2012 – random note to self
Joseph Beuys (@Dusseldorf Art School) says to Anselm Kiefer (regarding Kiefer’s Occupations series)
“It was good action, and for him, action was art.”
Below the text, this: The Guardian, “A life in art: Anselm Kiefer.”
my favorite man will head across the Atlantic to Polska, where he will begin a new life. It will be a temporary stay, six months (I think) in all. But other — perhaps longer — stays will surely follow, possibly even leading to a permanent move. Either which way, I shall miss him.
Unsent Letter:
Our sandals, now safe and dry in the kitchen,
nestle together like lovers,
like good friends,
your left touching my right.
Secretly I wish to keep them like that (together) forever,
as some kind of material testament or poetic artifact proclaiming
“We were here.”
Once a man and a woman walked,
kissed beneath an archway,
and, for a brief moment, loved.
Analysis of standardized tests over a 50-year period shows the achievement gap between rich and poor has grown steadily.
BY BROOKE DONALD
It’s long been known that the better off your family is, the better you tend to do in school.Yet despite this knowledge – and programs to help level the playing field – the classroom achievement gap between rich and poor students has grown steadily over the past half-century, according to research by Sean Reardon, associate professor of education at Stanford.
READ FULL ARTICLE
photo: L.A. Cicero
The hours are too few; I am beginning to feel like Casaubon, only worse. Unlike him, I do not have the good fortune of a beautiful, doting, faithful assistant such as his Dorothea at my side.
There is never enough time. Yet, in spite of wishing for more of it, I also hope never to have too much of it; that is, I hope I am never in a position or state to wish the thread betwixt the fingers of those fateful three sisters any shorter. Whichever it is, time or no time, so long as it is peaceful and productive, then. This is my request, dear Fates.
Letters: April 14th, 2012
Dear P____,
Here are the two “perfect” poems I’d mentioned a while back. They were given to me some time ago, perhaps as part of a birthday or Christmas gift from R____, and apparently had been concealed between a couple of books all this time. I don’t recall having read them upon receipt. Actually, I don’t recall ever having received them! How odd. But I do know they’re from R____, since the cover page bears his script. Their recent (re)discovery was a most delightful encounter, an unexpected boon! (I may very well include some references to or excerpts from Stevens’ poetry in my thesis, since much of his poetry deals with intersubjective reality.)
As best as I figure, the two poems are the last cantos from The Auroras of Autumn. Might you already have this collection among your stacks?
Well, my dear, I hope you find enjoyment, if not the very perfection I detect, in these two poems by Wallace Stevens.
Your faithful friend,
A.M.
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IX
We keep coming back and coming back
To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns
That fall upon it out of the wind. We seek
The poem of pure reality, untouched
By trope or deviation, straight to the world,
Straight to the transfixing object, to the object
At the exactest point at which it is itself,
Transfixing by being purely what it is,
A view of New Haven, say, through the certain eye,
The eye made clear of uncertainty, with the sight
Of simple seeing, without reflection. We seek
Nothing beyond reality. Within it,
Everything, the spirit’s alchemicana
Included, the spirit that goes roundabout
And through included, not merely the visible,
The solid, but the movable, the moment,
The coming on of feasts and the habits of saints,
The pattern of the heavens and high, night air
X
It is fatal in the moon and empty there.
But, here, allons. The enigmatical
Beauty of each beautiful enigma
Becomes amassed in a total double-thing.
We do not know what is real and what is not.
We say of the moon, it is haunted by the man
Of bronze whose mind was made up and who, therefore, died.
We are not men of bronze and we are not dead.
His spirit is imprisoned in constant change.
But ours is not imprisoned. It resides
In a permanence composed of impermanence,
In a faithfulness as against the lunar light,
So that morning and evening are like promises kept,
So that the approaching sun and its arrival,
Its evening feast and the following festival,
This faithfulness of reality, this mode,
This tendance and venerable holding-in
Make gay the hallucinations in surfaces.
LETTERS – March 25th, 2012
Good morning,
I like the image of minds wandering around in the woods. Reminds me of all those ancient English, Irish and Welsh stories where the hero is led into a mysterious wood while on a hunt. A mysterious stag leads him in. Mythically or metaphorically, I think that image of Hunter-Stag is akin to an object’s affordances, performs a similar purpose. For example, for a reader (listener if oral) back in the days when the stories from the Mabinogian were first being circulated, a hunter following a stag works narratively because it follows the logic of the hunter’s goal and hunting is a common activity engaged by titled persons. It’s appearance is not at all strange, not exceptionally novel in any way, and so both reader and and hunter trust its appearance, don’t question it, and so neither person hesitates to follow the stag into the wood, which, for the reader, is the wood of the narrative, the mental journey, and for the hunter, is the wood of experience. But would the hunter have entered the wood had something else appeared before him, something more novel, something too far outside the realm of his experience to make any sense of it? If it were some crazy looking hag or some anachronistic being waiting for him at the edge of the wood, trying to seduce him to follow, it wouldn’t happen. His instincts would tell him to flee. So the stag ‘affords’ the hunter the experience of transformation he’s about to encounter upon entry and affords the reader deeper entry into the narrative because the appearance of the stag and the hunter’s following is a logical narrative sequence. The affordances of objects are in the world of art and literature what I call entry points. But aside from that, the relationship between the hunter (who is usually some sort of royalty, btw) the stag and the woods, etc., is truly a practical metaphor for how we encounter and respond to the real events of our lived lives. Would you follow if it were not a stag? Or, for instance, with regards to our meeting, if I were not intellectually wandering around in those same woods? It’s our familiarity — our sympathies — which entice us to follow. How compelling they are, no? Personally, my past experiences have shown me repeatedly that the edge of the wood is a far scarier place than the woods themselves.
A found poem. Copyright A.M.C. 2011.
—————-
Doors and windows
closely guard
the great
gloomy rooms
where men
robbed of liberty
watch
the inexpressibly
slow passage
of time
the day’s going
night’s black blots
dying out
of a dream
seemingly eternal
the angel kisses
their starved lips
men who
have ceased
forever
to whisper
sweetheart
and mother
have ceased
to murmur
of food
and water
have ceased
to pray
for sight
of the blue sky
blowing over
well-remembered
fields
hope was a hope
for liberty
eager for a breath
of air
even death
days going
for the last time
under the eyes
of the guards
at eight o’clock
the fireplace opened
crawling
tunnel upon tunnel
an hour by
the watch
seven nights
traveling
at the heels
of 109 soldiers
in the half-
frozen swamps
a wild stampede
for liberty
before reaching
the Union lines
free
Journals – May 2011
I
II
III
“Don’t do that. You might choke,” it opines.
Intuitively she knows that these sounds are directed at her, are in response to her sounds, the surge of saliva she’d been tumbling over her tongue. Don’t do that! Chirp-chirp. You might slip! Chirp. Choke on a rock! Tick-tock, tick-tock. Cha-cha-choke! Catch a cold! Rock-a-bye, rock, and down will come baby…down will come baby. She tries to sing it. When the bow breaks… She remembers now, something about a rock, a cradle, and crashing, sonorous crashing. She tries to sing it, but all that will come out is one big wet coo.
IV
V
VI
I’ve long associated vago (Ital. wandering, roaming) with vagus (Lat. vagina) for many years, and I have contemplated the metaphor of vagina as vagabond, but I never would have made the leap to gay, though I have to admit I’ve never referenced the etymology of that particular American English adjective. “The Deep Roots of Gaiety” is an etymology blog post by renowned Germanic philologist Anatoly Liberman, whom, I believe, when he speaks of deep roots, is making a subtle pun (see paras 6 [inline text] & 8), or not too subtle if you’re of a certain mind. Apparently some minds, like other parts of the anatomy, run deeper than others. 
In response to a blog comment regarding the origins of the C-word, one reader wrote that the C-word “can also be used as a sexual reference, ie [sic] ‘I would love to lick your c#’ although I really dont know anyone that would like to hear that kind of language,” which in turn sparked this reply (or some version of it) from me:
I actually prefer the word c**t to its clinical sister term vagina, and enjoy hearing my lover use it expressively. When it comes to moments of physical intimacy, I likewise prefer the male C-word to penis. The distinction I make is this: a penis is what a man urinates with, and the other—that which I call by a C-word—what he effs with. There is a difference, notably one of turgidness. These words have their place, their own way of calling the imagination and alighting the senses, and I am glad of it.
Joshish, I think you aced this one: “verbs are the love, movement and spirit.” To attend, yes? I’m paying special attention to movement these days. The role of infant locomotion in the development of agency, and the role that subsequent contingencies arising from that locomotion, like parent admonition/discipline, play in the development of conscience. Motility and mobility–motion in general–is not only about movement in and of the physical, but also, as you appropriately note, the emotional and spiritual. Add to that the powerful movements of the mind. So often movement, for me, begins there, roots itself and disperses, budding and then leafing out through the senses.
From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, on Giambattista Vico, “Given that verum ipsum factum–’the true is the made,’ or something is true because it is made–scienzia both sets knowledge per caussas as its task and as the method for attaining it; or, expressed in other terms, the content of scienza is identical with the development of that scienza itself.”
Was Foucault’s theory on the discursive production of truth and knowledge inspired by Vico?
Falling in love, for me, is the equivalent of repeating the Iron Catastrophe. No big deal, really.
Sabotage is sometimes the result of obsolescent, maladaptive self-protection mechanisms. They may have helped us once, somewhere back there in our painful past, but are no longer useful to us, and instead cripple our ability to live out our dreams and hopes, not to mention our ability to be present. In such cases, I believe, the only productive form of self-protection is to fully embrace and offer our vulnerability. Only our deepest, honest offering, free of fear’s fetters and deflections, is strong enough to maintain the integrity of (or resuscitate!) the heart.
“I’m sorry, you must have me confused with Chuck Norris.”
I am neither a weeble wobble nor a rubber band. I fall down. I fracture. I break, just like everyone else. The next time you acknowledge someone else’s strength, bear this in mind: a show of strength is oft times the product of extreme effort, a precarious balancing act, and should never be confused with an absence of frailty.
"I take this picture of myself and with my sewing scissors cut out the face. Now it is more accurate; where my eyes were everything appears."
— Margaret Atwood (The Journals of Susanna Moodie)
