Lebensklugheit, or Musing on Herzog

The poet must not avert his eyes.

There is quiddity run amuck in the work of Werner and the world views it at various times encapsulates.  Like an undulating bass line from a Portishead song, or a squiggle from the erudite Virginian Mr. Twombly.

Ask forgiveness, but acknowledge also that not everything that is permitted stands on all fours with what the “ought” contains.  I can do it doesn’t mean I should.  Exceptions include eating a shoe and walking across a country on a pilgrimage with the faith that she will stay alive for at least as long as it takes for you to arrive at her side.  So faith can be medicine.  Or sustenance.

I can imagine that a long still shot can be a philosophical statement, even if I can’t quite seem to get captured in that conceptual netting.  Slipping through, though, doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate it.  When Werner speaks of the horror, or fire, or survival in the face of epistemic collapse - or take pick of whichever epic, grand subject most moves you - it doesn’t take the needle from the record.  That too is an article of faith, not so much on display as enacted in time.  Medicine, sustenance, and being able to attain meaning where others, uttering the same words and thinking themselves as having ascended to the same intent, falter and fall short.

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A similar incapacity to wake up from a dream

I.

in the great tradition of denuded realism, the female half of the young couple does not have the time or privilege to see with sepia-infused sentimentality. She is pragmatic, perhaps even frigid, cold, bitchy. The couple is wildly successful in material and style terms, but spiritually empty and existentially dubious still. A baby question lingers. But so does a remodel question. Much will be made of the worthiness of examined and unexamined lives, but only to extent they play out within socioeconomic brackets and a range of affect that has like two registers.

stripped down to its core, the notion that this sentiment or life circumstance is common does too much work. Dealing in Representative lives is a different kind of crutch no matter the niche in which it is done . Proxy status and synecdoche paper over an unwillingness or inability to speak from and for the idiosyncratic snowflakeness of the individual person. So that, naturally, the auteur of this particularly denuded realist artifact can’t be criticized if his or her instantiation feels flat. It is not a failing but a testament to verisimilitude. And so we end up with art whose chief virtue is to render with exactitude the limited flawed lives of its limited flat characters - getting the details and textures absolutely right is no substitute for a lack of interesting lives. It is a vicious virtuous cycle, a closed loop of banality.

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Another iteration of that repetitive pattern around the mourning star

A year ago today, a tornado sauntered on through the biggest little city in the 605 and tore down part of a tree that casts a shadow over my entire front yard. The downed limb struck the side of my house. I was alone. I “slept” through it, as I was still very much afflicted with the long lonely nights laying siege to myself with that baffling cunning powerful companion. And at some point that night, before the storm hit, I had made this:

{[collage being the greatest form of imitation]}

{[collage being the greatest form of imitation]}

A cavalcade of concentric circles limping down the line

All kinds of stories with unnamed narrators proceed along intersecting axes of reliability and legibility. The idea that “To be seen is to be understood” overindulges the cult of knowing in advance; and its counterpart, “to be understood is to be placed” ignores the observer’s shaping function. Sometimes we don’t need to wait until act 3 to know that when the climax comes, all the players will be scarecrows. Or when it comes time to button things up, the only ink available will write white.

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All the pretty horses had trenchfoot and ringworm

Slanted and enchanted,

this room full of bass clefs

and cranach the elder prints

a moribund pitch for the

business of dead souls:

get your smithy here, half-off,

Up above at the surface,

extra vagrants milled around

the steam vents, smelling like fried oil

and feasting on the ethereal spiff of

well-intended confabulations about

what the future may hold in store

if they would simply slough off their skin

and become entirely different diffident people.

down below the bubbles in the pot simmered

and I searched for a cheap but direct way to show you I am almost partway healed.

The jams are in the process of being kicked out.

1. On what to focus. 2. on the mothering arts

****
The word “happiness” in the center of one circle, surrounded by 10 slightly larger circles set out at evenly spaced intervals.

^^^^
The long interruption to our regularly scheduled programming is now rescinded. Because hope springs eternal and life-density in the future is always underestimated, the presumption is that more will come of longer length, greater vitality, and more often.

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A man named Whistler made a painting of his mother. It is of an old America. Its visual vocabulary may have become so assimilated as to obscure the fact that it is an old weird and internally conflicted America. Like all Americas are, regardless of vintage or how far back in time or moral depth we go. Anna Matilda is so patient, if not unruffled, and yet so very little of the visual math adds up. She is elongated. The depth of the field of the floor is just barely registered. She is not malevolent - the piety is strong in this one - but she is a mystery. Art is about mothers, in the strong sense that old art lives in the shadows of older art, which lived in the shadows flickering on the walls of the cave as the dancing fire crackles and breathes. There is (or was) a monument erected to Anna Matilda in 1938 on the base of which states: A mother is the holiest thing alive.

are the mothers of the past alive today in the habits and practices, virtues and vices, certainties and ambivalences, of their progeny? The answer is proleptic in the question. That you can’t be half-pregnant does not mean you cannot help but be partway determined, somewhat nurtured, good-enough rendered. How much you can help, how much you can overcome, and the varying degrees of how much too-muchness you can handle - these have staying-power salience in the old weird and the new as yet undiscovered Americas.

Of course, doting sons are no more and no less apt to become estranged fathers. This one was raffish, libertine, and said (by Dorian’s father) to have spelled art with a capital I. And doting sons are not necessarily borne up from devoted mothers. That things don’t add up, that causation is a fickle and illegible master, that ifs and thens flourish most unstintingly in the clean ecology of conceptualism, are all things Whistler knew. And, I suspect, his painted mother did, too.

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Citizens, consumers, users, cyborgs, and zombies

States have citizens, markets have consumers, platforms have users, world-makers have cyborgs, and dystopias have zombies. To have and to hold, for better or worse, with greater and lesser degrees of conceptual felicity. A person - an agent who acts or is acted upon - can be or become all such things and pass across the apparently clean lines of demarcation that differentiate their groupings. This is not all a person can be or become.

Ir is not for us to determine whether the thwack of an open-handed slap that one administers to the face with one’s hand - wake up, snap out of it, focus - is sufficient to still the grave and gravid thoughts that come when autumn is knocking at the doorstep. Endless summers are fictive realms of sun-kissed skin and white space calendars, and the task of the insomniac is to act as though the Finitude of the present - this exhausted and exhausting moment - exists in and has exited from its own realm, adjacent to but not encompassed within the endlessness.

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Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd

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I have not yet turned my back on impractical pursuits and the primacy of process over outcome.  But it seems more important to try to focus on getting just the right amount milk in the bowl so it is proportionate to the volume of cereal.  (Imagine every bowl of cereal consumed in this life set out in a room, staged six feet apart from another in a grid.)

Our moods do not believe in one another, and it is hard to tell whether that is a feature of moods or a personal shortcoming.  Outside it is the kind of August rainstorm that traumatizes pets and shears odd weak or rotten limbs from the biggest trees.  Inside - in this room at least- the ghosts are silently pirouetting, with the occasional jete’. Inside - in this body at least - the diastolic and systolic are following the lead of the shambolic.

I and I, the man explained.

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Which would you have, wise madness or foolish sanity?

It comes back to that old line from Ecclesiastes about how he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. On the other hand there is the one that goes like:

“If a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.”

Every so often, I remember that there was a purpose behind that idea of developing critical thinking and growing into the space it creates, which is not always comfortable and often affirmatively discomfiting. And that purpose wasn’t to charge someone money for a service. Or to be the equivalent of an intellectual mechanic.

also:

I think of things like the subjugation of women, drone warfare, neoliberal capitalism, Christian and Islamic fundamentalism, racism, police brutality, mass incarceration, massive wealth disparity, corporate sovereignty, the weapons industry, the fossil fuel industry, the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, population explosion, factory farming, and the destruction of wilderness as opportunist infections.

- from ahnoni, the creative independent interview

I was in rural Japan at a workshop on data collection, surveys, and research and the quite charismatic host was attempting to address the idea of whether it was compromising to do interesting work on behalf of large corporations. And he made a persuasive case that of course it is but that is no reason not to use it as a launching pad to do equally interesting work that might leverage a social good. Maybe this is an apologetics in form but in its delivery it was not in anyway blinkered or sooth-said.

Cui Bono? I would assume everybody who is anybody and everybody who wants to be somebody. Be a nobody, though, a traveler of gravel roads and a liver of a life that speaks sui generis, and you might just end up somewhere new. That is its own kind of apologetics - the self-enobling notion of go it alone.

Post hoc, primo rex

Would you feel more copacetic if this was all just a study of advertising, narcissism, Ben Lerner novels, chronic fatigue syndrome, and the semiotics of leopard print throw pillows? Maybe you booked the wrong sleeping car on the train that starts at John Hopkins with the double Ds, Paul and Jacques, and ends in the eerie rectitude of nihilism that was the trench coat mafia? Scuzzy townies across the land do what they want to who they want to do it to, and Craig Finn takes note. Except this time there is a saxophone player on each song and a pious Dadaist chant coming from the speakers of the Muzak in the gender neutral bathroom.

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Do I contradict myself? Very well. Picture the man in the suit staring in the mirror of an investment bank’s opulent bathroom, basking in what a woman he fucks but does not like calls his aura, but with blood streaming out of one nostril onto a Ferragamo tie (paisley, in aquamarine and turquoise and cream) and a heart rate of which coupled-up humping rabbits would be jealous. A frozen moment, yes? Or am I just seizing on that decade-spanning trope as a fictive dodge? because maybe even false confessional narratives of the mid-born triumphalist hitting bottom end up sounding nothing like the high-born being snuffed out by fate. As though Michael Fried’s theatricality and Michael Jackson’s aching falsetto did not eventually teach the same lesson, if on different ends of the existential spectrum.

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[sharp cut] “no gods no masters,” in black ink on oh so many torsos. We aren’t promised tomorrow anymore than we are promised a full moon. I heard the one about the last priest dies asphyxiated by being strung up by the last capitalist’s disemboweled entrails, and I heard the gasp too. Then what? Do humans even have entrails? Does it take a radical to verify or is it just biology?

Would you be copacetic with some real talk about self-help, self-care, self-actualizarion, and the shedding of the self’s skin as an overcoming to, rather than a succumbing to, the baby-stepped half-assed but still virulent gesture toward self-annihilation? I think maybe when we talk about the virtue of vulnerability maybe what we mean (and risk) is a shallow form of voyeurism. Call that a trenchant confession or buoyant form of social commentary.

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It is rare to be in the midst of a metastatic mode, of painful transition and productive growth, each one extending and calling into being the other. Yes yes yes I am in that midst and it is bringing this year of our lord 2020 to a fine point.

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Amy, plural

Enlightened ones may live everywhere among us, looking like functional failures.


I was sitting in a chair reading Amy Hempel’s a full service shelter, exploding on the inside as I came to its final statement. I finished my coffee and went to the kitchen.

I put on on Aimee Mann’s Mental Illness and listened to the first 3 songs over and over again, eleven times total, 33 listens, waiting for the clotting to finally take hold.

Every so often I am reminded of how a work (a text as we used to insist on saying) can shake me free, kick me loose, wield a stark and unruly autonomy over whatever pattern of coherence I thought I was rutted in, like a needle on a spinning record abruptly skittering from its track and the party stops so cleanly that it becomes clear that what we presumed to be a party is entirely and utterly something else.

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He was preoccupied with inventing the uncanny


That we might decide to have our say, to expel the passive virtue of unspoken acceptance from its place of priority, and instead speak our minds. Our vapid desultory minds, already colonized by the givers of received opinions, bathed  in mimeographed sentiment and crepuscular glory.  A slurry of metaphoric dung beetles and animatronic earworms had crawled up noses and down alimentary canals, digging in and making mischief the entire time we were having our say and having it speak us into being.

Do I protest too much?  Surely I do.  In all the hearse houses in the world, she had to walk into mine, amidst the bawdy self-satisfied speeches and the gullet-shaking peroration, it was not unlike what the devout would describe as being struck down and held fast by a bolt of faith from the heavens.  Not unlike it all, from their perspective, those devout who would happily offer themselves to the devourer.  And the entire time, the one that she came to see was banging away, anvil in hand, making sure we could remember things that had not happened and vouchsafe that disconnect, right quick.  

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Letter to fallen idols, or that imperious look

Peter Doig is one of the best painters. I need to write him another letter and will soon. His is the type of making that pulls and pushes at discovery, where the thing that is discovered does not so much map onto the thing made as to exist adjacent to it, but not in its shadow. Of the world but not in it. Dreams and floaters and the shimmering pointillism of cluster headaches and migraines with aura. All types of aura with the Doig paintings.

His work makes figuration endlessly interesting to me - the way a work that is recognizably based on some model (whether a photo or a mnemonic image) can have clarity in the sign-signifier way of correspondence and still vibrate with alternative meanings and slippage.

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My life is a joke and I am my own straight man

It is possible that the water that was subject of the statement that all is connected is not the water that is the subject of the statement i am drowning. Go ask Alice.

This is not Alice.

This is not Alice.

Smack in the middle of an unraveled life, it becomes hard to identify the latest end from the earliest beginning. Not quite sure whether this frazzled end right here, at my finger tips, is snarled up like a too-long-in-place braid or just its own natural undone end state.

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