July 27, 2008
THE DANCE OF RAMEAU'S NEPHEW
“By turns furious, soft, imperious, sniggering. At one point, he’s a young girl crying—portraying all her mannerisms—at another point he’s a priest, he’s a king, he’s a tyrant—he threatens, commands, loses his temper. He’s a slave. He obeys. He calms down, he laments, he complains, he laughs—never straying from the tone, rhythm, or sense of the words or the character of the song …
He whistled for the piccolos, warbled for the flutes, shouting, singing, carrying on like a maniac, acting out, by himself, the male and female dancers and singers, an entire orchestra, the whole musical company, dividing himself into twenty different roles, running, stopping, looking like a man possessed, frothing at the mouth. It was stiflingly hot, and the sweat running down the wrinkles in his forehead and down the length of his cheeks mixed in with the powder in his hair came down in streaks and lined the top of his coat. What didn’t I see him do? He cried, he laughed, he sighed, he looked tender or calm or angry—a woman who was swooning in grief, an unhappy man left in total despair, a temple being built, birds calming down at sunset, waters either murmuring in a cool lonely place or descending in a torrent from the high mountains, a storm, a tempest, the cries of those who are going to die intermingled with the whistling winds, the bursts of thunder, the night, with its shadows—silent and dark—for sounds do depict even silence.
His mind was completely gone. Worn out with fatigue and looking like a man coming out of a deep sleep or a long trance, he stayed motionless, dazed, astonished.”
December 4, 2006
THE BEES SEEMED SINGING BALLADS
August 9, 2006
WILLIAM GASS ON WILL VS WISHING
From an Introduction to the stories of Robert Walser:
Among Immanuel Kant’s many important distinctions is the one he made between willing something to happen and wishing for it to occur. When we will an end, he said, we must also necessarily will some means which will be effective in obtaining it. If you hear me speaking of my love of boating and the sea, of my dream one day of owning my own yacht and sailing the Chesapeake as if it were my own private lake, you will be quite properly disabused of your belief in my desire when you notice that I subscribe to not a single boating magazine; that I do not follow the cup races in the papers; that I have not set aside any sums towards the purchase of so much as a jaunty cap; that, in fact, I spend my vacations with my family in the desert Southwest. In short, I may wish for such a luxury, but I have never willed it. When I wish, my means are dreams. Each evening, before sleep and in place of love, I imagine my vessel parting the waves: I cry to the sky the salty orders of a shipmaster and eat heartily without any fear of sickness from the sea that lies around me like my cool, uninhabited sheets. As a people, as a race, Kant observed, we will always War; we only wish for peace.
And when the circumstances of my life—my six children and my fruitful but frigid wife, perhaps, my boringly repetitive work as an insurance adjuster, my rascally relatives and harsh climate, the painfully pushed-forward designs of those who would exploit me—when I see these force me (as I think) to give up my aims altogether, then I shall find myself in a classical state of powerless resentment, aggrieved because existence has become a broken promise; and my head shall fill with willing women, my yacht will always find the best breeze, I shall dream of flames while I stir my ashes, and my soul will swell like a balloon to float over the world, touching it only as a shadow.
If I were to try to save myself through writing, how difficult it would be for me to maintain the posture of a realist, for I should have had little acquaintance with the real (indeed, less and less), rather more with the subjects of my wishes than the objects of will. In order to confer the blessings of Being upon the small hollow dreams of my soul, these harmlessly private elaborations will have to somehow achieve the heartless powers of the page; yet my characters must be inventions, and how quickly these inventions will feel my disdain. What value could they have if they remain so utterly in power? So much for the story, too, which can be pushed and pulled this way and that, or dropped, suddenly, like a weighted sack in a lake.
August 8, 2006
CUPID AS A LINK BOY
Ms. Natalie is putting together a literature rack for the opening of a little gallery that’s attached to our studio space, and she is having people fax over small zines and pamphlets. I made one called Self Portrait as Cupid as a Link Boy, which you can download here in all its analogical distortion and rhetorical clutter or else just read on your screen. If you download it, you could maybe copy it so that it’s double-sided, but it might be more fun to paste it together with whatever’s around. The jelly from your bagel. Chewed-up houseplant leaves and coffee dregs, which would probably make a pretty green.
It’s a little mumbled sketch for what will hopefully be a larger work, some fragments centered around (well, sprung off from) a Joshua Reynolds painting.
February 13, 2006
IT'S SNOWING FLAKES LIKE CAMPING FLIES
dust mote gnats & tiny biters that hang out by water. I mean the little flies that work together at sex in spring—great, gross bubbling clouds of them hovering by the driveway. There really are creatures, I think, that rely on this sort of swizzle, hoping they'll bump into what they need through lazy drift. Those might live in water, though. But this snow looks like ash. And I love how it sketches out distances. Now, I can see the air between the window & the tree and judge how far they are by the noise between them.
We erect a statue in ourselves, Diderot said, and then live our whole lives trying to model ourselves after what we've erected. But what's more important, because it is the tint & flavor of that act of trying, is the character we exist with during the effort.
The flush faced guest being treated by his centered friends, the single at the couples house, the joker with the strangled streak. That sort of age-old ungrown boy whose noise & gab, heavy rumble and deep thirst only makes sense in the evening, by the bar there, where he’s waiting out the phase.
(oh, go tromp in snow. let it rest)
September 30, 2004
MOVING
Robert Creeley to Charles Olson, Aug 23, 1950:
What can be pushed—the exact & bitter knowing of what kind of egoism it takes—that it refuses even the slightest wish: to be of service—how can I say that, that I would, that I want, to be of service—when I only want to make this thing: true. I cant trust the reality of these people, I can’t believe that is much more than what they’ve, unwittingly, taken out of possibility, an unwilling surprise. Possibility: is, say, what happened, even last night? Like, sitting on the couch, Ann by the window, in a chair, reading, the light coming down on her book, herself, the yellow, somewhat hard there. Then, as it grows just beyond the window, outside, a lilac tree, with the deep green of the leaves, its own (from how may goddamn cold distant & echoing miles … as one could walk them?—) the moon, with its own light catching the leaves, making two lights, two kinds. Two, two: worlds. I used to read, then, of these things beyond, beyond—like fairy lands. And here there are nights, when the mist comes up early from the river, and before the sun has gone down, it rides still over the edge of the hills to the south, catches on these rises of the mist, as they come up/ makes for all of it—something that can be believed?
I don’t know. To ride each thing, to go, to move—to be ready for it, to go. The simple biz, perhaps, of having a bag packed. Cannot, cannot, stay: anywhere.
September 22, 2004
INTO LONGING
Fling the emptiness out of your arms
to broaden the spaces we breathe--maybe the birds
will feel the extended air in more fervent flight.
Down from the porch, where the lake is still catching the light, to the kitchen, where it's night already, for some ice coffee. Then back up to the light. Then later, back down again. It's an easy way to manipulate my mood. An already fluid, listless, afternoon mood.
Rilke, left alone in his friend the princess's castle, asked us all a question:
Is it not time that, in loving,
we freed ourselves from the loved one, and, quivering, endured:
as the arrow endures the string, to become, in the gathering out-leap,
something more than itself?
But the out-leap is also an effusion, a dangerous dispersion of the self. Rilke, an abused heart, was toyed with by his lovers, and so began to turn to the unrequited as ideal. The great lovers were, to him, the ignored lovers, such as the Comte de Chamilly who, in loving a man who did not love her back, did not fling the streams of her feeling on in to the imaginary, but, with infinite power, conducted the geniality of this feeling back into herself: enduring it, nothing but that.
What does it take, though, to harness that infinite power? How do I manage not to twist from me and, sinking, turn away, whenever M. is in the room? When passing by the house of B? Why is it not enough to be walking a little on the porch, making ice coffee, or (Rilke again:) reading something, resting, looking out--yes, I could be contented with everything, if only it were entirely mine again, and did not keep discharging itself into longing. I'm alarmed when I think of the way I've been living out of myself, as though always standing at a telescope, ascribing to every woman that approached a bliss that could certainly never have been discovered in one of them.
My dream, a few weeks ago, that stayed with me for days: I'm outside a broken shack with M and some of his friends. We're walking back from somewhere, from some earlier part of the dream, and he is ruddy, he is walking backwards calling out mindless jokes as we come along behind him. The landscape, the house walls, all of us fall darkly off away from him. He is happy, though, to have me there. A sort of novelty.
Then later, the others are gone, and I am inside the shack. I'm packing a bag. I guess that I am leaving. Things are heavy, thick with browns and deep green, and the only light is from the room where I hear M. laughing a little, walking around. In a while he calls out 'hey', excited, and I come through the door to where he’s sitting. He is pointing to a screen, grinning. And says, 'I caught us on tape'. He hears me behind him and turns around with a smile.
But he is expecting someone else, and his smile shifts a little—-On the screen, it's him and his girlfriend, a few other friends. They're naked, embarrassed, playing a game. Fooling around.
So what is outside of my dream, the way that things are now, slowly cups and coddles what is inside of my dream. My hand fell to hers, Gass writes, and she took it with a squeeze, so that the chilled soon lay within the chilled, I thought, like a bottle of champagne.
I could awake from this into another dream, into Rilke's. I could find that it is true, that I grasp myself. But I'm still caught between finding the string and leaving it. I wake up holding nothing, then plan where to throw it to, and how.