The Text+Body+Invention Project

2005-09-27T16:16:00.000-07:00

So there are links to each of the "Novels" below, I should mention that most of this is first draft work; though the first and second have been reworked, but the third hasn't even been copy edited. Parts of these are sophomoric, parts of these are derivative and certain parts may be incomprehensible, but over all the project so far has been an interesting experience for me. Also, the third text is only 3/4 finished and the fourth is nonexistent save for notes and concept.

2005-09-27T16:10:00.000-07:00

Ship Recaptured
Who has hung this young dog from the basement ceiling?

Whiteness is not limited to the color of its coat.

You may ask when is my vision of the future simply deduction.

Am I morally (spiritually) called upon to reject whiteness?

Nearly Furtive is easily the tallest in the duplex, though the dog’s death could not have been his intent. The words THESE, ARE, STILL, BLIND, PUPPIES, I, MUST, KILL are as fresh in his mind now as when they were in his childhood and the lack of resources necessitated such things. He would think the words BY, ROCK, OR, BY, WATER and their gums would catch the edge of his fingernail.

Of course he is not entirely sure he didn’t tether the pup to the rafters, leaving enough slack for the dog to walk a circle on the cool concrete floor. Excitement and the dog’s motion thus restricted were not considered.
The rope constricted when the pup ran circles.

What concerns me here is the direction the rope was turned and by extension the opposite direction it spun until stopped by the dog’s back paws. Turning, as you know, is a way Time has of repeating itself, it is a method of emphasis and a pathway to deduction.

There is a white rope and a white wall and a thin line of sunlight coming down the stairs from the kitchen window on the floor between them warmer than white to which it is easy to distract one’s attention.

Return to England
A new name, a death; you see the cycle. A method of reference cinched off and left to gasp in the wings.

After the marriage of his mother and Nearly Furtive came to pass in the apartment of a friend across the hall he thought his first life over. There was, of course, cake immediately following the procedure of which he partook, filling what had always been his body under his given name.
He may say SUN and it is there on the tabletop and there across a white blazer and there atop his brother’s platinum head. For him the sound of the word JUTE when whispered in this apartment, after the procedure, is the beginning of his propulsion from them.

Perhaps we assign too prime a place to our names.

Soon he will be dead in name only, but will persist in body. It is as if to be resurrected is to be anointed with a new name, a name not of one’s choosing but which is intended to elicit both glory and ire.

Adventures with Friday
Plot point 3: a morality play

L: I have this recurring fantasy about killing someone.
L: I have this recurring image of striking someone’s head, just above the left ear, with the broad side of a clever.
L: This fantasy is predicated upon various situations in which my action would be acceptable.
L: Not the broad side but the back.
L: In this image the skull has collapsed flat and sits atop a stupidly hulking body.
L: In this image I am watching myself relax, my shoulders relax.
L: Any blunt object with a sharply defined edge really.
L: This fantasy includes protecting or avenging someone.
L: In this image there is a moment of release in which any notion of personality abdicates.
L: In this fantasy I imagine moving the body out of the house as if it were one of my own limbs engorged.
L: As if by my actions this fantasy body had accreted to my physical body.
L: As if this was a method of making honesty.

Island Again
The Nouns: Father 1, Mother 1, Father 2, tomb, table, sunlight, honey, face, shape, question, sunlight, honey, chairs, boys, he, document, judge.

The Verbs: Absconded, Absconded, Absconded, opening, streaming, pooling, agree, raised, signed, judge.

Like to a river the light between the larger people and the boys.

Liken the moment to an island its line drawn out straight and severed thus commencing its recoil, its manipulation into the shape called his name.

2005-08-31T17:42:00.000-07:00

2005-08-31T17:37:00.000-07:00

New Plans
The past is something entirely separate from me, not because I doubt its occurrence but because I doubt its transport.

There is significant memory and then there is the re-called.

What he can remember mostly clearly from the event are the following: large dog’s white fur, Nearly Furtive’s ankle boots, small dog’s chest laboring for breath, clean puncture wounds on either side of small dog’s chest, three and red, small dog swaddled in a blanket and cradled in his mother’s lap.

Now to explore these statements one must assume a number of things and that assumption is the beginning of the narrative of the event, which can also be called the beginning of memory or the beginning of identity (this being based on expectation and memory). Looked at closely, I suppose, any repository of identity I may have is collaborative. My memory is faulty and so far exceeds the bounds of my body proper that to say “I did this” could easily be misspeak. Of course, my body itself is problematic; having exceeded all probable expectations it seems moot. For him the narrative of the event stands outside of chronology. The narrative of the event is a method for him to reconstruct his first life.

THE EVENT
At the home of a friend of Nearly Furtive’s in Appalachia he and his brother mill about the backyard with small dog. Large white dog breaks tether and descends upon small dog: maw over back, teeth into either side of rib cage; small dog lifted and shaken. Screams from him and his brother. Nearly Furtive emerges via back door, jumps from patio and kicks large white dog’s ribs, sending it flying a short arc and dropping small dog simultaneously. Ankle boots catch the sun gleaming through the tall grass.

So the narrative of the event would be redundant; I have witnessed all its recurrences and the changes are minimal, once the dogs’ colors varied and once small dog’s flaccid tongue mirrored precisely the color of the flesh glimpsed through one of the punctures one hour after the dog’s death.

Savages Return
He was not without mischief.

One constructs an interior to an event, thus giving Time a bi-directional trajectory, giving it a leg to stand on. It should be accounted that for him to say “I remember these events” would be conjecture, even whimsy in a certain regard. How much does one remember, but more importantly how much of what one remembers is true? In the end it is of no consequence, the notion of one’s past is pure commodity shored against orders to make one’s self identical with the situation at hand. He can’t imagine why it is that the deaths of animals occupy such a large portion of his first life.

How like writing they are.

The dog kept fenced to protect the chickens at his grandmother’s house sunk to the ground, any volition it might have had sapped into the gun’s report, any notion of apology condensed to a pill-sized hole behind it’s left ear.

It had occurred to him that the dog might understand, instinctually; remorse ridden out onto his sleeves he clutched at his shoulders and watched.

He’d tried to throw a stone into the dog’s water, quickly became unable to distinguish the sound of stones and sticks against the ground from stones and sticks against the dog’s flanks and back. It backed toward its house, lips curled, unrecognizable.

His male cousin was the slowest and most awkward falling slowly as the dog fell upon him, snapping at his back and head. What could he have done? Again a remove from what was happening furled within him, seeing things occur, without sounds, with enough precision to press his upper and lower jaws together as the dog’s jaws pushed into his cousin’s pale skin.

How like writing the sutures were across his cousin’s back.

Prisoners Freed
When beginning with a veil of smoke the narrator must parry disbelief only most of the time.

It is always a problem, who to trust, isn’t it?

I have begun many stories. Many stories are nothing more than a line permuted.

His first life is running out. He has come to distrust memory so much. The reasons for this are self-preservative. He is able to construct perfect memories which are entirely untrue, though lovely when written out. Scant as his first life may have been it has brought him, via something like a search feature, to assemble the appropriate path toward his future.

Cruelty so often passes for kindness.

You may balk as I say this to you, but if you will consider contexts, consider stance and channels which purport to inform, consider the face so wrung with sight that the respite of words, of being told is easily believed over what is clearly occurring before one’s eyes, you will know it to be an honest statement: “Cruelty so often passes for kindness.”

The cigar smoke hanging around his great-uncle and grandfather was, while not precisely a veil, sickening and did blur his eyes enough to function as a provisional veil to what ruckus the men were doing and watching in front of their bodies. A few paces back from the chopping block, from the stump, the men stood laughing the small ax between them. Chickens were killed occasionally, regularly for food. Watching the chickens flop and bleed was stupid he’d decided, his grandfather had offered the ax to him even held it in his hand, it was warm and comfortable, but he’d declined. The final body came to rest across his grandfather’s shoe, right foot. So death can take your head, but give you an entire man in its place, he thought through stinging eyes. Later he’d watch his grandmother wear a carcass over her fist, limp skin and white, and pass it slowly through a Sterno flame, singeing pin feathers.

2005-08-13T17:38:00.000-07:00

2005-08-13T17:34:00.000-07:00

Fear and Isolation
Juxtaposition is a mannerism which ignores coincidence. The coincidence of his brother’s raised thumb capped by the three inch bottle neck from a jagged coke bottle.
This manner of opening the body requires, the glass really a cowl upon his brother’s little thumb which he’d spun with the jerk of his hand forward and to the side, the letting of blood, the resultant fine red line encircled his thumb, made an island of his thumb, forced the rest of his hand to recede. It seemed natural to both he and his brother that the blood on the white and green tiles would retain its shape, the shape of eyes which through their blunt vision created a false reflection of the scene as if the blood itself had been generated entirely of the tiles there in the stairwell of the tenement and by seeing in purely vertical terms imagined themselves columns extending without contradiction.
This was the moment in which he began the mechanics of replacing juxtaposition with transformation in the world. He saw these seeds spread asunder and upon the realization of Space start to incubate a mythology, each to itself. Here, of course, well, here of course the image of a mouth surrounding his brother’s thumb, a mouth grown from his wrist and meant to devour the hand, occurred, which he chased back with a smack of his hand against his brother’s knuckles sending the bottle neck down the stairs and into pieces.
Once on the landing and through the door, the helplessness of human skin against any object struck him as one of the largest gifts a person could ever know, he placed his hand in the middle of his brother’s back as if to guide him through the passage between lives.

A word about blood and gravity:
I can remember an initiate splayed in a pit traversed by a bull. His face was so like a child’s sweet smugness at knowing the continuity of Time while plowing the dried thigh bone of a chicken through the dust toward a homestead composed of the birds remaining bones. When the bull’s gut was opened and it sank against its tethers the great wash of hot bull’s gore upon the young initiate and his ensuing low growling moan, not at the sick of it, but at the passage, the taking up of life through his pores while the bull’s innards pulse upon his body, the generous swath of Continuous Time swelling his body, traveled into the earth herself.

Methods and the accompaniment of methods.

His hand on his brother’s back was betwixt compassion and forgetfulness. It was during the walk back to the apartment that by forgetting he came to know Death. He was clothed by forgetting what had come before.

The Lost Ship
There are those who profess to accept the coexistence of every possible world, that is of every possible result, at the risk of being unduly recorded as a member of their lot, for choice within one’s destiny cannot be ignored, I will once again assault chronology here with regard to his life. For when the following occurred is difficult to judge, though occur it did the significance of which, you will see, is self-evident.
While clad in the robes of an attendant at the Catholic worship service he was meant to mete out attention for those in the congregation whose attention had wondered by raising his eyes while the priest raised the host to be transubstantiated above all there heads. The moment of the change was to be reckoned with the ringing of a handset of brass bells, which rest against his right thigh. While the priest’s mouth moved and made shapes the sudden thought of fires and insect legs caused the crease to the left of his genitals to itch and burn in a manner I’m sure you have experienced when boredom has caused the skin of the body to exert a hypersensitivity. His right hand remained at the ready as his left found its way to the crease in an attempt to ease the embers and exoskeletal legs out of his mind. In the process of this attempt a tremor traversed his pelvis and rang the bells thus interrupting the transformation, thus, in this instance, he came between the Bread and the Body and perhaps absorbed a portion of the divine body in its stead.

Encounter with Savages
Curiosity with regard to the span of one’s life is quaint. One’s life is endless, whatever one takes that to mean. My own life is endless, not only because my body is incorruptible both in the above and the under worlds (this a side effect of having changed genders twice and thus having become whole, so that the flow of Time parts at my step), as my life is a method of coincidence.

Upon crossing the threshold to this room.

The room Nearly Furtive had taken up in closed around his skull like a hood when he crossed the threshold with his mother and brother. It was small and the manner of detail nondescript, save for some book shelves composed of cinderblock and planks and the picture of a man dressed as a dog which was framed and placed off center on the wall nearest the window. Rather than a hood walking into the room he had the sense of a deep immersion, of plunging far into a body of water but not fearing it for knowing the depth removed fear. It was precisely at this moment, upon crossing the threshold to this room, that he lost the ability to imagine himself as an old man. In those few seconds with the sun taking up more of the room than any of them he knew, as certainly as Charon knows his distance from shore by when his passengers begin forgetting themselves, he would never be an old man.

A scab ending his ring finger, right hand, distracts him from the page.

This matter can be taken along two variants both acceptable, both plausible: NAME and BODY. This knowledge came to him by a path differing from my knowing the future, it came to him, I suppose, via a different route for each variant.
For NAME it was obvious from his being buoyant upon the passivity pent up around him, from both his mother’s and Nearly Furtive’s basic tendency to fall toward what is easiest, to take a track in which passivity comes to the fore and can be held, in their own minds at least, as a martyrdom of sorts. He saw what would transpire, in fact had know it since the trip back to Pennsylvania. He would cease to be his father’s son, first in body then in name, (Here I can comment on his somewhat myopic future telling, while separation does often connote a sense of abandonment, what he fails to foresee is the hand of Fate and his reunion with his father) via the eventual joining of his mother and Nearly Furtive.
As for BODY rather than a pronouncement it was something like a virus with which he’d always been infected, only just now realizing it. The stores he had for absorbing what went on around him were, of course, finite, but were also brimming. Put simply his body was exhausted with storing and having not resoluteness but caprice and pity like a pungent musk associated with denial wafting constantly around.

HIS DEATH IN NAME
As a consequence of the marriage of his mother and Nearly Furtive he was re-born fully clothed and without prior knowledge, without memory, at a time slightly subsequent to the ceremony. His first memory being a pathway of light, white and spilling over the precipice of a table, white and really filling the tabletop so that papers were absorbed; a pathway of light ending at two chairs and the judge’s mouth in the shape of a question.

HIS DEATH IN BODY
Coming from a family of illness and hypochondria his body wasn’t fragile but was pitted against itself, so that to proceed in any manner meant a subtle consumption of some liver enzyme, say, or the film over a molar; any incidence of future required the self-same fuel, his material being, so that bit by bit he will have disappeared.

Friday Observed
His future conversations, practiced in his mind, never begin with “what if”.

His first attempt at writing for film:

“THE WORLD DOESN’T END” MINI-TREATMENT

Act I: South Dakota’s Badlands, early 1990’s. Two friends, camping for the weekend; taking a breaking from their last semester of Graduate school, both in their early 20’s, hike up a sort of gulley toward the top of the plateau. They are writers and are talking writing and their plans after graduation. They are headed to what from the ground looks to be a cave, to read and write and get high. It’s dusk and easy going over the cracked mud. Near the top they’re getting winded and in the near dark they feel their way into the opening, the cave. Sitting, removing their backpacks, they have a laugh, get out Charles Simic’s book The World Doesn’t End and read aloud poems. They look out at the gnarled landscape, male character M makes some notes then takes out his pipe and lighter which they pass back and forth. Night has fallen completely when next they notice, in the meantime they joking, talking about the poem and each occasionally swats something above their heads. Finally it registers that they been swatting and both look up to see a hole opening out onto the top of the plateau, through which flies a small black object, which both take to be a bat. Suddenly the walls seem to be covered in bats. They grab their packs and stumbling, with laughter, with the adrenalin mixing with the pot; make their way back down the gulley. Occasionally, they fall down laughing but make it back to the road basically unscathed. They calm down while walking back to the campsites. Upon approaching M’s car and their site they notice another car parked at the site adjacent to theirs. They see no other people, but as they pass the car both see a cat sleeping in the back window and the back seat filled with clothes. They move on to camp to start dinner. As they’re cooking two teenage girls make their way from the public bathrooms toward the newly arrived car. The girls glance over to M and L, whisper something then disappear into their car.

Plot Point 1: As M and L are eating, the girls, not more than sixteen, emerge from the car and head their way. After flirting a little and joking about the cat in the car, litter box and all, the girls, N and O, ask M and L if they’ll buy them some beer.

Act II: They decide to take the girls’ car but M drives. It’s not a long drive to the convenient store they passed coming into the park. During the drive both L and M notice the interior of the car is filthy: clothes and food wrappers litter the seats and floorboards, the smell from the litter box in the back is awful and the cat is perched above the back seat in the window growling. As they drive the girls talk continuously about their adventures; L and M don’t realize until they pull into the parking lot that the girls are sixteen and they both are runaways from Nebraska. M gets out going buy the beer and L is left with the girls. Everyone is silent, except the cat. At this point L and M simply want to rid themselves of the girls, but can’t until they return to the campsite. Not only are they under aged and runaways, judging from their monologue on the drive to the store, they are both crazy. M returns with beer and wine coolers for them, which they open immediately. The ride back is quiet and tense. The tension from the girls coming from the fact that they don’t know what to do or expect next; the tension from L and M stemming from the fact that they want to get as far away from these girls as possible and as quickly as possible. L started yawning and commenting on their long day and their planned hike the next day; M says they’d better turn in early to get enough rest for the hike. When they get back to the campsites the girls invite them over for a drink but L and M decline and make their way to their tent, hurriedly.

Plot point II: L and M are plagued through the night by what the consequences could be for both having bought alcohol for under aged runaways and for having bought alcohol for under aged runaways who are crazy. They hear the girls milling around the campsites, being loud and drunk. On a couple of occasions they hear them come toward their tent. L and M hear coyotes howling and thunder. When they wake in the morning there are two beers leaning against the flap of their tent and the girls’ car is gone.

Act III: Meadowlarks. L and M take their backpacks, notebooks, a little food and water and head out following one of the marked trails across the prairie and over a large mesa. The day is hot and getting hotter, their tired but continue. They are amazed at the animals which seem to take no notice of them: prairie dogs, prong-horn antelope. L finds, while they cross the large mesa heading toward the prairie, what looks to be a piece of a clavicle, from what he assumes is either an antelope or a person. They talk less and less as they get farther away from camp. The hike is taking much longer than they’d thought, especially after the night they’d had. They find a small mesa, about ten feet high, which they climb up on and walk around. From there they can see to the horizon, they can see the prairie’s steadfast sameness and oblivion to them. They climb down and rest in the mesa’s small shade. They write a little in their notebooks then head back. Once back, finally, they rest and start to prepare dinner. They decide to eat atop a shelter which can be got to by climbing on top of a picnic table and pulling themselves up to its roof. M passes the food and wine up to L and they eat there above the ground watching the prairie. Another car pulls into the campsites and a lone woman gets out and comes to talk with them, asks for matches and invites them for a drink which they decline. Suddenly, they both just want to be back, away from this.

Plot point III:

I’ll include his notes which must serve as a conclusion to the manuscript:

There is no plot save for their dialogue and dialogue is essentially untrustworthy.

Back out of this. There is no development because they are not characters but people.

Back out of this. Resolution...resolution assumes the end of the world.

Friday Instructed
Dear M,
I've been thinking about the Blakean (and others)notion that Creation & The Fall are a simultaneous event not because I'm beginning to believe in that kind of an actively willed creation, but because it is interesting--what he is acknowledging is that the breech is wisdom or the road to it. The whole to the aggregates is a movement which then requires understanding, knowledge, etc. What is less than the whole, everything? Right. Well, of course I'm not really talking about a lessening, but a dispersion, so that things are forced to inter-act. Things have a reality which must be concerned, suddenly, with everything. If there is a point or a whole, there is no concern because everything is incorporated intimately and most economically. But the slightest introduction of space is an introduction of relationship, which previously was not required. All this is rambling, I know, but I'm getting at How and What God is, I hope.

I'm equating the creation/fall with the big bang singularity, wow, --sorry I've just realized something, which many others have, but let me get to it--. Although, I realize that one is a "willed" event which requires a certain leap. The other is difficult to speculate about, even scientifically. So really, each requires a leap which is similar: one a leap into allegory, the other a leap into the tight fist of everything, which has no history because there is no separation, which is nearly impossible to comprehend, except in metaphoric terms: "infinitely dense", " infinitely hot." So both are allegorical, one narratively the other quantitatively. These are ways of thinking about the world which proceed in the same way: something out of everything. This makes me think of something I read in that CS Lewis book about the medieval notion of Nature. That it went from being NATeverythingURE(my typography)to being Nature personified so that it could be a subject. Or something from everything, a distillation which is required for any thing to happen.

This sounds like a cosmic name game, right? God, Big Bang, what's the difference? Leave Religious dogma and social control by the wayside, they are a carrion the fly won't touch, and concentrate on the idea of Faith based simply on this singularity which begins the Motion. Again from CS Lewis, in the Ptomlian Model the spherical earth is surrounded by seven transparent spheres in increasing sizes. Each of which is assigned to a "planet" and each of which moves. The seventh sphere, Primus Mobile, is what sets it all in motion and is also the threshold of God. How does this set things going your flickering little tongue may ask, as did mine? Why, simple by its love for God. Ridiculous, of course, but what is interesting and exciting is that it is not God. It is in fact removed from God; it is in fact a relationship which traverses space. If this were how the universes were actually set up you can see how easy it would be to make a case for God=Big Bang and space between God and Seventh sphere as time elapsed between the singularity and the birth of our universe, etc.

So: 1) Matter exists.
2) Matter must be conserved
3) Motion is life.
4) Stasis is destruction/re-integration.
5) The relationship between Matter and Motion is space & heat
All this probably adds up to nothing or to paranoia or to narcissism, definitely to ranting, at best to another way of thinking.

So how does all this add up to anything? Or does it? I think so. At least how we've been talking about the soul fits into this, I think. I wrote in a letter, “Bird + Soul = God”. What I was talking about was something borrowed from two places, probably more unknown to me. One, Gerard Manly Hopkins ideas of Inscape and Instress; Two, Denise Levertov's expansion of those. Hopkins says that inscape is "the outward reflection of the inner nature of a thing", the "oneness" of a natural object. And that instress is the experience of the inscape. Levertov expands these to include not only natural objects but experiences and emotions (which are of course natural). We were using the word Ineffable, but could just as easily use inscape, right? Wait. No, no the ineffable would be the product of the inscape and instress (awareness/soul). It would be an end not a means. To instess the inscape of the thing is to be AWARE, and then it must attach to something so that we know HOW to think/experience about it. See I already feel myself slipping into a hierarchy which I don't want: Example, Car the inscape of a car is potential energy, right? But also it is a means of travel, of freedom and of individuation, etc. All of which ARE potential energy. Maybe I'm just unwilling to allow myself to believe in something so much grander than me, Pride. If all the functions and inferences of a thing are part of its inscape, then that inscape cannot be set; but must be a little nebulous and plastic beyond my capacity... But also plastic beyond its capacity, right? This goes back to BIRD+SOUL=GOD. So the true inscape of a thing is a function of its properties and its perceiver, it is a "moment of clarity", a whole. It is like positive and negative pole or static electricity, or the relationship between magnetic fields and electricity or cancer.

Here is what I am trying to get at or maybe was trying? If the big bang singularity is the introduction of space to the whole/point and God is the big bang singularity, then God is space. Space=relationship and history, so the AWARENESS of the relationship of things is what we were calling the ineffable which is perceived by Soul. A better way of putting it would be BECOMING AWARE of the relationship of things and their inscapes through SOUL is our only link to GOD.
OR
Berryman's (which he takes from John, after an assumption of sin), "We cannot tell the truth, it's not in us." We are only coefficients. I'm not so sure what my point was. Or so sure of any of this, so please tell me what you think.
L

2005-07-21T15:36:00.000-07:00

2005-07-21T15:16:00.000-07:00

The Die-er

Preface
I have never misrepresented myself, neither as man nor woman, as sighted nor blinded, with blunt present nor honed future in my head. The predicament of observer has been thrust upon me. I sanction no stance with regard to what happens. I retell and I foretell, always like a pulp in my mouth chewed beyond taste.
--Tiresias.

A Warning
Describe the line. It rises and is crossed and he is there. Describe the line. It rises in the shape of so many things. Describe the line. It has been split into hairs. Split and divided as the hairs of his head, first wet, then dry, black. Black at birth. Describe the line. When drawn around and about it makes an island which moves as he moves, a placental shore extending as he extends, a walk in his own shadow.

Describe the island. An umbilicus. From his umbilicus blooms the ragged cord. Describe the island. It is tiny and puckered to suck at the cord. Describe the island. It is self-contained: causing his grandfather (maternal) and his grandmother (paternal) to leave West Germany the next day in an airplane. This being the still bisected Germany which at some point beyond now will be reunified, as will his father and he be reunified. Not even the first grandchild, they had flown toward West Germany and awaited him, his head to appear, like a dark and bristly brush he was found just where left one day before they flew back toward America. Describe the island. No German. No memory of seeing West Germany, so he has never seen West Germany and now it is gone. Describe the island. In all likelihood it is magnetic, though an opposite pole to what approaches. Describe the island. It migrates from umbilicus to mouth. He feels it rise and fall between the two, as in the story he’s heard of his father melting, at sight of the birthing process, down the OR window to the floor without rising until much later. There is a sound for the sense of collapse which takes its inevitability at shoulder height and presses down into the framework of the body. It is as disappointing as the lack of fortitude itself, the shushing of limbs toward the floor then clatterstop: resistance. Inert and piled there on the linoleum the body displays all manner of congruity and incongruity. The splay of arm or leg can be read as tea leaves or the entrails of a cock and the variance is slight between prophecies. His father’s clenched right fist, outstretched right arm and left hand spread and pressed between cheek and floor are all among the indicators for a slow circling of wagons around another self, emergent and delicate as a hollow egg. His legs have thudded and settled into the position for walking. Each of these taken alone may be simple detail, but coupled together indicate leaving and emotional upheaval all round in five years time, thirteen years before the first steps toward the reunification of Germany.

Describe the line. First it was a bi-directional indicator neither completely him nor completely his mother. Once through her exhaustion, the line looped around his skinny neck and her blood poisoning, they were each left their own section of the line. The root, umbilicus, of his spawning the island. The root of hers slopped out and incinerated, as was the practice then among military people. But through its incineration fired into the air and turned webby by a process of memory and hormones. Whereas his was singular and sucked at by his umbilicus, hers was multitude and intersecting and aimed at capture for the simple reason of context, which he had yet to learn.

On a November day very like this one, though in Texas several years before, a president’s head was split and spilled into his wife’s lap like a hot and profoundly private secret, splashes of which: skull bits, brain matter, dazzled the surrounding agents with quick reflections of the sun. His smeary skin at birth was of a piece dazzling under the OR lights and expectation. Now carried through the West German wind, toward their upstairs rooms, the light all round like an upholstery, he was fully vested in the notion that this staggering action, indeed many of those involved stagger throughout the footage, while predating him cast his life in a certain tenor. The event hung not in the manner of a guardian angel so much as in a mood he’d fill out in time, like the kiss of someone once beautiful whiled away into a gnarled thumb then pressed into service against bitterness.

When strapped in the baby seat he’d convulse his body while sucking the room into his lungs, inching closer to table’s edge. Through freefall he’d managed to inhale the last corners of the room and compress it all into a hyper-dense singularity, this was the first instance of the island receding. But it wouldn’t stop, smaller and smaller it drew until it was just a pinch behind his stomach. He hit the floor, arms and legs striking out from him, sending the room spewing out in place of itself. The quiet he kept inside him was ravenous. Their love of the idea of Love had erected this apartment so far from Pennsylvania, had erected him as a safe stratagem, as a method of propagating security that guided their respective hands like a string. There was the love of the rescuer. There was the love of alternate territories. There was the love of the mole at 4 o’clock to one’s navel as one’s Soul. The love of traveling southward through Europe, from West Germany to Spain, having just multiplied, become tri-legged, before heading back toward America to face what they’d become in the interim.

The Storm
On. On and in. Intimation is virginity itself in the moment. They’d arrived at one another through a third, at the bedside of a third intimate with both. There were clues laid around which I will not pursue, ways of handling the body of a friend, possibly near death, which forego pretense, which relate absolute structures of personality, of tendency however dense one may be to them at the time. One holds the hand, limp, with thumbs crossed for instance or thumb nestled down, between palms. The first showing a concern, with a hint of the needing to care for, the crossing of thumbs as a confusion of persons, a dependency upon that which cannot be changed and so a well of Sorrow; the second deeply sensual and indicative of a situation with the body longing to reclaim itself through the physical act of love. Good posture to a spine inclined forward, unsprung but for a glimpse of insight, a breath warm with understanding, tongue-true, is painful. They both sat rigid in their seats at the third’s right and left hands pressing their shoulders back and thus their hearts out. On. On and in.

In. In and on. The larger, whitened about the edges, question of sex had to be intended, intended and retreated from, made a loving context for their bodies to forget their histories into. In and on the pats, grasps, grazes, the flitting and dawdling in this or that wet place, the stroke with arms crossed, eyes closed, the get it over with and paining void once gotten over, had to be pressed upon the new material: each other. All prior experiment wedded into the moist little hollows between their joined fingers. They were married and loved their bodies for what they did to each other, for how they carried away bitterness like streams of urine onto cool dark morning leaves, the steam of which, rising, converting, all too soon, into semblance, into vaguery, into what she quickly called You Don’t Find Me Attractive and what he called But You’re Not A Man.

In one of their goes he was rooted in. Describe the line. It rises and is crossed and he is there. Then they mounted a flight toward West Germany as a white horse, each the other’s rescuer.

Nocturne. Nocturnal. The West German night lay as a lens across his eyes. Polymer night. Stout night. When the plane was mounted to fly back toward America, and he equipped to them, he remained shaded by the West German night, made its tender host. This was the first seed of discontent found its way into the island, dropped from the sky or carried up then dropped. Before this, once in the apartment he’d clenched his fists and eyes with equal tension and popped out night there and then, though only for a moment, blink, a moment which then rose up, slits the color of sun through skin became glow and, if truth be told, his outer knuckles chilled while inside, the hot curl of fingers into palms was a kind of conception, the birth of touch.

The ocean itself was night’s body at his crossing with Stuttgart as a prodigal eye trained on beginnings, untetherings, and shining as if from a hole, or if prodded by Charon’s pole the unmercifully undead heart of his real and true.
The night language was in his ear and he, ill-equipped to understand, much later, would copy it into journals and publish it in books of little consequence. The language was a way of making a body out of words, either through arousal or dumbfoundedness, which he proved no master over. Hearing the thing, the phrase, wet his tongue with a pull like an ebb tide. The silence in the plane made him still and the re-breathed air made him far too aware of personality.

Pirates
How it was in America for him early on was a matter conjecture. Two episodes only, how it is with memory tight-fisted, he remembered and put in books much later. The first from The Imposture Notebook and, perhaps his earliest memory:
“I. Bees
A. Description
1. Tree trunk broader than me
a. Apple tree
b. Reaching tall
c. No birds
d. How far is it
e. Now only Beckett, how far is it
2. Fruit rotten, touching the gravel drive
a. Sour driven
b. And most slide under foot
c. Knees or elbows
d. Buzzing
e. Gravel then the cars
i. Two I think
f. Mouth waters
g. Step from grass to fruit to gravel as from out of the sea
3. Sounds
a. Below, at midsection and above
b. Honey bees? Though only larger motes
c. Buzzing at ear
d. Tickles ear, nape
e. Larger voices far off from the house
f. Two cars I think
i. Nicer than the tires over the gravel
B. Actions
1. Poking
a. Brown nail
b. Warm, moist
2. Throwing
a. One
b. Two
c. Three
d. Not well, Four
e. Five, impressed upon the tree
i. Circle
3. Biting
a. Soft, though firm here
b. Turn, bring to mouth, bite
c. Upper teeth puncture, lower miss, ooze soft apple
d. Do not see bees
4. Stung
a. I can only feel upper lip, aflame and growing
b. There is only upper lip as a limit
c. Set upon by voice and held aloft
d. No longer the sky but ceiling
e. The bathroom
f. Women’s voices arching to my ear and higher
g. Hands
h. The water is cool and there’s my face
i. Slip
i. Bottom lip split against basin
j. Man’s voice, let me take care of him
i. Women
k. Silent and an oracle through my swollen mouth
C. Effect
1. Hesitancy to form intimate relations
a. To commit to touch
2. Or lack of limits to self
a. Very quickly too intimate with words
i. Worlds.”
Of course, some of this he speculated in order to jibe the memory with the story of the memory, as one may, speculating, touch, in a certain way, a lover’s closed eye or middle palm to communicate a not oft, though not unpleasurable, practiced desire. The second is from his Scrawl and is fictionalized, as it’s spoken in the voice of Hades addressing Orpheus; once again memory may be fulfilling its story:
“HADES: I played with, once as a child, that which should never have existed. This was in Las Vegas, the early Seventies, stowed away in our garage against the sun. I was really far too young to remember what happened, but have been told enough and imagined enough to, now, have a memory of it, though certain details of this memory seem superfluous. The memory is a combing of these ingredients: the garage, a lamp or some kind of orange glow, the threshold into the house, a large quilt, a bicycle and a scorpion. There is, I think, a tendency for memory to preserve itself. What’s more the reality of the event is passed, so that what remains singularly is the memory of the event as contained by various minds. I’ve often wondered if I had written down the memory of the event at each stage of my life would it jibe, becoming more subtle, more nuanced as my life progressed or would it subtly flee from the visual presence of the memory to take harbor in the faculties left to interpret the memory of the event. So that while the memory itself might be nearly impossible to retrieve its message had laid alongside my heart as a shunt into the Soul.
The body itself often hinders memory.

The Garage
For the purpose of the memory of the event the garage was mostly dark and very warm, though not moist. There was a quality to the heat and dark which I felt I could absorb through a deep, slow and regular method of breathing. It was an enormous buffer zone surrounding my small body, through which turbulence was smoothed and from which my tiny lungs could suck a pure congeniality. The floor was cool underfoot and thus provided an anchor. There was balance in the garage, through which I could swim as if through viscosity itself, absolutely buoyant.

A lamp or some kind of orange glow
It was opposite the threshold into the house. This was, if truth be told, a corona of light not quite winked out and thus a remarkable component of the memory of the event. Its color and persistence had the feel of a gaze not quite invited while not wholly unappreciated, something more akin to a streetlight than the sun. It may have hung from a corner of the ceiling.

The threshold into the house
In the memory of the event it was through here that my mother entered in response to my scream, thus entirely transforming the scale of all I’d done. It also provided an entrance for the neighbor, who transformed the scale once again and irrevocably. When moving through a door the idea of continuous space is required, which I’d not yet developed, so often I thought of the threshold as a kind of mouth through which I was either digested or expelled into another circumspect space.

A large quilt
This covered the floor of the garage directly beneath the bicycle and was blue, though appeared gray in the orange light, thus was easily imagined as either the sky or the sea. The quilt was stitched with a grid pattern, so that if smoothed out each thing on it could be plotted.

A bicycle
Its seat pressed into the quilt, graphed at (0, 0); its handlebars somewhere further along, perhaps at (0, 12 or 13). Each point of contact bore the weight rather like the haunches of a poorly loaded animal. The bicycle was always inverted in the memory of the event and its rear wheel spun emitting a sound a shade different than a hiss, something more of a hum with a subtle whine, a plaintive whine. Even as I spun the wheel in the dark, listening for the sound’s pitch to be altered by the wheel’s velocity, the portal thus created approached the threshold into the house. I had been the beneficiary of many filters up to that point of my short life, filters on talking and listening for the most part, but this portal was something of a filter under my control. The spiral of air drawn through the spokes toward me would arrange the words of overheard talk into a body of words nearly as palpable as a pat on the back, the mussing of hair or even a peck on the cheek. So often the talk through the threshold into the house had the habit of being either far too loud or far too wet and airy to be decipherable, but through the filter of the wheel I heard the essential things a child should hear.

A scorpion
This I never saw. Though the hiss emitted from the mouths of both my mother and the neighbor as they spoke its name frightened me more than the arachnid, however deadly, ever did. While circumnavigating the quilt, perhaps for the second or third time, I felt and heard what seemed like a glass figurine, thick bodied, spindly legged, both underfoot and under the quilt. It popped, but just after a little sizzle; and I called to let her know what I’d found and thus fear was sown into me, fear of that which I could not control.

The memory of the event
The eye of the room spun at middling speed and I revolved around it, as objects will an eye, walking the outer edge of the quilt occasionally mis-stepping my foot onto the cool garage floor. It was when my little toes or heel or the ball of my foot came down on the concrete that everything drained into that area of contact, to suck at the cool. As the wheel slowed into a hum and stopped, I was pulled from orbit to crank the pedal. First pulling it up with my fingers then pushing it down with the heel of my hand. Pulling, pushing. Pulling, pushing. When the momentum carried the petal back up I forced it down hard until the wheel whined and the air started to move. The monotony of this rotation and my intersecting rotation was a contact just below my sternum like one hot fingertip, say my father’s, pressed there for remembrance, like the desert carried on the wind. I stepped syllables into the outer edge of the quilt, though of what words I cannot remember. Finally something broke under my foot, after the briefest of resistance, collapse with the sound of a short, quick guttural darting toward the wall. My orbit was halted and collapse on a grander scale proceeded.
At my call, and in one continuous motion, my mother breeched the threshold into the house, took me into her arms and lifted the corner of the quilt which I indicated. Horror has a way of mirroring horror so that both the action and reaction often assume a similar aspect. We went for the neighbor. The sound of his shovel under it was as harsh and dire as the first syllable of its own name. I’d killed it, though for good measure we walked to the highway which bound our front yard so it could be thrown beneath the wheels of an enormous truck sweeping by, dragging with it, in a deafening roar my wheel could never produce, the facts of the event.”

Escape from slavery
Here is the story of what happened, of what measures were left to him. Wheeled toward the west with the sun, that arc was the brow he took for his face and positioned beneath it each eye for infinitesimal vision and effect. Their sea’s green absorbed, thus mitigated, what was spoken into them. The litanies he’d taken in from both mother and father since infancy will eventually solidify, calcify into a new bone something like an Adam’s rib in reverse. He’ll cough around it; feel it poke and jab his liver, his heart.
Its eventual extraction will be piecemeal and at his own hand. Reaching into his belly while sleeping, dust in his eyes, to pull the bone, then with an admixture of spit and words will form a body, a twin, the memory of himself.
Guilt is a needling thing, like a bird’s beak at its nest or at its young, which when weaving among the twigs makes its own truth or the story of its truth. It is, after all, all opinion isn’t it?
I myself have felt guilt hot on the heels of taking things out of context, of fudging the particulars, even of it’s for their own good. I had often felt the urge to tell a love what had happened to me. How upon sight of the snakes my sex folded up and into itself leaving me open, how my breasts swelled like skins with wine. But then what is it for a man to have been with a woman whose was once a man, who would again be a man? I feel guilty for my lack of transparency, though grateful for my safety.
He was as guilty as they, but absolutely itched for their streams of words which flowed through his eyes and fell like warm milk down his neck and curved spine to his nether parts then pushed up again to stave the flow and stop it. Could he have been expected to understand the long term effects of such deluge, him only a few months old, though? Then there was how to plug his eyes. Blindness? Adequate, but I’ve found blindness to open a blossom in the brain which is difficult to ignore, then difficult to go without as it fades. Removed from speculation much of what happens here would seem bland.

She’d push him, talking into the world around them etudes on “I’m no one’s fool”, talking a web of fragilities into the air. If intent, with eyes closed, eyes quashed to little fists, he could trace her warbling out and up, into the branches of the American trees. This was a camouflage she’d been born to assume. As each leaf was a proof of her conviction, her foreknowledge of the situation with his father, she’d never have to admit that having the wool over her eyes was anything but her own doing. Strangely, she was securing a world by talking into it, the power of the name, while his father was securing a world through fathering in other men only the thought of himself. His father spoke into the world by what went unsaid and the duration of silences; his voice bawdy through a wall and his touch lingering like the memory of a touch, so for his men it was that which had already happened and thus fulfilled its own expectation. If his mother’s securing was through the power of the Name, albeit the naming of her fears, his father’s securing was through the power of acting upon the Name, albeit the fucking of his fears.
Both a stroller and a wall are methods of transport taking at their base a certain passivity, an assumed portion of which lay in wait in the Other and was brought to bear only in circumstances when singularity was out the window. It was in each of these objects that his first memories of their divide were housed, vessels he had emptied of solidity and comfort to use anew.

Brazil
From the corner of my eye a boy’s head enfolded under the right arm of the Spartan. Both figures bend forward, staring into the earth as the Spartan rasps, in short bursts, across the small face an iron claw in the shape of his hand.
A figment hasn’t a sound.

I will, if you’ll permit me, relate the story of my own first transformation as it entails a similar sort of passivity.
Upon sighting the snakes twining round one another tightly in what seemed a Herculean effort at erasure I was caught. Sex, even between beasts, when viewed from the outside strikes you dumb, while giving your body free reign as flaying your hand produces instant distance and incredulousness. There was a weight at my chest as if I’d grown a new, parallel heart and both it and the prior heart had become monstrously engorged at the sight. I was pulled toward the earth in an ever so slight arc, pulled by my breasts which now hung and moved just after the rest of me moved. Next there was an inhalation except of flesh rather that air and in through my nether parts rather than my mouth and lungs. My sex breathed itself into my body proper leaving me open. What remained on my exterior was a little beak of flesh which itched and pointed away from me. The snakes left me to my new body, which felt as one dropped over me from the trees, hugging me so tightly as to push my wind out, named Love Thyself.

There is. There is. There is in an eye beneath an olive tree the evidence that I am now a woman as surely as there is dust beneath its man’s stinking frame.

When his father burst from the pool, on base in Thailand waiting next to the war the Americans were losing, he was like an oil binding each glance toward him together into a spotlight of attention he could thrive under. One nearly furtive glance found him an authority whose yoke he’d willingly assume. While any other found his father’s hand pushing through his hair, releasing the last drops of water down his spine, either simply utilitarian or the kind of flag better left ignored. Caught in his eye, Nearly Furtive was approached by his father with two Cokes.

What is the blister attraction will not let be? The heart? Perhaps, if it is said by way of meaning the genitals. The ego? Surely, but not simply. Some would say the magnet of Fate, which while drawing things together heats them up. It would be far too romantic to say loneliness, though certainly that is what many will think, too clean.
In the end every hand or cave wants a name and to be called out by name and so orients, by attraction, the mess. As for choices, it is as it comes; so the curve of lip at the final syllable of your name when issued from the beloved’s mouth is your downfall or the slick spot of saliva just off center of the beloved’s lower lip as the mouth makes to say your name or the fear of your name harbored by the beloved or the silence it is kept in. You may take this to mean that we are, each of us, interchangeable. I daresay we are not; there is a rhythm to be struck, which, being subtle, is often missed. You can only call a man a woman or a woman a man so often until either they transform or you get a jarring you won’t soon forget or they make off with the wind.

Later in his father’s office Nearly Furtive talked, opening and closing his lips, showing his tiny, faintly blue teeth, talked toward a courage which he felt pull from his middle spine into his stomach and rise into his mouth. His father’s hands lay left on right in the center of his desk. His wedding ring was the only metal thing on the desk save the frame holding his mother’s picture. Nearly Furtive’s voice and thought matched up on the words, ARE, YOU, MARRIED, as his father’s ring ticked on the desktop. Both heads inclined toward the picture. In his father’s winningest smile, atop his skinny neck, each tooth sung out both shine and these words in unison, MY, WIFE, IS.
When fitted with a yoke I imagine it to be uncomfortable at first while the skin toughens and the mind contrives it really to be other things, a young thigh pressed near to each ear, the body of a stricken hero, sacks of grain, anything which can be tossed off at will. Only after the body has forgotten its presence and the mind embittered itself does it become a yoke, something meant to harness the power of something else.

Shipwreck
You click. The words.
Prescription for simultaneity of place in the story: brown shutters and the expanse of twenty-five years. It is dumbfounding. The house there skirting Las Vegas in 1972 and later in 1997 when his father returned with curiosity, the shutters held fast. SAME BROWN SHUTTERS, his father commented, after having first lost a little then won a little money, as a way of saying nothing had changed, when in fact everything had changed. SAME BROWN SHUTTERS. Same is what? Same is when I’d say, “same bloody lump” after starting my second cycle and when I’d repeat every month “same bloody lump” for seven years? Same is a shield or the mode of transport into exile? Same is perpetuity? Same is sudden pitch into the neuter? SAME BROWN SHUTTERS behind which he crushed a scorpion under heel, into which his only brother was brought? SAME BROWN SHUTTERS his father droned to hide the relief and the ache.

Click. The words you.
Prescribed by the simultaneity of two actions in the story, it makes adjustments. He was in Las Vegas with his mother and new brother while his father was in Thailand not saying, through hissed-in breath, SAME SHUTTERS, but thinking same gender. The gifts were appropriate to his rank and well liked. On taking, from the box stuffed with brown paper and capped with a letter on white paper, the hats from the box, his father and Nearly Furtive searched the Thai streets for closed toe sandals, their camouflage seemed dark against the light of Vegas, his father’s toenails were patched with fungus he couldn’t bear to have seen, only to be mocked by the Disney patches sewn over the hats’ surfaces. The Thai people leave their toes exposed as if they have no shame.

If I am a lover to a woman to whom I was a lover to when I was a man is she the same woman? Am I the same lover? Same is a matter of emphasis, it would seem, the vast need of the speaker to have been impressed upon the world and been duly taken account of, noted. At the base of it, working within a pidgin of Time, a phraseology, that if blended at its most luxurious presents a past which predicts its future and a future with notes of its past: very near that quality in the voice remaining always unmimicable. Have I lingered too long on this spot? Roll over and I’ll bite that mole you’ve made me love.

At the same moment his father spins on the toes of his right foot, to check the stitching along the sole, letting the faint moan from the frowning leather ripple up and over him, he spins the camouflage hat on finger end as if spinning the world. The stitching is the color of a mole privated away.
His mother’s face looked on covered with a slick of Happiness as thick as it is made. THESE ARE MY BOYS flashed before her eyes slowing their motions because of what was left out, leaped between, foisted upon the world. THIS IS FROM MY HUSBAND was in back of her, laced across her shoulders, below the base of her skull, and pulling down like a yoke. She tasted dust,

Gravity can easily be taken for Time as both pull you into dust.

first dry, then moist and sweet, she watched her boys prance in their new camo hats, then sour and hot, acid crept up her esophagus and slow-burned where her tongue began, MY HUSBAND closed around her neck like a hand.

Sole Survivor
Truth amounts to nothing more than a beagle in the corner, agreeable to all for a gentle rub or the slightest morsel.

I have foreseen, in all its variety and circumstances, across Human Time, always the story of the child born with an invisible penis. In many places this would mean a quick end, a swift blow to the head or, less mercifully, immersion in cold water with the resulting chill-skin and coughing so violent as to make one’s eyes water and blur the whole thing.
If, as in some versions, the child reaches the age of sequestering by gender it is instantly popular among the girls, who, for the life of them, cannot figure how this girl can do what she does to them, though quickly stop trying and wait in line. It is from this version stems a tradition of immaculate pregnancies and births.
In other versions the child is quickly sent to either the cloistered life or the life of a hermit. In both cases the unseen member becomes a spiritual stick, and in some tellings it is God or Devil or both necessitating bindings of differing severity or, in at least one version, severing with a thin flint blade. In this version when found the child has just died and its blood lay pooled around its pelvis. The body is taken and cleaned, the wound seared with a stone from the fire and its blood used to give a little color to its nipples and lips before being left for the wolves as an offering to stave off hunger and perversion.
In some stories these children grow into formidable wives. In others formidable husbands; in some warriors; in some tinkerers; in some conduits between Past and Future; in some the medium of expression; in some, once found out, their skins are highly valued among the impotent; in some they are taken and meted out on occasions of great celebration or darkest dearth. In one case, at least, the child instantly understands its totality and is so filled with Freedom as a result it slips into the world unnoticed by all to do as it pleases.

It is in this manner I and the boy may have some lineage.

Longing is a method of precipice, a method of shaping the body by memory. Nostalgia is a method of re-placing the present body into the past. It is a method by which the desire to forget, palpable as a bitterness, say of walnut skins on the back of the tongue, stokes the means of remembering; a method by which ghost bodies are positioned throughout the past in what begin as futile and end as ignoble attempts to alter the future.
For his mother the ghost bodies are those of the pups she raised as a child, the pups she regaled as children and stroking, soft, so soft as to seem moist, pups’ fur, did not cause his mother’s parents to adore one another.

Once when chewing a wire coat hanger, simply for the metallic tang on the tongue, for the running of saliva, its end poked through his mother’s right cheek. An inch or so of brassy metal inclined back toward his mother’s mouth as if to complete a circle and thus draw his mother into a similar passivity. This sent his mother’s mother screaming from the house in an exemplary act of denial. Could running full tilt out the door and down the hill toward one brother’s house really stave off the present and its need for immediate attention? Is it so that to run from something so clearly of the moment one is running toward an image of the past?
He will become enamored with the prospect of method and its consequence for passivity, will, on a January day which will feel like an April day far hence from now, come to recognize how deeply it is that regret is held within the method of the body functioning in the wind between the garage and the house proper, in the slow curl of the wrist while retracting the wire from his mother’s cheek; how to be imbued with the passivity of a piece of metal formed into function is also to be imbued with a certain strength.

First Days
In the end I can say to you that Del Rio was hot, was the beginning of heat, but you’d not know what I mean, though neither would he: sweaty hands at the window, the doorknob, at every surface, all of them hot and he in among them.

I am in a position of large regret as you see now, the stray entered by the door left open by his mother to catch even the hint of a breeze, leapt to the counter and began to lap the butter, as you may have guessed I have no effect, can have no effect. While the cat leaps I can tell you where it will land, can tell you that in perfect synchronicity with its leap a cloud of similar color and shape will trace across the sun causing a shadow to be cast upon the first step of his father and Near Furtive beginning their ascent toward the apartment.

The light falls into halves. Falls and is described along the line bisecting the parking lot as a melee between the Light and the Dark, though such descriptions are wrong and misleading. The asphalt ocean in Texas, where the cars are buoyant and the people a tide; what is the shape of the things I could tell you? What are the things? Any shape would be a lie, would be only the shape each letter forms in your breast.
He jumps up, outside the apartment door, in the open hallway, and on occasion can see over the balcony into the parking lot. It is split into black and lighter black as if part had been washed and left to dry. He can feel their steps on the stairs vibrate up through his feet and legs. There’s a gray tail brushes the inside of his right calf like a warm breath as he passes through the open door and shuts it behind him.

The vibration behind his mother’s right eye, the minute buzz, begins when his father and Nearly Furtive enter the apartment. It isn’t audible; his mother cannot even feel it though her vision is altered always afterward. The outline of his father looks perforated to his mother as if, perhaps, his father’s pores are breathing him into the surrounding atmosphere, as if his father’s essence was now being perpetuated otherwise by spores and there was now less of him, somehow, contained in his body which shone into the room.
The sun shone full force now and, through the small kitchen window, contained the butter dish in a yellow square. Scooped into valleys and peaks by the cat’s tongue, it seemed a landscape to him where form and essence were more subtle and so more malleable. Bodies should be like this, so that under the tongue they are transformed, though not without the hope of return, subtle and made to fit more easily by heat and hunger. The adults talk and laugh into the air sounds which are breaking things until the square moves on, splitting the butter dish into day and night.
Nearly Furtive played along and thought the words ONE, IS, A, MAN, HOW? into a thread twisted around a finger tip, twisted upon itself over and over again, thought the blue-going-purple finger tip into the words LIKE, THIS?

Throng. Late into the night his father and Nearly Furtive will look out from a balcony, dancing all around them, them dancing in 1973, THRONG will fill their minds then diverge among them into ENDLESS POSSIBILITY, LONLINESS, WRITHING, CONTROL. In the eye loneliness grasps every man there ambiguously and broadcasts ARE YOU MY FATHER. In the eye endless possibility is more forward, glints the geometry of bodies intimately engaged; in the eye writhing is equipped to this. In the eye control controls the eye.

The Journal: Food and Shelter

...engram...I feel this huge anger toward the structure of the sentence toward expectation...The limb is not necessarily the limb the letters explode that...Where are the letters...Vertical word/horizontal thing...I want the it was in each phoneme, in the attention before the phoneme...Not suffering but the distinction of all things...Bring along the nets, Lord garment...makes the “A” pre-attentive...Mordecai...Intermeasurables ...Violet...the agent instead...Prophesy to the breath...This too is the emptying into (illegible)...Covalence...Letting...Flood water...Copperhead...Selves...To bear...Mind ...Force...Suction...Sweet...Private...Cohort...Dispersive...True wood...Way... Poke... Topped...Thinned...Eliminated...A heft...Thud...Servant...Coordinate...Metaphor doesn’t out stretch at all, no new space/attention, but relies on memory to disable what is no longer present in fullness because attention has been introduced...It’s a gesture toward the infinite which can never be at hand...Is no metaphor but the form of the saying of “I am” in me...Stretch sensors along the spine...Slave...Out stretched self, twin selves...Force versus exaltation...Thought: fullness, parable...Observation of thought: realized (acknowledged) separation...Description of thought: superceding I, allegory redemption/dogma...The body owns, owns...Does thought annul the body...Relatedness still fleshes out difference...Text creates attention as it creates a participant...The self-emptying of “I am” is the self-emptying of difference...Attention is self-emptying...No salvation...Judgment is both outside and fulfills the moment...Only moment...In a true relatedness there is no difference...Saying of “I am” and the emptying of “I am”...Relatedness does not stand, is rather a plasma, not between but only in, only new space (attention)...Difference stands the letter (phoneme) does not stand...Text creates attention because it is speech first and foremost...Attention versus difference... Proline...Household...Synthesized...Authority of word versus authority of thing...If I say chair have I created reality, I have [created] a violence with the inhalation...The true saying though has no division...The self is truly emptied into the thing which is invested and therefore able to become uncovered...Consciousness=time...When the text presents itself as a work it only concerns itself with telling about...Enemy of power...Each text/phoneme must create attention otherwise it is a spectacle for power...The text must be porous...Relatedness is the dissemination of power so it is an un-power...All ends... I’m feeling the pressure of abandonment...There is the nominal, the verbal which
Reciprocate...Are the letters/sounds antinomian...Of course not...Yet they are not Components, are the shape of light, are the articulated difference which is self-emptying
...Is process always ideal...If it is it is only as process or in process not in or as retrospect
or in or as projection...So present process is ideal...To (away) from shine...To bring forth...To point out/bring to light...E ideal in transvaluing between the girls, the tree...Parent-mount, his Vesuvius, his cicada (so) his distance...The soul is anarchical...E ideal in the process valuing between the three girls tree...E ideal in the process transvaluing between the girls the tree...His (parent-mount, Vesuvius) (cicada is distance)...Dear voice...Dear if each...Dear...Sometimes word, sometimes mind, sometimes mind, sometimes Jesus, sometimes door...Mouse...Is the self-emptying into between so that between is the subjected...Between is soul, is relation, is text...What’s taken away from (in time, i.e. what is re-told, even re-imagined) between is life...It is again parable (between) versus allegory (subject yields object)...I must be aware of the constructs...Always aware...The mystical body is the primacy of relation, it is between...Yes the moon...The soul is anarchy...Necessaries...So anarchy must include a sense of sacred space (self/trust/contract) NO...Is there the difference of interiority versus exteriority in: one gives perception to the table and one gives attention to the table...The giving of attention is self-emptying...In the giving of perception the self is consumed within self-filling...The mystic: one is attentive of the contract...The theologian: one is perceptive of the parties of the contract...So is self-emptying pre-conscious...Is it willed...Or is it the difference between attention and perception again...Libertas...Original point versus body...Can the contract not be the representative...If out-from between is that there is the making of “I” then what of the object/thing...Does it return to the elemental...Is the entering into between (i.e. contract) with table a possession of table, a violence...So table is between there is no efluxus, only the “I” must self-empty to (illegible)...Touch is the foregrounding of table...Is touch always possessive...Blue aster ...Axis...on’s limb vulnerable out-from stone Jacob shutters into house...Robin ...On the one acorn tangential is weight, blue, person...Because I’mflight not dead there is delay and so time...So attention is death, as there is no delay in attention it is outside from time...Cause...Can there be attention in touch i.e. between in touch...Can there be a known separation in touch...The self (that is the capacity for self-emptying)...The touch/labor which is encompassing is between...Between is infinity so long as between is verbal...How does one come away from the other...The out-from between then is a tendency toward totality only...Not imagination but nothing...So the mutual self-emptying is nothing, that is, between is nothing...It is brought/forced to a point with the extending of the words...So my self-emptying in the face of the other is the ground of god... Imagination versus Nothingness...Between is the creation of one body, resurrection, i.e. the death which is the process into between and the birth into nothing which is between...Action brought against the eye...On the one acorn seeing corona...Seeing melanoma, areola, areola, triangle traversing his sternum...Object versus Other...1) object in its essence is self-emptying i.e. it is given over 2) other has that potential but is required to choose attention and the entailing encompassment...In both cases the self-emptied self enters into the between/nothing with the self-emptied other and returns holding more than the self can contain without metamorphosis...

The Journal: Natural Disasters
....traversed the grass beaded assumes various forms...Beaded branch...Open language thins to an arm...Ordinary...Quality....her finger moves over her skin distorting her skin...The earth is distorted itself with these leaves on it...These....An honest community versus a true community...What is ordinary language?....Is it ordinary Language that is the language of communication?...Pedestrian communication?....No...A context which defies context...Real language which has been put into an unusual situation...Real versus ordinary?...Into his thigh community has been sewn....each stitch buckled and some where hairs...What I can see and what I can set down and what I can remember...Is memory separate from soul...Syntax is a way of making memory present....palpable... Knowing my body as I do....your body is separate from the dog’s...Slant the sun....golden is a quality in human skin...Eumenidies...Mastery of death?...Mimesis?...“what is it about tone that you dislike?...I dislike the way it makes a spectacle of the writing as does Narrative and description...What is it about Drama which attracts people....in a piece of writing which is not theater?...This can easily return to people’s need for God...That is this muddle of language which requires so many circuits to (illegible) often accepts metaphor as veracity...Whereas in a writing which is closer to thinking there is little need of circuits...Heaven....location....description versus the Hebrew word for heaven being plural....the idea of plurality alone....one....after death....existing as a true plurality...The soul is an action...Is it assumes with spinneret....egg...sack....abdomen....drama.... attachment...moon hauled on leg points...Dissolves on touch the caterpillar...One third the petals russet with skin...He wrote it as separate from his lungs...In the way their lips slide one to one...There’s a way in which people can blur over the boundaries and make soul...The two of you have a strong soul which I hope you’ll have always...Saying something versus making something would make consciousness a micro-mythology?...Crisis occurs when that micro-mythological template is laid across others...Their myths are different...I can think of things which I did today for good or no and now I can think of alternatives to those previous actions...How does this affect those perceptions?...Is that “actual” micro-mythology altered?...Of course actual refers to its being on the outside and able to be corroborated...This is memory....a micro-mythology...This what it is that attracts people to drama....that it mimics the creation of these micro-mythologies...What happens when belief is withdrawn from self?...Prime mover....is it still?...World as ecstatic...No center...Death....greatest spectacle....yields sex yields the self being subsumed...Released from spectacle...So when I think of tone etc as making a spectacle out of the writing am I simply reacting to the death instinct?...What happens if everything is equally a prime mover?...Cause and effect would be replaced by action and re-action?...Hierarchy is dismantled?...Unity is replaced with process?...This is Love...The leaves shadowed are....more and darker leaves...If one is able to emphasize the boundaries of things (ideas and objects) one is dispelling unity...Does soul still remain after excending those boundaries?...Yes because it is action...Why is this not spectacle?... Is it excending versus transcending only?...To climb out of versus to carry across...Fuscia rhododendron blooms at night...Culpability....Photography...How can one question value without establishing a new system of value...Is something which is beyond value by definition beyond spectacle...Can one redefine value (or remove it for that matter) by requiring that it be excending rather than transcending...I suppose here I’m back to Nietzsche...But would this require abstaining from belief....as belief itself is what establishes value...Is belief not opposed to intimacy....in that it requires only a passive action...Here is the problem with tone which exemplifies the problem with spectacle as a whole...They require a system of belief which bars certain contingencies while setting in place other expected outcomes...Value yields spectacle yields tone...Is only supported by belief...I believe intimately in the immediate structures of the world—the give of flesh....the lack thereof....in stone or wood...The point at which I become a skeptic is when the creation of so many micro-mythologies lays a completely artificial template over those structures....and is not aware of it...Things are not to be doubted....for that matter....neither are perceptions alone....but perceptions in conjunction with a self are to be held if not in a dubious light....then at least accepted as fodder for true thinking and experimenting...If one is blind to the porous nature of self one is likely to be either deceived by its capacity for tyranny and thus become a tyrant or to become a victim of another’s tyranny...Study of the positions of the body...Dante...Beckett...Resound hands move...Photo Graphism...Actaeon yields study yields Beckett yields body position... Actaeon yields study yields Dante yields body as the surface or capital for punishment... Dante manifests punishment as physical pain so does....in his case....the body either:....1) usurp the soul or 2)....become the soul...Beckett also uses the body as a surface or a barrier against which the world reacts...for in him the world is always only outside...Is it always only outside...Is it possible for the body to be a surface which is the result of a tension....or better....a being made tense or being strung...that is an elongation of the inner and the outer so that both are manifest completely in the surface which is body...So that the body changes from being a barrier to being a ground of inclusion...Does this require dis-belief in the self...And how honest is that or can it be...How does this jibe with unity...If each body is a ground of inclusion in the afore mentioned sense can there be distinction...And can that surface....stretched as it is....produce...Is there volition in such a body...Is there difference between writing morally and writing an honest surface...That is in being a body...Is it possible to write an honest image...In many ways this is the problem I have with fiction...It is constantly trying to make something to make images for something which already exists under the pretense of telling the story....but isn’t implicit in that some kind of subjugation of the writing—suddenly it is bound to not be a surface—it is bound to belief in the self and by extension submits itself to conventions which are constantly subverting it...The Rational Violence....Soft breath....red face through determination...A great firm dome....ignorance must encompass you...Quiet granite forced from hand....from expectation of body....the rational violence...What are the consequences of Memory’s usurpation of vision in the writing...Or is that the case...How can one alter the frame of the body...Would this be a manifestation of the rational violence...Or could it be that an alteration occurs in the struggle between memory and vision...Can soul happen without a physical barrier being breached...Is memory or can memory breach(ing) a physical barrier…vision...Gaze and the template of memory possibly can result in violence...Muscle’s belly frames....in this position....the head...Bone at bottom of face having seen it...I remember....here....crux... Tighten accordingly to....“The flowers of the Prunus Japonica deflect and turn, do I not think of you dwelling afar?...He said:....It is not the thought, how can there be distance in that?” (Confucius)... How does one get that sense of looking out of the text...Out of soul...Can one make a text which is part of the world...Once again this comes back to spectacle...Does the lack of narrative forego spectacle...Is the “I” necessarily a spectacle...These “Indicium”...At what point are a set of name’s a set of facts...In thrum all outer form....from vase all possible situations...Object....white chrysanthemum sun...To come to a text, whether through writing it or reading, without the regiment of progress is to relieve it of spectacle... Progress....bullies in temporal locators....which of course lays the template of a long-term syntax over the text...Making like the idea of an experience versus making something an experience...What are the consequences of this way of thinking....not simply for the text or reading but for thinking itself...Is this where one comes to Zen’s “worship” of the moment...Is that dichotomy all there is...Progress versus moment...Is a moment an object...If so doesn’t it “contain the possibility of all situations”...Can a moment choose its own history...Can an object...No...Both object and moment are delivered of History... What effect does the introduction of the possessive pronoun have?...My object...My moment...Are those particulars limited by their context... For example is my object having been used in a particular way for one year precluded from other uses in that context of the “my” simply from habit...Is a moment used...Paradise...Sappho...Horace... Aster seed...Seed aster....forced....each from the five of them...What is moment and object...paradisiacal...redux...Rapidus sol...If a body meet a body coming through the rye...If a body kiss a body need a body cry...What is it....imagination....takes from the world...Tactility...What is it....imagination takes from the world...Tactility...Rachis....was it barbule...Living wing...Thing-events to not experience...Shudder groin...Shudder her head just after...Operators and things... Blueberries...What is “the structure of the world”...This way of thinking requires an acuity by exclusion...Enormity...Is it simply aggression in a text which makes it thinking...Of course....I do not mean violence as such but transgression...Aeschylus... Prometheus literally “fore thought”...Days in those.... leaves transfiguring the (illegible) remains...Is what happens in the text acclaim of existing...Is it similar to proprioception... Does an a-narrative stance necessarily proffer the body itself, or better, a measure of reference...In a narrative progression the context is obvious...Yet here in an aggressive a-narration body itself, not as in drama—i.e. spectacle, is the residual context for what happens...Again back to Soul being manifest out of the context of at least 2 bodies... Bodies or bodies in action...Experience =Soul...Is all thinking breach...Yes...If images are possible do they manifest this aggression...Is there a such thing as world images...I can think of fact striated/layered on and transformed under various pressures...Can this be reduced to a macro versus micro issue i.e. the local “personal” being consistent with the global...Of course one wants to say representative of....but representation is itself simply a way of avoiding responsibility... Again is it simply aggression in a text which makes it thinking...Do I believe in Self...Must....I....History versus Eternal Present....this goes to the idea Attention...Gospel of Thomas taken as life plan...Fiction structure of novel interspliced with Natural history pertaining to fish and birds...Then you are known....dove itself crushed in cat jaws...One’s own self....nothing....here is the dove...Of course strike the evil...Ama nesciri....love to be unknown...Michel Tournier Friday...It is both my hand and the bat—paradox...Subject versus object image...Nekuia a journey to the underworld...Is his “magic moment” or the moment of metamorphosis the same as The Transformative moment:....the point at which cause and effect can be confused... Check...Metamorphosis versus Transformation... Could the self be constituted within every context...The problem with writing fiction is that it just doesn’t seem true...It necessarily has an acuity which occludes...Very red...“Salmacis was alarmed, and she answered:....‘I leave this place for you to use it.’” (Ovid)...Smell of mint after the rain...Soul itself—a place, No—a direction, No—that occurrence of transfer 1 for 2...Soul versus manifestation of Soul...How can one move from a sense of singular self, even on which is constituted again in every context to a true multiplicity...Is this that distinction between Self and Soul wherein Soul requires the loss of distinction while Self chomps at the bit to establish it...I can watch the spider working and smell the mint beat into the air by the rain...These are perceptions which are of a singular context a context in which one can fell the Self...But they are not a context based on dexterity rather they are a context based on a kind of pedestrian panorama...In that context based on dexterity there lies the basis for:....the text....Soul....Thinking itself (i.e. it’s aggressive nature)...So that’s it this dexterity keeps the aggression at its root at bay...Text=Soul=thinking....all in this special sense...Aristotle’s ten “categories:” substance....quality....quantity....relation.... action....passion....place....time....position.... way of Being...Raining glistens...Could faith be simply...Created an evolutionary line for the manuscripts....God?------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Devil?...Corpus....Socius...Is this simply humility versus pride...If so where does honesty fall on that spectrum...in order to be humble one must first be honest....which is a brave thing...But doesn’t honesty require a certain pride either based on innocence or will... Brilliance....agility....subtleness....impassiveness...I am not willing the movement... Squandered is a judgment about the movement...Hand moves up.... tongue curls down....it retreats...There is a mist about the moon as if for balance...Gemini are one-souled... Castor...Pollux...Is the idea of soul as transgressive to the fortified centers of self predicated upon close association...i.e. Castor and Pollux...If it (soul) is spontaneous between people does it require love...Or does it require pure attention...Is this idea of soul truly just anaction...Or is it an action at all....for that matter...Is it the result of an action...That action being the excluding of self which any pure attention requires...When in face to face discourse with someone...2 passenger jets hijacked and crashed into both towers of the World Trade Center....both collapse thus collapsing surrounding structures...1passenger jet hijacked and crashed into the Pentagon...1 passenger jet hijacked and crashed in PA...Probably thousands dead....no word yet... Under the moon...Venus...Confabulation....the glass and people...They are joint... Joined...One destroys imagination with building or field or passenger jet.......Is it...How does the human body end...How does that question differ from Where does the human body end...Does one vilify method...One of the primary engines of this writing is honesty which....I hope....goes some distance toward deflating the authority of spectacle...To proceed by....analysis is a way of exploring the idea of coherence....however broad it may be...Isn’t that fundamental challenge to authority necessary in the positioning of one’s life—isn’t it the egalitary...Doesn’t it require a text which is not invention or creation but which can meet everything/one equally as a “center” so that the text becomes or is.... even....an aggregate of free association whose concern is apprehending and not valuation...In order to be humble one must first be honest and honesty is a brave thing as it requires a willingness to abstain from satisfaction...Aspidistra...At that instant....hic et nunc.......Irides dull from joy into resignation...Templum/Tempus...Is the limit of the body simply spatial...Or can it also be temporal...Is memory a way of extending the body by way of the mind...If this is the case can memory constitute soul...How is the body employed differently is saying....“I remember the angular look of my grandfather’s body just before he died” and “I remember the tingling, almost electric, feel in the tips of my fingers when moving them over my grandfather’s cotton shirt stretched over his ribs as he slept just before he died”...Argument from the absurd...if Nature had wanted...Before a thing exists....its particular time could not exist...Skin hill....If Nature had wanted a detail....an argument...Writing by her face....here soft....6:30 when its pallor....cogent.... with place....its desire origins that smile at time for that smile...Skin hill....The sky directly natural...The “good” will not be something brought in from the outside... Plotinus?...Does it proceed by recognition then....Apple under the skin...Are these texts events of experience...How does language constitute an event of experience...How does the body...Because an event of experience can be an extension of the body is it the soul...(Experience used to be called the soul)...Do they both do it simply through reference alone...Can juxtaposition be a reference...Sure...For thought and sensation to be equally present....which is to say simultaneously present...Not as in a cause and effect relationship....but simply as an analysis of experience...Of course this presumes a breaking of the template of thought...What it imposes is a plurality to the depths of the inner self...Narrative is a violent struggle to contain the self...Narrative is not about experience but about drama...Its primary concern is not having a thought or sensation but about conveying one...Its emphasis is misplaced and because of it both the thought and the sensation are misgiven...How does one break the template of thought...Mostly by breaking narrative...By breaking the idea of whole self/unity...When one realizes the plurality of the self....which of course is to say the myth of the self....one realizes....A world view predicated on Power versus A world view predicated on Justice... Is the radical de-centralization of Power Justice...Isn’t the meeting of everything equally a center Justice...Isn’t that the “Kingdom of God”...Description...I want the mark to stay on the ghost...Does/can an anti-narrative stance subvert the world...In the sense of parable’s ability to do so...It comes back to whether the world proceeds by narrative which I believe it does not...Soul itself resists narrative...Lumen –divine radiation or natural illumination versus lux –perceived light in the eye of the concrete beholder, as the focus of interest...Leonardo’s sfumato...Is clarity inherent in Purity....with respect to language...How does that fit in the context of creating’s being resisting rather than communicating...Something which is entirely pure....of course....cannot resist or communicate because it is solitary—it is pure to the extent that it is insular...What is it which makes turning something into something else appealing...And isn’t that turn inherently dramatic...One must remove the containing of one context within another... Context itself must be broadened...How far can context be broadened before it falls apart...That remains to be seen...Can context be linear only...Is a string of juxtaposed phrases a context...Can an image itself have a context...Is the attacking of context a sufficient resistance...Thought is never innocent....it is aggressive...Honesty versus Truth...Is truth directly linked....as Nietzsche stated....to the feeling of Power...Spectacle is a corrosive to honesty because it’s couched in terms of drama...The transition of a closed system to an open one that is where it is no longer a matter of communication but of transformation...Tintoretto...The name of the hero is the people...Is perpetuation the same as proceeding...If one removes narrative from a text is it necessarily static...No...If one does away with the “vehicle” in any text one must proceed by transformation...This of course is variously manifest:....grammar....syntax....context....imagery (if there is such a thing)...Because the narrative is absent....thought there exists moments of self-reference or subjectiveness....resistance....is....severely foregrounded...That way of thinking comes back to a broad trust in the notion of representatives....whether they be devices or persons...But resistance to what...To being assimilated and thus repeating the current line or world view...Fiction...Show me the ideas you claim to have...The point at which the muscle attaches to the bone is its most vulnerable...Their both being attached to weakness at certain points in various systems...Efficacy...A bird the size of her ear....wind wasted... Muscles....bones....orifices....skin....organs + the idea of conception through the ear (i.e. immaculate) + bird imagery...I’m not interested....simply....in different ways of telling... Am I telling at all...I’d hoped to have a progress of thinking....That is an engagement... Focus on what it is that is breached...What is breached...The hero is called the people... An assumption about thinking and thus the text...Resisting is a way of defeating representative thought...Once again honesty versus community or (family)....Again is the attacking of context a sufficient resistance...Is resistance necessarily solitary...Honesty.... Memory....Eros/Thanatos....body....jesus...Is description a unit...Bronchioles...How is knowledge different from honesty...Both are perceived to be value based systems....I suppose one must make the distinction between nouns and verbs here...In terms of nouns....knowledge and honesty are both value based systems for arranging things...The three conditions of testimony:...reason...information...reliability... Dimples one’s skin... One inserts trusts....immediate acts...Pro nobis...That about the pear wood which revealing Helen...Severe arm/branch....putrefaction...Oh this ghostly beauty...“The real presence of time in the world is called Man......Time is Man, and Man is time.” (Augustine)...A concentration of pigment so as to make the skin seem a hole...happen... Blackberry blossoms at night...Is the perception of oneself mythology?...That or “I am being honest”...Is that automatically to assign a specific value...Does one want to escape value...Is escaping value different from combating unity...Is value complicit in unity... Palm....value...Once again the language must be attacked...Sister is properly community... Available....boys...One can imagine power...Winter...No caps in the text...Experience:.... burning due to cold hands...Habit:....radical clarity habit cold and red cardinal...If one breaks habit does one break reason...Are relations external to their terms...Even if those terms are altered by those relations...Determining to carry (our) thoughts from one object to another to transfer the past to the future...Abscondo... Barbarity....caprice...One can imagine power....desires....this morning....frost....thick rim of the body....yard....then birdhouse versus unified personality...Parousia....Calypso...Who conceals....she...Saliva... through the cave’s sensual rooms....sacred wood and hinterland...Slicks area around the lips....each finger her servant...It is a device....the finger...Each future...His hand into a sparrow....manipulated...Creaking branch adversarially...In this light....could the subject be an image for soul...So long as this notion of the subject isn’t one in which the subject ends performing for the other...So long as there is no drama...If in fact this subject cane emerge of a coalition which is predicated upon an equal de-valuation of subject and other...Of course that would be in an ideal relationship....which is pure fancy...But the flux’s center is that or must be that notion of equality...Because in that vacuum uncovered by this de-valuation soul emerges...That is the problem with narrative...there is no de-valuation....and there is no opportunity for something “great and innocent” to occur.... Only afterward can one ornament its carcass...Blake’s polypus still reverts to myth... Reverting to myth....is fine so long as one keeps in mind that that is predicated on the notion that all myth explains is human desire...To ask the question “why is there anything at all” is to couch it in terms which take for granted a centered self...What happens if the question is phrases thus....“is there anything at all”....Only then follow with the why...Is this because it is a nominative...Do all nouns partake of myth...Can a verb be a myth... White wall...What is related to it...Contiguous....blue...A study of Tiresias...Beckett’s shorter plays “Not-I”...Hunched in description....there....tongue in the grass...Are there any limits to Performing I...Clover...Upon the elm....astringent...I have forgotten the function of metaphor....butterfly...Thought is made in the mouth....Ripping at scenery thought sun contrasts trees....envision...Does beginning the text in the first place necessitate one’s picking oneself out as a subject...Not necessarily....thought often is a default (illegible)... It does set out a point of departure which is at very best minimally scatter-shot...Can the text be the making of a subject...Is it possible to interchange subject/context...Is being a “poet” a social category...No...Is participating in honesty a social category.......One tires of description...Depiction: mouth...Description:....my mouth...Over against roughly that it is the move from one thing to another where both points are affected and hence changed:...1 that is linear thought which valorizes the ends....2 it is thought which is dependant on causality and thus on time....3 doesn’t it ignore a moment by moment progression for the “agency” of moving from and moving to...By the same token is responsibility possible in a moment by moment progression...I think so given intelligent choice...What about the problem with time...As far as the text goes it doesn’t exist...So does that remove causality...One tests its limits....therein lies responsibility...Morning yields night....1 day...17 hours (illegible) (illegible)...Imagology...I have often imagined this...Meditation:....russet...One often imaging this....bound by white....feathers under it....blue wing...Flesh pot...Trove hope trove...What about fluidity of the....text...In large part this contributes to its being taken/made as an artifact...Does fluidity necessitate a hierarchy...Can a text be fluid while being anti-grammatical...Yes....because it implies a grammar which is standard...What about the soul/self....is it fluid...Can it be while also being honest...No....overall the soul is not fluid...Does one accept a fluidity based on desire...Tactics: the lizard....the wood wasp...Sophocles...Gaping iris...Extending the house....moved her arm up....over their bodies hooked her hand down over their heads and blew five lifts skin to cheek.... lips...Corrigibility dulls each slight smack....salving the branch Ability to release an image...Desire...Once a garden just past the garage...Medusa Once intense fascination with its feathers ended red in fact the body formed into a ball....One fascinates with her breast....citizen...Prominent flesh...Stone...Fish...Fiber...Dough... Crack...Block...Breath... How does this relate to my notion of soul as between....Can it in fact only occur in such an arrangement....l’un-avec-l’autre...Could being (dasein) = soul...Another description of the soul/self occurring Now....Now....Now Etc....Only the shock of the instance...Does this constitute time...No....because a progression by instants does not include a past or future, but simply occurs as a present...Sovereignty...It is not numerous; it is more... We...Commandeering...Blue glass vase...Mud the lark adjusts (illegible)...Force rolls from cheek into lip...The three conditions of testimony:...reason... information...Example (chronometric)...Medieval annals...709 Hard winter...Duke Gottfried died...710 Hard year and deficient in crops...711...712 Floods everywhere Etc....So is a progression by moments this kind of chronometry...Doesn’t adding narrative to this attempt a lording over, attempt a controlling and nothing else...Are my texts chronometric...How would chronometry fit in with soul/self...Narrative from the great white blossom....removed... Squirrel hooked up from ground...a word that evokes hybrids and monsters...The marvelous....the natural...and the voluntary...Being is society with Experiencing... Learning...Take into oneself...Consuming...The literature of entertainment...A concentration of pigment so as to make the skin seem a hole...The antinomian Amauricians...Is man’s reason the image of God...What of stances of anti-reason...Would anti-(or non)reasonable acts subvert that image of God or transform it, thus extending the same transformation to God...It would do both...Mythologically....Hand One wants solitude...Severing of body and soul...Metempsychosis...Eurydice from life to death.... from dead again to life....from life again to death...Horrible leaves...Io to cow....the god...The entrails of a hen....for example....turn into a toad...From love of one’s own.... enfleshed...To love of the similar neighbor...To love of the enfleshed...To In nova… mutatos…formas…corpora....of bodies changed into new forms (Ovid)...Marie de France...flesh...In lieu of light she moved her arm up....over their bodies hooked her hand down over their heads and blew into his hair a breath as if she’d been illuminated.... centering the room with her skin and not being able to see out...Her skin shone and blinded her...“By story I mean…real change...In an Aristotelian sense, story involves metabole, the replacement of something by something else.” (Bynum)

The Journal: Illness

Head
Bone of skull.
Dura mater.
Venous sinus of dura mater.
Arachnoidal granulation.
Arachnoid.
Subarchnoid space.
Blood vessels.
Neuroglial membrane separating the blood vessels from their pial sheath.
Pial sheaths surrounding cerebral vessels.
Cerebral cortex.
Superior sagittal sinus.
Cerebrum.
Corpus callosum.
Choroid plexus of lateral ventricle.
Choroid plexus of 3rd ventricle.
Cisterna superior.
Pituitary gland.
Sphenoid bone.
Pons.
Medulla oblongata.
Spinal cord.

Heart
Brachiocephalic trunk (innominate artery).
Left common carotid artery.
Left subclavian artery.
Arch of aorta.
Ligamentum arteriosum.
Right pulmonary arteries.
Left pulmonary arteries.
Superior vena cava.
Pulmonary trunk.
Right coronary artery.
Left coronary artery.
Left atrium.
Right atrium.
Circumflex branch of left coronary artery.
Great cardiac vein.
Anterior descending branch of left coronary artery.
Anterior cardiac veins.
Inferior vena cava.
Small cardiac vein.
Right pulmonary veins.
Left pulmonary veins.
Aoritic valve.
Pulmonary valve.
Tricuspid valve (right atrioventricular).
Left ventricle.
Anterior papillary muscle.
Right ventricle.

The Journal: Recovery

This is not a true reply to your letter, though I (we for that matter) do intend to give a true reply. This is simply to let you know that I did not receive a copy, though ______ read his copy to me so I know you intended that I should receive a copy. It may have been lost or who knows what. If you could send a copy to me I would greatly appreciate it.
Also, I think you should know that I am not angry, but I am confused.

I realized after I had sent the previous email that it was rather pointless to ask for a copy of the letter. I don’t need a copy in order to respond (______ read it to me over the phone.) I hesitate to use email simply because I dislike it for serious correspondence, but it is fast. It is important to preface everything which follows by saying a couple of things: first, as I stated before, I’m confuse and second, as I stated before, I’m not angry.
I suppose I should try to explain why I am not angry. When I asked ________ why the two of you divorced she said it was because you are gay. At that point, suddenly, it seemed to me that the divorce and your staying away was your way of protecting us from something which is difficult to explain. I thought then, and do now, that that must have been the best course of action. By telling you this, though, I am not trying to make you less culpable for your choices; there were also some selfish and irresponsible motives behind them. I am not naïve enough to assume it was better this way and there is no point in speculating. You said in your letter that you wanted to be honest, as do I. I think at this point there can be no other way to be and still hope to proceed. I do want to ask you two, for now, questions: first, what’s your side of the story, second, why now? I can think of other questions, but for the time being I think we need slowly to begin establishing a history before we can start trying to fill it in. You stated that you also have questions, I’ll be glad to answer them honestly, though slowly—this is a difficult thing which requires time, care and respect.

I spoke with ______ and we both agree that for you to send each of us a letter would be best now that you have both of our addresses. By both of us getting a letter, even which contains the same information, we will be able to react individually. Also, I want to stress that any dialogue, aside from the transmission of facts, which is to take place between you and I and between you and ______ must take place individually. Many of the concerns which this dialogue involves are mutual, but many more are extremely individual. It seems that ________ initial questions echo mine: What happened? and
Why now? If you have any questions feel free to contact me, but I will not relay information, again, aside from facts, between you and ______ that will be up to the two of you. I can’t and won’t assume to speak for ______, but I for one look forward to reading your letter.

I received your letter yesterday and want to thank you for being so prompt. I told you in a previous email that I thought it best to communicate by letter, I still do, the reason I am sending this email is that I couldn’t read your return address on the envelope. I guess I got my habit of writing quickly from you. Also, I want to thank you for being so honest, I know this can not be easy for you. Most of the information you gave I knew to some extent, except for the __________________________________. This is something _________ was not honest about. When I asked why the divorce happened, and this was 7 or 8 years ago, I was simply told that you were gay. Over the years I’ve gleaned information from here and there and
_________________________________________________________________. I want to ask you some other questions. But I also want you to know that anything you choose not to answer is fine with me and that my wanting to pursue a relationship with you is not contingent on either your answering or your answers. I guess I’ll ask the hard one first: did you know you were gay when you married _________? I also have loads of other questions along an entirely different line: your life. I want to be as honest with you as you have with me. You stated in your letter that I apparently had tried to find you through the _____ side; the fact is I didn’t, though I had thought about doing so.
_________ may have tried though I don’t know for sure. This doesn’t mean I’m sorry that you have contacted me; I am, in fact, very happy. I don’t know what kind of relationship you have in mind. I’d like to share some things about my life with you but I don’t want you to feel overwhelmed. I don’t know what I expect but I do want to try to understand you in some way and I’d like you to feel the same. Just let me know what you have in mind or if you don’t know either maybe we can simply keeping writing and see what happens. I’ll try to answer any questions you may have about me and my life.
_______ tells me that your return address is easily read. So, I now have your true address, but I’ll send the email anyway.

Each time I sit down to write you I can tell the focus of my attention is moving from wanting to ask you questions toward wanting to tell you things. I think this is good, although I can't get over what a strange and rare opportunity this is for the both of us.
Here we are at the cusp of, what I hope will be, an enduring and mutually rewarding relationship. Each of us has here the opportunity to create a self for the other, of course by that I do not mean an invention but a presentation of who each of us thinks we are, which is why I so value the honesty which your letters from the first have strove to require. I want us to always be honest. What you said about whether you knew you were gay when you married _________ makes a great deal of sense. It is amazing how long a culture can ignore or deny something only to turn around and the in space of 3 decades almost completely assimilate it. You said you didn't want the last letter to be about you. But I do, I want to know things about you: your childhood, which you mentioned, your life until now, what you do, what/how you think about things, everything. I, too, don't want you to feel I'm asking too much too soon, but still I wonder.

I want to thank you for the enthusiasm of your last letter; you couldn't have stated anything more perfectly. As far as feeling intimidated by the fact that I’m a writer, you shouldn't, you express yourself very well. What I do isn't something which is impossible for most people if they would just let themselves. Two things which you mentioned in your letter, especially caught my interest: 1) that you are on disability, is it fair of me to ask due to what condition and 2) what things do you do which might surprise me? I'm curious about the disability because I want you to be well and to be able to sustain being well. Do you still paint? I've seen a couple paintings which you did long ago and I'm curious. Do you read a lot, if so what? Being a student of Life is all any of us can be whether we want to admit it or not. There are many people who expend all their energy in trying to fulfill a convention which has nothing to do with them, for whom the phrase "student of Life" is viewed with contempt. Of course they feel contemptuous because they've never given themselves the opportunity to feel something deeply and let it affect everything else in their lives. Also, we live in a product oriented culture which places little emphasis on the paths which lead to those products. But the fact is that the path is everything, in fact the only thing. Honestly I can think of very little about which I am uncomfortable answering questions, so anything you can think of is fine. By the same token I'll let you know that I am an odd person, which I do not say in order to be self- congratulatory nor do I mean that statement as a lament, but only to be honest. I like to do thing my way. I am not a Romantic. My writing is, if any thing, analytic though personal and extremely visceral. I write in a peculiar way and do so because it seems, to me, most honest. I find most fiction too concerned with story, which is to me an artificial sequencing of events. Other things about me outside of my writing: I do not watch television. I like subtle colors. _____ will tell that I am not witty, though I try occasionally. I dislike most comedy, because it seems simply an escape.

I want to write this to you for two reasons. One, in some way I wanted to tell you Happy
Father’s Day which is not to say that I want you to (nor do I think you want to) take
_______ place, but you still are my father and I don’t see why I simply can’t have both.
Second, I mentioned in my letter that there was a slight chance that I might have a book of poems coming out. Well it looks as though I will have one out this spring. Also, I wanted to include this poem, which I’ll begin by saying is very old (I wrote it when I was 22 or 23) and is not indicative of the way I write now. There is something of a story behind it, which is unusual for my writing. In some way the poem involves you or at least my idea of you at that time. I’ll just tell you what happened then type the poem. This was written not as a direct outgrowth of the experience but sometime soon after it. It was primarily an experiment in a way of writing which was then attached to you and this experience. Here’s the story. When I was living in Iowa City in 1993 I went to an exhibit of the AIDS quilt. While the viewers where looking around at the beautiful and various quilts; a speaker was reading the names of victims of the disease, I could have sworn I heard your name read. I was taken aback, obviously. I was sad and confused. Anyway in the weeks which followed something of that experience came back up in this poem, though I don’t think anyone would know it unless I told them. Again, I wrote this when I was very young. You (and I to some extent) are the Hungarian.

Love story
The Hungarian bursts everything he owns.
These are the seeds of guilt. Which the pigeons
will not eat, which the singing birds will.
He bathes in the bone water of a bone tub.
To break now would leave him transparent.
The love of a man is heartbreaking. The Hungarian
loves one. Trees are never cold. Trees
are never beautiful or ugly, but graceful.
The Hungarian is beautiful and bursts everything.
Everything bursts. These are the seeds of desire.
Which the pigeons will eat, which the singing
birds will not. He bathes in the fuchsia water
of a fuchsia tub. The kiss of a promise is heartbreaking.
The Hungarian is beautiful and bursts everything.

I did receive you letter on the 17th. I want to thank you again for being so honest, it couldn’t have been easy. I’m glad to know how healthy you are. I don’t know so very much about HIV. I know that there have been and are people who have gone twenty years or more and haven’t developed AIDS. It is a little frightening, though, I’m sure it was for you, at least when you found out and for the first few years. I am glad to hear how seriously you take your health; there are too many people who act as if they have no control over what happens to their bodies. You never have to worry about my thinking differently about you because you don’t read a lot or because you watch TV or what ever. It is obvious to me that you are a thoughtful person and that you care a great deal about things. I hope it was OK that I called yesterday. I would like to hear your voice. Not that I don’t like the correspondence we’ve had, but somehow a physical voice would make it more real.

I also enjoyed our conversation yesterday. There are plenty of things I’d like to tell you about my childhood, though on some level it would simply be hindsight. I mean taking a frame of mind which is in the present and using that as a template for past events is almost always a mistake. It was a pretty normal childhood, I was safe and loved.

Having both you and ___ here was such a joy. I am constantly impressed by the way in which you have handled every step of this process of reintroducing ourselves to each other. There is nothing which could have been handled with more tact, respect and love.
You have really made all of this seem simply natural, for which you have my greatest appreciation. I, too, felt sad when hugging you good-bye that Saturday night. But, at the same time, exhilarated, whole to a degree I was, and still am, surprised at, and happy. You spoke of ______ and me as filling part of a void in your life. You've done that for my life as well, except it was one which I didn't I know I had. For that I also want to thank you. It is obvious to me that you are a sensitive, caring and generous man by the way you interacted with _____ and _____, also, in the way you write about them. You are a very insightful person. The things you said about how _____ and I are raising _____ do mean a great deal, because you are right on. The things you said about me and what I've done with my life I find very moving. I feel I have so much in common with you. I am very comfortable with you and I want to tell you things. Whether or not there is a mutual Love between us I think cannot be questioned. As to whether there are any bounds that you could over-step, quite simply there are not. I don't want you to worry, at all. Say what you think, say what you feel and I'll do the same. I, too, look forward to getting your letters. They make me happy and excited. I am very glad that all this has come about at this point in my life, when nothing seems the least bit confusing. I enjoy having this conversation with you, because with you I feel a real connection, something which isn't born of simply Time elapsed but which side-steps that notion all together. There are certain relationships which grow exponentially and I am glad this is one. Of course there is more than one side to your personality. You are a passionate person and that passion is equally applied. I lose my temper and am not always as nice as I should be. I am, at times, judgmental and assuming. But I try and it is obvious to me that you do too. I think you and I are similar in many ways even if they maybe subtle.

The Journal: Exploring the Island
One turns to oneself in times of grand stress and loneliness and finds a warm body eager, a-go to the idea of a whirl.
You see what it is now. As a man I push at my nether part, from the soft ridges of flesh gathered above my fist there is the whiff of launch, of extension, but pulled back the ridges smooth, even tighten creating a leveled field. Once again pushing and reaching the tether’s end, over and over; but I am not extended nor launched. Rather than pushing away, as a woman I pushed my nether parts to muster a gathering. I was much taken with the beauty of self-pleasure as a woman, taken with the wet circle, the aggressive stance of a world apart and sufficient.

as her a finger in the mouth, the warm and wet tongue as a companion, to touch speech, full well muscle
as him a finger in the eye, protruding by blinding, for the assumption of power through my own teared over eye

One parts one’s body, or stretches it, according to one’s desire. At a certain point the confusion is minimal and one’s perception is narrowed in order to burst out further. As a woman I was a more generous lover, both to myself and others; though as a man I’ve attempted rather more than I might have.

There is now a ball of light on the lawn which has warmed as he can see its evidences in the unfurling grass; in his genitals the light lengthens both into and out of him, in concert with the unfurling he, perhaps, has shared, fractionally, my insight. The line was drawn and was his body, the island which being redraft is both raked over and ignored, and thus pristine.

Draw the line round and about, largely, so that sized is complicating the definitions. Round about internally: an archipelago. I was alive, he’d thought in the confusion of the spheres, in the synapses between my line and theirs. I was alive so that a ball of light sat warming the grasses and what lie beneath them. The voluptuous curves of the hillocks and vales, rut and strong tree; step and the foot there among whatnot, but asserting; one body the restriction of another; the green, green grass; mouth and push and pull.

It all comes of, if you’ll permit speculation, doubt. Mothered or fathered within the fact that there are things; we are not extended to compose a sip of wine or a tick at the beagle’s back.

We are not composed at all, but composing.
One touches one’s self either through a method of necessity or delight or regret, but the lay of the land comes of it.
Unknowing, from a cloud pulls a car in front of one then the stench of intestines and what one’s method brings to bear is spangles throughout the cloud like lightening or blind stink.
It is elusive only within reacting to it; temperament as a means of orgasm, and thus as a means of revelation.

The Journal: Of Pots and Canoes
What began the beguiling with names? The relevancy of quest?

Blank.

He will place a ball in your hand which, while wet from his mouth, will retain the warmth of his body. As if in his child’s mind this was an organ to view the invisible life. It will be the size of an eye, though is not an eye. He will not change one bit at being relieved of its modest burden. But you will feel all simplicity drain from you and perhaps materialize at your feet as a dog of some sort.
He will place your palm on the top of his restless head to cap what he will think into place, holding your wrist as a capture which when amended to his vocabulary will leave you with your hand all pins and needles. The wrist will, for him, be all affect. With the moon over the heart he will bend to show you the grasses he will burn then extinguish. This will be a method of controlling a method of control.

Blank.

The house was within him and a circle, a mesh of something with objects. The hill like a head with the house topping; within the hill the house rooted, so that much more was in the hill than topped the hill. The house was within him and a cylinder. First room: a glass wall with bed in lead wire inlayed. Second room: the illusion of depth, the illusion of space. Third room: while the lead is upon the glass, so raised perhaps an eighth of an inch, the bookshelves and books have no real depth. Fourth room: just glass. Fifth room: a window has been painted on the glass.

Blank.

The stones came to acquire the glint of an eye and, by sailing from the other disciples’ hands into the air, a breath. Much of the stones’ fledgling voices were lost first to his robes, and finally to his flesh and bones. They had no particular language, if you’ll forgive their helter skelter pattern at his feet. Once down among them he saw how many times smaller these stones were than the heart. Their indignation was hot, for what was a human heart but meat. Flame was loosed from each stone upon its thrower, who moving for some moments within his flame crackled and fell into a heap.

Blank.

His mouth, in that moment, was Jesus’ mouth and the stones in the hands of the other disciples’ were the hearts of the wicked, hardened and called forth at his word. At each strike against his body Jesus’ mouth was loosed from his, incrementally, until finally freed and spoken into a bird it was gone. From the ground he saw the others as pillars of flame and motion contrived against doubt.

Blank.

Doubt of every variety is rife among these pages.

Blank.

He moves his leg and it is a bribe to the swell to furrow and repeat itself until it has pulled the sands of the beach and curled them up into a gloss of surface then dropped them swirling to the bottom. As it happens, here, there is nothing interior to him; the wind pushes through his mouth and there are birds which flitter in the trees like chinks in armor. He cannot even imagine a word to say.

The Journal: Reflections
I stood as one thunderstruck.

I stand, now, talking this to you, knowing I’ve done so before and will again, with perhaps an altered sequence, and am thunderstruck.

I stand before walls as one stands in one’s own skin, with an all-consuming desire to expand what is encompassed.

I stood with my house in my head, smooth and cupped out of the beach as if an immense penis or breast had been pressed into the sand. Into my house I descended and laid with a small drain at my back ending in a nipple of sorts. Leeching salts were added to fill my house. I breathed through a tube run to the surface. The fluids pulled from me gathered at the drain and discharged through the nipple. My shrinking as they left was the losing of division, the division of Time. This liquid, when provided with a low voltage electric current became a translucent putty studded with bits of grit. When this is molded into a house is it a house or an action?

No Escape
The futurity of an object can neither be called to task nor made reliable. Even in motion and urine yellow the glass ashtray airborne between his naked father and the naked Nearly Furtive, while traversing a segment alluded to by their engorged members, will be a wink of the sun, not a method of escape for either man. Just as one man takes hold of the glass object and propels it, it provides a veritable lens through which to see becomes as good as to understand. Just as rage fouls the air of the room reducing the breathing of both men to a wheeze and both faces to red smudges, DISBELIEF needles its way to the surface, though is at a loss to find an opening.
His father’s smile has flashed to bone.
Nearly Furtive thinks the words into his eyes, YOU, AREN’T, MY, FATHER. And while his scrotum is tight with a kind of love it is not, he admits with a cough, paternal. The question quickly becomes, and broadcasted exaggerates the movements of his arms and legs, WHAT, MAN, IS, MY, MAN, AND, WHY.
While this is the end of their relationship, at least their directives have been established. His father will live on in Texas for the time being. While Nearly Furtive will take on tracking down his mother, his brother and him in order to re-invent himself as a father.

There is a complicated system of preparing a shield: Its first step, this I’ve seen performed endless times in endless places, is to slaughter a favorite animal. Once its blood has been ensconced in a vessel appropriate to the situation the holder of the vessel has a reasonable feeling of security, feels reasonably shielded from the inevitable, but of course is not.

Broken or breaking glass will figure at least once more in this mythology of his first decade. But taken in totus the mythology of his life will be studded with it, gleaming.

Further Improvements
One can be carried a great distance at the whim of another, on the back of discontent, grief even. He would shape the space inside the car by means of the light’s change between night and day, between Texas and Pennsylvania. He could breathe into the space and alter it into directions unnoticed by his mother. As her breathing settled by thinking STEERING WHEEL, thinking WIND SHIELD, thinking that any carcass beside the road is less convoluted than her; thinking the nouns of the car carried them away from his father’s altered skin, his father’s honesty rearing up to buck her back toward her mother’s heavy word. I imagine him sculpting the space in the little VW Beetle into the shape of words he’d only heard: CHOICE, HONESTY, into the shape of visages so incremental as to seem discrete: the ground corner of a tooth, into anything outside of him, anything cool and constantly moving, say the air from the passenger’s window which hugs its rubber seal imperfectly, say lifting his thigh from the upholstery to let the sweat dry, it was in these moments that belonging began becoming a grotesque glut of which he wanted no part.

Transgression.

Transgress.

To transgress has, now and again, meant to be called out.

One turns a blind eye. I turn a blind eye. By holding breath in his mouth then blowing it out in a plume he has transgressed his body proper and began an encroachment.

I have seen the transgressions of the Father revisited upon the Son to no real avail; the body is the body however hung or crouched. The transgression one must bring to bear is Honesty, which is, among other things, blatant disregard for Future. The hand his hand will grow into may smack his own thigh or the thigh of another and that sharp crack will be so centered as to command the notion of surrounding Space in the moment of that action. When his mother’s stifled sobs, while driving toward Pennsylvania, contort her shoulders and her forearms, outstretched with hands grasping steering wheel, modulate between a structural power of muscle and bone and the passivity of meat by turns until finally there is dissolve he will gasp from the air of the moving car each segment of regret, each segment of confusion and hatred which while wracking his mother’s body reduces it to a vial small enough for a breast pocket and stoppered with something nourishing and perishable, an almond maybe.

A Footprint
One finger has been transformed to a rod, the length of which is undeterminable, only through forfeiting to distance and thus being left for stasis. Forfeiture enters the body by any number of methods; the resultant reaction tends to adjust the carriage of the body, to adjust expectation.
For him the lengthening and the broadening of both his mother’s and his grandmother’s mouths, upon (finally) reentering his grandmother’s house after what he came to recall as the drive northeast during which the idea of Space had suddenly entered him giving him the ability isolate both people and object so discretely that they would continue along as if interaction was still possible, will always be the image of forfeiture. Lament had ultimately settled, and Anger, into the visible forms of his grandmother and his mother while a rooster sent up a call to his chickens in the side yard.
So this was resignation and the first heave toward lumbering within a life resignedly. He carried what little he could as if apologizing all the while to everything he encountered. To the wrought iron little bench, black with red velvet cushion, “I know this isn’t our house, you’re very generous for letting us stay.” To the gaudy candle sconces upon the imitation birch paneling, “I don’t know why we’re here.” To the red wall, “We are here to be away and to be different.” To his grandmother, “Are the chickens always so feathery and loud?”

One can take a tact against the body under the auspice of forfeiture. In this case one forfeits by increment the body entire to extension, toward, what can be thought of as a sacramental, exceeding of the limits of the body. Generally in this instance phrases occur to the mind of the body

Bones
Glass orifice. An orifice entirely of glass.

There are to events, two recollections, which involve his brother as a child, who has been seldom mentioned in my relating this to you and who will remain so aside these two diversions. Chronologically there is some confusion as to which came first. Chronology has, for me, always been a sore point. Events occur either in or out of the Past or the Future, while I’m out of stasis here in the Present, which while a shelter in name only continues to hold the warmth of a body speaking into the air around.

I’ll say this occurred first.

The sunlight skirting under the eaves of the carport was of an unusual color and intensity. It had the remarkable tendency, on this morning outside the house of a friend of his mother’s, of isolating each object so that all of space seemed to be sucked into it and suddenly the object held the opportunity of resolution, in its new grandeur, of the resolution to his growing concern about Place and whether he had one. He’d looked from object to object lining the half walls of the carport each containing a piece, as it were, of the puzzle; one the lilt of a wrist, another the tenor of a particular name spoken softly through a door, first with longing then resignedness. The object which held him longest was a glass Cocoa-cola bottle nestled on the back half wall of the carport which had been re-filled with a thin, slightly cloudy liquid. His brother was drawn directly to the bottle, took it down and, with a gleeful step, walked into the sun. As he lifted the bottle to his lips the sun was caught in the liquid; what was diffuse through out it was lit up so the tiny congealed masses floating through the bottle took on the aspects of continents rushing toward one another near the bottle’s orifice, perched gingerly upon his brother’s lip. The guilt he felt about his lack of intervention was palpable and washed down his throat. Though through his transfixion with the illuminated bottle and liquid he came to understand that he stood apart from the others, from the object which thus animated joined the ranks of Places he’d not enter, Places his body came to revile as something so much a part of an otherness he wanted no part of, so much a part of the world that any gleaming or terrific circumstance which poked through he took to be the hand of his own mind guiding him beyond it all, toward a direct relationship with matter. He was culpable, at least in some small degree, no? Can one equate culpability with non-intervention among children? Insight has a way of laying open objects and their circumstances to the fact that they work as they are, to the fact that they work with what is at hand to sustain some kind of a presence. What he wanted was to recede.

2005-07-21T15:08:00.000-07:00

Scrawl

Note:
The Augustine passages are from The Confessions of St. Augustine trans. Rex Warner.
The two newspaper articles are from The Charlotte Observer, dated 10/20/00 and 4/17/04
Respectively (names of both people and places have been removed).

she

am among the dead

The box arrived unexpectedly and occupied space, the right hand corner of her desk, inefficiently. It mussed the piles of manuscripts, arranged in the kind of hierarchy which, while idiosyncratic, sped her work along and held in stasis, against wind from the window facing, by leaden glass discs. She glanced at the return address just as a circle, what seemed a circle, of blue fluttered past the window, by the window: jays in her periphery, and recognized the liquid hand of one of her writers. His was the kind of handwriting in which one could easily mistake an “i” for an “e” or an “a” for an “o”, so one read it with an eye to open possibility as when making out an object in the dark.
Her phone rang and she talked, sitting behind her desk with the box a near forty-five degree angle from the corner of her right eye, watching a student down by the river occupy a bench entirely with his mood. He removed some paper from a notebook and started folding or tearing, it was difficult to tell from here, throwing, what were revealed to be, paper airplanes toward the center of the river. The first and second planes rose steeply, an obvious flaw in the design she thought, creased too hard, and plummeted into the current. Watching, while her mouth was speaking into the phone, bored with the idea of the last crest and watery mainline, the last plane too crested very high and came down fast but leveled out over the water and glided the fifteen feet to the bridge where it was sucked through and lost to her sight. It was unusual of him to send a box, she thought just as the plane was transferred into memory.

She saved mail for last; it was her habit, a way of ending the day by receiving a gift of sorts. After getting through the miscellanea of letters regarding the press or teaching she placed the box squarely in front of her, light from the window now casting it more russet, tired. She found it to contain the following: a moderately underscored copy of The Confessions of St. Augustine, from which, while fanning through the pages, fell two used boarding passes dated November 4 nearly ten years ago, she recognized the names on the passes as mutual friends of theirs who happened to live in town (she’d have to give them a call), sitting atop four of his manuscripts she’d yet to see, those atop two hardbound sketchbooks, filled with his frustratingly mercurial handwriting, those atop a single sheet of paper. The manuscripts seemed to be of his usual quality, if not gradually better. The notebooks: guilt in her fingertips she leafed through them amazed at how like drawing they were, at how a word or phrase would leap off the page as legible amid a sea of miniscule curves and straight cut-backs the motion and sentiment of informed opinion and fury. She took up the single page again. It was blank save for one line centered both on the vertical and horizontal, written in cursive and printed, and one line typed just beneath it. The handwritten line intrigued her. The first word was nearly illegible, two letters perhaps, a break then printed, “among the dead.” From context the first two letters must be either “am” or “i’m”, there was an “m” like quality to the second shape. Where did it go? Had it come loose from one of the manuscripts? Then reading it just beneath in typeface, “am among the dead”, she took it as directive, held her breath a moment and folded the paper.

First she attempted the obvious in making some sense of the box, but finally resorted to the oblique. She spread the materials before her, the notebooks, manuscripts, the Augustine, the paper and ticket stub. The manuscripts, she supposed, were to be expected. With a glance over her desk she placed his four manuscripts into her hierarchy and moved on. The notebooks, while interesting in the ideal, were illegible. In fact illegible to the extent that they no longer resembled writing but seemed to cross over some threshold, some critical point at which human endeavor breaks down and pure nature takes hold. These lines eroded the pages, severe and heavy, furious with intent but whiling away to scrawl, termite tunnels. Of the remaining three items the Augustine and the ticket rushed out to her, the paper lay as a buffer of sorts, a line of demarcation which while holding sense and nonsense at bay shone in the light of her office.
Looking up she was reflected to herself in the window. It had grown dark; though the length of the day seemed indefinite in the midst of these things. She could see through her reflection the wall behind her and as she looked the desk, the papers, the box itself bore into her, all space in the office was flattened out.
She stood, stretching her legs and walked toward the glass as it occurred to her: “a list.” She was first an organizer, a list maker and second an analyzer. Staring down at the brick ledge outside the window absently working through lists she’d made the brick darkened in one tiny spot then inched over. Looking down through her face in the glass, as now her reflection was a window through the glass, an earwig froze and curved its body aggressively. Earwig, she knew was a nebulous name. It referred to any of an order called Dermaptera, that is insects with short, horny forewings, biting mouth parts and a pair of forceps at the terminal end of the abdomen. What she liked about this creature was that it ended with an open parenthesis and the fact that its common name is based on a lie. It, of course, did not try to enter humans’ ears while they slept, though this idea did put the earwig in the company of the angel Gabriel as he entered and impregnated Mary in a like manner.
She’d begin by listing those passages underscored in the Augustine. She’d read each passage not for what it said or intended to say but for what it could contain with regard to making sense of the box. They must be the materials of something else, some other way of constructing a story or a message which she would have to discover. She supposed a book could be passed back and forth, say among prisoners, those cloistered, and the words rearranged in such a way by each so as to tell the story of their lives. It happened with people in general, with their genes, with their ideas, for that matter with their words; it was happening just now somewhere.
The earwig was motionless in its contortion, fixed. And, for that matter, fixing her within its forceps, she and the room were parenthetical. This was a point of beginning from which all subsequent events could be measured. Her grandeur, afforded simply be size, was not reduced as much as appended to this gesture. She was now a figment, granted, not without bearing on what happened. She left the earwig, its dominance established, and the office, with the Augustine in hand flicking out the light as she emerged into the hall.

The office was bright again. To be there now seemed to be returning to the place of some subtle though pervasive event, some insistence which gurgled up from the floor and altered a quality in the room, the air say, so that the memory of a touch, quick and random though filled so utterly with comprehension that one blushed and stopped speaking and noticed the large pores or lower right ear lobe of the other. The possibility of all work melted away. The box was articulate and hulking among the stacks of paper, even empty. Was she to compose the story of the box by sifting through the Augustine, picking rice from the sand? The underscored passages congregated near the middle of the book stopped then picked up again toward the end. She listed, and annotated, them, carefully writing out each as it was underlined, thus cutting sentences either at the front or back; some were intact, some nearly entirely cut away as with people, reserving those left intact as good friends, maybe lovers at points past or future, and those parsed to an infinitive were contacts, functionaries who fulfilled that undesignated position with the utmost economy and were abandoned.

AUGUSTINE: And you beat back the weakness of my sight, blazing upon me with your rays, and I trembled in love and in dread, and I found that I was far distant from you, in a region of total unlikeness, as if I were hearing your voice from on high saying: “I am the food of grown men. Grow and you shall feed upon me. And you will not, as with the food of the body, change me into yourself, but you will be changed into me.”
AUGUSTINE: I am that I am.
AUGUSTINE: Supposing them to be deprived of all good, they will cease to exist altogether.
AUGUSTINE: So if they are deprived of all good, they will cease to exist altogether.
AUGUSTINE: Therefore, all things that are, are good, and as to that evil, the origin of which I was seeking for, it is not a substance, since, if it were a substance, it would be good. For it would either have to be an incorruptible (which is the highest form of goodness) of else a corruptible substance (which, unless it had good in it, could not be corruptible.)
AUGUSTINE: To you, then, there is no such thing at all as evil.
AUGUSTINE: …all things together are better than the higher things by themselves.
AUGUSTINE: …the only meaning of falsehood is when something is thought to exist when it does not.
AUGUSTINE: And I asked: “What is wickedness?” and found that it is not a substance but a perversity of the will turning away from you, God, the supreme substance, toward lower things—casting away, as it were, its own insides, and swelling with desire for what is outside it.
AUGUSTINE: …to the soul which perceives by means of the bodily sense…
AUGUSTINE: …I went on to the faculty of reason to which sense data are referred for judgment.
AUGUSTINE: For to be now moving and now not moving the limbs of the body by an act of will, to be now feeling some emotion and now not feeling it, to be at one moment uttering wisdom by means of the signs of speech and at the next moment to be silent—these are all marks of a soul and a mind which are mutable.
AUGUSTINE: …for a truth which was incorporeal…
AUGUSTINE: …is between presumption and confession…
AUGUSTINE: …had trembled.
AUGUSTINE: Yet the mind is mind, and the hand is body.
AUGUSTINE: The force of the order is in the force of the will, and disobedience to the order results from insufficiency of the will.
AUGUSTINE: For if it were entire in itself, it would not give the order to will; the will would be there already.
AUGUSTINE: So the reason why there are two wills in us is because one of them is not entire, and one has what the other lacks.
AUGUSTINE: Him that is weak in the faith, receive.
AUGUSTINE: For those who find their joys in things outside easily become vain and waste themselves on things seen and temporal and, with their minds starving, go licking at shadows.
AUGUSTINE: In the Eternal Simplicity I had other corn and wine and oil.
AUGUSTINE: …looking with wonder at your works, and we came to our own souls, and we went beyond our souls to reach that region of never-failing plenty where Thou feedest Israel forever with the food of truth and where life is that Wisdom by whom all these things are made, both what is past and what is to come; but Wisdom herself is not made; she is as she has been will be forever; or rather, there is no place in her for ‘to have been’ or ‘to be going to be’; one can only say ‘to be,’ since she is eternal and ‘have been’ and ‘going to be’ are not eternal.
AUGUSTINE: …we returned to the sounds made by our mouths, where a word has a beginning and an ending.
AUGUSTINE: …by not thinking of self, were to transcend self…
AUGUSTINE: So I was using truth as a kind of fomentation to dull my torture, a torture which was known to you, though the others, who listened intently to my words, did not know it and thought that I had no feeling of pain.
AUGUSTINE: And I said to all those things which stand about the gates of my senses: “Tell me about my God, you who are not He. Tell me something about Him.”
AUGUSTINE: My question was in my contemplation of them, and their answer was in their beauty.
AUGUSTINE: I had already looked for Him by means of the body, searching from earth to heaven, as far as I could send the beams of my eyes as messengers.
AUGUSTINE: It was to this part that all the messengers from my body gave their reports and this part sat in judgment weighing the replies of heaven and earth and all things within them when they said: “We are not God”
AUGUSTINE: …by the things that are made; but by loving these things, they become subject to them, and subjects cannot judge.
AUGUSTINE: Of it would be trurer to say that they speak to everyone, but are only understood by those who compare the voice which comes to them from the outside with the truth that is within.
AUGUSTINE: …better part; you animate…
AUGUSTINE: But there is another force—not the one by which I give life, but the one by which I give perception to my flesh.
AUGUSTINE: …through these senses, with all their diverse functions, I act, retaining my identity as one soul.
AUGUSTINE: “Does the thing exist? What is it? Of what kind is it?”
AUGUSTINE: …I was recognizing them in my own mind…
AUGUSTINE: …unless in fact they were in my memory already, but so far back and so buried, as it were, in the furthest recesses that, if they had not been dragged out by the suggestion of someone else, I should perhaps not have been able to conceive of them?
AUGUSTINE: …means simply this: by the act of thought we are, as it were, collecting together things which the memory did contain, though in a disorganized and scattered way, and by giving them our close attention we are arranging for them to be as it were stored up ready to hand in that same memory where previously they lay hidden, neglected, and dispersed, so that now they will readily come forward to the mind that has become familiar with them.
AUGUSTINE: …for the mind is one thing and the body another.
AUGUSTINE: But memory itself is mind.
AUGUSTINE: Can memory itself be present to itself by means of its image rather than by its reality?
AUGUSTINE: Though one might perhaps say: “There are three times—a present of things past, a present of things present, and a present of things future.” For these three do exist in the mind, and I do not see them anywhere else: the present time of things past is memory; the present time of things present is sight; the present time of things future is expectation.
AUGUSTINE: It is not often that we use language correctly; usually we use it incorrectly, though we understand each other’s meaning.
AUGUSTINE: What we measure is the space between a beginning and an end.
AUGUSTINE: The long one has not even begun to sound unless the short one has ceased to sound.
AUGUSTINE: Or it would be truer to say “it did sound” and “it will sound”; for the part of it which at any moment is completed has sounded, and the part of it which remains to be uttered will sound, and so it goes on, as the act of will, which is in the present, transfers the future into the past, the past growing as the future diminishes, until the future is consumed and it is all past.
AUGUSTINE: “Why did the idea of making something occur to Him, when previously He had never made anything?” Grant them, Lord, to think carefully what they are saying and to realize that when there is no time, one cannot use the word “never.”
AUGUSTINE: Again not many people are acute enough in understanding as to be able to see without difficulty how it is that the sound is prior to the tune: the reason being that a tune is a sound that has given form, and , though a thing that has not been formed can at least exist, a thing that does not exist cannot give a form. Thus the matter is prior to the thing which is made from it—not prior because it makes the thing (it is rather the case that it is made than that it makes), and not prior in any temporal sense; for we do not first of all utter formless sounds without a tune and then later on shape them and fit them together into the form of a song, as we do in the case of the wood or silver out of which we are making a box..

Though not the story of his life and only one of the possible permutations, she understood. He’d written his body and was now un-writing it, through the gesture of this box. He was destroying glut to ensure sustenance. This was a potlatch to some degree. She stood and raised the blinds, but this was different. She supposed by his sending these things, especially the manuscripts, that he’d intended them to be published. If he meant this to be a cleansing act what about the story of the event. In the destruction of excess isn’t one assured, almost as an exchange, the story of that destruction? If the host’s belongings became tinder wasn’t it so his name would be licked into the air by the flames, so that his name was written in smoke and carried in the minds of each witness as an example of selflessness thereby lending itself to increase that name? Publishing them wasn’t destruction but dissemination. She rested her hand on the glass which had begun to warm in the mid-morning sun; the sensation drew her eyes to her hand pressed there, flat, opposite her. “The hand is body,” she thought. “The mind is memory,” she thought. The whole business was spectacle, a spectacle which had nothing to do with him, but with the writing; to siphon him off from the box seemed impossible but exactly what he’d wanted, to exist as pure words.
The river shone like a page down below. She had the memory of the plane in her mind then placed it over the water, just before the bridge and held it there. It occurred to her that the earwig’s terminal forceps need not be an open parenthesis only, but could easily be the closed parenthesis. Her head lowered her eyes to the brick window ledge. She glanced up quickly to see the plane sucked under the bridge and out of sight.

a modern invention

—Sure, wow that was a long time ago. Let’s see we’d flown down for his wedding, what maybe ten years ago now.

—We were there over a weekend.

—Yea, your typical big, traditional southern wedding. And when they went to leave the church, you know I’ve always had a great empathy for him, from the first time we met in graduate school. Something about him, I don’t know a passive quality, he seemed to need defending. Anyway so when they went to leave the church their little red car had been covered in toilet paper. You could tell he just wanted to leave, to get away from the spectacle of it all and then there was this, the car shrouded and some boys laughing in the grass. So he went and started clearing the windshield without saying anything. I went to help, then others did, and they drove off.

—Right, I probably put the boarding pass in the book the night before, Friday night. After the rehearsal dinner at his parents we’d gone back to his apartment with his fiancée and their friends. They shaved M’s head that night. I was tired and turned in early, in our room I saw the Augustine and started reading; I must have read it through out the weekend.

—I thought it odd that he’d started underscoring things mid-way through, but then again most of the front of the book relates the story of Augustine’s pre-God years, which I don’t think he’d had.

—He was always serious and self-conscious. Once back in grad school at a party I’d asked him to dance. He simply said he didn’t dance. I told him it was just like sex, easy. He still declined. I turned on my heels and left.

—I think he came up to me to make sure he hadn’t hurt my feelings.

—He was always just watching at parties or anytime for that matter; unless a conversation was one on one he seemed to have difficulty.

—We did dance though later. Well that is the four of us: M and I, before we were married and he and his wife before they were married at the wedding of another friend. During the wedding he’d got up to read from Shakespeare’s sonnets, which I thought must have been difficult for him.

—The same friend read the same sonnet at his wedding. He and his wife left the church to Ode to Joy.

—I don’t know what to think. He’s purposeful so there’s got to be something to the box. I remember once we’d checked one of those paintings out from the library, prints really but framed. The colors were nice, though structurally it was derivative. He was there looking at it and started talking to us about, what was it, the blue of it. How it was Chagall’s blue, which of course it was. He noticed those kinds of threads, following things back. I think he then went on to talk about Francis Bacon’s use of the mouth in his paintings. What was strange was not that he was insightful, but that he’d never spoken about art before. That may have been the night I kicked, perfectly, the bell of a wine glass off leaving the stem in tact and standing.

—What? I’m just remembering another time, later, when we were listening to Beethoven’s late string quartets. M was going on about how they’d been written after Beethoven was already deaf. He didn’t think that spectacular. He said something like at that point he knew how it sounded as he was writing it; the playing of it was superfluous. The sound of it was in him, a reflex of sorts. Anyway he approached conversation haltingly, saying either too much or too little though always guardedly. Has something happened to his wife?

(MAENADS: What. Yes. Excuse us. Yes, excuse us. After the shots and the ringing stopped. The resounding. Yes, our resounding ears. There in the night with the silence suddenly thick around you. A cudgel to the ear really. The holes. The new holes. The new holes in his body were invisible by way of his clothes. His reddening clothes. And red cough. And splatter. Though it was night so this is imagination. With each hit a forced exhalation and a finer and finer mist from his lungs growing redder and redder. Until liquid. And fall like that. Yes, step back rather against one’s will. As if fighting into a fierce wind with moral purpose. Then the ground and people separating from the darkness to circle him. This not even Thrace. Hands were the form of darkness on his sleeves. His hands opening and closing like fish gasping. Or like that Orpheus’s mouth to the heavens from the river. Yes, his voice a dull drum to submerged ears. Yet moving by the current. His hands opening and closing by the current.
*
The moment one leaves the thought what’s left of it? His head in the water isn’t the thought of him recapitated and smug among the woodland creatures, the Maenads railing against his circle of connection or his resilient flesh and his creamy voice. One wonders about the lyre in this scene at a certain risk. Is it enamored with itself when accompanying his voice? As the trees, the sun-struck rocks themselves weeping into the ground what must surely be a mineral sort of tear. Is handicraft a talisman against the charm of his playing? Say it is dulled into consent or hummed with such pleasure at being a source for the charm that trust and action have merged that when presented with that situation, the circumstance of bobbing, adjacent to his head torn free, upon first the river then the sea what could it do but plunk along to his voice woefully. In the matter of choice this would have to be excluded. It was automatic, given these circumstances this is what happens.
*
MAENADS: Pot-bellied and gut-strung. No, but he. But him. He was dead. Is dead. One lays out a body, cold and dead and waxing up. The holes, orifices for excreting blood, which when placed along those for excreting waste or sperm or words look no different. A dead body is calming. Once it’s died. Yes. Soothing. Skin presses itself to a crease, thus enfolding each hole. When was his glance. What. His look. Over the shoulder? Yes. These deaths always involve a lack of judgment. The miscalculation. Beginning all sequencing with him. To point defines the horizons of flesh. Still there’s no glory in it. For whom. The fate of falling backward just before one’s stoop with three bullets nestling the organs. Hitting the ground. Slight bounce. Notebook jarred free. Lost really. To add that darkness separating from bodies. Animated bodies. Which is a complete sham.
*
This was his last dream. Coming from the snow-suck into the house, the heat draws his breath up and out of his chest where it hangs about his face as a shroud. The coal stove over-stoked hissing and blushing up. Quick breath pulls the shroud down into him. With closed eyes he sees the large regimented body, white hair and blue eyes, barrel-chested from which are pulled a silver pocket watch and through a more muscular method, phlegm the color of port spat into a cotton kerchief, hot and indignant in its communicability, viscous as only resentment can be.
*
MAENADS: There’s no snow here. Where. About the house. It’s sleep. A dropsy place. Palace. All this to separate one’s body? Maniacal this sheering of the self. To have it shorn. To always be a child really. And the method one’s brain chooses. Appropriate? Methods and implements require a stiff conditioning. So that the action is without a seam. Automatic.)

From where she sat, back rigid against the threshold between dinning room and living room, straddling the threshold, she could make out the blotches of coffee stain she’d scrubbed from the wall opposite her. These spots gleamed a little less than the surrounding wall. They took on the aspect of a face, wincing. The furrowed brow converted to a texture in her brain, feeling altogether different than she anticipated. Nostrils dilated, sucking air from the room to rebuff whatever affront was causing the pain. Thin line of mouth, thread really and curfewed from movement thus circumventing the chance word of weakness. Flat field cheeks. Dulled-over eyes, these set the least to imagination as the surrounding wall was live with the oils and grunge it’d picked up through containing this room for years. These cleaned eye spots sung with resignation, with putting up with, even enjoying the act, not for having done it but for having that will, the power over the body to endure. The face seemed to have a repertoire behind it, of actions received entirely beyond its control, which while making it stronger propelled it toward indifference. She held the receiver to her face with a slight abhorrence and made the face talk to her as her interlocutor talked. The wince remained throughout, though adding a sense of desperation to what was said, a sense of the levity of what was transpiring between them that neither could yet imagine and would never speak. The stripped among the grimed which so easily fell to predicting a cycle in things, an ease of living through objects and having them come out the other end, because of their magnanimous nature, altered by human touch. Becoming a touch of sorts laid instead at such a threshold, to what purpose only the observer can entertain.
Unawares to her as she continued and spoke into the receiver the face mimicked the motion of her lips with a great synchronicity, fell in line at the word “tried” and persisted without let up through to the end.

—You’ve tried everything I suppose.

—All there is, yes. I would have thought so too. Still I have the notion that she must be in this somehow. The Augustine, especially, does seem to bear intent, doesn’t it?

—Yes,

At this she felt her face moving, separate from talk, and saw it thus reflected in the window. So intent was she with her face reflected that her words stumbled out, watching herself doing the thing bred self-consciousness and doubt. Was this how she looked as she spoke always? The face, it seems, can move at a different interval than its speech. How pale, really, though not unpleasant.

—What? Yes, tired.

It was easy to see the impulse to create and name constellations, patterns of light and dark make up our bodies at base, in her face framed in this manner, flattened, harshly lit and disembodied. Day’s end and the oil on her cheeks spawned the light from her glass face back into her eyes. A looking out and a looking through; There are affections, there are loves, there is the uncleanness of our spirit flowing away downward in love of care and distraction… was all the Augustine she could bring to mind.

eurydice

The news:

OFFICER WAS SPEEDING AT TIME OF FATAL WRECK

Author:
MELISSA MANWARE, Staff Writer

Article Text:
The _________________burg police officer whose cruiser collided with a car last week, killing a 23-year-old woman, was driving nearly twice the speed limit, according to a report released Thursday.

Officer ___________, 25, was going about 68 mph in a 35 mph zone last Friday when his cruiser hit a Honda at _______ Avenue near the ____ Road intersection, the report says.

____________, a passenger in the Honda, was killed in the crash.

_____ and the Honda's driver, 24-year-old _________, were not seriously injured.

The report doesn't determine who was at fault. The _______burg district attorney will decide whether to press charges, police spokesman _____________ said.

The report does say the police officer contributed to the crash by exceeding the authorized speed limit and exceeding a safe speed for conditions. It also says ______ did not contribute to the wreck.

_____, a _________________burg police officer since December 1998, has been on administrative duty since the crash. According to police records, _____ was suspended this summer but police officials would not explain why.

Both internal affairs and the Police Department's traffic unit are investigating the wreck.

The crash happened just after midnight, as _____ drove west on _______ Avenue. He was on his way to help another officer with a traffic stop.

According to the report, _____ turned left from _______ to ____ Road in the path of the patrol car. The cruiser hit his Honda in the side, where _______ sat.

_______, a 1995 __________ High School graduate, worked as a customer service representative for the _________________________ Performing Arts Center.

Her family declined to comment Thursday.

Sgt. _____________, who is investigating the wreck, has said the officer was not using his blue lights. Police policy requires officers to use emergency signals if they exceed the speed limit.

"If the internal affairs investigation finds there were policy violations, then that would have disciplinary actions," _______ said. "It's way too premature to determine fault."

_________________burg police have been involved in at least two other fatal crashes - one happened just a block from the site of last week's wreck.

In November 1979, three members of a _________ family were killed at _______ Avenue and __________ Drive when a police cruiser struck their vehicle.

The police officer, ________________, eventually pleaded no contest to three charges of involuntary manslaughter. He was given disability retirement about nine months after the crash. Civil lawsuits from the case resulted in settlements totaling $465,000.

In September 1985, an 18-year-old _________ woman was killed on _____ Boulevard when her vehicle was struck by a police cruiser going more than 70 mph.

The police officer, ___________, was fined $1,000 and given a two-year suspended sentence after he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of death by vehicle and driving too fast for conditions. He resigned from the police force two months later.

the dream-life

Each word he used was a mouthful and a butterfly so he feigned muteness and consulted his graph, the size of which (and general shape) may surprise you, nearly twice his size. Tacked to the ceiling of his little room it was an expanse: him looking up from a hole as it were. Graphed was the surface of his body, the outline, to attend to each parish, each section, in either red or black ink, a pleasure and a pain (as was appropriate to what had been applied). The paper of which was thin and dry, not unlike the shed skin of some immense reptile, and squared with blue lines which when viewed from the floor had the appearance of green. The graph tacked there on the ceiling was easily mistaken, misjudged, for a map of some island, well traveled though not well populated. A misjudgment he did not correct.

The graph was consulted by way of a ladder, which leaning into the wall opposite the window often shone. Ascending its A-frame, in order to tick off (and describe) a parish in red or black, he often noted the A as a perfect description of his ladder but found no perfect description for the body, though in many cases the I would do. Ascending he found it not so difficult to ascertain the goal of the ladder, it is to ascend, with the body though it is difficult. The goal of the body seems to be a death achieved through minute graduations, by that which is cast off through intent and that cast off through accident.

His eyes, which are, rather, internal organs that have succeeded in slitting the skin and surviving there caught between whatever harbor the inner offers and the world itself, he has refrained from including on the graph. His eyes so often function as a diaspora for his thinking, that part sundered and flung and rooted and particularly creative. It comes to the fact that in his eyes he has found a witness. As he stood there each eye bearing witness to paper, line and miniature script, interest left him, though quite actively a car door shut outside and laughter occurred.

This is the opportunity; the likening he had so often heard was wrung from one of his smaller fingers and left him. Each guise exited in this way so that the last two fingers of each hand were heavily marked on the graph, though the color is indistinguishable for the crosshatches of red and black. Even the descriptions are read difficultly. This is the opportunity, this is the likening: knuckles, cotton, it seems any object, melic. The opportunity and the likening of his left calf rested in an older boy’s falling, crushing his calf into the field, which to this day has left the skin strangely thin and revealing.

Consequence his first tattoo, alteration his second, both so often misjudged as snowflakes, are the eyes of Time. First for infinitesimal vision second for prophetic vision, on the graph these marks are red, brightly and unabashedly. Pure pleasure, though referencing a Croatian Fraternity dating to the Ottoman Empire, they assumed both significances: snowflake and a seeing Time, thus having morphed his right forearm into Nature scrawled then sealed with Consciousness.

Heavily blacked, upper right arm banked in toward his breast, on the graph, though, now, red eyes too, as pain fades to numbness then fondness through memory. The scar he noticed almost immediately perfectly represented the Greek delta, though now more and more he’s come to recognize the Roman A. The screw from a bicycle horn tore back the skin in this shape revealing the fat; blood was surprisingly scarce; stooping, picking up a red scarf, finding snow beneath. The apex of the A is directed hence from his heart.

There was enthusiasm in the opportunity to break things, having bowed to it the second knuckle of his right index finger rounded, especially glass. Red, red, red on the graph so that his index and middle fingers seem to have joined into a thick digit with a certain menace, a broken then mended digit, in this way, foretold the illusory, crow, crow, tree frogs, a rhetorician’s heart which on elucidation left crow out of crown.

The shape, on the graph, of the referential marks denoting two scars on his lower right forearm are thus: for the one furthest from his wrist, RECOMPENSE and the one starting two inches above his wrist and ending just as his hand begins, traversing one visible vein, THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS. While on the graph the description and the marking coincide, which is the only instance of its kind on the graph, RECOMPENSE had a more vegetable nature and THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS was purely animal. Once again breaking occurred here, though this time more in the sense of metamorphosis. The energy of chase transferring into the energy of altering shape, not unlike so many nymphs; the glass broken because it was a barrier to apprehension and the door was simply functioning. He has remembered, though cannot verify it, a neighbor with a butterfly bandage in his glove compartment. Deus ex machina.

Bulge to the skin, is it as with globe under skin, blood from vein run through, duly noted on the graph, thus: red circle, opposite right elbow, diameter of which, disembodiment. There have been occasions during which blood, while surprising, has not been painful. He assumed this was a lack of empathy, even for his own blood. The shape blood assumes when absorbed or diluted by whatever means cannot be ignored. The shape of lips on a tissue, a bird in the toilet water or simply a mound inundating the muscle beneath the vein; augury, it has often seemed to him, is the simple fact of seeing what’s in front of you and realizing its affect upon the floor’s green tiles or the nurse’s aides with their needles and tubes or the sense that his right arm has taken on a significance which supercedes his body proper.

Pinched to a white point, in the mirror, his left breast’s nipple remained resistant, on the graph this was marked in red as there was no pain, only disgust that his body’s volition was more resolute than his mind’s. Of the implements attempted the sewing needle seemed the likeliest to slide through the skin, but even that stopped once an eighth of an inch in, the piercing stud the likeliest by sheer force and space occupied and the hoop earring the likeliest by dexterity. He alternately supposed this episode was further evidence that the body and mind are divided and that the body and mind are not. Self-preservation vs. fetishism. Pain as either an arousal or a warning.

The new spirit was something he associated with altering his body so that these alterations could be recorded on the graph, so that both the graph and this manner of dispersion of his body could constitute community. Alienating, isolating, each muscle through resistance, etching with a hypodermic needle and ink his left forearm in such a way as to repel it from his body. The limbs of Osiris had been sundered and spread, which he found a ready model for the establishment of community, now his own, though not just limbs, body might be sundered similarly through reportage and assignation. A mark on the graph was as good as something bartered.

There are peripheries, not the least of which each numb thigh, front only, gently reminds the numb citizen of substance and a tingle will follow or a cooling, quickly, of the general area or else, ground shaken, a quick pain. On the graph the white ovals demarcating these areas take on the aspects of eyes, pupilless though with threads of red and black tracings. For him eyes at the trunk of the body are viable, they represent a consequence of the step taken against ever knowing fully how it is that one can come into contact with a thing, how one can conclude a barrel-shaped light just under the ladder is projected, in essence, and that he, at present, in the position of witness of that projection, is made a part of some communication; some community within images, their tools and a referentiality given to proclamation. Ever knowing all peripheries, the thighs are a Tiresias of the body proper.

Inadvertent, he assumed the commerce between ball and heel of his foot when placed, as if a step were a commitment, over top of her foot. On the graph a firm red line which by tributaries fans up through calf, back of thigh then to the limit, though fading to a slighter and slighter red so that upon ending the limit is not ultimately approached. I am to say this, concrescence by any other method would, while likely attaining the same out come, locate this traverse differently. What occurs to the body, and hence the graph, is or can be thought of as a system within which actions and objects congeal momentarily in the sun. He’d never thought his feet so sensitive and such an engine for arousal, but this feather of a touch in this particular context was without equal. If he’d recorded at the moment of contact, a monument, the graph itself would have become ludicrous because aflame and disorienting. Other bodies have the effect of so many prophets to him, a gesture, as simple as lifting a hand to remove a hangnail with the teeth, a whirlwind or a whale. There is motion in any space occupied and I can say to you with regard to him that motion, by turns, was egregious and absolutely miraculous.

Spurious monograph on left index finger, fissure, details which in this case duly cast, over both the knife and the glance upward, so saturated a pre-judgment as to preclude any telling; on the graph, now, a faint black line, which could as easily be an inadvertent stroke; carelessness. When approached on this account, of course all considerations left reeling; he pointed and with a motion of his chin filled the entirety of expectation as a wind. There are situations, eventualities during which he could easily be you or I in his seemingly unending substance, which resists both methods and implements. Seemingly unending is the proper description of the place, any place through which his thought flits, a wall, for instance, whether plaster or gypsum has the authority of a polyp on any number of surfaces, relegated to the dark labyrinthine enclosure of the throat or intestines. There are seven virgins at every turn, so that satiety is as good as in your pocket.

Shuttling within voyeurism shapes occurred to him, so many orifices with their sundry mechanisms of closure, or those such as nostril and aural opening which remain apertures, for these on the graph he cut small round holes so that at those spot the ceiling is visible beyond the graph. The shape of his voyeurism concedes too many things and situations; it is rather animal in nature and highly adaptable. His own hand or hair has struck him dumb on more than one occasion. Though this should not be retained as mere solipsism, the list of nouns which have held him transfixed is nearly endless and thus the shape of his desire ran the gamut. The ladder remained an object of affection for him even through out its purpose, generally a concrete thing or effect struck and he’d have reacted, to all prying eyes, with motionlessness. Stillness, so often equated with ineffectualness or stupidity, in him would grow and, eventually if left undisturbed, distribute his body far and wide, so that even the idea of a body would seem sophomoric, even ill conceived, because in this state of affairs any distinction was lost. Smote was he as he was and assumed the aspect of nouns, of objects and people, this tendency toward selflessness was born out as he’d move down the ladder and close the window, in fact closing the tenuous partition which might have existed between what his left hand and right hand were doing unknown to the other. In this frame of mind he’d add marks to the graph, while witnessing the unspeakable aggregate of events at any given time in any given place, the wind now, now the malaria parasite, hunger and self-satisfied articulation now, the worm in any number of bodies animal and vegetable and acts regarding parts of his now body which further separated it from him while bringing intimacy and gesture: feeding a child with one’s fingers.

There were days when the pressure of coincidence would weigh with such heft at the base of his skull that the will to mark the graph escaped him, brought to bear across his nape then up to just above both ears the piled on natural world. His head would never seem to retrieve shapes in a normative manner on these days and often the source of the sparrow’s calling would be a novelty chair set in front of the house and colorful beyond belief. The shapes would then press into his body, as it were, calling their true forms out or sending visual cues against him in riotous waves, anarchic demonstrations aimed at for ever disjunctioning themselves from whatever process he’d used to lure them away from themselves. This was not unlike a seduction, though neither party was aware of either its part or the fact of its proceeding toward the consuming act of metamorphosis, in which both would remain shapes to the other, caring would be the diverted path, the call, along which bodies remained useless until someone flinched, then rushing back would assemble and the quick stifle of mistake would chirrup back into what was then the sparrow in the holly bush, again, just out the window.

The graph had started becoming a method of both exiling and repatriating, through description, his body, which always seemed borrowed, as if by stepping through a certain threshold or into a particular light all would fall away leaving nothing like spirit but objects convoluted with that thinking which constructs passion and desire. So easily the things of Nature come to mind, but that way of expression, that method of conveying information, as though wind or castings can really make any more of this concrete was ineffectual. The lines, both black and red, drawn from each finger tip, palm side, to the base of his hand are to grasp. Circling things in this way, he came to realize, ignored the way they tend to proceed without theory. At the moment the shape of his desire was this description with the August sun bright and every object repelling itself from him and securing the things that are immediate. Some will circle about, as if a declension into the more articulated, if not specious, movements, which are the prelude to sleep and a selfless knowledge removed from any questioning, were a short shrift happy world. Some are inclined to stop. The grasp of a pine cone differs in degree, only, from the gasp of his penis, the renditions of this grasp are of course numerous and self-indulgent so of an entirely different world than every other object. There was no way toward objectness, separated as it was his body remained constant and constantly demanding. He assembled a small circle of thoughts about this and, not without irony, thought it the spirit of his age.

As to whether the graph was a figure or a sort of chart he was inclined, and through this inclination had formed something of a compass rose for the island he now took himself to be, in this case the rose shown not direction but the various paths one travels down toward that which is entirely other, but which requires a solid hub at center, a self which is seemingly indestructible despite severance and severing, despite neglect and viciousness, so that on this rose the upward axis prophesied God, the downward Godlessness, the right approached a virtual intelligence for which shape, of any kind, was held in distain, and finally the left an aggregate of those leaning toward selflessness who have massed their forces to become a single collective self, to take it by turns. The dahlias were surely beautiful as were their measurements and description. By tattooing a grid over the skin does he become the chart of himself? Does the simple act of quantification actually decompose the flesh? Wouldn’t measuring, with index finger and thumb, the slight wall between the anal cavity and the vaginal cavity of a woman require a more fixed and intimate understanding of, not only the body, but possibly the methods he has of imagining space? Circling this line of thought down to a moment of establishment in the ear ever so long ago would have the effect of a cold towel on him as he sits with legs and arms crossed, breast folded onto knees so that making himself small will in turn enlarge everything which is not him.

Having marked through, on the graph, the face entire he assumed the aspect of looking, intimately and publicly, this of course has to do with the use to which bodies are put and the place of that use. If an act were split crosswise, as one fells a tree, and the concentric circles were read there, not to determine age but rather the fluctuations between the intimate and the public, the frequency, as it were, of a body in the mist of doing, say of walking to check the mailbox or of typing, so that decorum can be retained. To muster a guard against iconoclasm he would follow a moth’s curved abdomen as a beacon at head level around the room approaching and retreating from the light, the windows even the mirror in which he, each time, found his glare arresting, swarming even to occlud that glimmer of the outside world which had only moments before been his focus, a focus which he’d been refreshed to find outside of his thought, as much as looking and locomotion can be situated outside of thought. The moth brought with it a device akin to that of the chorus in a Greek play, the level headed commentator or the judge, whichever it was, in those fevered steps, that chase, the doing replicated a population and he a city which it inhabited.

There was, for him, concentric solitude, it was concise, solid and useful as a tooth, along side this vision there was also linear solitude which, through the introduction of Time, was rather like bleeding. On the graph, from memory he’d approximated the spot, he’d marked a fissure at back of skull two inches long. The color was an odd mixture of red and black, resulting in something of a noncolor, a stain, a mark made almost involuntarily so as to be considered in the future, as with so much approximation, wind through the window smacking of the first circle of Hell, and the kind of frozen heat which can flush an entire body in the instant of embarrassment or unjust anger. Circle round on this he did thumb, finger and nail, the tooth which caused that wound a friendly tooth in a friendly game nothing dire or fixed with the sort of judgments that blood can cause among adults the world over, a game permuting itself to be all inclusive and thus have constant relevance, the way any word can with someone when spoken is such a way or such a place. The body heals, caught up in preservation, and the events are transformed into the story of the events so that a tooth or the skin of the skull adapt accordingly and can stand in stead for any of us.

The dog struck by a vehicle then wrapped in a blue tarp and left on the sidewalk was substituted for his body today, though not the entire body, starting from somewhere around the diaphragm down, the rest, for what it was, remained and in this position he began the colossal task of managing the graph. Whereas many people would take this predicament in the proper light, in a hyperbolic light in which to throw any other hardship into a more correct perspective, that is to say as a frame of mind, he, on the other hand, being of a mythic mind, took this as the result of some action, some event either real or imagined, as there is little difference, which had compromised his method of being in the world. Of course there can be no judgment as to the justice of this transformation, things happen from moment to moment and what’s left is to deal with and adapt to them, happiness, for him, never adhered into any form, solid or ethereal, but always sprouted from the ability to confront a development freshly and to take it on its own terms, so while the tarp flapped about his nipples his upper body puzzled over the graph, over where to add an extra head and two extra limbs, and how to adjudicate the difference.

Response was reasoned into each strike against the graph as if it were an instrument pitched, just so, to induce discomfort in nearly all listeners, of course there are those who retain in their bodies a resoluteness, a reservoir of capacity to absorb distain, even if that distain is meant, in the end, to bring about a more honest understanding. The graph felt nothing of course, however much it resembled a skin, albeit an ancient and in some ways decrepit one, though by being marked and lulled over it had a character which resembled his character. On his back, over the right clavicle, on certain occasions the skin became numb, it was as though something integral had been detached from his body at just this point, as if what had rushed in to fill the space left was either deficient in the basics of tactile sensation or was an amalgam of everything so that feeling was superfluous, because feeling would require an outside, something other than this tight web of affectation. He’d imagine, when this occurred, this is how the womb must feel just after birth when attention is suddenly focused elsewhere. He’d given up using red and black and settled into brown, a rather nebulous brown stain on the back, something like an unrealized coffee stain.

His mouth, on the graph, had been blotted out through overmarking, though as far as intensity of sensation goes, and here the distinction between feeling and sensation must be emphasized for what it is, nothing less than an alignment along the side of partial illusion or the side of whole illusion as along the sides of a river swollen with days of rain, discolored and erratic, a baseball to the mouth as a child foregoes all else, even riveting statements of love or disconnect or disbelief. For that discrete moment his body had no center and reacted as if he were all mouth, there were no bastions of expression left uncalled to the event, no holding back as is so often the case in all concerning him and his body. The graph tells no tale other than a hole here, but of course this could be interpreted in many ways, as a politics for instance into which all effort and intention are poured and endlessly assimilated, as visual evidence of his feigned muteness the way a lame leg is a magnet for focusing attention on the obvious fact of the lameness itself, even as a mistake, a misspeaking at the exact wrong moment so as to forever change a position or a relationship (on this account I’ve found misspeaking to be a reliable way to parry any situation). Once his lips were pulled from his braces and the last stitch was secured the shape of his upper lip remain slightly pointed, rather a V, the nadir of which, while foretelling a Herculean struggle with authority, brushed his lower lip incessantly.

The graph itself stood out in his mind as an image he’d previously seen but not acknowledged, some of the information his brain is constantly being basted with such as the fact that prairie dogs are carriers of monkey pocks or that the intestine itself when pulled free and clean is a milky expanse which easily conjures up prenacient feelings of enclosure, security and a sort of double motioned time which occurred between each distinct heartbeat, that is when the beats vary there was a realm of possibility which furled out ever so quickly and ridiculously, when the beats synchronized again time was over, conflagration, only to burst from its ashes at the next variation, it is no wonder that many birds are the size of a human heart. The image, which he always remained just at the cusp of remembering, was something akin to petroglyphs, maybe in remote Utah, left and misinterpreted, something which through sheer persistence had altered not only the landscape, but the idea of what a landscape could be. The body itself is far too adept at change to achieve such persistence; what’s more it can be devoured, both figuratively and literally, through the eyes, first, and then mouths, ultimately, of any number of predators.

A hand on the graph is as good, whereby set into motion, a motion proceeding on aural legs, rustles, rumbles, clacks, the cooling coffee carafe ticks, with a certain regularity, the day began and darkened via a thunder storm, as a spiral of expanse, so often made reference to by mentioning the ocean, whether of water or meadow, that sense of foreboding which by rising and swelling, not unlike a heart, tends toward a dialectic with whatever inside he can muster. What if on this occasion he were to take his own face as the expression of something other than his own intent, a scowl that knot of spiderlings, grinning a rough handling, perplexity something, an unspeakably soft and warm wound brought about through unbridled desire plus towheadedness, winsome hand cupped under an apple, the very beginning of a push to wear one’s organs exterior to the body as articles of speech so as to constantly direct living more visibly. The rhinoceros, the monkey and the camel have been written over by the opportunity to furrow his brow.

As far as the question of memory’s effect, his body went on stratifying itself with the past, there are depths which were achieved through an active vigilance of his skin and brain, so that in certain incidents the graph acquired, vicariously, that anticipation of an expected act, erotic or otherwise, or, on occasion, the ruddy nature attributed to health and good diet and even once something of a bulge along the chest cavity, facing the heart. Of course the bulge would be better described as a recess as it was toward the interior, scooped out of the visual plane and invisibly three dimensional. The problem, ultimately, is in what he takes for his body, it could be that the act of changing in itself was his body, various acts and situations, in this scenario, would be as ornaments, gaudy, at times superfluous, but still fulfilling the deep need of beautification, of attraction, of propagation. A change on the graph, whether by his own hand or not, produced the most exhilarating effects. There was this sense of taking the day into his mouth, as a smooth stone, of tucking it under his tongue so that by mimicking speech in this way it was fully occluded, an angry sun and its carnage, which he‘d spend the remainder of time before dark renaming: thyroid, trachea, branching artery, sloop among the bile and distance to pass through.

Once he had removed the graph, yellowed and brittle in places, under grandiose intention, in order to hold it up to the window so that by being made a second window to the sunlight something might be revealed about his body through the paper’s opaque glow, fact is he thought of eyelids the color of bone and sunk, with this image, down into retrieval, into accounting for, into correspondence and thus the graph at hand was replaced, momentarily, with memory’s flow-chart and the linking of ideas, images, people, of everything through a system much more habitual and complex than his. He was dumbfounded at the minutia, at the sheer will of that process which seemed to force his hand with regard to the graph, while backing up the very eventuality that brought it to it. Primus, he could call his mind there in the diffuse light. Primus which painted the walls and added grain to the floorboards, Primus the sense made of the marks on the graph, the sense of imagining to speak, Primus whatever animal heart was a scourge to him in his socks and deep in memory. Goose-pimples all the while he was repositioning the graph on the ceiling and all the while he wrote Primus over the outline of his body as a continuous barrier, dipping and rising in small letters and touching the horizon of skin just as a hand in the sea.

Consequence was a word as good as requirement, assuming the shape of the eyes but interiorly, plaques on his brain which due to their thickness, distribution and general shape hold forth unrepentantly upon every manner of movement and absorption, their embargo was frighteningly melded just so along each of his limbs so that down to the center they became ignorant and ignoring. Spiral of data which hugging closer and closer its axis loses circumference until what remains is a segment from A to B, a finger stiffened and unrelentingly pointed, though usually upward, now into his diaphragm, now his sternum, now into windpipe, now mouth, these were what he took for harbors. The manner he took for manners in the book, there was no sleep in this child, against his face the graph felt utterly nonhuman, though not sub-human rather something trans-human, across human and arid, often stultifying, and palpable in the roof of his mouth by a sudden drying of saliva.

Mulled possibility became a gristle, contorting his mind and body to achieve various eventualities, a paper flower, an impatient father, childlike even, for that matter, the cat and dog, consequence was kept at arm’s length by the quick succession of changes, by the need for these changes and the need to record them and thus transform them again as a convex mirror reflects a concave one. Deep within the vistas he’d brought up, with a nearly cellular clarity which was in itself dazzling, the slick coat of the nerves was thinning so that his muscles were not his own, lit unto the day a strike so searing against his eye that he marked them out on the graph. He can see in an object or an event the spiral it carries close to it which is a matter of information organized in such a way, in to the head of a medicinal flower celebrated for its scarcity for instance which when placed just so in the mouth of a dead weasel by its mate has the effect of resurrection, this graph carried within it, though unencumbered, the opposition of contingency.

He had his tentative hand moved slowly by his brain and lifted revealing a small “a” nearly in the shape of a fish on the graph positioned so as to resemble a visual cue meant to evoke seeing, so placed just before the space left for eyes, thought it was backward, in fact approached the small Greek alpha, an unclosed infinity sign. So now he saw it and puzzled, in automatic writing it seems a certain part of the brain exude a power, drenching everything else, the way a television can, so that it is all subsumed and incorporated into the process. That the fact of looking was looking back? Ultimately this has to do with projection and reflection but what is the role of interpretation, need there be one? He settled by the window, looking can never be simply looking out, it must be, on its broadest face, the work of looking out, the work of action, the work which only his body can be typing and not only his hands.

Somebody in some action had placed a clipped notion of regalia as the scent of a musk into him, thoughts were becoming so many adornments woven among a context as a wren might weave one of his hairs among the pine straw and twigs of her nest. Placing things usurped the things themselves as necessary. Continually found under the cloth of his shirt or under foot a hardened virtue, the notion that he must always turn, facing away from the sun, and embrace that which, through gritted teeth, he admired, to this end the day was embraced, called forth as if by his acceptance diurnal life could begin each morning, the warmth from which he arose became his bed, what struck at his eyes, in the harsh, interloping light, the room around, the window, even the graph itself, one corner unanchored and limp. The sense of power achieved through such meandering was dizzying, though behind it all and not totally with out his acknowledgement, there was laughter from the street the cause of which was hidden from him, the face of god for all he know had been evidenced, recorded in the asphalt or in the shape of a woman’s skirt blown up by a morning breeze or in the laugh itself, confident and bright and called upon so as to disarm. The chariot of the sun dragged with it the sleep of habit and lack of concern, pins and needle enveloped his left arm as he squeezed it into his chest.

he

He woke by degrees. First his ears opened: lapping water, though not quite as quickly rhythmic, a longer duration within the pattern, pitch all wrong. Then nose: sweat, something medicinal and unnerving, musk of fear and confusion. Wrens, of course, in the yard and himself, still damp. He was awake and the room emptied into him clods of what he took in sequence to be grief, emptied her things into him as only objects can shed an allegiance, so that she was gone and fortified into memory. His brain shot him the word sedative. He was uncomfortably aware of his eyes. He awoke, damp still, emergent. Shot the word Eurydice.
He moved not out of need or desire, but habit from the bedroom through the hall and living room to the front porch, retrieved the paper and placed it, precisely, on the table, not reading it. He started coffee. His mind had remained in the bedroom following chains of facts and events to their logical ends, only just noticing where he was and how he’d got there. He heard a ringing, he couldn’t place in those facts and events, saw the phone and lifted the receiver. His mouth spoke.

-Hello.
-How are you doing? I mean, I mean you couldn’t move at first, last night.
The back of his throat rose and fell making a guttural acknowledgment. His brain shot the word immobile
-You couldn’t speak. The sedatives must have been…
His dream came back to him like somebody stepping into the room. Each word he used was a mouthful and a butterfly so he feigned muteness and consulted his graph, the size of which (and general shape) may surprise you, nearly twice his size. Tacked to the ceiling of his little room it was an expanse: him looking up from a hole as it were. Graphed was the surface of his body, the outline, to attend to each parish, each section. The paper was thin and dry, not unlike the shed skin of some immense reptile, and squared with blue lines which when viewed from the floor had the appearance of green. The graph tacked there on the ceiling was easily mistaken, misjudged, for the map of some island, well traveled though not well populated. A misjudgment he did not correct. The dream was part of a structure, a dream-life, which he knew he’d have to work to recover. He smelled coffee and shut off the warmer.
-…a godsend.
-Yea. What. Yea. I don’t know.
He replaced the receiver.

Staring into the half-space between his body and the ceiling, not seeing, his brain shot a series of events to him, of eventualities, as though he was a mechanism and certain contingencies were activated when faced with specific aggressions, not dissimilar to how words were shot to him when writing. This was the zone in which his brain, while focusing on nothing, was focused, where the idea of depth in a person, any person, seemed to have its greatest credence the way one’s fist can be instantly shocked into being hollow by grasping a wasp. This was the horizon, the primal image of expanse, whether ocean or earth, at which one trusts that something starts up where vision lets off. He rose from bed, careful not to look to his right, and moved. Moved without cause but still, ultimately, toward effect, the path one imagines a myth to have taken when conjured from the world into the mouth, through the house and to the garage to find a box which he then filled with the following: a blank, save for eight words (one cursive, three printed and four typewritten), sheet of paper, two hardbound sketchbooks which he used for notebooks, the four finished manuscripts from their shelf and a copy of Augustine’s Confessions, which he hadn’t picked up in years.
Having sealed the box he placed it in the passenger’s seat and drove across town to a different post office. The anonymous had always had a great allure for him. He’d always been drawn to the anonymous writing of various sorts of people which were so frequent in the past. Prayers, searingly erotic humor where a slap was as good as a fuck among the monks, even lists of occurrences which passed as early histories for a stagnant people. His urge to remain anonymous drove his red car away from the familiar, away from anything which could constitute him.
He stopped for a light. From under a Bradford pear came a woman seeking pity and money. Stiffly she filled his window, her hair the same dogged color as her sweater, the cables of which were slightly serpentine. He lowered the glass and thrust five dollars at her before she could speak, before she could alter the space of his present mood and direction. She took the money and turned, shyly aware of her power. His brain shot the word Tiresias to him. As he watched this person retreat it struck him there was no sign of gender in this figure. Everything was neutral. The figure stiffly moved away dragging misjudgment and conceit. Shot the word snake. The figure seemed a natural part of the lowly, noticeable for its motion only. Shot venom. An addict or in a synchronicity either a moment ahead or behind the turning world. Shot: then the tender arch, closer the ball than the heel of her foot, fell upon the serpent and she was hauled down into the earth while its venom still coursed, while in collapse her hand, of its own accord, held fast to leaves.
The clerk had said something. Had the clerk said something? His brain shot the question: could the look have been misconstrued? Shot: grit in the palm.
-No return address?
Had he said something?
-Excuse me.
-Oh.
He wrote his first initial, last name and the rest in a tremor, a loose thread drawn tight.

What is the opposite of arousal? Withdrawal? He withdrew from every evident thing in the room so as to muster her back, even her smell, which dried his palate while wetting his tongue, required focus. Though this, of course, was not her but his reaction to her, the process by which the image usurps the thing itself. His brain shot the words the only meaning of falsehood is when something is thought to exist when it does not to him. What about her did not exist, her body?, who he knew her to be?, the ceiling fan raced to fill its form as he slowly focused on it, thus reconstituting the room, each wall and useful thing, the bed, with its intimate knowledge of them like a secret name, and the cool sheet under him. Ache was all around his skin, was in his mouth, he tried to construe it as a single word, something guttural and harsh and constricted, which he could expel, could spit into the dark. His right hand dredged the sheet into a fist and carried him to sleep.

Once he found the officer’s address he sent a letter, trusting to his brain and his hand what he couldn’t imagine. He addressed the envelope as if laying trap, deliberately he watched the letters form then fade into scrawl. The letter itself was written on blank, unlined paper. His brain shot the words And you beat back the weakness of my sight, blazing upon me with your rays, and I trembled in love and in dread, and I found that I was far distant from you, in a region of total unlikeness, as if I were hearing your voice from on high saying: “I am the food of grown men. Grow and you shall feed upon me. And you will not, as with the food of the body, change me into yourself, but you will be changed into me.” to him, which he copied onto the page. He added two additional blank pages, folded it all, filled the envelope and sealed it without reading what he’d written.

He lay there putting on tragedy, warming to it, trying to warm to it. His limbs had numbed beneath the bedclothes. Even with eyes closed, as if a portal had formed there and then crackling; he knew outrage was massing just beyond his extremities. Outrage was useful though passed too quickly, leaving only adrenalin and hands which opened and closed for minutes at a time like futile mouths decidedly too large for their faces and thus dumbly erotic. His right hand moved to swallow his penis, his left clenched. His brain shot the words the mind is mind, but the hand is body.
There was an aspect of his desire which, when pressed, dismembered situations with a finite precision, slowly angling for a channel through which to remove an arm here, leg or buttocks there, even heads, hair, the divot between nose and upper lip, nape, breast, amassing instances with the brute purpose of transference. Wet and supple skin when disembodied and pressed into motion ignores the bounds of person or soul and becomes safe or at very least able to rescue itself, amid the musk, to be its own memory.
Tragedy was less dexterous, entering the limbs so as to reanimate them with their own sudden gravities exaggerated and coursing through the muscle making him sink deeper into the bed until, with slack jaw, he opened his eyes and heard the jays. His body at that moment was a lethargy his brain couldn’t accept, so flooded with words he moved stiffly through the morning assessing what needed to be gotten and done. There were images and books and methods pounding into him; names, too, or rather one name which he’d recognized though not understood. He dressed putting tragedy on as a vestment to hide something soft and inadequate about his middle body.

The house was a tight knot around him. The news:

PIT BULLS MAUL, KILL BOY IN FATHER'S BACK YARD

Author:
ROBERT F. MOORE, STAFF WRITER - STAFF RESEARCHERS SARA KLEMMER AND BRANDY BOURNE AND STAFF WRITER KATHRYN WELLIN CONTRIBUTED TO THIS ARTICLE.

Article Text:
Neighbors and a mailman heard the screams of 8-year-old _______________ as his father's four pit bulls mauled him to death in the fenced-in back yard of a west _________ home Friday.

But the boy's father and the man's girlfriend, who were home at the time, didn't come outside until the boy was already fatally injured, police and witnesses said.

______, who neighbors said had been staying with his father during spring break, was attacked just after noon and later died at _________ Medical Center. _________________burg police said the boy's death was the first fatal attack involving a dog in the city since 1985.

Police said they're investigating why the boy wasn't supervised and trying to determine whether the adults inside the home heard his cries for help.

No one has been arrested in connection with the boy's death, but his father, _______________________, 29, was charged late Friday with drug- and weapons-related felonies.

Police said the district attorney's office also could consider charges ranging from child neglect to murder. Police say murder charges in such cases are rare.

______________, who lives across the street, heard screams and then silence.

"One had him on his neck. Two had him on the side. And one had him on the leg," said _______. "They were pulling on him just like you do a rag doll."

_______ and his wife, _____, were working in their front yard on _________ Place when they heard the boy screaming for help. A postal carrier was standing near their front door and had just given them the mail.

_____________ said he and the mailman ran toward the screams and stopped at a chain-link fence. Most of the boy's clothes had been ripped off, ______ said.

The carrier, according to _______, threw his mailbag and then a wooden block about 4 feet long at the dogs.

The pit bulls ran, leaving the boy apparently lifeless in the grass.

The mailman jumped the fence into the back yard after the dogs scurried, but nothing more could be done for ______, _______ said.

_______, who has lived in the neighborhood near _________ Park about 35 years, said he had never seen the boy before.

Neighbors and police said ______'s father came outside after the attack and told the mailman to get off his property.

When officers arrived, three of the dogs were inside. The one that remained outside had to be tranquilized because it was still behaving aggressively, police said.

Animal control officers seized the four dogs while they and homicide detectives began their investigation. It was not clear late Friday whether the dogs have a history of violent behavior.

Hours after the attack, crime scene technicians removed what appeared to be a safe and several long guns from the house. Police said the girlfriend gave officers permission to search the house.

Late Friday, authorities charged _________, with possession with intent to sell or distribute marijuana, trafficking cocaine, possession of a firearm by a felon and maintaining a dwelling for the purpose of trafficking.

The boy's mother, whose name was not available, was hospitalized after her son's death, police said.

What would it take to crush one of these dogs’ skulls? What need brought to bear? What sequence of collapse, physically? The connective tissue would give way first, tendons, ligaments, the smoothing cartilage. Say the dog was asleep, belly pressed to the ground, head between paws and so completely natural like that that trust might as well be the air around. A quick step up, strategic and swift stomp at the base of the skull, where it perches atop the spine deftly, and then proceed. Or say the dog’s not asleep, but dismayingly obedient. Eyes open. Through his shoe he felt his sole assume the contour of the skull top, a slight knobby protuberance then sloped away toward ears, eye orbits and spine. The gentle give in the jaw even with this little pressure endeared him to the dog’s loyal nature. A couple of tentative pumps, as though testing new brakes, confirmed his complete control. He knew that before he’d finished the pressure against the dog’s brain would mount until, as a relief, the dog would lose consciousness. He imagined the tendons, ligaments, cartilage, even some muscle would tear and suck away from one another with a squelch at some points and would be ground into one another with the sound of wet sand under foot at others. What would issue forth from eye and ear and snout? Would the tongue press desperately against the grate of teeth, perhaps shredding in the process? A pinked foam, reddening quickly, blown from the lips, blown out hard in an attempt to blow the pressure into the ground or at least into the air, combining with what trust there was surrounding them to make it a better approximation, a more honest capture? A whine which collapses to a gurgle or grunt as the palate collapses?
His brain shot the words for I am, and I know, and I will. I am a being that knows and wills. I know that I am, and I know that I will. I will to be and I will to know. Now he who is capable of doing so will see how there is in these three an inseparable life—one life, one mind, one essence—and how, finally, how inseparable a distinction there is between them, yet nevertheless there is a distinction to him.
He smelled coffee so stood to switch off the warmer.

As he stepped through the silent doors into the silent library his brain shot two words, one of which was, trinitrotoluene to him. He was taken aback, stopped dead just past the threshold. The mind is memory his brain shot. The seeds of this had fallen to him in his bedroom. He saw now that he’d started this process with the letter, perhaps even with the box, it made an obvious sense like stepping in from the rain. Bolstered by the tremor of a new project he settled once again into motion, moving toward the walls of books which absorbed so much of the sound in the place giving it the semblance of quiet.
It was a property he’d often envied the book, its capacity to take from each reader the one thing which was irretrievable; Time. Given this diachronic trait it was no wonder that when collected en mass the books exuded a silence which was palpable. Of late there had been trouble with sex among the stacks; mostly late adolescents, hidden away in the biographies. The library had acquired surveillance equipment with the hopes that the prospect of visual evidence would make the act physical enough in the minds of the perpetrators to discourage it. He valued the library, above and beyond its books, for its mutable array of individuals come to consult information in its most austere form, but never having done it before wandered around refusing help and complaining about the noise. The fact is that these are the people who make his life possible, not because they would ever buy his books, rather because information for them was so visceral, so concrete and so prescribed that any formulation he could make which almost resisted that seemed insightful. He was absolutely aware that he was empowered by those who down right despised the act necessary to consume any of his products, in the way that one is absolutely empowered by the objects one surrounds oneself with. Being a writer required two things at base a small audience to read the work, that is to buy it and thus perpetuated it, and a much larger audience to witness the smaller and pity them their vicarious methods.
As he arrived at the indicated row and shelf which held the second of his books a couple approached him who had a vague resemblance to people he’d once known. The man led, putting his features into the positions which broadcasted pity. The woman, though more honest in aspect (her face bore both reproach and concern in a way which was rather beautiful and against its better judgment his brain shot the words bird’s nest to him), nevertheless came a half step behind with her left hand resting in the small of the man’s back as if pushing a button.
—How are you? She said it wasn’t you, but I said of course it’s him.
—Tired.
—We heard…you’ve separated.
—Yes, months ago. There were difficulties.
He cast about the books waiting for them to swallow their voices.
—I’d imagine.
—Differences.
—Have you been working?
—I’ve just come onto a project.
—Good. Good to see you at it again.
Their heads nodded in unison. He feigned distraction and sidled away toward the restrooms to hide out until they’d left the building. In a barely contained whisper:
—Do you hear from her?
—Yes.
He turned the corner and entered the men’s room, his throat dry and saliva collected in the corners of his mouth. This made him uncomfortably aware of the point where his lips intersected, the point at which his mouth began. His brain shot the words borne above the waters at him.
He consulted the mirror. His eyes were fringed with red, in the manner a child might go through a book circling each favorite word with red crayon, maybe “it” or “be” something small which could be expelled on request. Since adolescence he had eyes which seemed constantly on the verge of tears. He was drawn to his face, to the imperfections of his face and thus to mirrors but was now pulled from the bridge of his nose, from his wide pores, to the fact that someone had entered the room by the low hissing of the door. He had the sense of leaving all safety behind as he left marking the distance from it by the slow drain of volume from the hiss.
He craved anonymity like salt. Taking a circuitous path to the circulation desk he took on stores of being anonymous while walking slowly past fiction, past the reference desk, around and through the children’s area and finally waiting his turn in line, to stave off the barrage of questions from the librarians whom he’d know for years. He rehearsed answers which were short, non-committal but factual. At reaching the head of the line he looked up, seeing a stranger behind the desk all his stores were poured out as if in libation and he shone, he was sure, in the genuine anonymity now thrust at him. He reached right hand into left inner pocket to withdraw his notebook while just meeting her broad, bland smile, composed of teeth the shape and color of small pumpkin seeds; when the breadth of her smile seemed to drain upward into her eyes and in the process turned itself inside out from a pedestrian kind of joy to absolute horror, her eyes dilated and shone as if trying to see in a dark room, then just as quickly the expanse flushed back to her mouth smiling this time not so broadly, self-consciously and she was giggling while trying to inhale (embarrassment).
—I’m sorry…It’s me…It’s me…Well when I saw you.
She stopped, clasped her hands and stared at her crossed thumbs for a moment taking in breaths slow and deep as a tonic.
—Now I see it’s a notebook.
—Excuse me.
—Your notebook, in your hand.
—Yes.
—Before, when you were waiting in line and took it from you jacket.
—Before?
—Yes, before when you took it from your jacket I thought it was a gun.
She giggled this time through a long, reedy exhalation (relief). He stared as the middle of her face reddened, then laughed a single loud report which echoed through the lobby and turned heads. Smiling, too, made him keenly aware of his mouth.
—A gun?
—Yes, well it’s the right size and color and your gesture…it.
—I suppose you’re right. You’re right.
He said while withdrawing his pen from the spiral binding at the top of the notebook, flipping it open to the first page and printing in large capital letters, GUN.

His brain shot the words why did the idea of making something occur to him as he both lifted his right foot to mount the steps and came upon the bag. It was fogged, though even from there he could make out a dark object inside, convoluted and still. Where the bag rested on the object condensation was wiped clear and he could see stripes, bands, alternately black and pus-white. This could be the intestines, easily, on a reduced scale, in a clear sack, wet and in a late stage of decrepitude.
When he lifted the bag from the porch the snake fell into itself like a continuous sentence so that it wasn’t exactly flat but by its own weight had transformed itself into a pure density bulging at the sides. Holding it up the snake was a mask for the lower half of his face while the bag was a lens through which, where wiped clear of moisture, he could see the street. His chest tightened into its own world.
A couple of indeterminate age and gender was passing his house; each could have been a side of the same face, nearly identical, altered just enough to call it difference. Their heads turned in unison. Their mouths formed hello, their faces formed exaltation for the living man and woman, for the sighted and the blind eye, for the inner eye, which borne in darkness and set diffusely throughout the body was a receptor for the infinitesimal, the minute increments which so often foretold the nature of things and actions, and he felt it in his mouth like something live and slick and frantic with its unprecedented circumstance, a dark creek was nothing like this mouth. This was a transfer of the most profound sort, akin to that taken from Gabriel to Mary, which fitted him only more securely into that process, that automation, which had arrived and commandeered him. Of which he was given glimpses as if discovering morsels among his teeth. The couple moved out of sight and he took the snake to the trash. He loved his fate; though there were moments he thought it all too much; his tongue should be that snake in the trash.
Was the bed moribund as he lay first on then in it? His faculties exchanged periods of expansion and contraction. The room wobbled and hauled him into sleep.

(HYPNOS: They enter me bodily. They exit me bodily. What remains are random sequences of thought culled from their thinking, providing them the ellipses they call their dreams, providing me the material I call the story of my life. It is not a story of connections but connectors requiring, not interpretation, which is a kind of transference, but management, which is a kind of pragmatic marshalling of the given. Crust behind her right ear…orchids in pond water…delicate…the initials L E G…a shockingly accurate portrait of the fist, for example, from him just now; a synchronicity of only details.
You may have heard me called knock-knee tooth, the prince of grime, even the Greek of sleep (how I once heard someone refer to her dreams); the fact is that the words by which these thoughts are to become rotund are so very nearly empty I hesitate to proceed, though I’m left no other recourse. He is, if nothing else, courageous in sleep, folded within me, as few others are whether or not you come to think this of him in general. He embraces the dream-life as the compliment of the waking-life, thus letting one inform the other, the way your alphabet is nearly named for my alphabet making us both siblings and rivals; making us family. He is an accomplished re-dreamer, of course this being the very foundation of the dream-life, who can return with frequency to the same scene to retell the story to himself, not, it would seem, to achieve a better clarity, but simply for the variant itself; for the varying nature of the story of one’s life.
Some may object to my presence here as distorting, so be it, but to lose one so fluid in his nocturnal and diurnal lives to misjudgment or pity is ignoble. This should be, at very least, given breath to, if not taken as a parable, as the kind of transgression of language which while making ecstasy possible, also makes horror. You can spend the live long day telling the box what it is, but until you’ve combined your dream-life with your waking-life you cannot transform it. The box quickly became, for him, a mouth into the room.)

He heard a pounding which was not his heart, for which he searched the house and found the door. The officer entered and stood in the living room; his head jerking nervously to take it in, as if he had once been a massive creature but by some process (say evolution) had been shrunk down to the size of a hand and was wary. He was there just to talk.
—This letter you sent.
—Which?
—To the officer.
—Yes.
—What’s it mean?
—I’m sorry?
—Is it a threat?
—No.
—What is it?
—Mostly a quotation.
—Where from?
—St. Augustine.
—The town?
—The man.
—So what’s it mean, why did you send it?
—I suppose I thought he…
—The officer?
—Yes. I suppose I thought the officer could use the attention.
—I see; the attention. I think the officer has all the attention you would expect. But what’s it mean, the quote?
—If I remember…
—Don’t you have the book around?
—No. I sent it to my editor. I suppose I wrote it from memory.
—What’s the name of the book?
—The confessions of St. Augustine.

His twitchy eyes landed on the table, on the books on the table.
—Unabomber?
—Excuse me?
—(pointing) Unabomber.
—Yes, he seems to me like something of an artist.
—A murderer.
—Well a craftsman then.
—Is there a difference?
—Some would say.
—I’d say a murderer.
—In the proper context he would have been a saint.
—For killing innocent people?
—For his convictions. The wrong age had his ear.
—(speaking together) Or spirit./How so?
—If his targets had been different, say drug dealers or pedophiles or rapists…
—Or wife beaters…
—Or wife killers.
There was a pause during which each object in the room received its due attention, wavered then collapsed under it sending silence up into the air as spores.
—Listen, she wasn’t your wife.
—I understand that.
Pause as spores settled into the folds of his clothes as so many congregants, enough to keep him always silent.

The box was unadorned so needed preparing. He came to it’s preparation as he’d once attended to her body, an initial scout which established topography, followed by a closer examination of each marsh of desire, to evaluate its level of containment and to determine which would well up under either their singular or mutual touch; but the box was beyond desire as his hands rasped its surfaces. The whole process here was more akin to dressing a corpse into life so as to save mourners its glimpse into their own capacity to rot than the gentle cycle of naming and touching of parts by which intimacy proceeds.
His last dream returned to him, partly, like a cough from another room in the empty house: snow surrounding his grandfather’s house, which he emerged into, through the snow-suck at his feet, letting the coal-stove grasp him and hiss into his ears. After this the list of materials needed for the box was obvious: a swath of white satin of sufficient area to line the box, enough crushed (powdered if possible) glass to fill the box a couple of inches and a shaft of paper the breadth and length of his index finger.

wedding dress
Once the dress was dismembered it looked more a body to him than the effigy it seemed while hanging there. A body: arm, arm, torso, cave of skirts, which he laid out on the bed, shears still cold in his hand and heavy, a poor balance for this delicate skin. He disrobed and struggled against his forearms and shoulders and waist to don the new body, but neither the context nor the event was appropriate. He was left with the satin cool around his wrists, neck and ankles as if these were thresholds from which the idea of his body emerged. It was an attempt at intimacy he rarely made, to occupy another and to, thus, transform them into a talisman: a body to which his own could meld. He felt the ridiculousness of it, of himself; from the pit of his stomach something tried to escape him with blunted claws.
He re-dressed quickly and took up the shears again. From the skirts he cut a generous swath. This he took to the kitchen table to square against the box. Once the size was correct he started to line the box, stopped, smoothed the satin back out like quelling a storm and took up a pen. Through a quick summation he determined its center and wrote, THIS IS TRANSFERENCE. Later as he looked down into the box the scrawled letters were more like a tangle of eyelashes, one actual eyelash striking through the “is”.

household glass
He crushed the glass between two plywood squares, everything he could find. The items were arranged on the bottom square and covered with the top, over which he walked back and forth either vertically or horizontally. Each piece broke differently and under different force. Their pitches varied according to thickness and composition from sharp little calls to the groans of utter regret. His brain shot the word let the dead bury their dead to him, which he walked into the glass syllable by syllable. Let-the-dead-bu-ry-their-dead over and over until all he heard was an occasional little sizzle dowsed with sand.

message
On the paper finger he drew the letters T, R, I, N, I, T, R, O, T, O, L, U, E, N, E carefully with the notion, vaguely in the air as a fog, that a mistake could put out an eye or plunge a finger deep into one chamber of the heart. Finished, his hand aching, he placed the paper on the glass bed in the box as if launching a paper boat into the most violent of waters. His brain shot the words borne above the waters to him and he sealed the box.

The car door’s clap, which he felt as a forearm deadened with cloth against his chest before he heard, brought the sibylline nature of the box placed at the officer’s door home to him. When presented with an object of scrutiny he’d always found a story into it, a story of him so that the object then had a palpable revelatory power and, in fact, could be incorporated in such a way as to be an auger. The box was taken on its own terms, for what it was, a final act to some extent, a way of making an obsession material and leaving it aside to proceed as it would relieved of its host. It was like that, a parasite in the way a wisp of cloud if viewed at a certain angle or in a certain mood was a mouth against the moon which then led by the tubular imagination to his stomach could nourish all notions of grandeur, the notion that the story itself was enough a squandering of the story to release him from it, that that projected mouth could lick its structure and language into the atmosphere and leave the sky the sky and him forgiven. His brain shot the words realize that when there is no time, one cannot use the word ‘never’ to him. This was what the box was a mounting of ‘never’, he thought and let it go.

The motion of pulling the mailbox open, pushing the letter through and listening, nearly one second, for it to land occurred repeatedly to him as he walked toward the house in the dark. The balance of first pushing then pulling seemed appropriate to the idea of communication, to the idea of a letter. Letting it fall was the imagination, the depth of it, whether the words would spiral to a point and thus level some kind of recrimination or lament or latent fear or by their spiral outline an unspoken love. The labyrinthine letter held for him some of the same appeal as the anonymous, with it’s words stacked as bricks and only a mortar of communication, what they walled in would slough the words identity so that only a rough grit was left in the palm. The pull was the incoming the push the outgoing; it was a description of naming as a consequence of recognition, a demarcation of the province of memory.
The night was cool as he cut through it. He felt the pull of each object he saw and the push of its name in his tongue and lips, though left his mouth closed thus laying a dam. As he got closer to the house the push of these names piled up against his teeth, pushed his tongue down into its fleshy underside and rose toward his palate. He gagged as if some thick liquid hung partially down his throat filling his mouth entire, then stopped himself. He imagined a cloth there to absorb the words, a gauze or handkerchief leeching the words up and drying his tongue, mouth and throat slowly until they were like paper. Cars passed him spinning sounds into themselves and the sidewalk was more defined in their lights. He was nearly to the house when the fall of the letter occurred to him as the fall of everything into something else, the mechanics of information which dictated his own steps, the cool air plunging deep into his lungs and radiating into each bronchiole; dictating that the moon be hung above him then space then atmosphere, moisture, fowl of the air, trees mirroring themselves into the earth, his own driveway and walk, his front steps bound with police officers, his door through which they moved. He stopped; they have come to forgive my intent. His brain shot the words thank you to him. He ran his tongue along the backs of his teeth. His brain shot the words I will write our story to him, to evidence this he reached into his jacket for his notebook holding it up as a gesture of his honesty. Their faces blazed in gun light.

O

The letter arrived not without expectation. She opened it. His handwriting scarcely more than an undulant line, “This is the story I’d meant to write all along.” Then the following typewritten:

am among the dead
He came down to them gently, through the ache in his eyes and the grit in his palms, through his playing. Their faces bubbled and streamed according to viscosity and orifice. Their torsos jerked, nearly convulsed, shoulders rolled forward then chucked back. Chins tucked to chest. What they had wanted kept at arms length. Their faces quivered then ran then licked like flames. Hot he could feel; never had he seen bodies in such violent aspects. Their muscles themselves seemed to crawl toward their skin exuding a deep regret. Their hands were brought to faces, fingers woven then raveled as if through this fleshy shroud the face of who they each were would be stripped off at a greater, more merciful speed. There was a natural capacity for grief in each of their bodies which, he suspected, was directly proportional to their natural capacity for fear. His voice and lyre brought them beyond their capacities and thus loosed their mouths.

HADES: I played with, once as a child, that which should never have existed. This was in Las Vegas, the early Seventies, stowed away in our garage against the sun. I was really far too young to remember what happened, but have been told enough and imagined enough to, now, have a memory of it, though certain details of this memory seem superfluous. The memory is a combing of these ingredients: the garage, a lamp or some kind of orange glow, the threshold into the house, a large quilt, a bicycle and a scorpion. There is, I think, a tendency for memory to preserve itself. What’s more the reality of the event is passed, so that what remains singularly is the memory of the event as contained by various minds. I’ve often wondered if I had written down the memory of the event at each stage of my life would it jibe, becoming more subtle, more nuanced as my life progressed or would it subtly flee from the visual presence of the memory to take harbor in the faculties left to interpret the memory of the event. So that while the memory itself might be nearly impossible to retrieve its message had laid alongside my heart as a shunt into the Soul.
The body itself often hinders memory.

The Garage
For the purpose of the memory of the event the garage was mostly dark and very warm, though not moist. There was a quality to the heat and dark which I felt I could absorb through a deep, slow and regular method of breathing. It was an enormous buffer zone surrounding my small body, through which turbulence was smoothed and from which my tiny lungs could suck a pure congeniality. The floor was cool underfoot and thus provided an anchor. There was balance in the garage, through which I could swim as if through viscosity itself, absolutely buoyant.

A lamp or some kind of orange glow
It was opposite the threshold into the house. This was, if truth be told, a corona of light not quite winked out and thus a remarkable component of the memory of the event. Its color and persistence had the feel of a gaze not quite invited while not wholly unappreciated, something more akin to a streetlight than the sun. It may have hung from a corner of the ceiling.

The threshold into the house
In the memory of the event it was through here that my mother entered in response to my scream, thus entirely transforming the scale of all I’d done. It also provided an entrance for the neighbor, who transformed the scale once again and irrevocably. When moving through a door the idea of continuity of space is required, which I’d not yet developed, so often I thought of the threshold as a kind of mouth through which I was either digested or expelled into another circumspect space.

A large quilt
This covered the floor of the garage directly beneath the bicycle and was blue, though appeared gray in the orange light, thus was easily imagined as either the sky or the sea. The quilt was stitched with a grid pattern, so that if smoothed out each thing on it could be plotted.

A bicycle
Its seat pressed into the quilt, graphed at (0, 0); its handlebars somewhere further along, perhaps at (0, 12 or 13). Each point of contact bore the weight rather like the haunches of a poorly loaded animal. The bicycle was always inverted in the memory of the event and its rear wheel spun emitting a sound a shade different than a hiss, something more of a hum with a subtle whine, a plaintive whine. Even as I spun the wheel in the dark, listening for the sound’s pitch to be altered by the wheel’s velocity, the portal thus created approached the threshold into the house. I had been the beneficiary of many filters up to that point of my short life, filters on talking and listening for the most part, but this portal was something of a filter under my control. The spiral of air drawn through the spokes toward me would arrange the words of overheard talk into a body of words nearly as palpable as a pat on the back, the mussing of hair or even a peck on the cheek. So often the talk through the threshold into the house had the habit of being either far too loud or far too wet and airy to be decipherable, but through the filter of the wheel I heard the essential things a child should hear.

A scorpion
This I never saw. Though the hiss emitted from the mouths of both my mother and the neighbor as they spoke its name frightened me more than the arachnid, however deadly, itself ever did. While circumnavigating the quilt, perhaps for the second or third time, I felt and heard what seemed like a glass figurine, thick bodied, spindly legged, both underfoot and under the quilt. It popped, but just after a little sizzle; and I called to let her know what I’d found and thus fear was sown into me, fear of that which I could not control.

The memory of the event
The eye of the room spun at middling speed and I revolved around it, as objects will an eye, walking the outer edge of the quilt occasionally mis-stepping my foot onto the cool garage floor. It was when my little toes or heel or the ball of my foot came down on the concrete that everything drained into that area of contact, to suck at the cool. As the wheel slowed into a hum gradually stopping, I was pulled from orbit to crank the pedal. First pulling it up with my fingers then pushing it down with the heel of my hand. Pulling, pushing. Pulling, pushing. When the momentum carried the petal back up I forced it down hard until the wheel whined and the air started to move. The monotony of this rotation and my intersecting rotation was a contact just below my sternum like one hot fingertip, say my father’s, pressed there for remembrance, like the desert carried on the wind. I stepped syllables into the outer edge of the quilt, though of what words I cannot remember. Finally something broke under my foot, after the briefest of resistance, collapse with the sound of a short, quick guttural darting toward the wall. My orbit was halted and collapse on a grander scale proceeded.
At my call, and in one continuous motion, my mother breeched the threshold into the house, took me into her arms and lifted the corner of the quilt which I indicated. Horror has a way of mirroring horror so that both the action and reaction often assume a similar aspect. We went for the neighbor. The sound of his shovel under it was as harsh and dire as the first syllable of its own name. I’d killed it, though for good measure we walked to the highway which bound our front yard so it could be thrown beneath the wheels of an enormous truck, which swept by dragging with it, in a deafening roar my wheel could never produce, the facts of the event.
PERSEPHONE: Memory is another present; a phantom limb. He is dying beneath my hand (this was my grandfather) on his back. The cancer has metastasized, is now snaking up his esophagus toward his mouth as if it has something to say.

His rasped breath, his breath-rattle replaces the dark in his bedroom by way of the ear. Removed from any plaintive notion his moan mimics the creaking bed frame.

He died so soon after I’d left that the feel of his shirt over his ribs will not leave my fingertips.

His entire torso has been replaced with pain which, in turn, replaces the dark in his bedroom. It crackles out and changes a quality in the room, say the air, to something so much more tenuous. He rasps into his torso his own pain from the room.

He’s taken memory for the only present. He’s forgotten to remind his body how to walk, how to sleep, how to eat, how to breathe the air around the pain.

OK he says, OK over and over again into the patience for his body.

2005-07-21T07:22:00.000-07:00

Imposture Notebook

area 1: The rational violence
notebook, imposture: presentnotebook, durus: working books 4/01/01 thru 6/01/02notebook, mollis: correspondence (truncated) 5/08/01 thru 3/27/02

This all began with a letter not received.
Traversed the grass beaded assumes various forms Beaded branch Open language thins to an arm Ordinary Quality her finger moves over her skin distorting her skin The earth is distorted itself with these leaves on it These leaves An honest community versus a true community What is ordinary language? One thinks of Williams or Wittgenstein Is it ordinary Language that is the language of communication? Pedestrian This is not a true reply to your letter, though I (we for that matter) do intend to give a true reply. This is simply to let you know that I did not receive a copy, though ______ read his copy to me so I know you intended that I should receive a copy. It may have been lost or who knows what. If you could send a copy to me I would greatly appreciate it.Also, I think you should know that I am not angry, but I am confused.

communication? No A context which defies context Real language which has been put into an unusual situation Real versus ordinary? Into his thigh community has been sewn each stitch buckled and some where hairs “We must begin with the mistake and transform it into what is true.” (Wittgenstein) What I can see and what I can set down and what I can remember Is memory separate from soul Syntax is a way of making memory present palpable Knowing my body as I do your body is separate from the dog’s Slant the sun golden is a quality in human skin Eumenidies Mastery of death? Mimesis? _____: “what is it about tone that you dislike?” I dislike the way it makes a spectacle of the writing as does Narrative and description What is it about Drama which attracts people in a piece of writing which is not theater? This can easily return to people’s need for God That is this muddle of language which requires so many circuits to (illegible) often accepts metaphor as veracity Whereas in a writing which is closer to thinking there is little need of circuits Heaven location description versus the Hebrew word for heaven being plural the idea of plurality alone one after death existing as a true plurality The soul is an action Is it assumes with spinneret egg sack abdomen drama attachment moon hauled on leg points Dissolves on touch the caterpillar One third the petals russet with skin He wrote it as separate from his lungs Mandelstam’s “Conversation about Dante.” In the way their lips slide one to one There’s a way in which people can blur over the boundaries and make soul The two of I realized after I had sent the previous email that it was rather pointless to ask for a copy of the letter. I don’t need a copy in order to respond (______ read it to me over the phone.) I hesitate to use email simply because I dislike it for serious correspondence, but it is fast. It is important to preface everything which follows by saying a couple of things: first, as I stated before, I’m confuse and second, as I stated before, I’m not angry. I suppose I should try to explain why I am not angry. When I asked ________ why the two of you divorced she said it was because you are gay. At that point, suddenly, it seemed to me that the divorce and your staying away was your way of protecting us from something which is difficult to explain. I thought then, and do now, that that must have been the best course of action. By telling you this, though, I am not trying to make you less culpable for your choices; there were also some selfish and irresponsible motives behind them. I am not naïve enough to assume it was better this way and there is no point in speculating. You said in your letter that you wanted to be honest, as do I. I think at this point there can be no other way to be and still hope to proceed. I do want to ask you two, for now, questions: first, what’s your side of the story, second, why now? I can think of other questions, but for the time being I think we need slowly to begin establishing a history before we can start trying to fill it in. You stated that you also have questions, I’ll be glad to answer them honestly, though slowly—this is a difficult thing which requires time, care and respect.

you have a strong soul which I hope you’ll have always Saying something versus making something would make consciousness a micro-mythology? Crisis occurs when that micro-mythological template is laid across others Their myths are different I can think of things which I did today for good or no and now I can think of alternatives to those previous actions How does this affect those perceptions? Is that “actual” micro-mythology altered? Of course actual refers to its being on the outside and able to be corroborated This is memory a micro-mythology This what it is that attracts people to drama that it mimics the creation of these micro-mythologies What happens when belief is withdrawn from self? Prime mover is it still? World as ecstatic No center Death greatest spectacle yields sex yields the self being subsumed Released from spectacle So when I think of tone etc. as making a spectacle out of the writing am I simply reactingI spoke with ______ and we both agree that for you to send each of us a letter would be best now that you have both of our addresses. By both of us getting a letter, even which contains the same information, we will be able to react individually. Also, I want to stress that any dialogue, aside from the transmission of facts, which is to take place between you and I and between you and ______ must take place individually. Many of the concerns which this dialogue involves are mutual, but many more are extremely individual. It seems that ________ initial questions echo mine: What happened? andWhy now? If you have any questions feel free to contact me, but I will not relay information, again, aside from facts, between you and ______ that will be up to the two of you. I can’t and won’t assume to speak for ______, but I for one look forward to reading your letter.
to the death instinct? What happens if everything is equally a prime mover? Cause and effect would be replaced by action and re-action? Hierarchy is dismantled? Unity is replaced with process? This is Love The leaves shadowed are more and darker leaves If one is able to emphasize the boundaries of things (ideas and objects) one is dispelling unity Does soul still remain after excending those boundaries? Yes because it is action Why is this not spectacle? Is it excending versus transcending only? To climb out of versus to carry across Fuscia rhododendron blooms at night Culpability Photography How can one question value without establishing a new system of value Is something which is beyond value by definition beyond spectacle Can one redefine value (or remove it for that matter) by requiring that it be excending rather than transcending I suppose here I’m back to Nietzsche But would this require abstaining from belief as belief itself is what establishes value Is belief not opposed to intimacy in that it requires only a passive action Here is the problem with tone which exemplifies the problem with spectacle as a whole They require a system of belief which bars certain contingencies while setting in place other expected outcomes Value yields spectacle yields tone Is only supported by belief I believe intimately in the immediate structures of the world—the give of flesh the lack thereof in stone or wood The point at which I become a skeptic is when the creation of so many micro-mythologies lays a completely artificial template over those structures and is not aware of it Things are not to be doubted for that matter neither are perceptions alone but perceptions in conjunction with a self are to be held if not in a dubious light then at least accepted as fodder for true thinking and experimenting If one is blind to the porous nature of self one is likely to be either deceived by its capacity for tyranny and thus become a tyrant or to become a victimI received your letter yesterday and want to thank you for being so prompt. I told you in a previous email that I thought it best to communicate by letter, I still do, the reason I am sending this email is that I couldn’t read your return address on the envelope. I guess I got my habit of writing quickly from you. Also, I want to thank you for being so honest, I know this can not be easy for you. Most of the information you gave I knew to some extent, except for the __________________________________. This is something _________ was not honest about. When I asked why the divorce happened, and this was 7 or 8 years ago, I was simply told that you were gay. Over the years I’ve gleaned information from here and there and_________________________________________________________________. I want to ask you some other questions. But I also want you to know that anything you choose not to answer is fine with me and that my wanting to pursue a relationship with you is not contingent on either your answering or your answers. I guess I’ll ask the hard one first: did you know you were gay when you married _________? I also have loads of other questions along an entirely different line: your life. I want to be as honest with you as you have with me. You stated in your letter that I apparently had tried to find you through the _____ side; the fact is I didn’t, though I had thought about doing so. _________ may have tried though I don’t know for sure. This doesn’t mean I’m sorry that you have contacted me; I am, in fact, very happy. I don’t know what kind of relationship you have in mind. I’d like to share some things about my life with you but I don’t want you to feel overwhelmed. I don’t know what I expect but I do want to try to understand you in some way and I’d like you to feel the same. Just let me know what you have in mind or if you don’t know either maybe we can simply keeping writing and see what happens. I’ll try to answer any questions you may have about me and my life. _______ tells me that your return address is easily read. So, I now have your true address, but I’ll send the email anyway.

of another’s tyranny Study of the positions of the body Dante Beckett Resound hands move Photo graphism Actaeon yields study yields Beckett yields body position Actaeon yields study yields Dante yields body as the surface or capital for punishment Paz on Duchamp Zukofsky 80 flowers Bottom on Shakespeare Aristotle on the soul Olson’s notion: “I’ve lived so long with my body that it must be my soul” Dante manifests punishment as physical pain so does in his case the body either: 1) usurp the soul or 2) become the soul Beckett also uses the body as a surface or a barrier against which the world reacts for in him the world is always only outside Is it always only outside Is it possible for the body to be a surface which is the result of a tension or better a being made tense or being strung that is an elongation of the inner and the outer so that both are manifest completely in the surface which is body So that the body changes from being a barrier to being a ground of inclusion Does this require disbelief in the self And how honest is that or can it be How does this jibe with unity If each body is a ground of inclusion in the afore mentioned sense can there be distinction And can that surface stretched as it is produce Is there volition in such a body Is there difference between writing morally as Martin suggested and writing an honest surface That is in being a body Of course here what Martin implies with morally I think of as amorally Is it possible to write an honest image In many ways this is the problem I have with fiction It is constantly trying to make something to make images for something which already exists under the pretense of telling the story but isn’t implicit in that some kind of subjugation of the writing—suddenly it is bound to not be a surface—it is bound to belief in the self and by extension submits itself to conventions which are constantly subverting it I feel close to Zukofsky especially when I can relieve him of his predilection for Poetry I don’t believe in Poetry The Rational Violence Soft breath red face through determination A great firm dome ignorance must encompass you Quiet granite forced from hand from expectation of body the rational violence What are the consequences of Memory’s usurpation of vision in the writing Or is that the case How can one alter the frame of the body Would this be a manifestation of the rational violence (as in Duchamp) Or could it be that an alteration occurs in the struggle between memory and vision Can soul happen without a physical barrier being breached Is memory or can memory breach(ing) a physical barrier…vision Gaze and the template of memory possibly can result in violence Muscle’s belly frames in this position the head Bone at bottom of face having seen it I remember here crux Tighten accordingly to face “…Who would give a bird the lie…,” A Midsummer Night’s Dream “The flowers of the Prunus Japonica deflect and turn, do I not think of you dwelling afar? He said: It is not the thought, how can there be distance in that?” (Confucius) How does one get that sense of looking out of the text Out of soul Can one make a text which is part of the world Once again this comes back to spectacle Does the lack of narrative forego spectacle Is the “I” necessarily a spectacle Spectacle yields assuming power by disregarding plurality, individuality At what point are a set of name’s a set of facts In thrum all outer form from vase all possible situations Object white Each time I sit down to write you I can tell the focus of my attention is moving from wanting to ask you questions toward wanting to tell you things. I think this is good, although I can't get over what a strange and rare opportunity this is for the both of us.Here we are at the cusp of, what I hope will be, an enduring and mutually rewarding relationship. Each of us has here the opportunity to create a self for the other, of course by that I do not mean an invention but a presentation of who each of us thinks we are, which is why I so value the honesty which your letters from the first have strove to require. I want us to always be honest. What you said about whether you knew you were gay when you married _________ makes a great deal of sense. It is amazing how long a culture can ignore or deny something only to turn around and the in space of 3 decades almost completely assimilate it. You said you didn't want the last letter to be about you. But I do, I want to know things about you: your childhood, which you mentioned, your life until now, what you do, what/how you think about things, everything. I, too, don't want you to feel I'm asking too much too soon, but still I wonder.I guess now for me, to begin I don't mind answering any questions you have for me ( although I'm not too interested in writing about ___________________, I'll tell you they are still together and seem happy, they live nearby and I see them often.) I'll start with the questions you enclosed. Yes, we were in New Castle until 1984 when we moved to Charlotte, NC where I've lived since, except for two years of graduate school. In school, at least, elementary and high school, I'd say I was average maybe slightly above. I graduated from high school in 1988 and started college at UNC Charlotte the same year where I received a BA in English in 1992. In the spring of that year I'd been accepted into the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa and graduated from there in 1994 with a Master of Fine Arts degree in Poetry. There are lots of other things I could tell you which occurred in the space of those years, but for now I'd rather start with facts. So, that was most of the boring stuff, although my writing is very important to me. Here's the story of my wonderful wife ______. We began dating at 17 and have been together ever since. We were married in 1994. I should tell you that she has always encouraged me to try to find you and is very supportive of everything which has happened. She is beautiful, humble, strong, generous and caring. She has taught me how to be confident and strong and responsible. My being able to do this is in no small part due to her. She makes it possible for me to be happy in all aspects of my life. I love her very much. Yes, we have one child, _____, born in 1996. He is a wonderful boy: intelligent, creative, confident, loving, difficult sometimes, but a joy. We've enclosed some pictures (again I hope this isn't too fast), they've been scanned so the colors are distorted. He and my wife are the two people it would be difficult to do without, they fulfill me. What do I do, well; I stay home with _____ and have his whole life, also I work part-time at the county library and I write every day. All this sounds like some kind of resume, but I want to start with this and build on it. If you have questions let me know. Also, there are things I'll want to tell as we go along. I know, from things you've said, how difficult this has been and continues to be for you, but I want to thank you for doing it.

chrysanthemum sun Are Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers anti-spectacle poems Are they esoteric only No in many ways they are self-supporting, that is they produce this energy at the point of composition that is word to word Spectacle=Soul (conventional) To come to a text, whether through writing it or reading, without the regiment of progress is to relieve it of spectacle Progress bullies in temporal locators which of course lays the template of a long-term syntax over the text Making like the idea of an experience versus making something an experience What are the consequences of this way of thinking not simply for the text or reading but for thinking itself Is this where one comes to Zen’s “worship” of the moment Is that dichotomy all there is Progress versus moment Is a moment an object If so doesn’t it “contain the possibility of all situations” Can a moment choose its own history Can an object No Both object and moment are delivered of History What effect does the introduction of the possessive pronoun have My object My moment Are those particulars limited by their context For example is my object having been used in a particular way for one year precluded from other uses in that context of the “my” simply from habit Is a moment used To Davenport Paradise Sappho Horace Aster seed Seed aster forced each from the five of them What is moment and object paradisiacal redux Rapidus sol If a body meet a body coming through the rye If a body kiss a body need a body cry What is it imagination takes from the world Tactility What is it imagination takes from the world Tactility Mary Caponegro Tales from the next village Rachis was it barbule Living wing Thing-events to not experience Shudder groin Shudder her head just after Operators and things E. Goffman Asylums From notes to Poe’s “Eureka” “…that attraction and repulsion are matter” Blueberries What is “the structure of the world” This way of thinking requires an acuity by exclusion Enormity Is it simply aggression in a text which makes it thinking Of course I do not mean violence as such but transgression Aeschylus Prometheus literally “fore thought” Days in those leaves transfiguring the (illegible) remains Is what happens in the text a claim of existing Is it similar to proprioception Does an a-narrative stance necessarily proffer the body itself, or better, a measure of reference In a narrative progression the context is obvious Yet here in an aggressive a-narration body itself, not as in drama—i.e. spectacle, is the residual context for what happens Again back to Soul being manifest out of the context of at least 2 bodies Bodies or bodies in action Experience = Soul Is all thinking breach Yes If images are possible do they manifest this aggression Is there a such thing as world images I can think of fact striated/layered on and transformed under various pressures Can this be reduced to a macro versus micro issue i.e. the local “personal” being consistent with the global Of course one wants to say representative of but representation is itself I want to thank you for the enthusiasm of your last letter; you couldn't have stated anything more perfectly. As far as feeling intimidated by the fact that I write, you shouldn't, you express yourself very well. What I do isn't something which is impossible for most people if they would just let themselves. Two things which you mentioned in your letter, especially caught my interest: 1) that you are on disability, is it fair of me to ask due to what condition and 2) what things do you do which might surprise me? I'm curious about the disability because I want you to be well and to be able to sustain being well. Do you still paint? I've seen a couple paintings which you did long ago and I'm curious. Do you read a lot, if so what? Being a student of Life is all any of us can be whether we want to admit it or not. There are many people who expend all their energy in trying to fulfill a convention which has nothing to do with them, for whom the phrase "student of Life" is viewed with contempt. Of course they feel contemptuous because they've never given themselves the opportunity to feel something deeply and let it affect everything else in their lives. Also, we live in a product oriented culture which places little emphasis on the paths which lead to those products. But the fact is that the path is everything, in fact the only thing. Honestly I can think of very little about which I am uncomfortable answering questions, so anything you can think of is fine. By the same token I'll let you know that I am an odd person, which I do not say in order to be self- congratulatory nor do I mean that statement as a lament, but only to be honest. I like to do thing my way. I am not a Romantic. My writing is, if any thing, analytic though personal and extremely visceral. I write in a peculiar way and do so because it seems, to me, most honest. I'm not very interested in publishing, though am lucky enough to know some editors of journals here and there (Colorado, Las Vegas, Manhattan) who have published some things. Also, I've found out recently that there is a small chance I may have a book coming out, though nothing definite. I am interested in the avant-garde, though not as a community but as an individual pursuit. My writing is, to my mind, a philosophical inquiry. I read little American poetry, preferring some French poets and good helping of philosophy. I find most fiction too concerned with story, which is to me an artificial sequencing of events. Other things about me outside of my writing: I do not watch television. I do not eat red meat; in fact I eat little meat at all. I like subtle colors. _____ will tell that I am not witty, though I try occasionally. I dislike most comedy, because it seems simply an escape.
simply a way of avoiding responsibility Again is it simply aggression in a text which makes it thinking Do I believe in Self Must I Do “we will only at someone else’s expense” as Cioran suggests Dostoyevsky’s A Writer’s Diary History versus Eternal Present this goes to the idea Attention Gospel of Thomas taken as life plan Fiction structure of novel interspliced with Natural history pertaining to fish and birds Then you are known dove itself crushed in cat jaws One’s own self nothing here is the dove Of course strike the evil Ama nesciri love to be unknown It is both my hand and the bat—paradox Subject versus object image Nekuia a journey to the underworld The Cantos From Pound Is his “magic moment” or the moment of metamorphosis the same as The Transformative moment: the point at which cause and effect can be confused Check Metamorphosis versus Transformation Metempsychosis in Pound Could the self be constituted within every context The problem with writing fiction is that it just doesn’t seem true It necessarily has an acuity which occludes Very red “Salmacis was alarmed, and she answered: ‘I leave this place for you to use it.’” (Ovid) Selig Hecht Clarence Graham Smell of mint after the rain Soul itself—a place, No—a direction, No—that occurrence of transfer 1 for 2 Soul versus manifestation of Soul How can one move from a sense of singular self, even on which is constituted again in every context to a true multiplicity Is this that distinction between Self and Soul wherein Soul requires the loss of distinction while Self chomps at the bit to establish it I can watch the spider working and smell the mint beat into the air by the rain These are perceptions which are of a singular context a context in which one can feel the Self But they are not a context based on dexterity rather they are a context based on a kind of pedestrian panorama In that context based on dexterity there lies the basis for: the text Soul Thinking itself (i.e. it’s aggressive nature) So that’s it this dexterity keeps the aggression at its root at bay Text=Soul=thinking all in this special sense Aristotle’s ten “categories:” substance quality quantity relation action passion place time position way of Being Raining glistens Eric Fischl Could faith be simply “a feeling that keeps him (the believer) from knowing solitude?” (Tournier) Created an evolutionary line for the manuscripts God?------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Devil? Corpus Socius Octave Hamelin Is this simply humility versus pride If so where does honesty fall on that spectrum As in the letter to _____ in order to be humble one must first be honest which is a brave thing But doesn’t honesty require a certain pride either based on innocence or will Brilliance agility subtleness impassiveness I am not willing the movement Squandered is a judgment about the movement Hand moves up tongue curls down it retreats There is a mist about the moon as if for balance Gemini I want to write this to you for two reasons. One, in some way I wanted to tell you HappyFather’s Day which is not to say that I want you to (nor do I think you want to) take _______ place, but you still are my father and I don’t see why I simply can’t have both. Second, I mentioned in my letter that there was a slight chance that I might have a book of poems coming out. Well it looks as though I will have one out this spring—no contract yet, though I’ve heard from the editor who says she will send one in August. Also, I wanted to include this poem, which I’ll begin by saying is very old (I wrote it when I was 22 or 23) and is not indicative of the way I write now. There is something of a story behind it, which is unusual for my writing. In some way the poem involves you or at least my idea of you at that time. I’ll just tell you what happened then type the poem. This was written not as a direct outgrowth of the experience but sometime soon after it. It was primarily an experiment in a way of writing which was then attached to you and this experience. Here’s the story. When I was living in Iowa City in 1993 I went to an exhibit of the AIDS quilt. While the viewers where looking around at the beautiful and various quilts; a speaker was reading the names of victims of the disease, I could have sworn I heard your name read. I was taken aback, obviously. I was sad and confused. Anyway in the weeks which followed something of that experience came back up in this poem, though I don’t think anyone would know it unlessI told them. Again, I wrote this when I was very young. You (and I to some extent) are the Hungarian.
Love storyThe Hungarian bursts everything he owns.These are the seeds of guilt. Which the pigeonswill not eat, which the singing birds will.He bathes in the bone water of a bone tub.To break now would leave him transparent.The love of a man is heartbreaking. The Hungarianloves one. Trees are never cold. Treesare never beautiful or ugly, but graceful.The Hungarian is beautiful and bursts everything.Everything bursts. These are the seeds of desire.Which the pigeons will eat, which the singingbirds will not. He bathes in the fuchsia waterof a fuchsia tub. The kiss of a promise is heartbreaking.The Hungarian is beautiful and bursts everything.

are one-souled Castor Pollux ) Is the idea of soul as transgressive to the fortified centers of self predicated upon close association I.e. Castor and Pollux If it (soul) is spontaneous between people does it require love Or does it require pure attention) Is this idea of soul truly just an action Or is it an action at all for that matter Is it the result of an action That action being the excluding of self which any pure attention requires When in face to face discourse with someone 2 passenger jets hijacked and crashed into both towers of the World Trade Center both collapse thus collapsing surrounding structures 1 passenger jet hijacked and crashed into the Pentagon 1 passenger jet hijacked and crashed in PA Probably thousands dead no word yet Under the moon Venus Confabulation the glass and people They are joint Joined One destroys imagination with building or field or passenger jet “The human body is the best picture of the human soul.” (Wittgenstein) Is it How does the human body end How does that question differ from Where does the human body end Does one vilify method One of the primary engines of this writing is honesty which I hope goes some distance toward deflating the authority of spectacle To proceed by analysis is a way of exploring the idea of coherence however broad it may be Isn’t that fundamental challenge to authority necessary in the positioning of one’s life—isn’t it the egalitary I did receive your letter on the 17th. I want to thank you again for being so honest, that couldn’t have been easy. I’m glad to know how healthy you are. I’ll be honest I don’t know so very much about HIV. I know that there have been and are people who have gone twenty years or more and haven’t developed AIDS. It is a little frightening though, I’m sure it was for you, at least when you found out and for the first few years. I am very glad to hear how seriously you take your health; there are too many people who act as if they have no control over what happens to their bodies. You never have to worry about my thinking differently about you because you don’t read a lot or because you watch TV or what ever. It is obvious to me that you are a thoughtful person and that you care a great deal about things. The biggest problem I have with most TV watchers is that they cease to think. It seems as though you think quite a lot. The book thing is exciting and a little scary. I write in a very peculiar way. I was trying to explain this to _____ last night. In many ways the premise of my writing is to attack that which most people assume is necessary to any writing, i.e. narrative structure, metaphor, strong sense of some kind of coherent self etc. If you’d like I can send you a manuscript copy. I hope it was OK that I called yesterday. I would like to hear your voice. Not that I don’t like the correspondence we’ve had, but somehow a physical voice would make it more real.

Doesn’t it require a text which is not invention or creation but which can meet everything/one equally as a “center” so that the text becomes or is even an aggregate of free association whose concern is apprehending and not valuation In order to be humble one must first be honest and honesty is a brave thing as it requires a willingness to abstain from satisfaction Aspidistra At that instant hic et nunc Irides dull from joy into resignation “The disjunction or discontinuity between the spatial existence and the temporal existence of a person ruptures the connection between body and the mind…” (Hejinian) Templum/Tempus Is the limit of the body simply spatial Or can it also be temporal Is memory a way of extending the body by way of the mind If this is the case can memory constitute soul How is the body employed differently is saying “I remember the angular look of my grandfather’s body just before he died” and “I remember the I also enjoyed our conversation yesterday. There are plenty of things I’d like to tell you about my childhood, though on some level it would simply be hindsight. I mean taking a frame of mind which is in the present and using that as a template for past events is almost always a mistake. It was a pretty normal childhood, I was safe and loved. As for a teacher who really affected my life that would probably the friend I told you about. I first had a poetry writing class with him as an undergraduate and he really took me seriously and turned me on to real contemporary writing. He continues to be my friend today, though we have very different ideas about things. _____ brought home the copy of my manuscript today so I’ll mail it out soon. Here’s an odd question: are you religious? To let you know, I am not, at least not in any conventional way, I’ll elaborate later in a letter.
tingling, almost electric, feel in the tips of my fingers when moving them over my grandfather’s cotton shirt stretched over his ribs as he slept just before he died” Argument from the absurd if Nature had wanted Before a thing exists its particular time could not exist Skin hill If Nature had wanted a detail an argument Writing by her face here soft 6:30 when its pallor cogent with place its desire origins that smile at time for that smile Skin hill The sky directly natural The Power of Language Ponge—The object is poetics The “good” will not be something brought in from the outside Plotinus? Does it proceed by recognition then Apple under the skin Ethics is spiritual optics Levinas 1. impassiveness 2. each are from the shirt breadth 3. overlays fingers hand fire ants (there) 4. contentment --------------------------------once 5. 6. 7. Etc. Knowing Desiring Feeling Santayana Dominations and Powers Her/Him Her I despise a dabbler in imagery “…Flesh is at least as good a gauge as words are…” (Williams) 1. is an object C at school with historic particularity 2. particular lip quavering then tensed 3. a filter is it holly then privet the ground moist They Wires are pushed into a mouth form a mouth “…words progress into the ground.” (Williams) Each corroborating next 1. each corroborates the next leaf 2. substitute commonality soul was prophetic (illegible) Are these texts events of experience How does language constitute an event of experience HowThis will just be a quick note. I wanted to get this manuscript to you quickly. I wrote to the Poetry editor at Fence to ask that he send a back issue of the journal which my poems are in to you if possible. He is a really nice guy, so I think he will try. ______ and his kids were here all day Friday. We went to the pool and let the kids play. We talked. I gave him a blank journal which I told him to write in, not to show anyone but just to have a way of getting some feelings about anything out. I, of course, don't know if he will use it I hope he does. Friday morning while I was cleaning the house _____ danced to the Beastie Boys for at least 30 minutes. He also likes The Talking Heads, Tom Waits, lots of Bach, Charles Ives, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis. He really picks up on music. He took Suzuki violin lessons for a year and now wants to do cello. Also, he does gymnastics and wants to some kind of martial arts. I don't know if in reality all of this will come to pass. _____ does things to the extreme, he pushes every limit there is, which of course is a great trait to have as an adult, if it is directed into productive channels, but as a child it is frustrating. Are you political? I am in a strict intellectual way, which I know is something of a cop out. I don't vote. I'm something of an Anarchist, with out being violent. This informs my thinking about religion, soul etc. I'll go into that later. I want to keep this short. Keep in mind that my manuscript is meant to be challenging. Take care. Tell ___ I say hello.

does the body Because an event of experience can be an extension of the body is it the soul (Experience used to be called the soul) Do they both do it simply through reference alone Can juxtaposition be a reference Sure For thought and sensation to be equally present which is to say simultaneously present Not as in a cause and effect relationship but simply as an analysis of experience Of course this presumes a breaking of the template of thought What it imposes is a plurality to the depths of the inner self Narrative is a violent struggle to contain the self Narrative is not about experience but about drama Its primary concern is not having a thought or sensation but about conveying one Its emphasis is misplaced and because of it both the thought and the sensation are misgiven How does one break the template of thought Mostly by breaking narrative By breaking the idea of whole self/unity When one realizes the plurality of the self which of course is to say the myth of the self one realizes soul JohnDominic Crossan A world view predicated on Power versus A world view predicated onJustice Is the radical de-centralization of Power Justice Isn’t the meeting of everything equally a center Justice Isn’t that the “Kingdom of God” Description Fragments for the History of the Human Body pt.2 ed. Michel Feher Jean Francois Lyotard I want the mark to stay on the ghost Politics, Writing, Mutilation Allan Stoekl Does/can an anti-narrative stance subvert the world In the sense of parable’s ability to do so It comes back to whether the world proceeds by narrative which I believe it does not Soul itself resists narrative 1. sea lily 2. had brought into the world a violence over against their tolerance 3. The sea lily 4. sea lily Is it a tolerance Pyotr Yakovlevich Chaadaev (1794-1856) Sherman Alexie Lumen –divine radiation or natural illumination versus lux –perceived light in the eye of the concrete beholder, as the focus of interest Leonardo’s sfumato Is clarity inherent in Purity with respect to language How does that fit in the context of creating’s being resisting rather than communicating Something which is entirely pure of course cannot resist or communicate because it is solitary—it is pure to the extent that it is insular Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision David Michael Levin What is it which makes turning something into something else appealing And isn’t that turn inherently dramatic One must remove the containing of one context within another Context itself must be broadened How far can context be broadened before it falls apart That remains to be seen Can context be linear only Is a string of juxtaposed phrases a context Can an image itself have a context Is the attacking of context a sufficient resistance Thought is never innocent it is aggressive Having both you and ___ here was such a joy. I am constantly impressed by the way you have handled every step of this process of reintroducing ourselves to each other. There is nothing which could have been handled with more tact, respect and love. You have really made all of this seem simply natural, for which you have my greatest appreciation. I, too, felt sad when hugging you bye that Saturday night. But, at the same time, exhilarated, whole to a degree I was, and still am, surprised at, and happy. You spoke of ______ and me as filling part of a void in your life. You've done that for my life as well, except it was one which I didn't I know I had. For that I also want to thank you. It is obvious to me that you are a sensitive, caring and generous man by the way you interacted with _____ and _____, also, in the way you write about them. You are a very insightful person. The things you said about how _____ and I are raising _____ do mean a great deal, because you are right on. Not to mention that you picked up on this after having only been with us one day, whereas others in both _______ and my family still haven't. The things you said about me and what I've done with my life I find very moving. They are things nobody has ever said to me in so succinct a way, which is not to say that __________________ are not proud of me, but they aren't nearly as eloquent as you, nor as forth coming with praise. Most of my motivation for the choices I made early on was simply to live differently than them, especially to think differently than they do. I feel I have so much in common with you. I am very comfortable with you and I want to tell you things. Whether or not there is a mutual Love between us I think cannot be questioned. As to whether there are any bounds that you could over step, quite simply there are not. I don't want you to worry, at all. Say what you think, say what you feel and I'll do the same. I'll tell you something which just popped into my head, and may seem off the wall. This quote from William Blake (18th century British poet) “I must create a system of my own or be enslaved by another man's." He was speaking of his poetics and his ideas about God, etc. It has always been something of a credo for me, it seems as though you'd understand that about me and I don't think _________________ would. He also has some great aphorisms, here's one: "Damn braces, bless relaxes."Again, I don't know that this pertains to anything I've said, but it is interesting. My friend ____ from Brooklyn said he sent you a copy of the Fence which I am in. You should get it soon. I want both of you to take care. And we'd love to see you anytime. _____ will come around in his own time. He isn't very comfortable with his feelings, but as I told you before that is beginning to change.
1. decisive grass the self-appearance hems in 2. Florida 3. as if a small male member Is the poem nothing as (Riding) Jackson says “But what might the term autobiography mean when the ego’s autonomy is packed away with the other illusions?” (Lyotard) Max Jacob’s The Dice Cup Gorgon Bataille’s Inner Experience again Honesty versus Truth Is truth directly linked as Nietzsche stated to the feeling of Power Spectacle is a corrosive to honesty because it’s couched in terms of drama The transition of a closed system to an open one that is where it is no longer a matter of communication but of transformation Tintoretto The name of the hero is the people Is perpetuation the same as proceeding If one removes narrative from a text is it necessarily static No If one does away with the “vehicle” in any text one must proceed by transformation This of course is variously manifest: grammar syntax context imagery (if there is such a thing) Because the narrative is absent thought there exists moments of self-reference or subjectiveness resistance is severely foregrounded I don’t believe in the role of the Poet or in Poetry that is the role which is predicated upon any sense of “objective correlative” It is no wonder Eliot was an Anglican That way of thinking comes back to a broad trust in the notion of representatives whether they be devices or persons But resistance to what To being assimilated and thus repeating the current line or world view Fiction Walter Benjamin 3. gulls Show me the ideas you claim to have) The point at which the muscle attaches to the bone is its most vulnerable Their both being attached to weakness at certain points in various systems Efficacy A bird the size of her ear wind wasted Muscles bones orifices skin organs + the idea of conception through the ear (i.e. immaculate) + bird imagery I’m not interested simply in different ways of telling Am I telling at all I’d hoped to have a progress of thinking That is an engagement Focus on what it is that is breached What is breached The hero is called the people An assumption about thinking and thus the text Resisting is a way of defeating representative thought Once again honesty versus community or (family) Again is the attacking of context a sufficient resistance Is resistance necessarily solitary Honesty Memory Eros/Thanatos body jesus Is description a unit Bronchioles How is knowledge different from honesty Both are perceived to be value based systems I suppose one must make the distinction between nouns and verbs here In terms of nouns knowledge and honesty are both value based systems for arranging things In terms of verbs to know and to be honest to say “I know” Zygmunt performing Clover Upon the elm astringent I have forgotten the function of metaphor Jacques Lecercle Thought is made in the mouth Ripping at scenery thought sun contrasts trees envision Does beginning the text in the first place necessitate one’s picking oneself out as a subject Not necessarily thought often is a default (illegible) It does set out a point of departure which is at very best minimally scatter-shot Can the text be the making of a subject Is it possible to interchange subject/context Is being a “poet” a social category No Is participating in honesty a social category RD Laing Over against what _____ about self roughly that it is the move from one thing to another where both points are affected and hence changed: 1. that is linear thought which valorizes the ends 2. it is thought which is dependant on causality and thus on time 3. doesn’t it ignore a moment by moment progression for the “agency” of moving from and moving to By the same token is responsibility possible in a moment by moment One tests its limits therein lies responsibility Morning yields night 1 day 17 hours (illegible) (illegible) Imagology I have often imagined this progression I think so given intelligent choice What about the problem with time As Meditation: russet One often imaging this bound by whiteWhat about fluidity of the text In large part this contributes to its being taken/made as I, too, look forward to getting your letters. They make me happy and excited. I am very glad that all this has come about at this point in my life, when nothing seems the least bit confusing. I enjoy having this conversation with you, because with you I feel a real connection, something which isn't born of simply Time elapsed but which side-steps that notion all together. There are certain relationships which grow exponentially and I am glad this is one. Of course there is more than one side to your personality. You are a passionate person and that passion is equally applied. I lose my temper and am not always as nice as I should be. I am, at times, judgmental and assuming. But I try and it is obvious to me that you do too. It sounds as though you and ___ had quite a workout with his sister and kids. I am glad everything went off well. Again, I'm sure some of that was due to the fact that it is very easy to be natural around you and ___. The two of you exude a kind of certainty which can put people at ease. _____ really wants to come and visit, I should say that I do too once we can get the money together and things can be arranged. She wants to go to Sea World, which would be fun for us and _____. Also, I'd like to have some more time to just sit and talk. We'll see. Yes, _____ starts school Aug. 15. He is very excited and we are excited for him. It will be a big change. It's important to both _____ and I that he does well, which doesn't just mean academically but that he is confident enough to both make friends and remain individual. Also, I hope to not have a problem with _____ being taught things which are wrong, by that I don't mean differences of opinion but things which did not occur. I'm sure we'll figure a way to address anything that comes up. I don't think _____ would mind if I give _______ and the kids' birthdays: _______ is January 2, _______ is February 2 and ______ is October 1. _____ starts school this Wednesday (August 8). They live in a different county. My work out routine is going well. I'm doing an abs program which works towards 3 sets of 15 repetitions for two exercises each for oblique, lower and upper. Right now I'm at two sets of ten. I've kind of adopted your way of working out, one day per body part. I do five to seven exercises per body part. I've also started writing it all down which helps a great deal with making progress and seeing it. Yes the book was helpful; it demonstrates a lot of different kinds of exercises. What do you think about this? On Mondays I've been working my chest. Bench press, dumbbell fly, incline press, incline fly, pull-overs and narrow grip presses each 3 sets working toward a goal of 10 reps, then I increase the weight. Is it useful say on Friday to do another 3 sets of benches and incline benches followed by some sets of heavier weights, say 5 one rep sets? I probably will write some more when _____ goes to school. As it is we're up at 5:30 and I write from around 6 to around 6:45. Then off and on all day what I've written is on my mind. Then at night after _____ is in bed I read a couple of hours and sometimes go back to what I have written. I rarely re-write anything, I only cut out what doesn't work. I plan to send out more poems to journals after _____ starts school. I have enough manuscript pages for two more books which I will organize. Today, (Sunday Aug. 5), we read another abridgement of Frankenstein to _____ which he loved. After we finished he put together a Frankenstein costume and I made stitches on his forehead and wrists with face paint. He told _____, ______ and I that we were Frankengirl, Frankendog and Frankenman respectively. I think he is a very special kid, whom I love very much. I hope the storm "Barry" doesn't make landfall near you or give you too much rain. Be careful and both of you take care. I want to tell you again how considerate it was of you to send both the e-mail regarding _______ first day of school and the book. I think you and I are similar in many ways even if they may be subtle. It was a generous thing to do and is appreciated.

an artifact Does fluidity necessitate a hierarchy Can a text be fluid while being anti-grammatical Yes because it implies a grammar which is standard What about the soul/self is it fluid Can it be while also being honest No overall the soul is not fluid Does one accept a fluidity based on desire Tactics: the lizard the wood wasp Sophocles Gaping iris Extending the house house finch had it been surface context his modeling bird with hand Pear blossoms five lifts skin to cheek lips Corrigibility dulls each slight smack salving the branch Ability to release an image Desire Once a garden just past the garage Medusa One fascinates with her breast citizen Prominent flesh Kierkegaard Stone Fish Fiber Dough Crack Block Breath How does this relate to my notion of soul as between Can it in fact only occur in such an arrangement l’un-avec-l’autre Could being (dasein) = soul Another description of the soul/self occurring Now Now Now Etc. Only the shock of the instance Does this constitute time No because a progression by instants does not include a past or future, but simply occurs as a present Sovereignty It is not numerous; it is more We Commandeering Blue glass vase Mud the lark adjusts (illegible) Force rolls from cheek into lip commandeering blue vase Mud the lark adjusts The three conditions of testimony: reason information reliability Dimples one’s skin One inserts trusts immediate acts Pro nobis That about the pear wood which revealing Helen Severe arm/branch putrefaction Oh this ghostly beauty “The real presence of time in the world is called Man. Time is Man, and Man is time.” (Augustine) Example (chronometric) Medieval annals 709. Hard winter. Duke Gottfried died. 710. Hard year and deficient in crops. 711. 712. Floods everywhere. Etc. So is a progression by moments this kind of chronometry Doesn’t adding narrative to this attempt a lording over, attempt a controlling and nothing else Are my texts chronometric How would chronometry fit in with soul/self Annals Hard monies away deficiently Narrative from the great white blossom removed Squirrel hooked up from ground One inserts terminus (illegible) Millet Mixta Mixta (mixed or composite Walker Bynum The marvelous the natural and the voluntary Being is society with Experiencing Learning Take into oneself Consuming The literature of entertainment A concentration of pigment so as to make the skin seem a hole “…monsters are named from the verb monstrare (to show)—that is, not from their ontology but from their utility.” (Bynum) The antinomian Amauricians Is man’s reason the image of God What of stances of anti-reason Would anti-(or non)reasonable acts subvert that image of God or transform it, thus extending the same transformation to God It would do both Mythologically Hand One wants solitude Severing of body and soul Metempsychosis Eurydice from life to death from dead again to life from life again to death Horrible leaves Io to cow theSorry I've been long in responding with a letter. It's been a hectic week and I also wanted to wait until after _______ first day, which was on Friday. Basically, he loved school. He didn't cry or get upset at all, even though the class had a substitute on the first day. His regular teacher went to Virginia to be with her father during triple by-pass surgery. He can't wait to go back. A friend he had made at the pool is in his class, which I think helped some. He was excited to tell _____ and me about his day, previous to the first I had asked him if he would tell me everything that happened and he said that he would tell me in the car and would still be telling me at home because it was going to be a long story. _______teacher's assistant said he was a sweet boy, although he and his friend wandered off the playground to the baseball field (only a couple of hundred feet away) to pretend it was a desert. So he'll need to keep with the group. But that's not too bad for his first day. I appreciate the confidence you have in _____ and I as parents, it’s nice to have it said. As far as _____ is concerned the easy answer is I don't know. Sometimes it’s hard to gauge what _____ is feeling and thinking. Honestly, I don't think it would seem too pushy for you write another letter. I haven't heard from him much lately, so we haven’t talked about all of this or anything for that matter. I know that sometimes even once he's made up his mind to do something it takes him a while to actually do it. _____ started school on the 7 of August and he's working long hours so he just may be feeling a little over-whelmed, but that's just speculation on my part. _____ went to church with our neighbors this morning. His friend had asked him last weekend and I was taken aback and didn't know what to say so I said he could come this Sunday. He and I talked about how different people come up with stories to explain thing which are hard or impossible to explain. I told him he could go occasionally but not every Sunday, so we'll see what happens. I don't accept things with out questioning them and I know he's only four, but I don't want him to have to go through what I did in order to come out from under any kind of dogma. Yes, I do like how I feel after I work out. I like the confidence it gives me and I like feeling strong both mentally and physically, which of course is the Greek notion of a well-rounded person. We were very tentatively thinking of trying to visit at Thanksgiving, of course though we don't want to take precedence over what ever traditions you have. So if you have something you both do for Thanksgiving please say, not to mention we don't yet know if we will be able to swing it, _____ only get 3 days off from school. We're still talking but I wanted to let you know that we are serious about coming some time and to find out about what you do for the holiday. Otherwise you and ___ are welcome here whenever, really. By the way _______ mom says she would like to meet you. So would my friend the professor. Next week I have to start re-typing my manuscript. The press needs it on a disk in Word. I usually work on a Mac without Word so I'll have to re-enter on the PC, which is not a bad thing. It will give me the chance to catch mistakes and make changes. So I'll end here. I hope you both are well and taking care.

From love of one’s own enfleshed To love of the similar neighbor To love of the enfleshed To love “…identity can mean spatiotemporal continuity.” (Bynum) In nova…mutatos…formas…corpora of bodies changed into new forms (Ovid) moved her arm up over their bodies hooked her hand down over their heads and blew Blackberry blossoms at night Is the perception of oneself mythology? “I am being honest” Is that automatically to assign a specific value Does one want to escape value Is escaping value different from combating unity Is value complicit in unity Palm value Once again the language must be attacked Sister is properly community Available boys Winter Thomas JJ Altizer No caps in the text Experience: burning due to cold hands Habit: radical clarity habit cold and red cardinal If one breaks habit does one breakreason Are relations external to their terms Even if those terms are altered by those relations Determining to carry (our) thoughts from one object to another to transfer the past to the future Abscondo Barbarity caprice One can imagine power desires this morning frost thick rim of the body yard then birdhouse versus unified personality Parousia Calypso Words of Selves Who conceals she Saliva through the cave’s sensual rooms sacred wood and hinterland Slicks area around the lips each finger her servant Mark C. Taylor Charles Winquist It is a device the finger Each future His hand into a sparrow manipulated Creaking branch adversarially In this light could the subject be an image for soul So long as this notion of the subject isn’t one in which the subject ends performing for the other So long as there is no drama If in fact this subject cane emerge of a coalition which is predicated upon an equal de-valuation of subject and other Of course that would be in an ideal relationship which is pure fancy But the flux’s center is that or must be that notion of equality Because in that vacuum uncovered by this de-valuation soul emerges That is the problem with narrative there is no de-valuation and there is no opportunity for something “great and innocent” to occur Only afterward can one ornament its carcass Blake’s polypus still reverts to myth Reverting to myth is fine so long as one keeps in mind that that is predicated on thenotion that all myth explains is human desire To ask the question “why is there anything at all” is to couch it in terms which take for granted a centered self What happens if the question is phrases thus “is there anything at all” Only then follow with the why Is this because it is a nominative Do all nouns partake of myth Can a verb be a myth White wall What is related to it Contiguous blue A study of Tiresias Beckett’s shorter plays “Not-I” Hunched in description there tongue in the grass Kathy Acker Spurs: Nietzsche’s styles Zygmunt Bauman Life in fragments: essays in Postmodern Morality Are there any limits to performing Clover Upon the elm astringent I have forgotten the function of metaphor butterfly “Thought is made in the mouth.” (Tzara) The Violence of Language Jean-Jacques Lecercle Thought is made in the mouth Ripping at scenery thought sun contrasts trees envision Does beginning the text in the first place Finally, I can sit down to write you a letter. Although I enjoy writing letters, in fact I value the act of letter writing very highly—when I am corresponding with someone I am able to solidify thoughts and ideas and feelings which are floating around in my head—though I require relative calm to do it. This week has been rather busy. I spent Wednesday at _____ sitting with my Grandmother because mom had a routine operation on Tuesday. Thursday I sat for a couple hours while the brakes were done on the car. Anyway now I can sit and respond to your letter properly. Yes it is a little strange not having _____ around all day. And I do miss him, sometimes more than others. In some way my biggest concern about public school is _____ coming under the influence of other people. I know that sounds paranoid and I'm sure _____ wouldn't entirely agree. I don't think I assume the worst about people, but for some reason I often assume people in positions of power are concerned first and foremost with maintaining their power. Even if that means quashing something as fragile as creativity or imagination or for that matter even different kinds of intelligences. Don't get me wrong _____ and I both like _______ the teacher and principal, it’s the institution of which they are a part which makes me uneasy. Public education is meant to 1] educate the middle of the road student primarily and 2] produce, originally good citizen, but more recently workers. Well, "good citizens" today means that people are meant to be strong consumers and to accept the status quo in most things. Neither of which are things I am or do and neither of which are things I want for _____. If public education is meant to be the great equalizer it is simultaneously the great leveler. On a lighter note, _____ and I are very excited about coming to Florida for Thanksgiving. It will be very nice to spend time with you and meet your mom, though I'll be honest I'm a little nervous about that, and your friends. We are also looking forward to your coming here some time soon. Just let us know when. What you said about going to the beach and thinking or not-thinking perfectly describes how I feel at the beach. It is very nice to be close with someone who enjoys their life so many people simply don't. Many of the women _____ works with do not enjoy their lives, in fact they hate their lives—in many cases I don't think they even realize it. The sad thing is that they've never considered that there is another way of living. I got an e-mail from the editor at _______press (the press doing my book) saying that she would get a contract to me soon and to start thinking of a cover. So after pouring over art books I've come up with what I want; though _____ despises it. It is a charcoal drawing by a French painter named Odilon Redon, 19th century symbolist. It's called figure in armor and is very striking. It seems to fit the spirit of the book, which is very individualistic. So we'll see. I tried to find a copy of it online to send to you but I couldn't and a copy wouldn't do it justice. ___ is such a thoughtful guy. It is very kind of him to be excited about having us come to your house. We are looking forward to seeing him too. Well I suppose I'll being seeing you soon. Take care, both of you.

necessitate one’s picking oneself out as a subject Not necessarily thought often is a default (illegible) It does set out a point of departure which is at very best minimally scatter-shot Can the text be the making of a subject Is it possible to interchange subject/context Is being a “poet” a social category No Is participating in honesty a social category RD Laing The Divided Self One tires of description Depiction: mouth Description: my mouth Over against what _____ about self roughly that it is the move from one thing to another where both points are affected and hence changed: 1. that is linear thought which valorizes the ends 2. it is thought which is dependant on causality and thus on time 3. doesn’t it ignore a moment by moment progression for the “agency” of moving from and moving to By the same token is responsibility possible in a moment by moment progression I think so given intelligent choice What about the problem with time As far as the text goes it doesn’t exist So does that remove causality Time and Myth John S. Dunne Richard Kearney The Wake of Imagination Michel deCerteau The Practice of Everyday Life One tests its limits therein lies responsibility Morning yields night 1 day 17 hours (illegible) (illegible) Imagology I have often imagined this Meditation: russet One often imaging this bound by white feathers under it blue wing Flesh pot Trove hope trove The Inoperative Community Jean-luc Nancy What about fluidity of the text In large part this contributes to its being taken/made as an artifact Does fluidity necessitate a hierarchy Can a text be fluid while being anti-grammatical Yes because it implies a grammar which is standard What about the soul/self is it fluid Can it be while also being honest No overall the soul is not fluid Does one accept a fluidity based on desire Tactics: the lizard the wood wasp Sophocles Gaping iris Extending the house their heads and blew five lifts skin to cheek lips Corrigibility dulls each slight smack salving the branch Ability to release an image Desire Once a garden just past the garage Medusa Once intense fascination with its feathers ended red in fact the body formed into a ball One fascinates with her breast citizen Prominent Your letter was not in the least pretentious. It was well considered and stated, simply put it was smart. You are older than me and have had many experiences I have not, therefore you have certain wisdom to offer. You are right in what you said about my concerns about authority and _______ school. Basically, I want you to know that I appreciate your insight and your concern. And of course there's nothing wrong with being melancholy when some truly horrible things are happening. I've been amazed at how much all of this has affected me. _____ hasn't asked too much, which leads me to believe that he hasn't heard as much as I figured he would. His school had a moment of silence that following Friday before which over the loud speaker they said to think of the people who died in the plane crashes, he told me about this, though has asked no questions. My impulse is to let things go as they are until he asks. It is such a complicated issue, I think it would be unfair at this point to bring it up to him unless he asks. I'm very glad that he didn't see any of those images, especially over and over again as a lot of kids have. We, too, are looking forward to seeing you in a couple of weeks. It will be nice to sit and talk, all of us together. That Saturday we got a few free tickets to an amusement park around here. But if it doesn't work out, then _____ can just take _____, he's never been and it’s the only day they can be used. Let me know if you think you'll want to get together that Friday or if you want to get together with just ______ (although I don't know his schedule that night) or if you guys just want to rest and start things off Saturday, whatever is fine with me. I finally got the contract from the press, so have been working on that this week. I had to finish re-typing the manuscript into Word. Also, had to answer many many questions about who I know in the Poetry world, what prizes I want them to submit the book for, who will write blurbs for the back of the book etc; all so that they will be able to market the book well. All of it feels a little weird, though exciting. I'm going to go ahead and tell ___Happy birthday now, though I'm going to send an e-mail so he'll have it before you go to Ft. Lauderdale for the week end. ___, I hope you have a wonderful Birthday. I am happy to know you and have you be part of my life. You're a good person, which is something that, at times, seems in short supply. Also, I want to thank you for how happy you make and have made ___. Happy Birthday. I'll end here so I can get it out to you in the morning. Take care.

Flesh In lieu of light she moved her arm up over their bodies hooked her hand down over their heads and blew into his hair a breath as if she’d been illuminated centering the room with her skin and not being able to see out Her skin shone and blinded her
Pre-fixing the alpha there is no time without people when it isn’t protecting The barking the dogs back of red two ‘Rt yields arêtes Success versus arêtes Democracy Anarchy Center of Power= self Communism the re-establishment of the KING’S body Parable koan yields diffusion of power Relationships Happiness/thoughtfulness Commodity/fetish Klossowski on Nietzsche Disjunction Will=cohesion “I cannot make it cohere…i.e. it coheres alright” (Pound) Only as a result of disjunction from the egotistical imperative It coheres because there are suddenly (and so often this is the way) no standards from the outside placed upon the process it is self-determining Which is nothing more than the chucking out of the I in favor of the neutrality of the event itself It seems to me that this is the difference between allegory and parable Parabolic language is self-determining and therefore perceived as aggressive It is dangerous/angry Prouder “For it is not true that the verb represents an action, it expresses an event, which is totally different.” (Deleuze) An auto-erotic “this-side” Quasi-cause stylus flycatcher You smell the same the bathwater as Warming isolating arm has Michel Tournier Friday His ball hitting blackbird’s real converting the flesh of Tuck Elemental His ball hitting the blackbird’s flesh Rolling over orifice fig abdomen Full well sun getting my 3 organs overproducer gets glistens to Rolling over orifice fig abdomen Full well sun getting overproducer Glistens at “gets” Division Aristotle versus analysis Ownership G. of Thomas “Who has made me a divider?” Aggression versus warfare Thought It is very easy—each seed from its mouth—counter-tyrant Digs Parrhesia = lit. “saying everything” Pierre Hadot Sweet William viola is it Structuring everything in the room both hair and skin into the mouth Good person Why the militarized language? _______ letter Body as the model for a sort of theo-geography Zen Head heaven thought Heart earth feeling Orifices of expulsion and pleasure hell Body as a whole as way to thought Of nothing Unlearning Zen (Cage, Johns, Duchamp) The body is a product of chance Corporalizing Adriadne Corporalizing of middle thigh I feel Apples A very sturdy sun Squeezed over each muscles hard Misunderstanding the laurel as two persons “The contradiction is not between the ‘true’ and the ‘false’ but between ‘abbreviations of signs’ and the ‘signs’ themselves.” (Nietzsche) De nobis fibula narrator Their story is our story It is very easy the branch That in Helen the pear wood by dictum Could/cloud (illegible)/Fabulation What is the role of the body in a nomadically (de-centered) distribution Must the body be a center Does the mind’s usurping of the body remove it from being a center What is the body Soul as the between of bodies In solitude does the extension itself become the other bodies Character versus biology This is mind over the body again The establishment of self Tree capable of exploding cardinal out from the conflation to mouth The 3 fingers The drawing the names for Q A and the pictures Pasture Stairs from mulberries Confabulation the stair from the mulberries are Nor thought nor Reason nor conscience nor will nor soul nor truth Yes goes to saying a stair On Yes goes to saying a “stair” “skink” Toward saying neither mind nor reason nor thought nor consciousness nor soul nor will nor truth Onto his/her hand Clear cease up along forearm/Hektor/inked eaten rose Atropos Yes, we had an extremely enjoyable time at your house. I thought it was obvious that we had. Being with you, ___ and your friends felt very natural and good. Being there just reinforced a bond I felt with you very quickly after our first contact. I couldn't imagine how the week could have been better. You guys are a lot of fun and being close to you made me very comfortable and warm. You are such a good person, by that I don't mean simply pleasant (which of course you are), but you care not just about us but about everyone around you, honestly, which is something everybody should see more often.Thank you for a wonderful time and a real sense of family. When you sent the e-mail saying that a letter was on the way I decided to wait to finish this letter until I got the letter. You'll never know how much I value your ability to express how you are feeling in your letters. It makes it easier for both _____ and I to do the same. We really did have a wonderful time and feel like a family. ______________ were very kind. Honestly, I didn't know what to expect from her, not that I thought it would be bad, I simply didn't know. But she was very sweet. This time of the year is odd for me too. It is difficult shuttling between three different houses all day long, for _______ parents to _____ then back to _______ parents, it makes for an exhausting day. But aside from that, somehow I always end up feeling disappointed, not materially, but emotionally. I wish it were as easy for people to say what they mean as it is for them to give a gift. But with _____ around there is a lot of fun too. I'd been thinking today what an eventful year this has been. In large part thanks to you, honestly, this is one of those years which will rank up there with the year _____ and I were married and the year _____ was born, for which I want to thank you. What you say about ______________ keeping their independence as long as possible is, of course, right. I see what my grandmother goes through and by extension ______. But, although I understand her wanting to take care of her mother, I can't help but feel she is going to miss out on a lot because of the care my grandmother requires. I suppose it is a somewhat treacherous course. It’s hard to be around my grandmother, she forgets who you are etc. It just doesn't seem she's trying. Anyway, I admire you wanting to care for you mother. I don't know if I could. The galleys for my book came last week, so I've been checking them. Also, I've been trying to figure out how to get permission from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to use an image they own. I think I've figured that out. Also, I've been asking poets I know for endorsement for the book, which is weird, though two close friends have written some nice things. The publisher says the publication date will be March or April, we'll see. I, too, have enclosed some photos. Feel free to give some of the wallets to _____. We had _______ pictures taken at the beginning of November. I want to be honest with you, I've been trying to come up with some kind of gift for the two of you for Christmas, not because I think I have to or anything like that, I want to. But also, I want it to be something with some emotional heft to it and not just a token. I want to do this because of the great gift you've given me, by initiating all of this. I suppose this a long way of saying I've been thinking of you a lot lately and want to let you know it. Yes, any time you guys want to come would be great. Just say the word. There are no privileges which you have lost for any reason what so ever. I'm proud of the fact that you are my father and it’s not that I don't want to call you dad, right now though it’s still all a little confusing. But, I want you to know that I do think of you as my dad. Take Care. Please, let ___ know how very much we care about him. And how lucky I think we all are to have him and you in our lives. one of three fates who determine when a person was to die Walden in reference to the engines both of the railroad and of social convention fashion “He war.” (Joyce) Occupancy Out from (illegible) and down to smallest distance Exceedingly are occupancy and labor His arms are not Property his legs Arms his occupancies Anatopia/heshe hand the moving head forward/up/community in one Diogenes Laertius on Chrysippus Events yield soul Soul as the between is an event so it must comprise exteriority Do events occur within the body It seems the body is a mixture of bodies (to use the stoic terminology) So that in interiority are “states of affairs” and not events When Olson says “I’ve lived so long in my body that it must be my soul,” he doesn’t go far enough He sets the limit and the only fills it He in some ways only moves the boundaries Soul from inner to composing the body and boundaries from body to composing the world There is no immediacy and no particularity Hegemony with that book sun Benveniste On the coriander white hegemony with that book sun “The Universe is a machine for making God.” (Bergson) Emerson Meinong The paradox of neutrality, i.e. “cats eat bats…bats eat cats” (to use Carroll) Is this a description of the between The neutralization of selves (that in particular) producing sense/soul Yorn Yellow ending orange In testicles In ovaries In brain Yellow ending lily Pulling a phrase at random Neutrality paradox Suck because having them in hand Occupant “Turquoise” “My hand” “Salt woman” “Because” Homo Natura Here are these things some of which are only words Is what is use is by Breast his mouth produces/ surface into each leg from the table Shining-walled Lack R.D. Laing The Politics of Experience Heliogabalus Elagabus “Histrionism” Libidinalizing social fields a cash Paralogisms Desire yields soul/between yields anarchy Letting coherence take up as much room as necessary/possible It was really great to get your letter. I'm just now sitting down to write you back because things have been kind of busy here. Let's see. First, your resolutions sound great. That's something I've never been able to do, make resolutions. I think spending the time coming up with so concrete a way to improve oneself is great and that more people could do it.How was you're party? I meant to send an e-mail that day to wish you luck. But I forgot, and then I realized that you didn't need luck because you and ___ are natural entertainers, I'm sure it went just fine. _________ finally decided to put my grandmother in an assisted living facility about three week ago. I know it was a hard decision to make, but I think it was the best one. Though my grandmother won't let on, I think she likes it there. The staff says she cuts up with them and does a lot of walking, which she didn't do at________house. I've been up once, but plan to try to go more often. Her birthday is tomorrow, but we celebrated it this past Sunday. It was fine, though she didn't know what was going on. When I left I wished her happy birthday and she said the same to you, which she also said to _____. _______fine, working hard, but happy. As is _____, though were kind of disappointed in his class. So we decided to try to get him into a charter school for gifted children. If he qualifies, there will be a lottery for the spaces. The school is much further from our house, but is much smaller and encourages self- direction and gives the kids a chance to progress at their own speed. The total enrollment will max out at 157 and that's for grade k-8. The deadline for application is Friday, but we won't know until the end of March if he's in. Speaking of March are you guys still thinking of coming up then. I hope you are it would be great to see you again. Any time is fine; you're always more than welcome. There's been news about the book. The editor has finished the design for the cover, which she mailed to me and I should get soon (I'll send a copy when I get it). Of course it will depend on what The Met says about the image. Also, the press never received the corrections which I mailed them three weeks ago. So, we had to go through the manuscript over the phone yesterday. Now, I just need a picture of me, which _____ took last night. I have poems appearing in four different journals this year. One is based in Canada and publishes poetry from Canada, the US, UK and Ireland. I think I should get a copy in March. Also, I've been doing some painting for _______ parents this week, so that's been taking up some time. _______ Birthday party is this Saturday which _____ is excited about. Also, we're going to the Circus on Saturday, which will be fun, _______ never been. Yes, it would have been great to have had you here in the snow we had a lot of fun. I hope you both are well. Take care, I think of you often and miss you.

*****“By story I mean…real change. In an Aristotelian sense, story involves metabole, the replacement of something by something else.” (Bynum)*****I often have wanted to compose a history of a death from symptom to sentence. Above Baltimore harbor the bride and groom are separate then together then separate; I am watching them. From just over those trees the writing comes. In the tips of my fingers his vertebrae and ribs remain. I have an exaggerated sense of Time. While I was hearing of my grandfather’s death I watched a small group of grackles rise from the neighbor’s yard, fly up and over my yard. Later I wrote them as blackbirds. Near future.

area 2: The box
notebook, Durus: working books 4/01/97 thru 6/01/98notebook, Mollis: Taber’s Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary

(FIRST) DO NO HARM.Engram I feel this huge anger toward the structure of the sentence toward expectationBone of skull.The limb is not necessarily the limb the letters explode that Where are the letters Dura mater.Vertical word/horizontal thing I want the it was in each phoneme in the attention beforeVenous sinus of dura mater.the phoneme Not suffering but the distinction of all things Bring along the nets LordArachnoidal granulation.garment makes the a pre-attentive Mordecai Intermeasurables Violet the agent in
Arachnoid.stead Prophesy to the breath This too is the emptying into (illegible) Covalence Subarchnoid space.Letting Flood water Copperhead Selves To bear Mind Force Suction Sweet Blood vessels.Private Cohort Dispersive True wood Way Poke Topped Thinned EliminatedNeuroglial membrane separating the blood vessels from their pial sheath.A heft Thud Servant Coordinate Metaphor doesn’t out stretch at all No new spacePial sheaths surrounding cerebral vessels./attention but relies on memory to disable what is no longer present in fullness becauseCerebral cortex. attention has been introduced It’s a gesture toward the infinite which can never beSuperior sagittal sinus.at hand Is no metaphor but the form of the saying of I am in me “Set a watch, O Cerebrum.Jehovah, before my mouth; keep the door of my lips.” (Psalms) Stretch sensors along Corpus callosum.the spine Slave Out stretched self twin selves Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Choroid plexus of lateral ventricle.Schizophrenia “And through the hieroglyph of the breath I am able to recover an idea Choroid plexus of 3rd ventricle. of sacred theatre.” (Artaud) Force versus exaltation Thought: fullness parable Cisterna superior.Observation of thought: realized (acknowledged) separation Description of thought: Pituitary gland.superceding I allegory redemption/dogma The body owns owns Does thought annulSphenoid bone.the body Relatedness still fleshes out difference Text creates attention as it createsPons.a participant The self-emptying of I am is the self-emptying of difference AttentionMedulla oblongata.is self-emptying No salvation Judgment is both outside and fulfills the moment Only Spinal cord.
moment Winston-Salem, NC 27109 May 15 8:00 Morehead toward stadium pass Brachiocephalic trunk (innominate artery).stadium right on Cedar next left on Hill street In a true relatedness there is no Left common carotid artery.difference Saying of I am and the emptying of I am Relatedness does not stand isLeft subclavian artery.rather a plasma not between but only in only new space (attention) Difference standsArch of aorta.the letter (phoneme) does not stand Text creates attention because it is speech first and Ligamentum arteriosum.foremost Attention versus difference Proline Household Synthesized Authority of Right pulmonary arteries.word versus authority of thing If I say chair have I created reality I have a violenceLeft pulmonary arteries.with the inhalation The true saying though has no division The self is truly emptiedSuperior vena cava.into the thing which is invested and therefore able to become uncovered ConsciousnessPulmonary trunk.=time When the text presents itself as a work it only concerns itself with telling aboutRight coronary artery.Enemy of power Each text/phoneme must create attention otherwise it is a spectacle forLeft coronary artery.power The text must be porous Relatedness is the dissemination of power so it is anLeft atrium.un-power Those new poems of ______ are too worried about being immutable All Right atrium.ends I’m feeling the pressure of abandonment There is the nominal the verbal whichCircumflex branch of left coronary artery.Reciprocate Are the letters/sounds anti-nomian Of course not Yet they are not Great cardiac vein.Components are the shape of light are the articulated difference which is self-emptying Anterior descending branch of left coronary artery.Is process always ideal If it is it is only as process or in process not in or as retrospect Anterior cardiac veins.or in or as projection So present process is ideal Lucien Goldman Le Dieu Cache Inferior vena cava.Corbin “Paradise is a person. Come into this world. The soul is a magnificent Angel.Small cardiac vein.“(Olson) To (away) from shine To bring forth To point out/bring to light E ideal inRight pulmonary veins.transvaluing between the girls the tree Parent-mount his Vesuvius his cicada (so) hisLeft pulmonary veins.distance The soul is anarchical E ideal in the process valuing between the three girlsAoritic valve. tree E ideal in the process transvaluing between the girls the tree His (parent-mountVesuvius) (cicada is distance) Dear voice Dear if each Dear Sometimes wordsometimes mind sometimes mind sometimes Jesus sometimes door Mouse Is the self-emptying into between so that between is the subjected Between is soul is relationis text What’s taken away from (in time, i.e. what is re-told, even re-imagined) betweenis life It is again parable (between) versus allegory (subject yields object) I must be aware of the constructs Always aware The mystical body is the primacy of relation itPulmonary valve.Is between Yes the moon The soul is anarchy Necessaries So anarchy must include a sense of sacred space (self/trust/contract) NO Is there the difference of interiority versus exteriority in: one gives perception to the table and one gives attentionto the table The giving of attention is self-emptying In the giving of perception the selfis consumed with/ in self-filling The mystic: one is attentive of the contract Thetheologian: one is perceptive of the parties of the contract Mitral valve (left atrioventricular).So is self-emptyingpre-conscious Is it willed Or is it the difference between attention and perception again Libertas Original point versus body Can the contract not be the representativeWhitehead If out-from between is that there is making of I then what of the object/thingDoes it return to the elemental Is the entering into between (i.e. contract) with tablea possession of table a violence So table is between there is no efluxus only the I mustTricuspid valve (right atrioventricular).self-empty to (illegible) Touch is the foregrounding of table Is touch always possessiveBlue aster –udes possess cull agnus Axis on’s limb vulnerable out-from stone Jacobshutters into house Robin flight  On the one acorn tangential is weight blue personBecause I’m not dead there is delay and so time So attention is death as there is no delay in attention it is outside from time Cause Can there be attention in touch i.e. between in touch Can there be a known separation in touch The self (that is thecapacity for self-emptying) The touch/labor which is encompassing is between “TheLeft ventricle.words too, slow, slow, the subject dies before it comes to the verb, the words are stoppingtoo.” (Beckett) Between is infinity so long as between is verbal How does one come away from the other The out-from between then is a tendency toward totality onlyNot imagination but nothing So the mutual self-emptying is nothing that is betweenIs nothing It is brought/forced to a point with the extending of the words So my self-Emptying in the face of the other is the ground of god Imagination versus NothingnessBetween is the creation of one body resurrection i.e. the death which is the process intoAnterior papillary muscle.between and the birth into nothing which is between “Say: In whose hand is the dominion of everything, protecting and himself unprotected, if you have knowledge?” (Sura 23.90) Action brought against the eye On the one acorn seeing corona Seeingmelanoma areola areola triangle traversing his sternum Object versus Other 1) object in its essence is self-emptying i.e. it is given over 2) other has that potential but isrequired to choose attention and the entailing encompassment In both cases the self-emptied self enters into the between/nothing with the self-emptied other and returns holding more than the self can contain without metamorphosisRight ventricle.

Area 3: Child’s
notebook, imposture: presentnotebook, active recollection: specific past event

Much earlier; all speculation.
I. Bees A. Description 1. Tree trunk broader than me a. Apple tree b. Reaching tall c. No birds d. How far is it e. Now only Beckett, how far is it 2. Fruit rotten, touching the gravel drive a. Sour driven b. And most slide under foot c. Knees or elbows d. Buzzing e. Gravel then the cars i. Two I think f. Mouth waters g. Step from grass to fruit to gravel as from out of the sea 3. Sounds a. Below, at midsection and above b. Honey bees? Though only larger motes c. Buzzing at ear d. Tickles ear, nape e. Larger voices far off from the house f. Two cars I think i. Nicer than the tires over the gravel

B. Actions 1. Poking a. Brown nail b. Warm, moist 2. Throwing a. One b. Two c. Three d. Not well, Four e. Five, impressed upon the tree i. Circle 3. Biting a. Soft, though firm here b. Turn, bring to mouth, bite c. Upper teeth puncture, lower miss, ooze soft apple d. Do not see bees 4. Stung a. I can only feel upper lip, aflame and growing b. There is only upper lip as a limit c. Set upon by voice and held aloft d. No longer the sky but ceiling e. The bathroom f. Women’s voices arching to my ear and higher g. Hands h. The water is cool and there’s my face i. Slip i. Bottom lip split against basin j. Man’s voice, let me take care of him i. Women k. Silent and an oracle through my swollen mouth

C. Effect 1. Hesitancy to form intimate relations a. To commit to touch 2. Or lack of limits to self a. Very quickly too intimate with words i. Worlds