intellectual properties

echolalic

and yet history does intrude on every word:
those with no memory, no history, no spirit, speak in mechanical tongues
old words like bridges, burned
the future story
a repeated
mimetic
image
an infinite echo
of barbarism: a return to the magic bison on the walls of the cave

.::.

links/ refs:

1 adorno: the jargon of authenticity

2 radiolab: words + radiolab: why the sky isn’t blue

3 TED: a stroke of insight

4 verb: “to GIF”

5 barbarism_(linguistics)

6 rimbaud: the alchemy of the word:

“My turn now. The story of one of my insanities.

For a long time I boasted that I was master of all possible landscapes and I thought the great figures of modern painting and poetry were laughable.

What I liked were: absurd paintings, pictures over doorways, stage sets, carnival backdrops, billboards, bright-colored prints; old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books full of misspellings, the kind of novels our grandmothers read, fairy tales, little children’s books, old operas, silly old songs, the nave rhythms of country rimes.

I dreamed of Crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard of, republics without histories, religious wars stamped out, revolutions in morals, movements of races and continents: I used to believe in every kind of magic.

I invented colors for the vowels! – A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. – I made rules for the form and movement of every consonant, and I boasted of inventing, with rhythms from within me, a kind of poetry that all the senses, sooner or later, would recognize. And I alone would be its translator.

I began it as an investigation. I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still…”

a soft religion

i don’t tumbl, so i just have to repost:

http://anneboyer.tumblr.com/post/49357708624/nyc-2

“He said that in his soft religion, if you have saved one life, you have saved the entire world, and if you have killed one person, you have murdered an entire community,

and when he spoke to me about his soft religion which sounded very soft I was tired after a long weekend at a conference in which I kept wanting to use my friends as pillows and all I wanted, then, was a soft pillow. I wanted a pillow that contained a soft philosophy which like his soft philosophy was a thing which was soft and easy to rest my head on and accounted for weakness, infirmity, youth, and age, men and women, the real reality of all of stakes of interrelation and space of care, a soft way of being in the world in which the weak were not the first to die, in which no one would never use humans instrumentally, in which we would never grab after glittering and impermanent objects, a soft philosophy of the world in which it could be guaranteed that we never look at our hands and find, with horror, that those hands which had always been grabbing were now empty, or worse, they were covered in blood.”

(see: my dream)

brooklyn ladders, violent dreams

in the backyard of a block of railroad apartments in bushwick
we had to climb through a precarious window to reach
there stood in a line between the trees
a series of tall metal ladders
reaching up into the branches
overgrown by years
artifacts of a time
when cotton was scrubbed in tubs
and the wet sheets and linens
and pantaloons were hung out to dry
stretched on long lines from windows
3 ,4, 5 stories tall
crosscrossing the interior courtyard on mechanical pulleys
stiff in the summer sun
and winter wind

i looked at the ladders against the night sky for a while,
wondering if anyone else had been since the moment of arrival
wanting to climb,
or if this was something only a non-native new yorker would do.
then over the ledge and into the unkempt garden,
-”hey, those probably aren’t safe” -
the solid steel frame barely moved under my weight
and confident, up i went
a few stories into the night
-”hey, watch out for those power lines”-
-”hey, be careful, it’s starting to really shake” -
-”hey, maybe someone should stabilize the bottom”-
i perched near the top, momentarily
the rest still wondering aloud
-”what is she doing?”-
until i climbed down, rejoined the party,
satisfied.

.::.

last night i had the most violent dream i can remember. i awoke surprised and a little scared at who i’d been in my subconscious – a demon throwing plates, breaking furniture, screaming wildly and stabbing the life out of someone, a knife in my bloody hands.

for these leaves and me you will not understand

confession: i have been reading Leaves of Grass again.

(For in any roof’d room of a house I emerge not, nor in company,
And in libraries I lie as one dumb, a gawk, or unborn, or dead,)

(Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand: Walt Whitman)

i assume because most of the past week i was in the woods, upstate.

.::.

it is impossible to go unnoticed in the woods,
unlike urban creation
where the bone structure is naked and overpowering
such that one can move through invisibly
among the noise,
hiding in plain sight,
no one, no thing taking notice
of your small life
inside the ritualized superstructure of modernity -
atomized, dissolved, unparticular, indiscrete:
the sacrifice to civilization of the nonidentical to identity.

the trees are singular,
autonomous
in their stand,
unmoved rarely even by wind and fire
though they will eventually fall -
the trees live among their own dead,
a state in our unnatural lives and deaths we only experience as tragic:
sailboats of immigrants across the atlantic filled with hope and dying,
30% mortality, bodies lifted into the sea every day,
the numbers dwindling as freedom approached,
the rest wondering whether their lives would end
unfinished, incomplete -
without the hand of man a tree never suffers such a fate.

a tree stands from its first tender root in its own graveyard,
once the promise of the acorn is fulfilled
the fallen ones are reincorporated with the rain.
complete.
walking between them you are present, another creature,
your footsteps on the soft path
cracking twigs
your breathing a birdsong
your heartbeat a waterfall
your scent leaving a trail
all along the leaves:
there is no hiding there.
in the eyes of the forest,
you will be clearly seen,
your life, your death
illuminated in the dappled sun and moonlight -
even on the darkest, starless night
the forest will find you there.

.::.
This is to reach the highest thing,
that Heaven perhaps will grant us:
not admiration or victory
but simply to be accepted
as part of an undeniable Reality,
like stones and trees.
(borges, again).

.::.

(i am aware that i am just repeating myself, year after year).

qotd: jagged pill

Because he’s right. If there’s anything I’ve learned about being single, it’s that this world wasn’t meant to be experienced alone. We were created for the purpose of fucking, of loving, of mating, and every day you spend failing to do just that, the universe ignores you a little bit more.

–ryan o’connell in vice

from the sky down

Consider how quickly all things are dissolved and resolved:

IX.

Consider how quickly all things are dissolved and resolved:
the bodies and substances themselves,
into the matter and substance of the world:
and their memories into the general age and time of the world.
Consider the nature of all worldly sensible things; of those especially,
which either ensnare by pleasure,
or for their irksomeness are dreadful,
or for their outward lustre and show are in great esteem and request,
how vile and contemptible,
how base and corruptible,
how destitute of all true life and being they are.

–Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book II

(~via)

you have come to the end of the world. keep walking.

“I realize quietly what a terribly civilized person I am—the need I have for people, conversation, books, theater, music, cafés, drinks, and so forth. It’s terrible to be civilized, because when you come to the end of the world you have nothing to support the terror of loneliness. To be civilized is to have complicated needs. And a man, when he is full blown, shouldn’t need a thing.”

–Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn

joan didion on new york

a beautiful read about being young and growing older in new york, but it could be almost city, anywhere:

GOODBYE TO ALL THAT, BY JOAN DIDION

…I could make promises to myself and to other people and there would be all the time in the world to keep them. I could stay up all night and make mistakes, and none of them would count…

and then

… at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young anymore…

read the whole thing

everyone so intimately rearranged (music)

listening these days:

.::.

i love both of these songs by silversun pickups:

panic switch

/when you see yourself in a crowded room
do your fingers itch are you pistol whipped
will you step in line or release the glitch
can you fall asleep with a panic switch/

+ lazy eye

/everyone so intimately rearranged/

.::.

i don’t generally like bands like this. i mean, i really do not like postal service or death cab for cutie, but i think they have similar sound. but i could be wrong and comparing dissimilar things here. maybe SSPU remind me more of smashing pumpkins.

.::.

anyway!  i do still really like Sleepy Sun from SF and have i mentioned enough how much i still love the song Marina? listen to them!  If you are in California they on  tour there starting next week on May 1 in SF and if i were you i would go.

.::.

mike doughty: pleasure on credit:

/Well, I’m a coaster, you’re a flume
Yes, I blossom, yes, I bloom

Get wide because I’m spacious
Got words but not loquacious/

{smart girl, not the crazy one}

.::.

nirvana: bleach (1989).  i like to do yoga to this after i’ve had a big cup of black coffee.  because that’s how i stretch. cobain allegedly hated this first album saying they were forced into being grung(ier) (they do sound more like pearl jam here i think) and that the lyrics suck, and i agree it’s not the best, but 1. about a girl  2. and there’s something raw about it that i like despite its very bad poetry.

/i need an easy friend/

.::.

and also, upset with trent reznor for saying coachella is “the coolest festival” in this vid from How To Destroy Angels @ coachella2013. if by “coolest” you mean “most popular”, then yeah. it’s objectively popular. but that’s what it is: coachella is a consumerfest of angst and popular opinion. i mean, watch the Jimmy Kimmel show interview Coachella hipsters about fake bands. sorry trent. i think you lost me there.