the unwritten

I am wondering where the written, the recorded, begins and ends. In what sense is it possible to speak of the unwritten, the unrecorded? In a way, the ear of the person I am speaking to has already "written down" everything I have said, "recorded" it for later... but who is speaking to whom here? In the white noise of blank anonymity we lose our voice, what do we gain in return?

Arch

POEM--
built from tattered pop cultural materials that arrive from time to time at my doorstep

HELLO.

From the plains of America
As the motor of World
begins to lock up
And as I try to be
in a somewhat delusional way
an economist
As the fabric of life
seems ghostly gossamer stuff
and I fail to turn the doorknob
at the Entrance

As I imagine myself
as Magician of Light

It has
(I say too soon)
All Ended

And what is it all for
What is it all moving towards?

Here there are faint outlines
of the lights of Home
in a reflecting pool
Scarcely visible
through subdivided subdivision homes

And as God measures the light
And as God divides a dollar

Where are our minds?

Rilke would say
"In a dark time the eye opens"
For fuel to go forward
Pacing and smoking of lunatics
By the light of Luna
Endlessly

As we all withdraw
to our "fortress of solitude"
no longer men of steel
but something else very fragile

With no time
for a phonograph record
Or a song
Or a dance

And returning again to the bottom line
The Automotic Industry
Has a glitch
A broken beltway
Because it cannot measure or fathom
What escapes a time cycle
Or an Arch
to enter some Western Civitas Dei
Alongside some River...

And returning again to the bottom line
"today's Tom Sawyer"
lives amid some economic gears
of ripple effects
as Chicago's polis
cascades Southward
in ways Sandburg could not envision
along the mighty
Mississippi

dream journal

The other day I dreamt that I was at last able to see the contours of the world surrounding me through some kind of fog.  I take this to be a representation of a real state of things, the anesthetic that my mind was dealt by life at a certain stage is beginning to wear off.    

alone: echolocation experiment

So I am in a place I am hoping is not an echo chamber.  The transparent sphere that Dali at one point sat inside painting shapes is a bit brighter of a place, but I hope that this place is not akin to that sphere either.  I fear that in these times it is hard to find the true measure of the world outside, that measure, proportion, balance are lost as we are in the grip of forces incommensurate with us and our surroundings.  The anonymous inner voice, and the anonymous external force echoing each other make pretense of strength, or ability to measure anything by an ever more fragile bodily frame laughable.  The spindles and the ropes of this marionette show one can feel, but whose is the hidden hand that sets the spectacle into motion?

Drama of a god that breathed life into the golem that he shaped, or conversely of the golem that had to invent a god to stand up on his feet and give himself life.

 

Maya

I seek the real and substantial.  Where is it?

the unhappy farmer

Once again happiness pursues and dogs me.  I say this because I have found that periods of happiness bring mental and artistic sterility in their wake.  To be lost in happiness, implies a kind of senile self-satisfaction, does it not?  Thoreau must of known something of this sense when he wrote that he wanted to live "with a wide margin", allowing things to grow and ripen inside him like stalks of corn.  But I do not.  I seek mental coolness and detachment in this harvest season if that is in fact what it is-- maybe it is but unbeknownst to us, we do not know the field, either the location of the silos or the place of the cooling brook.

To be happy I am afraid is the same thing as being a person who is "eating well", who has given full assent to the unfolding of life, its rewards and its coming around back to one.  I believe that it is instead better to be a little bit hungry, a little bit lacking, better to not labor the canvas to "perfection".

Silent others at the four corners of the farmland, show me how to plant a bit more and labor a bit more while I reap, let me feel the night breeze that comes from and leads to other lands than this ground.

Hermes

I have before me Derrida's book-that-is-not-a-book Dissemination.  It is of course not the same book I am reading now that I read long ago, carefully and obsessively, at the Edge in Memphis  over the course of what must have been three weeks.  Out of a sense of the faint resemblance of the book I read now to that past book by the same name, I try to study now.  A recap of some inaccessible past at best.

Page 84-- Plato's Pharmacy, I, 3: "The Filial Inscription: Theuth, Hermes, Thoth, Nabu, Nebo"

Three quotations, unforgettable, or rather, very forgettable, so I try to reconstitute them here.  Or some trace thereof.

Universal history continued to unroll, the all-too-human gods whom Xenophanes had denounced were demoted to figures of poetic fiction, or to demons-- although it was reported that one of them, Hermes Trismegistus, had dictated a variable number of books (42 according to Clement of Alexandria; 20, 000 according to Iamblichus; 36,525 according to the priests of Thoth--  who is also Hermes) in the pages of which are written all things.  Fragments of this illusory library, compiled or concocted beginning in the third century, go to form what is called the Corpus Hermeticum...

---Jorge Luis Borges, "The Fearful Sphere of Pascal"

That's it, I am going to sleep now.

all the news that's fit to print

I am wondering these days about the boundaries, the margins, the content and the form, of journalism.  As the institution of printed journalism, the press, undergoes transformation, is gradually dismantled, or just plain shuts down one dreary and windy day-- what remains?  As the task of objectivity about the collective world is decentralized or outsourced to "citizen journalism" what is being reported and from where, to where?  Are we really living in a time of interconnecting blogs unscrolling in the void?  And we, are we more real and substantial than our blogs?

And our minds, and all we witness through the screen, are our minds being "rebooted" to take in some vast new terrain?

Or simply erased?

Train

I wrote this here poem:

Concourse
of the moving, quietly rocking train
over the tracks
Through deep blue on the horizon
And the ghostly shapes of
the deciduous landscape
of the Southland
The bank of the river
appears and then recedes from view
Like long curtains of stage
scenery shuffling across
And as the city outside
moves slowly into view and
Finally comes to a stop
I have been awake and fascinated