Freaks and Greeks

in

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts, and be warned of freaks bearing the 1970s on their inflationary shoulders. Pay due consideration to defaced monuments as to debased coinage.

After Virtue ends by calling for the waiting for Godot to end and waiting for St. Benedict to continue. Doubtless that’s mangled but the point is the waiting and the austerity which which it instructs.

Staring down the incessant run on the prime rate, our forebears in their salubrious American spree waited for Volcker and his pound of cure. Which turned out, in retrospect, to weigh out, in multiples, as spur, then hedge, as taurus looks back toward ursa in its great celestial sparkle.

A terrible beauty is born, we are told, and so we go and search for it, bumping into the calling out of lines unspooling black against white. We strain to see what may come, and in straining come into our strength. Poetry without you equals us, and you don’t like my easy way of claiming “we,” not because it is presumptuous in being wrong, but because in its presumptuousness such wide and consuming shadows are cast.

Do you remember when the anthropologist went down the stairs beneath the tower at the outer edges of the mapped territory and found the wall on which was written so much incantatory gibberish, but the writing was not just a process, but a kind of biological seething, and the anthropologist wanted to hold the gun instead of being held at gunpoint? Maybe some details are wrong, doubtless so - I’m tired and my grasp of the new weird was always tenuous and trending toward unintelligible - but I can still feel the breathing unease that arose alongside the reading of the biological seething that did its own writing, which tended to make agoraphobia look like personality strengths and not just holding off the bughouse at arms’ length.

Sigh. I wouldn’t suppose that

when Achilles with his short sword pierced the breast of Penthesilea
and as usual twisted the blade thrice in the wound, he noticed that

the poles could be translated anew so long as they stood at the axis of creative license and bald, emaciating theft, which created an exile from show trials who could see and hear at least one pole who had traveled back to Ithaca.

I wouldn’t suppose that the honor among thieves is sustenance like flat bread that sours over and over and over, consuming itself and bubbling over.

I think about Bartleby in his copyist’s costume, play acting at refusal until it logically if surprisingly progressed to the sickness unto death.

I think about sleep but bed down with insomnia. Which the 1970s would always understand, for which I am thankful.

Fortuna in a dark lair with iris eyes, having watched us heap fads on Eleusis

You don’t need to read tarot cards to try to trace the way in which the death’s head endures, sticks to the salt that gathers on the rocks that are sometimes on the rivers edge and sometimes deep beneath the channel, depending on which era of accretion under reckoning. You step in that river once, the tumult comes and then the tremendum strikes and shimmers in the cold’s clamorous residue.

An apparition, convex for a moment but then regained, strutting up and down the ranks and urging them on to shed blood and pay out the last length of the mortal coil, sputtering like a leaky sieve until the last becalming moment of silence has come.

Colors presented, the march goes on. someone stands to the side, tosses seeds into the furrows that had been raked in their wake, and after the excessive spoils of the sun did their work, the leaves that emerged could be read to say:

Pound canceled in his own mind the disassociations that had been isolating fact from fact for centuries. To have closed the gap between mythology and botany is but one movement of the process; one way to read the Cantos is to go through noting the rest restoration relationships now thought to be discreet — the ideogrammatic method was invented for just this purpose. In Pound’s spatial sense of time the past is here, now; it’s invisibility is our blindness, not its absence. The 19th century had put everything against the scale of time and discovered that all behavior within time’s monolinear progress was evolutionary. The past was a graveyard, a museum. It was Pound’s determination to obliterate such a configuration of time and history, to treat what had become a world of ghosts as a world eternally present.

Even the prisons were prisons

I was elbows deep in life: a users manual and could not avoid how much I needed something sumptuous to eat.  I wanted Mark Strand’s poem about eating ink like a ravenous carnivore raw, not cooked, but it was off menu. The cutlery clattered to the floor. I pushed it off the edge with a tall red plastic pizzeria glass that sweated. Being able to say enough is enough is a developmental milestone for those who hold a visceral, painful knowledge of what is too much.

Ingres and other parables was set for auction and I figured it would sate me, but what little money I had was staked to buying an all day ticket to the white box gallery in which my mind had hung all the paintings from painters whose work I wanted to feel numb in front of but which buzzed around in my head for years asking to be thought out loud.  I did not, though, think them out loud. Salutary inner monologues proved reasonably, damnably sufficient  for the purpose of giving voice to these paintings’ hold on me. I will no longer make any boring art is a paraphrase of what was written in chalk by the innocent proxies who knew enough to accept payment for the deed when the punishment constituting it would come ever so freely.

Arresting colors, transfiguring shapes, and then reading and eating and viewing all gave way to a paralyzed recognition of how many munitions were still hanging out there, tracing a precise parabola toward their intended target, whom I never knew nor could pick out in a despairing line up, but to whose end I had - symbolically or or by omission or otherwise - made some contribution.

How is a social contract cancelled, would you say? This may become something more than a thought experiment in a coming era when the tails cease wagging the dogs.

Why did you leave your father’s house? To seek misfortune

To become a muse for a disorienting movement. To chronicle civilizational massacre. To gather more experiences than might be collated into a particular historical epoch’s particularized blooming neurosis.

Because all the hollow men, the stuffed men, could not bring themselves to give honest answers to the questions:

  • What is your idea of perfect happiness?

  • What is your greatest fear?

  • What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?

  • What is the trait you most deplore in others?

  • Which living person do you most admire?

And instead caught trains to Trieste and Zurich and spread the feverish din of original declamations.

Vademecum on how desultory triumph leavens seraphic dread

All angels are terrible. No wonder their beauty triggers paralytic bliss. Pay the favor of the lash to any man or woman who doubts that two moments in their presence up in heaven would be withstood. Snap self-abnegatingly out of it!

For our supper we sing on the beat but three notes off the melody. Some sharp, others flat. This is recompense for selling our time so cheaply and letting wants go bearded as needs. And yet: rent, baby formula, tires that are not so bald as to reintroduce friction and grip to the idea of vehicular control, food that a great great grandmother would recognize as food.

Look around. The sad must not become extinct, even if the sad sacks do, or else the real will, too. Which is both an erudite wish and a brute truth, like pilfered taxes.

I am not sure anyone remembers how to spell heaven, much less find the map on which an X marks its entrance. And why would it need gates? And what would come of our wounds, if we entered them? Terrible but necessary, the seraphic beauty, leaving so many mortals cocooned in their still-to-be-deadness and insulated by the amniotic deadness of their still-aliveness.

he’s the most human kind of otherworldly kind of Greek god I’ve ever met.

Is what was said of the creator of the mind-bending and the navel-gazing and the honest artifacts, to whose nominally intact artistic gaze I am about to devote one month’s worth of attentive immersion.

Placate the void, feast until sick

The women with their ladles ladling out gray gravy onto lumpy potatoes, pivoting from one serving dish to another in smart slacks and sensible shoes, taking care not to let too much dead time pass before one asks a question of another. Small talk is not too much a distraction from adding heaping piles of steaming lasagna and filling styrofoam cups with cider. More than one thought this might be her last year of going through these wretched motions, that next winter might fill up with a cruise to Juneau or ten day stay a Tucson condo or a respiratory illness for which convalescence was an impossible ask. One never could tell what might happen, even when what was happening had been happening here, in this church basement, for longer than anyone could remember.

The men, those few who still came, sat hunched over their plates, maneuvering forkfuls of limp green beans into their mouths without tasting them, because they had tasted them before, because they had been eating the same green beans for fifty years, because they knew that no matter how much time passed, a plate did not serve its function until it was clean, and belonging to the club whose members hewed to that rule was not just a point of pride, but the non-negotiable crooked timber of being. This might be the last supper to attend, if courage had any substantive say, and so might as well feast on the perversities at hand.

My poverty but not my will agrees to the updated terms and conditions

In place of aesthetic fecundity, we have a frictionless expanse of the inoffensive. Ozempic shrinks the paunch the way methamphetamine used to hollow the pitted cheeks, which is, undoubtedly, a kind of metonym for the American pilgrim’s progress.

The frictionless expanse of the ineffably inoffensive kicks us loose from sense and nonsense. Daft hunks of meat speak with trumpet mouths into the bell of which a mute is forever lodged. Maximalists walk around with hammers for hands and see nothing but screws. They put their hands to ill use and make a mash of things.

The future we have lassoed unfurls only when desire is anesthetized. Excellence packets get distributed per the pro rata of prime numbers, lumping Pareto with the assimilating precision of Acronym’s inhouse speculative scribe. Consequently or independently - it’s hard to tell - an oily algorithmic residue clings to the cathedrals’ ceilings.

Come join me in the suffocating monotony of the online souk, which we would call dark ten years ago when USPS was a primary plug. But now the fentanyl sells itself. All of the dragons there were then have since become geckos and no longer spit insurrectionist fire but now grow new limbs on command.

This is how to supplant grandeur (or so nostalgia would have it) with seamless consumption (or so our less fortunate, more principled friends would frame their interdiction and tempt you to draw cold but aspirational comfort from believing in the virtues of making nothing new.)

This is how to buy into a compromised lot and foreclose on any schema of knowingness which has squatted on what to you ought always to be Terra Incognita in the desert of pure feeling.

The business of art is form, which sometimes is money. A tall bald man teaches that a cue card with a delineated process is the thing to catch the conscience of the king. With sorry on their lips, his proselytizers warp time to go back and make a magnanimous picture-talk feature. They can be overheard telling Philip to step out of the path of their sun, but no one in this canon’s dream realizes it was Alexander who listened and actually complied with their gospel. The focus on the weeping is misplaced - it’s the sound of the tear sliding down the cheek that does the underwriting, and without shame.

All of which is to say that aesthetic chastity, were it to exist, would not occupy a more privileged or more perspicacious position. The idea that comes only after the check cashes still stands or falls on its execution, and the jiggery-pokery criticism of the ascetic purists won’t prop it up or make it come crashing down, either.

Knowing this is ennobling. Just as poets create their predecessors, not all cynics’ skins can be scratched to mine cadmium squares. Heraclitus did not come to debase the coinage, but to call logos into being, into account. We would be fools to sing for a symbolic supper when the daily bread at hand is rising.

a sage for whom awareness is the live wire on which anomalous whims of ghosts and girls and eggs subsist

It isn’t just the vicious disregard for keeping one’s affairs to oneself, outside the realm of two factor authentication. It’s not just the decades’ long saturation with the culture of self-celebrity and pic or it didn’t happen (all those who sat on the bleeding edge 15 years ago repeated that phrase like a kind of self defeating koan). It’s how throughly we all have forgotten the ways in which silence visits violence on the foes and sycophants we’d all do well to vanquish.

We are against content production and those who produce it. First things last, on that account.

We prefer that the tincture of time not be wasted on those who would not withstand having their pupils dilated naturally, as though everything significant has always already happened. Give them the syringe with the drugs that can’t be swallowed.

We are against escaping lives of quiet desperation by increasing the volume of the desperation and the writhing spectacle of those in its throes.

More training reading the ones for whom making a moment is a death-in-life affair. It’s the mark that makes the picture, not the dent in the universe that the picture inflicts. Reception - the consequence of having looked and the effect of having been read - comes to wise fools and ascetics who have not lost an avaricious need for more feasts that hold the gaze.

We find that beauty makes its own argument, collapses its own interior walls, runs the score up doing desire’s blind bidding, and still makes time to strip from every interlocutor the first-person microphone.