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.