and said, of being one in things / so: outward, that begun and interrupt that it is as spoke, as serial thing, act through event
"the eternal event"
Right?
coming-mouth, and right on in, to touch, her, where she starts up, wet and well, tongued-in, and eyes open to her navel, and penetrated deep, like a hot depth.
She waits (aside, of consciousness, to get motive out, as an open choice, that thing which sends us out after death, and toward some separate and special beloved, and that is what opens up before, and this is the cause of the specific in the one. As a close recognition and special, too, that it comes of course (as a course is set, out and straight for it), to register the terminals of sensation in their proper (pro-prio-ceptive) context.
Of course, and the reproducibility of the mode in others to certain degrees (of specialty of performance), the event that is, comes to be seen as whole-ly significant; that is, "what am I doing" yields event, as conscious focus, and me, thus, here, at "verbalizing" and "energy" that is, in display of both: precisely that, and, tho, manifesting language. "We are constantly manifesting ourselves", Roshi tells us. Though he is what he is before that, before anything else, and that is the voice in operation, set out right against act, toward, but in being, my friend, in and of con-jointly.
The where "of space", signifies and rightly, where style presupposes (out of vernacular considerations), content: though that should be made more concrete: it is demonstrable that ego and self define "locale" differently under national/ cultural/ propagandistic circumstances, that is, against the enemy, material, known, falsely palpable essence, "the real." Like Ibsen & Wagner, as against the Wen Fu and, perhaps, Pound; where even Baudlaire's eclecticism is constantly informed by the essence of what he is, contradicted, even. Which is the definition, and the form of it, out of which one grows toward reason, out of repetition and accumulation. The trick is, here, of thresh-holds and biological-maturation points, like Dr. Montessori did for the kids, to chart out the ages of consciousness peaks, cf. developmental, and to get for those same offspring, an anticipated sequence of acts which is not tampering but responding to observation and the instinct to be of assistance, to help; so the question about new information and consciousness comes about for this: how do we place the tendency (toward torpor, you said) toward engagement, not choice, but the awareness, in act that, yes consciousness did engage, did reflect, yes, by (whatever)(eg. serial), means, by that mode, but it did that, did.
Yes, one remembers in the way out of (into) sequence. The mode of outward.
The image, or illusion of, preceded, how, out of, where, the neolithic? And that relation to the activity, not entirely ecstatic, and sometimes vernacular and fold, of the vision made sacred, which we usually as, now, "American Indian Art", sequentially photographed, with crude material-objective text accompanying, a material act, surely, that "way" of the book, even in those solid terms, cultural (MOMA:1948). And alterable, and possible, that is, likely, and advisable.
The notion, there, of advised action for purpose, or acts-out-of-value.
"He does not think anything is the matter with him." (Laing) Reductions of attention, such a schizoid behavior, the very image fades before response to it, that is, of coming back on the consciousness-of-consciousness into further acts. Nothing diffuse, here, that any manifestation of purpose or interpretation of (the) said, as owing to a motive for existence, and reflection is that-which-is. What is one talking about, then, is one simply aligning speech and time into some personal pace which is actual, is that song? The ear gives word its ocean.
The excesses of kitsch and the vulgar are, is, the imitation of taste: matter and intelligence separate into act and cause, from what is whole to what is a reflection, that is the of the literary or the erotic. And to turn to that and out into responding is pleasure. The told. Lived in and touched.
* *
Or, devoured, that is the message of the past, ouroboric devouring, us as whip-tail, bent around, the tail looking in, the eye ahead of the jaws. Demon teeth, dragon-sown, harvesters of the fields, silence to that, too, where it lasts out beyond time and its intermissions into the open realm. And distinguished there, as stasis-space, no movement, nor death, but nothing else, either, it has sagged open, perhaps Auden's term; the photographs will do, in combination with other things.
And "what am I doing" is swimming across from the one to the other, having birthed-out, and now, half way across, casting out. Swimming.
the form of it, then occludes / there is, in that
version of seeing (through form to event)
indirectness where it is meant, & in the term
term of it, from Response to the Contra-
dictory (against diction, or speech), silence,
then, the dichotomy. The second-glance,
that is of observation is what kicks
it through, the line through the
double-vision of the intellectual,
which is right, the line into any
mysticism is the continuity of time
into which each act penetrates.
There!
Arlee, Montana, 1972
7771
Thomas Lowe Taylor -- UNTITLED
***************
[perceptual defined]
/What is a saying? A poem or made
thing but that which is perceived or
gotten & how but by its manner
can it become adjusted to the
abilities of the person at hand who
also perceives with his intentions to
being (whatever) that he is there in
the act & moment of his flesh?
& what is a poem but that very
same made thing with its accretions
of style & symptom, that, I mean
have to show if the thing is to
become distanced out to some
place resembling where it came off?
(hasty)
poem is act & must shift accordingly
to retain the distance traveled, it
must recreate in the memory of
the reader the kinds of moves
by which it came to be, it must
be a record and a thing
simultaneously--
Projective-voice-breath scheme restores
"poem act," that is of composition, to its metabolic
relation, of act & body. Inasmuch as, hwvr,
Rhetoric involves a Distortion of a continuum (via style)
toward the establishment of tht cont. whch
means that the form (poem) & the ace (comp.) are
not the same always tho strive to be always in
their mutuality of person to achieve balance.
so there is consciousness to account
for, in terms of line, distribution, redundancy,
image, whch is to say that the comp-act & the
read-act shd resemble, & it is at resemblance
that we always differ toward other-ness &
whch gives the effort toward one-ness (whch
is what poetry is) its percepts.
one sees, the other
is Blind to all but resemblance.
The perceptual mode would offer itself to
the poet & reader as co-compositors equally &
imply some reception to acts, that they are not
"explosions in a vacuum", or ego thrusts only.
There is the functional, developmental requirement of
personal growth that announces to attention,
locally & culturally (cf. Rank's Art & Artist) whereby
acts of self review the entire act-event definition
of the culture (sic.) & the heroic plays itself toward
some correspondence of terms wherein an entire
complexity exists by suggestion & definition. Attention
to any process of perceptions, for instance, would
have a center suggested by the ways in which
kinds of syntaxes revolve, hit, suggest & spin,
which is to say, that attention perceives from a
center and permits itself more & more to be shoved
around, all toward establishing a certain
relation with itself which is viable & absolute
& not exclusive.
[technique]
Syntax by its very nature exists through
the continuum of consciousness, the feminine of
reception. An essentially male or procreative act
yields utterance as the child of consciousness.
So we are in act, distributing toward the abstract
where a unitive measure would expand the poem
by the suggestiveness & distribution of kinds of acts
across from versatility (purely, a style) to confidence
(a context of styles); so we should distinguish
cleverness from the cynicism which isolates it
& find those moments wherein distortion
serves to create the poem (eg., relation).
"Tree-foot," "Tree-Brain," "tree-Toad" etc.,
differ, first, serially, but, finally, as things in
the world. First as images & finally as events,
that is, where one comes first upon the energy to
generate such relations and finally where style
activates the consciousness under way toward
further acts, ends & means conjoined in
extensions of behavior.
A style is also a behavior. What the
technical means in the poem as an act is that
a poem should not be the same throughout,
but should move in parallel with the
energies which have brought it about. "Concretism"
establishes that poems are things, made, and that
they lie to the perceptual in their seeing, though to
the extent (seen-things) that that is their content.
they are less than poems, & it is here, with
content & style that we confront abstraction, perception,
time and the meaning of acts. It is the intent of
a perceptual and abstract mode to act on the
person underway in such a manner as to coincide
the time of seeing & the act of seeing toward that
experience we usually refer to as space (simply,
the absence of time).
[stations]
internal developments (style & time) should
accurately follow the incursions of energy which
move the subject (person, poet) through the episode
of composition, should cause "movement" (in
relation to a center) by which he sees an
advance through to the real. The so-called
veil of consciousness is removed and light enters
from an exterior space. Motive & act combine to
cause. So the "problems of illusion" continue
only so long as an act is content to achieve
& retain the metaphorical ("a poem is like...").
Inasmuch as an act is an event, it is not
"like" anything at all, and the whole developmental
situation of resemblances (eg. metaphorical cnscnss)
persist only so long as choice rejects its own
perceptions.
So we have heroes of choice.
in the mandala of development (achieving to a
round or continuity of consciousness in space).
Then, we come to a notion of "the stations of attention."
The concept of stations of the round
suggests that the passage (through) is legible &
that it occurs throughout any archetypal consistency of
types (eg., in a community); so we might read
Gray’s Elegy etc. as a precise statement that
poetry is far less exclusive in its hierarchical ambitions
than we now hold it to be; or any act yields information,
but inasmuch as our heroes of poetry yearn after
the visibility of being-in-the-world, we have
elevated them statuelike as carriers of a dogma
which overcomes itself not to silence but to an
abstraction of acts which is personal. The point
here is to yield style & voice to their proper
figurations: to insist that the means of the poem
be included in its forms of development just
as any secrecy be overcome in its achieving to space.
Where person yields in his distortions (those which
he can control) to become world & image.
[love]
It is love as the center & light of being
seen, first as "something one says" & finally
as a technical manifestation, that the act
of composition includes toward its development
just as it contains the energy which gave rise to
it in the first place. The alchemy of acts, that
they can be contained, is seen to yield energy & information
(they are the same). It is not so much, then, a matter
of what is seen but how, not what the images are
but of how they are rendered with respect to the
consciousness "at bay." In the conflict of opposites,
image & person yield to a constancy of states
which include image to their pattern.
The thing to object to, finally, is a
poetry exclusively of voice or image which does
not include the event of the poem in its
vocabulary of development and which does not
include the event of its development in its vocabulary.
Love & Magic, moment of act
As self-voice, as not over-heard
meditation on exchange of
real qua real, it
is voice of person speaking &
being connected, voice to ear(s)
in circuit completed
which has
causal effect on person reading
& listening, is
(cnscnss<-->cnscsnss)-->one
[perceptual defined]
/What is a saying? A poem or made
thing but that which is perceived or
gotten & how but by its manner
can it become adjusted to the
abilities of the person at hand who
also perceives with his intentions to
being (whatever) that he is there in
the act & moment of his flesh?
& what is a poem but that very
same made thing with its accretions
of style & symptom, that, I mean
have to show if the thing is to
become distanced out to some
place resembling where it came off?
(hasty)
poem is act & must shift accordingly
to retain the distance traveled, it
must recreate in the memory of
the reader the kinds of moves
by which it came to be, it must
be a record and a thing
simultaneously--
Projective-voice-breath scheme restores
"poem act," that is of composition, to its metabolic
relation, of act & body. Inasmuch as, hwvr,
Rhetoric involves a Distortion of a continuum (via style)
toward the establishment of tht cont. whch
means that the form (poem) & the ace (comp.) are
not the same always tho strive to be always in
their mutuality of person to achieve balance.
so there is consciousness to account
for, in terms of line, distribution, redundancy,
image, whch is to say that the comp-act & the
read-act shd resemble, & it is at resemblance
that we always differ toward other-ness &
whch gives the effort toward one-ness (whch
is what poetry is) its percepts.
one sees, the other
is Blind to all but resemblance.
The perceptual mode would offer itself to
the poet & reader as co-compositors equally &
imply some reception to acts, that they are not
"explosions in a vacuum", or ego thrusts only.
There is the functional, developmental requirement of
personal growth that announces to attention,
locally & culturally (cf. Rank's Art & Artist) whereby
acts of self review the entire act-event definition
of the culture (sic.) & the heroic plays itself toward
some correspondence of terms wherein an entire
complexity exists by suggestion & definition. Attention
to any process of perceptions, for instance, would
have a center suggested by the ways in which
kinds of syntaxes revolve, hit, suggest & spin,
which is to say, that attention perceives from a
center and permits itself more & more to be shoved
around, all toward establishing a certain
relation with itself which is viable & absolute
& not exclusive.
[technique]
Syntax by its very nature exists through
the continuum of consciousness, the feminine of
reception. An essentially male or procreative act
yields utterance as the child of consciousness.
So we are in act, distributing toward the abstract
where a unitive measure would expand the poem
by the suggestiveness & distribution of kinds of acts
across from versatility (purely, a style) to confidence
(a context of styles); so we should distinguish
cleverness from the cynicism which isolates it
& find those moments wherein distortion
serves to create the poem (eg., relation).
"Tree-foot," "Tree-Brain," "tree-Toad" etc.,
differ, first, serially, but, finally, as things in
the world. First as images & finally as events,
that is, where one comes first upon the energy to
generate such relations and finally where style
activates the consciousness under way toward
further acts, ends & means conjoined in
extensions of behavior.
A style is also a behavior. What the
technical means in the poem as an act is that
a poem should not be the same throughout,
but should move in parallel with the
energies which have brought it about. "Concretism"
establishes that poems are things, made, and that
they lie to the perceptual in their seeing, though to
the extent (seen-things) that that is their content.
they are less than poems, & it is here, with
content & style that we confront abstraction, perception,
time and the meaning of acts. It is the intent of
a perceptual and abstract mode to act on the
person underway in such a manner as to coincide
the time of seeing & the act of seeing toward that
experience we usually refer to as space (simply,
the absence of time).
[stations]
internal developments (style & time) should
accurately follow the incursions of energy which
move the subject (person, poet) through the episode
of composition, should cause "movement" (in
relation to a center) by which he sees an
advance through to the real. The so-called
veil of consciousness is removed and light enters
from an exterior space. Motive & act combine to
cause. So the "problems of illusion" continue
only so long as an act is content to achieve
& retain the metaphorical ("a poem is like...").
Inasmuch as an act is an event, it is not
"like" anything at all, and the whole developmental
situation of resemblances (eg. metaphorical cnscnss)
persist only so long as choice rejects its own
perceptions.
So we have heroes of choice.
in the mandala of development (achieving to a
round or continuity of consciousness in space).
Then, we come to a notion of "the stations of attention."
The concept of stations of the round
suggests that the passage (through) is legible &
that it occurs throughout any archetypal consistency of
types (eg., in a community); so we might read
Gray’s Elegy etc. as a precise statement that
poetry is far less exclusive in its hierarchical ambitions
than we now hold it to be; or any act yields information,
but inasmuch as our heroes of poetry yearn after
the visibility of being-in-the-world, we have
elevated them statuelike as carriers of a dogma
which overcomes itself not to silence but to an
abstraction of acts which is personal. The point
here is to yield style & voice to their proper
figurations: to insist that the means of the poem
be included in its forms of development just
as any secrecy be overcome in its achieving to space.
Where person yields in his distortions (those which
he can control) to become world & image.
[love]
It is love as the center & light of being
seen, first as "something one says" & finally
as a technical manifestation, that the act
of composition includes toward its development
just as it contains the energy which gave rise to
it in the first place. The alchemy of acts, that
they can be contained, is seen to yield energy & information
(they are the same). It is not so much, then, a matter
of what is seen but how, not what the images are
but of how they are rendered with respect to the
consciousness "at bay." In the conflict of opposites,
image & person yield to a constancy of states
which include image to their pattern.
The thing to object to, finally, is a
poetry exclusively of voice or image which does
not include the event of the poem in its
vocabulary of development and which does not
include the event of its development in its vocabulary.
Love & Magic, moment of act
As self-voice, as not over-heard
meditation on exchange of
real qua real, it
is voice of person speaking &
being connected, voice to ear(s)
in circuit completed
which has
causal effect on person reading
& listening, is
(cnscnss<-->cnscsnss)-->one
Thomas Lowe Taylor -- THE END OF SOLITUDE
fr Vincent Ferrini
I
Rome and the other falling
glimmers relentlessly, the view fades
and holds, we are among a density
and formation of fantasy-rhythms.
Decrease, love's name surprises, engaged.
The other popular sentences re-wind
have you moved across to hold my ear?
Alight, to grasp the turkey tightly,
and new names move forward, "air"
another density has this room removed,
let the one decide who has no passion,
we are hitting right & left to each other.
II
or would you
sleep
or would these entireties rest:
it is no beginning this image
Roughed to tongue, fire away, lets
inside the moon's
you are still moved, it
collapses still the same
But a room divides its walls
incessantly, provides leadership to
the moon's own name,
revolving vocabulary.
A setup.
This questing for
grand gestures
is too lean,
is inharmonious
III
arising a style out of the contrary
energies, they are moved throughout
by textural differences,
"she has my hope"
and the child's name
to celebrate the
reoccurrences of life
acknowledges death,
you are still the
food of absence is
too plain, and keeps
me trembling, inside
My fear collapsed, there are no others
in this poetry without content, where
I am no champion
but occupying myself
professionally:
Aha!
IV
Still, frame-maker, do we keep
the Avocational before us?
now this is
serious!
I mean, there is
voice, the a priori
& song, yr name
oh let me rise these weepings
are so vain & per -sonal
& you are my name:
but the art of letters is so
artless
when studied,
No, I am no system
but this
breathing
exercised and woolen,
woolen & worn.
V
I mean, there is the personal
vocal
doubled out
even,
from knowing,
and this posture of forgetting
wherein we speak,
what should we want
but our
Time, in speaking, to arrive
at the center & name of
who we are
and then
collapse,
remove,
escape,
these embraces we have sought.
VI
No-one has updated the craft,
you said,
no-one has questioned the
syntax,
not, I submit, even Gertrude,
though she swims she does not
speak,
& Charles, we have him
outlined by his Ambitions.
How is one to be a poet
& remain human?
. . . achieve
the anonymity from which the
poems speak,
who are we to want
after anything?
VII
There is also some engaging
to encounter out of les tours
speaker, mask, role & drum, these
shamanistic robes I have made:
out of what is contrary to speech,
the unwinding of prose gestures,
we are left, even here, with
prose couplets, aspirations to clarity.
cloud, the moon rings, oven, clasp
inside the dam of the heart's
remembering to close your ears
& see the line lunging out,
But hold, and skin
the tough team yields.
VIII
Another remembering submits to
plain-ness,
any style is borrowed,
she arrives at the heart,
the landscape
centers at
love's act
you are also
dead to life
&
unafraid
though it is in seeing
that the body gives
its way
to being.
no, there are no others in
this living...
IX
not exactly a
throw away
&
not exactly a
letter
&
not exactly an
advertisement,
though there is in any gesturing
after the cosmic, an adulteration
of innocence,
and no,
there is simply
what one has before him
as task & utterance, this
going-along
X
And this going-on, friend, is
not anything at all, some continuing
from which you are come, suddenly,
at this visible enterprise, yab-yum
of the ear's seeing.
But making the way clear
to memory is some further unfolding:
And a man would have his
love suddenly before him, ashamed to
see the plenty and exaggeration
of the Blood's wail & chatter exploding
from the sum & particle of the
vocabulary:
"but a way is made
then set",
and we are inside nouns,
and particular, and told.
XI
Any empty passing holds clear
to these musings of the familiar.
Let color decide, let the markings
of the earth declare themselves valid.
There are pathways in the mountains
and they make you crazy. Ah!
But the formalities are given way
to some subtleties, revived at last,
thrust, claim, these odors & pasts,
revival of the nomenclature, overt, mutual.
Any other density is remote.
Day decides where speech resounds.
The flaw, the gathering abstractions,
and "who you are" is possible.
XII
clear, the passage, clean & portable,
but read, these allocations, the mood,
of a shadow made name & song,
I flew past, the eye quickened.
Hay, green, more, slipped, green can,
a dot, less, even & more, to speed,
or collapse, from some alluvial
dream, but familiar, too, a
discourse, made image-less, fathom,
of word torn, her heart, meant,
she cried in memory, held me in
passion, I love her, we are
still there still, making light of it,
and the language rests where it
was dropped, the heart's oven door,
and a name made casually,
for effect, for life's new beginning.
XIII
Still, in these developments of irony
stages of persistence, there is no
comedy, only enough food, and
a verse which imitates the
psyche and loses the line.
which reparation made
scale might retrieve to
presence,
and make poets of the resting.
But still,
and sliding, a space defined,
point, center & name,
you are too
clever,
But a man's name is simple,
and love comes in at the end.
XIV
And practicing these simplicities, this
Absence, where problematical
is no less concise.
"Whereby"
conscript to love's acts.
allowing the imitative full reign,
naming deceit, catalog
of his faults,
transparent
throughout the same
wondering.
But polemic is that, and
this is
this.
Gloucester
April 20, 1974
I
Rome and the other falling
glimmers relentlessly, the view fades
and holds, we are among a density
and formation of fantasy-rhythms.
Decrease, love's name surprises, engaged.
The other popular sentences re-wind
have you moved across to hold my ear?
Alight, to grasp the turkey tightly,
and new names move forward, "air"
another density has this room removed,
let the one decide who has no passion,
we are hitting right & left to each other.
II
or would you
sleep
or would these entireties rest:
it is no beginning this image
Roughed to tongue, fire away, lets
inside the moon's
you are still moved, it
collapses still the same
But a room divides its walls
incessantly, provides leadership to
the moon's own name,
revolving vocabulary.
A setup.
This questing for
grand gestures
is too lean,
is inharmonious
III
arising a style out of the contrary
energies, they are moved throughout
by textural differences,
"she has my hope"
and the child's name
to celebrate the
reoccurrences of life
acknowledges death,
you are still the
food of absence is
too plain, and keeps
me trembling, inside
My fear collapsed, there are no others
in this poetry without content, where
I am no champion
but occupying myself
professionally:
Aha!
IV
Still, frame-maker, do we keep
the Avocational before us?
now this is
serious!
I mean, there is
voice, the a priori
& song, yr name
oh let me rise these weepings
are so vain & per -sonal
& you are my name:
but the art of letters is so
artless
when studied,
No, I am no system
but this
breathing
exercised and woolen,
woolen & worn.
V
I mean, there is the personal
vocal
doubled out
even,
from knowing,
and this posture of forgetting
wherein we speak,
what should we want
but our
Time, in speaking, to arrive
at the center & name of
who we are
and then
collapse,
remove,
escape,
these embraces we have sought.
VI
No-one has updated the craft,
you said,
no-one has questioned the
syntax,
not, I submit, even Gertrude,
though she swims she does not
speak,
& Charles, we have him
outlined by his Ambitions.
How is one to be a poet
& remain human?
. . . achieve
the anonymity from which the
poems speak,
who are we to want
after anything?
VII
There is also some engaging
to encounter out of les tours
speaker, mask, role & drum, these
shamanistic robes I have made:
out of what is contrary to speech,
the unwinding of prose gestures,
we are left, even here, with
prose couplets, aspirations to clarity.
cloud, the moon rings, oven, clasp
inside the dam of the heart's
remembering to close your ears
& see the line lunging out,
But hold, and skin
the tough team yields.
VIII
Another remembering submits to
plain-ness,
any style is borrowed,
she arrives at the heart,
the landscape
centers at
love's act
you are also
dead to life
&
unafraid
though it is in seeing
that the body gives
its way
to being.
no, there are no others in
this living...
IX
not exactly a
throw away
&
not exactly a
letter
&
not exactly an
advertisement,
though there is in any gesturing
after the cosmic, an adulteration
of innocence,
and no,
there is simply
what one has before him
as task & utterance, this
going-along
X
And this going-on, friend, is
not anything at all, some continuing
from which you are come, suddenly,
at this visible enterprise, yab-yum
of the ear's seeing.
But making the way clear
to memory is some further unfolding:
And a man would have his
love suddenly before him, ashamed to
see the plenty and exaggeration
of the Blood's wail & chatter exploding
from the sum & particle of the
vocabulary:
"but a way is made
then set",
and we are inside nouns,
and particular, and told.
XI
Any empty passing holds clear
to these musings of the familiar.
Let color decide, let the markings
of the earth declare themselves valid.
There are pathways in the mountains
and they make you crazy. Ah!
But the formalities are given way
to some subtleties, revived at last,
thrust, claim, these odors & pasts,
revival of the nomenclature, overt, mutual.
Any other density is remote.
Day decides where speech resounds.
The flaw, the gathering abstractions,
and "who you are" is possible.
XII
clear, the passage, clean & portable,
but read, these allocations, the mood,
of a shadow made name & song,
I flew past, the eye quickened.
Hay, green, more, slipped, green can,
a dot, less, even & more, to speed,
or collapse, from some alluvial
dream, but familiar, too, a
discourse, made image-less, fathom,
of word torn, her heart, meant,
she cried in memory, held me in
passion, I love her, we are
still there still, making light of it,
and the language rests where it
was dropped, the heart's oven door,
and a name made casually,
for effect, for life's new beginning.
XIII
Still, in these developments of irony
stages of persistence, there is no
comedy, only enough food, and
a verse which imitates the
psyche and loses the line.
which reparation made
scale might retrieve to
presence,
and make poets of the resting.
But still,
and sliding, a space defined,
point, center & name,
you are too
clever,
But a man's name is simple,
and love comes in at the end.
XIV
And practicing these simplicities, this
Absence, where problematical
is no less concise.
"Whereby"
conscript to love's acts.
allowing the imitative full reign,
naming deceit, catalog
of his faults,
transparent
throughout the same
wondering.
But polemic is that, and
this is
this.
Gloucester
April 20, 1974
Thomas Lowe Taylor -- Vincent's Ferrini's Fortieth Book
*************************
Thomas Lowe Taylor
Listening to him talk about vocation during a reading, you realize he's
talking about the Stations of Attention, locating the moods and sensations
via voice of states of being which attend from a complete world view, one
which includes his corporeal chakras and an enlivened and illumined eros.
No, we are not listening to erotic poetry, but to poetry from an erotically
enlivened man, in whom vital energies are successfully utilized in erasing
the poet's body from the physical body and so blur the inner/outer illusion.
"I am the poem...we are all the poem...." he says expansively, noting that
it was in the mutuality of his friendship with Olson that his sense of what
poetry does was made firm, not by who Olson was, certainly a contributing
factor to the depth it achieved, but more in the fact of friendship that the
word became flesh.
And so Vincent inhabits all religions in his embracing of them, and not with
any attitude at all save the tonality of his line, be it brief or vernacular
or pure juice, it is all cosmos and he is its evidence. This is ecstatic
poetry.
Vincent is a manifestation of the sacred and complete man, saying that he is
"a communicator", perhaps enlivening the notion of what a poet is, he
inhabits the personal with his Word, noting that for the most part, we have
lost touch with it.
But if you aren't somewhere, that is, manifesting yourself, all of
this takes place in a vacuum--hence Vincent's sense of community, of being
somewhere, interacting with other people in their lives. His poetry is a
poetry of voice, of encounters, of a life lived fully among and within other
people. "A person is a person because of other people" goes the saying. No
ivory tower here.
The poems strike not like artifice, but as true speech, sometimes embellished
by poetic effect. A word is a just cause, not to be misused or misplaced, in
each place made specific by its use. In much that is about today, the
plasticity of material is so disrespectfully used as to deny many "word
products" their vitality.
To have a poetry which is not out of one's life and vision is to write
someone else's poetry, or perhaps no ones, perhaps it is just "to write".
Word as flesh, not as signifier
*************************
Thomas Lowe Taylor
Listening to him talk about vocation during a reading, you realize he's
talking about the Stations of Attention, locating the moods and sensations
via voice of states of being which attend from a complete world view, one
which includes his corporeal chakras and an enlivened and illumined eros.
No, we are not listening to erotic poetry, but to poetry from an erotically
enlivened man, in whom vital energies are successfully utilized in erasing
the poet's body from the physical body and so blur the inner/outer illusion.
"I am the poem...we are all the poem...." he says expansively, noting that
it was in the mutuality of his friendship with Olson that his sense of what
poetry does was made firm, not by who Olson was, certainly a contributing
factor to the depth it achieved, but more in the fact of friendship that the
word became flesh.
And so Vincent inhabits all religions in his embracing of them, and not with
any attitude at all save the tonality of his line, be it brief or vernacular
or pure juice, it is all cosmos and he is its evidence. This is ecstatic
poetry.
Vincent is a manifestation of the sacred and complete man, saying that he is
"a communicator", perhaps enlivening the notion of what a poet is, he
inhabits the personal with his Word, noting that for the most part, we have
lost touch with it.
But if you aren't somewhere, that is, manifesting yourself, all of
this takes place in a vacuum--hence Vincent's sense of community, of being
somewhere, interacting with other people in their lives. His poetry is a
poetry of voice, of encounters, of a life lived fully among and within other
people. "A person is a person because of other people" goes the saying. No
ivory tower here.
The poems strike not like artifice, but as true speech, sometimes embellished
by poetic effect. A word is a just cause, not to be misused or misplaced, in
each place made specific by its use. In much that is about today, the
plasticity of material is so disrespectfully used as to deny many "word
products" their vitality.
To have a poetry which is not out of one's life and vision is to write
someone else's poetry, or perhaps no ones, perhaps it is just "to write".
Word as flesh, not as signifier
*************************
THE SCRIPTURE OF LOVE (by Vincent Ferrini, sent to Thomas Lowe Taylor)
Me and Charles Olson
Vincent Ferrini
**************
for Tom Taylor & Karen Johnson
(Who convinced me to overcome my
resistance to writing out
my relationship with Charles Olson
or others will put their own
spin on this History)
Mercury
&
Gold
do
not
wet
the
hands
nor
snakes
************
The Secrets of Love
(My encounters with Charles Olson)
Charles Olson had insight and foresight
when he met me in Gloucester,
the territory of his major Opus--
In Lynn Library he read all my books and especially
No Smoke about the life and times of the Shoe Workers
of Lynn during the Great Depression,
he saw immediately that I had clear vision about
the fate of the people of the city I grew up in
who would lose their jobs and become wards of the failure
of the Profit System, the ups and downs
of the Free Market,
he saw how I told the people what they could do,
but the people were powerless,
He saw me in Gloucester, a poet of two cities
Shoes and Fishes
when he saw a weak link in my work with 4 Winds
a magazine of new writings
he hit me from all the angles of his acute arsenal
a hate settled under his literaryh armor,
amore went out the window as mist
we continued our friendship
in spite of that judgment in Eternity,
I loved him and learned from his attack
as another lesson from a mountain authority--
authorities being my Opponent
all forms of it coming from teachers primarily
forcing me to grow up--
He had a huge influence upon the poets of
his generation, and mine,
they followed the dictates of the Master Scribe--
The attempt to diminish me last for
18 years, when I hungered to Sing,
which I could not do while he was alive,
I feared another attack in the annals of the immortals--
I was knocked outside the pale--
It was a time for me to get involved in the Life and Times of Fish City
and I did,
in 1979 I published Know Fish,
my key would be
The Theory of Poetry
The air is an organic farm
for the practitioners of Paradise
The First book was the Lady of Misbegotten Voyages
Meanwhile Charles is still very much alive in Gloucester
And in Literature
His acolytes took his judgment of Ferrini as Gospel
But I continued with Know Fish in 7 books--
Few paid attention
Olson had to get me out of Gloucester forever,
Yet while he was still here in the flesh
I ate with his family and friends at his Skylight tenement--
He knew he could trust me and he did
because one time, when he saw me in dumps of low mood
he said, 'Vincent your time will come'
I drove him and Betty and Charles Peter to the South Station
Betty was against going, and decided under the pressurew
of his Alp in the last five minutes to go with him
it was against her will and we knew it--
What happened is literary history--
I knew and Mary Shore knew
that his time on the planet was drawing to a close--
George Butterick edited and selected a collection of
my poems in 1976, and his introduction placed me
in the local and national canon
George was intimate with us both and he once said
about Maximus, that 'He is right and so are you'
When I read his Collected Poems edited and assembled by George
I read the book I was prepared by George that it contained a long
poem about me Ferrini-I
I read it three times and could not dope it out,
I picked out the Dictionary of Mythology, and it clarified eulogy
it came on as an elegy, and there it was, the original
friend who saw me as I am and taught me the lesson
he was compelled to administer,
he has passed that state of love/hate,
because he knew I would write about our beloved City
after he was gone,
few poets I have met are familiar with that Ferrini-1
won,
he was out of the region freed of feelings that cloud the mind
Following my words closely, his prescience came through
for both of us--
One day Ralph Maud editor of the Minutes of the Charles Olson
society sent me a letter from the Chjarles Olson Papers at
the University of Connecticut, Misc. Notes & Fragments
undated,
Inscription for Vincent
My dear Vincent:
I've done my duty
-and now I'm free
(wow, what will I do?)
love,
Charles
The dead living to this hour
The stink in my gut of rotten matter
I have not digested
that I had threatened his position in Gloucester,
he too was insecure in spite of his constant show of Power
his fear that
I could become Gloucester poet of its heart
When I have a project on my shoulders
I do it
but this work of Charley O and me
was and is still buried in my solar plexus
and roosting and not getting enough air
to breathe it out
itching and irritations attacking me
which I feared letting loose
that even in Death he could attack me another time
in another Eternity
that he saw my weakness I inherited from my childhood
and youth,
rejection by teachers, not being good enouth
in his eyes not good enough,
having failed my tasks and family,
my tendencies to blame my self first
and not another
that's been the law of my living,
others first me second
he was on my back
till now
and after I read this from Ferrini-1
'Freud who did not know the Germans were
officialdom--and did not therefore properly
interpret dream. Co-kings, Hines-Orpheus and
Dewsnap Ferrini. Dewsnap means impartial
beauty. We rule, beyond the mares hooves.'
Not good enough, and now an equal--
Truman Nelson said that "when the Revolution comes
you will be up against the wall facing the firing squad"
A rigid Marxist, little did I feel that deep inside me I carried
an incipient anger against each ostracism
and the itch and the irritations attacking myself since I can't get back
at them
The lie that I sold out the followers believed in
that stuck in my vessels of blood
During my childhood I hated Poetry
It was another Armor of Authority
So he killed me in his Letter 5, and with Ferrini-1 brought me
back to life in his death
Ralph coming to visit me needing guides
to show visitors what the names mean, where they, and what for
educating the tourists
I told him
Olson turns over in his grave
Ralph, Gloucester is bigger than Olson, Ferrini,
Blackburn, Fitz Hugh Lane, and Joe Garland
The fisherpeople, Ralph, they are all ways here in one form or
nother
Did you read Ferrini-1 in his Collected Poems, and he hesitatied,
I got the book out and read the quoted section,
Gloucester Ralph, the city, its people and its problems and how
the sense of community is alive and thriving,
they are the poems in action!
You have to read Olson from the angle where I am
Get the Universities into the community,
Show the citizens the power that is sleeping inside
them,
forget the seminar for Olson
Check Wellspring, for an example,
Check the kids in schools writing poetry just for the fun
of it, and the smell of fame for the moment,
forget the Fortune part of it,
Get the sacholars shoveling the shit and the garbage society
is bogged down in
Maud walked out as though he'd been hit by a
a Gloucester hurricane
Olson told me the time he went to Lynn
to study me and he went to a barbershop to savor Lynn
and the barber called him a Monster-- ?????????? Monster
He went back again to the same shop and came to pay my respecks
with that handshake he crushed all the bones in his fist--
To hear Charley talk was an education in itself
and how O gloried in it
doing all the talking and at home around his kitchen table
Betty listened rarely said a word,
when he bragged about his prowess I raised my eyes to her
standing behind and and she shook her head
While I was living with my family
in the cottage next to the Fairview Inn
Helen Stein gave me her
1929 Self Portrait--
one of outstanding works
I hung it on the Wall of the living room
when it drew too much attention
I rehung it on the wall
upstairs where I slept
I forget to take it with me
when I left and divorced Peg
I asked for it
and was told they knew nothing about it
Peg and the children had forgotten
my feeling still is
that it was destroyed
because Peg felt I was having an affair
with Helen
which I was not,
I have missed that inquiring face
sister to Picasso's earlier
Self portraits
I still miss it
which I see hanging
on the wall in my brain's study
The written word is divided like society and persons by the dead
matter and miracles & the lost between them
That time he drew spirit blood, when he wrote
the mind Ferrini
is as much of a labor
as to lift an arm
flawlessly
I made picture frames customers would leave their works of art
for me to enhance them and bring them alerted.
Then I came across that bisness of the arm in a sentence by WB
Yeats,
The Word carries the weight of a whale and both are ephemeral
Yet his command of Mythology fed my appetite
for the flesh of wisdom
Charley envied Ginsberg his international fame,
ensnared between the few and the many
one or the other rarely both
Birth is by words--
I, too, was made for wirds
and the sound of them bvacked them up
That contain the realities of the physical and
mystical worlds
words that change the directions of history
the personal lives of people
transforming political governments
Words are real magicians participating where you
least expect them
the little souls dying to stick me
into their boxes, lock it fast
and throwing the key away
the desperate need their have to get me
out of this back to back civil war
down the centuries of galactic lostness
He was seduced by the feminine intuitive
and feared it
He was jealous of their influence
upon my creative life
He saw me under their coital pull
the deep undertow currents of the Ocean
as when the daughter of Gloria Parsons
gave me the ashes in a plastic bag
approaching Good Harbor Beach
the low tide waters
that Sunday afternoon
and no one around
as I cut the bag with my thumbnail
and heaped a handful of her
& here comes Gloria infinite sands to join you
here comes Gloria windful of skies
here comes gloria
ours of Day Night
and her eldest daughter asked me
'how old are you?'
I said I am still in the world's womb
'I understand'
& Charles keeping a record
in the closet of his mind in the Hereafter
O Memory help us dig
jLong ago I was fearing he'd rob me of Mirandum
& He, that Betty would leaved him
for me
Mind and Organs in an unspoken contest
follwoing my Love Poems
He came to the hospital where Mary was recovering
from a Hysterectomy
and tossed her the O'Ryan Poems
tjhe Bosky girl (check)
Grist for his lines
Letter 5 was a rape of my Psyche
And he said that Letter was 'the best
Poem by Maximus'
We rule in Eternity
safe away from the divine lips
and their power upon us
as they still have
against my 'too organic' nature being
cholly oceanic
how deep does this force go
the 'mares' hooves
Peg's Mother's
who came to live with for her last years
taking over trhe family and the household
& the children
Peg going along as I did
and her brother Holdfast in charge
in front and behind
the detective and hundrysleuth
the status Quo
the Harvard Mathmetician and the handyman
Plagued by itchings & irritations
the Doctors gave me statistical diagnosis
So I go to Susan for covering the whole skin
and underneath
for the undigested emotional contents
hear healing hands cure
the organs
are pleased and understand
hearing holy hands
her powerful fists untensing them
pushing out the poisons
the long time rotten matter stinking
the Sacred Temple
And this Lady, between us, Susan bringing
Another Kundalini
I
cannot
reach
my
secret
self
as
you *
do
balancing
the
spur
of
my
spirit
organs
with
your
knowing
touchings
of
wholeness
of
my
power
The
Lotus
Of
This
Earth
As
The
7
charkas
in
tune
is
the
linchpin
in
the
Heaven
You
Resurrect
Peg's mother surreptitiously took over my house and family
with her son, Status Quack--
The first crack in the community of the principal unit
the overshoes of the Mare trampling on the fintage of
deligt-
'The seer, Polyeidus commanded by Minos of
Crete to restore his dead son, Glaucus, to
life, the child having died from falling
into a vat of honey. Polyeidus saw a snake
approaching the dead child, killed the snake.
Another snake appeared and seeing its mate
dead went away and teturned with an herb
which restored the dead snake to life.
Polyeidus used the same herb on the dead
child and broght it back to life.'
tered
Olson slaugh/me and brought the Herb of Poesia as the
tart medicine to heal together the lost pieces of
my Anima--
Parts kept apart by the acolytes of Maximus, and the history
of Teachercrystalizing a Judgement stopped in cement minds--
19 years arrested by the Media of Poetry--
I saw the Sun rise in one of Betty's paintings, and the
ominous cloud on break of day--
The contest of the Verse Warriors, the troubadors of
the ritual sacrifice, swordplay men revel in--
On the August watercolor morning of Good Harbor Beach
There's a battle between Paul
& Vincent
for Sandy's attentions
& I don't relish it
Sandy desires both
On her terms of equilibrium
but it cannot be on the basis of a Contest
If Paul says He & Vincent
are soulmates
Then he has to practice
relaxed tension
Competition is insecurity
& I will have none of it
We are Devotees of Beauty
Sandy represents that combination
of impartiality to human experiences
& we both love her for that
but Contest is immaturity
If we can share her equally
we have it made
& she also--
Furthermore Sandy is happily married
& there's no way either of us
can possess her
possession being passe
& the route to suffering
My senses told me
that Sandy was displeased
to be in the middle of these
2 unicorns
Paul is in Europe seeking the celestial Enclosure
the Crown on his Uni-Horn
Sandy is Queen of the Beach--
Women's masculine mind crystal clear
& Men's feminine gut in a bullshit mind
between High and Low poetry--
a logjam
reezing the Harbor
The dead child dead in another's brain as the story
escaping the responsibility of the consequence
till the story is told
& gone into the archives
You hit it with your pre/cision Charley O
Talking is poetry
as all those who never writing done
so busy are they living it
And you lived and robbed yourself of the 10 years
you crave to get the other Opus done--
But it was finished as you knew it
in that letter to Vincent you never sent--
The Man at the Wheel is a still life living poem--
and Fitz Hugh Lane on his hill his eyes peel
for the next horizons
and Blackburn's dory a skeleton ribbed
and only the hands, the fingers clench on the oars
Ah the scholars who dont dig deep enough
The gravewriters
the tombstones enamoured
all because your judgement hit a Wall
and the followers hitting their heads and the brain juices
leaking down and leaving crevices
Vincent Ferrini
**************
for Tom Taylor & Karen Johnson
(Who convinced me to overcome my
resistance to writing out
my relationship with Charles Olson
or others will put their own
spin on this History)
Mercury
&
Gold
do
not
wet
the
hands
nor
snakes
************
The Secrets of Love
(My encounters with Charles Olson)
Charles Olson had insight and foresight
when he met me in Gloucester,
the territory of his major Opus--
In Lynn Library he read all my books and especially
No Smoke about the life and times of the Shoe Workers
of Lynn during the Great Depression,
he saw immediately that I had clear vision about
the fate of the people of the city I grew up in
who would lose their jobs and become wards of the failure
of the Profit System, the ups and downs
of the Free Market,
he saw how I told the people what they could do,
but the people were powerless,
He saw me in Gloucester, a poet of two cities
Shoes and Fishes
when he saw a weak link in my work with 4 Winds
a magazine of new writings
he hit me from all the angles of his acute arsenal
a hate settled under his literaryh armor,
amore went out the window as mist
we continued our friendship
in spite of that judgment in Eternity,
I loved him and learned from his attack
as another lesson from a mountain authority--
authorities being my Opponent
all forms of it coming from teachers primarily
forcing me to grow up--
He had a huge influence upon the poets of
his generation, and mine,
they followed the dictates of the Master Scribe--
The attempt to diminish me last for
18 years, when I hungered to Sing,
which I could not do while he was alive,
I feared another attack in the annals of the immortals--
I was knocked outside the pale--
It was a time for me to get involved in the Life and Times of Fish City
and I did,
in 1979 I published Know Fish,
my key would be
The Theory of Poetry
The air is an organic farm
for the practitioners of Paradise
The First book was the Lady of Misbegotten Voyages
Meanwhile Charles is still very much alive in Gloucester
And in Literature
His acolytes took his judgment of Ferrini as Gospel
But I continued with Know Fish in 7 books--
Few paid attention
Olson had to get me out of Gloucester forever,
Yet while he was still here in the flesh
I ate with his family and friends at his Skylight tenement--
He knew he could trust me and he did
because one time, when he saw me in dumps of low mood
he said, 'Vincent your time will come'
I drove him and Betty and Charles Peter to the South Station
Betty was against going, and decided under the pressurew
of his Alp in the last five minutes to go with him
it was against her will and we knew it--
What happened is literary history--
I knew and Mary Shore knew
that his time on the planet was drawing to a close--
George Butterick edited and selected a collection of
my poems in 1976, and his introduction placed me
in the local and national canon
George was intimate with us both and he once said
about Maximus, that 'He is right and so are you'
When I read his Collected Poems edited and assembled by George
I read the book I was prepared by George that it contained a long
poem about me Ferrini-I
I read it three times and could not dope it out,
I picked out the Dictionary of Mythology, and it clarified eulogy
it came on as an elegy, and there it was, the original
friend who saw me as I am and taught me the lesson
he was compelled to administer,
he has passed that state of love/hate,
because he knew I would write about our beloved City
after he was gone,
few poets I have met are familiar with that Ferrini-1
won,
he was out of the region freed of feelings that cloud the mind
Following my words closely, his prescience came through
for both of us--
One day Ralph Maud editor of the Minutes of the Charles Olson
society sent me a letter from the Chjarles Olson Papers at
the University of Connecticut, Misc. Notes & Fragments
undated,
Inscription for Vincent
My dear Vincent:
I've done my duty
-and now I'm free
(wow, what will I do?)
love,
Charles
The dead living to this hour
The stink in my gut of rotten matter
I have not digested
that I had threatened his position in Gloucester,
he too was insecure in spite of his constant show of Power
his fear that
I could become Gloucester poet of its heart
When I have a project on my shoulders
I do it
but this work of Charley O and me
was and is still buried in my solar plexus
and roosting and not getting enough air
to breathe it out
itching and irritations attacking me
which I feared letting loose
that even in Death he could attack me another time
in another Eternity
that he saw my weakness I inherited from my childhood
and youth,
rejection by teachers, not being good enouth
in his eyes not good enough,
having failed my tasks and family,
my tendencies to blame my self first
and not another
that's been the law of my living,
others first me second
he was on my back
till now
and after I read this from Ferrini-1
'Freud who did not know the Germans were
officialdom--and did not therefore properly
interpret dream. Co-kings, Hines-Orpheus and
Dewsnap Ferrini. Dewsnap means impartial
beauty. We rule, beyond the mares hooves.'
Not good enough, and now an equal--
Truman Nelson said that "when the Revolution comes
you will be up against the wall facing the firing squad"
A rigid Marxist, little did I feel that deep inside me I carried
an incipient anger against each ostracism
and the itch and the irritations attacking myself since I can't get back
at them
The lie that I sold out the followers believed in
that stuck in my vessels of blood
During my childhood I hated Poetry
It was another Armor of Authority
So he killed me in his Letter 5, and with Ferrini-1 brought me
back to life in his death
Ralph coming to visit me needing guides
to show visitors what the names mean, where they, and what for
educating the tourists
I told him
Olson turns over in his grave
Ralph, Gloucester is bigger than Olson, Ferrini,
Blackburn, Fitz Hugh Lane, and Joe Garland
The fisherpeople, Ralph, they are all ways here in one form or
nother
Did you read Ferrini-1 in his Collected Poems, and he hesitatied,
I got the book out and read the quoted section,
Gloucester Ralph, the city, its people and its problems and how
the sense of community is alive and thriving,
they are the poems in action!
You have to read Olson from the angle where I am
Get the Universities into the community,
Show the citizens the power that is sleeping inside
them,
forget the seminar for Olson
Check Wellspring, for an example,
Check the kids in schools writing poetry just for the fun
of it, and the smell of fame for the moment,
forget the Fortune part of it,
Get the sacholars shoveling the shit and the garbage society
is bogged down in
Maud walked out as though he'd been hit by a
a Gloucester hurricane
Olson told me the time he went to Lynn
to study me and he went to a barbershop to savor Lynn
and the barber called him a Monster-- ?????????? Monster
He went back again to the same shop and came to pay my respecks
with that handshake he crushed all the bones in his fist--
To hear Charley talk was an education in itself
and how O gloried in it
doing all the talking and at home around his kitchen table
Betty listened rarely said a word,
when he bragged about his prowess I raised my eyes to her
standing behind and and she shook her head
While I was living with my family
in the cottage next to the Fairview Inn
Helen Stein gave me her
1929 Self Portrait--
one of outstanding works
I hung it on the Wall of the living room
when it drew too much attention
I rehung it on the wall
upstairs where I slept
I forget to take it with me
when I left and divorced Peg
I asked for it
and was told they knew nothing about it
Peg and the children had forgotten
my feeling still is
that it was destroyed
because Peg felt I was having an affair
with Helen
which I was not,
I have missed that inquiring face
sister to Picasso's earlier
Self portraits
I still miss it
which I see hanging
on the wall in my brain's study
The written word is divided like society and persons by the dead
matter and miracles & the lost between them
That time he drew spirit blood, when he wrote
the mind Ferrini
is as much of a labor
as to lift an arm
flawlessly
I made picture frames customers would leave their works of art
for me to enhance them and bring them alerted.
Then I came across that bisness of the arm in a sentence by WB
Yeats,
The Word carries the weight of a whale and both are ephemeral
Yet his command of Mythology fed my appetite
for the flesh of wisdom
Charley envied Ginsberg his international fame,
ensnared between the few and the many
one or the other rarely both
Birth is by words--
I, too, was made for wirds
and the sound of them bvacked them up
That contain the realities of the physical and
mystical worlds
words that change the directions of history
the personal lives of people
transforming political governments
Words are real magicians participating where you
least expect them
the little souls dying to stick me
into their boxes, lock it fast
and throwing the key away
the desperate need their have to get me
out of this back to back civil war
down the centuries of galactic lostness
He was seduced by the feminine intuitive
and feared it
He was jealous of their influence
upon my creative life
He saw me under their coital pull
the deep undertow currents of the Ocean
as when the daughter of Gloria Parsons
gave me the ashes in a plastic bag
approaching Good Harbor Beach
the low tide waters
that Sunday afternoon
and no one around
as I cut the bag with my thumbnail
and heaped a handful of her
& here comes Gloria infinite sands to join you
here comes Gloria windful of skies
here comes gloria
ours of Day Night
and her eldest daughter asked me
'how old are you?'
I said I am still in the world's womb
'I understand'
& Charles keeping a record
in the closet of his mind in the Hereafter
O Memory help us dig
jLong ago I was fearing he'd rob me of Mirandum
& He, that Betty would leaved him
for me
Mind and Organs in an unspoken contest
follwoing my Love Poems
He came to the hospital where Mary was recovering
from a Hysterectomy
and tossed her the O'Ryan Poems
tjhe Bosky girl (check)
Grist for his lines
Letter 5 was a rape of my Psyche
And he said that Letter was 'the best
Poem by Maximus'
We rule in Eternity
safe away from the divine lips
and their power upon us
as they still have
against my 'too organic' nature being
cholly oceanic
how deep does this force go
the 'mares' hooves
Peg's Mother's
who came to live with for her last years
taking over trhe family and the household
& the children
Peg going along as I did
and her brother Holdfast in charge
in front and behind
the detective and hundrysleuth
the status Quo
the Harvard Mathmetician and the handyman
Plagued by itchings & irritations
the Doctors gave me statistical diagnosis
So I go to Susan for covering the whole skin
and underneath
for the undigested emotional contents
hear healing hands cure
the organs
are pleased and understand
hearing holy hands
her powerful fists untensing them
pushing out the poisons
the long time rotten matter stinking
the Sacred Temple
And this Lady, between us, Susan bringing
Another Kundalini
I
cannot
reach
my
secret
self
as
you *
do
balancing
the
spur
of
my
spirit
organs
with
your
knowing
touchings
of
wholeness
of
my
power
The
Lotus
Of
This
Earth
As
The
7
charkas
in
tune
is
the
linchpin
in
the
Heaven
You
Resurrect
Peg's mother surreptitiously took over my house and family
with her son, Status Quack--
The first crack in the community of the principal unit
the overshoes of the Mare trampling on the fintage of
deligt-
'The seer, Polyeidus commanded by Minos of
Crete to restore his dead son, Glaucus, to
life, the child having died from falling
into a vat of honey. Polyeidus saw a snake
approaching the dead child, killed the snake.
Another snake appeared and seeing its mate
dead went away and teturned with an herb
which restored the dead snake to life.
Polyeidus used the same herb on the dead
child and broght it back to life.'
tered
Olson slaugh/me and brought the Herb of Poesia as the
tart medicine to heal together the lost pieces of
my Anima--
Parts kept apart by the acolytes of Maximus, and the history
of Teachercrystalizing a Judgement stopped in cement minds--
19 years arrested by the Media of Poetry--
I saw the Sun rise in one of Betty's paintings, and the
ominous cloud on break of day--
The contest of the Verse Warriors, the troubadors of
the ritual sacrifice, swordplay men revel in--
On the August watercolor morning of Good Harbor Beach
There's a battle between Paul
& Vincent
for Sandy's attentions
& I don't relish it
Sandy desires both
On her terms of equilibrium
but it cannot be on the basis of a Contest
If Paul says He & Vincent
are soulmates
Then he has to practice
relaxed tension
Competition is insecurity
& I will have none of it
We are Devotees of Beauty
Sandy represents that combination
of impartiality to human experiences
& we both love her for that
but Contest is immaturity
If we can share her equally
we have it made
& she also--
Furthermore Sandy is happily married
& there's no way either of us
can possess her
possession being passe
& the route to suffering
My senses told me
that Sandy was displeased
to be in the middle of these
2 unicorns
Paul is in Europe seeking the celestial Enclosure
the Crown on his Uni-Horn
Sandy is Queen of the Beach--
Women's masculine mind crystal clear
& Men's feminine gut in a bullshit mind
between High and Low poetry--
a logjam
reezing the Harbor
The dead child dead in another's brain as the story
escaping the responsibility of the consequence
till the story is told
& gone into the archives
You hit it with your pre/cision Charley O
Talking is poetry
as all those who never writing done
so busy are they living it
And you lived and robbed yourself of the 10 years
you crave to get the other Opus done--
But it was finished as you knew it
in that letter to Vincent you never sent--
The Man at the Wheel is a still life living poem--
and Fitz Hugh Lane on his hill his eyes peel
for the next horizons
and Blackburn's dory a skeleton ribbed
and only the hands, the fingers clench on the oars
Ah the scholars who dont dig deep enough
The gravewriters
the tombstones enamoured
all because your judgement hit a Wall
and the followers hitting their heads and the brain juices
leaking down and leaving crevices
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