It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given offNo one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car—William Carlos Williams
21 March 2020
What I am to think about, in a room with others, is the nature of Zero Hour—our new life. Our colloquy is an opening to that question.
22 March 2020
The poet often sees oneself as an isolato, “a person who is physically or spiritually isolated from others.” We are collectively isolated, as well.
This is the common condition we have sequestered ourselves within. These are the occasions for what I am now writing: here begin.
23 March 2020
Putting on Vivaldi to get the morning started, I recognize the theme music Delta Airlines uses on its transatlantic flights, to CDG, FRA, or AMS.
Homeless panhandler on corner of southbound Lodge offramp and Forrest reaches out without direction as I round the corner, and falls over.
“With history piling up so fast, almost every day is the anniversary of something awful.” Under this rubric I find words I intend to use . . .
24 March 2020
Imagining our isolation through multiple visual maps: blue and gray dots colliding; exponential curves ticking upward; geography filling in at a rate.
The graph of deaths doubling every two days, every three or five days, every ten days—these are abstractions, what do they mean in the event?
Although concern increases with the incidence of disease, the percentage gap in belief stays constant at about 40% between red and blue states.
Am I a nonperson in a mask and hat, or the announcement of a social order to come? The learning curve for what counts as human is constant.
25 March 2020
Singly or in two or threes individuals float naturally 1/2 inch above the pavement or path they are walking on as light filters through bare trees.
This is the hour that it is, a repetition of the same hour a day earlier and a day later; time is adjusted to a lack of expectation confirmed globally.
Central distribution hubs continue their work in silence, elsewhere, represented by paid employees who transport packages and return.
I wanted to write a poem that had a purpose in the world, that was distributed universally, that became an object, that was its consequence.
Nothing is “out there”; everything is “in here”; the passage of time begs for a new arrangement; objects persist in their frozen stability.
26 March 2020
Still dreaming of a series of X, the residue of the day’s events, inverted into a waking dream that prohibits me from waking from it, duly recorded.
“The form of prose is the accuracy of its subject matter—how best to expose the multiform phases of its material. / The form of poetry is . . .”
Sociality disappears behind two inches of leaded glass, through which the most important persons can only signal their solidarity by hand.
The psychoanalyst and translator has died in Paris; the wife of the philosopher died in Paris; the mother of her son the poet died in Paris.
A grammatical paradigm of states of being, all tenses of a certain verb, are brought to a single point in the determination of the event.
“Has happened, will have happened, is happening, would happen, had happened, happens, were happening, happened, will happen . . .”
27 March 2020
The poet of objective experience delights in impurities, without guilt or forethought he allows them into the written record of his being.
Anxiety is a displacement outward toward a nonevent; anxiety is an embodied state without dimensions; anxiety attaches to a specific object.
Water boils in no time, the moment water decides to boil, no one is observing it as it boils, nothing can prevent it from continuing to boil.
You are now having an experience that, in the welter of events, you believed was taking place all along but you had no access to it.
This dream has consequences as it tears through the veil of objectivity and opens to content brought to you by living persons as co-present.
It is a hybrid of San Francisco and Edinburgh, a harbor and tourist area where we walk out among others and the sea is visible at low tide.
What of the “dead” way the citizens are adhering to life as a mere holding pattern and an opportunity to stream video in measured episodes?
28 March 2020
It is a kitsch hybrid combining the biopic of a historical figure and low detective comedy, making its untenable fantasms even more credible.
After episode three, I say, “Goodnight, Lou Salomé”—and she says, “So you think I am Lou Salomé?” “Of course,” I say, “you are mysterious.”
The schematic images incorporated into streaming media each become the occasion for an unmasking, a reveal—there will be a series of them.
Against a background of dead accumulation, things declare themselves and disappear into paralysis—this must be the meaning of Orfée.
But what I have lost is boxes—specially labeled and full of my own content, at the far end of a warehouse of shelves of nondescript items.
In another section there is a stockpile of Critical Theory, including Adorno and Benjamin, along with some glossier literary magazines.
This is getting desperate and the new work routine in emergency conditions means that I may never be able to repossess my property.
Underneath the civil veneer are revealed various animals in mimetic costumes, ready to consummate perversions and lusts of evil nature.
29 March 2020
Even as I am distant from them: it is an opportunity to write, to arrange one’s thoughts on paper, to line up ideas for the greater benefit of . . .
The lower-level functionary who has displaced me from the position I occupy, on orders from above, since all narratives must be compacted.
They stupidly identify with sources of anaesthesia that protects them, that performs an erasure of threatening outcomes that surround them.
Such are mere numbers: the data is corrupt and nonrepresentative; there is no control or sample size; false negatives and positives abound.
They not only lacked the ability to perform any type of modeling, forecasting, or time series but could not even perform basic analysis.
Due to lack of access to data, the coefficient of not-knowing increases over time; the specificity of events diverges from any expectation.
Our “horizon of expectation” has become fused with the Lisbon Earthquake, the Spanish Influenza, and the great Australian wildfires.
Around 1937 her great loneliness began. Friends went away and could not be reached by post. She had long since ceased to exhibit her work.
Everyone was suspect. One ceased to speak with anyone. Language was forgotten. The arts atrophied. The smallest insight revealed disturbance.
30 March 2020
The landscape remains identical; the equinoctial sun rises above recent rain; houses stand in their distanced proximity; voices may be heard.
What is there for us to expect? We can only amplify the phenomenology of the question, which we must use to justify our existence.
The open question is the form of sociality in our Great Isolation, where each must find their place in a series and no end has been disclosed.
The open form of the question accesses only bare remains of material evidence and distant reports of mayhem in public buildings.
I am a window on a crowded room, a distant observation point on a small screen, a recording device that cannot be confirmed by others.
The only mitigation between “out there” and “in here” is doubt about social hierarchies and the boundaries of the property system.
Fear brought an object into the room, covered with minuscule particles of glitter; your task is to remove them by whatever means necessary.
Fear created an empty object that cannot be removed or gotten rid of; it is colorless, odorless, tasteless and reflects no light to the observer.
An empty halo shelters the object in place, while the day dawns in neutral overtones as it did the day before, and any succeeding day.
One imagines violent and prolonged kissing with others as compensation for the sustained separation from them one has endured.
31 March 2020
Civilization has gone beyond discontent to paralysis; we are reduced to being global spectators of a drama of manipulated outcomes.
Trauma is the law, foundation of the social order, the only legitimate vocation, a preexisting condition that opens the pathway to disease.
Episode five is a bloody mess, a parody of Viennese Actionism in ritual spasms of bloodletting to access a pre-Christian past beyond guilt.
There must be a secondary affect that provides the truth we seek, while the lack of explanation can only be recovered in its traumatic origins.
In Iceland the light is blue reflecting off cold steel in an abandoned warehouse where the victim, the perpetrator, and an agent meet.
Narrative becomes a crevasse in which the body of a teenage boy who wandered away from the orphanage will be found years later.
What motivates a sequence of events is not disclosed but a gunshot rings out at the end of the episode and we refuse to watch further.
Sudden discontinuities are tipping points, abrupt moments of change occurring in a nonlinear fashion when the global system crosses a line.
Such tipping points, occurring throughout history, may be pushed by biophysical feedback mechanisms into virtual “tipping cascades.”
This writing is vertiginous unfolding of manipulated outcomes, each one crossing a line to cancel any causal connection between them.
This nature is a manifold of nonlinear outcomes, each one the expression of an underlying principle that is discontinuous with the next.
1 April 2020
I who am here at this date and time, inhabiting this place with another, hereby submit my data to be counted in the general record if not will.
This is an account of personal identity in which I am not continuous with myself; I am a series of discontinuities by which I know that I am.
Symptoms may include headache, fever, chills, sore throat, dry cough, reddening eyes, loss of sense of taste and smell, tiredness, body aches.
Symptoms may progress from one state to the next or not; they may include some symptoms and not others; there may be no symptoms.
We need to come to a better understanding of what this story is about; I am sick of the usual run of disinformation and the paranoia of denial.
There are multiple frames of interpretation, each historically distinct from each other, but organized around a central, uninterpretable core.
There is objective danger, Gefahr, dangéité, fraught with danger, Gefährdung, a danger-situation, an endangering of the subject, he said.
What is a danger? It will be granted that fear, of its nature, is adequate to, corresponds to, entsprechend, the object from which danger stems.
One day, he rides out onto a plain and, at sundown, as the sun has always already set, he spies a belfry in the distance, but close enough.
He sees flickering through a tiny window, high in the turret—which he knows no one can reach—a mysterious, inexplicable flame, signaling fear.
A guarantee from harm surrounds you, and a voice is all you hear; you feel various sensations in your body, but are far removed from them.
Let me translate: you have nothing to fear, there is nothing to be afraid of, there is nothing there, anything that is not there cannot harm you.
4 April 2020
“Most of my life has been lived in hell—a hell of repression lit by flashes of inspiration, when a poem such as this or that might appear.
“Life’s processes are very simple. One or two moves are made and that is the end. The rest is repetition, a playing out of foregone conclusions.”
In the emergency rooms there is another kind of hell being lived without recourse to any closure, a mere holding pattern of bare existence.
In one world the law is everywhere present, in another everywhere withheld. The two worlds split into justice for some and none for others.
The country has adopted an array of wartime measures never employed before in history—confining 230 million of its people to their homes.
How many thousands of deaths, or millions of infections, would be prevented with a response that was more coherent, urgent, and rational.
An American woman bought a tin of sardines; the grocer made her open the can because you cannot hoard tinned food if it is opened first.
The Germans have just announced that if Warsaw does not surrender within twelve hours, the army will use all military means to subdue it.
Unreason begins with the particular, ends on an epic scale that elides our comprehension; we can only perceive its traces in what does not add up.
It is a shell game of conclusions, where the cause disappears from shell to shell. We only know the bare outline of what made such things occur.
They will order their provisions and they will be placed outside, ready at the curb to be picked up—this will reduce their contact with others.
The Germans said it is the Poles in Warsaw who are violating international law by making their civilians help defend the capital.
Reporter signs off: “But, as I say, I just can’t follow the things that are happening in this war. Off to the front tomorrow, if I can find one.”
5 April 2020
“Then the flu hit us . . . were making up to sixty calls a day . . . we were knocked out . . . one younger of us died . . . others caught the thing . . .
“That potent poison sweeping the world . . . finest physical specimens seemed to be hit hardest . . . sick one day and gone the next . . .”
One day I thought I would be next. You could read about me in the news. I would be added to the data in my zip code in Oakland County.
Greater Detroit has 4.3 million people, nearly half Michigan’s population and more than double that of Cleveland, Columbus, or Cincinnati.
I would be a bar graph, a projection curve, a downward spiral of case acceleration, a bubble on a map that when you clicked on it got larger.
History is abolished during the course of a disease, placed on hold: no one knows the port of entry, the points of contact, the transmission route.
New cases were linked to dormitories for foreign workers; roughly 20,000 people have been confined to their rooms for the next 14 days.
Who will be there to finish my archive? This text constitutes instructions for what should be preserved if it comes to that—namely, everything!
Only the present endures—eyes wide shut to the minor distinctions that index what thou lovest well as a condition of social distancing.
This sentence is a synecdoche for everything that must be preserved—all of it, beginning with the objects on my desk, what I am now writing . . .
What I look out and observe on some street in the suburbs, people walking in twos and sometimes threes, an isolato with surgical gloves . . .
Dogs on leashes and children on bicycles, people stopping to talk at the required distance, more than a few cars parked across the street . . .
My neighbor speaking furtively into her cell phone: “She’s terrified, doesn’t want to leave her house, I’m really concerned about her . . .”
The hurried visitations of service workers; tree trimmers, delivery trucks, garbage collection—maintaining units of population, points on a grid.
All this was predicted years ago; we knew it would come to pass. The tyranny of the majority as a biopolitical endgame that everyone will win!
6 April 2020
Then, all at once, he climbs out of the subway and stands in the twenty-first century. Or is it the twentieth? It looks surprisingly the same.
The difference is that which is withheld, cannot be observed, is happening elsewhere, to be transmitted over virtual networks.
A woman gets on a bus in the distressed zone and coughs four times; the bus driver complains about her manners; two weeks later he is dead.
The young doctor’s video captures his day: entering the zone and masking up; attending to indescribable passages; calculating his survival.
I thought I knew him from his picture in the paper, but the sphere of those I can identify with certainty has been shrinking from day to day.
A new anonymity takes us away from ourselves; those unnamed others have less implication. We care, certainly, but can do nothing about it.
When we are in prosperity: on the first day of spring, families picnic in Franklin park; boys play pickup basketball; a father coaches his kids.
Nightly the spectacle of the unnamed dead unfolds before us in streaming media from outlying precincts, in languages we do not understand.
Surveillance drones monitor breaches of regulation; an EMS vehicle facilitates transport from an affected home; the numbers add up.
Each time I stop in front of a photographer’s window to view pictures of the living in their finery, I involuntarily recall the unnamed dead.
Their foot will slide in time: their lack of preparation, errors of judgment, refusal of responsibility, lack of empathy will finally undo them.
The unnamed dead might be seen laid out, in tidy rows separated by curtains, in the refunctioned convention center of a major urban area.
What is a person and what do I care? I care about myself and those dear to me, who have been statistically modeled to an optimal number.
Just one unnamed photograph making its mute appeal to the indifferent viewer scrolling through serial pages, vainly asking to be identified.
Behind this veil or curtain or screen lies the undisclosed truth—a communicating vessel placed between the container and the contained.
This thickness of things, appearing before my eyes, is an obstruction. The truth of numbers adds up to nonexistence, but we remain in place.
8 April 2020
Who gets to achieve social distance? What necessities drive them out of the house, to what necessary ends? Who gets to stay alone?
Democracy is demography: the condition we call “social being” is not only rights of the citizen but privileged location on a statistical curve.
One works an “essential” job and has lost two friends and colleagues over three weeks; another has an aunt who is very sick and diagnosed . . .
Chains of affiliation and contact are necessary for survival; they are conduits to disease; “community” transmission is part of a social body.
Big talking mayor organizes 3000 trials of serpent medicine to show compliance with unreason policy; one half of volunteers get placebo.
All direct questions are answered by hypotheticals; this is the best we can say under the circumstances; the outcome is unclear.
Sociality is distance: the pseudo-objectivity that comes from no human interaction but a stream of packaged goods delivered to the door.
Pseudo-objectivity transforms: our complexities reduced to a blank slate; all horizons narrowed to a point; the persistence of alienated nature.
The sound of bird noise filters through the plate-glass window; evidence of seasonal activity persists; visible in form of buds and nests.
Vitality was their excuse for all cruelty: a natural deduction of those who have been reduced to a state of nature, so their nature insists.
“Now at last spring is here! The rock has split, the egg has hatched, the prismatically plumed bird of life has escaped from its cage.”
The dwarf magnolia blooms; violent rainstorms will soon scatter its petals; the caught moment telegraphs its urgency; the pattern repeats.
Where the aim of all life is death: schematic illustration traces collective spread from birthday party and funeral to the onset of disease.
Because one person hugs another, the next person is compelled to hug the next. The erotics that constitutes their bond are rigidly increased.
Therefore the real, an irreducible pattern by which this real presents itself in experience, is what anxiety signals. This is the guiding thread . . .
Therefore an absent cause is what remains of the irreducible in the complete operation of the subject’s advent in the locus of the Other . . .
Therefore is a purpose to all things. The billboard telegraphs its message, you have a stake in this outcome. It would be happy to think so.
10 April 2020
Now I have a memory: a group reading of Spring and All to a stricken friend who did not survive, in a community shelter near the ocean.
Some thirty years on, the text is a lucid declaration of the present in mourning for it; an anticipation of the present for which we mourn.
The archive unfolds its presentness: oceanic feelings reduce to marks on paper, each remaining potent with irresolution, virulent themselves.
Negative capability sought the present in lieu of any outcome; marks on paper record their firm resolve, despite contingency of time and manner.
A gathering colloquy planned for months is canceled; we meet instead on virtual media; and in Lisbon, after the crisis, in two years time.
“This is your birthday, sister, and I rejoice that thus it passes smoothly, quietly, ere the great voice, from its fair place, shall bid our spirits fly.”
A day advances past one that is marked; another passes it by. Each is an iteration of the same, flattening the curve in increments.
The crisis comes in waves: first wave withdrawing; followed by a larger swell, which rolls back; a barely perceptible surge announces the third.
Electronic monitors record O2 levels; heart rate and blood pressure; cardiac rhythms; breathing rate. Everything is normal, within limits.
Dreams are a wash; it is better to forget them. The crisis is canceled, postponed for a week, a month, or a year. We will never get back it.
Your self-understanding is a distortion; the guilt of existence is universal; you have dared to think you are an exception; this is a correction.
“I dreamed we couldn’t record my podcast,” he said. “Because the disease spreads over the airwaves, and we would risk each others’ lives.”
There is continual disquiet about food—will there be enough of it, what is missing from the shelf, what dangers must I face to obtain it?
Does anything in your dream mean more than a pitiful gasp of the unconscious, creating a parallel unreality to the one you are now in?
There is never enough food. The people are frozen in their instinct of survival; a new wave of violence will be forthcoming from them.
She compares such dreams to a jukebox in a diner—the greatest hits of our inner turmoil, neatly labeled, shuffled, replayed nightly in sleep.
Panic buying on a suspended day before scheduled redemption. The world of commerce acquires our religious needs, in the competition for goods.
Death is a commodity on the market. If there is too much death, the market tanks. We must withhold our labor to bring the price back up.
12 April 2020
Dreams are an algorithm of preexisting content. It is well known one never sees the sun in dreams. You have never seen a poet’s notebook . . .
I am in a crowd at UC Berkeley. The Spring Semester has commenced; they refuse to cancel classes. Thousands stream forth from buildings . . .
The false dream charged the true one with its lack of content, into the light of prefigured existence now that its meaning is revealed.
I am not wearing a mask; no one is. As mine auctor told an aspiring poet who sent him things: “Strike through the mask—let’s hope you do!”
Lucid they stream from buildings in an algorithm of decision, among nodal points of access, toward determination of their chosen field.
The field spreads out in spring, a helicopter lowers overhead, dropping its false content, couples picnic, sunbathe, or read their assignments.
I reverse the tape, reenter the gymnasium, bypass the game in progress, exit the front into a panicking crowd under a descending cloud of gas.
The content was foretold, a gift given freely and at no expense, decided by contingency. The bottom line is to capture the tale as it spreads out.
The class is an introduction to anthropology for medical workers. It will “serve my needs” better than any puerile introduction, I believe.
The cheerful instructor dissembles a refusal to disclose any content. There is an uncomfortable place to sit while I put on my mask.
I recall key texts by Kroeber and Mead, Kluckhohn, Durkheim, Malinowski. Only later could one say I read the classics of anthropology.
A poetics of crude mechanical access was the crux of their dispute—an anticipatory method that would “serve my needs” over years to come.
I am asked to present on Olson—I say, the point is the inherent identity between content and form that makes the poem a scene of decision.
Why this is a question of anthropology is never stated directly; only later would we come to see “the shape of culture” as self-identical.
What people do with those closest to them: the sheriff’s deputies at Bert’s affirming their bonds; many sickened and died as a result.
A descendent to come takes off his mask and finds kinship never under dispute, a pattern of affiliation that precedes any outcome.
The cause of my persistence is an algorithm of dreams, a crude mechanical access that discloses a narrative both “mysterious and dark.”
My words have been embedded—embodied—so he must internalize them as a foreign body to be rejected. That must be my dream!
Meanwhile, I must find my way home over a labyrinth of roads that were predetermined, anticipating my confusion in navigating them . . .
14 April 2020
Every day is one more, an increment. Every day we watch the numbers, and every day we add one. Adding number to the days names them.
Numbering the days, charting the spread. Every point on a map is the origin for a new cycle of event. Time expands, as space contracts.
My waking coincides with the word management. I am entering into a contract with the unfolding days, their unstoppable momentum.
An eternal month of Sundays, organized in a ring around the missing core, each with its distinctive variation, girded by underlying threat.
I read the numbers: they are not identical. They precede and override my understanding of them. The number I have just read is 13,000.
A light coating of ice crystals greets the day, distributed equally over all the environs, glittering with impermanence and menace.
The closer the markings of an event, the more distant we perceive it. In the form of a name, the totals add up. A name is a marker of the event.
To know the event by a name, but not its number. The event has no qualities: it is colorless, odorless, tasteless, and cannot be seen.
We know the event is identical to what caused it. There is no cause outside the event. Nor is the event inscribed in any form of ideality.
That was the meaning of form we subscribed to, so many years in the past. We attended to the form of events as they unfolded, materially.
Now such an event has come to pass. A philosopher sequesters in a suburb of Paris, anticipated by the poet in his book titled A Wave.
I open the book to see what it can tell me. “To be a writer and write things / You must have experiences you can write about . . . ,” it reads.
That much is clear. Writing itself must be the experience we mean. I must see if I can extend it, in as many ways as possible. To begin . . .
Until the writing covers the earth with fine crystals of never melting ice, anticipating the form of a universal stasis, a concept I reject.
“Stasis is pinball,” I wrote, a young poet anticipating the event. The older replied, “Just living won’t do. I have a theory about masterpieces . . .”
“How to make them.” Experience is the ice crystal of the event, a form of overknowing that drops down all our days. The making of an event.
We are half way through the event. An eternal half cuts through a cross-section of the month. “This is no one’s story,” the poet described.
The challenge to meaning is over there. Brick by brick, the building falls; stone by stone, the mountains rise. “Waves beat against the shore.”
The cross-section of the month is missing, has no name. Had it one, it could not be inscribed. The mid-point of the event is the name it gives.
It is as unlikely to know the inside of the body by its cross-section as to know the nature of the event that we live. The two coincide.
15 April 2020
There will not be any kind of recognition of what we are experiencing now. A great literature will rise thereby, built on the unknown traces . . .
A great city rises above the permafrost in Siberia, an enclave protected from the encroachments of disease, populated by recovered patients . . .
The clean surfaces of modern cities, the cold surfaces of nordic climates, the deep waters of pent-up rivers, the deep drive of unseen forces.
A detail is lost in the woods; they search for it with flashlights and dogs; drones capture the active scene; TV crews stand ready to broadcast.
Let us interrogate a cell phone: not only what it knows, what it contains within, but where it was made, the make and model number.
Communication is built on an absence at the center that fuels the drive to communicate. The media are saturated with use in a global disaster.
Anonymity has become a form of kinship. The closest have become isolate, sleeping in distant beds, suffering their own expectations.
Kinship is reduced to cell phone transmissions. Angry mobs are burning cell phone towers in England, accusing them of distorions and lies.
Angry mobs attack the governor: her image, her authority, her power, her appointments, her constituents, her access to media, what she decides.
“Let us repeat what history teaches. History teaches.” The lesson of history is an image broadcast live from a burning cell phone tower.
Recombinant genes invade living cells and replicate their sequence. The living body becomes a sequencing machine for forces that destroy it.
I want to see the destruction. Media inserts a probe into containment rooms, broadcasting its living nightmare to the brains of the dead.
“We can describe someone as self–contained when they are complete and separate and do not need help or resources from outside.”
Marx describes capitalism’s undoing as an interplay of forces generated from within. What we die nightly of is its strictly enforced decree.
A leveling off of peaks and troughs occurs; the graph becomes linear and flat; the world it corresponds to slows down; things lock in place.
“New pathogens emerge from void in global health outcomes,” a headline declares. Newspaper boy in classic pose cries out the news.
Mornings at 8 he sits at the panel of video game, where he will hole up for the day and avoid being killed, as admiring millions look on.
There is no new information to share, to add to the existing store of knowledge. “New excitement for drug in clinical trials,” the market replies.
The data is inconsistent: we do not know what counts as death. What counts as death is circular, buried in a mass grave on Hart Island.
“These are the very rich garments of the poor,” huddled together in dim lands of peace. Language is shrouded in a protective veil.
Everything is permanent. “Ever since I’ve been condemned to die, all the lines I’ve ever known in life are coming back to my mind . . .”
18 April 2020
Imagine I am consulting the present and it speaks to me in sentences in a manner akin to an oracle. It must be a sign of mental decay.
We seek the oracle elsewhere. I want to encourage its speech by writing it down, with plenty of half-rhymes and tone leading of vowels.
We are asking a question of nature, which answers back with ferocity. This is the story of remdesivir, the answer to a hard-put question.
We seek the oracle everywhere. It speaks a cryptic message: remdesivir. They line up at six-foot intervals to absorb it into their bodies.
Frankenstein is a favorite book. I thought it was a true one. “Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn’t let you into heaven for . . .”
We seek the oracle anywhere. Having a complicated arrangement of parts or pieces, there’s an element of chance we cannot control.
This is an example of elision: the omission of words to be inferred by the listener, making statement hard to deal with or understand.
A complex machinery speaks in fragments. “Like K2 in the Himalayas.” Underneath all evidence of the senses, the oracle is winning its way.
This is a complex transmission both hermetically sealed and entirely porous to any content. Packages are delivered at an accelerated rate.
A virus, as a means for undermining the meaning of simple statements like tweets, and complex linguistic forms like poems, spreads out.
This is a recipe for the kinds of disasters and controversies and scandals we see. A package arrives; we open it. It may not be addressed to me.
Fact and science are hard masters; we cannot build the factory until we know the machine. We speak in fragments in each and every case.
Missing is a group of related ideas, desires, and impulses that influence one’s attitudes and behavior. “How many dead? Nursing home won’t say!”
Elision happens in many languages, and follows certain patterns. He has a superiority complex. She had a complex about dark rooms.
Missing is a poem as theoretical object about the horizon of possibility that enables it. Anything is possible, an outcome we may infer.
The horizon has shifted, tilted on an axis, ending up upside down. Like plants climbing a vertical wall, the horizon endlessly recedes.
Nothing the passage of time will not have fragmented or broken down. “I’ve done . . . questionable things. Also extraordinary things . . .”
Hydroxychloroquine, he said. Without context, we cannot determine any content. At the heart of its mechanical drive, meaning seeks its use.
One example is an exploded diagram of an n-dimensional object. Each dimension is a different manner of use. It is not the English novel.
The question of content is vexed. Narrow is what remains when all objects, persons, and institutions external to a person are taken away.
One example of good investigative technique is to place pictures related to the victim and suspects on a wall and try to connect the dots.
They are shouting down dark alleys in the sequestered city the name of a cure and the date it will become available, to no further avail.
19 April 2020
This is where it starts to gets real. The rules of the game keep changing. Then the game itself changes. It is only with the story’s end in view . . .
O2 levels of 40–45% are not compatible with human life, yet we find them relaxed and smiling, chatting on their cell phones to the last.
“Nothing is more clear than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated in its dénouement before anything be tried with the pen.”
The history of vitalism rolls by on training wheels with bright orange crash helmets. The happy father looks on; the family remains intact.
“The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.” Her favorite brand of cigarettes was Kent.
Were it otherwise. We substitute predicate for subject to create a reverse order of cause and effect, in an attempt to undo our fate.
Various kinds of fantasy baseball, with unusual instruments for bats, played indoors in rooms, the spectators just six feet under or away.
“Either history affords a thesis, or one is suggested by an incident of the day.” In such wise are history and experience joined at the hip.
I am speaking of a new form of anthropology, with all genetic material held in common, where phenotypes are an algorithm of descent.
We are reduced to binary switches, they are all that we can produce. Behind every visible surface lies a set of coded signals that may change.
This is nothing to be concerned about: only a false alarm. When it is time for you to take this seriously we will give you notice of six days.
The materialism of an encounter; who could not wish for that? Nothing hurts more than an encounter when it assumes immaterial form.
Swiftly the Achaians returned to their boats, setting out to sea. To arrive alone in one’s home country, having foregone all one’s friends.
To write a poem about nothing that continues through the duration of our days. This is the overliving we have learned to survive.
The sun sets on Western man, but later. This is the pinnacle of self-understanding we have achieved, echoing in our fragmented lives.
It is the nothing of the not there yet. Works of philosophy sit alone on a shelf, guarding their privacy from the neighboring tomes.
Their houses have become miniature tombs. The lesson of culture is the form of preserving all that used to be but is no longer there.
Ishi’s recording remains unheard; we listen to Ishi’s recording but cannot understand it; the secret to Ishi’s recording has just been revealed.
The poem is a form of broken pottery. All pots were made to be broken. Such is the evidence of the senses, preserved on a basement shelf.
Ishi is telling about Wood Duck to Waterman. He begins in the afternoon; the story lasts into the evening and continues the next day.
Wood Duck is a young man and fine hunter in search of a wife, somewhat like me. He finds all sorts of women, but keeps rejecting them.
Finally he finds the woman he wants and falls in love with her. But now he doesn’t want the woman, so Lizard grabs her and takes her away.
Lizard and Wood Duck have a great fight and Wood Duck is killed. But Wood Duck is brought back to life in a new body, so goes the tale . . .
23 April 2020
The work of Wood Duck is not over; something remains to be done. Once we begin to tell the story, we must always complete the task.
The dénouement is suspended in the Land of the Dead, before the tale is complete. If we stop before the ending, something bad can only result.
We move from one place to the next, from a state of isolate knowledge only one person can have, to a crowded arena that cannot admit it.
About midnight near the landing, the roads glittering from recent rain, traffic lights alternate according to pattern, no cars can be seen.
Anxiety overcomes reparative drives to keep us focused on the present. The hat trick of dissociation does not work: I look straight ahead.
Distributing their knowledge, they can never know. Entropy takes over, a virtual wind blowing its consequences to the far corners of the globe.
In math, a derangement is a permutation with no element in its original place. We must renounce any knowledge gained by biostatistics.
Next came the clogging of the machines, which refuse to purify her. It is a sequence of events combining horror, death, and the duty to repair.
They threaten you with mysteries and ancestral curses, with melodramatic devices such as hidden passages and fainting women we adore.
The common element is danger. The least particle could be fatal for us. “So strong is the belief in life, that in the end that belief is lost.”
He is interested in the fleeting, the extreme facility of the news. It is an imperative not to care, to maintain ironic distance from everything.
In the immense cone of light where no one can neither exit nor stay, one is privileged to be present at the creation of the world.
And a dark world it is. The new life is unlike anything that has gone before; more impartial research is needed before we can say.
When you see yourself in a clear light, you will know the body as it opens up. Bottles of disinfectant line the shelves, waiting to be used.
You will see that you resemble a sick woman who cannot stay quiet upon her bed, but twists and turns through the night to ease her pain.
Until each part of the painting is seen in a different way. Unborn in the eye, without reason or heart. . . . He knew what he was up against.
It is the Young Man Looks at Death, a woodcut by Albrecht Dürer (1498). Whose meeting is an irreducible drama, rifted with decay . . .
A concatenation of self-portrait, animated corpse, and alluring woman produced about the time of the artist’s marriage to Agnes Frey.
Metonymy, basis of all appropriation. For a brief discussion of metonymy as “substituting cause for effect and effect for cause,” see . . .
The displacement of my body onto yours signifies the destruction of both. It is the universal figure, projected onto a macabre display.
Only I achieve the right to associate freely, regardless the distance entailed. In virtual space, in language, in an overplus of dream.
At the end of time, bodies. He moved seamlessly between house and techno, waves of ecstatic anticipation built up from isolate tracks.
That we knew all along. The recognition of common destiny is shattering, a waking into a life that continues to unfold its purposes.
Despite all enmity. Breaking out of their isolation, those welcoming looks in the distance, the certainty of all that had gone before, will become.
26 April 2020
Yet I am living still. Therefore you may ask me, dear cousin, to go where any living feet may go, back in the world, and be there: I will go.
It has been decades since I wrote those lines: “By extension I inhabit all buildings. I meet myself at all corners—I see myself moving away.”
As sometimes standing still is also life. The New Life at Zero Hour. It is a knowledge, despite accumulation of all data, I intend to stay.
Notes and sources
Sources:
John Ashbery, The Double Dream of Spring and A Wave.
Ted Berrigan, The Sonnets and So Going Around Cities.
Joe Brainard, [source t/k].
André Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism and The Communicating Vessels.
Dante, Vita Nova and Purgatorio.
John Frow, Conflicts of Interpretation.
Mike Huckaby, RA Podcast 278.
Ishi, “Tale of Wood Duck.”
John Keats, “Sonnet VII. To My Brothers”
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, book 10: Anxiety.
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition.”
Joseph Roth, What I Saw.
Ryan Ruby, Context Collapse.
Ridley Scott, dir., Blade Runner.
William L. Shirer, Berlin Diary.
Gertrude Stein, Geography and Plays.
Barrett Watten, Decay.
Meredith Williams, Wittgenstein and Meaning.
William Carlos Williams, Spring and All and The Autobiography.Monica Hesse, report on coronavirus dreams.
Contemporary media coverage of the pandemic.
Image: wallpaper, public domain.
