Raw Materials

Seed Head

THE EVERYDAY

45
Standard raw materials
To create standard,
Interchangeable parts, to

Be assembled by
Automatic control into
A standard vacuum

Cleaner. The solace
Of form is
Found in imperturbability,

The way it
Runs a noisy
Railroad track right

Into a neighborhood
Tavern in order
To imbue it

With the surplus
Value of novelty—
Gulp a Manhattan

whilst a Pullman charges around the bend and throttles down to park itself just there where that boater’d gent’s about to amble off looking for the loo. Standardization is capable of making enormous reductions in cost though its progress is dauntingly slow because of the perennial artificial style rumpus in sales and marketing, prematurely despoiling standardization’s regularly engineer’d attempts at fruition.

Annual model period
Pieces. Pre-engineer’d
Style (new forms)

For the nonce.
Stupendous (stupefying) numbers
Of choices with

Largely unvouch’d-for
Specs and durability.
Serialization of machines.

Jack Spicer: Empty
Fragments, pots found
In some Mesopotamian

Exhibit. Found not
Put together. The
Universe’s got distance,

Not much else.
Higher output meaning
Not much else.

Intractable the lunge
At the new
Unceasing, earnest, doom’d

To mimic any
Market of intangibles.
I make of

My brow an
Erstwhile alchemical equation,
Studious and dumb

To “furtherance,” happy
To retool a
Technology of ease

And mouths working
A common measure
To refine without

Conspicuous or savage
Parading that which
Is the case.

—

Rain gear’d up in the yellow parka against the sporadic blasts of rain coming down out of duotone black skies. Lawrence Durrell kept “quarry books” full of scribbles—phrases, scenarios, clippings, transcriptions. Reworking some severally, leading to the “cubist” perspective-sense of, in particular, The Alexandria Quartet. One learns in the posthumously put together (by Joseph Tabbi) 2002 William Gaddis book, The Rush for Second Place: Essays and Occasional Writings, that “Gaddis left innumerable uncollected news items and ‘hundreds’ of further ‘clippings, outlines, vast numbers of notes, drafts of early pages’ intended for” a history of the player piano. Comparable to—in Tabbi’s words—“Walter Benjamin’s unfinished ‘Arcades’ project, or—better still—a prize contribution to the still evolving “Dead Media” project initiated on the Internet by cyberpunk novelist Bruce Sterling (a compilation running from Klieg light spectacles to eight-track tape players and superseded software platforms).” That project is, apparently, in abeyance or “transition” or defunct, though some notes remain and Sterling’s (1995) statement. Struck by Sterling’s talk about Man Ray muse Jacqueline Goddard’s, her percipience regarding how (largely) tools change behavior:

After a day of work, the artists wanted to get away from their studios, and get away from what they were creating. They all met in the cafés to argue about this and that, to discuss their work, politics and philosophy . . . We went to the bar of La Coupole. Bob, the barman, was a terrible nice chap . . . As there was no telephone in those days everybody used him to leave messages. At the Dôme we also had a little place behind the door for messages. The telephone was the death of Montparnasse.

(Relation to O’Hara’s famous: “While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem”?) Gaddis’s clippings and notes, chronologically order’d, include things like these (for 1913):

J. P. Morgan dies.

Santayana: “For utility makes beauty, & eyes bulging out from the head like his are the most advantageous for seeing; nostrils wide & open to the air, like his, most appropriate for smell; & a mouth large & voluminous, like his, best fitted for both eating & kissing.”

On Walt Whitman and the “charm of uniformity in multiplicity”: “Everywhere it greets us with a passionate preference; not flowers but leaves of grass, not music but drum-taps, not composition but aggregation, not the hero but the average man, not the crisis but the vulgarest moment; & by this resolute marshalling of nullities, by this effort to show us everything as a momentary pulsation of a liquid & structureless whole, he profoundly stirs the imagination.”

As for the ultimate consumer of all this musical feast, the American music lover, he ate it up and cried for more. No longer did he have to exert himself even to the extent of pumping pedals or pushing levers. An electric motor now reduced his chores to zero. He merely sat back, relaxed and dreamed, while his piano, entirely on its own, delivered performances by the giants of the keyboard, from Pachmann and Godowsky to Vincent Lopez, right in his own living room. No czar, sultan, or begum could command more.

The final item label’d “[clipping].” Elsewhere: references to “Fisher Body kilties bagpipe band” (1923) and “Indiana Standard Oil mandolin club formed” (1925).

Not entirely certain what it is I am pursuing here. Thinking about “public writing” (“The Everyday”) and my own increasing disinclination to kowtow to the various “product placement specialists” of my cohort—editors—which is probably putting it a little strongly (that is, perhaps I simply make a manifesto out of personal sloth, “can’t be bother’d”). Point is, everything I write gets “put up” here (not exactly the truth: the “off” day scribbles of late—number’d sections of “The Everyday” get add’d to a now fifty-or-so page file collecting the whole). Is that a “quarry book”? Is all of Isola di Rifiuti a “quarry book”? Is there any intent to “rework” any of it? Extract and “publish”? If Santayana’s right and “utility makes beauty” (or if Whitman’s right and what matters is the scribbling itself, that “effort to show us everything as a momentary pulsation of a liquid & structureless whole”)—then why bow to the historical (authenticating) ritual of the book, or the postures of the vetted? (Back to O’Hara: “I confess that it may be the death of literature as we know it.” That primary insouciance that says: “how can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means,” and adds, “or reads it.”) That’s not why one put on the kilt in the first place and set out to squeeze at that bag of air so lustily.

Man Ray, [Jacqueline Goddard], 1930

“Made in the Shape of One’s Own Desire”

Some Grasses

THE EVERYDAY

44
Implacable necessity of
The alphabetic imperium
We grunt under,

Tongues making noises
Unspell’d by any
Lingual feat. Say

Of the day
That it tarries
And readjusts, up-

Dates its clocks,
All “set” for
Man’s own proceedings

To fill a
Variorum edition of
What hap’d in

Particular: the black
Peg, the slate
Board, the homey’s

High malevolent stare,
And the post-
Slapdown improvised preening

In the pharmacy
Door, pick in
Hand. Poetry is

A kind of
Inevitablism honor’d, a
Rage to romp

Uncommittedly in meadows
Full of fireweed.
It is ornery,

Misbegotten, miscegenous, eliding
Raw data in
Romantic embouchures with

Tinny constructivist nail-
Ups, bleeding milk
And honey into

A temporary stasis
Conceived in liberty,
With constraints and

Strictures put into
Play by sheer
Use. It swelters

Benign and under-
Achieving in unfurnish’d
Rooms where sentries

To a candidate
Stuff ballot boxes
With unprovenanced notices

And fail to
Own up to
Their words, Rimbaud

In Cairo discounting
The futurity of
The Villon-Baudelaire-

Verlaine line, tossing
Vowels off into
The blue’d desert

With the savage
Air of legend—
For novelists, the

Vigorous inheritors of
Diminutives, all the
Words nobody owns.

—

Finish’d Durrell’s Panic Spring and lit out for the territory call’d The Recognitions, Gaddis, William Gaddis. Funny how two books’ll elide without plausible intermission (particularly if one’s reading on the verge of sleep). Durrell:

Sitting there, in all simplicity of mind, he contemplated his own death as something new and delightful; a divorce from the present which was perplexing, always perplexing, with its trivialities. Death, once beyond that partition of physical pain and fear, seemed to him made in the shape of his own desire. It would be a place of infinite understanding, in which there would be no bars for the roving intuition; everything would be open, and explored. Death must be a very spacious place, he heard himself think, in which so many heroes can be accommodated, so many mysteries solved. And thinking like this, in the warm first flush of exultation, he recalled to his mind all those things which before had done him hurt, trying to prove that the new strength was proof against them. As a man will press a bad tooth to see that it still hurts, he filled his mind with the unhappy things, but was at peace.

“Made in the shape of one’s own desire”—the very definition of the everyday. And why, precisely, in the earliest pages of The Recognitions, here, say, with the young Reverend Gwyon in Madrid (he’s only just bury’d wife Camilla, here, in Spain)—

Around him less than a million people closed outside shutters, sashes, inside shutters and curtains, hid behind locked and bolted doors themselves in congruent shapes of unconsciousness from the laden night as it passed. Through that open window he was wakened by lightning, and not to the lightning itself but the sudden absence of it, when the flash had wakened him to an eternal instant of half-consciousness and left him fully awake, chilled, alone and astonished at the sudden darkness where all had been light a moment before, chilled so thoroughly that the consciousness of it seemed to extend to every faintly seen object in the room, chilled with dread as the rain pounding against the sill pounded into his consciousness as though to engulf and drown it. —Did I close the study window? . . . The door to the carriage barn? Anything . . . did I leave anything out in the rain? Polly? . . . a doll he had had forty years before, mistress of a house under the birch trees in the afternoon, sun, and those trees now, supple in the gale of wind charged inexhaustibly with water and darkness, the rest mud: the sense of something lost.

That knowing that arrives full-treacled, a gush of innards display’d de-bellying the cow, ripest desire at the gash-moment of total loss—is that it? What the everyday conceals for delivery in its off-moments undeclared (to customs, to the customary). Why it is necessary to lay siege to it, relentlessly, make a ménage of it, the quotidian.

How strange to thing of The Recognitions being deliver’d up in 1955. I recall an energetic, if somewhat prissy, guy a few years my senior reading it in Ithaca, early ’seventies. I’d swear it belong’d to that “era.” (Second novel, J R, publish’d in 1975.) William Gass captures some of the myths of the intervening:

He had been a floorwalker at Bloomingdale’s. That was one rumor. He was presently writing under the nom de plume of Thomas Pynchon. That was another. He had had to pay Harcourt Brace to publish The Recognitions and then, disappointed and peeved by its reception, he had the unsold stock destroyed. He died of dysentery or some similarly humiliating and touristy disease at forty-three and had been buried stoneless-in-Spain under a gnarled tree. Among the more absurd was the allegation that he had worked as a machinist’s assistant on the Panama Canal and served as a soldier of fortune for a small war in Costa Rica. He had no visible means. What he did do was traipse. He became a character in books which bore a vagrant’s name. No. He worked for the army and wrote the texts of field manuals. No. He scripted films. They told you / showed you how to take apart and clean your rifle. A rather unkind few suggested he had been a fact checker at The New Yorker. Not at all, argued others, he was born a freelancer. And became a ghost who moved corporate mouths with gathering material for a novel he would write one day about America and money.

(Momentary anonymous grip on my wrist that, maybe, one ought, in the global unbuttressing of the banker’s glorious halls, be reading the “America and money” book (J R). Ought’s a funny word. And, Gass notes, too, how, post-anonymity, Gaddis provided the editors of a book of essays about him with a drawing of himself, “suitably suited and bearing a highball glass.” Gass: “The figure has no head.” I recall seeing Gaddis read circa 1995—a little pinch’d, astringent, fractious, “suffer no fools” and with a ravening mirth-light to the eye.)

William Gaddis, 1922-1998

Drawing by William Gaddis

My Hobby

Sunflowers

THE EVERYDAY

43
Stet initial’d greenly Johannes Factotum. I raked the dry rumpus of leaves off the greensward, and push’d the spindly cutter about to clip down the grasses for winter. A raw spot on my thumb for proof. I panic-napped and the dog join’d me. I need to borrow a ladder to “get at” the gutters. The one (ladder) I found down the street—I think the postal facteur (or facteuse) inhabits the joint with Tuffy the dog—a few years back with a sign reading FREE attach’d: I lean’d it up against the eaves and plant’d one foot against a rung and had it bust in half bingo. “It” made me “wary.” I read a few pages of Lawrence Durrell. I clamor for roseate feelings splay’d out against Levantine skies, high daunting boyish percepts “engendr’d” by turpentiney retsina or licorice’d ouzo. Oh skittish history! In the port of Piraeus I slept in a vacant lot. Lading clang’d the steel decks and swarthy shouts and in the morning I found a sheep’s horn where I’d laid myself down to sleep. Sleep to sleep we go with besot’d upright intervals between. Ezra Pound says: “Part of literature seems to spring from hate but its vitality is not in the hatred.” Confusing, one assumes, a sloppy fueling anger (and its stinging hoots of perennial gut-busting laughter) with some dullard thing, basic, that hot white Andy that, unleash’d, could kill a man. And there’s Shostakovich saying that (under the Soviets) writing about death’s “tantamount to wiping one’s nose on one’s sleeve in company.” Death making its blunt foray into the cacophonous weekend realm of mild duty and uncertain pleasure, the scrivener’s itch to rope off a chore for oneself and be subsumed by it. (Raking, I found a cat-claw’d chipmunk expiring in the sun, nudged it with a finger. Whereof it gaped a little gingerly and fell to panting oreye mush bilge its squint emphysema’d with a sudden glare Zukofsky.)
Messes undo the mesh. Autumn
Is here in order that
Spring mought lick its wounds,
Give nurse to its surviving
Cub whose play is strong
Enough to engineer a sobriety
And welter hard as rock.
Everything conspires to fetter sun
To the land that names
It sun and the world
Feigns go about its business
Of stern nonchalance with its
Flag-wavers not ever up
To code, the semaphore men
With arms wind-milling like
Arms, only to get the
Signals so wrong, so mightily.
The vociferousness of reason is
Rivet’d into itself by voice,
By a crude particularity of
The “reasonable”—and so it
Flows off, chart’d into stasis.
Off we go to paw
Through books abandon’d by owners
In the hitherto perfect weather,
To confront the resilience of
Print, how it refuses indulgence,
Off to roam and collapse
Into a leather’d chair, air
Unfurling in cool billows out
Of ducts hid by grates
Dispersed amongst ceiling tiles made
To resemble deal, unfinish’d odd
Job lots of yellow pine,
With countersunk fixtures baffled by
Foil-color’d discs that throw
Any available light back out
Where it glances mischievously up
Off the notebook page to
Offer umbrage for writing’s solitary
Task, its misfit circularity of
Saying a thing that is
Without say-so, yclept, puttering.

—

One’d think I’d “of” muster’d up some less meagre galumph after my three day spree in absentia. No. Is there a “natural” trajectory of writing that peters out in a month or so? The daily belting of the pencil to my rachitic claw becomes ever less uplifting, its results squeezed out as if under duress, mephitic, vaporous, pestilential. I see some high hootenanny about something is proceeding, somebody mess’d with somebody’s “stuff” (my word, is what Archie Ammons’d say), or is it that “our” “intellectual” “property” got stuff’d in a sack and is being fenced, or somebody sew’d a Karl Lagerfeld tag into a grimy pair of gym shorts: I don’t know, piracy in the trenches poetickal, it all seems terribly redundant, and anybody cow’d by it, or anger’d by it, or turning to tort’d up legal malapropisms for succor, a fleabit whinger of another “era.” If the Scot William Dunbar’s the first to use “fuck” and “cunt” in print (1503), he got the angle on it, no? A lot of perennially coop’d up horses bucking wildly is what I see and C’est mon dada, still means “It’s my hobby,” no high horses need apply.

—

To work.

The American Poet

Goddamn

Some Clouds

THE EVERYDAY

39
Complicated simian ways
Like a kinship
Syndrome group’s fire-

Sale pursuant to
Aims and claims
Unmonitor’d by hereditary

Overseers or captains
Of industry in
The guise of

Regular guys out
Coughing up fiduciary
Acumen for private

Coffers with heating
Fuel costs sky-
Rocketing and winter

Is icummen in,
The loan is
Due again. Goddamn

Mortgage swap is
Fiscal slop, the
Banker chews my

Pen and I
Eschew the slumgullion
Meat in mud

Handout to rich
Wankers and high-
Riders manipulating waves

Of world neurosis
Underslung by credit
Erect’d by gangster

Lobbyists for half-
Built projects guaranteed
To pile-drive

Into the Third
World mud a
Million or so

(Rounding down) workers
At a minimum
Wage represent’d by

Dollars spent providing
Massive arms shipments
To governments friendly

Enough to fend
Off any union
Beyond one aligning

Wealth arm’d with
A brutal acquiescent
Military to unstopper’d

Corporate greed, sing
A loud Goddamn
Unallow’d, sing Goddamn.

—

Cold enough to sweater up under the jacket biking in. Yesterday’s lines mortar’d together into three by three bricks, something satisfying about making a forsworn shift out of the battery-duo of prose tossing it to the line, the line tossing it back. In Panic Spring, a character sketch of one Rev. Richard Pixie, a parson recall’d back in England—Durrell is notorious for saying he left behind “the English Death” in leaving what he call’d “Pudding Island”—includes the sentence: “He had never heard of Donne, piles, the Reformation, Duke Ellington, the cosmic ray, Remy de Gourmont, Henry Miller.” An omnivorous list, one pulling up several shrieking mandrakes of contemporary culture of the moment (c. 1935). I toy’d with the idea of translating it into equivalent terms (c. 2008)—who is “our” Henry Miller, who Duke Ellington? Durrell’d just begun corresponding with Miller, senior by two decades. A note indicates that “the Symbolist poet Remy de Gourmont” was “a major influence on Durrell through Ezra Pound’s translations, The Natural Philosophy of Love in particular.” A book I’d assumed nobody took seriously, or even read. Pound, in a “Translator’s Postscript” writes:

“Il y aurait peut être une certain corrélation entre la copulation complete et profonde et le développement cérébral.”

Not only is this suggestion, made by our author at the end of his eighth chapter, [Pound translates the line: “There might be, perhaps, a certain correlation between complete and profound copulation and the development of the brain.”] both possible and probable, but it is more than likely that the brain itself, is, in origin and development, only a sort of great clot of genital fluid held in suspense or reserve; at first over the cervical ganglion, or, earlier or in other species, held in several clots over the scattered chief nerve centres; and augmenting in varying speeds and quantities into medulla oblongata, cerebellum and cerebrum. This hypothesis would perhaps explain a certain number of as yet uncorrelated phenomena both psychological and physiological. It would explain the enormous content of the brain as a maker or presenter of images. Species would have developed in accordance with, or their development would have been affected by, the relative discharge and retention of the fluid; this proportion being both a matter of quantity and of quality, some animals profiting hardly at all by the alluvial Nile flood; the baboon retaining nothing; men apparently stupefying themselves in some cases by excess, and in other cases discharging apparently only a surplus at high pressure; the gateux, or the genius, the “strong minded.”

Elsewhere, Pound claims that “the power of the spermatozoide is precisely the power of exteriorizing a form” and talks of “the symbolism of phallic religions, man really the phallus or spermatozoide charging, head on, the female chaos.” He gets in a poke at the English: “Even oneself has felt it, driving any new idea into the great passive vulva of London, a sensation analogous to the male feeling in copulation.” No slouch at constructing airy castles of insolence out of sheer exuberance and megalomania, Pound attempts a seizure of wild categoricals, duds it up in pseudo-scientific lingo:

Postulating that the cerebral fluid tried all sorts of experiments, and, striking matter, forced it into all sorts of forms, by gushes; we have admittedly in insect life a female predominance; in bird, mammal and human, at least an increasing male prominence. And these four important branches of “the fan” may be differentiated according to their apparent chief desire, or source of choosing their species.

Insect, utility; bird, flight; mammal, muscular splendour; man, experiment.

All hogwash, though admittedly a kind of energy attends to it. One admires the thorough brashery of Pound’s public fibbing to himself, and notes how timid and hollow the similar (duller) effusions of Pound’s categorical followers seem. With Durrell, the fictioneer, the oddity (and the pedantry) of such incursions is subsumed by character—it’s thrilling to consider the whole feast of human beliefs and systems, the “complicated simian ways” outside of the lecture room.

To Monday. (Enough “stupefying myself by excess.”)

Ezra Pound, c. 1966
(Photograph by Jonathan Williams)

Milch Milch

Some Clouds

THE EVERYDAY

38
The market went down at five. The cuckoo is apt to lay its eggs in the nests of much smaller birds, chaffinches and the like, allowing its offspring to be markedly bigger and stronger than its fellow-nestlings, thus permitting it to oust any competitors. Lizards tick into stasis, or flicker out haphazard lightning-streaks of a blood-color’d tongue. The marquetry went down at five. In the woods near Ithaca, New York, a coppery eft plods through down’d oak leaves where the Indian pipestem, a plant lacking chlorophyll, hoists its pale meager towers. To be like Thomas Hardy and call a man a “stunpoll.” To find oneself caught between sleep and wakefulness like a dissipated citizen of naught, in a tent pitch’d “at” an imaginary apex, a pinpoint that is unverifiably one for reasons of scale. There’s a foul-smelling predisposition toward rakishly-donned victimhood there in that one, seemingly unslaked by the honest crises of others, rather, fuel’d by it, a rampant immaturity hoist’d up (series of pulleys and cords) the flagpole of “art.” The marquise went down at five. That coupon’s redeemable only at the Naughty Dog Café. If Theodore Enslin claim’d living in New York City (c. 1963, in Origin) resembled “a reciprocal disease of parasites,” who (I read it today) suggest’d it’s like “several tapeworms in a jar”? Reminds me of Thomas McGrath’s “cost-plus featherbedders who come forth out of dewy bowers.”
Tesserae of the quotidian collect’d
And put willy-nilly up
Against the daunting white sheet
In a routine of wonder,
The routine a frame out
Of which a practice of
Contemplating a result is construct’d,
And an ecstatic pattern, luxurious
And gigantic. Losses (the inchoate,
The incoherent, the denatured) get
Dispell’d by repetition, or distributed
Into crannies made by the
Perceptible, the emergent, shifting bulk.
Lawrence Durrell: “I salute you
In the name of Nut,
The mother of Tchem-Tschek
The gourmandizing son of Thoth,
Who is Bennu, sacred bird
Of Heliopolis. The solemnest greeting.”

—

Funny to stumble into yesterday’s film, “Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man.” I put it “up” after listening to Christopher Cook Gilmore’s report of being chased by the “CRS goons” (meaning that, viddying the remaining fifty minutes, I had a few doubts). I tend’d to avoid Shakespeare and Co. doings, the only distinct recall of readings there: one of Piero Heliczer, one of Kenneth White, two stringers, one vaguely Beat, one vaguely Buddhist, neither of whom I particularly cotton’d to (to whom neither I particularly cotton’d—like an a prefer’d old T-shirt—for the pedantickals in the bunch). (One ought to model a gauge for measuring the import of “what I think I am saying” calibrated to the sass “with which” I say it.) High sass nothing. I do recall (c. 1980) finding a hardbound copy of Ashbery’s The Double Dream of Spring chudk’d in a Shakespeare and Co. bin. Fifty francs, something under ten dollars by the exchange, and somewhat more than I ought consider parting with. Which turn’d out a needless dilemma: just at the point of paying for the thing (distract’d clerk), George Whitman (seemingly out of nowhere) swoop’d down with a claw-hand and snatch’d it up: “Ashbery first edition, oh, that’d have to be much more than that.” Exactly how much more plainly not forthcoming, and Whitman disappear’d with the book. I did like to see him in the completely green suit he sport’d, scooting about the city on a Mobylette, rather frail-looking and hawkish a la fois. One sensed a lot of posing (and hierarchy) amongst the bookshop’s regulars.

—

Why the splurge of memory of late, its disordering tasks? Durrell in Panic Spring, just after noting “the rhythmic milch milch of the sheep as they nibbled the hot spikes of grass,” reveling in a period of unsully’d thinking (gain’d, he hints, through everyday routine):

Life was, at such times, like a landlocked lagoon without a ripple on its surface, without a disturbance to its continuity; but how imperceptibly it passed, how soon the delight in its images was swallowed up! Slowly the almonds ripened, slowly the ripe medlars tumbled from the trees, slowly the flowers shone out of the sconces of the prickly pear. All day long the Greek shepherd girls lolled under the olives on the hillsides, like snipers, singing their songs or talking; in their vivid headcloths and with pomegranate flowers in their teeth. A hundred sights, sounds, sensations created their momentary impacts and passed on. They would recur, he knew, in retrospect, become luminous and whole in relation to the Pattern; and the flavour of them would be purged of any discomfort. Enjoyment would come with assessment. For the present, passivity inside the narrow cage of immediate routine and work was enough.

Like snipers! What Durrell’s investigating (studying) here is Quietism, a kind of loss of self through passivity, serenity, acceptance, ataraxia. “Christianity’s Nirvana.” Marlowe, Durrell’s character in Panic Spring is reading Miguel de Molinos’s Guida spirituale.I simply thieve off it to think about writing, states of writing, routines of writing, resultant formal registers. A release. The story of the Greek painter Apelles of Kos (fl. fourth century BC) who, attempting to paint the wild foam of a horse, overheat’d. Apelles tries and tries and, finally, in a rage heaves the sponge he’s using to clean a brush with at the unfinish’d mural and there sees represent’d the horse’s foam.

Apelles of Kos, “Venus Anadyomene”

Omphalos

Some Clouds

THE EVERYDAY

37
Olesha writing to Bulgakov: “Mishenka,
No abstract lyrical ditties for
Me, ain’t nobody needs that.
A poet’s got to write
Satirical poems, vicious and spare.
One’s lines ought to be
Practical for seven-ruble burger-
Flippers. Okay for you, Mishunchik,
You do humor like Mark
Twain. Me, I keep seeing
Clouds shaped like South America,
Itches in the air.” Dante,
Too, witness’d a moving bas-
Relief cut in a cliff,
An enormous tableau vivant of
Mercy. Olesha, who complain’d about
The “compilatory itch,” endless nodal
Combining ungoad’d. The everyday checks
Its mail, finds a new
Book: “In French, the word “sommeil” (sleep) comes from “petit somme”—in Latin somniculus—a word that falls apart in the mouth.” Liking sentences that demand a transference of authority—demoting the eye—and make one say a thing out loud. Liking, too, sentences that narrow seeing to a mysterious grammatical kernel (canny, uncrack’d): “My nut is vitiate.” I worry that the everyday slithers off into the monocotyledonous grasses like a skink, a snake, threading its way across the field in high report, notating the sowbug, the slug, the dun-color’d carapace shed, the nematodal rootlets, exposed to air, of a stray cornstalk sprung out of a previous year’s ear, without seeing the field itself, how the wind sweeps the timothy and alfalfa east just before dusk, as if the sun exhaled hotly in setting.
Lag and constitutional, the dog
Tugging along uncomb’d, or squatting
To pee. The longing is
To collapse into a book.
I try to capture what
Slips through the neural pus—
Spongiform, mapping, wires, guylines, a
Rapturous slew of possible nouns
Makes itself available; what I
Meant, though, occur’d prior to
That onslaught, in the fugue
Moments of all thinking stop’d.
(Stop’d meaning a continual play-
Back mode, a scratch making
The record skip: sponge, sponge, sponge, the wall the ratiocinatory hits is a common word.) Just so, the everyday founders in ordinary currency, that sluggish dependable that manages to bring the groceries home. Bean soup and sliced tomatoes and a can of beer. “Everything” bagel with peanut butter. A pernicious thin rain begins, comfort in the way the closest drops individuate into percussive sound against the slur’d constant backwash. Everyday punctuation, the story itself unrehearsed. There’s that desire to lull the neural firings down into sheer inactivity, the no pulse contra the frenzy of input bombardment, to allow a long billowing swell of recognition to alight in the form of one solitary neural gull, repeating is dulling, ongoingness is dulling, the everyday gull’d and schtupped by stupor: welcome.

—

The books pile up, the reader stands akimbo, violently thumping the parquet with one insolent foot thrust forward. Temporary condition of connubial bliss in reading in, not writing about. So off I go to read, and promptly fall asleep. Histoire de ma vie. I look at a picture (in Blue Thirst (Capra Press, 1975) of young Lawrence Durrell leaning up (in jacket and tie) against the omphalos at Delphi:

He’s leaning on the great omphalos, the great bellybutton of the world at Delphi. In those days, Delphi had no barbed wire around it and the omphalos was lying about in a field for anyone to sit on—I could have taken it home in the car if I could have lifted it. It’s the ancient Greek center of the world and of course, all the more dangerous for a poet to do that sort of thing, to take up that blood-curdling arrogant attitude because right next door is the shrine with the Pythea where the goddess of all poetic inspiration officiates, and she could really have driven him mad. If she had turned over in bed he would have been crushed like a bed bug.

And the terror “when I see myself innocently sitting astride the omphalos up there like an idiot fiddling with the safety-catch of the universe.” The calling of poetry. The mandatory and canny respect and tributes for its rituals, its gods and goddesses. The need to keep a nodding participatory obeisance to that posture so’s not to sully the art. Do I believe that? I don’t know. The room is filling with wings, beating wings.

Lawrence Durrell with George Whitman, Proprietor of Shakespeare and Co., Kilometer Zero, Paris

“Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man”

Skitter

“Unfinish’d”

THE EVERYDAY

36
Against the heart-shorn clinical new, the programmatic registries of global static, one samples the cosmological indifference of the earth. Pale asters light up the field, and the asclepia pods undo to flail out the intricate dross of their regeneration. The light in the trees tilts up sharper, variegated by the pre-dehisce brown and curl ongoing in the all-green reaches. “The thousand natural clocks the earth is heir to.” A Cooper’s hawk barrels down off the telephone pole straight into the woods, cinematic and angling for a slot, a biplane’s stunt-vertical slice through a break in the cloudbank. Aural lag interrupt’d by the goldfinches “cheeping on the bounce” bounding off into the buckthorn cuts. Sun “burnisht in Glory thick” drops its bounty unbid into our paregoric sleeps, and we are minions: we call it “Man’s sobering Perplexitie when call’d to an Account.” We ape the tiniest black ant carrying a white moth wing like a banner up the mullein stalk. It marks a momentary surround, defers study of higher motive. Like a minuscule slab of schist toss’d out into the impingements of sun. Like the pale pointillist green sprawl of duckweed scumming up the pond. Like the way the water-strider dents the shiny surface, marks its malleability with a skitter, inscribing Allah’s name. Like the way one arranges the parts of oneself according to the butcher’s cuts, making comestibles of the whole cow. Like the jerky carriage of one mad, bellowing forth approximate scrannel’d rhymes.

—

Is it the way the weekend allows whole worlds to drift off (replaced by others—the yearling, a little gangly, lunging out behind the doe sidestepping the washboard potholes of East Delhi Road) into an unreachable vernacular—or is it the mere loss of routine: “The Everyday” plummets into confusion (apparently) in the changed rhythms of fin de la semaine torpidity. Which is just dandy: I think if I kept it too attuned to the vapidity of that other side of the Cyber Pass, it’d become a wholly desperate thing. (See Thoreau: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.”) Like John Taggart says in “Unveiling / Marianne Moore” in There Are Birds (Flood Editions, 2008): “another thing / other things must be / known paid attention to known and brought together hyphenated fused” and “Surroundings answer questions.” (I, too, ’d argue that one of the most deleterious “things” (habits) according a self-same frailty and “preciosity” to les poésies norteamericanas of the late imperial U.S. centuries: the muscling up in cities, the Dullsville of cottoning to a tepid popular culture (whatever comes down the pike), the rarity of unleash’d gut curiosity.)

Found myself ripping through the recently republish’d Lawrence Durrell novel, Panic Spring (ELS Editions, 2008). Publish’d in 1937 under the pseudonym “Charles Norden.” I like Durrell’s half-sentimental lushness and whack attraction to deviance, particularly religious. So I dug out my batter’d copies of The Alexandria Quartet, all in individual Faber and Faber editions bought (according to the inky purple stamp inside Justine) at the American Book and News Agency in Athens, 1974. Fifty-six drachmas, if I recall rightly, a little under two dollars. Setting off a train of hurry’d thinking. How the “Workpoints” that Durrell includes at the end of the book—notational jottings, character field marks (“character-squeezes” in Durrell’s lingo)—kin to the tiny sketches one finds in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up, pertinent lines out of Cavafy, one- or two-line anecdotes—how all that temper’d my “poetics.” Impressionistic flurries (furies). I associate it with a love (particularly in painting) of the half-completed, the left off in the middle: Jacques-Louis David’s unfinish’d portrait of Napoleon, much of Cézanne, Cy Twombly. Durrell (a sample):

Landscape-tones: steep skylines, low cloud, pearl ground with shadows in oyster and violet. Accidie. On the lake gunmetal and lemon. Summer: sand lilac sky. Autumn: swollen bruise greys. Winter: freezing white sand, clear skies, magnificent starscapes.

*       *       *
Da Capo: ‘To bake in sensuality like an apple in its jacket.’

*       *       *
Pursewarden on the ‘n-dimensional novel’ trilogy: ‘The narrative momentum forward is counter-sprung by references backwards in time, giving the impression of a book which is not travelling from a to b but standing above time and turning slowly on its own axis to comprehend the whole pattern. Things do not all lead forward to other things: some lead backwards to things which have passed. A marriage of past and present with the flying multiplicity of the future racing towards one. Anyway, that was my idea.’ . . .

*       *       *
A basket of quail burst open in the bazaar. They did not try to escape but spread out slowly like spilt honey. Easily recaptured.

The other reminder: the only thing I ever read by Freud that made me think I ought to read Freud (serving as epigraph to Durrell’s Justine): “I am accustoming myself to the idea of regarding every sexual act as a process in which four person are involved. We shall have a lot to discuss about that.” (S. Freud: Letters)

—

The sense (reading Durrell) that words (some words) are a vestigial part of oneself. That palpable. “Gunmetal and lemon” in scaly lozenges shifting in the water. It’s precisely what I find Kafka, too, talking about—the notes merge interchangeably:

I have been reading about Dickens. Is it so difficult and can an outsider understand that you experience a story within yourself from its beginning, from the distant point up to the approaching locomotives of steel, coal and steam, and you don’t abandon it even now, but want to be pursued by it and have time for it therefore are pursued by it and of your own volition run before it wherever it may thrust and wherever you may lure it.

I can’t understand it and can’t believe it. I live only here and there in a small word in whose vowel (“thrust” above, for instance) I lose my useless head for a moment. The first and last letters are the beginning and end of my fishlike emotion.

So that (Durrell’s Justine ends with “So that” and a blank page, nodding—it strikes me—to the end of Pound’s “Canto I”): I mutter through the morning routine wholly caught up in Greece, the magnificent blue and yellow birds the size of mourning doves I saw walking aimlessly south along a rock-strewn road south of the Mykonos port, looking for a somewhat shelter’d place to sleep. (Not finding one, unroll’d my sleeping bag in the open—skimming a found copy of Crawdaddy (or Creem?) in the gloaming. A Greek man stopped by to say no fire (I think, in memory I see nothing around to burn, all scree and coarse tufts of weed). A day or so later finding the community in the caves around Paradise Beach (the other side of the island): the police boat coming around the bluff that shelter’d it, a policy of tolerance coupled with systematic harassment.

Lawrence Durrell, 1912-1990
(Photograph by Peter Keen)

“Dotty”

“Wake Up”

THE EVERYDAY

33
Sharp green nut-rubble under
The hickory tree, seasonal work
Of squirrels methodically decimating it.
One chitters and sizzles, keeps
A tree between itself and
Me, scrabbling laterally if I
Approach. Leaves tinged with gold
Hint at a fire-lick’d
Plinth, upstart angels, draft plenipotentiary
Up to heaven, though nobody
Spouts that Ranter shit nowadays:
Upstart you mean startup, angel
You mean venture capitalist. One
Longs to cease belonging to
One’s foul century, where talk
Of nuts seems insupportable, the
Feckless denial of a genial
Nitwit “huff’d out of town”
By supercilious holders of deeds,
(Not words) howsoever worthless they
Be. Think of Keats who
Long’d to be “turn’d loose
To feed upon spiritual Mast”—
Denying the way the horrifics
Of the day demand something
Beyond scurrility and airy-plait’d
Nebulosities of the fancy, that
Total abandonment of one’s trajectory
To the boot’d regulators, for
Whom one is expendable, a
Rote human machine, and not
“A sort of ethereal Pig”—
Or Kafka admitting bluntly “Writing
Is a stench.”
                        Green the
Hickory nut remains escarping up
Under the tree, squirrels like
Migrant laborers methodically decimating it,
Stockpiling. One natters and ratchets,
Peeking out, the tree-trunk
It grips between itself and
Me, scrabbling laterally if I
Edge up. Gold-broider’d leaves
Point down to a fiery
Plinth, upstart angels riding the
Updrafts, plenipotentiaries carry’d “unto” heaven:
Nobody needs Ranter talk nowadays.
For upstart read startup, for
Angel read venture capitalist. One
Longs to cease belonging to
One’s befoul’d century, where mere
Nut-talk is supportable only
Through reckless denial of things
(Words) conducive to any nitwit
“Huff’d out of town” by
Ever-haughty deed-doers, holders
Of script’d orders for action, howsoever
Worthless it be. I think
Of John Keats who long’d
To be “turn’d loose to
Feed upon spiritual Mast”—a
Stance of nebulous fancy, air-
Plait’d buffoonery, that denies the
Daily demand for imperial horripilation,
The total abandonment of one’s
Dreaming to the boot’d regulators,
For whom one is expendable,
A hireling machine’d to task
Inhumanly, and not one
Of the “ethereal Pigs”—or
Franz Kafka scribbling down “Writers
Speak a stench.”
                                Spiky and
Broken, the hickory nuts scrawl
Out under the hickory, a
Kind of writing, a short
Unendurable history of how a
Small troop of squirrels, needy
Gleaners, methodically did the tree
In, fatting up against winter.
One scritches and mews, intently
Keeping the tree between itself
And any approach, dashing laterally,
One eye cock’d. Finger’d leaves
Tinged a terrible yellow point
To some monumental fiery slab
Whence cometh emergent angels, upstarts
Sailing up singing, plenipotentiaries for
A heaven on earth: levellers
Rising to bring down mountebanks:
No heed to Ranters nowadays.
Any upstart’s a startup, another
Market dot in a market
Dotted with dots (that’s not
Writing); any angel’s a venture
Capitalist. One longs to cease
Belonging to one’s “dotty” century,
Where talk about angelic leavings
(Nuts) is a sure sign
Of insupportable nitwittery, bird-brain’d
Denial of things any stalwart
Of the state’d be sure
To see “huff’d out of
Town” for relief, for what’s
Taxing to a “doer” is
The ill-deemery of rampant
Possibilities with no issue
Of orders, howsoever reckless they
Be. There’s Keats who want’d
To be “turn’d loose to
Feed upon spiritual Mast”—riddling
And weaving up a cloud
Of fancy, puff’d airy buffoonery,
That exceeds (freely) the daily
Demand of empire’s boot’d regulators,
Undepictable abandonment of one’s oneness
To one fit expendable, machine’d
To a common inhuman slot,
Never again to be one
Of the “ethereal Pigs”—and
There’s Kafka: “Writers talk stench.”

—

Finish’d the Rorem New York Diary. He complains about singers treating songs as “arias, meaning as events bigger than life.” And says: “A song is an intimate experience having less to do with mammoth scope than with miniature intensity. This last quality has become, at least in America, like a needle in a haystack.” I think of the lyric poem, the complaints about its epiphanic onslaught, swelling up the momentary to (too) gorgeous (weight’d) heights and bignesses: perfectly aria’d (in Rorem’s sense). Though the opposite tendency, objectivist restraint, the “merely notational”—oh, it registers with a shrug, so what, too drab, why bother.

Turn’d to Kafka’s diaries (The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910-1913, edited by Max Brod, translated by Joseph Kresh), reading rather breathlessly, stunned by inexplicable moves sentences make, or metaphors that claw at the gut-ineluctable (“When despair shows itself so definitely, is so tied to its object, so pent up, as in a soldier who covers a retreat and thus lets himself be torn to pieces, then it is not true despair.”) Kafka, too, addresses the aria-tendency, responding to a mediocrity (a novelist): “A man who on a small scale produces something fairly good here blows up his talent to the size of a novel in so pitiful a manner that one becomes ill even if one does not forget to admire the energy with which he misuses his own talent.” (A suitable review-line for the plodding obsessional accumulative “heroics” of something like Ron Silliman’s The Alphabet? Oh, probably.) Kafka:

Almost every word I write jars against the next, I hear the consonants rub leadenly against each other and the vowels sing an accompaniment like Negroes in a minstrel show. My doubts stand in a circle around every word, I see them before I see the word, but what then! I do not see the word at all, I invent it. Of course, that wouldn’t be the greatest misfortune, only I ought to be able to invent words capable of blowing the odor of corpses in a direction other than straight into mine and the reader’s face. When I sit down at the desk I feel no better than someone who falls and breaks both legs in the middle of the traffic on the Place de l’Opéra. All the carriages, despite their noise, press silently from all directions in all directions, but that man’s pain keeps better order than the police, it closes his eyes and empties the Place and the streets without the carriages having to turn about. The great commotion hurts him, for he is really an obstruction to traffic, but the emptiness is no less sad, for it unshackles his real pain.

Incredible. Is it the simple velocity of the images, tugging in replacements and expanding? Is it nature of that image (“that man’s pain keeps better order than the police”)—as if Wallace Stevens’d placed not a jar, but a wound’d jarhead—I can’t help myself—in Tennessee? One sure thing: the spell. One trusts Kafka completely (wheresoever he, blind—“I do not see the word at all”—, travels), just as he trusts the writing completely. (The next day he writes (about writing): “It is really something effervescent that fills me completely with a light, pleasant quiver and that persuades me of the existence of abilities of whose nonexistence I can convince myself with complete certainty at any moment, even now.” (I think of Marianne Moore’s lines about how one “with controlled agitated glance” observes an insect “and all’s a-quiver with significance.”) Agitations of maintaining a state of receptivity, that portentous pinpoint stance, writing with breath stop’d (some look for it in alcohol, for there is a moment, there, too, of perfect drunkenness, unmaintainable). Kafka: “one should permit a self-perception to be established definitively in writing only when it can be done with the greatest completeness, with all the incidental consequences, as well as with entire truthfulness. For if this does not happen—and in any event I am not capable of it—then what is written down will, in accordance with its own purpose and with the superior power of the established, replace what has been felt only vaguely in such a way that the real feeling will disappear while the worthlessness of what has been noted down will be recognized too late.”

The “versions” contain’d within number 33 of “The Everyday” mimic the diary whose early pages (at least) served Kafka (partly) as book of drafts. Reading several variant beginnings of a piece—a kind of cubist writing—I thought to rattle the cages of the few lines I’d “penned” last night: und so weiter. Everyday repetitions, scales.

Franz Kafka, Aged Five

Something Else

“In Progress”

THE EVERYDAY

32
Monstrous “orbs of Eccentrics,” bulging
Out here and skinnying down
There: isn’t the piecemeal regular
Going of it a little
Taxing? The light is sidling
Off early and the pre-
Cook’d sense of model emergency
Offers all kinds of shill
Beleaguerments of little consequence beyond
A kind of Everyman’s theater
Where each curtain uncovers another
Curtain and certainty lies expert
In the staging of contempt.
One roots for a gash
In the human fabric that’ll
Point to the sun-rot
Of its threading. One sees
A legitimating of corporate control
Of the state: mal occhio
Knockdown, “bundling” in the works.
Prop handling. Data munging. Sleights
Of long-finger’d hands. Golden
Parachutes, golden showers, ad hoc
Reprisals, there is nothing a
Man is not capable of.
The four o’clocks foist off
Final blooms, low-scrounging flowers.
The thousands of hawks sailing
Over Lake Erie keep sailing,
And the hawk counters count
And knot up slightly out
Of a more or less
Aimless dispersal if a shout
Cuts loose indicating something rare:
A golden eagle, or one
Of the accidentals the regulars
See. “Gluttony causeth cholerick diseases”—
One sees it in pinch’d
Lips of bankers, the clench’d
Jaws, fury riddling the battalions
Of tiny muscles, raking the
Stony superficies of a face:
All controls turn’d to contempt.
The afraid to mean anything
Crowd basks in its sluggish
Materiality, cottoning to the up-
Coming soldiery of venders of
Small winds and majestic unmendables.
I am ashamed for my
Cohort and myself, moving words
About without the mettle necessary
To seize a rung of
A plausible ascendant ladder and
Coax oneself up out of
The manic drift underived. A
Little heroics of belief, a
Sour viable commitment, the kind
Of static spark-throwing electricity
The present weather requires, all
That is lacking. A common
Treasury of earth, provender steward’d.

—

Catching a spell of craven blankhead’dness. Etymology obscure. Or is it simply result of dog fussing too early about the skunks rifling garbage. Is my conjecture. Thinking about Charles Olson’s “base premise picked up, somewhere: / life is preoccupation with itself.” A footing I’d rather not build “upon.” For God knows there’s plenty enough of that going around. (Result, partially, I admit, of reading the narcissist Mr. Rorem.) Kafka, in a diary entry (January 1922), talking about how the particular “Kafkaesque” way of life (think of another, terrifyingly brief, entry—“My prison cell—my fortress”) arrived:

The evolution was simple. When I was still happy, I wanted to be unhappy and drove myself, using all the means that my times and my tradition made available to me, into unhappiness, yet even so I always wanted to be able to go back. In short I was always unhappy, even with my happiness. The strange thing is that the whole act, if one performs it in a sufficiently systematic way, can become real. My spiritual decadence began with a childish game, however conscious I was of its childishness. For example, I would deliberately contract the muscles of my face, or I would walk down the Graben with my arms crossed behind my head. Annoyingly puerile games, but effective. (Something similar happened with the evolution of my writing, except that later the evolution of my writing came regrettably to a halt.) If unhappiness can be forcibly induced in this fashion, then one should be able to induce anything. However much subsequent developments seem to contradict me, and however much it conflicts in general with my nature to think this, I can’t by any means accept that the origins of my unhappiness were inwardly necessary, perhaps they had some necessity of their own, but not an inward one, they swarmed in me like flies and like flies could have easily been driven away.

Out of Roberto Calasso’s pleasantly ruminating K. Astonishing. What I read as a kind of parable of writing itself—its beginning as an “annoyingly puerile game”; as a swarm of flies that “could have easily been driven away.” Isn’t that the perception? One goofs off for years—on and off—and subsequently finds oneself “stuck” in an inexplicable habit, an “everyday.” (A story akin to the cautionary deterrent against permanent internal strabismus: “if you keep going cross-eyed like that, they’ll be stuck that way.”) One might’ve done something else entirely.

Franz Kafka, 1883-1924

Everyday Throes

Lily, Agape

THE EVERYDAY

31
All the clouds assembled and push’d down into a pot to make a semblance (removable) of what the pot contains. “Narrative bickering.” All in the shape of containment, comedic for being borderless. One revs in the soup, trying to exceed the immediate, trying to tangle with a slippery array of verbs: all discourse’s cuings-up. Sound of a dog lapping “at” water. Incongruity marking the jut of the line’s failure to turn, its obverse tendency to trail off aimlessly into weed-stem’d fields roistering loud with the dry susurrus of insects. A voracious match. A voracious match point. “Avid for it.” The purse of lips signing a document with remedial focus. Initial encounter with “execrable” led to my aligning it with “crabbed.” Upcoming realignments in the housing sector. “Asset grab.” The collaborative logic of essence and the beating human heart. “On edge.” Syntactical gaffes allow that permutation to beaver its way “in the swim of things” up to a dry “spot” under that heap of branches that looks like a total loss. “Up for a ways.” The code is broken, meaning specific occasions of regular temporal disorder (which is speech) become markers for inspecific evasions of utterance (which is writing). “Clowns the issue.” Working against dispersal of meaning brings one suddenly around a bend: the audacity of completeness in a vista glimpsed. Noting, with a peremptory shrug, matter-of-factly, one signature bound in upside-down in The Orton Diaries. “Bravo the farrago.” Early in the day, the peristaltic contractions of the earth squeezing the sun up out of itself. “Kinnikinnic, of dogwood bark and sumac leaves.” Oblivious, the grammar throttles forth with a freight train’s sorry glory, unflagging. “The tyranny of the dignified.” Knowledge tether’d to proportion, manageable (rote) chunks of predigest’d slithery. “Daub. Daub. Daub.” What if, out of the slather of the present, a grammatical smudge were “access’d,” a cross-tissue cut, slicing arroyo and air and peccary droppings and the listless exoskeletal remains of the scorpion, a membrane of a moment’s continual undoing, what if one “had” a single word for that batch of particulars, a word that’d remorselessly morph exactly to the ravenous accompaniment of time, feeding meaningfulness into the system at a rate equal to its random (forsworn) changes and accumulations, hence allowing (demanding) the amassing of an unutterable vocabulary, so that tense itself would require the sayable “old words” (there is no language for the future)? “Embêtements sans poésie.” Tooling through the bled of the implausible with no peerless beast or serviceable courtier to guide. The sign of the workability of any language system (an aesthetic) is that its art be reproducible by any ordinary Tom Tinker up late rearranging the whiskey bottles and saleable on the street the next (insurrectionary bright) day, thus serving to placate impulses mercenary, mercantile and ecstatic. “Begging off the trope standard.”

—

Into Ned Rorem’s New York Diary now, publish’d in 1967, though concerning roughly the years 1955-1961, a period of fairly constant travel, Paris, Italy, the south of France, “around the Mediterranean,” New England, Buffalo. Months in New York go by unreport’d. Some gleanings:

To think—even to talk—about your life is, in a way, to stop living, so a diary becomes a breathing corpse which eats into the present. Possibly, writing music is also a kind of self-denial (as well as self-indulgence), but no one can assert that it’s autobiographical. Music and prose satisfy two distinct drives in me, though each involves anesthetizing life temporarily to bring order from chaos. But the music is sacred chaos while the prose is ordered profanity. Being today involved in the latter . . . I halt to pluck green memories and mount them in this scrapbook like drying fall leaves, leaves whose veins still flow with an inextricable poison that pervades and blurs the very system that formed them.

Or, thinking about the death of lyricist John Latouche (“symbol of immoderate freshness in a country where assembly-line resemblance seems the rule”—I see he wrote lyrics for a song call’d “Ballad for Uncle Sam,” a song play’d both at the 1939 Republican Convention and that of the American Communist Party. I knew of Latouche only out of O’Hara’s “A Step Away from Them”: “First / Bunny died, then John Latouche, / then Jackson Pollock. But is the / earth as full as life was full, of them?”), a taunt against death itself: “Où sont les nègres downtown? . . . Poetically speaking, growing up is mediocrity.”

And (obligatory anti-flarf citation): “Why does mediocrity have that nervous laugh? . . . Does this dumb unfelt giggle impose assurance onto insufficiency? Or is it a groping toward poetry (if you’ll pardon both terms)?” (Too: “Of all nervous diseases, hysteria . . . bores me the most.”)

And (obligatory anti-language writing citation, “some translating required”): “The concrete 12-toners think they are recovering primary sound, but they are only uncovering surface noise.”

John Latouche (seat’d) with composer Jerome Moross, collaborators for the musical “The Golden Apple”

Nicholas Moore’s Spleen

“Poison”

THE EVERYDAY

30
A copy of Adrienne Monnier’s Rue de l’Odéon with its pages uncut beginning at the “Préface au catalogue de la bibliothèque de prêt.” A crankable green radio with built-in light. A capped bottle of one hundred acetominophen caplets, minus ten or twenty. A notebook containing the date 15 September 1999 and the word “haibun” written in pencil, and “The Green Edge of Yesterday.” A reddish rock (with faint lines of yellow) about the size of a darning egg. A canvas bag mark’d “Bookpeople 1971-1991.” A paperback copy of The Blue Devils of Nada. “Flat space and overlapping planes, the list as cubist.” An upright filing box assembled in Brooktondale, NY of six quarter-inch plywood scraps, containing “rough drafts” unsort’d for a dozen years. My Life and Loves in Greenwich Village, by Maxwell Bodenheim. Walter Pater saying, “Experience itself is the end.” A calendar unturn’d since February, picturing Audubon’s “Great Northern Diver, or Loon.”
The “chancequarrièd, selfquainèd rocks” of
A listless moment offer’d up
To the twenty-first century
With its arriviste burn of
Consequence, its ravaging accelerants toss’d
Into the sere ongoing fury,
As if an uncontainable human
Rage for regular self-fuel’d
Annihilating ruses staked out implausible
Claims, and were heartily met.
So many lies now “lie
Tumbled-to” we’ll never get
An assessment that’s not flaw’d
By power, by power’s incendiary
Itch for power, the spur
Digging a ragged bloody hole
In the horse’s flank, horse
Pitching itself off a sky-
Scraper’s canter’d roof. I cannot
Keep a momentary journal, my
Burst spleen against the world-
Smotherers accepts naught of the
Dignity of measure, lashes out
Incommensurably numb. Me, I am
The fuckingest king of the
Rainy country, midge-rich and
Indecent, and if my pecker’s
Mistook for a zucchini, I
Bore myself with a dog
Or any other available beast.
Nobody’s happy hereabouts, not the
Gibbering factions, not the people
Diving off the balcony at
The buff end of idiotic
Ballets, keeping up a front
Whilst under assault by cruel
National maladies. There’s girls around
Who’d vote for any cute
Butt, and did, and now
Impudently collect toiletries to send
“The troops,” a squalid bunch,
Killers hired to extirpate “corrupt
Elements” out of a bloodbath.
Old Romans with oily stentorian
Voices commandeer the few youths
Who join’d for a chance
Out of hebetudinous ghetto cadaver’d
Jerkwater jobs, and back home
Flows the tarnish’d blood of
Lethe: memory gone incommensurably numb.

—

In Chicago a couple of days back I stumbled into a copy of Nicholas Moore’s Spleen (Menard, 1990). A reprinting of an earlier edition (1973), its complete title being Spleen (Le Roi Roi Bonhomme): Thirty-one versions of Baudelaire’s ‘Je suis comme le roi . . .’ The book is load’d with surrounding material: a preface by original publisher Anthony Rudolf, a foreword by Roy Fisher, a note call’d “On the Impossibility of Translation” by Moore himself, and a moving afterword by Peter Riley. The circumstance of Spleen’s coming into being is stunningly odd. Anthony Rudolf:

Spleen started life as an entry in the 1968 Sunday Times Baudelaire translation competition judged by George Steiner. Steiner drew attention to an extraordinary multiple entry, thirty-one versions of the same Baudelaire poem, obviously by the same hand and under a large number of pseudonyms, typed in brown or green ink and sent from various addresses all over the country. It emerged that the author was Nicholas Moore, who in the 1940s had been as famous as Dylan Thomas but who later disappeared from view. His last full-length book of poems had appeared in 1950 . . .

Some of the pseudonyms: “Harrowsmith Blamesworthy, Phil Okes-Box-Wunnayay, Rosine MaCoolh, H. N. (Helga Nevvadotoomuch).” I recall mention of Moore somewhere by John Ashbery, one of the overlook’d odd ducks he’s prone (thankfully) to point out. What little I know: b. 1918, d. 1986. Son of G. E. Moore, the Cambridge philosopher. (Here I recall with a shudder spilling blue ink into a James McConkey’s copy of a book by Moore, borrow’d for reasons of preparing a report on Moore in a relation to something wholly forgot.) Moore, in an “Autobiographical Note (1973)”: “From 1950 (approx.) to 1964 engaged unprofitably in various forms of horticulture (including writing a now out-of-date book on The Tall Bearded Iris). Became ill with a gangrened foot and was found to have diabetes.” Peter Riley reports Moore’s circumstances c. 1984:

I found a genial, brusque and quite proud man in his late sixties living in a wheelchair in a small ground-floor maisonette deep in suburban Kent, where he had been since 1948. Steely grey hair, glasses, brown jacket, wiry determined face, rather twangy “educated” voice with a slight London cadence, a small round body enthroned in the chair. The place seemed to be a total disaster, but acquaintance revealed this to be “organised squalor.” The living room was like a miniature mountain landscape. There was a valley-like route for the wheelchair, with turning-bays, from door to fireplace with a branch to the table and work-desk, through precipitous mounds of domestic substance—books, newspapers and magazines, records, papers, old chocolate and cigar boxes, seed packets, wine bottles, and general detritus, most of it with something split over it and the whole under a coat of brown dust from a continually smouldering coke-fire. An aroma as of decayed perfume. Somewhere under these heaps were the furniture of the premises and about three thousand poems typed onto sheets of thin quarto paper.

Out of the three thousand Riley’d edit a selected poems call’d Longings of the Acrobats (Carcanet, 1990). Moore loved jazz (Roy Fisher mentions how, after Moore’s disappearance in the early 1950s, “the only indication I had of his continuing existence was, over the last ten or fifteen years of his life, the frequent mention of his name on the BBC Radio Three weekly Jazz Record Request programme; he was probably its most persistent client”); the translations (and some of the pseudonyms) make much reference to it and its players. (There is, too, an palpable animosity toward the newer “pop” culture—The Beatles, &c.—recalling Jack Spicer’s similar bent.) What Riley makes evident (and the onslaught of Baudelaire versions of 1968 testifies to): Moore’s refusal to stop:

He could hardly see at all now, but he learned forward in the wheelchair till his nose was an inch from the typewriter keyboard and letter by letter, very slowly, hammered out the poem already completed in his head. . . . When the poem was typed it joined the heaps, but he could always find a poem when he wanted it, or a jazz record or a neglected cigar, as least those less than ten years old, by a kind of opencast mining. The secret was not to stop. He ordered more jazz records, more claret, more crocus blubs, conceived another poem, always looked forward to “getting better” and to being acknowledged for his work. A wodge of fluff half an inch in diameter adhered to the stylus. More music.

A couple of Moore’s versions, preceded by the original:

Je suis comme le roi d’un pays pluvieux,
Riche mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant très vieux,
Qui, de ses précepteurs méprisant les courbettes,
S’ennuie avec ses chiens comme avec d’autres bêtes.
Rien ne peut l’égayer, ni gibier, ni faucon,
Ni son peuple mourant en face du balcon.
Du bouffon favori la grotesque ballade
Ne distrait plus le front de ce cruel malade;
Son lit fleurdelisé se transforme en tombeau,
Et les dames d’atour, pour qui tout prince est beau,
Ne savent trouver d’impudique toilette
Pour tirer un souris de ce jeune squelette.
Le savant qui lui fait de l’or n’a jamais pu
De son être extirper l’élément corrompu,
Et dans ses bains de sang qui des Romains nous viennent,
Et dont sur leurs vieux jours les puissants se souviennent,
Il n’a su réchauffer ce cadavre hébété
Où coule au lieu de sang l’eau verte du Léthé.

—

KING OF THE SKIDS

(“In the evening comes your harlot
And on Wednesday it’s your charlat-
an analyst;
He’s high up on your list.”
              —Ray Stevens: Mr Business-Man)

(for Nicholas Moore)

I am like the Father-Figure of a haar-damp island,
Wealthy, but impotent; still young, but dry, and
Unable to stand my psychiatrist’s bon-mots
And equally hung with dogs or chasing does.
None of it’s fun. You play, but you’re not winning.
Nor is your family’s death a cause for grinning.
Your favourite group’s way-out howling distracts you
Not one small wit from the illness that so wracks you.
Your bed, beflagged with iris, is a tomb.
Your whores—for whom each Business-Man’s a bomb—
Can’t find postures obscene enough to cull
The slightest smile from your womb-naked skull.
Your banker with his smoothest manner can’t
Gift you the kind of credits that you want.
Roman blood-baths; Picasso’s Guernica—
Both potent pills for the old pleasure-seeker—
Can’t warm your corpse, where, bloodless, seethe like Lethe
The green tides of an unborn lethargy.

Rosine MaCoolh
(“Ginny” Rose Lee of the Go-Karts
and Strip Arts Council)

—

TAIL-STING BLUES

(for Edward Kennedy Hellowell)

I’m like the kind of rain-douched Scorpios,
Quite rich enough and game to take a toss,
Hater of journalists and hoi polloi,
Not fond of dogs or animalculi.
I can’t get really pleased at sport or journals,
Nor at Greeks kept captive by the colonels.
Maria Callas’s dramatic yell
Finally didn’t serve to make me well.
My eiderdown, embossed with antique flowers,
Reminds me of those sad Egyptian towers
Where mummied princes lie beside their drabs
Unsmilingly with dead dogs and scarabs,
Where all the wealth of golden ornament
Can’t raise the proud Egyptian in his tent.
Though glories of our blood and state contrive
With bloodbath frequently to keep alive
Old roués, none can warm this skeleton
Whose green blood, Lethe-like, just pooters on.

Aldila Varese
c/o Dr Enid Starkie,
Department of Romance,
Oxford University

For all the mockery and tomfoolery, Moore’s inclination is, it seems, to make something serious (as Fisher says, regarding the jazz references in Spleen, the poems, for all the sass, are “affectionate and honorific; each is a talisman against the universal slither.”) Moore himself, though, claims the poems “grew not so much from a wish to enter the competition as from a disagreement with part of Dr Steiner’s thesis . . . namely that it was a good thing that so many modern poets were interested in translation.” Which is mostly preface in order to say both that translation cannot be done and that a poet ought be the last to proceed in it. Moore: “The ideal translator is someone who is sensitive to words and ideas and can put himself into the mind and place of the poet he is translating. But the poet is not that kind of person. He is more likely to be doing the opposite, to be putting the poems translated into his own mind and circumstances, and by implication at least, the author of it too.” Not Moore filling Baudelaire’s espadrilles, but Baudelaire becoming Moore. So that translation becomes a kind of license to mutate, to fit the material to the present. Which is Pound’s “frigidaire patent” in Sextus Propertius. Which is how the war in Iraq gets into my Baudelairean romp at the end of “The Everyday” excerpt above, that “national malady,” or the girl who admit’d she voted eight horrific years back for little Bush because of that “cute butt.”

Charles Baudelaire, c. 1855
(Photograph by Nadar)

Nothing (Everything) Particular

“Where’s the Art?”

THE EVERYDAY

29
Capaciousness is its own form
So long’s there be snags
For a “torpid mind to
Catch at” (Marianne Moore). So
The eddy of watery particulars
Needn’t avoid the piling that
Holds up the pier one,
Uh, peers down off of,
Looking for nothing in particular.
“Cleansed clean of lousy Byzantium”—there’s that sure brute efficacy of the American will, the one that demands NO MORE THAN MORE and damn the consequences, forgetting how la nature a besoin d’un long travail if it’s to avoid going belly up like the nineteenth century and its maîtres penseurs. Here it’s an alms-mimicking hand of peanuts and back to work, Jack. “Fiduciary Tribe Jones (I Got Them Old)” on the box. Somewhere between Reddy Kilowatt and the era of the ubiquitous “cell” (not talking Al-Qaeda) we mortgaged what we had for a sack of diminishing dough. Monday’s always a manhandler, just like the data-rich American moon. I sport my rowdy collar with rhetorical emphasis. I like to mimic the unstable scenarios of the day, just another filmic idiot in the systolic noise of the system clamping down on itself. Or, stretch’d out like a visor’d sepulchral knight, the dog sleeping at my feet, (I like to) stew in a grandiose funk, making sentences. Think of Flaubert in a “marinade” between bouts of bellowing out phrases impeccable and inutile. Think of Harry Partch recalling a public shaming he’d got as a kid for drawing a horse with a “long and portentous” sex, a piece of work “vigorously rubbed out” by a teacher, and Partch saying “Wherever you are, woman, long-deferred nuts to you!” I write down “Snatch light,” a kind of memo to work up a sentence about a man who’d the tiniest black tuft of a dog he call’d Snatch. The “light” is a mystery to me. Some days later (today) I recall it: a woman with an equally tiny dog with a bicycle light clipped to its collar. In the taller grasses it look’d as if she walk’d light on a leash.

—

Finish’d the Barthes. Finish’d Rorem’s Paris Diary. Did a lot of driving, reducing the day’s utility to a percentage of itself, the brainpan sprain’d by repeat and “mere” scenery. Rorem says: “My best works have burst from me like a lonely infection that finally splits the skin. Pieces I have slaved over have always been artificial failures.” (Something “everybody” says, or every Romantic expressivist. Though not quite so hygienically. Is it so? Or is its truth con-sensual, a conning of the senses? The acrid sweat of overwork clinging to the other kind of piece driving one off?)

Something skeptical in the air. I review the jotted Rorem anecdotes, the quotables and all, look a little pointless: a drunk in Trieste “who mistook his wife’s canary for a lemon and put it in the squeezer.” Or, of Rorem’s ancestry:

Rørhjem was our original name. In Norwegian it means “mixed home,” but was shortened, as they all were, by immigration authorities—oh, a hundred years ago. Rorem in Latin means “dew.” Et rorem misericordiae tuae perennem infundas (and shed upon them the dew of your mercy).

Rorem saying (like Ammons’s suggesting that a writer ought keep himself “a little stupid”): “To a creator, knowledge is unnecessary, sometimes even harmful.” (I know nothing about Rorem’s music. I read the diaries for the gossip (slight), and out of a fine mesmerism with Rorem’s bluntness: he is a character who fascinates, self-bundled. And, reluctantly, latterly, for the writing itself—is it, too, a “(cruel) manipulating”? It flies, though. Here’s Rorem against the phenomenon of Pierre Boulez (c. 1954, when the twelve-tone system is a-loose like a wild cat, seriality with its destruction of anything beyond the present moment de rigueur, sentiment and emotion suspect, and all that rather anathema to Rorem):

Boulez has hypnotized Europe à la Hitler: even those who’ve never met him fear his charm. The force of a dictator (as of a saint) lies in the absence of personal libido; not caring, he can focus equally on everyone. Such a one in power is rare. So if Boulez (like McCarthy) were assassinated, a vanishing chaos would result, fertilizing the road of a genius whose ideas might be in absolute reverse. I can only say what I know, compose what I feel. Like everyone born in the twenties I have just discovered that today is yesterday’s tomorrow and the velocity of living has quadrupled, hurling us—as invisible as cold cream—toward a death we thought would never come. Why keep a journal? It never records anything more stimulating than that in Venice one says: “Oh, but you should see the pissotières of Toulon,” and once in Toulon you wish you were back in Venice to die like Wagner and Diaghilev and George Sand and Thomas Mann and the wings of the dove.

Flying. The perfect brashery of “invisible as cold cream.” The way Boulez comes off a perfect replica of “the-artist-with-the-solution” (Alex Ross points to the animosity Boulez reserved for fellow composers who refused to follow him “on the high modern road.” Sounds like any number of self-convinced and -righteous contemporaries in the imaginary trenches of les poésies d’Amérique du nord, hein? The Stalinists of le détroit, meaning the narrows.)

Is Rorem’s diary “pertinent” to “The Everyday”? (Everything is pertinent to the everyday.) Rorem: “A diary has impact only through the accumulation of unlimited observations (of which many are obsessive and recurring), never through the development of themes (for then it would no longer be a diary). Works of art must have a plan; beginnings and ends. A diary necessarily has no form beyond the accidental one of improvisation; hence, though it cannot be a work of art (improvisation precludes this), perhaps it can be a masterpiece.” À bas l’art, vive les chefs-d’oeuvres. Which, considering the ninny pulchritudes of the masses with sweat-shop ideas of art, one’d emblazon to one’s niggardly brow, if he cared enough to do so, and so countenance displeasure.

—

“The Everyday” is not a diary, it is a texture of one’s dailiness. I keep considering the possibility of allowing other formal eruptions—the long-winded couplet, the poignant-weighted stepping down line of Williams—and the immediate consensus is always no, there’s limit’d (dual) rhythm to dailiness. Then again, devouring time is capable of gulps and nibbles and finer mastications—a gamut of gustatory style, or, Roman feast-like, recurrent refreshing vomitorium purges—Time relenting its grip—re-sequencing, rehashing. Surely the everyday ought mimic the sensory regimes Time instills (is capable of instilling). (Why is this note here, and not embedded with the soldiery of “The Everyday”?)

Ned Rorem, b. 1923
(Photograph by Christian Steiner)

“Seeing Is Not Interesting”

Homage to Joe Brainard

THE EVERYDAY

25
Net change in unrealizable appreciation
Equal to cancelled disbursements minus
Applicable participant transactions: who’s in?
Fees incurred on overdrafts by
Unaffiliated borrowers equal to gravity
Of the requests: is that
A hand up there? Underivable
Pricing matrices cover defaults along
The axis of unforeseeable maturities:
There’s a stack of repurchase
Agreements on the table here.
The dog is delirious after
A day expend’d amorously guarding
The opossum’s “hole” she’s dug
Next to the shed. I
Suspect a thorough investigation’d determine
Only the skank’s left, the
Beast itself hied off opprobrious
Of that kind of unrelenting
Love. I knew a girl
Like that. So the dog
Flops down to bivouac next
To a pile of library
Books, a rotating cache, meat
Of my solitary researches into
Rustick airs and Flaubert’s own
Defiable Carthage. I read a
Few pages of Marianne Moore.
She isn’t afraid of adjectival
Bluster and pin, is characteristically
Accurate. If it’s summer it
Is permissible and proper to
Say summer. With the autumnal
Sting entering the air, I
Recall (soak’d in the briny
Nostalgia of a single tear—
Here it is, penny-sized)
My poke-salad days with
Lady Bracegirdle, the saga of
The errant avoirdupois, the circus
Of my legerdemain. Levity rode
Sidesaddle throughout: we’d glommed “onto”
One another at the headbanger’s
Ball, shining young aesthetes amongst
All the crockery, like Zelda
And F., a man with
The monicker of a cat.
Of the master-piece (she
Likes to expose its parts
That way) Gertrude Stein says,
“It may be unwelcome but
It is never dull.”

—

Ned Rorem says Stephen Spender says “German art constantly moves, comes toward you and passes like a train; but the whole French aesthetic is based on cooking in a series of additions (a pinch of garlic here, some tomato sauce there).” And Rorem adds, rather brilliantly demolishing the argument by means of noting its form, that “the curt preciousness” of Spender’s kind of expression is “basically French already,” and therefore the opinion “cannot, for the moment, mean anything.” Did I ever report how, monstrously drunk, I attempt’d a conversation with Spender (about what, aucune idée, he, too, apparently schnocker’d as a pup) and got royally distract’d by the way he, discreetly holding a tumbler of whiskey between pinky and thumb, kept clawing the ice-cubes out of it—they bounced around the carpet at ’s feet—all throughout a peroration? Rorem’s obsessions: death, particularly gruesome death, and alcohol. He’s a brilliant fabulist, too. In Morocco:

A few minutes ago, as I was sitting on the toilet reading Giraudoux, a big insect flew in the window. It looked like a wingèd scorpion with a Frankenstein head. It hovered hypnotized, stared at me, quivered a full minute, and then flew off again. But I could do nothing more.

—

Had to re-read Stein’s “What Are Master-Pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them” with heighten’d attention after skimming it yesterday. It is, of course, largely an argument for imagination, the way it’ll shrill down out of nowhere and abscond off with one’s “self” entirely. Subsequent temporary loss of “identity”—that bland regular construct of memory and time—its replacement by “entity,” a kind of recording angel, a Martian, everybody’s got a name for it. I like how she puts the kibosh to mere description (“seeing is not interesting”)

The tradition has always been that you may more or less describe the things that happen you imagine them of course but you more or less describe the things that happen but nowadays everybody all day long knows what is happening and so what is happening is not really interesting, one knows it by radios cinemas newspapers biographies autobiographies until what is happening does not really thrill any one.

Seeing, being the body, is only the occasion of a firing, a “launching pad” into that entitative state (Stein: “any moment when you are you . . . without the memory of yourself”) that allows for the writing (of master-pieces). And, to worry the motor-mouth poetics crowd: “talking essentially has nothing to do with creation.” Though one’d argue with some chance of bringing down a quarry that “the dilatory preciousness” of Stein’s interminable yakking is “basically a sign of identity refusing to relinquish itself to entity already,” and therefore Stein’s opinion “cannot, for the moment, mean anything.” (One hedges one’s bets with lectures and “literary formalism.” As Stein admits of “I write for myself and strangers”: “that was merely a literary formalism for if I did write for myself and strangers if I did I would not really be writing because already then identity would take the place of entity.”)

A final scribbled thing: “the master-piece has nothing to do with human nature or with identity, it has to do with the human mind and entity that is with a thing in itself and not in relation.” The untether’d.

—

“Absent jusqu’à lundi. Soyez sages.”

Gertrude Stein, 1874-1946