Petite Dinosaur

She Walks Like A Petite Dinosaur

Through the spit-stained and crack-riddled streets of darkened Philadelphia.

But she is my angel.

She rips and tears and renders me helpless …

But she is my beloved.

Her mind is fused with a body that demands stimulus: her body and mind are one and she is whole. But she falters at the very edge of pure human experience, and makes art of her variable self.

She is pure in mind, but gored in spirit.

Her face is a reflection of that aeonic image of eternal production that makes artists of us all.

She sings like an angel and scrapes like a beast:

Her hair is perfect.

I tasted her for a moment and entered a portal beyond which lies a darkness that I simply cannot enter.

No: will not enter. I’m not going to offer explanations to Dante and Virgil …

My explanation is to this white space upon which I type these words.

The love of a man for a woman is a mystery and a chalice, one from which all should drink, sacramentally, liturgically, whatever the fuck you want to say …

But the purpose here is to remind myself of the mellifluous little lady (short and cute) that I’ve lost.

Scum seeps into the streets of every life that draws sustenance from this earth that feeds us all …

Walk away or stick around and get infected by the common sweat and all of its bacteria – all that oozes from the graying skin of dying humanity.

The purity resides when a rather naïve and fetishistic man places his mouth on a worldly goddess …

The body … oh, the body!

Memory tries, but it never fails, no matter how severe the eruption of tainted dreams into the sleeping brain of a bereaved body.

It Festers ... and we calll it Philly

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To be bored with oneself

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end,

But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

There was never any more inception than there is now,

Nor any more youth or age than there is now,

And will never be any more perfection than there is now,

Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

Urge and urge and urge,

Always the procreant urge of the world.

~ Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, III.

This only makes sense if one is in a co-breathing relation with the world (what the ancient Stoics called SUMPNOIA) … If I have this “spiritual” sense that the entire cosmos cares about my (well-)being, and that somehow I belong (metaphysically) in the exact space and time I inhabit, then Whitman’s gorgeous, exultant poetry moves me.

But I don’t believe it.

Walt wanted to make love to the earth itself, to fuck the ground he walked upon, and to somehow find communion with the iconic goddess “Nature” by masturbating himself into some sort of union with his supposed source of All.

The concepts by which we live are phantasms of the mind … that sounds like a quote, or perhaps it’s something I picked up from my life-sustaining reading over these past several years.

In any case, the urge to bring forth new selves into the world is universal. But the self, as a concept, is unique and unrepeatable, but gloriously malleable!

The Church Father were right to call it/us : HUPOSTASIS

.

Listen: as I sit in a café in Greenwich Village, martini in hand, smiling at the roving pseudo-angels that inhabit such joints, I am one self.

When I speak at a conference, where people engaged in actual research are taking the time to listen, I am an other – not a different (specious distinction!) self.

“The Same and the Other”? Horseshit!

Whatever swinging-dick motherfucker who came up with that distinction deserves to have his balls cut off!

There is only the self and the perceived world.

Period.

Get it?

Good.

No real matter. The HULE of our Being rots away at its own petty pace, from day to bleeding day … >We all fail and fall ... “Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.”

Day by day I’m drained of theTHUMOS that once made me a force to be reckoned with.

That’s fine.

Peace falls like a shroud upon us all, eventually.

If we are quiet in our hearts.

Someday I hope to walk, drunk (as usual) through a park or some suburban pathway and find a dying goddess.

Poe himself said that there is nothing more beautiful than a dying woman.

But it takes a dying man to appreciate her.

And the boredom of imminent death is enough to draw togetherPSUKHOIthat would otherwise remain Monads.

Gnostic-like.

In her is the end of breeding. Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.

~ Ezra Pound, The Gardenblockquote>

I wouldn’t dare – at this point – to declare anything about Pound. His nature was of another order.

Harold Bloom would be proud: I acknowledge the anxiety of influence.

There’s just one person that I refuse to acknowledge …

She lurks like a succubus in the dark Huysmanian night and she will be exorcised.

Peace, my friends.

To my enemies:

Asphyxia.

The contrast of blue and green is enough to make a darkened soul hate its ignominy. The Descent of Aeneas into Hell (French, circa 1530, painted enamel on silver copper)

Now let’s see: what has passed in the past 24 hours that requires a written message? Not much.

I drank, listened to Springsteen, slept, and drank some more … Oh, I took a 5-mile run around the local park. BFD

Perhaps Wordsworth can help us figure out, for this one moment in time, just why someone pretending to be a poet writes.

Taking up the subject, then, upon general grounds, I ask what is meant by the word Poet? What is a Poet? To whom does he address himself? And what language is to be expected from him? He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them. To these qualities he has added a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present; an ability of conjuring up in himself passions, which are indeed far from being the same as those produced by real events, yet (especially in those parts of the general sympathy which are pleasing and delightful) do more nearly resemble the passions produced by real events, than any thing which, from the motions of their own minds merely, other men are accustomed to feel in themselves; whence, and from practice, he has acquired a greater readiness and power in expressing what he thinks and feels, and especially those thoughts and feelings which, by his own choice, or from the structure of his own mind, arise in him without immediate external excitement.

(William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1802) – my emphasis

That is where I disagree with Bill. “Immediate external excitement” is the be all and end all of life. I cannot recollect anything of emotional force in tranquility. I can only recreate the scene and, perhaps (if I’m poetically lucky) the atmosphere.

How very few theorists have dwelt on atmosphere! I mean real atmosphere: the kind that causes a suburban lane to suddenly transform into a track behind a mediaeval English manor house, where the Gawain-poet likely wrote.

When I read poetical texts of any kind, I look less for content than for atmosphere. I don’t particularly care for Piers Plowman, but the opening lines:

In a somer seson, whan softe was the sonne,

I shoop me into shroudes as I a sheep were,

In habite as an heremite unholy of werkes,

Wente wide in this world wondres to here.

Ac on a May morwenynge on Malverne hilles

Me bifel a ferly, of Fairye me thoghte.

I was wery forwandred and wente me to reste

Under a brood bank by a bourne syde;

And as I lay and lenede and loked on the watres,

I slombred into a slepyng, it sweyed so murye.

(William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman, prologue)

These lines invoke a childhood past that never quite existed, but came close enough to the tenor of those ancient lines to produce a marked affinity. And that, to me, is sufficient to make a poem worth reading. I am no fan of allegory, which is why I cannot quite make it through the rest of Piers (nor the Faery Queene for that matter!). But I think, somehow, we all make an allegory of our respective lives. My descent into alcoholism can be described thus:

Because this beast, at which thou criest out, Suffers not any one to pass her way, But so doth harass him, that she destroys him; And has a nature so malign and ruthless, That never doth she glut her greedy will, And after food is hungrier than before. Many the animals with whom she weds, And more they shall be still, until the Greyhound Comes, who shall make her perish in her pain.

(Dante, Inferno, Canto I. – Longfellow translation)

If I tried hard enough (actually, it would be pretty fucking easy) I could allegorize my life as a struggle against this insatiable monster (the bottle of vodka in front of me as I write this), one to which I am rapidly succumbing, but yet still only on one knee! It is too easy to allegorize, which is why so much of mediaeval poetry is bullshit to a post-modern atheist. Yet I still love it for its atmosphere!

So here is my anti-allegorical tale:

One early morning, when I was about 10 years-old, I rode my bike to the edge of a brook near our street, parked my bike, descended the bank, and watched the water flow against the emerald green of the bank. I fell asleep, and when I awoke, a garter snake was warming itself on a rock nearby. I watched him sleep, and was amazed at his primitive beauty. Like a typical young boy, I tried to catch him, but he quickly slithered into one of the many rocky outcroppings along the bank. Now I could easily turn that into an allegory, but it was just an experience, a point in my life when my childish innocence had yet to be sullied, and my connection to nature yet to be mediated by all-powerful science.

Yes, that old-fashioned manner of speaking still applies.

And when I returned home, the excitement of that day became a tapestry of that day’s denotive texture and tinctured it with a silent sort of significance. (I’m being consciously alliterative and silly now, but still whistling-in-the-dark serious) …

When I recall those days, the obvious reference is to Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode.

But yet I know, where’er I go,

That there hath pass’d away a glory from the earth.

(lines 17-18)

For something in me that day spoke of a point of no return. Carrying my household gods on my back, I returned to that brook later … only to find: The snake still there, the same emerald bank, the same gently bustling water. But my eyes had veils over them, metaphorically speaking. Only when I was in the moment did it matter. All now is a memory. And memories are like assholes.

I may not agree that we are capable of relinquishing the “immediate excitement” of a moment while still remaining poets, but I do agree that something of beauty has left this world … but only because our (meaning MY) drunken eyes can no longer see it. When I embrace a woman today, I only feel a potential corpse. The days of feeling a warm example of the life-principle are long over. (If any reader of mine has read Dragonlance and I refer to Raistlin, she or he will know exactly what I mean!)

The manifestations and perambulations (my own choice of words) of the universe: it still goes on. As do I.

For worse.

I am, like Wordsworth said, affected by absent things as though they were present. It is a disease of the mind. The greatest poet of the 20th century (in my none-too-humble opinion) Sylvia Plath, said:

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.

Past and present, present and past, the point of immediacy which exists not. Too much fucking philosophy. Sylvia said it best. We don’t need Heraclitus or T.S. Eliot to tell us that the river flows and we are but tragic salmon. (Horrible analogy, but purposely so, like Lautréamont’s famous sewing machine). But I do need to make a point of this admittedly drunken ramble through a park filled with goose shit and crying brats, as I gulp from a bottle of Poland Spring water that is actually vodka. So here it is.

If ever I see the snake on the rock again, I shall recall my days of Gnosticism. If ever I meet a woman like Sylvia I won’t be a Ted Hughes but an Edward Moore.

And if ever I meet again the woman I truly (as if truth exists!) love, I shall tell her this (and so this day-long production ends):

Charon did not cry when the last soul reached the shore … He rejoiced, but with the melancholia of one who is alone, and has no purpose.

Sometimes it is good to have no purpose. At other times, despair becomes the wraith that smothers us in the night.

The poet creates a purpose, and it is his own.

That is why some of us continue to live.

All the learning in the world cannot compensate for the loss of the compassion that leads one to talk to a madman in Central Park at two o’clock in the morning. One may have to be drunk to do so … but by God (who doesn’t exist!) I’m better off for having been that person. Now that I recede into the dim caverns of my Avernian vodka, I hold on desperately, and as life recedes, my love for it increases.

Does that make me a poet?

Time is one No One’s Side

What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation.

~ T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

In an essay from 1919 Eliot said some shit about the personality being something that personality-strong persons should want (occasionally) to escape from … Load of shit (as far as I am concerned). He said:

“… of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”

If I could escape, even through art, from my personality (hupostasis) I would cease to be Edward. Fuck that! I’d rather be the drunken, rambling pseudo-poet that I am, rather than some plastic “artist” living as an artifact of his “tradition.”

So much for Eliot.

But what about REAL poetic theory? Is there such a thing?

My answer is yes. And I shall use my beloved as an example:

Sylvia Plath strangled her own life for the sake of her art … She watched her children crawl about like slugs as she wrote the masterpiece known today as Ariel. She died for her art, and I am prepared to do the same. Here’s what SHE had to say:

“… everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

Eloquence (and proper grammar) might be absent from her statement, but the sentiment (all-embracing) is there!

Sylvia is telling us that the highest to the greatest is cause for poetry. A quick blowjob in a subway station, or a major fuck in a five-star hotel (you see where my mind is at!) … All are worthy of poetry.

She herself was worthy of poetry, and I’d like to write about her … I just don’t feel worthy. So here I am going to perform a shameless imitation of my beloved. Harold Bloom would likely approve (and for those who understand this reference, you get my silent applause). So here I

go: Listening to Van Morrison While Guzzling Vodka

A drink of water laced with vodka slows my soul But sets it moving Why does Born to Run suddenly seem like great poetry? Because I am drunk. Why do I think back to those golden days when I fed ducks in the parks and spoke cryptic words with my grandpop? Because I recall what it felt like to be HUMAN. Days take their toll, and love dies … What is a man to do? We … I … must remember that my soul resides only in this world: In the air, in the trees, the geese, the grass that tickles my feet … I must remember … I cannot. A veil has fallen. Something called …. Who fucking cares?!! A veil has fallen. My eyes are dim … not like Milton’s, but like a drunk who stares too long at Botticelli. So what, then? The world recedes and I call out to it with the only faculty I have left: my voice. No one answers. So I spit at the world and await a fight that I know will never come ….

And so my Sylvia awaits an academic reply. Sorry Sweetie, not yet … too much vodka in my system. Someday, my glorious angel, I shall do you justice in “academia” (whatever the fuck that means).

In the meantime, I shall lend you this:

“Curiosity killed the cat … Kerouac’s Dharma Bums and On the Road …”

OR BETTER YET: Sylvia’s Colossus and Ariel!

You surpassed all of them, my love … all of them.

I’ll see you when my love grows, Sylvia … It won’t be too long. We’ll soon embrace.

In the meantime, take my tribute as a poetic memorial (if such a thing exists – we’ll have to ask Shakespeare!) and remember:

A world of experience does not create a person. For no creator exists. Not even the world.

Let us love from beyond the grave, ghoulishly, if it must be …

Philadelphia: the crust of plebeian scum

In Philadelphia

“It's a town full of losers

Then we're pulling out of here to win”

~ Bruce Springsteen, Thunder Road

When I first read Lovecraft as I child, I didn’t believe that towns could have personalities. How wrong I was!

A certain substance of impersonal conformism pervades the town of Philadelphia (it doesn’t deserve the appellation “city”)

Tattooed men and sluttish women

Those with various diseases, writhing forbidden in rooms not their own

A fellow with a penchant for philosophy and poetry fucking a bitch ten years older in a room with no hot water

Why?

Time takes its toll, and makes us all slaves to its sluttishness

My first orgasm was a revelation of otherness

My second was dirty

My third: PAINFUL

My fourth and final a gaze into eyes belonging to a dark demon, an eye of the pit, with no love, no mercy, nor any sense of inter-personal passion.

That gaze was celebratory of only the deepest spasms of the body

Not of the soul.

When the monsters showed up at the door and I stood my ground

Everyone surprised (including me)

I felt like a god!

They all ran off.

Me in my Armani suit and silk shirt scaring off dudes with big muscles

Who would’ve thunk?

But it happened.

I have only myself to thank.

I took the worst the world has to offer, and I gave back my own violence

Which is deeper and more powerful than anything lurking here in the sun.

After All … Wordsworth was Right!

Nature is the only source of poetry …. Although I AGREE WITH Coleridge that the language of the common peasant is not sufficient to convey the intricate pronomials of Nature that a reflective mind demands.

But Wordsworth, who said that “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility” (Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1802) was more than right.

We sit and wonder why the world grins and smirks at us with a manner approaching derision

.

It is because we refuse to allow our bodies and minds to be taken away – into a realm of Lovecraftian space – by the immortal Beauty that lands itself before us.

One day I sat in a park, drinking vodka, and watched a couple (hand-in-hand) walk about the lake …

And I felt derision.

The next day, seeing the same spectacle, I felt hope.

Moods change, but people prevail.

Tomorrow may bring a monster or an angel, or a some half-life Ialdabaoth betwixt BOTH.

OK

In the meantime, Edward is here, dying, waiting for his beloved.

She is resolutely unavailable.

Screening Myself

In tight spaces lonely people meet

In the dark and moist areas of life people often come together

Momentarily

Too many people are afraid of a kiss, not because it will change anything, but because it won't

A note from a clandestine lover at a rehab is worth more to me than all the works of Beethoven

The musicality of proto-love cannot be granted access to the realm of art:

It is too beautiful to be called 'art'

It is the enamoration of lost souls (a cliché I know -- but true nonetheless)

A loving glimpse into the eyes of the Other that no one (not even a philosopher) can conceptualize!

Thank whatever Force holds this galaxy together ( I'm being Star Warsy silly now)

Permits such things

A certain woman, a Vietnamese woman with a name that I cannot pronounce, made me feel like a soul capable of embrace:

Oh! that it would come, and that Wordsworth and whatever poets called out to nature in her country lived today would applaud and call us blessed!

Grace Smothers

The first thing you must do is kiss the woman's foot

Then you must kiss her butt, and ask her respectfully not to sit on your face for too long

Or else you might not wake up

If she is cruel, and gets you to the edge of consciousness, only to revive you and start again, you know your fantasy has gone too far

In Fact, it's no longer a fantasy, but outright torture

The desperation felt by a suffocating man beneath a merciless woman cannot be described: only shown

Once upom a time I succumbed to this

: I thought I was about to check out!

I woke up alone

which is nothing new

I fell down hard and had to rethink my symmetry

This is a poem about an atheist who desperately wants to be(come) a Christian

Tine will kill us if we're not careful

Time is a whore and a bitch and a block of bad cheese

Fuck time! As hard as you can!

Make her beg from the exit of your cock from her dispirited cunt!!!

nocturnal epiphany

As the night screws with us like a cowardly bully, we fight back

Temporary respite from the pain is no cure

What is needed is a word from above: a theotic utterance that won't just give us hope but the necessary love that makes life endurable

Recall Faulkner, in his Nobel speech:

:

I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice.

I agree with Bill up to a point: our voice is inexhaustible.

But we are also immortal: we just talk too much

The speech that we utter relieves our pain: it is not a desperate attempt to delay Charon.

I write and speak because my personality demands it

I'm not trying to overcome others with my prosopon

Instead, I'm trying to keep my heart from breaking and -- more importantly -- my soul from decaying

My sweet love, if you're still out there, please remember who and what I am!

Nocturnal Epiphany

Once I believed that the loss of my wife was enough to take God out of the world.

At this moment I'm recalling my devotion to theos

Not sure if I'm being honest, but I need someone right now

Loneliness is torment: it's a reminder of how fragile life is ....

As Faulkner said, we are not meant to endure but to prevail.

Prevail over what? Over the fragile shell of our existence?!!

I scent death every day: soon I shall be gone.

My like is declining

Perhaps some day soon I shall be able to express myself to all those who have loved me

In the meantine I suffer, and watch my hands shake, strangely (un)aware of the dominant

Dunamis

of the world

It's all fucking cruel. amd I want to smash it. But I'm too weak

I drank away the woman I love the most

I've licked the pussies of those that mean nothing to me

But here's the reality: never again

If I ever experience love again, it's going to be with an angel: and YES!

They do exist!

Philadelphia iS NOT WHAT IT CLAIMS

The Goddess Who Extends Her Hands

A spark hits the ground

It's a smile from heaven: one that tells us it's time to awaken to a new life

I once believed in pneumatic effluence

No such thing exists: what does exist is the life-principle in each and every one of us

What I mean is this: When the day dawns and the sorrow hits something gets us out of bed.

It's not God; it's something that reverberates in our souls

I call it hupostasis

One day, I'll learn to believe in theos again

But when I cry somebody responds: it's a sort of recollection of all the women I've ever lloved

It'a more than that, though

Love writes our life for us, and if anyone tells me otherwise, I'll show them HATE

I've found myself feeling misery for Wordsworth

His love of nature, his declaration of the glory of what faces us each day

He was wrong: each day we are met with a smirk, a face that tells us that we mean NOTHING

But we know better: we are sparks of the divine essence. Better than that which brought us here!

For s Pascal said: we are reeds, but thinking reeds

We know that we are capable of being torn to shreds by the crimson had of God

Yet we love him, for we know that there is no other manner of existence capable of sustaining our emotional needs

Physical needs are easy: they come with shit, foot, and sex

But EMOTIONAL needs: that something else entirely

I need to know that my loves of Beethoven, Botticelli, Bruce Springsteen, and cats are

Loves shared by others. Because a life without communion is a life without interpersonal communion

.

And such a life is no life, and it's worth leaving

One day recently I forgot about philosophy

I called out to God like a fool

Hoping some dumb foxhole prayer might save me

It didn't

But here I sit, beer in hand, thinking that it would be best to die.

No! Instead I'm going to explain to you -- if you'll give me a minute -- why this is so beautiful:

"The other error that scares us is our consistency: a reverence for our past act or word because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loth to disappoint them." (Emerson, "Self-Reliance").

The love of the other is what makes us human.

I am loth disappoint others with my words because I don't want to lose the necessary, life-affirming love of others

I am waiting for a goddess ... I've said this before

Once upon a time I sat beside a stream and held a woman.

She quoted Thoreau to me:

"There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

I'm an excitable boy. I have delusion of grandeur

However, like Byron, I know that salvation comes from a woman

Though the day of my Destiny's over,

And the star of my Fate hath declined,

Thy soft heart refused to discover

The faults which so many could find;

Though thy Soul with my grief was acquainted,

It shrunk not to share it with me,

And the Love which my Spirit hath painted

It never hath found but in Thee.

Lord Byron, "Stanzas to Augusta"

<

A Time for Hate ... LOVE

a time for peace, too late perhaps

It's a tad too late, but that's OK

Somewhere, somehow, I fell into an avernian ditch

I'm not quite out, but I'm scratching

Virgil is no guide. but this woman is:

One thing to say is this

Boredom kills, adventure inspires

But adventure destroys the mind and all it loves ....

Remember that!

Sylvia My Love

I met you one day, before I was born.

You smiled and quoted some bad poetry.

I made fun of you, but we laughed, and for a moment I fell I in love.

Then you died.

I wish I were older, perhaps I could've rescued you from Ted ....

Or probably, more likely, I would have destroyed your soul instead of your life.

I am evil.

She Mocves Me

The pain and the pleasure linked together in a sick dance.

I found myself writhing, striving, for a new chance at life, One that would involve no sacrifice. Just love.

But that concept – love – is rather new. The Greeks said

agape sou

Who knows? What I do know is that there is a time for hate and a time for when he, submissive, yielded to her :

He yielded to her, and his heart was glad.

~ Homer, The Odyssey bk. 24.

Gladness of heart … Let’s recall what ancient language formulated that phrase …

Forget it. In our vernacular, we’ll say that joy has its hands ever at its lips, bidding us adieu. (Keats, “Ode on Melancholy,”)

loosely quoted)

As I sit here, watching a fountain merge with the sky, and children run with “joy” about the wooded lanes of this park, I realize that “there hath past away a glory from the earth” (Wordsworth, “Immortality Ode”)

One of these days I’ll watch for a little while a Lou reed-style satellite.

One of these days I’ll feed geese gain at the park.

One of these days I’ll wake up without the shakes, and eat a sandwich, alone …

Always alone. I should quote Poe, and I guess I will, but not what you’d expect:

Some human memories and tearful lore, Render him terrorless: his names’s ‘No More.’

` Poe, “Sonnet – Silence”

But I’ll smell the grounds again around the little brook along our street.

Someone wielded a sword at me once ,,, it was a fantasy.

Talking is a function of the mind.

Singing of the soul.

Adjectives are perverse, and make us feel like rotated brains.

Somewhere I recall reading about a man who sang only to himself:

I think I’m talking about The Hill of Dreams, by Machen.

Lucian was the fellow’s name.

I stop sometimes to admire nature and find I cannot.

Ducks are cute, and trees are lovely, but my soul is desecrated.

Why then do I persist?

Here’s a little something:

Around a Park on a Monday

She Moves Me

The pain and the pleasure linked together in a sick dance.

I found myself writhing, striving, for a new chance at life, One that would involve no sacrifice. Just love.

But that concept – love – is rather new. The Greeks said

: agape sou

Who knows? What I do know is that there is a time for hate and a time for when he, submissive, yielded to her :

He yielded to her, and his heart was glad.

~ Homer, The Odyssey bk. 24.

Gladness of heart … Let’s recall what ancient language formulated that phrase … Forget it. In our vernacular, we’ll say that joy has its hands ever at its lips, bidding us adieu. (Keats, “Ode on Melancholy,” loosely quoted) As I sit here, watching a fountain merge with the sky, and children run with “joy” about the wooded lanes of this park, I realize that “there hath past away a glory from the earth” (Wordsworth, “Immortality Ode”)

One of these days I’ll watch for a little while a Lou reed-style satellite.

One of these days I’ll feed geese gain at the park.

One of these days I’ll wake up without the shakes, and eat a sandwich, alone …

Always alone.

I should quote Poe, and I guess I will, but not what you’d expect:

Some human memories and tearful lore, Render him terrorless: his names’s ‘No More.’

` Poe, “Sonnet – Silence”

But I’ll smell the grounds again around the little brook along our street.

Pushkin scented Life

So much of life I have neglected

In following where pleasure calls!

Yet were not morals ill affected

I even now would worship balls

I love youth’s wanton, fevered madness,

The crush, the glitter, and the gladness,

The ladies’ gowns so well designed;

I love their feet--although you’ll find

That all of Russia scarcely numbers

Three pairs of shapely feet…And yet,

How long it took me to forget

Two special feet. And in my slumbers

They still assail a soul grown cold

And on my heart retain their hold.

~ Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin

Mark Alexei

On Listening to Georgs Pelecis on a Particularly Terrible Day

On Listening to Georgs Pelecis on a Particularly Terrible Day

By Edward Moore

Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), The Children of Niobe A piece by the composer Pelecis, entitled “Nevertheless” takes me back to an old love-making scene (and I use the word “scene” carefully, for no real loving occurred, just a fantasy reaction) … Anyway (I almost wrote “nevertheless”) something cold and calculating in me was born that night … or perhaps not born but encouraged to tickle the hyper-nervous tendrils of my imagination. It is often tempting to use adjectives like “tragic” or “revelatory” to describe moments that are really just selfish jaunts into the domain of the sensual. I love sensuality, and the physical form … What did Wallace Stevens say?

Beauty is momentary in the mind – The fitful tracing of a portal; But in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies; the body’s beauty lives.

(“Peter Quince at the Clavier” IV.51-54) The body lives in the taste left on my lips, the sweat that covers me after … After what? Pretending that she was Aphrodite on her crimson shell, or Thetis with the glistening feet coming to console her war-weary … lover? No, the body dies every day, in myriad ways, and only the noussurvives. Nevertheless, a fetish cannot be sustained by intellect alone: it requires taste, texture, a certain scent, and (hopefully) words to go with it. To hear a word of sensual kindness from a desirable woman is probably the most beautiful thing the world has to offer a man. But we – or at least I – seek alternatives. This descending motif of Pelecis, in which the violin vies with the piano for supremacy is like one of those rare and wonderful episodes of love-making in which the woman can laugh and the man can get annoyed and both find, in one orgasmic moment, that they love each other more than words or even music can tell! Some things are terribly funny, like a woman farting in the tub and the man making a crude joke, and then wrapping her in a towel, telling her what a goddess she is, and tasting every ounce of her womanhood with an ardor born of aeons of evolution. It should be obvious from this that I have, as D. H. Lawrence famously put it, “sex on the brain.” But it’s more than that. It’s a return to origins: to a time when all was new and I could be silly without being branded a drunken fool with a foot fetish by women with whom I used to discourse upon the finer points of Hegelian philosophy. So now I have turned from Pelecis to Beethoven: quite different effluences of the divine pneuma. Since I’m on to Ludwig’s violin concerto now, here comes a poem. A gentle tread upon the grass How different from the blistering bluesy antics of concrete! One wants to be surly but can’t (for) The tired indifferent glance of the world makes us long for friendship. Tears can fall with power, like an aggressively scraped G-string on a Stradivarius. But they can rain gently, too, like the tears of Echo as she tried desperately (and ingeniously) to court Narcissus. It’s the same, really. Remember what Whitman said: “There is that in me – I do not know what it is – but I know it is in me.” I would love a woman who would rape me with words: Who would tear back the dull husk of my noetic diaphragm to reveal the glossy suppuration that festers within. I would love such an one – not with a love of roses and chocolates, but with a love of Niobe-like contentment with a glorious pissing-off of the gods. To make something, as ktisis:create (which is a Christian term) … Perhaps to be demiourgos… That’s better. I want to invite love into the world, not demand it! When I sit on the shore fishing, I want to catch crabs … Crabs that will walk backward and return me to the history of my race. When I make love to a woman, I want to be carried forward, into a world that even my drunken mind can’t conceive. That is Love.  AGAPE

Too late to talk, too late to not think

I have no ashtray and my cigar is smoldering.

Why on earth can I not rest at the feet of a woman like this ...? Sometimes I think that loving beauty too much is a curse. Yannaras indicated as much in his Person and Eros. Begin: I once loved a goddess, a noetic form morphed into an all-too-mortal frame. Or coil, as Hamlet would say. Chivalric codes once placed Woman on a pedestal, to be worshipped. Now we expect women to be confident, aggressive, even cruel. But what happens when a man cries ... a Roy Orbison-type cry, not a pussy-bitch cry? What then? I think I've spent too many hours at the feet of beautiful women, worshipping them, and not enough time striving to strip off my Herculean shirt. I'm going to end on a lighter note: Madame Recamier probably had a hygiene problem. I wouldn't have wanted to ... well, sure I would. But I'm human, hygienic, and hyper-sensitive. And I've only had six beers today. 24 ouncers!

Ladies in Transition: Prey

My feet killed me today, as I walked the city, searching for a goddess

...what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

~ Allen Ginsberg, "A Supermarket in California"

I know little about America, I'm no Walt Whitman, but I do know something about the scowl of Charon, and the manner in which it rotates one's eyes back from the darkness to the light of the agalmic entity that I've posted at the head of this ... A sweet Venus, born without luck, as if such a thing exists ... A sweet Venus, one with whom I could vociferate like a loquacious bore about Bach and the atonalism of Schoenberg. Perhaps she would smile and embrace me, or else walk away with a smirk ... Either way, I would be living. I'm not living now. I'm a silent form frozen in a monument of sluttish time. But I'll tell you this: Life won't let me go. I'm engaged and enraged and plagued by the very air I breathe. I'd like to pass into the other realm, but I know it doesn't exist. My Venus is out there, writhing in liquid ... It would be too lame to say it's my tears. Ha! Again: Do you exist, my angel?

Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my angel?

~ Ginsberg, ibid.

"I'm all alone, and I'm expecting you to lead me off in a cheerful dance."

~ Bob Dylan, "Workingman's Blues"

Earlier today I rested beneath a brick wall, on my way back from buying beer. My body is not behaving like an Iamblichean soul-vehicle. No: instead, it's breaking down, rigidly, with the ardor of a rotting oak. But somehow, day after day, I get my ass out of bed and look up shit like this:

If you think of its birth and death as ever-recurring, then too, Great Warrior, you have no cause to grieve

~ Bhagavad Gita, "The Second Teaching" 26.

I'm no warrior, but I am the greatest person I know, for I wake up with myself every morning and pass out drunk alone every night ... Unless, of course, I have a woman with me, and then it only exacerbates my monadic nature, demanding an almost Gnostic-like reversion to utter silence. Sige as the Coptic Gnostics called it: it meant the profound stare of the lone eye into boundless space, with no one with whom to speak, and nothing to hope for ... So why do I grieve? Because I need an aeonic partner. Someone out there knows what I mean. Someone ... I don't want to undergo the labor of birth again, nor the infantile mommy-cry of death, Bhagavad Gita be damned. It's a nice thought, but you know what's nicer? My beautiful lady, smiling at me at the end of a long day, kicking off her shoes, and telling me not to talk about Heidegger, but just to make love to her. And it says I have no cause to grieve!

T. S. Eliot called Dido's snub of Aeneas in Hades "the most telling snub in all of poetry."

Among them Phoenician Dido wandered, in the great wood, her wound still fresh. As soon as the Trojan hero stood near her and knew her, shadowy among the shadows, like a man who sees, or thinks he sees, the new moon rising through a cloud, as its month begins, he wept tears and spoke to her with tender affection: ‘Dido, unhappy spirit, was the news, that came to me of your death, true then, taking your life with a blade? Alas, was I the cause of your dying? I swear by the stars, by the gods above, by whatever truth may be in the depths of the earth, I left your shores unwillingly, my queen.

Virgil, Aeneid bk. 6.440-476.

Need I write more. I left my own shores like Ulysses, with ancient mariners still adept at adventure. But tired as I am, I weep daily the folly of my passage through the straits.

Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace And rest can never dwell, hope never comes.

~ Milton, Paradise Lost bk. I. 60 ff.

Bereft of hope a man stands strong. There is a suppliant nature that is encouraged by hope. A different nature – not that I believe in phusis, after having read Sartre – desires only to stand like Manfred on the Jungfrau. Shades of my past haunt me. Is that nature? Regions of sorrow kick me in the posterior each day. Is that nature? Rest is a dream and a second death. No nature there. Hope, on the other hand … Someday I hope to see a tall blonde woman strolling through a meadow, white shoes in her hands, bare feet stained green with grass. I’m talking about my ex-wife (a terrible appellation!) Sweetness lives in memory. And I’ll leave off, like I often do, with a quote:

Her blue-veined feet unsandl’d were, And wildly glittered here and there The gems entangled in her hair.

~ Coleridge, Christabel I.63-65. I’m writing / quoting here of my ex-wife. If the pain is not apparent, “I never writ, nor no man ever loved.”

Ophelia, by John Everett Millais (1851-52) Edward Allan Poe said somewhere that there is nothing more beautiful than a dying woman. He was drastically wrong. Life on the ascendant is what we all strive for, and what we love. A beautiful face beneath the water, with a sorrow unspoken engraven on her visage … No! Rather, a bright set of eyes across a table at a cheap diner, promising something unattainable: that is what makes life worth living.

Omens are always bad

...bad as the omens were, The end was wrose, for as the bride went walking Across the lawn, attended by her naiads, A serpent bit her ankle, and she was gone.

~ Ovid, Metamorphoses, bk 10 In times past I have found that certain illusions of dearth plague my mind with dear fear. The passage in pearly white sandals of my wife, across the lawn of our reception, made me think that someday those feet would bleed, and that I would not be there to tend to them. I crossed over into Phlegethon, I think ...

Into that thick and murky atmosphere, Fear gathered in me as my error fled

` Dante, Inferno Canto XXXI So what? The tenebrous veil of this valley came as a surprise to me? Hardly! I set myself to sweet worship and a love born of hopelessness. I did look on the face of theos, like Moses, and I spoke these words:

The Lord made a babble of the language of all the world; from the place the Lord scattered men all over the face of the earth

` Genesis 11. And so I die slowly, being misunderstood. No hunter of men like Nimrod, just a false prophet of my own fantasies. And somewhere, someplace, my Venus still walks, in her pristine white sandals, soft soles waiting to be kissed. And some other man has her. Yet I write, with sorrow and Mozart as my two best friends. Oh, to die! "Old man! 'tis not so difficult to die." `Byron, Manfred III.151.

open your eyes, O idiot, innocent boy, look at what has happened: once there were sunlit days when you followed after where ever a girl would go, she loved with greater love than any woman knew

(Catullus, "here's no time for nonsense") Roman poets give us some wisdom, but they seem to have had a charmed life, with women like these: the Graces of Botticelli, or better yet, Maclise's lovely Madeline, brushing her hair. Of course these were Renaissance (or early 19th century)versions of Romanesque ideals. It doesn't matter. Where are these women today? In my mind. Dwells angels of the highest aeonic order. I dream of rosy lips like Botticelli's Venus, or like that haughty woman reclining on David's couch. The one I love the most recedes from me. Like Cat Stevens sang: a lot of nice things turn bad out there. If I had proleptic power(not like Macbeth's!)I'd recede into the vast quietude of my past, when I rode my bike, wearing a Who t-shirt, trying to make the woman of my dreams love me. Now I KNOW I'm crying like a bitch, but let's be real. What man ever wants to see the woman he loves recede into the misty distance?

Tapestries of life. We weave ourselves into clumsy corners where no spiders dwell. By which I mean: dangerous entities intent on devouring not our bodies but our fluid essence. I don't bleed red like most ... I bleed noetic effluvia, and I try to share it with women who simply don't care ... or at least make fun (which is worse) As I guzzle my beer and smoke my cigars, I think of the Bayeux tapestry, and how my life is little more than a collection of black threads.

O ravenous hell! My evil hatred rises against your power

Catullus, "Dress now in sorrow, O all" Shantih

A Vietnamese Woman Who Made My Heart Kick Its Heels Across the Dance Hall of Life Her smile and face made me want to kiss her immediately. So what did I do? Like a schmuck I talked about Li-Po and other relatively Asian poets, while missing out on the glorious luster of her lips, the cute manner in which her eyeglasses slid down her adorable button nose…I had a lot to tell her: about how Queen Elizabeth sent Sir Francis Drake on a pirate mission …. Or better yet, how Milton, blind as a bat, declaimed the verses of the greatest poem the world has ever known. She only smiled, with eyes that made me melt, and desired to embrace her beauty. Nothing else mattered. Botticelli’s Primavera mattered not a whit to her, only the promise of my kiss. I tried to explain atonalism in music to her, but she just smiled, and took my hand , and begged with glorious eyes for a kiss … And what did I do? Like an ass I started reciting Shakespeare. “O that this too too solid flesh would melt,” etc. …. She held me, and listened, and for a moment I felt like a man again. But when my tongue tasted her body, I danced across the hall of life like a horny jester, and I ceased to be me.

Metaphysics lives in a parking lot

There is a thing called hule and it invades our souls

Someone had better be prepared for rage. There would be more than ocean-water broken Before God’s last Put out the light was spoken. ~ Robert Frost

A root beneath a NO PARKING sign declares nature to be a unique, unrepeatable entity – Not prosoponbut hupostasis How many know the theologic-philosophic distinction? One, perhaps two … and one I’ve lost. A Monad without the all-formative, productive Dyad. So now what? I smoke my cigar, awaiting governmental largesse. My watch is white gold and platinum, my shoes are KC, but yet I’m poor. I’ve squandered my money on liquor, women, and Onyx Toros. But somehow the Monad remains. Augustly aloof, rotting in the juices of his own noetic effluence. This root beneath the sign that I keep tapping, enjoying its permanence, makes me feel ephemerality as almost a virtue. I sing a song and dance a dance with myself …. Quietly alone, awaiting the worst but somehow always finding an angel. They DO exist, but not in dreams or shadows as Stevens once put it. Divinity is an attribute of our evolved selves. I lack it. But I love it in others. The sweetest woman who ever lived (in my own biased estimation) was the pretty Vietnamese lady who hugged me when I cried, and sent out a page for me to make sure I didn’t leave before (chastely) hugging her goodbye. And yet still I return to this root. It establishes a strong sense of  - a sense that the wooden nature of reality will never abandon us. A sense that no matter how much vodka I imbibe, I am still Edward Moore, 39 years old, at the midpoint of my life … And like Dante in his dark wood, but with no Virgil to guide me. A guide? I reach out when necessary, and as Ginsberg once wrote, Mohammedan angels dance on the rooftops. What more can I ask for? My angel ….

If I can get metaphysical for a moment .. Bach's 4th Brandenburg Concerto combines the windy plurality of the Platonic Dyad with the stable Saturnian force of the One. This may seem too precious, but I'm really just trying to recapture my old love of music by way of my recently usurped love of philosophy. My ex-wife has excelled where I failed, and I can't bring myself to write philosophy any more. So here is a poem instead: Neither death nor immortality was there then, No sign of night or day. That One breathed, windless, by its own energy (svadha'): Nought else existed then (The Rig Veda) How glorious to have no death, life, nor breath -- just consciousness. Probably the finest definition of a god that I've ever encountered. But where does the HUMAN come in? My pain and stress and desire for yet more alcohol leads me to an embrace of life that is perhaps cold and abusive, but ... I'm Edward, and shall remain so. But over atop all of it, on my face with her moist femininity is my Venus. Breathing is pointless, when there is something more precious than oxygen in the air. Smile of a woman, her sweet caress and (clichéd) tenderness, all this makes the pain endurable. Without it, I fear I'm done for.

There is a painting by Daniel Maclise (1868) entitled Madeline After Prayer. It's based on the poem by Keats, "The Eve of St. Agnes." Madeline is painted therein like a sad angel. I won't comment on the clarity of the presentation, for I don't particularly care for that too lengthy poem by our greatest poet since Shakespeare. However, the melding of melancholy and effortless beauty in that woman's face moves me to thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. I write this because I recall a certain young teacher, when I was in high school ... She had that ethereal beauty that makes sensitive souls turn like flowers to the sun. When she saw me carrying around a volume of Lord Tennyson, she began to show an interest in me that I interpreted as, well ... erotic. It wasn't. But the recollection of the fantasy has sustained me through many dark periods of a turbulent life. I am listening to Chopin right now, pretending to be stable and connected. When in fact, I'm drunk and ready to go start a fight. I promise to write more about Maclise. It's important, to me if to no one else. Peace to all. And if you ever stop loving life, read Shakespeare.

The Aristocrat: The Aristocrat: A Drunken Poet Rambles

The Aristocrat: The Aristocrat: A Drunken Poet Rambles: The Aristocrat: A Drunken Poet Rambles : On Listening to Georgs Pelecis on a Particularly Terrible Day By Edward Moore Jacques-Louis Dav...

The Aristocrat: A Drunken Poet Rambles

The Aristocrat: A Drunken Poet Rambles: On Listening to Georgs Pelecis on a Particularly Terrible Day By Edward Moore Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), The Children of Niobe A...

A Drunken Poet Rambles

On Listening to Georgs Pelecis on a Particularly Terrible Day By Edward Moore Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), The Children of Niobe A piece by the composer Pelecis, entitled “Nevertheless” takes me back to an old love-making scene (and I use the word “scene” carefully, for no real loving occurred, just a fantasy reaction) … Anyway (I almost wrote “nevertheless”) something cold and calculating in me was born that night … or perhaps not born but encouraged to tickle the hyper-nervous tendrils of my imagination. It is often tempting to use adjectives like “tragic” or “revelatory” to describe moments that are really just selfish jaunts into the domain of the sensual. I love sensuality, and the physical form … What did Wallace Stevens say? Beauty is momentary in the mind – The fitful tracing of a portal; But in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies; the body’s beauty lives. (“Peter Quince at the Clavier” IV.51-54) The body lives in the taste left on my lips, the sweat that covers me after … After what? Pretending that she was Aphrodite on her crimson shell, or Thetis with the glistening feet coming to console her war-weary … lover? No, the body dies every day, in myriad ways, and only the noussurvives. Nevertheless, a fetish cannot be sustained by intellect alone: it requires taste, texture, a certain scent, and (hopefully) words to go with it. To hear a word of sensual kindness from a desirable woman is probably the most beautiful thing the world has to offer a man. But we – or at least I – seek alternatives. This descending motif of Pelecis, in which the violin vies with the piano for supremacy is like one of those rare and wonderful episodes of love-making in which the woman can laugh and the man can get annoyed and both find, in one orgasmic moment, that they love each other more than words or even music can tell! Some things are terribly funny, like a woman farting in the tub and the man making a crude joke, and then wrapping her in a towel, telling her what a goddess she is, and tasting every ounce of her womanhood with an ardor born of aeons of evolution. It should be obvious from this that I have, as D. H. Lawrence famously put it, “sex on the brain.” But it’s more than that. It’s a return to origins: to a time when all was new and I could be silly without being branded a drunken fool with a foot fetish by women with whom I used to discourse upon the finer points of Hegelian philosophy. So now I have turned from Pelecis to Beethoven: quite different effluences of the divine pneuma. Since I’m on to Ludwig’s violin concerto now, here comes a poem. A gentle tread upon the grass How different from the blistering bluesy antics of concrete! One wants to be surly but can’t (for) The tired indifferent glance of the world makes us long for friendship. Tears can fall with power, like an aggressively scraped G-string on a Stradivarius. But they can rain gently, too, like the tears of Echo as she tried desperately (and ingeniously) to court Narcissus. It’s the same, really. Remember what Whitman said: “There is that in me – I do not know what it is – but I know it is in me.” I would love a woman who would rape me with words: Who would tear back the dull husk of my noetic diaphragm to reveal the glossy suppuration that festers within. I would love such an one – not with a love of roses and chocolates, but with a love of Niobe-like contentment with a glorious pissing-off of the gods. To make something, as ktisiscreate (which is a Christian term) … Perhaps to be demiourgos… That’s better. I want to invite love into the world, not demand it! When I sit on the shore fishing, I want to catch crabs … Crabs that will walk backward and return me to the history of my race. When I make love to a woman, I want to be carried forward, into a world that even my drunken mind can’t conceive. That is Love. agape 