Aug. 9, 2006

NINE AMBULANCES IN TYRE

a buried child's toy
a fly took note
of a buried child's toy
eking out its
playful tune, laying
it out in the jet singed
air over Tyre

In the rubble it played,
alighting on pieces of flesh,
hands emerging from the
white dust clutching a
child, the dust like
talcum powder on its ear
exposed to the light
in the sere air of
the sunlight, the fly
can travel much faster
and lighter than nine
ambulances in Tyre

14 - 10 - 06

Kilkauff precipitately trimmed the hedges with shears, as with haste the towering tufts of bush fell to recline on the sidewalk, leaving angled rents in each strand of hedge in lines arranged like a game of pick-up sticks. Coterminous with the curb, the side-view mirror of his car protruded over the sidewalk, though Kilkauff never really owned a car in his life. It will only lead to a rent in the shroud of time blanketing Kilkauff's memory and occluding the eyeball of his thoughts precipitately following the gaze along the sharp shear edge finely rusted (browned) with tiny lancets and spears of grass matter. How did Kilkauff finally come to terms with Kant? The Critique of Pure Reason was on his mind after days and hours in his study where he pondered why he did not own a car, especially when he had a garage. His wife looked on in wonder and longingly desired a car to take groceries in rather than that contraption on wheels, like a tall wicker basket, only made of widely spaced rectangular mesh. Two parts came down in poles with plastic caps so that opposite the two wheels could be tilted back and come to rest with brown grocery bags full of groceries could then be unloaded, like gunnysacks with an exoskeleton, though the cicadas had already emerged and were singing their lisping song high in the branches of the elms that had not succumbed to the Dutch elm disease yet. Kilkauff began to perspire profusely, what with the humidity high there was no legitimacy in the endeavor to tar the driveway since it was mere gravel between two flat rails of cement where a car could have parked for fear he might ever get one, the wife's needling voice chewing at its chaw of tobacco in the rear-view mirror of his mind coining phrases that taunted him exceedingly with atonement and upbraiding.

31/3/08

Kilkauff was constantly put off by the obstinacy of his procrastination, much to his amusement & bemusement. He dropped the hedge clippers and walked up the street, Kenworth Avenue, as much as to say to his wife, screw you, unfathomable bitch. He clenched his teeth and proverbially set his jaw against the humidity. What was in his damn craw?! As much as to say there wasn't any categorical imperative, whatever that was. That blankety-blank transcendental ego had him .

15/9/06 Projective verse
I. What projective (open) verse

• is
• how accomplished (as opposed to non-projective

II. what stance towards reality is brought into being from projective verse

• how stance affects poet & reader

the stance involves

• a change larger than the technical

the stance may lead to

• new poetics
• new concepts

from which latter two emerges, perhaps

• some sort of drama
• some sort of epic

III. Kinetics of the thing
A. the poem is a "high energy-construct"
an "energy discharge" at all points
B. the principle:
"form is never more than an extension of content"
i. "right form ... is the only and exclusively possible extension of content under hand."
C. the process:
"one perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception" (Dahlberg)
"... one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER!"
"that verse will only do in which a poet manages to register both the acquisition of his ear and the pressures of his breath."
"the syllable... is the king and pin of versification, what rules and holds together the lines, the larger forms, of a poem."
from out of the root, the syllable, come the dance
"the ear, which is so close to the mind that it is the mind's, that it has the mind's speed"
"it is from the union of the mind and the ear that the syllable is born"
"Observation ... must be so juxtaposed ... that it does not ... sap the going energy of the content toward its form"
"because ... a poem has, by speech, solidity, everything in it can be ... treated as solids, objects, things"
the poem now can be treated as a solid because of speech
"the convention which logic [cf. Breton's remark that Latin logic must be done away with] has forced on syntax must be broken open"

16/9/06
Olson's essay foresees Z's Objectivist Anthology and the Language poets' play with syntax

19-9-06 Tues.
"can tedium produce seeds for herons and storks?" -- Dahlberg The Carnal Myth

obscure dream of late. a bird with very long legs with the shanks of a hawk, but as if walking on stilts with trousers in a swamp manifested itself out of the obscurity while another long-legged bird sprayed long jets of water from its bill that sprinkled me.

Dec. 4, 2007

I am the 'o' in potato
I am the mime of the squirrel's shadow
I am the deleterious effect of the pebble's spite
I am convinced I am no
I am the hollow knuckle of a bird's bone
I am a congeries of whims
I do not feign to know
I am the whore in the bellows
I am a chink in the wall
I avoid small choices in a single bound
I affect to know nothing
I am the craning little stick that beats the drum
I am Finn's thumb
I am the 'mor-' in '-pheme'
(I am the inbetween of 'mor-' and '-pheme')
I am the gold in Nausicaa's tresses
I mean no harm to any one
I stir the bed of coals
I assert the wherewithal of mauve
I suck the lichen off of rocks and bark of trees
I do not seem to know
I follow the void up, then down
I turn the hayrick into chaos
I am the interminable smell [itch] of crotch
I hang like a navel hernia
I crane my neck to turn a cock
I slake the thirst of a glacier floe
I marvel at the yes in no
I turn the ankle of my toe
I seem to remember in forget
I grate the cheese in watercress
I will not deign to heat it though
I cannot opt to check the flow
My mind is always in a knot
I've half a mind to let it go
But it crops up in cogito
The tourniquet was disabused
of all I ever had of news
I span the belly of Mother Earth
I furnish her with all the breezes
I make the kettle's being hot
I forestall the coming weather
I retract the woodpecker's tongue

All-highest, glorious God,
cast your light into the dark-
ness of my heart.
Give me right faith,
firm hope, perfect charity
& profound humility, w/
wisdom & perception, O
Lord, so that I may do
what is truly your holy
will. Amen

O alto e glorioso Dio,
illumine le tenebre
del cuore mio. Dammi
una fede retta, speranza
certa, carità perfetta
e umiltà profonda.
Dammi, Signore, senno
e discernimento per
compiere la tua vera
e santa volontà. Amen

Wed. June 27, 2007
trip to Universal City
yesterday, trip to San Diego Zoo (Naval Medical Canter cafeteria for lunch)
breakfast at Denny's in El Monte, L.A. County (first Denny's in Lakewood, CA, in 1959)
Bob Evans died a few days ago, aged 89
Denny's founded by Butler and first called Denny's in1959

10 Feb. 2006
Muscat
Mutrah souk
walking thru it as in Cocteau film where in the corridor the arms beckon with torches, the shopkeepers drifting out of the shops to get your attention w/ a hello and an exaggerated smile, the seasoned tourist walking in a zomboid state, the green horns politely saying no to each one w/ a smile.

sign: Ratansi Purshottam Co.

"I am encumbered with impedimenta."

BRAINSTORMING (LOONY TUNES) FOR NONSENSE CHAP.

One of the characteristics of the genre of nonsense is the rejection of metaphor
Heads of the Town largely is written in nonsensical style verse
Where does Spicer say he rejects metaphor? (in the Lorca letter?) Is 'rejecting' connection, which I take to mean metaphor, for metaphoric devices are all about connection, Spicer's rejection of metaphor? Ideas, language, rather, words 'stick' to objects, so objects correspond...
One gets the idea early, before the serial poems, that Spicer rejects metaphor by making a ridiculous or nonsensical metaphor of comparing writing a poem to the length  of a hat of his nephew and to the width of spoiled writing

'I speak language' vs. 'language speaks' is the dichotomy Spicer uses (as pointed out [not re Spicer] by Lecercle (p. 165)) and plays with
We come up against a brick wall when we merely point out the contradictions implicit in Spicer's verse, as I did in his stuff on Surrealism

However, what we have lurking in Spicer's verse is what the genre of nonsense is all about, the ideal object; for,... (see p. 165, Lecercle)

"Conversation, dialogue and verbal struggle are the explicit or surface manifestation of the constitutive dialogism of the text" (p. 191, Lecercle).

The complacency with which this bitch has a tenacious hold on me, and it was only a night in a thousand and one that has and will not come, and the dread lies there in the corner as completion, coitus, perishes, kills the immediate and never really is, the foreshadowing of the coitus never arrives at the center but is that circumference which is nowhere, everywhere and elsewhere at the same time and place, another dimension hovering above.

back to Lecercle
the exhaustiveness of meaning is deconstructed in nonsense as well as the author's "intention of meaning" (p. 190) but the genre of nonsense does not really constrain the speaker as the form of any genre usually does (what Lecercle implies), although there are its own constraints in nonsense
the author of nonsense "means to say nothing, or he means not to mean (p. 190). This deconstructs the exhaustiveness of meaning and the intention of meaning...in so doing "both the theme of the utterance and the intention of the speaker are at best secondary and at worst nonexistent (one should rather say they have dissolved)" (p. 191).
Consequently, the generic constraints  come to the forefront and these constraints become the true theme of the text, "and the voice, or voices, that are heard in it. This is the specific polyphony of nonsense" (p. 191)

the telephony of Spicer's nonsense (heading for diss.)

p. 116: How much intention can the speaker control, [how much intention can he exert on control? To put it nonsensically] is the question Lecercle raises and this directly relates to what Spicer says about getting rid of intentions
The question for Spicer would be, could he voluntarily (intentionally) switch on or off the transmissions?

What is the relationship btwn meaning & saying? (pp. 118-

p. 124: subversion & support is the dialectics that characterizes literary nonsense

non-sense, as distinguished from nonsense, is "a text which is said, and certainly not meant" (p. 124), and so nonsense is non-sense or is a nonsense text only paradoxically non-sense because "it means not to mean?" (p. 124)
Lecercle poses the question, is there expression in excess of meaning?

non-sense = something which is said but in no way meant (p. 125)

Duchess's theory of meaning is that meaning precedes saying

Searle: whatever can be meant can be said, which denies inexpressibility or the ineffable

"true nonsense would not be expression and meaning, but expression without meaning" (p. 126)

a fictional utterance is not an assertion--at best a non-serious assertion--and so is not like a truth proposition in philosophy (p. 127)

in writing fiction the author 'pretends' to assert and so the assertion must be judged from the author's intention, in other words, there is always a meaning-as-intention behind the saying (utterance) "There is no dire without voulire dire" (p. 127)

Lecercle goes from the Duchess's theory, meaning is the origin of saying, to "saying as the source of a proliferation of potential meanings" (p. 130), a "Saying-Meaning-Saying chain where an Ur-text inspires a meaning that results in a text

Spicer's notion of transmission as coming not from an Ur-text or mythical origin of a primeval text from God is actually an embodiment of the paradox of 'I speak language' versus 'language speaks', meaning that "no one means the multiplicity of utterances that may be derived from the text, no one except the free play of language, as the receptacle of multiple intertextual chains" (p. 133). Thus we have "a theory of the emergence of texts, and therefore of nonsense texts, as the output of intertextual chains" (p. 134).

perhaps "Lowghost" is what Lecercle refers to as "corpses, dead metaphorical remnants of forgotten scientific theories" (p. 156) or Lakoff & Johnson call 'ontological metaphors'

I Understand Meursault

I understand Meursault now. At first I didn't. In the beginning, when I was an undergrad, I struggled with distinguishing btwn. pour soi and en soi, such difficult terms to understand despite their terseness. Spicer would call them examples of the Lowghost, ghosts of words with a former body. Meursault shoots and kills an Arab on the beach under the brutal, beating rays of the sun. A random act seemingly. I tell my son to stop using the word random because he really doesn't know its meaning. In his adolescent conception of things random is something that happens, not by coincidence, he doesn't believe in things happening by coincidence, but it is "just random," as if it is not enough to say random and enough not to explain what it means. I am taking a walk, a random sentence inserted into this discourse, but I have just come back from an early evening walk in the nearby date palm plantation and I intend my rambling sentences to be "a loose salley of the mind," as Dr. Johnson defined an essay. I tried to explain to my son that random is such an encompassing concept that there is no qualification for it--here I approach the curve before the penultimate leg of my walk--just or merely, in fact, not doing justice to this concept which can only be described with 'omni-' perhaps, a prefix attached to it, or "total randomness" would be a qualification to do justice to its true meaning, and so with my qualification I am just as at fault as my son in trying to qualify a word that is belittled by any qualification.

Meursault, a French Algerian (pied noir), became an Arab by killing an Arab. He got into the skin of an Arab, a being that he loathed. [...] My wife told me the other day, but being with her here, up until recently, has been an every day sort of affair or trial, especially when she was still working,--she said she had begun to hate people, and that these people at work had changed her into a person who loathes others, that she was not like this ever before. How does one love your enemy she asked, those people, who at work, in the lab, form a kind of neighborhood which she entered every morning at 8 o'clock and left around 4:30? For almost six years, and largely most of the time during those six years, she hated a certain number of people in the lab, her neighbors. How does one love your neighbors when they are your enemy? I told her to turn the other cheek, as Christ taught. (Can one love and hate them at the same time?)

Burroughs in his lucid, surreal sci-fi stories depicting worlds ruled by death,--that to get in the skin (I was going to write 'under') of another body is merely a matter of ejaculation. So, in hatred, we ejaculate our bad words and thoughts at others. My wife, who is Asian, was conditioned as a child to put on what I would call, being a glib American, a front--this quite simply leads to her vituperation directed at anyone in the environs within the confines of our large flat, which, as is the custom here, is made all the more private by walls outside of walls, until she gets under her own skin, and so can't stand herself, though she would simply rather die than go on, back to work the next day.

The olfactory bubble is the phrase used by the socio-linguist Hall to describe the Arab's cultural practice of not keeping one's distance as Americans want to do when in face-to-face intercourse. This tendency Arabs have is as notable as their penchant for staring [I really mean Indians]--[it was put once as "the lust of the gaze," in a non-sexual sense, or as I would call it, the optical equivalent of Whitman's loafing]--, which is a practice Americans do not like, using such expressions as, when stared at by a stranger, "take a picture, it lasts longer," meaning to indicate that a stare fixes one into a space or pins one like a species of butterfly to a paper for closer inspection, it is just plum impolite. I admit many of my memories reside in olfactory bubbles, for example, the woman, and being part Cherokee might attribute her to a down-to-earth-ness, I knew at university, who lived with another woman in an old house near campus that wreaked of the most pungent of odors, cat. The urine in certain spots of the carpet had rotted away the jute fibers in the backing and it was particularly pungent in the winter when the windows were tight shut despite the drafts from under the doors, a house similar to certain native American abodes in California that Angulo observed but without a smoke hole to relieve the draft of air from circulating around the house, making it a very large olfactory bubble. She admitted to me later, after she had moved from this cat's pismire, that she had not realized the state of the house because she must have been depressed, and she thanked me for my unflattering comment about the smell of cats that she had finally been jolted out of her depression. A bubble bursts, I suppose, after a certain amount of pressure from the outside. Living in the desert one would be particularly welcome to smells, as they don't linger, unless they are borne by aerosol spray, T.E. Lawrence's bedouin smelling, after sniffing the ethereal air, and finding traces of different layers of perfume wafted to his nostrils. Certain organisms cannot survive without water, so there are certain ones that cannot exist, where they would otherwise in a moister climate, and so it is healthier living here despite the dirt and dust. I remember the same woman, especially her breath after a shwarma sandwich [...]. I gag often at the cheap perfumes worn here. [...]

"Completion is the perishing of immediacy: 'It never really is'."--Sherburne, Key to Whitehead's PR, p. 70

"[...] the total nexus that is the tree is temporally thick [...]--it consists of generation after generation of actual occasions succeeding one another" (p. 78, ibid.)

NOTES  on Derrida's Χώρα

Myth puts into play a form of logic, a logic in contrast to the logic of non-contradiction of the philosophers, a logic of ambiguity, equivocalness, and polarity, a logic other than the logic of the logos

this other logic belongs to a third genre or kind...it does not name...it is a stranger to the order of the paradigm...it is without sensible (perceptible) form

Χώρα does not submit itself to the same law that it places or situates

the discourse on the khôra is also a discourse on the kind (genre) and on different kinds of genre

the khôra does not adapt itself to the distinction between the sensible (perceptible) and the intelligible

the khôra does not lend itself easily to placing, assigning a place: it is more situating than situated or placed

the khôra has no essence but it does have a structure--the khôra is the anachronism of being

khôra is not a subject, not the subject

we cannot even say the khôra for that would give it a signification, which it doesn't have; the article 'the' presupposes the existence of a thing
khôra designates none of the known types of being; it is neither perceptible or intelligible

khôra gives nothing in giving place (it doesn't 'take place')

khôra is "something," which isn't a thing, that puts into cause the distinction word/concept, word-concept/thing, sense/reference, signification/value, name/nameable

khôra must not receive for her, she then must not receive, only lets be lent the properties (of what) she receives (p. 34)

We have to speak of her, not so much by always giving her the same name, but speaking of her in the same way (p. 34). Is this in a singularly idiomatic way or in the regulated generality of a scheme?

Notes on Sartre's Psychology of Imagination

"...in the imaginative act desire is nourished from itself...the object as an image is a definite want [lack]; it takes shape as a cavity. A white wall as an image is a white wall which is absent from perception" (161).

"all spatial determination of an object as an image presents itself as an absolute property...it is impossible to count the columns of the Pantheon as an image. The space of the unreal object has no parts" (164).

principle: "the object of consciousness differs in nature from the consciousness of which it is the correlative" (165).
the time of the object of the image is different from the flow of time in the consciousness of the image (165)

"contracted compressed duration" is "'density'" of duration

"objects...run off more slowly than does real consciousness, for consciousness really lives several seconds while the world of the unreal lasts for several hours" (166).

unreal duration is like unreal space, it has no parts (168)
it is impossible to count the instants of an unreal act just as it is impossible to count the columns of an unreal Pantheon (168)
the time of unreal objects is itself unreal (169)

"...I can produce at will--or almost at will--the unreal object I want but I cannot make of it what I want" (173).

"...every unreal object carrying its own time and space occurs without any solidarity with any other object" (173).

"Consciousness is... constantly surrounded by a retinue of phantom objects" (173).

the real imaginative consciousness and the unreal object are of distinctly two natures (175)

the image is a mental form, not a simple content of consciousness among others; therefore "the entire body participates in the make-up of the image" (176) (81)

Notes on Coleridge's B.L.
ίδέα: the visual abstraction of a distant object (original sense of word in Pindar, Aristophanes & St. Matthew's Gospel) when we see the whole w/out distinguishing its parts
Plato's idea is a technical term opposed to έίδωλα, sensuous images, the transient and perishable emblems, or mental words, of ideas. His ideas are exempt from time. Nowadays 'idea' is like 'Ideal', but opposed to 'idea', or image whether of present or absent objects

Descartes: material ideas, configurations of the brain, so many molds to the influxes of the external world

Locke: ideas, adopts Descartes' meaning and extends it to whatever is the immediate object of the mind's attention or consciousness

Hume: impressions: representations which are accompanied w/ a sense of a present object
idea: representations reproduced by the mind itself

thought & attention are parts & products of the blind mechanism of will and not distinct powers that control, determine & modify the phantasmal chaos of association (81)

the soul becomes not a real separable being

contemporaneity is the limit and condition of the laws of mind (85); it is a law of matter (this reiterates Coleridge's "the sole law of association is contemporaneity" (76)

contemporaneity = continuity

contemporaneity : thought : : gravitation : loco-motion

contemporaneity is the condition of the laws of association and is not the cause or essence; time is the cause or essence of the co-existence of images in the mind recalled from present circumstances or operation of likeness & contrast (86)

space is the measure of time and it is our notion of time that makes us distinguish time from space

the act of consciousness = time considered in its essence (not the notion of time)

body & spirit are different modes or degrees in perfection of a common substratum

intelligence & being are each other's substrate (94)

Coleridge considers perception as passive & "merely recipient" (109); thus sensuous

intuition: the immediateness of any act or object of knowledge

the Lowghost: "words which are but the shadows of notions" (168)

"The mathematician does not begin w/ a demonstrable proposition, but with an intuition, a practical idea" (se 171 for demonstration)

subject for Coleridge is defined in the Scholastic sense of "mind or sentient being, and as the necessary correlative of object or quicquid objicitur menti" (174)

"freedom must be assumed as a ground of philosophy, and can never be deduced from it" (185)

"sensation itself is but vision nascent" (187)

"...nothing is deemed a clear conception, but what is representable by a distant image" (189)

"...besides the language of words, there is a language of spirits (sermo interior) [perhaps Breton's "mouth of shadows"?]...the former is only the vehicle of the latter" (191).

FROM "THE BLUE NOTEBOOK"
I. 11:00 Sheikh arrives
Bishop receives him & gives bouquet at gate
cutting of ribbon on double doors
unveiling of plate [plaque] & cutting of ribbon
Bishop leads Sheikh to church
II. inside church (spectators go down stairs
into basement of church
Bishop takes Sh. on tour while spectators go down
Sheikh goes down center aisle
Bishop & Sh. go down into basement
everyone seated
nat. anthem
everybody sits
Bishop's speech
Ali welcome dance
Hashemi
an other dance
cutting of cake tentative
word of thanks by Fr. Francis
gift is given to Sheikh when
he is thanked
the thankees:
Sheikh Zayed (late)
Sheikh Khalifa
UAE government
Sheikh Hazza Tahnoon (Bishop gives gift)
& son Sheikh Haza
Ali Hashemi
List: dignitaries
AIDC
municipality & Town Planning
AADC
Police Dept.
Etisalat
& all present personalities
& officials
George Mathews
Boutros Mannie
Marwan Manie
contractor: Nael Construction Co. (Umeh Vargis Oammeh, gen. manager
construction committee & consultants & parish counsel
Invite all to enjoy snacks by Fr. Francis