Blackbird 14a

We walk by Cayuga Lake.
Vogdesa sees a grackle.
It appears before her, on this much she and I will agree, but for her it becomes a referent on a four-dimensional axis of time and memory, heartbreakingly in search of denotation, which becomes one of the forms of a moving x-ray striking a chord on a Bechstein. The pall of ardor diffuses planes of surface and sounds, seeking place in the spectrum, and longing for a sense of belonging, either simplified or swollen like a river, and altogether separated from the world’s murders or joined with its dignified and reposeful angelism. The bird plays upon the homonyms, her imposition of a patterned weaving, a harmony-chiming paraphrase of her reading. Bergson comes to mind. Spinoza comes to mind. Dymaxion fluxion. The thing we all used to locate between being and consciousness trembles and wobbles and contravenes the gyroscope (dictionary), then seiches from object to subject and commutes once more, the transubstantiating mersion. A vulgate spake d’antan the tonguewords of more fluid playwrights, those inventing metaphor and by their rhymes rebuffing the deist’s black moll. It is Chaucer’s grackle! and consequently one sunbeam’s momentary flash of illusory fix (Gottschalks hath it so). Vogdesa is unable to lie for freedom. Before the round is done, another round begins: a noble, esoteric, sublime and calculated indifference to botany, zoology, migrations, deeding, conference, faith, (suborning of course), and hegemony. E’en Ithaca’s hilltop copses vanish! Apprehension of the grackle so:

Moddel fikt de bottel crackle
Frins die ocher shacken nackle
Briss auf fridog thor unt frackal
Poppel pindt die uben grackel.

Of meanings’ planes which vie and parry, feint, shudder, and vibrate, rays and waves appear and emit undifferentiated hues and (aural) tones, a minor synaesthetic pression, the suggestive surfaces fade and inflect themselves; they grid like moving x-ray plates, each twinkle a shimmering of recollections, deliquescence, and variance. The overlord is untempered, yet still a cyclone breaks upon the shore, possibilities of consequence in tidal waves. Birds are intricate.
Yet at some point the humming hums evolve into a tale, a tale that is peopled with happy gnomes and merry elves and blind giants and buzzy gnats, which romanced prose presses into the clay of remorse, which shares its home with glee and light. And for a while it vaunts its dominion, and may even invent some cheery dance steps, unencumbered by historical perspective, dances danced in gracious gardens, say. Amalgamated aggregated inquiries and woes arch the stones of Beckett and Ruskin, benighted Crusoe’s Sisyphean beating back against the ravaging storms on an island off the coast of Chile, say. Such of her foraging yields barely sufficient scraps of fruit and weed, forming from the grackle’s gift outright of wondrous keys and contradictions, the quantum sums reciprocal and mounting, the synoptic grains, the Sargassoed sea of nutrients and sharp prickly kelps, a lofting jellyfish grand and bright, the matrix of points, the topic sentence glimpsed and blent, the maelstrom of epigraphs, a hailstorm of puffs, a fashion of adumbrated grammar peeked, a rhetoric of memory, a smoke ring foehned away and into parts,

yet remains the syntax of the holding heart,
the necessary angel,
and the lucid dream of creativity:
a poem, say, or rhapsody adreamed.

Art tiles

It has often been pointed out that V. Nabokov killed and impaled the most beautiful things in his life - tender butterflies tenaciously stalked and smothered all over the wide wide world. La Vogdesa and I make our living by locating beautiful images and transforming them through media and by fire to ceramic tile and botticino stone. At the last moment the pieces are reassigned by a wee act of commerce, and are then bound for backsplashes, murals, tabletops, lacquerbox inlays, framed wall art, poem-folio, and finger-and-hand-tangible bridges to Rembrandt, Tamara de Lempicka, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Dan Bacich, and several dozen artists who are insufficiently published.
Readers may wish to wing their hearts to our anticamera.

Stolen kisses.

My Dinner with Chowder

bakst

The noble and wonderful Chowder wonders why I am reading JADIS. A re-read, actually, though it is one of those books one is never quite not reading, so persuasive and so new are the visions. I am reading several novels just now that obey my primary rule of art, that the novel sits before one as a novel, and does not show itself trying to become a novel. (I do not know where this leaves Proust.) In another such work, Robert Briffault's NEW LIFE OF MR. MARTIN, one finds the epigraph by Arthur Symons: "We have no longer the mental attitude of those to whom a story was but a story." Lucidity, force, ease. Briffault's Martin lives among the Moors, another culture one can speculate as displaying the first twinkle of satire. I'll keep looking.

Ken Chowder JADIS

Edvard Munch

In his novel JADIS, Ken Chowder does exactly what I imagine all novelists and moviemakers should do: cease the progression of story and plot at about the halfway mark of the work, and let the rest of the novel or movie, having provided you with enough mooring, lay before you an author's explication of character and sentiment, which is the only location in which aesthetic sense resides. That Jadis lights Egg's way to Tory in the very last few paragraphs of the book only happens to postscript Chowder's having already suffused you with integral, rhyming counterpanes of evolution and what is often called soul. The only true rockmark is imaginary. The browner skins are shortcuts. Annie dispenses with children on page 25, else we would be children.

Carol tours the world

My friend Carol and I debate whether or not we have ever met. In the mid 1970s she came to Ithaca to visit Our Kate, and one of us believes we had a brief greeting, and the other believes that I was Tom. Whenever Carol visits Florence, she always stays at the Hotel Davanzati. Lately she has traveled to Stockholm, Budapest, Singapore, Marrakech, and Rio. In these cities she always looks for a hotel named Davanzati, or a hotel that combines as many of the letters of Davanzati as possible. This reminds me of the 1916 Ronald Firbank novel INCLINATIONS, in which Miss Dawkins strives to locate her lost father in all the capital cities of the world alphabetically.

Erie Canal

Hailed raised-glass greetings to my friends in Spain, France, England, the Netherlands, and Belgium: It is still possible, in 2009, to cruise the 1825 Erie Canal for hours, in a slow, ancient canal boat refitted for cabin comfort, between locks, between towns, between villages, and out of sight of cottages and camps: long spells of boat-on-water. Tie the stern to a bush and the bow to a branch: this gin and these sandwiches, atop the deck reading clouds, with reveries of missed opportunities and adornments unswept. Let us say one is reading The Compleat Angler, or Praeterita, or the darker and brooding sonnets. Let us say it us not altogether such a dismissible hoot to speak of the objective correlative, and let that be the sun stepping behind the afternoon clouds. This sleeping is intimate. These dreams portend and these dreams are dopamine.

Ιθάκη

Unfortunately, one of the cheesiest poems in the public domain, Ithaca by C.P. Cavafy manages somehow in its mangling of rather a nice sentiment, to foist upon the author a rhyme of considerable merit, though of some concerning grief. First, one must despise being lectured and patronized, but if I am going to encounter eighteen episodes of drama after departing the homeland, as surely I must, I can only send peals to the sunbeams above that they might settle upon me melodies immeasurably more beautiful than the honk-honk that C.P. somehow once thought fit to publish. The horror:

As you set out on the way to Ithaca
hope that the road is a long one,
filled with adventures, filled with understanding.
The Laestrygonians and the Cyclopes,
Poseidon in his anger: do not fear them,
you’ll never come across them on your way
as long as your mind stays aloft, and a choice
emotion touches your spirit and your body.
The Laestrygonians and the Cyclopes,
savage Poseidon; you’ll not encounter them
unless you carry them within your soul,
unless your soul sets them up before you.

Hope that the road is a long one.
Many may the summer mornings be
when—with what pleasure, with what joy—
you first put in to harbors new to your eyes;
may you stop at Phoenician trading posts
and there acquire fine goods:
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and heady perfumes of every kind:
as many heady perfumes as you can.
To many Egyptian cities may you go
so you may learn, and go on learning, from their sages.

Always keep Ithaca in your mind;
to reach her is your destiny.
But do not rush your journey in the least.
Better that it last for many years;
that you drop anchor at the island an old man,
rich with all you’ve gotten on the way,
not expecting Ithaca to make you rich.

Ithaca gave to you the beautiful journey;
without her you’d not have set upon the road.
But she has nothing left to give you any more.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca did not deceive you.
As wise as you’ll have become, with so much experience
you’ll have understood, by then, what these Ithacas mean.

Paris-Brest-Paris 1975

Interview with Jim Konski, 1989, Syracuse NY

PM: Do you remember your first century?
JK: The earliest century I can remember doing was about 1934, I would have been seventeen at the time. I was riding in New York City in the late 1930s. I quite often went over a hundred miles in those days. On my fixed wheel, of course. I usually rode out into the nearby country, out past Rye, NY, past Queens, into Long Island, or I’d go across the George Washington Bridge or out the Jersey coast. The month before I went into the Marine Corps, in late 1939, I took a bike trip up through New England, staying in hostels at night; we through Sherbrooke, Canada, into Montreal, and back down the Hudson. I did about 1200 miles, a hundred miles per day. One day, as I remember, I did about 160 miles, in Canada. Most hostels had cooking facilities; I would go to the corner store and provide for my dinner and breakfast. Then for lunch, I’d buy cake and milk.
PM: Did you do any racing back then?
JK: Yes, I belonged to the Columbus Cycling Club, an Italian club on the New York west side. I couldn’t afford good equipment, but I held my own on runs, but nothing of great form. The fellows I used to ride with were more experienced European riders. I remember we’d make a trip into Jersey on weekends, and rode wheel to wheel with great discipline. It was very precise team riding. You held your place in the line of riders. You were told when to go to the front, when to fall back.
PM: Were you always more interested in long distance racing?
JK: I did road racing and even a little sprinting on the track. The long distance came on even more as I got a little older.
PM: Your first Paris-Brest-Paris was in 1975.
JK: I did pretty well. I made one mistake, I took wheels with twenty-eight spokes, and with the cobblestones and the rough roads, it was a big mistake. The rim began to buckle, and I was always stopping to straighten it. Just outside Paris I stopped in a little café to fix my wheel again. I was so tired I decided to take a short nap on the floor and I told the bartender to wake me in an hour. And he didn’t wake me. When I woke, it was much later, so I got into the Paris finish line a little late. But in the Great Book of the race it says: “The brave Konski rode 400km on a buckled wheel” so they gave me the medal.

Ithaca: the last Rhiner

Ithaca’s Rhine is difficult to define, but easy to feel in one’s memory. Chronological and geographical distinctions are easily disproved, but the sentiment and effects of the Rhine can be confused with no other element of Ithaca’s societies or culture
My father (1917-1993) and I (1947-soon) are both life-long residents of West Hill; the odd numbered houses of Elm Street near Chestnut Street perch above Floral Ave, and the boatyards in which we spent many years of our lives are adjacent to the swamplands that, before Flood Control, formed some of the dark and doubtful haunts of the Rhiners. In the 1920s and 1930s my father and the bolder of his many brothers would hop down the bank to the wetlands below, to socialize (that is to say, play) with the young Rhiners down there, not excluding the ‘coloreds’ and the doomed transient hobo kids strung along by a feckless parent. Fishing and fistfights, mostly; but either activity would be followed by some congenial hanging about, until the West Hill kids would scamper up to homes and chores and dinner, and the Rhiners would disappear into the hovels and camps, and vanish from consciousness. “They never came up to play with us,” said my father, “Dad would have skinned us alive.”

Nate was a Rhiner who had settled in, one might generously call it. He had an awfuland tattered shack a few yards north of the Buffalo Street bridge, and, uncommonly, a boat, that sometimes ran, and always listed for the sloshing bilges. He was grizzled and unkempt, toothless and greasy, and made rather an impression on me in the 1950s. My father would always hail him, thought they doubtless never met. His boat must have formerly been rather a dashing craft – sleek, many years before – but it had degenerated into a heap, with flecking paint, loose decking, gashes, wounds, and much creek scumdirt. Reconstruction in the 1960s erased any trace of Nate’s life in Ithaca.

Throughout the Rhine era, notions of its crime and poverty were often exaggerated into a dangerous kind of unwholesomeness and depravity. A sort of social eugenics seemed to supply enough of a gulf between its people and ours, on West Hill or Fall Creek or South Hill, but democratic Education began to integrate persons who otherwise had no occasion to mingle. I became aware of Joe Simon in 1960, at Boynton Junior High School on Buffalo Street. He was a Rhiner in all ways. I believe he lived on Cherry Street, in execrable conditions, and his share of life was a desecration. He wore the same clothes every day; and I never knew him to own a winter coat. He was undernourished, small and weak. Despite these afflictions, Joe had classroom friends, and was included in the joshing and jokes, though he too probably never was invited home. One day after school I saw him on the street; he’d secured a one-serving bag of potato chips, and just as he opened it a Creeker came along and needled him into sharing his chips. It is possible to imagine that those chips were the most nutritious meal he was going to have all day. As he palmed the open bag to the other boy, several more Creekers came by, each dipping their hand in for a chip. Joe could only smile, and let all the chips go, with a sort of bemused exasperation that might have suggested he’d rather have the amiable attention of those boys than the chips.

Later that winter Joe and his cousin were walking on the railing of the State Street bridge near today’s Jungle, which is rather an innocuous area for transients compared to the much severer privation from which it is sometimes said to derive. The other boy slipped and fell into the ice and creek below. I don’t imagine either of them could swim anyway, and certainly not floundering in icy water. Joe, of course, immediately dived in to try to help his cousin. Death by drowning.

Those of us whose parents were reasonably proficient at moving things around according to the little marks on special paper, or those of us who might even have flourished at moving things around according to the little marks on special paper, will have Ithaca fixed in our memory as a benign and healthy place in which to have matured with other persons who grew up in Ithaca, but it is unlikely that our lives lived out in the second half of the Twentieth Century and curling into the Twenty First Century will have ever demanded taking the measure of that within us which might have been forced to go into the cold water heedless. I have afforded myself the privilege of calling this courage, and if I cannot see it in myself or in others, I can see in other people when it is not present. Lives lived “safely” stink.

Helpfully: two

Gaudier-Brzeska

The often stupefying oceanic hum that is caused by too much beauty, or too many martinis, or too many wise books, or too much desire can be abated, I have found, by remembering a definition of Buckminster Fuller:

The universe is the aggregate of non-simultaneous,
only partially overlapping,
transformational events.

Palliation!

Our intentional theatre

In the way one can only really enjoy an apple from the cart by stealing it - not by degrading the acquisition with a buck, I would evidence my wonder by citing (emphasis added) without permission, a review of EXIT THE KING by Hilton Als from the New Yorker, the review so close to perfection that I feel I have been waiting years and years for his expression:

“Exit the King” takes place, first and foremost, in a kind of jumpy, excited intellectual space—the theatre of its author’s imagination. Written by the Romanian-French playwright Eugène Ionesco (1909-94) in 1962, the piece emerges from its author’s belief in what he called “imaginative truth” in theatre; that is, a disavowal of “everyday reality.” Whereas Samuel Beckett, another chief proponent of the theatre of the absurd, tried to describe meaninglessness, Ionesco aimed to deflate power for power’s sake, to expose men’s intellectual and emotional greed.

Brilliantly directed by Neil Armfield, “Exit the King” introduces us to the major players as they stride across the stage, waving at the audience, as if greeting the paparazzi. After fulfilling their public duty to be adored, they retreat into their home, where we catch glimpses of the characters beneath their calcified public masks. There is no pretense to naturalism. Armfield wants us to know, straight off, that the play that Ionesco wrote—lovingly and well translated for this production by Armfield and Rush—is as much about performance as anything else. Ionesco once said that plays were not literature; he meant his to be, in a sense, springboards for the actors’ imaginations. The actors here, kicking aside their too long trains on a tapestry-strung stage (the thoughtful set and costumes, by Dale Ferguson, use dark hues and deep reds that bring to mind Julian Schnabel’s paintings), inhabit the space as though they were simultaneously inside and outside it. They love Ionesco’s language, but they know that the Master didn’t want constrictive realistic readings of it. So they perform little pirouettes around his concrete poetry. Rush and Ambrose are especially astonishing at this. While Ionesco’s plays have a tendency to overdescribe the action as it’s happening, Ambrose and Rush convey the absurdity of talking this way, in such hyper-theatricalized speech. They’re interested in exposing the rigor behind the presentation, and in deflating the ridiculous notion that we ever present a true self to the world. Still, they make the audience comfortable with this entirely unexpected Broadway fare.
Part of the pleasure of watching the show is marvelling that it made it to Broadway at all. But placing this delicate world of ideas alongside the musicals and canned dramas of the boulevard is exactly the kind of thing that Ionesco loved to do: upset our traditional notions of theatre and remind us of the difficult and joyful process of suspending disbelief. The joke for Ionesco, Armfield, and the actors is that they know their world is artificial. What’s real is their attempt to convince us otherwise."

Heavenheadedness

Paris-Brest-Paris 1948

I thought of Daisy. Years ago, in the golden, providential era of the present tense, when marijuana and LSD, for me, were steeped in a dazzle of socialization, in a leafy green village upstate, and peyote and mescaline, for me, were steeped in a dreamy introspection and differentiating perspective, out on the plains, it was only the latter that could be taken seriously and for which I have a nostalgic affection. Never fulfilling enough to become a habit, later on, in 1987, I found a more useful expedient. Paris-Brest-Paris is a 750 mile bicycle randonnee (Audax Club Parisien), formerly a professional race. Riders of modest ability or weak hearts ride straight through, from Monday 4AM to Thursday 11PM without sleep, to finish within the ninety hour limit. To sleep deprivation is attributed a hundred manners of psychological distortion, and scientific studies have articulated a fabulous array of case studies, effects, and measures relating to insight, savantism, and ontology. I prefer to call this time-travel. Riding back to Paris, having not slept, I came to understand that we would be routed through Versailles. Along with the certainty of breath and blood and growing old, cycling on those drives and allees remains one of the only unbelievable wonders to which I refer myself that did not actually happen.

Music: Two

Brenda Kahn. Epiphany in Brooklyn was released in 1992, a glimpse of dawn before first light, and occupying the spaces between and among the fortresses of insipidity - those out there trying to make albums, trying to make music, trying to make songs.
As against which, she stands foursquare 'gainst gales, and lays upon your placesetting the wholly aloof cat. That this gift was heavened and feathered before us seventeen years ago will suggest how rare are the benefices of the good intentionalities.

and you find that your life is a frustrated vision
of Gauguins, Rodins and excellent diction
mint juleps and needles don't add up to wisdom
you've cracked you've gone mad
it makes me so sad
that I like you better than most of the men
I've had

Richard Farina's decease

Wolf Kahn

My third reading of BEEN DOWN SO LONG IT LOOKS LIKE UP TO ME (Richard Farina) happened forty-one years after my second. After shaking off the wonderment of considering what I must have thought I had been thinking during the first two readings, brightened by the light of my confidence that this third reading knoweth all, the pain of the novel's foreboding and death, and the tenderness of the romance in its soon-to-be dissimulated form have reminded me of an occasion in 1968 when too, in two ways, I had not known or may not have known how closely I was waxwinging toward the sun. (O sourest oblivion!) In Croton-on-Hudson I was staying overnight in the room of a friend of a girlfriend. As he slept, as was his habit, the radio loudly played WBAI, keeping me from sleep until 3 AM, when I asked him to turn it down. "Sure."
(The noise that bothered me surely was the sound of blood beating through the veins of the 1960s, had I ears to hear. Just as Catherine and I the year before had taken the train into the Village, and, when it rained, stepped into a diner for coffee and pie, instead of into the White Horse for beers.) But before the my Croton fellow host slept we had talked about Farina's death. He had been taking guitar lessons in the City from the person who had just a few years earlier given Farina guitar lessons. The teacher was convinced that (as the novel was being published) Richard had foreseen something awful - shall we not call it a certain kind of monkey? - and that he had reached forward and yanked the bars of the motorcycle, pitching himself into the utterest canyon of unknown possibility which some people call suicide [or] escape from suicide. Not long before he died, I had been speaking with Peter Kahn (David Grun) about the tepidity and the pallid surrender of, at least in groups, Cornell's students in 1996. It caused Peter to say a few words about Farina (he pronounced it Fa-reena) in 1958, but I missed the chance to ask him what he thought of the guitar teacher's belief. And Peter, a visionary, would have known.
Richard with Ruth Kahn

Obama, Muslims, Moors, Briffault

Alvar Sunol

Walker Percy, in THE MOVIEGOER, describes an experience of time-and-place/being dislocation (not unpleasant) familiar to many persons. Binx Bolling sits in a theater watching a movie the setting of which is the theater's neighborhood in New Orleans. Our art gallery (Magpie, child of Loudeac Tile Studio) is on Dryad Road, Athene (near Acadamae Avenue), perhaps twenty steps from Guido's Grill, in the book I was reading, there, today. BEEN DOWN SO LONG IT LOOKS LIKE UP TO ME - Richard Farina, Ithaca, Johnny's Big Red Grill, et seq. Today, young Obama extolled in Egypt the merits and glory of the Muslim world, a point that Robert Briffault made ceaselessly ceaselessly ceaselessly in his career as a cultural anthropologist, novelist, and scholar. If there were a thousand souls listening to my thoughts, they would, over the years, have heard me aching and trying to quote Briffault:

It was under the influence of the Arabian and Moorish revival of culture, and not in the fifteenth century, that the real Renaissance took place. Spain, not Italy, was the cradle of the rebirth of Europe. After steadily sinking lower and lower into barbarism, it had reached the darkest depths of ignorance and degradation when the cities of the Saracenic world, Baghdad, Cairo, Córdoba, Toledo, were growing centres of civilization and intellectual activity. It was there that the new life arose which was to grow into a new phase of human evolution. From the time when the influence of their culture made itself felt, began the stirring of a new life.

The Birth of the Cool

I once asked Professor Donald Kennedy at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill if there was any satire in Malory. He thought not. (Thoughtfully; quizzically.) For the last forty years I have thought of Milton generally along the lines of Ezra Pound: "Dante's god is an ineffable divinity; Milton's god is a fussy old man with a hobby." This probably began in a leafy green upstate New York college where, second semester of my senior year, my friend Louis V. and I were asked to leave Professor Orwen's Milton class due to excessive disruptive giggling in the back of the classroom (the tower at Wads Aud). Grade for class: F. The vogue by which we are washed over just now, elucidating Milton's prescience and hipness, naturally enough, intimidates me, and I should seek out as might in the 19th century West, a scout for annoyed Native People, the bit of a moment in his work when he peeked into our times and saw the difference between those who believed resolutely in the inviolability of the present tense, and those who drifted freely, and quite merrily, as rudderless sailboats, with

in the galley,
the morning aromas on the water,
of coffee, eggs, and bacon.

Frieze: 1

The author in 1969, Iowa City

In the era of this photograph, I was not asking: "How do we know we were here?"
Which now, I do.
It was taken in the present tense.
Everything smelled like smoke.

in the dooryard bloomed

Ms. Ulysses and I live in a hollow, a moderate ravine, a gap in the hills overlooking Ithaca. 350 years ago Cayugas lived here, in a village of longhouses on a spot chosen doubtless for the same reason later was built a mill and a covered bridge extant.
In the dooryard (pictographic form, above) eighty years ago, a family domesticated the scene. The house on the site was built just after 1865. When Hellhound the sheepdog and I go out to chase sticks and look down the valley half-lost in dreamy contemplation, roughened features pop up their heads through the years. Arrowheads, an apple tree, a blackberry bush, a raspberry bush, a chicken coop, granite boundary markers, a community of voles, forsythia, pine trees, a huge oak and the rotting stump of another oak that must have been enormous, bees, a creek, a rowstand of pines, a lilac bush. It is a frieze. An outbuilding houses my studio, where I produce art tiles (woodstove, electricity, church-like silence). In the house, the roof leaks; the chimney is doubtful; there is a 1903 Steinway on which La Vogdessa plays Gottschalk, Brahms, and Rhapsody in Blue, and another woodstove. In 1779 George Washington commanded John Sullivan to My Lai the persons living in this hollow; I have elsewhere seen the text translated from the English using the word "mischief."

But you will not by any means listen to any overture of peace before the total ruinment of their settlements is effected. Our future security will be in their inability to injure us and in the terror with which the severity of the chastisement they receive will inspire them.

There's a fish in the percolator

David Foster Wallace (b. Ith, incidentally) understood Markson's book well.
As do those who achieve book-epiphany with their first howl of merry mirth.
Or perhaps that is a peal.
One ripples and knows currents of bubbles just below the surface of the water.
Ulysses' dog features in Wittgenstein's Mistress.

So I think of David Lynch.
Particularly Twin Peaks.