Authors: Ian Pindar
Emporium (5 page)
On our last day
when I kissed you so
passionately, you had every right
to bite off my tongue and spit it out.
Instead you cried. I cried two
days later, listening to a Jew
on the radio describe
how he survived Auschwitz
by the skin of his teeth.
The skin.
The teeth.
For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
G
ENESIS 3:19
Tout cela se résume finalement, pour reprendre Duchamp, à un «élevage de poussière».
J
EAN
B
AUDRILLARD
Dust over
everything. Nothing
but incomplete
exposures and
obscured views.
The ambiguity
of moving parts
never seen
in toto
and never explained.
Motionless pennants
and the heart
of a machine
beating, crystalline,
housed in an underwater
cavern, visited by
defeated characters
after dark
half-dressed and
curious, half-alive,
who die
if awoken,
before they can
touch
the beating heart that isn’t a heart
but a natural formation in the rock
and there is no machine.
A STUDY IN HYGIENE
Lo!
Loon is
Loon was
alone and never alone
being in the world.
No!
Loon has
no past
no future
being in the present.
Loon forgets
everything. Also:
Loon forgets
everything.
(Memory is
unhygienic.)
Loon has no
interior.
(This poem, too, is all
exterior.)
Loon was
Loon is
at the mercy of
encounters
events
sympathies
antipathies.
He flees
the sad
the anxious
neurotic
paranoid.
Sadness is
contagious.
A slave logic.
Loon has experienced more than once a revelation, though seldom any sense of levitation, being bound by the laws of gravitation,
occasioned
by his inclination to inebriation, to which must also be attributed his tendency to profanation and the occasional eructation, through the incautious potation of liquids created by an ancient process of fermentation and whose stimulation is generally held to be the ruination of many a fine soul whose life ends in dissipation. But far from making this a cause for lamentation, as would many who find Loon a source of extreme irritation and look upon his
irregular
ambulation as a cause for disapprobation or even condemnation or at the very least grounds for the confiscation, in accordance with the relevant legislation, of what he fondly and without hesitation calls his medication and only consolation, resulting in a
confrontation
with those who would subject him to interrogation, using insult and intimidation, with a view to his immediate transportation or deportation, or who would at the very least, adopting a sombre
and serious intonation, call for his reformation, regarding him as a blight upon the nation, we offer no explanation, other than to point out the obvious correlation between Loon’s desolation and his exaltation.
Illness narrows Loon’s
possibilities.
(Skip this part
if it tires you.)
Loon is
USELESS,
rejecting the capitalist values of production and exchange.
In death did Loon transcend
in some inscrutable way
the matter of which he was composed?
He did not.
Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour … It is not life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre.
M
AXIM
G
ORKY ON FIRST SEEING A MOVING PICTURE
Sound is superfluous in
death’s realm, in
faded prints.
Narrative lost, morbid
radiance,
shimmering
liquid tremor. They shudder
and blur, shift and
bulge as in
a funhouse mirror. Scuffed
snapshots of
reality passing,
most beautiful when
their strength is least
assured.
These shadows posturing
resemble dimly,
dimly recall
the duration of
bodies,
the ancient forms
empirical, action
reaction.
Is it still life
at 18 frames a second?
Is life only a question
of speed?
Bring the girl into the basement,
The sophomore, and cast her down
On the bloodstained and mouldy mattress.
Let the Doberman Pinschers above bark
As you tie her to the wall, and let the wind
Through the broken window
Move the hooks descending,
Then everything goes into reverse and a happy ending.
Listen to her breathing,
Missing the people she trusts, the camper van
On the beach where she spent her last night,
The rain erasing all sign of a struggle.
If she has stopped hoping it is because
Your mouth is at her ear, so close
There can be no more pretending,
Then everything goes into reverse and a happy ending.
Your third marriage collapsed like an old barn.
The crash of it silenced the saloon-bar chatter
like the cry of a newborn.
You never expected to stumble and shatter
like a fumbled glass, or drown
among strangers in a bar.
On sunny days, the curtains drawn,
Pernod on tap but no beer,
the décor emerald green and gold,
your early promise unfulfilled,
you hid away from the world,
certain you had failed.
Your looks dropped away with the years
and the people you knew.
The son you stopped talking to cried real tears
at your funeral, but not for you.
lost in living
making love
and a little money
the heart
grieving
lost
attention
inattention
forgetting
the living connection
a habit
unromantic
unforgiving
She lies awake
if only to evoke
her body
in the dark
stretching
unveiling
her shoulders
like mountains
her pulsing heart
in the dark
an illustration
in a medieval
bestiary
ridiculous, too,
married to
a death to
come.
I mature
like a rich quarter of town
with its own sense of
belonging –
not through propriety but
the passage of time –
enough days to make
a life, a clearing in
the forest.
Fields of grain
and a good life among
companions –
their grief a gathered
worship, the track of
a difficult birth –
open bones
troubled dust.
Some are carried
through a thousand
victories
others must lay down their lives
for a sigh.
Each has his goodness stolen.
My sight is
a standing flower
my sound
a rejoicing people
moderate in their convictions
and secure
in the growth
of their own minds
each restless but
awakened
and no one
taking offence.
I like simplicity with
fortifications.
I am without
a language
lost in the fog of being
alive
of being a singular
thing.
I have been
robbed.
No doubt.
The law is
a mystery but
the ultimate paradox
must be a love without
bondage.
It cannot be proved
but I discern a
sensation following
a sensation
like water in its
passing away
like waves towards
a better future
without prejudice without
collective hysterical
Humanity.
Can you conceive
of a life where
everything is
a fragment and never
develops
exhausting
itself through
the distance it must travel
simply to be
a fragment?
All founded on
nothing, like you
said. Only your words
found it.
CHAIN LETTER
: 1 William Langland,
The Vision of Piers Plowman
; 2 John Gower,
Confessio Amantis
; 3 Geoffrey Chaucer,
The Canterbury Tales
; 4 Sir Thomas Wyatt, ‘They fle from me that sometyme did me seke’; 5 Edmund Spenser,
The Faerie Queene
; 6 Sir Philip Sidney,
Astrophil and Stella
; 7 William Shakespeare,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
; 8 John Donne, ‘The Broken Heart’; 9 John Milton,
Paradise Lost;
10 Andrew Marvell, ‘An Horation Ode upon Cromwel’s Return from Ireland’; 11 John Dryden, ‘The Hind and the Panther’; 12 Jonathan Swift, ‘A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed’; 13 Alexander Pope, ‘An Epistle to Bathurst’; 14 Thomas Gray, ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard’; 15 Christopher Smart, ‘Hymn II: Circumcision’; 16 William Blake,
Milton
; 17 Robert Burns, ‘Tam o’Shanter’; 18 William Wordsworth, ‘Old Man Travelling’; 19 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Dejection. An Ode’; 20 George Gordon, Lord Byron, ‘The Vision of Judgment’; 21 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘The Sensitive-Plant’; 22 John Clare, ‘I Am’; 23 John Keats, ‘The Eve of St Agnes’; 24 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ‘Lord Walter’s Wife’; 25 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘Ulysses’; 26 Robert Browning, ‘My Last Duchess’; 27 Edward Lear, ‘The Owl and the Pussy-Cat’; 28 Walt Whitman,
Leaves of Grass
; 29 Matthew Arnold, ‘Dover Beach’; 30 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘Sudden Light’; 31 Christina Rossetti, ‘The Thread of Life’; 32 Emily Dickinson, ‘Safe in their alabaster chambers’; 33 Lewis Carroll, ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’; 34 Algernon Charles Swinburne, ‘A Leavetaking’; 35 Thomas Hardy, ‘After a Journey’; 36 Gerald Manley Hopkins, ‘I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day’; 37 Oscar Wilde,
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
; 38 A.E. Housman, ‘The laws of God, the laws of man’; 39 Rudyard Kipling, ‘Mandalay’; 40 W. B. Yeats, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’; 41 Gertrude Stein,
Stanzas in Meditation
; 42 Wallace Stevens ‘Credences of Summer’; 43 James Joyce, ‘The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly’; 44 William Carlos Williams,
Paterson
III; 45 Ezra Pound, Canto XXXIX; 46 D. H. Lawrence, ‘The Mosquito’; 47 Siegfried Sassoon, ‘Everyone Sang’; 48 Marianne Moore, ‘The Mind is an Enchanting Thing’; 49 Rupert Brooke, ‘The Soldier’; 50 T. S. Eliot, ‘Lines to a Persian Cat’; 51 Wilfred Owen, ‘Strange Meeting’; 52 e. e. cummings, ‘Humanity i love you’; 53 Charles Reznikoff,
Jerusalem the Golden
(55); 54 Hart Crane, ‘Powhatan’s Daughter: The River’; 55 Laura Riding ‘A City Seems’; 56 Langston Hughes, ‘Cross’; 57 Stevie Smith, ‘The Jungle Husband’; 58 Lorine Neidecker, ‘Thomas Jefferson’; 59 Louis Zukofsky,
29 Poems
(‘18’); 60 Kenneth Rexroth, ‘Un Bel di Vedremo’; 61 Samuel Beckett, ‘Ooftish’; 62 John Betjeman, ‘In Westminster Abbey’; 63 W. H. Auden ‘Taller to-day, we remember similar evenings’; 64 George Oppen, ‘Party on Shipboard’; 65
Charles Olson, ‘The Kingfishers’; 66 Elizabeth Bishop, ‘The Fish’; 67 John Cage ‘’25 Mesostics Re and Not Re Mark Tobey’; 68 R. S. Thomas, ‘On the Farm’; 69 Dylan Thomas, ‘Among Those Killed in the Dawn Raid was a Man Aged a Hundred’; 70 John Berryman,
Dream Songs
(47); 71 Robert Lowell, ‘Skunk Hour’; 72 Lawrence Ferlinghetti, ‘Autobiography’; 73 Robert Duncan, ‘A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar’; 74 Barbara Guest, ‘Twilight Polka Dots’; 75 Philip Larkin, ‘Church Going’; 76 Jackson Mac Low, ‘Trope Market’; 77 Philip Whalen, ‘Sourdough Mountain Lookout’; 78 James Schuyler, ‘The Crystal Lithium’; 79 Denise Levertov, ‘Stepping Westward’; 80 Kenneth Koch, ‘With Janice’; 81 Jack Spicer, ‘Phonemics’; 82 Allen Ginsberg, ‘This Form of Life Needs Sex’; 83 Frank O’Hara, ‘The Day Lady Died’; 84 Paul Blackburn, ‘The Onceover’; 85 Robert Creeley, ‘The Door’; 86 John Ashbery, ‘A Wave’; 87 Ed Dorn,
Gunslinger
II; 88 Thom Gunn, ‘In Santa Maria del Popolo’; 89 Gregory Corso, ‘Marriage’; 90 Gary Snyder,
Myths & Texts: Burning
; 91 Ted Hughes, ‘A Childish Prank’; 92 Geoffrey Hill, ‘An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England’ (‘The Laurel Axe’); 93 Sylvia Plath, ‘Nick and the Candlestick’; 94 Diane di Prima, ‘On Sitting Down to Write, I Decide Instead to Go to Fred Herko’s Concert’; 95 Ted Berrigan, ‘I Remember’; 96 Amiri Baraka,
AM/TRAK
; 97 Susan Howe, ‘Speeches at the Barrier’; 98 Clark Coolidge, ‘On Induction of the Hand’; 99 Seamus Heaney, ‘Station Island’; 100 Lyn Hejinian,
My Life
; 101 Ron Padgett, ‘Big Bluejay Composition’; 102 James Tate, ‘Nausea,
Coincidence
’; 103 Alice Notley, ‘Beginning with a Stain’; 104 Anne Waldman, ‘skin Meat BONES (chant)’; 105 Bernadette Mayer, ‘First turn to me … ’; 106 Ron Silliman,
Paradise
; 107 David Shapiro, ‘Dido to Aeneas’; 108 August Kleinzahler, ‘A Case in Point’; 109 Charles Bernstein, ‘The Klupzy Girl’; 110 Paul Muldoon, ‘The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants’; 111 Maxine Chernoff, ‘Breasts’.
CᾹRVᾹKA/LOKᾹYATA
: Lokayata was a materialistic system of Hindu philosophy that flourished around the first century CE. Its founder is said to have been Carvaka, whose dates are unknown. The writings of this school are no longer extant and all we know of it comes from the criticisms of its detractors. Cf.
Cārvāka/Lokāyata: An Anthology of Source Materials and Some Recent Studies
, ed. Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya (New Delhi: Indian Council of Philosophical Research, 1994).
BIG BUMPERTON ON THE SABBATH
: The Outsider artist Johann Knopf was a locksmith who went insane and was diagnosed ‘paranoid form of dementia praecox’ (schizophrenia). One of his drawings is entitled
Big Bumperton on the Sabbath
. Knopf’s illness emerged after the death of his mother, with whom he had lived, then a subsequent unhappy marriage. He suffered
from religious delusions in which he believed he was a Christian martyr and could understand the language of birds, which he considered tragic creatures.
IT TAKES A MAN
:
The great Emathian conqueror
…
Pindarus
: Cf. Milton’s Sonnet VIII: ‘When the assault was intended to the City’. Alexander’s army sacked Thebes in 335 BCE, but he spared Pindar’s house and showed mercy towards the late poet’s descendents.
Rodez
: In 1937 the French poet and actor Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) was arrested in Dublin, repatriated and interned for nine years in a succession of psychiatric hospitals, including the asylum at Rodez in southern France. Here he created in his imagination the ‘daughters of the heart to be born’: feisty warrior-women bodyguards, based on ex-lovers (and two beloved grandmothers), who would protect him from the black magic of psychiatry.