Snapdragons
THE EVERYDAY
52
A VOICE: What is it not to say? A pearly little hot shut, that’s what. No choking in any sign. That’s what it is. How the world begins to know not what the what is for. And for what? Bold houses. Maps of a mediocre Florida. Conjuncts unloos’d.
A PEACH: Peels heap the red bench. Woe is a grand penchant for grief.
SLEEP: White white.
Shape it with a round.
Round it with a shape.
White and white.
THE COMPOST: The white of rootlets and tubers. Exactly how it is, the world begins in white embryonic light. Sun notes and neglect, splints and preparatory hobbles, Sergei Prokofiev, waxy sealants of jam jars: all white. Point clear: the way to say it is to say it. Chucking out muck, fortifying. Renegade Fridays with all hands hot and callous’d.
A VOICE: The grammar of lake holds the hold. Sun-chips skipping, the lacerating daylight. No more than the more you kowtow to it. And it itself.
A KEY: I heed the consequent unpocket’d.
Therefore gusto.
Therefore pout perfect.
Therefore a straight long eyelash bat.
Therefore milk.
Therefore bucket.
Heretofore cow.
DORMANT RED: Thinking of film and its casualties and jams. Thinking of the movies and its fetchable Brahms. Thinking of cinema and its haphazard lizards flickering by like lightning, its prominent zig-zags of spill’d blood shining white. Some days I can’t tell the difference between a reading jag and a crying jag.
A PEACH: Vacant lots of blow’d out puffs of goldenrod down at the dark end of the street. Something I know: been happy. Radio got done in by words intolerably writ. The new is camp photography put up with music and hardly any rattle.
DOMINANT RED: Dignity is wit: toss me a cigarette.
THE EVERYDAY: Monday, for shirters, Tuesday, unstable, Wednesday, a tenement, Thursday, say pennywhistle, Friday, lump aggregates, Saturday, Byzantium, Sunday, the of.
SLEEP: The sad archivists in sour disarray.
THE THREAD: “Prune and cleanse every leafe and spray.” Tie them together in a bundle, they’ll work to keep one another straight.
A VOICE: What is a gap? Cinders in ash. A shirt collar.
—
William Gaddis in The Recognitions: “Most forgeries last only a few generations, because they’re so carefully done in the taste of the period, a forged Rembrandt, for instance, confirms everything that that period sees in Rembrandt. Taste and style change, and the forgery is painfully obvious, dated, because the new period has discovered Rembrandt all over again, and of course discovered him to be quite different. That is the curse that any genuine article must endure.”
And, regarding early fifteenth century Flemish paintings, how every object’s imbued with its “own form and density”: “Because they found God everywhere. There was nothing God did not watch over, nothing, and so . . . in the painting every detail reflects . . . God’s concern with the most insignificant objects in life, with everything, because God did not relax for an instant then, and neither could the painter then. . . . There isn’t any single perspective, like the camera eye, the one we all look through and call it realism . . . the Flemish painter took twenty perspectives if he wished, and even in a small painting you can’t include it all in your single vision, your one miserable pair of eyes, like you can a photograph, like you can painting when it . . . when it degenerates, and becomes conscious of being looked at.
. . .
—Like everything today is conscious of being looked at by something else but not by God, and that’s the only way anything can have its own form and its own character, and . . . and shape and smell, being looked at by God.”
And, stray aphoristickals: “Originality is a device that untalented people use to impress other untalented people, and protect themselves from talented people . . .” “Most people are clever because they don’t know how to be honest.”
Apply to contemporary poetics where needed.
Detail of the Ghent Altarpiece, Hubert van Eyck (c. 1366–1426) and Jan van Eyck (c. 1395-1441)
Jan van Eyck, “The Marriage of Giovanni Arnolfini and Giovanna Cenami,” 1434
