The ascetic’s last pleasure is blaming you for all he has forgone.

Reading Yeats on Blake, and Blake on Milton, and Elliot on Blake, and Milton on divorce, and Mlinko on Koethe, and Heaney on Yeats, and Hofmann on Murray, Solie, Seidel, Lowell, Bishop, Schuyler, Goethe, Heine - Hofmann on a shopping list, an obituary of a tepid life lived in the interregnum, on anything that causes his pen to scrawl on paper.

The phenomenology of a sigh.  The epistemology of a claimed infidelity.  The futility of a clasp on this living hand, now earnestly grasping. The causal vector of a distracted driver. The slow spreading of a spilled secret across the dead leaves by which this enlivening conversation occurs. Where Have You Been?

Like a dog with a bone (::) wrestling over Polish consonants

A soft spot for delaminating psyches grown aghast with insight that one day, potentially very painfully, all the pictures don’t just go dim, but suddenly stop dead.

A soft spot for old dogs with benign growths and ragged rancid garbage breath, tails thumping and tongue lollygagging around

A penchant for taking a mulligan on getting wrong footed in a difficult conversation, blinded by ego and shame, overwhelmed by an indiscriminate need to be liked by this listening someone to whom love cannot be professed but who is awaiting exactly that. Can I start anew? Now that we both know we are going to die?

A penchant for wild eyed sages for whom sitting on a stump is always exactly sitting on a stump and who offers a full throated hello to dawn but with no expectancy of reply.

The knife likes to think of itself as a mirror.

They say you can’t smoke in a church but they stop saying it soon enough.

white on white Lisianthus bound in twine and the ash burns into the filter

My bill of particulars can’t puncture the gaze affixed to your face, can’t make you listen.

Struck mute at the thought that you were always listening at my feverish attempts to be seen and heard and how tiresome that feigned ignorance must have been.

We’re seemingly done standing on ceremony, but of course calling quits isn’t quitting.  Not really.  For all my chips, I still don’t know that yet, do I?

I take pains to fathom glory and approximate a solace as cold as the frost on the stained-glass pane in this false knave

It would be easier to lie and supplant this moment with a breathless I love you, in the echo of which I might then ease out of the sanctuary, into the gray much of afternoon, saved from the cloying handshakes and painstaking hugs and animate aching.

But being kind and congenial in this appalling moment dishonors the grandiose monster begging to be fed.  Better to give offense in the full obscenity of this glistening grief.

There will be ham sandwiches and red juice and salted ruffles chips in an adjacent room and an adjacent time, as though anyone could swallow in a time like this.

There will be another round of having to say words as though they may pin and be pinned by their signifieds.

There will be consequences, penal and otherwise, if the smoking in the sacristy continues, or so they say, but they will stop saying it soon enough.

Flick ash, inhale, repeat.

The festering held always in.

The dissipating hiss of a struck match coming ever closer.

The wispy acceptance of not having you hear me say the things that I’ve always had to leave unsaid.

At last, some hope

That impulse toward propitious self-destruction:

 Exactly, and then you can say, If I hadn’t done this gram of coke I wouldn’t be a maniac, but it’s because you’re a maniac that you have. You can reverse the order of cause and effect and materialize your emotions. Those are very great advantages. And you commit suicide slowly instead of making the perhaps nauseating decision to do it totally. So drugs are great—drugs were great for me—in slowing down the act of suicide. In fact I think I’m alive today thanks to being an intravenous drug addict.

And of dead fathers neglecting to leave in their wills what they couldn’t help but devise in their genes:

he’s clearly a sadistic individual, and he takes advantage of some of the props that the world has lent him in order to aestheticize his existence, and reject what Americans call a can-do spirit. Not that it’s a can’t-do spirit—I don’t think any culture admires pure incompetence—more a won’t-do spirit. It shows that you could do, but then you refuse. Why? It’s a sort of decadence, the last withered leaf of an idea of effortless brilliance. Why worship a thing that doesn’t exist anyway? There isn’t such a thing as effortless brilliance, so there’s a cunning exploitation of things like that in order to cover the fecklessness.

And Lethe-wards sunk, a conjecture of time entertained

The insouciance with which a boy at six can sit in church and pick and discard a booger with a nimble finger’s flick, but not without first appraising and taking its measure. His eyes grow big as the money plate comes round and thinks of what God will do with those bills.

The wild look on the sunken face of a hospice ward who vibrates near the end with a sense of there must be some mistake as the stranger in a collar strikes a falsely somber tone and stumbles at the start of last rites.

Dilating from the local color. We become afflicted with the complacencies  of the wide water, to the point of forgetting that wetness is what we emerge from into this life.  Protest just the right amount and Goldilocks will leave your porridge be.

Style being the deference grace pays to uncertainty, and mother’s milk its own reward. We wait, as though somewhere in the baked soil of this big skied Flyover country we might finally inherit a st Aubyn steeped in Cather and ready to tell a story, having shed the callow, blue-veined skin of the rich wag’s frivolity. Eliot can lose St Louis, perhaps more easily than Edward can take on the trappings of populist navel gazing and a wide, serfless landscape.

Not every self to be portrayed can cock and wield a brush before it goes off. Even the autodidact from a barren zip code has to breed celerity on credit and earn stale poise through repetitious toil before the self mythologizing can take flight.

The best kind of a Brechtian soul, foulmouthed, deep-dyed in sin and dirt

Cheap grace and costly grace, tossed out into vivacious space, each wanting to be confused for the other, like how sometimes lust flies the flag of love. Cheap grace and costly grace, vying for the taciturn affections of confused theologians serving an apprenticeship to belief and pining for a moment when it becomes cast into a final fact of faith freed from the confines of coherence.

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Doubling as in Blake, the seeing doing doer who sees that it will be done without escaping the moment in which it is done, no longer wanting to be seduced by the time present-is-time-past lines that came after shantih shantih shantih.

The impatience for the new hour of stilled utterance where the poetry may shed its skin and well formed utterance, advanced as an argument-making meter, may appreciate into some form of quiddity on which not even the most perspicuous species of a surveillance state may levy a value-added tax.

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A gun running retired poet gone glassy eyed in the opiate den will do as a boon companion to the acolyte of precarious happiness who goes hoarse from singing its dead-eyed lamentations. The stairs no longer ascend to the treasury where grace sits without a price, which is not without a cost. It should not be lost on anyone that when the user is not a purchaser and is a product, these roughed out thoughts don’t boomerang back with alienated majesty.

Deleuzian hit man, spilling hot takes against a backdrop of a Roman criminal with lithe visions and a German secessionist multiple times over

The set up:

Nietzsche:St Paul as

DH Lawrence:Saint John of Patmos

Rising action:

In truth, it is Christianity that becomes the antichrist; it betrays Christ, it forces a collective soul on him behind his back, and in return, it gives the collective soul a superficial individual figure, the little lamb. Christianity, and above all John of Patmos, founded a new type of man, and a type of thinker that still exists today, enjoying a new reign: the carnivorous lamb, the lamb that bites and cries, “Help! What did I ever do to you? It was for your own good and our common cause.” What are curious figure, the modern thinker. These lambs in lion’s skin, with oversized teeth, no longer need either the priests’ habit or, as Lawrence said, the Salvation Army: they have conquered many other means of expression, many other popular forces. What the collective soul wants is power(POUVOIR).

[. . . .]

With the Apocalypse, Christianity invents a completely new image of power: the system of judgment. The painter, Gustav Corbet. (there are numerous resemblances between Lawrence and Corbet) spoke of people who woke up at night, crying “I want to judge! I have to judge!” The will to destroy the will to infiltrate every corner, the will to forever have the last word long – a triple Will, that is unified and obstinate: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Power singularly changes its nature, it extension, distribution, its intensity, its means, and its end. A counter power, which is both the power of nooks and crannies, and the power of the last men. Power no longer exists except as the long politics of vengeance, the long enterprise of the collective soul’s narcissism. The Revenge and self glorification of the weak, says Lawrence- Nietzsche.

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The deferral of the denouement:

Saint Paul is the ultimate manager, while John of Patmos is a laborer, the terrible laborer of the last hour. The Director of the enterprise must prohibit, censure, and select, whereas the laborer must hammer, extend, compress, and forge a material…. That is why, in the Nietzsche-Lawrence alliance, it would be wrong to think that the difference between their targets - Saint Paul for one, John of Patmos for the other - is merely anecdotal or secondary. It marks a radical difference between the two books. Lawrence knows Nietzsche‘s arrow well, but in turn, he shoots it in a completely different direction, even if they both wind up in the same hell, dementia and hemoptysis, with Saint Paul and John of Patmos occupying all of heaven.

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The drone, with a video camera, hovering over a man in uniform whose options do not include escape or survival, dignity in death or privacy in annihilation.

Of the five plastic eggs holding hidden candy, the children found only four. Wet wipes were distributed afterward.

First things first, I’m gonna eat your brain. Then your heart can think for once.

All the supplicants in town are singing karaoke, and the single moms who were teen moms are putting cornflakes on the green bean casserole.

One characteristic of the times seems to be a sizable percentage of the population which looks out on the world and believes there is good reason to think things are getting worse and will only continue to get worse.

A much smaller percentage of the percipient population is familiar with a litany of commentators over thousands of years who have looked out on the world and believed things were getting worse and would only continue to get worse.

Perhaps this is a great shock or a sick joke, but there is no such thing as a mutiny of small differences or an asymptote climbing toward the limit of the degraded worst. It won’t take too long to find great goodness and boundless love, cross-pollinated with destructive greed and ceaseless strife. It’s not about looking hard, and it’s not about optics, really, at all.

But what do I know? I’m just a guy who eats his meals over the sink and has to act like maybe his wallet is under the bed, even when I’m alone, as one step among many down an anonymous, seemingly ceaseless path.

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Reading the ceaseless murmuring of innumerable bees

Weinberger translated that Bei Dao that put me in traction for two weeks, a complete mental yard sale, when I was 33, unless that was when I was 26, unless it was Paz.

Miller, of Brooklyn but against it, late in his book about Paris and gashes and proto-Beat straight narration of a bender in Le Havre, vaults into phantasmic riffing that starts by quoting all caps Goethe, then segues to feverish delamination, plays on Fyodor, and declares in homage to Milton the love of everything that flows. And right before invoking blind aeropagatica and right after the arpeggios of vision quests and the aesthetic superiority of bilious screed, he declares, in the high style of this ten page riff:

It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us, but if that is so, then let us set up the last, agonizing, bloodcurdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war whoop! Away with lamentation! Away with elegies and dirges! Away with biographies and histories, and libraries and museums! Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living once dance about the room of the crater, last expiring dance. But a dance!

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The music critic recites:

I suggested that there might be no more potent motivation on earth than “I’ll show you,” directed at everyone and no one. “Exactly,” she replied. “That’s the energy that I had after I left that situation: You’ll fucking see. You just wait.”

YOU. JUST. WAIT.

Came no church of cut stone signed

To walk in money through the night crowd, protected by money, lulled by money, dulled by money, the crowd itself a money, the breath money, no least single object anywhere that is not money, money, money everywhere and still not enough, and then no money, or a little money or less money or more money, but money, always money, and if you have money or don't have money it is the money that counts and money makes money, but what makes money make money?

• atropic but not atopic from H miller

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There is a wealthy man in my modest anonymous third tier burg who must be mid 8 figures if not 9 figures and probably liquid to boot and resides somewhere on the spectrum with dwarfism and small dick energy. Quite good at making money, but repulsive in its social media display. And oblivious, in a characteristically autistic, archetypal oblivious way, to the aggregating cringe effect that comes from posting screen snips of a W2, a Lambo, a Rolex - all the accoutrements of new flash and the clingy tasteless gauche. And whether from envy or a faux sense of having better hypothetical sense on what to hypothetically splurge, it is a reflex to lampoon and lambast him in the text thread, as though the flaw is lacking a tighter compass upon which to rely in setting a conspicuous consumption course. And why I care enough to care at all is its own indictment, obviously. Ah but worrying changes nothing and you can’t help but arm critique with the unintended consequences of your neuroses and be afflicted by their abnegating acuity at the same time. Just the way it is

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The ordeal of undeserved grace

Dream breaths weigh out even if the scale seems broken.

But it’s not as if waking to erasure makes easier the bearing of frustration that comes with the jolt back into this life. Let’s just say it: having just the last scene of a dream on the tip of the tongue, and then trying to describe it, and cognitively coming to, as though from a fainting spell, as the words come into the tighter focus of an expressed thought, is a kind of exquisite and dutiful futility, in that the remainder of what happened immediately prior - the thread of the dream - always goes to wisps of smoke. You hear me, don’t you? You can pick up what I am putting down about not being able ever to pick up what the dream put down?

Or maybe it’s just having too many layers to pass through to get to bedrock of what hasn’t ever happened, but somehow did. And still the effort to adduce it plays out like a spinning top that was flung out from the exhaled space of that steady sleeping breath.

Another angle: you can’t complete the grind until you break contact, and then again it’s not really pulled off until you land.

Axioms to be rejected by, arias to saunter to, and codas to be buried with

Joy W. on the late style imprinted on a codex with the pen of the now dead man:

afterimages lingering in the afterlife of a mock moon, soon to be made absent forever in a world waning null.

Bowden making it known that he knew and was on speaking terms with the one who did the fear and loathing and making it known that he shares the abyss of the infinite with the one who taught us about fear and trembling from inside the carapace of all of the pseudonyms, and making it known that he broke bread with the unkept beards of all the sagacious desert rats whose bones are sun bleached and gnawed on.

He can speak in declarative sentences that would sooner sculpt despair than flinch at sentiment.

He would have you think he comes by it naturally, on account of being Chicago-born and going at things self-taught and making a record his own damn way, up to Madison, Wisconsin where he had been temporarily housed in the department of the futility of intellectual history, then on to an Arizona flophouse and a newspaperman on the trail of depravity, and hunting down and being haunted by all those stories, rising and falling in Los cruces and getting beat down in Murder City, old and tooth-rotten and scarred and honest about how the telling of it is fiction that aspires to truth and that is anchored in facts that no one really wants to believe.

Of schools we had our druthers, for blood we had our brothers

enlightenment (Buddhists), sagehood (Confucians), freedom (Kantians), authenticity (existentialists), or flourishing (Aristotelians).

As against that I poke my head into Kekulé’s dream and make space for the baleful effects of giving a heterodox gloss on scripture-based orthodoxy. The triune Godhead notwithstanding . . . .

The menu does not list prices, or tell what intensity of conviction might be mandated to cook the starch and metabolize the protein. Everyone is everywhere tired of just making do, and tired of complaining of being tired of just making do. In place of mental scaffolding on which to make an ascent I will suffer mere mental furniture on which to find a steady seat and rest my weary feet, stoke my fabulous resentment, palpate the outer edges of abundant honesty.

I won’t go to shanty town where the simulacrum of schooling is projected onto the largest wall still standing, which isn’t large, in relative terms, at all. There are no tickets to travel there. You just end up there, at the end of a rope to which it seems like you could be clinging or from which you might be hanging, from one moment to the next.

A dull feast of saints and apothecaries

We live in a trivializing age. The opportunity to make difficult judgments and act on them comes and goes. The opportunity to reach consensus on meaningless half-measures is seized. A step in the direction of what might pass for seriousness is always already paused mid stride. Like Zeno’s arrow, a half of a half is called out as a full measure. Few see the con for what it is; of those few who do, most seek to procreate with a passive investment rather than go out ablazing. Being alone, but not wanting to feel alone, we gaze into a flat plane and watch others who, being alone but not wanting to feel alone, gaze into a flat plane and watch others, too.

INTERLUDE

The most successful celebrities are products. Consider the real role in American life of Coca-Cola. Is any man as well loved as this soft drink is?

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We live apologetically, with fear and favor, passively spectating, slipping from place to place on the bile that is secreted in the stomach of the culture and calling that progress. It is an enervating procession from crisis to malady and back again, fitful and shrill but no longer productively restless.

Class, or a book urging the beating to death of baby whales using the dead bodies of baby seals

Fusty, Paul was not, though he also was not apologetic. He said the dropping of the bomb was not a mistake, or at least not a moral abortion, and he thanked god for it, as one who would have fought and maybe died if the war had not ended.

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He knew from war. Knew from history too. Irony as the great 20th century mnemonic device. He also knew proles and nouveaux, the signs and sizzle that we bring to a differentiating game.

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What I remember most clearly is the middle-middle bathroom (or was it lower-middle?) - with carpeted interior and upholstery on the toilet seat. Which is to say I don’t remember much very clearly, even what I remember most clearly. But it still hits, this ever more granular way in which we hierarchize and slice and offer up sacrifices to the status gods.

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Happily, I can report that my acquaintances who choose to come out as “wealthy” by splurging on sports cars have not choked on blood-filled lungs or sprained the anomie of the spleen and I have not confused cloying envy and ego hurt with the aesthetic distance of reproach.

And how even when you talk about painting. Pictures. Portraits. Art objects. Aesthetic currency. The whole shebang. You are talking to in groups, showing status, peacocking.

All so the words used to slay inner and outer demons may (in our delusional but not disillusioned heart of hearts) still be held at a remove and outside.

“do it or do not do it—you will regret both

An inheritance, this undaunted joylessness, making grimness a job. Squareheads with blonde hair and silent troubles, where salt is a spice and boiled mushy fish an extravagant variation. No wonder, except accidentally born, no vivacity, except slipped loose from the cohort. Give me a wagon, a scythe, and a sod house, with four score and fifteen theses and four nails.

Store contents under pressure, proof for two hours, pummel with the heel of the hand, and while waiting, feast on this grimace-as-art

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Like what Europe did to its wolves, this place will do to your dreams. Let be be finale of seem, is something you might read before the flame flicks out in the wind that seeps into the floorboards and makes wisps of dust.

But take with a grain of salt and a thimbleful of whiskey as medicine. Nothing competes with the lack of acknowledgment and cankered observations from a sticker (in Stegner’s sense) who gets stuck and feels betrayed.

A strong offended sense of the ridiculousness of the human being

Big hearted but not a sucker, reticent but not dour, flinty but not brutish, capable of losing time but not a dirty hippie: an assemblage of traits that would build and amplify each other into what might pass for spiritual vagabonding.

Whitman in the supermarket, rapping melons and tracing the supple ovals of Roma tomatoes. Chinaski at the track with an eye on the chalk and a fluttering heart. The New York Football Giants dancing asunder on the clotted blood of Exley and his stigmata. Helen and her goshawk, in love with the lengthening tumble of a shadow that just matches the downward slide of another solitary year.

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It would take the opposite of onomatopoeia, or at least someone who would tell me this is a “very unique” moment without melting my face off, for me to able to summon the magic that might bolster the velocity to break free from yet another wintry night’s sad clutches.

The stack 2024 early

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Flashpoint of cesium, half life of yttrium

From Stuttgart to Jena, from Jena to Breslau, a brief interlude at a sanatorium, then on to Warsaw and the ritual drowning in consonants as a purge against clamped consciousness, before tracing all the way back to Barcelona. Backpack with books and clothes, head full of a dreamer’s itinerant attention and unerring aspirations, thriving on weak tea, hard cheese, and spongy biscuits, buoyed by optimism equal parts unearned and irrepressible.

Dust into dust, yes, and so much of it seems gauzily drifting in the past, but the scene at every rail station along the way is a core memory stamped into every neuron that is still firing.

Philosophy and practice of the everyday

If we’re all wrong about everything, the life so short and the craft so long to learn, the assay so hard, so sharp the conquering, the dreadful joy that passes so quick and then being left alone again, what I mean is love astonishes my feeling with its wonderful working so ardently so painfully that when I’m thinking about such certainty I don’t know like the earth if I’m floating or sinking.

Orner channeling Chaucer in order to break my brain

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I don’t know why being left alone is a bruise when if I’m Forced to Play the part in a conversation of listening to what is said the klaxon in my brain which only I can hear (have you your own klaxon?) goes off and I just want it to end so I can be left alone again and trace round the edges of the bruise with unthinking fingers.

I keep reading about how poetry does not allow for neutrality and how there is no choice but to protest against this human brutality but there’s so much of it, we swim in heinous acts perpetrated against the relatively innocent, and I am so selfish, so self-absorbed, and my protesting muscles are currently all farmed out to my diaphragm, their exacting principal, which labors with their help to keep the air coming in and coming out, when all forces seem to come together to pin me to the floor and make it the same as the ceiling.

I did not mention that there is a blizzard and I am rendered a homesteader and the dog is restless and the children are embedded in a cinematic experience that tests the boundaries of homage to the Greek gods. To call it kitsch is to falsely summon Walter Benjamin and stuff his suitcase with unlaundered cartel money.

On a personal level, I don’t know what being more tired might feel like, and somewhere in a dark corner for the locating of which thankfully there is no map all of my squanderings have drifted and gathered and this fierce wind will come and scatter them soon.