"So abandon all hope ye who enter here. Best to veer away unless willing
to risk some secure rumored footholds of logic, meter, measure, rhyme,
sanity. I'm with old Ezra's humbled fife and thrum, 'is repentant, haggard,
niggardly self in ripe and rife old age, beyond chastened, crumpled yet
and yes but for a tongue and pen still at and in't, the wiser for 'is sins n schisms/"
- from text below
**Epimetheus is Prometheus' brother. Name of Prometheus means "sees ahead" "forward seeing" "future sight" whereas Epimetheus means "looks back" perpetually
[NOTE: This site has utterly defeated me. The text page for writing, indexing, etc. is utterly inconsistent and one part of the text will extend into the right margin edge, another part will be hard left but then make a space between lines of the text, text can be of a completely different font and size arbitrarily imposed by whatever fractured algorithm insisting upon making essays on this, instead of being pleasure and ease, an exhausting and defeating task. I curse the AI gods or lazy controllers of the did-jots and spit-tittles of composing and posting for such a torture, may you be bitten by a thousand fleas....To the very rare reader here, thank you, and welcome, I apologize here for the sloppy pastiche layout that is the site's cyber-no-brain's fault, not mine. I literally spent hours of agony just trying to make it as presentable as I could but to no avail. Entonces, I admit defeat because ecce homo, and not AI. I am flesh, blood, bone, think and snot but not necessarily in that order (I bray, I mean, pray), I am not abstract coding, rather the only code I got is DNA and DNA will whip AI's
the 'god-image' of this site -
any familiarity of that/those
of Western "Syphiization "is
accurate]
non ass in and out of any space and time corridor.
Code is no victor here though I admit defeat. William Blake has it right, "Eternity is in love with the productions of time." And Carl Jung has it right too, though many many will call him heretical, and he would admit it and without shame, Eternity is in utter need and dependency upon creation, humans particularly, to unite the opposites of IT's N0 Self within each ourselves and in so doing mitigate and perhaps some far time in the future (if future there is) IT, will also become more whole since IT is split too...there's a danger in such uniting of good and evil but that's another essay for another time and perhaps on some other site with less budgy-fudgy-excre-mental-bytes-but-bloats all the more with rank Kubricks, I mean, HAL hubris.
All images are my own unless otherwise credited. All texts/poems are mine unless otherwise credited]
Photo taken in 2013
Tis a Selkie, not a selfie. A decade ago in the Adirondacks, wood stove flue over my left shoulder. My zennish days more or less or not at all, my NOW AND ZEN SOME days, my zen teacher a proponent of Wrecking Ball Zen which explains the glazed right eye and the intense left, bereft of self or no-self.
"... to begin with a swelled head and end with swelled feet..." - Ezra Pound
From the journal then:
ENTRY 13:
Sensei tells me: It's undertow that matters.
Me: I am stumped.
ENTRY 14 (Caught in the undertow mind m-utterances)
One adjusts. Continually.
The persona is adaptation
appearing to be solid but sleep reveals the neutrality
of the animal.
Dreams tell us otherwise
when we remember them as it takes an ego to witness,
to remember.
They reveal that we are
caught up into something so much greater than
flush and stir.
It's a wonder we make do
as much as we do and still call ourselves by name,
a species of animal, 'homo sapiens'.
I regret self pity.
I'd reject it if I could but it adheres,
last resort of old coots born honestly
into it no matter the copious Mercurochrome baths,
the smelling salts obviating the needed nipple.
The stippled trout I nightly catch,
pink insides turned out by blue blade
kept beneath the pillow,
baits me with the riddle
again and again.
Something about a stand of trees,
a man carving some bark,
what breath is for.
ENTRY 23 More's the muddle w/th' not so subtle nuance "there's no undertow in a puddle"
aka Han Shan 9th century Chinese poet:
"Who will lend a dipper of water
To save a fish in a carriage rut?"
Today the Market reports a run on Mercurochrome.
Birth goes on.
I am for rebirth.
A dirth of days makes me suddenly Hindu,
foregoing gurus and bindu point.
I've made my own here,
one foot well into 'Cracked and Crank',
the drunk tank a memory
worn out.
Doubt is my companion.
Love, too.
No remorse here.
Buys me time, aftershave and
loads of underwear for the trickles ahead.
Thank the gods for all that.
Oh. And one last good cigar.
I'm switching to Groucho Marx Zen aka
"You sed th' woid, you got th' VOID."
ENTRY 2635 - Years on in still at zen. Nothing broken. Nothing to mend...and yet...and yet...
Ramana Pajama,
Coda Pagoda,
rolled outta bed,
sat.
Sang,
"No more sensei."
Epimetheus looks back
"So, friend, you die also. Why all this clamour about it?" - from The Iliad XXI by Homer
...but it's late and I've been under-slept, much distressed, stretched through veil and moan, though I dreamed last night a sweet not-dog/yet-dog sleeping upon a burning log most inviting. I see now it is a sacrifice that has consented to such and thus is resolved, at peace, surrendered to gentle flame, to rules of the human consciousness game, and/but I want to secure its comfort and safety though Fire winks at me and says,
I got this covered.
So.
What to do?
Out of my league as creature alone,
I demur to Fire.
Am awaiting further instructions.
Marinating in petrol.
Negotiating
with Combustion Union
even as I
speak or spark,
whichever comes
first which will
inexorably of course
come last then
ashes to ashes
and the mourning
a thousand
or more books unread,
not understood.
Tou jours
mon ami,
mon frere
to rhyme
with fire
and sireling.
Me during covid "warrentine" 2020 upstate New York
ENTRY 2637 - Sensei's 7 years dead now, the "sitz path" continues unsure, it proceeds still, path-enough
SENSEI'S PARTING SENTIMENTS
Where have they gotten too
these graces clumsy on their feet?
They've fled, easy wings balletic
toward ocean or other, black, they
bob low over white waves, confuse
themselves for sails or Van Goghs
or Cezannes, even Twomblys, and
so steady they do go away, or de-
pending on time of day and slant
of sun, they may wobble or appear
to do so when things, even birds,
are bent, mirage-podge-and-puddle,
trajectories and intent, fused in-
stincts, prevailing, so weaving they
have went,
their patience with the city spent.
They're fled. Gone.
glass-handled knives
I'm not clear where we started
between the rain
whose throat is blue
like a wild fern is clear
I am sad when I see you
your letters arrive fat
swollen with human form
they fly out from my palms
look around you
The distant gazebo of that small
town wears white lights garlanded
round, and snow. A boy without
gloves reads alone.
He is no fool who takes his time and
place to know.
I rediscover you a gift here still as
I have in good counsel curtsied and coughed
often enough, my own hand to my own groin
to discover a fissure again, again to repeat,
that you are tissue essential still and
fabric to my own particularity upon a hill,
a house, one fence above a stream and rails,
a blinking boy turning wet pages knowing that
you or someone similar, only a few years
ahead, already familiar, dwells inside
compels his reading just before sunset
squinting at words beyond and past the
fence and the stream, the train late,
footprints dark blue in the patient drift.
ENTRY No longer counting - see ZERO praise below - after thoughts, setting-away zen, begin again - arrivals, departures three years after the Quarantine (Warrentine) Journal, Quetzal dreams as koan:
again, for sensei, and George E.
afterplay, and fore, for, foregoing lookingbacks ahead, familiar dread bed head pillow play dreamed the dead analyst returned blind to me, kind faced, staggered as if dizzy and holding onto walls, face turned toward me then walled he through a door into clouds white, nevermind the triteness of image, I felt love, relief, received his blessing after all the failing him and me and what ever the Self requires of me/not-me. Again, yet, arrivals, fretted departures, never say 'not' nor 'never' so unfolds mind-tries three years after:
"Who turned us around like this, so that we always
do what we may, retain the attitude
of someone who's departing? Just as he,
on the last hill, that shows him all his valley
for the last time, will turn and stop and linger,
we live our lives, for ever taking leave."
- Rainer Maria Rilke, from Duino Elegy 8
Thusly,
"Mark the first page of the book with a red marker. For, in the beginning, the wound is invisible." - Edmund Jabes
"Toot Toot Lovers! Bag of bones coming through!" - Richard Hugo
"We happen to live at a moment that is going to get worse before it gets better. The world went inside the internet and became the world...a poem may not conform to your worldview, your tastes, or what you think a poem can be. I often hear students get exasperated if a poem stretches the bounds of what they think poetry includes." - Sean Singer
"There is another world, but it is inside this one." - Paul Celan:
"I don't believe in the other world ...But I don't believe in this one either unless it's pierced by light." - Anna Kamienska
"There isn't any one correct way to write poetry. Poetry is a word like love: an endless confusion of different things all warped into one word because no vocabulary of discrimination exists." - Jack Gilbert
Old now, haiku
easier on the breadth:
Road gets narrower
eyesight dims,
even signs wave
Basho's ghost
guides with ink,
HERE NOT HERE
Can't ever cross
Rainbow Bridge
Beneath it, though,
a billet of mist
On the other hand,
me, just to be clear at another outset, to set it out, to lay out or in
what follows, is to follow, rather, I follow IT, lay it out as IT and how
it plays and wants to say, perhaps its stay - which now all below as
they go-and-go, are excerpts, patches from poem after poem, a long
roam, a life time roaming of them toward rumored HOME, more the
homing devices, words, than settling, planting one flag for everything,
impossible to do as things, even words do fray down to string and
filament fly loosened eventually strand by strand (as do I, me) in
fate-wind, and thus the pastiche ensues, unwinds/unravels on purpose
not to my own end but to poetry's ends (plural) in creating, destroying,
reconfiguring worlds of possibilities plural. And from below bellow
scraps filched from whole poems that doubt their legs capacities to
stand on their own aka poet Robert Duncan's declaration that
'language, words, make meaning, I don't...'
So what's below is no rural romp or tread and though most readers
dread having to participate in the reading of such, having to use their
heads and more, better, use their ears without fear of noise or nonsense,
then let the lazy forego their efforts here and head off to church or
collective shrine or club or circle and so 'knit one pearl two', don the
harder shoes that force a straight unyielding path to (or so it is thought
and hoped) chaste and bidden conformity to believed to be 'received
revealed' paths of doggerel and sentimentality.
Or, alas, early 19th century exiled American poet's proclamation
propounding to 'make it new' all the while living in classical Europe,
is now, early 21st century, 'the old soft shoe' boogie bougie of those
new penners currently blowing in the wind, the Bestseller genies
sprung like Athena from Zeus's noggin fully formed Jack n Jill
Horners patenting both thumbs and plums having believed that
they are progenitors of both. But I'll be plumbed, forego the curd
topping the pie but stick, rather, a nether in an eye to scrie or effort
something wanting to show itself though shy or disguised to throw
readers off petrified 'tried and true'. Ask not for whom the tell bolls,
it bolls prithee (which is a fun thing to say 'slythy-ly') .
If the reader is a free bleeder and curious about the flow and where
it goes or takes one then have some fun and fuddle, let red matter
puddle in the mind, the ears, at least one, the better ear the bad one
cuz then one must squint an eye try to hear, must effort to ken what's
to be be heard that matters in the dim dumb hum haw hem 'to wit, to
woo, to whom to what will 'draw flies or better' if it can (or can it) or
draw curiosity that begins and ends in further quests such are questions
behest that one at least not tarry too long but scurry or surrey forth
in whatever meter one finds is adequate to the moment. There is no
certainty here, capital C, so run away to yer barnacled BIG BOOKS
HOLY WRIT yer RECEIVED THINKs. A tinker's damn from me to thee.
With humor, old and newer meanings both, risk laughter at what Allen
Ginsberg calls 'shapely thought' and of course 'unthought' that can
open to mystery though the masses are horribly afraid of all that!
There's plentyuh old mystery to be had easily and so cheap (tho stale)
at The Dollar Store with or without a steeple or shrine or other tell-tale
once was symbol now reduced (and on sale) for only a sign, the spark
that was once in the totem fled or dead matter tho nostalgia goes far
enough for most.
Still, wonder can shew even in an image of Jesus (choose holy man
or woman or symbol) apparition-ing on burnt toast.Now THAT I'll
take seriously for I could never worship a deity or sacrality that has
no sense of humor, one what can still fun us with rumored visitations
in the juub juubs and baubles, from Babel to Babble (how many
denominations are daily born, each claiming sole authority?), veritable
spawn of further holy wars.
There is some rhyme here below too, some poems, though rhyme's
now long verboten in mod school of poesy forgetting that it, poesy,
still 'surely hath its posies' aka Ernest Dowson with whom him too
I am and 'have been faithful to thee, O Cynara! ' fiddle dee fiddle dim
dumb. He died of debauch. But I am the more abstemious preferring
profligate torrents of words and what surds may jell even if but for a
moment or just plain even if.
As a boy my daily chore was to dump food scraps and other
trash-could-rot into large mulch piles to use for father's gardens. And
to dig in the dark dense layers for fat worms with which to fish. From
this early boyhood chore, the fishing too - a worm on a hook fathomed
into unseen depths for a hopeful forkful revelation of fin and flash
cornmeal battered, a vocation long emerged into verges with disregard,
and dys-regards, effort taken with reading oracular shards glyphs for
meaning or leanings toward such that one could take for meaning even
if arrived at by other than expected, received and baptized means.
So abandon all hope ye who enter here. Best to veer away unless willing
to risk some secure rumored footholds of logic, meter, measure, rhyme,
sanity. I'm with old Ezra's humbled fife and thrum 'is repentant, haggard,
niggardly self in ripe and rife old age, beyond chastened, crumpled yet
and yes but for a tongue and pen still at and in't, the wiser for 'is sins
n schisms/
Head of a shouting man - Matthias Grunewald
from Pisan Canto LXXXI by Ezra Pound
"What thou lovest well remains,
the rest is dross What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage Whose world, or mine or theirs
or is it of none? First came the seen, then thus the palpable
Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell, What thou lovest well is thy true heritage
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee
The ant's a centaur in his dragon world.
Pull down thy vanity, it is not man
Made courage, or made order, or made grace,
Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down. Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry,
Pull down thy vanity,
Paquin pull down! The green casque has outdone your elegance.
'Master thyself, then others shall thee beare'; Pull down thy vanity
Thou art a beaten dog beneath the hail, A swollen magpie in a fitful sun,
Half black half white
Nor knowst'ou wing from tail
Pull down thy vanity
How mean thy hates
Fostered in falsity,
Pull down thy vanity,
Rathe to destroy, niggard in charity, Pull down thy vanity,
I say pull down.
But to have done instead of not doing this is not vanity
To have, with decency, knocked That a Blunt should open
To have gathered from the air a live tradition or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame
This is not vanity.
Here error is all in the not done, all in the diffidence that faltered..."
- March 25,2023
Deer Dance/Fire ceremony, Ohkay Ohwengeh
reservation, New Mexico
Entry - Exuent - Fluent yet Flatulent - 04/23/2023
My words here are not intended, nor are they able, to exclude what Word-oriented, revealed religions of 'the Book' have brought to us and advanced, but now, next 2000 years, the creative struggle will be to conjoin meaningfully polygamous images of psyche into compressions (es-pressions, as in espresso) and ex-pressions (pressed out) by and with word and Word which have tendencies toward monotheism, one true meaning only, which results therefore, can't be avoided, into a heavy-handedness in terms of a perceived/derived one and only Absolute. Ironically, the Arabs discovery of always heavy Zero - which, to me, is the only Absolute of merit - gave birth to a multiplicity, diverse, perverse, all the more irascible yet embraceable, maddeningly erasable, while growing arms beyond counting, the better to carry the unforgiving densities.
Count them (or try) we must; for congenital compulsions such are calcifications - spirit, soul, life in the body - are gripped in the teeth of the world; beatific, we perceive ourselves to be in the image of deity. Still, we can believe we are 'safe' within these calcified 'absolutes' - o here is the 'burning bush' - or we can risk the profligate ramble which is consciousness, a fire still burning, an intuition in each image that there is more here than meets the eye or thigh or deities as imaged. We all look, or try, beneath the skin of things - under what is presented, or within it - for that half-guessed/hinted at and/or 'felt sense' that there is MORE beyond the barred nerve, more and 'other-than' the shock of a chrome bumper-bent world careening, aware that within all is here-a-Presence, all images and words assuming that Presence - the Arabs gift of the non-alloyed Zero unmeasured by mass, a better name for god depending on thermal history's twisting vector or ghostly mirage, if any are to be had - the base in spite of or within the Metallic Matrix of the blacksmith heart hammering verdigris, chambers, ventricles, into shape, Newton's grave conjugations, living time solidified, hardened, stiffening Presence into dilute renderings of base metal, and chaste Frida Kahlo, her canvases chasing plutonium wire unaware, bears the blunt end of Presence at the end of the Aeon of the Fishes still barely beyond Bronze Age's just sharpened edges fluted, pre-Christian Mexico preferring obsidian ones hacked, chipped, scraped upon hard flint. Frida, volcano born, turns into conjugal vessel, Quetzal plume conjoined to Serpent skin rebirthing extensions of crash, a returning God, boat and horse delivered from the red beard of the bloated sea confronting yet one more deity requiring blood.
Frida Kahlo. The Broken Column
ENTRY Unexpected - Presumed To Have Fledged, Upon Witness Days, Asynchrony Of Swallow Murmurations In Christmas Season - A Gnoetic Poetic of Eye to Ear and Back Again into Adoration
"The spirit as it awakens is adoration." - Ludwig Wittgenstein
murmur - (A) to make the sound 'mu mu' (old Greek)
or 'mumu', to murmur with closed lips, to mutter,
moan... (B) to drink with closed lips, to suck in...
-Liddell and Scott, Greek-Engish Lexicon,1897 ed.
"when the attentions change
...even the stones are split
are rive..." - Charles Olson, from The Kingfishers
So ensues the Murmuration moan, ,
wind mutter the winding matter bebothered
of Swallows
NOTE: ASYNCHRONY OF SWALLOWS
which is a-synchrony, just to remind =
absence or lack of concurrence in time
In other words, no rhyme scheme
or known reason though presumptions
occur in observation of patterns that
such are the habits of nature to assist
drawing conclusions which are surmises
which are in the end and beginning
always "unhatched eggs" or, better,
words as eggs
**
(all praise) and what marvelous
vapor is life restive (as are days)
in thousand undulate congregations
no need for a falconer after all
when Chaos a daze of a Sunday
evening seems to know something
so falls into
purple fields
(O Friend, remember)
edged by sheer snow peaks where
sheep surefeet know no fear of
heights and there do dung and
play fearless or at least pretending
not to fall in their waking dream
which is the thing -
concavity curves
in a dead hatchling's sparkless
eye reflecting dead eggs' perfect
forms soft brooded upon as
one might brood one in hand
pondering which is the better
off the flown lone one or the
ongoing knot which can also
denote an egg - unhatched or
not or clotted everyly or other-
wise - is all surmise who knows
what is the thing joy's winged
malingerers in sudden annunciate
thunder a flashy entrance as
Swallows do so flash as flash
can and (it
Awe) may last along awhile
if
memory
serves
is glad
one's self
to have
hatched
and fledged
see what
glory can
be made
and had
at edges
(earth's
clearly domed
the shape of
eyes makes
it so)
and one knows or someday will
in lighter or heavier bones scry
the effort was/is made at all
as self portraits which may
or may not be the actual
who/whom we perceive
as selves to be we
(one feather
at a time
necessary dreaming
of
air) being adhered to dirt
so verily molded by known
and unknown forces within
which we make or
so we think
choose
but nevermind but
no
let us
return to mumur to suck in
sounds through and behind
lips and be naturally moved
bothered to somehow care
which with heart we indeed
do hard swallow.
One bird elder
once said to me
my being newly
fledged and flung
me at her knobby wither-knees
admiring her mustache and tooth
told me to observe and note
one or three do-re-mi's or more
(to better feathered choirs with)
so try at least to sing it, IT,
even if choking on what cannot
as yet be chewed/swallowed
IT being our
being-in
being-for
being-with
or without
craw or claw
but IT, bliss?,
eventually might if not understood
or withstood or notwithstanding
words thoughts ideas -
(throw in image which
is not spare aspire or
parenthetical but a must
so is)
in other
words
and perhaps
all birds
perhaps arrive land perch alight
a lift-off life time of chew and choke
then with some digestive orientation
from and of such sing of 'ossible
bone-tones some parsings or
other some conjugant choralling
which may/might ascribe flight
night daylight the usual things
so granted for taking so often
misspoken or under sung, we
being always flung trying yet
to cling to what cannot be
undone but forever always
clotted until we indeed do fly
no more in mind or breeches
and inevitably come
(completed?)
to full glottal stop
presumably fledged
utterly
Christmas Eve, Village of Focces, Gers, France 2019
