The Three Greatest Arts

… if oratory be the art of speaking well, its object and ultimate end must be to speak well.

~ Quintilian

At the first station I took a leak, at the second, I bought a watch.

The third, there was a stand selling plush kitties, at the final, there was the car waiting.

Art is always expectant, imperfect, ephemeral. We don’t wonder too much about it.

The warmth of the crotch is always eternal, spiraling into the memory like a worm.

A bore, an ice-fostered whisper, a bore, a drill, a bore, a breaking-point.

Thank you.

So, the first art: THEOLOGY.



A slut that rapes sweetly.

I remember a conversation about five summers ago when I sought to show my lady that my grasp of a certain concept was not quite like the grasp that the others had, that it was harder and softer (paradoxically) at the same time and quite the thing to be desired … to find at the foot of the bed, red, horny, and ready for the end … oh yeah! To find the source of All. It’s not hard. It’s now. Myself. Take it or leave it. That’s what IT says.

Thank you.

Now, the second art: PHILOSOPHY.

An irredeemable purveyor of anxious thought.

Someone who orders books, someone one cannot trust. Someone … that’s it.

A one.

A footstep in the hallway as one tries to sleep. A plan for the future all fallen to hell. A plague, a stylish nymph, a tribe of women slavering like hounds.

Fuck philosophy! Too many toads. I’d push her out the window, if I were Bukowski, but like him, I’d only have that devil HER crawl back again.

Suck the Triad: POETRY.

Demotion recollected in tranquility. Devolution tortured by its opposite. Demonstration of the lust for life that renders pointless the fangs of the omnipotent ONE.

My teeth want to bite but I’ve a calcium deficiency.

Specter I. {& Only}

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams

In death's dream kingdom

These do not appear

~ T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”

A prompt ending is preferable. But much of life persists, against our wishes. And what is a wish but a specter or phantasm of reason? At many levels reason fails. It is not at the level of the impersonal that such failure sends the person into an abyss of self-doubt, despair, and finally: the terror of dissolution. No. It is at the level of the personal, the part of us connected with this vibrating world of factuality and the dehydrating self-concern of others, that we finally see, with two eyes (and with infinite loathing), nothing but reflections of the hideous form that is desire.

If the above paragraph sounds out-dated and Romantic, it is because all that needs to be said has already been said – one needs only to listen. One can waste time teaching Bataille, the Situationist movement, the post-modern monsters who seek only to create more text for university classrooms, etc. (and we’ll have a Blast doing it!); but to do so is to ignore the fact that it’s all over. We are done. We have had done … with everything. The end of the story is this: there is no story, there is only the specter of a soul seeking salvation. And – dear God! – there is no such thing. Nothing at all.

The ignoble smile of a woman, which promises only future disappointment, is a far more bitter and organ-grinding poison to me than alcohol! I’d rather rot poisonously from inside, the gin coursing through my veins, than crumble alone in the darkness of a woman’s apathy. Her eyes do not appear! Whatever they were. I no longer remember the warmth of her gaze: only the harsh glare of her own personal – to me impersonal – light.

When one stands upon a hill of power, a point from which the world is observed and all is planned … When one stands such, it is hard to believe that the mind is finite. It is hard to imagine that humankind ever conceived of something so absurd as the Infinite. Damp cellars and dry brains seem more like it … a conglomeration of the human condition.

I remember an afternoon in Liverpool, fine ale pouring from casks beneath a well-worn counter. The stench of ages, and all that … But so what?

I remember a morning in New Orleans, fire under my feet and terror in my veins. The glory of dying youth!

I remember an Italian restaurant in Philadelphia, and eyes and infinite future and love and clandestine sex and prompt reciprocation of my emotions and a glorious revelation of shared ideals and promises and something that must be written and the power of a man and a woman contra naturam (speaking Latin as we went) and a sign and a signal and a whiff of life and lips and kisses on a subway platform not willing to say goodnight … I remember all this and die like a monster writhing in its own filth

Prose Poem, with some quotes

... Though I have lost

Much lustre of my native brightness, lost

To be beloved of God, I have not lost

To love, at least contemplate and admire,

What I see excellent in good, or fair,

Or virtuous; I should so have lost all sense.

Milton, Paradise Regained

Liberalism, in thought and life, is a virtue. The dim green mists of Merovingian or Carolingian spaces give way to the porcelain perfection of an English countryside, and finally to a clapboard puritanical hometown where everybody knows your name. To be recognized immediately for what you are (as Christ recognized Satan in Paradise Regained)rather than for Who you are, is to be dragged onto a cumbersome subway platform at 2:00 AM by some weirdo who needs a place to stay and a little swig of whatever you've got in your laptop bag. She demands a prose kinema, indeed. Sapphic charms and Attic graces notwithstanding, when there is snow on the ground and liquor in the pouch, it takes little effort to induce a confession of love. All who draw breath beneath this sickly sun desire love, and all who desire love fear death. Nothing novel about that! Once in the bluest of moons, however, we encounter a force that rends us, and forces a view of primordial notions unconnected to the personality. The peace of the materialist - for whom all emotion is but an outpouring of chemicals - gives way to the war of the idealist: for whom Life is a series of steps, on the way to a firm platform from which to address eternity. Only, there is no eternity, just as there is no "I". I used to think so. I used to pretend that I had something to say, a message for the world. I used to think that art would subdue idiocy; that idiocy would give up its chaotic secrets, and lend to art some unpredictable something that would permit originality, once again. Not hardly. Faulkner said it well, in his little Nobel Prize speech:

It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.

Over what, exactly? Over what will we prevail? I look about me and see no enemy but the deception of my own nature. Sartre was wrong: there IS such a thing as human nature. It is in our nature to selfishly draw others into our cocoon of comfort, where we feel all will be well, if only enough people would place their rubber stamp upon our decree of autonomy, and fall in line with our will. Everyone does this. Parents want children who will mirror them; men want women who will praise them to the stars ... and women want the same from men. The heroic life is a necessary myth. An enemy is necessary. To be liberal means to grant freedom of action to all, and to glory in the diversity of this egregious globe.

una salus victis nullam sperare salutem

~ Virgil

Solution

The basic problem of philosophy (from Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Plato) has been the mixture (often confused) of cause and effect. Past and present, to be exact -- future has no meaning. Time flows like a river (sage Heraclitus said); life is a long wretched stretch out of which we seek to extricate ourselves (thus Plato). So what do we do?

I have a solution: we kill ourselves. End it all. Who needs it anyway?

She walks

The scent of her hair was in my nose this morning.

Yes, this is a quaint opening to a poem, but no less real for that... The memories of the softness, the silken voice, the love that comes with eggs served at six AM ...

Whispering something soft and kind, like James Taylor said ... Nobody does such things anymore ...

Days of harshness and hardness, days of lax love, people with agendas, the crippling weakness that takes one over ...

I'd like to write a Whitmanian litany right now, but I just don't have the strength

You must forgive me

Deor (translation)

This is a highly interpretive translation of a 10th century (?) Anglo-Saxon poem that I have rendered in my own style. First there is my translation; below is the actual text of the poem as it appears in the Exeter Book (10th century CE).

Deor

Weland, ready for worms by swords’ cruel bite

Experienced a world of hardship

Agony was his only friend.

Friends fierce and heartless,

They wracked him with sorrow:

He nearly fell

King Nithad bested him!

Weland, the better man:

Nithad hamstrung him

And set him on the ground

That is in the past,

Soon will our troubles be.

Beadohild’s mind was tormented

By the death of her brothers;

But knowing she was large with child,

Little she cared for the outcome of that,

So great was her brothers’ burden

That is in the past, Soon will our troubles be

Matilda, too, we have heard of, How her troubles were deep and numerous, Love-pangs deprived her of blessed sleep

That is in the past, Soon will our troubles be

Theodric for thirty winters Held sway over Maeringaburg: Few were unaware of that!

That is in the past, Soon will our troubles be

Wolf-minded Eormanric ruled the Goths. What a grim king he was! Many warriors bound, Beset by sorrow, Prayed heartily for the overthrow Of that tyrant

That is in the past, Soon will our troubles be

In the darkness his soul finds solace, Thinking this is the only place for him. Turning to the Lord he finds That all the world is beset with sorrow: Such is the lot of men. But honor and glory come to some – To him, the question remains.

Now let me speak of myself: For some time I sang songs to the lord of the Hedenings. I was beloved!

Deor was my name. Winters passed in this prestigious state. My lord loyal Until Heorrenda Songmaster Bested me! And my protector no longer wants me. Like a lone warrior, I am left without sword.

That is in the past, Soon will our troubles be

Deor (Anglo-Saxon poem, ca. 900 CE) Welund him be wurman wræces cunnade, anhydig eorl earfoþa dreag, hæfde him to gesiþþe sorge ond longaþ, wintercealde wræce; wean oft onfond, 5 siþþan hine Niðhad on nede legde, swoncre seonobende on syllan monn. þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg! Beadohilde ne wæs hyre broþra deaþ on sefan swa sar swa hyre sylfre þing, 10 þæt heo gearolice ongieten hæfde þæt heo eacen wæs; æfre ne meahte þriste geþencan, hu ymb þæt sceolde. þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg! We þæt Mæðhilde monge gefrugnon 15 wurdon grundlease Geates frige, þæt hi seo sorglufu slæp ealle binom. þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg! ðeodric ahte þritig wintra Mæringa burg; þæt wæs monegum cuþ. 20 þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg! We geascodan Eormanrices wylfenne geþoht; ahte wide folc Gotena rices. þæt wæs grim cyning. Sæt secg monig sorgum gebunden, 25 wean on wenan, wyscte geneahhe þæt þæs cynerices ofercumen wære. þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg! Siteð sorgcearig, sælum bidæled, on sefan sweorceð, sylfum þinceð 30 þæt sy endeleas earfoða dæl. Mæg þonne geþencan, þæt geond þas woruld witig dryhten wendeþ geneahhe, eorle monegum are gesceawað, wislicne blæd, sumum weana dæl. 35 þæt ic bi me sylfum secgan wille, þæt ic hwile wæs Heodeninga scop, dryhtne dyre. Me wæs Deor noma. Ahte ic fela wintra folgað tilne, holdne hlaford, oþþæt Heorrenda nu, 40 leoðcræftig monn londryht geþah, þæt me eorla hleo ær gesealde. þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg!

Wayland never made it

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