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[14 May 2012|07:57pm] |
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This livejournal is obsolete. New one's here.
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| GP recommends X-files episodes |
[05 Apr 2011|09:24pm] |
This is just to put this in a permanent place on the internet so I can add it to my delicious:
"These are mostly stand-alone episodes. The ones that trail the main storyline are almost always very good, but it would be difficult to jump into them without knowing everything that has gone on before.
"Young at Heart" (Season 1) - A murderer that Mulder put away has escaped from prison and seeks revenge. This one probably goes under the "thriller" category, though it's plenty creepy as well.
"Blood" (Season 2) - calculators, microwaves, and other digital devices command townspeople to "kill 'em all." One of the creepiest things you'll ever find yourself laughing at.
"Duane Barry/Ascension" (Season 2) - 2 episodes, that really kick the overall alien/government conspiracy plot into high gear. It's part of the main story arc, but early enough that following it shouldn't be a problem. The title character believes he has been the subject of dozens of alien experiments, and that he's about to be taken away again.
"Pusher" (Season 3) - guy appears to be using suggestion to get people to kill themselves, this one has a very thrilling conclusion. There's a sequel called "Kitsunegari" a couple of seasons later which you might like if you like this one.
"Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose" (Season 3) - Man has the ability to forsee people's deaths, the agents try to enlist his help in tracking a serial killer, but he's reluctant (his character is excellent, he behaves exactly as you would expect a real person who had lived with this 'gift' would behave).
"Kill switch" (Season 5) - an out of control DoD satellite starts killing its creators who attempt to shut it down. It's a decent episode, but it's most interesting for showcasing the mid-90's popular perception of computers and the internet.
"Mind's Eye" (Season 5) - A blind woman suddenly starts seeing murders through the eyes of another. Another very well written character who really strikes a chord in the heart.
"The Post-Modern Prometheus" (Season 5) - One of the "joke" episodes that they did once or twice a season, this actually wound up being one of the best episodes in the whole series. A woman claims she's been impregnated by a comic book character, the whole episode is shot in black and white like a classic horror film.
"Dreamland I/II" (Season 6) - Mulder switches places with a 'man in black' for a few days, hilarity ensues. There are two parts."
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[09 Aug 2010|12:20am] |
I was reading Dickinson and Whitman
and the basil growing in my yard
reminded me how it would taste when I tasted it
and that I had not tasted it,
and that on the highways at night
for whom I thought of and whom I didn't
a shattering was coming to destroy them.
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[07 Aug 2010|06:59am] |
This is a stab at diagnosing myself:
I mistake..
1) the plausible mythologies and symbologies that my subconscious notices/creates without my consciously experiencing their formation--even though I am practiced at putting them together and so my brain at large, be I conscious of the process or not, is good at them--
and/or
2) the unplanned occurrence of intense discourses on profound subjects of personal interest to me--even though they are inevitable because I surround myself with people interested in the same profundities I am, broadcast my interest in those profundities, and live in a culture steeped in one particular profundity above all others (Jesus Christ and the diverse associated theologies)--
..for events so extraordinarily unlikely and yet deeply personally relevant as to almost certainly result from an agency powerful and knowledgeable beyond what I had previously understood as ontologically possible, creating to varying extents feelings of..
1) fear for my physical person, as one might feel in the presence of a dangerous animal
2) panic, as one might feel walking through the darkness where one thinks there might be predators
3) humiliation, as one might feel upon having egregiously violated a societal norm in front of the entire tribe
4) loss, as one might feel who has just been permanently separated from one's loved ones and home.
Anyway, maybe those two sources of apparent synchronicity are sufficient to explain every one of those ontologically paranoid moments. Or maybe not, but it was worth a shot to write it out.
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[03 Aug 2010|12:29am] |
I've been gathering quotes. Tonight is the night I post them.
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"But the poem is now held open to the precursor, where once it was open, and the uncanny effect is that the new poem's achievement makes it seem to us, not as though the precursor were writing it, but as though the later poet himself had written the precursor's characteristic work."
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence
".. when was it, to begin with, in all these thousands of years, that man acted solely for his own profit? What is to be done with the millions of facts testifying to how people knowingly, that is, fully understanding their real profit, would put it in second place and throw themselves onto another path, a risk, a perchance, not compelled by anyone or anything, but precisely as if they simply did not want the designated path, and stubbornly, willfully pushed off onto another one, difficult, absurd, searching for it all but in the dark. So, then, this stubbornness and willfulness were really more agreeable to them than any profit."
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
"The mentally disturbed do not employ the Principle of Scientific Parsimony: the most simple theory to explain a given set of facts. They shoot for the baroque."
Philip K. Dick, VALIS
The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.
Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism
"Yas klesas so bodhi, yas samsaras tat nirvanam" (That which is sin is also Wisdom, the realm of Becoming is also Nirvana) - Buddha and the Gospel of Buddha, cited on pp. 166 of Hero with a Thousand Faces
"The hero adventures out of the land we know into darkness; there he accomplishes his adventure, or again is simply lost to us, imprisoned, or in danger; and his return is described as a coming back out of that yonder zone. Nevertheless--and here is a great key to the understanding of myth and symbol--the two kingdoms are actually one. The realm of the gods is a forgotten dimension of the world we know. And the exploration of that dimension, either willingly or unwillingly, is the whole sense of the deed of the hero. The values and distinctions that in normal life seem important disappear with the terrifying assimilation of the self into what formerly was only otherness."
ibid.
"In mythology, wherever the Unmoved Mover .. holds the center of attention, there is a miraculous spontanaeity about the shaping of the universe. The elements condense and move into play of their own accord, or at the Creator's slightest word... But when the perspective shifts, to focus on living beings, when the panorama of space and nature is faced from the standpoint of the personages ordained to inhabit it, then a sudden transformation overshadows the cosmic scene. No longer do the forms of the world appear to move in the patterns of a living, growing, harmonious thing, but stand recalcitrant, or at best inert. The props of the universal stage have to be adjusted, or even beaten into shape. The earth brings forth thorns and thistles; man eats bread in the sweat of his brow."
ibid.
"The eye of the ordained victor immediately perceives the chink in every fortress of circumstance, and his blow can cleave it wide."
ibid.
"The arts of measuring and numbering and weighing come to the rescue of human understanding [against the confusion of appearances]."
Socrates, Plato's Republic
"[then] pleasure and pain [would] be the rulers of our State."
ibid.
"No man, while he retains [reason], has the oracular gift of poetry."
Socrates, Plato's Republic
"Socrates: Then you are the interpreter of interpreters?"
Ion (a man speaking of Homer): Precisely."
ibid.
"Poetry tends to express the universal; history the particular."
Aristotle, Poetics
"Coincidences are most striking when they have an air of design."
ibid.
"The best form of Recognition is coincident with a Reversal of the Situation, as in the Oedipus."
ibid.
"The expression of the poet 'sowing the god-created light'"
ibid.
"It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully."
ibid.
"They play clumsy antics before an audience which has never been moved; it cannot be otherwise, when the speakers are in ecstasy and the hearers are not."
Longinus, On the Sublime
"Men admire more than those who have [fortunes and honors], those who might have them, but in greatness of soul let them pass."
ibid.
"Pythian prophetess, approaching the tripod, where there is a cleft in the ground, inhales, so they say, vapour sent by a god; and then and there, impregnated by the divine power, sings her inspired chants; even so from the great genius of the men of old do streams pass off to the souls of those who emulate them."
ibid.
"Even in Bacchic transports we must yet be sober."
Demosthenes, via Longinus
"[For] great passages.., if they are formed by partnership into a body, and also enclosed by the bond of rhythm .. the limits which encircle them give them new voice."
Longinus
"The majority of us poets are tricked by our own standards. I work hard to be brief; I turn out to be obscure. When I try to achieve smoothness and polish, I lose punch, the work lacks life; the poet who proposes grandeur is merely pompous; the poet who tries to be too conservative creeps on the ground, afraid of gusts of wind; if he is anxious to lend marvellous variety to a single subject, he pains a dolphin in the forest, a boar in the breakers."
Horace, Epistle to the Pisones
"We and our works are mortgaged to die."
ibid.
"Only the poet..., lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow in effect another Nature, in making things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in Nature."
Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry
"There is nothing of so sacred a majesty but that an itching tongue may rub itself upon it."
ibid.
"[The poet] nothing affirms, and therefore nothing lieth."
ibid.
"There are many mysteries in Poetry, which of purpose were written darkly, lest by profane wits it should be abused."
ibid.
"A thing well said will be wit in all languages."
John Dryden, An Essay of Dramatic Poesy
"Not only we shall never equal [the great old writers], but they could never equal themselves, were they to rise again and write."
ibid.
"The vulgar thus through imitation err."
Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism
"Some positive persisting fops we know
who if once wrong will needs be always so."
ibid.
"Those best can bear reproof who merit praise."
ibid.
"Poets, a race long unconfin'd and free
Still fond and proud of savage liberty."
ibid.
"Shakespeare has no heroes; his scenes are occupied only by men."
Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare
"A quibble is the golden apple for which [Shakespeare] will always turn aside from his career, or stoop from his elevation."
ibid.
"Every cold empirick, when his heart is expanded by a successful experiment, swells into a theorist."
ibid.
"The expectation of ignorance is indefinite, and that of knowledge is often tyrannical."
ibid.
"The mind is refrigerated by interruption."
ibid.
"...the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies."
William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads
"I have also thought it expedient to restrict myself still further, having abstained from the use of many expressions in themselves proper and beautiful, but which have been foolishly repeated by bad Poets, till such feelings of disgust are connected with them as it is scarcely possible by any art of association to overpower."
ibid.
"Poetry is the fist and last of all knowledge--it is as immortal as the heart of man."
ibid.
"If the time should ever come when what is now called science, thus familiarized to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man."
ibid.
"The film of familiarity and selfish solicitude..."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria
"It is not possible to imitate truly a dull and garrulous discourser, without repeating the effects of dullness and garrulity."
ibid.
"Facts are valuable to a wise man, chiefly as they lead to the discovery of the indwelling law, which is the true being of things, the sole solution of their modes of existence, and in the knowledge of which consists our dignity and our power."
ibid.
"The lingua communis of every country, as Dante has well observed, exists every where in parts, and no where as a whole."
ibid.
"I am ambitious of doing the world some good: if I should be spared that may be the work of maturer years--in the interval I will assay to reach to as high a summit in Poetry as the nerve bestowed upon me will suffer."
John Keats, Letter 118
"Epitomies have been called the moths of just history; they eat out the poetry of it."
Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry
"Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted."
ibid.
"Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it."
ibid.
"Poetry .. is .. the source of whatever of beautiful or generous or true can have place in an evil time."
ibid.
"...episodes to that great poem, which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world."
ibid.
"...and a paradise was created as out of the wrecks of Eden."
ibid.
"All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained all the oaks potentially."
ibid.
"...those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar."
ibid.
"Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life."
Karl Marx, The German Ideology
"...the chorus of satyrs, a chorus of natural beings who live ineradicably, as it were, behind all civilization, and remain eternally the same, despite the changes of generations and of the history of nations."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
"Action requires the veils of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet."
ibid.
"The sphere of poetry ... desires to be ... the unvarnished expression of the truth, and must precisely for that reason discard the mendacious finery of that alleged reality of the man of culture."
ibid.
"The Dionysian reveler sees himself as a satyr, and as a satyr, in turn, he sees the god."
ibid.
"Where prophetic and magical powers have broken the spell of present and future, ... some enormously unnatural events--such as incest--must have occurred earlier, as a cause."
ibid.
"The course of development of a nation's language ... is profoundly interesting; and by regarding a poet's work as a stage in this course of development we may easily bring ourselves to make it of more importance as poetry than in itself it really is. We may come to ... over-rate it."
Matthew Arnold, The Study of Poetry
"He is often distracted from the enjoyment of the best, and with the less good he overbusies himself, and is prone to over-rate it in proportion to the trouble which it has cost him."
ibid.
"Leeze me on drink! it gies us mair
Than either school or college;
it kindles wit, it waukens lear,
it pangs us fou o' knowledge.
Be 't whiskey gill or penny wheep
Or any stronger portion,
It never fails, on drinking deep
To kettle up our notion."
Robert Burns, "The Holy Fair"
"Pinnacled dim in the intense inane."
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound
"[To not see] in the brilliancy of [the gifts of those around us] some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening."
Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance
"No one can ever have made a seriously artistic attempt without becoming conscious of an immense increase--a kind of revelation--of freedom."
Henry James, The Art of Fiction
"Writing has done much harm to writers. We must return to the voice."
--Gilbert (Oscar Wilde), The Critic as Artist
"These people ... confuse the notion of a religious cult with the notion of religious perception."
Leo Tolstoy, What is Art?
"The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality."
T. S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent
"Fiction is like a spider's web."
Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare's Sister
"It is as if the author has no language of his own, but does possess his own style."
Mikhail Bakhtin, Heteroglossia in the Novel
"He mistake social overtones, which create the timbres of words, for irritating noises that it is his task to eliminate."
ibid.
"Art is post-ethical, rather than unethical."
John Crowe Ransom, Criticism as Pure Speculation
"Criticism, like nature, prefers a waste space to an empty one."
Northrop Frye, The Archetypes of Literature
"The work of art is what man wrests from chance."
Roland Barthes, The Structuralist Activity
"Structural man ... too, listens for the natural in culture, and constantly perceives in it ... the shudder of an enormous machine which is humanity tirelessly undertaking to create meaning."
ibid.
"[For] structural man ... it will suffice that a new language rise out of history, a new language which speaks him in his turn."
ibid.
"All discourses ... would then develop in the anonymity of a murmur."
Michel Foucault, What Is an Author
"... an Archie Debunker such as Nietzsche of Jacques Derrida .."
Paul de Man, Semiology and Rhetoric
"Rhetoric radically suspends logic and opens up vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration."
ibid.
"While relativism is a position one can entertain, it is not a position one can occupy."
Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?
"In cases of witchcraft, the devil was defeated in the courts through the simple expedient of hanging his human agents."
Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare and the Exorcists
"The sense that everything the [actors] touch is thereby rendered hollow .. underlies [the] analysis .. of the entire Catholic Church."
ibid.
"When in 1603 Harsnett was whipping exorcism toward the theater, Shakespeare was already at the entrance to the Globe to welcome it."
ibid.
"At the moment when the official religious and secular institutions were, for their own reasons, abjuring the rituals they themselves had once fostered, Shakespeare's theater moves to appropriate this function."
ibid.
[of Poe] "The very poetry that, more than any other, is experienced as irresistible has also proved to be, in literary history, the poetry most resisted."
Shoshana Felman, The Case of Poe
"To touch the future on its hither side."
Homi K. Bhabha, The Postcolonial and the Postmodern
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[31 Jul 2010|11:57am] |
About halfway through The Hero with a Thousand Faces, my biggest problem with Campbell's theory is that his cosmology--with its vision of All, God in Majesty, the Core of Being in whom all terror and all ecstasy are but divisions of a perfect whole--is static. All things within it change ceaselessly, but for the godhead there is no growth. The 10,000 things are always already only 10,000 things. It is confined to the deadened desert of Ecclesiastes. God is the immortal attendant of a dusty old gas station in Nebraska sitting--almost incidentally--on an infinite reservoir of gasoline.
I contend that the smooth marble prison walls at the edges of infinity as Campbell would have them----of Heaven and Hell--of Blake's Clod of Clay and Shiva the Devourer--are just the limits of the human mind as it now exists.
Campbell sees the destiny of the actual universe in the melodrama that is man's mythological architecture. I see only the dreams of a monkey who has left the jungle and has only just now, for the first time, come to look upon the stars.
If the universe is scripted, fine, he's right. But I am not convinced we have a damned thing to say about God and the ultimate fate of the universe if we don't first, ourselves, struggle to become gods.
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| ellowell deeowen |
[18 Jul 2010|05:25am] |
oh tell me who you love, who bites your heart, who burns your eyes,
who do you glance at who you never spoke to
who you always thought you'd maybe meet if you'd just wait
and if you leave then you just think
oh well oh ellowell oh maybe maybe
blessed baby burning cheeks and sickly ably
tell you all you seek and
save me save me.
o hearts uncomplicated
full and aspirated
bloody with affection feckless fearless baby nearly seethrough
tell me how to feel again how feeling came out from the sleeves
in every stutter bubble up and shine and pop and dine
oh tell me why the past is golden
if i'm old
and where i'm going,
burden me and tell me tell me
tell me what to feel.
oh no, i know,
we want control
and no, i know,
i fill the ville,
i kill and kill,
but walk the stroll the scroll extols:
it sullies up my skull.
to tell the truth, it's babes cut loose,
it's ladies walking free and easy, being
breezy nights
and seizing anything they feel to.
and anyway so maybe i was saying
darling darling, loving on and on,
who could you be
i know, oh come, let's go and go,
be mine, oh
readymade
my valentine.
or maybe i was never born,
just cut to be through stomach stuff and
scarring and enduring
like a film that's starring
me and vengeance,
me and blades
till all i've killed is me and me
and all the me i could have dreamed
if only i'd have seen
a normal valentine be mine my wife i love you
childtime.
oh heart in weight with iron curled around my shoulders
20 pounds,
you weigh me down
i bring you round
you wobble to and fro
and mostly say come on, let's go
i'd sooner give the ghost than love her,
sooner drink monoxide
than go bedside
with the girl who'd love me for my blessings,
sooner hear the brightcurt curtsy of my manners,
smirking charm,
oh yes indeed,
mistake the me i keep safe in a holster there for
roller coaster
(me with all my frailty) yes believe i am the pyrotechnics,
yes, i am exploding dreams across the night
i am the sight to see
i kill the clouds i burn the world and let you watch
i am the trees lit up in flames
but tame the branches and they gleam.
oh come all narrow eyes, who hate
the noonday light,
the living god of advertising--
come all the eyes who tire of the gleam of gold,
the clean of cold,
oh come all those who cough up phlegm with daggers in your throats
oh cough up scabs for me,
cough up the world,
your soul,
come killing,
come with blades,
oh come, just spill it, come with wine, come shouting,
come and whisper,
come a ghost,
just come and come.
i only ever summon what i want
so come oh shaking shoulders, swinging heart
come on you plagued and tourniquetted, come on who only ever wanted
cadaver, blade, and time to edit,
come on, come all who ever sought to know a poet broke,
a man with hopes, come on
just come at once
and kill me back to life.
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[16 Jul 2010|04:36am] |
Giving it my moderate and drunken all, I am amazed by this quote. I thought I would find it everywhere, but instead find it only in Klara Glowczewska's translation of Ryszard Kapuscinksi's Imperium. Search as I might about Antoine Cournot, I cannot find the original of this quote, but shiver me timbers here it is:
--
"The art of clarification, like the art of negotiation, is often simply the art of displacing difficulties. There is, one might say, a kind of untouchable reserve of incomprehensibility in certain things that the calculations of human intelligence are capable neither of removing nor of diminishing but only of arranging this way or that, sometimes leaving everything in a half-light, at another time illuminating certain points at the expense of others, which are then submerged by a darkness even deeper than before."
--
If that don't beat all, I don't know what do.
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[05 Jun 2010|04:14am] |
What do you call this idea, and how do you kill it once and for all?
That you are the only experiencing being that has ever experienced, and that all that you perceive is intended for your edification and growth along a certain predetermined path, that everyone you meet is a programmed ghost intended to deliver a role (while seeming a real being like you), and that every event is occurring to guide you on some pre-intended journey.
Call it messianic solipsism if you must, but tell me how to obliterate it.
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[03 Jun 2010|03:52pm] |
What has happened over the past 600 years is that the signs and passcodes the rulers of the world used to identify each other and command their power have been learned by the lowest classes. The elite still control the capital: the walls, the lines, the hollow tips and warheads. What they no longer control is the word, which has swelled in the minds of the poorest people in an unbroken line from Gutenberg straight through to Wikipedia.
What happens now, though, in a world where metal and mental blur together, where a machine's being virtual or factual matters less and less, is that brick and bullet have become soggy, and the leys of power are running over their banks.
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[29 May 2010|03:49am] |
It's just that the world is changing.
Lord, it's funny. Why do I give a shit to speak to Everyone at Large when I'm home, drunk, and alone. What is that? An old friend, I guess.
Someday soon, you will be able to pay the creators of the songs you love directly and easily through micropayments.
Someday soon, smartphones will be able to form ad-hoc encrypted networks, and some mad philanthropist is going to airdrop them into Iran or North Korea, and they'll forge their revolutions wirelessly.
Within our lifetimes, someone is going to figure out how to make babies be born smarter and more compassionate.
California has a god damned good shot at legalizing marijuana in November.
Good holy god, is the world changing. I almost do not give a shit where and who I am, so long as I am speaking on behalf of this changing world.
Spirit of '69, I say.
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[27 May 2010|04:30am] |
So, tonight, I drank and came inside around 3:30 from people gathered on my porch. I put a towel over my head and wrote. I'm going to edit, now, if only to keep fine lines, and maybe some hint of the feeling I overflowed with onto the page:
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Maybe tonight I'm able to write some kind of truth. Let me go on. I hear off in the distance a lord of the wire screaming to be born.
Fuck that.
I said something today that is worthwhile, one of the most worthwhile things I've said in a long time, and I guess I've grown up enough to know how to say it:
Forgive me the false dichotomy, but in this life, we have the decision either to accept where we live, the people we live among, the traditions, the residue, the atmosphere, all of it, and we say,
"Look, if any happiness is a good enough happiness, then here is where I will become an adult. Here is where I shall seek love, have children, and attain that ever-exalted ideal of humanity, reproduction.
Thank you, Orson Scott Card, thank you, mother, thank you Genesis, thank you everyone. Thank you for pissing on art with all your balls and ovaries. Thank you.
So there you see my implied other way, right? I was born in Umatilla (Eustis, actually) and I thought, fuck have I got to get out of here. So I came to Gainesville, and in Gainesville, after a few years, I found that I did not like what I thought I would become if I remained here.
But in doing so, I have held myself distant. I have held myself apart from becoming too loving, and from being too reliably lovable.
In that process, I made myself cold. Maybe that wasn't why I started, but it was the flag I waved not even a year ago.
So I intend to move, to travel. I believe there is more to know than can be known from a wife and a lawn. Forgive my caricature, but I feel caricatured: a bachelor, ever adolescent; a child, not able to stand strong for what is good.
[Editor's note: Pardon the rant.]
Oh, a warrior knows, a warrior stands and protects the sheep. There is only the wicked and the good. O let me be the gun pointed at the devil's temple, because no one else will acknowledge the devil.
Am I wrong? Why all the fucking divorce, if I am wrong?
Then go the G.K. Chesterton route? Become a full-on, Christ's-dick-sucking Christian, and just buy into the whole woman-is-my-subordinate bullshit? Really? Because that seems one of the only ways out of this mire of adulthood/fucked-up marriage.
I am not spitting on parenthood, but I defer its charms.
[/rant]
Nonetheless, the pain of being alone.. and I hope I can do this:
I have written so much. I have a corpus. I have cried out, and my poems, thank the gods, show some faint mark on the wax where I screamed. I have not gone silent--and yet I have so far left only scratchy phonographs.
When, at the end of my 24th birthday party, I fell into my bed alone, miserable, and feeling more or less used (though I had brought it upon myself)..
Why did I throw that party? Why did I do any of it? Why did I go out into Gainesville and be social? Why did I speak a fucking word? Here: I wanted to be known, to be loved.
Still, there were old friends at the party who cared about me, who knew who I was, but who hadn't followed me into the next phase of my life, who had already settled out. No one could ever follow me, because I was always seeking more, more, more.
So there it is: I actively chose against those who knew me. I had intentionally pulled ever away. I was the center trying to fly off. I was trying to deafen myself to the falconer.
And so, the piercing pain of being there, crying in my bed at 5am, was because no one knew why I did it. No one had any clue why I had done the whole thing, the whole stupid gigantic affair. Why? Why? I had a reason, and there was no one there to be like, "Jesse, I understand. You made a mistake, and it is a natural mistake to make. I knew better, son, but I had to let you fail to realize it."
No one stood there to teach me. It was just my own pain. There was no one else. I was alone.
No parents could be there, no friends whom I had left behind to seek more friends, no lover, no nothing. I was alone.
And no lower than that is price that I have paid to not settle.
It is for no lower price than being willing to die with an undisclosed heart that I am able to move on and on like a comet.
Hopefully I said something.
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[23 May 2010|04:48am] |
Earlier I said a thing that I feel I have been trying to spit out for a while. Perhaps it is nothing. Anyway, I said something like,
When I confront a (more or less) infinitely complicated moral issue, I am not agonized by lack of a conclusion. Instead, I think about it as thoroughly as I can, and then am contented with having thought about it to the extent of my powers and time. Contented (rationally), because I trust that my thinking about it has changed the way that I will act in the future. Over time, I find I occasionally lapse. Usually, if I try to recall what I had thought before, I'll clean my act up again.
--
Anyway, this is not intended to be conclusive itself. It's just a thought I had, sort of a commentary or criticism on the way I've seen moral philosophy waged (maybe that says more about me than it says about academic moral philosophy). Maybe it's just that so many non-professionals get caught in some terrible dichotomic loop.
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I just can't help but notice how many people are abused by their own imprisonment within concepts--so many jigsaws which have been curled into wrist-bloodying handcuffs.
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And is noticing that yet a form of egotism? Have I only chased my self-love into ever-less-penetrable shadow, ever subber a consciousness?
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Earlier, I thought to write a poem about roaches, about how once a couple years ago I was in the kitchen around 3 or 4 AM, and I killed perhaps 10 roaches in 10 minutes, and sat down to look at what I'd done. There, surrounded by the roach ooze and bits and heads that I had scattered on the floor, a miracle happened. Suddenly, I could watch a cockroach and not want to kill it, not want to kill it at all.
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I've also been thinking I should write a sad but consoling poem called "Stay Drunk."
--
I have become okay with being 24, though still I sort of wish I had a poem for it like I have for 22 and 23.
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[09 May 2010|03:17am] |
I am so licking with life I can barely tell you the normal truth: I speak and overflow with what we bluntly and quaintly call figures of speech.
I dare with my tongue like a spear. I lick the world's wounds.
More than anything, I stand ready with the war for peace, the war Gandhi waged with his intransigent patience. I stand ready with the war of weaponlessness.
I war by saying no, and no, until no more yesses like knives arise. I am sick to my stomach, and am so old now I feel I am speaking from the afterlife into Gainesville. I feel like a ghost, thick with whatever wisdom the tomb might offer.
Socrates was right and a half. The older I have become, the more aware I have become of what expertise others have and I lack.
I feel such talent upon my tongue, but no words to speak. I remember what my lord has said: "If I can make myself believe, the rest is easy."
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[25 Apr 2010|05:06am] |
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The hipsters of today are the reactionaries a century from now. What the girljeans today find gauche, so shall your every great-granchild.
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[17 Apr 2010|11:21am] |
I've been thinking about why I'm more productive a writer when drinking. I think it might be because I'm willing to take risks and say things that I may not actually agree with, though they come out (hopefully) well-worded.
In short, how willing to possibly be wrong should we be, and how much is it right to stake when we might be wrong?
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[10 Apr 2010|03:24am] |
The puddle was coagulating at my feet like the Dead Sea at noon, and still I scooped up what I could. Lord, the city is dry. Am I thirstier than I have ever been?
So what is in Brooklyn? No prophets, maybe, but no zombies. The zombies were what I fled from in Umatilla: those that wander the bars quoting the jokes from the three most recent episodes of whatever's on these days.
No, hopefully just fire, more angelheaded hipsters. Have they gone, boy, have they gone? Don't tell me they're in California, sucking like fat slugs on the side of the digital empire. Don't tell me all my brothers are all fast teeth and Flash animation.
Just tell me they're still looking for the truth, still hitting our Anglo tongue with the hot iron, still seeking the ever finer razor, sharper with each psych experiment and economic decline. Tell me the chemists and the oneironauts still share an apartment wall. Tell me the junkies keep in touch with the fags.
I am going, God help me. But if it is not in New York, then where?
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[01 Mar 2010|02:40am] |
Two things.
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First, Lord of the Barnyard is fucking incredible. Tristan Egolf, may he rest in peace, makes a casual reference to Discordianism on page 198 and then keeps on fucking trucking. May he and DFW find peace in obliteration.
I couldn't feel better about the main character than I could if I were 15 again, hearing the triumphant radio broadcast of John goddamned Galt.
--
Second, these are some excerpts from an essay called "Alcohol and Poetry." The whole thing ends up being almost an advertisement for AA, but couched in an indeed interesting and indeed valid philosophy of poetry and self.
"Anxiety differs from fear in that it has no object. This means there is no action which will resolve the feeling. The sufferer who does not realize this will search his world for problems to attend in hopes of relieving his anxiety, only to find that nothing will fill its empty stomach."
p. 12
"In a power structure, dialect is the verbal equivalent of the slave's shuffle. It is an assertion of self in an otherwise oppressive situation. It says: 'I'll speak your language, but on my own terms.' ... [It] is a sign that there is a distance between real personal power and desired personal power. And yet neither of them is a true confrontation of that distance. They reveal that the imbalance has been neither accepted nor rejected, for such would lead to direct speech... When the slave shuffles he has been baffled into the myth that he has no internal power and his only hope is to cajole a piece of the action out of the master. The cloying voice depends on the audience it hates. It is divided, identifying with a power not its own and hoping to control that power through verbal finesse. This is the style of the con-man."
p. 16
"Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage. That is why it is so tiresome. People who have found a route to power based on their misery--who don't want to give it up though it would free them--they become ironic."
p. 16
"The character in his novel 'really thought, off and on for twenty years, that it was his duty to drink, namely to sacrifice himself. He saw the products as worth it.'"
p. 18
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[25 Feb 2010|11:24pm] |
This is the latest poem in response to a series of prompts I received in November 2008 when I called for topics and forms. This one was courtesy of Andrew Vaughan, who requested
Free verse, at least three stanzas, about reading haikus on the toilet. No latinate diction.
—————
On the toilet, reading haiku,
the world awhole passes through me;
the moon falls out into a winter prairie.
A little blonde ball that had become a stone
in my chest, with a splash
of wine and another,
dissolves and flows out like
abandoned blood from the womb.
I am not as I was—
the best of what I have been
is smeared onto white paper
held by hands in San Diego.
From blisters I am bursting
moths brown as iodine
crawl out and tickle their wings dry
on the thin pink skin of my waist.
And still there is more inside of me,
but I must force myself to remain here.
And even when the light shining forth
from golden streetlights
and the snow white under the sky
dims into sign after dark sign
that there is no more to come,
I must stare into the ashy chaos
that has stopped me on this page;
I must ignore the syllables and even the choice of word
and wait for the fire in each black gesture
to flare like a match in the dark
and burn the foul and heavy oil
dense with millions of years of death
and erupt like a bright fog of sunlit pollen,
improbable as rising meteors
falling up to fill the sky with stars
and stack, lamp on lamp,
into a moon and a sun in the sky at
the very same time
so bleaching bright upon the face of the clock
that the seconds and minutes are invisible
and the hands pass unseen,
each heavy moment forgotten,
washed out,
and I am no longer what I had ceased to be,
but free again to mix what is myself with
what I have never been, free to close my eyes
and spoon another into myself.
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