[from the disaster notes, a journal kept off and on around this day since the EVENT - not perfect cuz daily scrawled half-asleep waiting for espresso to kick in so….]
[][]_____Le Funambule*____[][]
I agree with Melissus. Ironically, VOID IS. Words are funny that way - O say can you see...
- for J who fell that day - tightrope walker, dancer, eye glancer where I once and forever fell continually onto soft landings. My demands are over. I find you now in clover beds behind the Metropolitan, Temple of Dendor overlooking our search for the rare four-leaved still-common flower. You are uncommon always to me. I am the grateful commoner once supplicant at your heart's many chambered door. I am content enough
Look!
no wobbling! no net!
the tent walls tremble,
for us he
pretends the
miracle of never falling.
**
"This day again, that day I slept in (being a "server" so it was not hard to "lie abed" as my Malaysian friend says), and missed the event but woke at 1 pm, made coffee then noticed that my answering machine was flashing red red red and the entire cassette was full. What? Took a few minutes to rewind - but the day cannot yet be rewound no matter how often we see it or, late night, are compelled to watch the 3 hours of its sudden beginning, the Picasso-like "impress" on the first building airplane angled in, or perhaps Derain or Cezanne daubs but pastel hues blue, gray, dark gray for where structure remained, hints of it, while edifice bore brunt of the "brute brush" stroke into smoke and where there is smoke there is inevitable ash with which a city adorns to mourn.
Even tho the event seems distant, clients still bring in dreams of the ruins, walking over them, bent steel beams over abyss that hopefully lead out of the mess, or over the river or bay, or stuck there on the balance beam in a twisted way glancing nervously up at sky for more planes or the rest of what hasn't fallen to fall...discovering that it is the nation in an infinitely slo mo fall still, grandiosity has no set speed when it falls, it can explode, shatter, or burn burn so let El Greco paint a New York City sky that burns eyes and throats, chemical scent was still in the air conditioner filter for a year after the event. Turn it on and down they come, the jumpers, the countless pages
(are their angels whose jobs are to count exactly how many pages burned in the fires, how many scraps action painted, say, Kline or Pollock, between buildings, past windows, on rooftops, water towers mocking their sudden elevation in height confusing buffeting scraps for pigeons, but knowing quickly that something was wrong when sudden flocks of crows gathered at the site, the cavernous hole choking still on einfalle, its arrogant declaration still absurd 2 decades later, that MONEY/MARKET rules. But, you may accurately point out, IT DOES, have only to ask any fool and they know that it, the gelt, rules even though human flesh melts, disintegrates in 10 seconds as do 3 floors of twin buildings that suddenly know how to spell Mercury, the Trickster, he whose name is where we get the very words "market" "merchant" "mercantile" "merchandise" to name a few.
So, the daily Swamp Singer sends poems today about THAT day, when I pull Tarot cards on that day and now years later and get major arcana aka the Wheel of Fortune card meets the Lightning Struck Tower card meets the Judgement Card imaging Archangel Gabriel blowing His Horn while, beckoned, dead, naked, humans rise up from their graves in order to give account, Last Judgement, of tiny little lives that seem, so it is insisted in Abrahamic religions seem to "chap God's ass" so much that even the presumed "peace" (certain surcease) of death is disrupted for further terrors, that of God,THAT trauma, sez Jung, "God is a trauma", he's painting in broad strokes, telling it straight out, that the day of Shouting, that of Resurrection, is not exclusively a promise for Glory
(etymology of "glory" is from Greek "doxa" (the word "doxology" which a hymn of praise sung in Churches,means, going way way back in earlier usage, "reputation")
because gore seems to feed the sacred just as much as glory so - there is that.
Evil.
From whence it came and still doth come
dum TEE dum-dum DUMMMM.
Calling Apple tree "set ups" from the beginning. Who's really to blame?
Calling Cain. Calling Job. Calling Jonah. And on and on and on-ah.
And, to conclude with the Bard,
"the world wags on" despite a new and very tempting tower (TIK TOK) close to South Ferry, its (not smoke, not yet) all mirrors to reflect, todeflect GPS planes intent on painting yet another Greco or Munch, another open-mouthed eyes-wide silent scream soundtracked by jet engines' screaming at highest velocity, another paint brush thrusting at glass canvas, hard on the outside, soft with flesh in the middle, counting angels poised';
I once heard painter Roger Bacon, 20th Century artist of despair, telling an interviewer, who asked, about his relationship to canvas -
"I do no paint. I HIT!"
Today, 9/11 2024, I woke up and while "lying abed" said a complete Rosary on my 10 fingers, arthritic, offering their pain for Jesus's and His Mother's sorrows, finger prayers, not beads, on purpose making mental note to ask if ever given the opportunity, the Angel in charge of counting fingers, how many were lost and how were found, and not, how many are still on the hollowed/hallowed ground or beneath it. How many lost fingers are there unaccounted for, unclaimed.
A sudden image, all these fingers, handless, but painting, as school children do, on any, each and every surface of or above "the Site" or at night, the perpetual orange glow is canvas enough to easily impress, a sky of finger prints only, countless (but for angels in charge of keeping tabs of dabs, daubs, the curves and turns of one finger, unique to itself tho partaking of "fingerness", same for all the others at work leaving cave wall like cyphers, little nests, or labyrinths through which future souls may use as maps once freed of/from matter.
Or - thread counts they are, too. Finest sheet for such nightly shrouding, there at day too but then the thin web is not seen, no sheen but sunshines through like Gabriel's glory on that Day when, too, tops of every skyscraper become mouths of Trumpets while somewhere graves open and "the dead shall be," are "raised incorruptible".
As all those fingers raise too,
follow the sky map they nightly make to reunite with the rest of remains returning without scars or deformities since archetype rules, primal patterns that LAW and lord over disaster ('bad star' the meaning of the word), disintegration, dismembering, and the Whole, never seamless, always a tear, a stray thread for imperfection is required for there is no Wholeness ever without it, fingers and other parts, angels writing names of those who were scattered on that day and who died from that day after the plummet.
So do say implicate psalms yet to be written but are always "in the works" and are noted, stored, given report of to the the Committee Heads to "better the feathered choirs" always chorusing, a muzak of sorts, They who do what They do which is Mystery (math appears to always be involved in every single thing) but we, I, mortal, can conjecture or at least imagine Their meetings, and those to Whom the Committee report and then make sense of and organize and arrange Fate and such.
Busy Busy.
Is there money in the abstract (money is abstract, is symbol, as too is heaven and facsimiles as similes and metaphor -
wherever, in whatever there there that is
where "They" are in (if They are a They
and are capable of "In-ness")? "
*
Mercifully, an end to some entries.
