host o' things

it wasn't hegel; it was heidegger that i was thinking of.

good one me.

reading kirkegaard. i really miss english classes, i think. singing school is HARD. but in a way the non-intellectuality of it (sorry, i don't mean that in a rude way exactly--i go to school with a lot of smart kids and smart teachers, all of whom are better at getting their assignments done than i--i just miss theoretical readings [of which i have had a few, but not enough, i guess] and theoretical discussions [which you can't really cram into a history review class, and we don't have a large enough format for me to unload my ridiculous thoughts in papers--lucky for our teacher, really]) is good.

good, because i think i've been hiding most of my life behind a strong amygdala, a problem with "depression," and an over-intellectualized viewpoint. i've begun to see patterns in the things around me--not necessarily patterns i want to be seeing, but patterns. every color, and more confusingly, every shape, every texture, seems to have something akin to a frequency like that of sound. sometimes this frequency-sense-thing is invasive; sometimes it isn't. i feel like i'm connecting to something deep...and WEIRD.

i also seem to be more in sympathy with the people around me. that is, if i think about it, which i often don't (being as always a selfish jerkatrice), explanations for what they're doing, what they're thinking within their actions, rise more easily to the surface than they used to, and sometimes i get a bead on the color of someone's aura that doesn't go away (though often it does, and often it has to do with the color of their eyes or the clothes they're wearing or the painting they look like). now, i know this makes me sound like a crazy person, or at the very least a self-deluding person, and i might very well be both.

the explanation i've come up with is that singing--concentrating on learning to sing so fully as i have been--has honed my instincts. the process of learning to fill yourself with a sound that you can depend on, can make over, can repair, is like filling yourself with the tree that sunshine fills herself with in robin mckinley's sunshine. (oh my god, what a book. i cried on BART. it was embarrassing. and incredible. mckinley and kirkegaard are actually turning out to be a great pair, because kirkegaard talks about pain as a poet, from without, and mckinley demonstrates pain as a singer, from within [that might be a false dichotomy]). the attempt to devote yourself to the moment, to work within yourself within the moment, is like her description of magic in a lot of ways--and that's what i feel like, like taking myself to this place of honed momentality, forcing myself to step back and fix and go on all in the moment, forcing myself to embody the process as opposed to the result, is making me magic. this seeing-the-patterns-of-stuff is a result of forcing my brain to understand my singing.

i don't understand it, though, obviously. i have a serious amount of road to travel to even get myself to passable. and i am worried that this whole thing is just the signal of advanced pituitary shutdown or something. but...holy smokes it's weird weird weird, and about half the time it's also beyond distressing--i get phobic about touching these things that have these patterns; especially after i've done something stupid interpersonally, i take it out on myself by freaking out over the patterns.

and that's why i'm thinking about trying to become a wiccan! because i want to be in better balance, and don't think that drugs will do anything healthy for my mind...which i need...if it's not already lost.

p.s. i might be totally wrong about hegel assuming that a is a. but attempting to make "does a equal a" a question is, in the sense i'm talking about, turning it into a noun--the question of a equalling a is instead a movement, a mechanism, in an aesthetic method, and as such can be more properly (for me, who likes, as i've said before, to know stuff rather than to learn it) looked at and become (hegelian, eh?).

po tee wheet

i'm not ready to give up. this might be the only claim to strength i deserve. i was downstairs, about to turn out the light, and saw the way that said light shone through the second doorway into the darkness of the kitchen, removed from me, and thought that that second light, which was a product of the first, was a good metaphor for something. don't yet know what the second light was a good metaphor for, but something, right? i'm still too close to this particular bout of "suffering" to make anything of it...i can't make poetry out of it, that's for damn sure, but of course whether i'm able to make poetry out of anything i experience is open for debate. i can't draw down any particular truth from it. i can do little more than hate it for what it does to me, what it implies within me--loneliness, sure, and crappiness, but above all weakness.

the best part is that i don't know if it's actual weakness that i really object to, or more just the appearance of weakness. i hate to broadcast what's done to me by depression, and probably the concern with appearances is the only thing that keeps me even close to doing something other than shutting down fully. i have proof, to some degree, that what happens in my unhappiness is real, is solid, is more than rrreputation as niska from firefly would have it: yesterday i slept for fourteen hours; this morning the colors of the world did that thing where they merge together into something like a single percieved frequency, which either turns into or implies a cacaphonous, quasi-physical loss of perspective in my head, which can be seen as a metaphor turned physical, or a physical condition turned metaphorical. i used to drink when things got like this; i don't do that anymore, which is probably good.

at least in winter it gets the chance to take on this rhythm; in summer the world drives itself blindly when its colors go uni-frequency on me; my heart gets lost in the light.

i apologize for these words. i should keep them private.

i read something this morning about schumann going through a period in his youth when he published things he'd just barely written. later on he learned to revise, but there was incaution in his earlier years...that's good to know. it's a little bit like reading what of emily dickinson i've read and noticing how her formal instincts both go toward and move away from an unmediated poetic moment. sometimes you feel like she's telling the truth straight out of the frying pan, and at other times she's attempting to master her words completely, not letting her own face even slightly peer out of the window she's dressing. people seem to respond to both types of composition, which, again, is good to know--just that there's a range possible, not that i can come close enough to emily dickinson to have her example have any real bearing on my compositional style. i know which type i personally prefer--when dickinson masks herself, she sounds to me like beethoven, who thus far i've never felt anywhere in his compositions, including the late ones, and when she writes straight from the hip she sounds like a version of stevens in ideas of order (as far as i remember), as if ideas of order had pressed its face into a piece of cloth and veronicized itself (chronologically, physically, and metaphysically impossible). but if there's one thing that w.c. williams and olson prove, it's that sometimes you have to write to the style as opposed to from the heart if you want to become anything that you currently aren't.

i hope it's more than clear that these statements come out of the wild and half-acknowledged sheaf gatherings of inner turbulence as opposed to any more clear-sighted process of analysis. at this point (close on age 27), i trust my instincts, possibly, as always, fallaciously, when it comes to anything that might approximate process. i know that what comes out of turbulence sharpens my senses and improves my directional knowledge--i know that it's the hand of inner turbulence that forces my head down into a mass of understanding impossible to breathe within, and that it's up to me to swallow whatever will, not save me, but make me, when i can breathe again, a person with a larger, deeper, or broader range of intra-subjective movement. i'd never deign to put down anything in here that wasn't completely personal--and my personal insights are of the nature of bright shapes seen from a shadow. they can't be proven; they can just be described, because to stand in the light, in their actual presence, would be to change the nature of how they can be seen, of what they look like and are.

this is to some extent why i don't really care about philosophy. the questions that philosophers ask and answer are simple, because in the end they're nouns. hegel makes something fancy out of the idea of ground. fichte says we needn't see anything beyond the insides of our own faces. aristotle--or was it plato?--tells us about some horse in the sky. these are all fine ideas, but they get treated like they're not false postulates--they all assume that a does equal a like it's no big deal. hence to discuss ground with hegel has plenty of bearing on a world that looks kind of like this one--with certain limitations. aesthetics deals with movements, with verbs--sees the space between the shadow and the bright shape as an action, which is what it is, or can be seen as. if space equals time, noun equals verb (this is what billy pilgrim was all about, right?)--but the crux of the matter lies in the fact that "verb" is a noun--and that therefore the action itself is what takes place between the twist of noun and verb (and adverb, and participle, and adjective)--if, as i dimly remember from that one intro to astronomy class i didn't over-frequently attend, gravity is supposed to be something like the physical manifestation of space gathering time (there was an explanation for this or something like it), then aesthetics is the gravity of conditionality.

because of the vonnegut reference, i'm dedicating this one to kevin murphy. two syllables for him: luck-ee!

witch hunt bad

i'm guilt-logged, laden, bowed down with guilt. and do i feel sorry for myself? unfortunately the answer to that question is HELL YES.

why do i always feel like i've KILLED someone after doing something moderately discourteous? and how do i manage to acknowledge that i'm totally in the wrong and yet feel sorry for myself at the same time? i'm a miracle of modern science. i'm utterly and totally impressed with myself right now. "utterly" is pretty redundant in the context of "totally." i'm impressed with myself for being able to make that non-distinction. i'm an all-around impressive sort of person.

i made a roast beef sandwich and put some fresh basil on it--it was really good.

after finishing adorno's book on the subject of mahler, i'm still not sure precisely what was said. it was a really good translation of some really good writing, and hence almost entirely enjoyable as long as i was able to hold onto the thread--for dear life, like that dude in the labyrinth. i think seriously passionate criticism is awesome. you don't have to agree with the writer, you just have to fall in love with him or her. and adorno wasn't faking it. either that, or his adaptation of an ingenuous critical stance fitted the form of his argument to the point of nullifying the gap between the world of the word and that of its writer (i'm trying to ape his style and totally crappng it up). i mean, it was aesthetic writing. which is a category of writing i'm trying to get into, because i find it less illogical than logic and less irritating than full-on philosophy. i've been reading alice waters' chez panisse cookbook; that falls into the category.

reading in aesthetic terms also gives you a little leeway. were i to read adorno's book as a book of criticism, i'm not sure i could find too much to love in it--he seemed to be involved in the project of extending marxist ideals into the aesthetic forum, which may be doable but i haven't ever seen it happen convincingly (it's more of a graft-versus-host situation, like that on tobias' head, where terms like "late capitalist" get thrown in here and there and all a person really understands from them is a feeling of the unbearable judgmentalness of being a marxist critic [it's not that i don't believe in marxist ideals necessarily; it's just that for me and therefore, i assume, naturally, for everyone ever, they stand outside the flow of language--they have this flavor of absolutism; either something is or isn't, say, late capitalist, and you can discuss whether it is or isn't, but it's like calling it orange, or calling it bad--most people seem happy just to have applied the term more or less correctly, and more than happy to then leave the whole word-object standing around in the bed of some spring rivulet that has drained itself in seconds...until the language of marxist ideals has to some extent transcended itself, it's kind of hard to take it seriously, though marxism itself isn't hard to take seriously {though it'd be easier to do so if the language was more seriously engaged in itself, what with function to some extent following form and all that}]). as always, NOT THAT I KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT.

adorno really gets into the practical side of things not being what they seem, or being what they seem only too much, of vernaculars pointing to what they aren't, and stuff like that, and i really liked it--the details are convinved, passionately so. he's taken the time, done the work, fallen in love...or he's a tremendously successful actor. either way it's an awesome book.

and reading that kind of thing makes you get further into your own "work," because it's not to do with judgment, but with experience. adorno's writing, in part, on the experience of seeing mahler in mahler's work, which is, in some small part, not not a smokescreen for seeing himself in mahler's work, and therefore is a detailing of the process of an aesthetic understanding as manifested in a piece of art. the fact that the perspective's so torturous is only helpful in applying it to poetry, because, as far as i seem to be able to understand, the closer you attempt to look at what the hell you're doing in poetry the further what the hell you're doing in poetry recedes, therefore adorno discussing mahler on mahler is probably the best sort of window that i could choose through which to look at my own "process" of "composition." letters to a young poet? i have to ignore that shit. rilke's probably right all over--he's probably righter than the whole shadow-shoe closet of a person with two left feet--he's probably righter than a texan with a gun and a back-tax problem. but what are you going to get out of discussing poetry itself? as a Meatist poet (why not indulge myself in aligning with a poetry movement i've renamed and possibly does not exist?), i try to keep things simple, and what i know is that charles olson was right, and when you're discussing poetry in the simplest manner possible you sound batshit insane. if you don't sound batshit insane, you are making it up. you are lying. that's all there is to it. (again, i have no idea how rilke sounded in letters to a young poet because i've never read them. conventional wisdom says one should, ergo fuck it if i will. it's like rexroth learning "oriental languages" so he could get closer to teachings that he thought would make his spewings about sex more interesting, and then shutting down ginsberg, who was a little punk, and whose spewings about sex actually WERE interesting. a great deal of the previous sentence was extremely unnecessarily harsh.)

i'm not on the side of youth. wallace stevens always seemed to be writing like he was a thousand years old, and i like him better than w.c. williams. i'm just on the side of people doing what they have to, as opposed to what they want to, and if it makes me a puritain i'm kind of okay with that too. because puritainism is, i think, after reading jane eyre however many sixties of times, not about denying pleasure. it's about finding pleasure in what's within you--not sweet, friendly pleasure, but the earth-shattering kind. to say that pleasure's always either good or nice is wrong. to find the velvet thrill in a depression so blank that it nauseates--that's deep red velvet. so puritainism is a connection with everything on a sensual level. to know the color of a tone--to feel sight. and to kill some witches. okay so i don't at all condone that part.

myoosings

that's it on those; that's my rhyme, as that one butthole surfers song says. i mean, they'll change, but that's their trajectory.

my head's a mess right now. something's been happening with music (which is my "other life" [way to throw in super-irritating quotation marks]) that defies description but sure doesn't want to... it's like things are shaking loose, resettling, stirring up again--i'm not in a place (i hate the description of psychic states as "places" [and again with the quotation marks]) where i can afford to fake humility. all i can say is that i realize that it's probably pretty atrociously problematic to relate such crap to the real dichterliebe, but i don't care--not because i don't want to care, but because i can't afford to do so right now. i'd like to have the psychic energy to make an elaborate apology, but i just don't.

in short, these poems are born of a pretty creepy idea mixed with exhaustion. that might be a pretty elaborate apology after all.

in heine's poems, i thought it was interesting that what the poet seemed to be dealing with, as opposed to a sonneteer such as petrarch, was the ramifications of physical contact--which, belonging to the New Meat school of philosophical and aesthetic thought, was interesting to me (Meat-ists is what i'd term the aesthetic successors of Francis Bacon [the painter]--when i'm in a mood like this, at least, in which i get to say what i want and act as cocky as i wish). i mean, laura (or was it beatrice? i always get those two confused) lived on in perpetuum for petrarch the poet as a constantly unrealized thing, whereas the dude in dichterliebe actually gets some sugar, and then has to deal with it getting taken away from him. dream replaces flesh--actual flesh--and the poet eventually recovers, because the scar is physical, but not before spending some time dealing with the ramifications of being in the flesh alone, if you see what i'm getting at. petrarch may have touched his chica, but it has little bearing on his words (as far as i remember--among the host of things i'm not, i'm also not a petrarch scholar). things are probably not this black and white.

it shouldn't matter what the program of a poem is, i think--to say that i intended this dichterliebe experiment to be an imagining of the poet dealing with the ramifications of a touch never fully realized because of the limits of a consciousness that can never be truly engaged outside of itself does moderate violence to the poems even as they stand, which isn't much of anywhere. i don't think they should be more than themselves (which is maybe what nabokov meant by continually protesting against freudian readings, though one does suspect him of slightly more ignoble motives, possibly on purpose on his part).

i've been feeling more like a monster than usual.

dichterliebe 12

meditations of the beast

beautiful scraps like

the fleeting repetition of a smell:

the sable arc of your long fur--

the scarlet of

your curved tongue--

the waft of your breath

as if it still carried

on some honey breeze

into these depths

as if you still

meant

something

inimical--

as if your image

still drifted

on the mirroring shimmer

above this cracked red lake:

skin, or reflection

of heat.

but it's quiet.

my hide in tatters;

this does not matter.

suspended

as if in water,

i wait, patient

in pale state,

for the next scent

to bring back

what i never

had.

dichterliebe 11

quietus

my heart like

a split end.

trim it away

with the fat of memory.

throw it

and watch that arc

as if of your hair.

it wasn't you,

lover, that crawled out

into day.

white skin pimpled with shock

beneath a blue sky.

as if i stripped you even of skin

and wore you,

huddled

within.

in the sanity of moonlight

moonlight dripping with memory.

i draw a zinc-white thumb

across a lip

and wait for the night

to dry.

dichterliebe 10

milton

i dreamed that

you told me to stop

wiggling my tongue like a snake

in a garden.

and i dreamed that there

were five steps to heaven.

all of them were made from you.

i dreamed a streak of blue flourescence

across your forehead--as if i'd marked it

there with a light-laden thumb--

i dreamed only your eyes and mouth

and then dreamed only your sides

and heart.

my limbs twisted

like sounds.

i wondered why

i was the only screaming thing

in a river of fire

that shimmered silent

as a mirror.

dichterliebe 9

i wept in a dream

to think

that

at one sparking moment

in the stream

of the past

i put my mouth

against your shadow

and

that at

one white point

in the night sky of the past

my face rested

against

a wind

that had curved itself

against you.

lover, i hold out my hands

and nothing comes into them.

lover, i hold out my hands and

nothing

comes into them.

dichterliebe 8

zinc metaphor

the equation is simple:

you never existed.

i never

touched your lips.

and i never fit

against your side.

and i never breathed

in

the scent

of your hair.

crawl in, something else,

and strip off this thick sick zinc

whiteness. sounds

choke in the mouth

the light burns

in the throat.

i hate this thing

with its veins like the nile delta.

its thin scalp and

the roots of its hair.

the way it flickers

in the mirror

and i see you there.

dichterliebe 7

veronica

this strange curling building

rhythm, sinuous and

cracked, racked as

a misspelled word, like

syne, lover, or

cosyne.

as if the limbs

of the word

were twisting

around themselves.

asleep in the red caverns

of your heart

was a jewel

the size of a fist.

it was my love

but it was cancer.

red and ravenous

with jaws like door hinges.

my love,

i wipe my face

on your empty shirt.

dichterliebe 6

ich grolle nicht

you know there's nothing to blame,

my dearest. nothing to

it's just that there's so little left of me

if i were a god i could write in tongues of flame

and i would say in letters a mile wide that it wasn't

it wasn't what i thought.

the taste

of a shadow is

something vile.

as if you were vile,

lover.

as if in the depths of your eyes lurked

white deformed things

that not even the sun of your face

could burn away.

white as zinc.

the flavor of a girl.

no longer to taste

the gravel

your steps

touched.

dichterliebe 5

resonance

the waves frequent westcliff drive,

the beaches there--a slow furl, seemingly,

of heavy, heavy water.

that curve mirrored

in the taut lines of roller coasters

at the boardwalk. the curve moves longingly,

heaving through air, shouldering itself.

i was shuddering at the top of that spinal

curve, and then plunging down

through air as if it were water.

and after i

got off,

i thought that

these paradoxical

movements

suspended in time

all were once

or would be

yours.

dichterliebe 4

roses

another word for red

necessitated

by the look

of your mouth.

redefinition of sensation,

my lover:

my eyes change color.

exquisite awkward words:

you understand them all,

doves, flowers,

other flowers,

thorns.

your lips displayed like fruit:

apples, pomegranates, plums.

ruby-red wine, blood,

breath, saliva,

teeth.

let me redefine

your mouth.

dichterliebe 3

dearest

as if i were

a self-planting furrow,

layers of deep earth

folding in over themselves:

in the warmth, i feel,

like your eyes,

rich as dirt.

one time i weeded on an aunt's farm:

the fineness of that soil

it got everywhere. and its moisture.

in the sun it looked deep and endless.

and when touched, it was warm

even in the deep places--

warmed only by the sun.

how much warmer i

under your regard?

dichterliebe 2

...the plan is to draft poems, with all the songs on dry in my ears, along the lines of heine's. do i read german? no. am i well associated with the schumann? again, no. have i listened to dry many times? guess what the answer to that question is. is this a project that could sink a thousand fredric jamesons into fair despair with its pastiche-ischness? why, yes. and what the hell is "along the lines" supposed to stand in for in this case? ah, the questionability.

raucous freshness

that hot concrete,

minute in detail, by turns sharp and smooth,

as if i crawled after your shadow.

i was glad to grovel

in the day's sun, gray almost

in your presence.

i had been hoveled within myself

always. but a hand reached out

of the depth.

it was shaken and pale

and it was mine.

i looked at it. it plunged into

the presence of you as if

into water.

look at the cracks in that road.

palpable almost to the eye

in your light, that blue shadow

edged so deep.

like my joy.

watch this hand shake

with those deep eyes, watch

what you can do

to me.

dichterliebe 1

new monster

zinc-white and subtle,

the drag of a blunt nail across a lower lip.

the purples and sables

of your dress; the sineal curve

of your hair tossed into the wind

that touched

your face.

i stood behind you and that same

wind blew

against me.

remembered perfumes, later,

bright in mind as colors.

lips pressed into a palm like milk.

lips lapping each other.

i said your name

and reached

inside.