being present

first snow fall

this is a wallace steven's kind of day....

music score: The Emperor of Ice Cream by roger reynolds



image/installation: The Emperor of Ice Cream by Varujan Boghosian


The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

--Wallace Stevens


I love Helen Vendler’s expository (and poetic) interpretation of Wallace’s poem:


For purposes of experiment, I have put the details the poem gives us into the form of a first-person narrative; I see the poem as a rewritten form of this ur-narrative, in which the narrative has been changed into an impersonal form, and the linear temporal structure of narrative form has been replaced by a strict geometric spatial construction – two rooms juxtaposed. Here (with apologies) is my conjectural narrative ur-form of the poem, constructed purely as an explanatory device:

I went, as a neighbor, to a house to help lay out the corpse of an old woman who had died alone; I was helping to prepare for the home wake. I entered, familiarly, not by the front door but by the kitchen door. I was shocked and repelled as I went into the kitchen by the disorderly festival going on inside: a big muscular neighbor who worked at the cigar-factory had been called in to crank the ice-cream machine, various neighbors had sent over their scullery-girls to help out and their yard-boys bearing newspaper-wrapped flowers from their yards to decorate the house and the bier: the scullery-girls were taking advantage of the occasion to dawdle around the kitchen and flirt with the yard-boys, and they were all waiting around to have a taste of the ice cream when it was finished. It all seemed to me crude and boisterous and squalid and unfeeling in the house of the dead – all that appetite, all that concupiscence.

Then I left the sexuality and gluttony of the kitchen, and went in to the death in the bedroom. The corpse of the old woman was lying exposed on the bed. My first impulse was to find a sheet to cover the corpse; I went to the cheap old pine dresser, but it was hard to get the sheet out of it because each of the three drawers was lacking a drawer-pull; she must have been too infirm to get to the store to get new glass knobs. But I got a sheet out, noticing that she had hand-embroidered a fantail border on it; she wanted to make it beautiful, even though she was so poor that she made her own sheets, and cut them as minimally as she could so as to get as many as possible out of a length of cloth. She cut them so short, in fact, that when I pulled the sheet up far enough to cover her face, it was too short to cover her feet. It was almost worse to have to look at her old calloused feet than to look at her face; somehow her feet were more dead, more mute, than her face had been

She is dead, and the fact cannot be hidden by any sheet. What remains after death, in the cold light of reality, is life – all of that life, with its coarse muscularity and crude hunger and greedy concupiscence, that is going on in the kitchen. The only god of this world is the cold god of persistent life and appetite; and I must look steadily at this repellent but true tableau – the animal life in the kitchen, the corpse in the back bedroom. Life offers no other tableaus of reality, once we pierce beneath appearances.

From The Columbia History of American Poetry. Ed. Jay Parini and Brett C. Miller. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. Copyright © 1993 by Columbia UP.

somewhere in my imagination i hear a greek chorus singing about sleep, numbness, what counts and what doesn't...but, most importantly, who gets to decide.

the language of fall

fall has its own language

much like memory

its colors are vibrant and yet muted

creating words and sentences that are so

fragile that the slightest breeze disturbs

their grammar

mixing and rematching words into new phrases

that are gentle and webbed

fragile yet eternal

beautifully stark and enormously full

turning so quickly to dust and creating in this charcoal coloured death

a recitative

becoming what will soon be a barren vastness

to be inscribed upon by the voice of winter in

a well metered aria filled with sharp phrases and powdered notes

that complete the frame by which fall is known and knows itself to be:

essentially the nonessential phrase lodged between two commas in the

mouth of

eternity

awesome picture 4 monday

joan didion + toni morrison = 2 incredible 4 words

ability and place

the body is inscribed upon by a language of ability
that in a room confined through language the body that refuses or
cannot be inscribed with this language must be contained
how do we change the language to reflect inclusive places
how do we narrate ability in different ways
the architecture that we engage with on a daily basis
is simply a language of ability
a narrative that helps to inscribe bodies
reminding particular subjectivities of their "normal-ness"
or "other-ness"
to change this language we need to change the architecture
not just materially but also rhetorically
and not simply by laws either
this change needs to occur on the level of metaphor and poetics
we need to stop thinking and conceptualizing a certain type of
normativity as an involuntary reflex

dear monday

love,
me

sunday memory: music

my new approach

Just because you are blind, and unable to see my beauty doesn't mean it does not exist.

--Margaret Cho

mantra from james wright

suddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossom

poem and image for the week...probably a re-post but i don't care

Not Waving but Drowning
by Stevie Smith


Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.





From Collected Poems of Stevie Smith by Stevie Smith, published by New Directions Publishing Corp. Copyright © 1972 by Stevie Smith.

driving towards death

i have never been more acutely aware of freud’s concept of the death drive as i am now. with the dissertation writing and the job search questing….i am now beginning to see that the various exercises and tasks that i must perform as neither ultimately getting a large document written to completion nor is securing a job for the future. rather all of this “activity” is nothing more that the accumulation of highly stylized rhetorical acts in order to stop the flow of life. when i write “stop the flow of life” i am not meaning it in a suicidal way (although it can and does mean just that). I am really looking at this in a very metaphorical way. the flow of life that articulates its movement onto and through moments of stress is what i am trying to address here. life is flowing around me like a fast moving river. it is pushing me to goddess knows where…perhaps over a cliff or maybe to a lagoon. but my overall desire is to get the flowing to stop…to quiet down…to become inert and static. i want to be able to find a consistent rhythm like a gently pounding heartbeat that harmonizes itself with calm, graceful breathing. writing a dissertation and finding a job will not accomplish this. in fact, both just lead to more “unfinished” business….more frantic flowing down a river. sometimes i wonder that if i swim with the current i will find the peace and inertia that i need oscillating between within the almost imperceptible interstices of this rapid flow of water.

rooms

painting by nick patten (nickpatten.com)

Sometimes I have the feeling that we're in one room with two opposite doors and each of us holds the handle of one door, one of us flicks an eyelash and the other is already behind his door, and now the first one has but to utter a word and immediately the second one has closed his door behind him and can no longer be seen. He's sure to open the door again, for it's a room which perhaps one cannot leave. If only the first one were not precisely like the second, if he were calm, if he would only pretend not to look at the other, if he would slowly set the room in order as though it was a room like any other; but instead he does exactly the same as the other at his door, sometimes even both are behind the doors and the beautiful room is empty.

--Franz Kafka
in a letter to Milena Jesenska

the unbearable lightness of daydreaming in houses

...the house shelters daydreaming, the house proetects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace. Thought and experience are not the only things that sanction human values. The values that belong to daydreaming mark humanity in its depths. Daydreaming even has a privilege of autovalorization. It derives direct pleasure from its own being. Therefore, the places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as daydreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time.

--Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, page 6

that daydreams can be embodied...that they can wrap around you like a familiar home and that this home is always with you....that's what i like about this passage.

pictures by paul politis at www.paulpolitis.com

FYI

seriously

poem for the week

One Art


The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three beloved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

-- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop

st augustine

i have been reading the works of st augustine for quite a while now
and there is no doubt in my mind
that his work on sign theory
is foundational to poststructuralism in general and
deconstruction in particular

but what strikes me as particularly interesting
is his theology as well
augustine is what we would call a founding "father" of
the church...not just the catholic church although in
the fourth century catholic was the only option
but his influence can be seen
woven into the protestant reformation as well

he influenced everyone from martin luther to john calvin
and their successors
baptism as a requirement for full inclusion into
christianity was established by him
as well as his involvement with the development
of the nicene creed and other germinal
church documents

he also refined the practice of hermeneutics
a practice that not only is used in theology
but also in secular contexts as well
from literary theory and cultural study
to feminist critique and queer epistemology

i, myself, have had a rocky relationship with
christianity
i have very little patience for literal interpretations
or heaven/hell, all/nothing binary thinking

but i do believe in a creator
i do believe that there is something
outside of our perceptions
maybe an energy
maybe a communal soul
maybe it's love
that draws us like magnets from this
plain of existence to another
and i certainly accept that
there is more than one "way" to conceptualize this
energy which is to say that
anyone who says christianity is the ONLY
way is, in my opinion, wrong
not only wrong but extremely short sighted

i have been watching and reading the debates
within the episcopal church in particular and the anglican
communion as a whole with some interest
not only because i am episcopal but i am
also queer

the issue at hand deals with ordinating
gay and lesbian bodies as bishops, priests, and deacons
homosexuality (a 19th century term) is being
debated using a text that is (at the youngest) over 2,000 years old
i have little patience for this
and quite frankly i have never seen such
unchristian behavior
or arguments against homosexuality
as i have witnessed in these debates
especially at the lambeth conference of bishops
in england that took place this past july

at first they invited an openly gay episcopal bishop,
+gene robinson, to participate in the conversation/debate
then they uninvited him because conservative bishops
threatened not to come
the irony of it all is that during the closed service
these bishops sang an hymn entitled "all are welcome to the table"
really?
the stupidity and obvious hypocrisy of it all astounds me

aside from the social construction of sexuality
and the misinterpretation that occurs when conservative
male bishops like jack iker who (i am embarrassed to admit)
was my priest and assisted in my confirmation almost twenty years ago
takes such unchristian stances while at the same time
claiming the love of a creator

i go back to st augustine at this point
as problematic as his fourth century views are
he at least recognized
that interpretation was, at best, faulty
that we could never, ever truly know the mind of
the creator because this creator is outside of language and therefore
incomprehensible
the best we can do is work with the language that we have
to approximate distance between ourselves and the spiritual

in his book _on christian doctrine_ and in _the city of god_
he discusses the role of scriptural interpretation at length
whether it involves complex work with dense passages
or straightforward texts where interpretation is fairly evident
there are two rules (and only two rules) that we
should pay attention to...two rules "uttered" by
jesus christ ("son" of "god" or a "prophet" or something else...you choose)

1) love god with all your heart, soul, and mind

2) love your neighbor(s) as yourself

according to augustine THESE are the two rules worth
paying close attention to
other interpretations whether simple or highly complex and abstract
are ancillary
and, in some cases, useless if in the end the love of the creator and
your neighbor are detoured

now my question to the anglican communion at large
and the episcopal church in particular is this
where is the love?

images, song, and lyrics

wise up
aimee mann

It’s not what you thought
When you first began it
You got what you want
Now you can hardly stand it though
By now you know it's not
Going to stop
It’s not going to stop
It’s not going to stop
‘Til you wise up

You’re sure there’s a cure
And you have finally found it
You think one drink
Will shrink you ‘til
You’re underground and living down
But it’s not going to stop
It’s not going to stop
It’s not going to stop
‘Til you wise up

Prepare a list of what you need
Before you sign away the deed
'Cause it's not going to stop
It’s not going to stop
It’s not going to stop
‘Til you wise up

No it’s not going to stop
‘Til you wise up
No it’s not going to stop

So just give up

poem and image

“We Don't Know How To Say Goodbye”
Anna Akhmatova

We don't know how to say goodbye,
We wander on, shoulder to shoulder
Already the sun is going down
You're moody, and I am your shadow.
Let's step inside a church, hear prayers, masses for the dead
Why are we so different from the rest?
Outside in the graveyard we sit on a frozen branch.

That stick in your hand is tracing
Mansions in the snow in which we will always be together.

FYI