intellectual properties

echolalic.2 / the center cannot hold

{3am. today’s notes. more words. incomplete. }

.::.

utter:  1. complete, absolute.  2. to make a sound with one’s voice.

semantic satiation with every single word:
i’m afraid i’ve lost all meaning.
or: the only words uttered are those that mean nothing.

complete, absolute.  which nothing is.

it’s not apathy.
but maybe i’ve lost all affect
an inability to earnestly put any sign on things without feeling like a liar.
but then also a liar in silence.

(if) there is no thought without language
(if) there is no language without meaning
why can’t we know what we know?
can there be nothing inside a thought?

how is it that one can stand looking down a path of destruction
and say “well goddamn, this sure is crazy”
and keep living?
perhaps what we have now is a constant state of shock.
stumbling. speechless.

people search for meaning everywhere.
they go to conferences, universities, tabloids, newspapers, twitter feeds, comment sections, television, movies, music, baseball games, bars, museums, forests, mountains, the ocean, poetry, literature, pornography, sex, drugs, dance, meditation, yoga, church  -

in the falsification of what it means to know
the search is endless and now at a continuously increasing velocity.
perhaps the same velocity at which the world is washing away.

click. click. click. click.

how many words have you read, just today?
just now, even?
and how many of them, really, had meaning?
there is so little meaning to be found
despite that it’s all right there.
quod petit hic est.

the problem with the truth is that you have to have the strength for it.

has it ever been taken seriously how those people in the Allegory of the Cave remain in their seats?

“Nobody believed us when we told them what was happening in Treblinka.”

in the democratic unwillingness to admit inequality, we have grown weak under a guise of strength.
a refutation of authority
that forgets that the word is .(AUTHOR)ity.
the strength of conviction of one’s word.
weakness in that we are no longer authors of our own lives in our own words.
“our” “own” “words”
simplified in a democratic language.
we repeat.
and we repeat what is repeatable.

the terror of actually having to say something that means something will render most of us mute.

.::.

affect:
in the rank natural growth
of the civilizing process,
the weather of our thoughts and feelings has borders, and they are political.

.::.

“the humble are they who go about the world with the lure of the real in their hearts”,
he paraphrased.

and that the protagonist in every novel is a roofless man: a homeless person, a wanderer, untied.

.::.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

–Yeats

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).

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 will not be saved by what was left

You will not be saved by what was left
written by the ones your fear implores;
you are not the others and now you find
yourself in the center of a labyrinth
your steps designed. The agony of Jesus
will not save you, nor of Socrates, nor
strong, golden Siddhartha who accepted death
in a garden as the sun was going down.

Every word you have written turns to dust,
as does every word your mouth has spoken.
In Hades there is no such thing as pity
and God’s night is endless and infinite.
You are made of time, which never ceases.
You are every solitary instant.

–Borges, The Speck

the romantic desire for chaos (you too?)

question the need for philosophy
but when the mind becomes aware of itself as an object
it cannot help but consider its own existence:
the world now merely raw material
and a pretext for talking about oneself,
adolescent and becoming.

this irresistable urge to introspection
and ostentatious subjectivism
is a maniacal tendency to self-observation
with the compulsion to consider oneself
over and over again as one unknown,
as an uncannily remote stranger.

the romantic rushes into this duality
as he rushes into everything dark, ambiguous, chaotic and ecstatic -
the bizarre and grotesque
the ghostlike and pathological
the macabre and perverse.
a demonic dystopian dionysian
flight into the unconscious
or the other side of utopia -
the fairy tale, the fantastic,
the uncanny, the mysterious
the indefinite iridescent atmospherical and musical
space of childhood of nature,
to dreams and madness:
a yearning for irresponsibility
and dignity in the unknown.

a belief that the more bewildering the chaos,
the more radiant the star that emerges:
a mad genius uncivilized mind.

but with this want to experience everything simultaneously
and no search for synthesis-
with all antitheses possible,
all determinate utterance is dead and false.
nothing is.

dark crowds stumbling out of cinemas
numbed and blinded
by the narcotics of sound and light
which hex and strengthen the spell -
no reality is desired inside a dark movie house-
only romantic dreams.

when we dance, it is bait for death.
to escape atomization and alienation,
in coming together, we desire to be dissolved.

.::.

romanticism:
a psychotic fear of the present:
an ideology for a new society
inside a necromantic cry for the unrealized past -
an expression of generations which no longer
believe in absolute values
or absolute anything,
this feeling of homelessness
and loneliness
and isolation
is the fundamental experience
of whole generations

romanticism is an overcompensation
typical of the emancipated and disillusioned individual
found wandering in the slipstream of every revolution.

yet no psychosis has ever been more fruitful:
there is no product of modern art -
the exuberance, anarchy and violence,
drunken stammering lyricism,
and unrestrained, unsparing exhibition -
that is not a shadow of the romantic
desire for illusion by the disillusioned.

.::.

{c.f. hauser, the social history of art: german and western romanticism, pp. 155-172}

[when spring comes when spring comes when spring comes when spring comes when spring comes when spring ]

{Poem #14 from 20 Love Poems and a Song of Despair}

.::.

(happy equinox!)

quantum entanglement

this morning i woke up and wanted to have brunch in california, where it is 70 degrees and right now as i type this there is a sunny backyard full of friends laughing and having mimosas.  it is snowing softly but steadily here in brooklyn.

[who'd have thought

that snow falls?]

WHERE IS MY FUCKING TELEPORTER, i silently screamed.

then, because there is the internet, i looked that up.  what *is* the situation with teleporters? and rabbit hole: i started reading about quantum entanglement, which i get but don’t really understand and so my brain turns metaphysics into a love poem for the universe and everyone i love in it.

you move that way

i move this way

with perfect correlation

regardless of distance

“there is no

slower-than-light

influence

that can pass between

the entangled particles”

 [

there is no

slower-than-light

influence

]

.::.

einstein thought this all up, with a little help from his friends. thursday was Pi day and his birthday.  did you read this?

and now they found the God particle (again.)  this seems like a thing that will be endlessly discovered. (that’s some job security right there, looking for god particles)

.::.

on the infinite:

“I promise you that labyrinth, consisting of a single line which is invisible and unceasing.” — Borges

– referenced in the first line of Bochner and Smithson’s The Domain of the Great Bear: in the center of the infinite:

from last wednesday’s art class. textual art in the form of a “magazine-intervention”. see:  ”the medium and the tedium”, a 2010 written piece by bochner for explanation of this and his other work on language. {+that triple canopy website layout is awesome.}

["For translucence, against transparency."]

["questions of meaning, due to the nature of language, are undiscussable."]

the silent and spoken structures of language are an alien and incomprehensible labyrinth, an unmanageable pantheon.

 smithson :a heap of language:
(larger)

.::.

i am tying us together with really weak strings, strings that are unnecessary to the already entangled.  but i like the feeling of these words as strings, pulling gently.

.::.

borges: mirrored tigers

borges, on mirrors, reflections, representations

.::.

from two poems [parts]:

In my soul the afternoon grows wider and I reflect
That the tiger invoked in my verse
Is a ghost of a tiger, a symbol,
A series of literary tropes
And memories from the encyclopaedia
And not the deadly tiger, the fateful jewel
That, under the sun or the varying moon,
In Sumatra or Bengal goes on fulfilling
Its rounds of love, of idleness and death.
To the symbolic tiger I have opposed
The real thing, with its warm blood,
That decimates the tribe of buffaloes
And today, the third of August, ’59,
Stretches on the grass a deliberate
Shadow, but already the fact of naming it
And conjecturing its circumstances
Makes it a figment of art and no creature
Living among those that walk the earth.

[ http://thefloatinglibrary.com/2008/09/03/the-other-tiger/ ]

Today at the tip of so many and perplexing
Wandering years under the varying moon,
I ask myself what whim of fate
Made me so fearful of a glancing mirror.

Mirrors in metal, and the masked
Mirror of mahogany that in its mist
Of a red twilight hazes
The face that is gazed on as it gazes,

I see them as infinite, elemental
Executors of an ancient pact,
To multiply the world like the act
Of begetting. Sleepless. Bringing doom.

They prolong this hollow, unstable world
In their dizzying spider’s-web;
Sometimes in the afternoon they are blurred
By the breath of a man who is not dead.

[ http://thefloatinglibrary.com/2009/02/25/mirrors-j-l-borges/ ]

.::.

one story:

Islam asserts that on the unappealable day of judgment every perpetrator of the image of a living creature will be raised from the dead with his works, and he will be commanded to bring them to life, and he will fail, and be cast out with them into the fires of punishment. As a child, I felt before large mirrors that same horror of a spectral duplication or multiplication of reality. Their infallible and continuous functioning, their pursuit of my actions, their cosmic pantomime, were uncanny then, whenever it began to grow dark. One of my persistent prayers to God and my guardian angel was that I not dream about mirrors. I know I watched them with misgivings. Sometimes I feared they might begin to deviate from reality; other times I was afraid of seeing there my own face, disfigured by strange calamities. I have learned that this fear is again monstrously abroad in the world. The story is simple indeed, and disagreeable.

Around 1927 I met a sombre girl, first by telephone (for Julia began as a nameless, faceless voice), and, later, on a corner toward evening. She had alarmingly large eyes, straight blue-black hair, and an unbending body. Her grandfather and great-grandfather were federales, as mine were unitarios, and that ancient discord in our blood was for us a bond, a fuller possession of the fatherland. She lived with her family in a big old run-down house with very high ceilings, in the vapidity and grudges of genteel poverty. Afternoons — some few times in the evening — we went strolling in her neighborhood, Balvanera. We followed the thick wall by the railroad; once we walked along Sarmiento as far as the clearing for the Parque Centenario. There was no love between us, or even the pretense of love: I sensed in her an intensity that was altogether foreign to the erotic, and I feared it. It is not uncommon to relate to women, in an urge for intimacy, true or apocryphal circumstances of one’s boyish past. I must have told her once about the mirrors and thus in 1928 I prompted a hallucination that was to flower in 1931. Now, I have just heard that she has lost her mind and that the mirrors in her room are draped because she sees in them my reflection, usurping her own, and she trembles and falls silent and says I am persecuting her by magic.

What bitter slavishness, that of my face, that of one of my former faces. This odious fate reserved for my features must perforce make me odious too, but I no longer care.

[ http://thefloatinglibrary.com/2008/09/12/the-draped-mirrors/ ]

.::.

i too have a strange relationship to mirrors.  who is it that we see there? the images are always reversed and untrue.

I touch you knowing we weren’t born tomorrow

so full of so many good lines:

some of the 21 love poems by Adrienne Rich

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