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.