Two Speculations

If we were to have a motto, it would be this:
This poem is not a poem.
It is precisely this presence of the senseless that makes it a poem.
To speak of what makes something a poem is, then, poetic.

Why is it the senseless that makes the poem
(A kind of double poem)?
Does the poem say what cannot be said?

To say what cannot be said is senseless, and hence romantic.
The romantic suffers from the palpable illusion of a speech;
But he is aware that his speech has become a symbol for nothing.
This is the darkness I spoke of earlier --
To surround oneself with the senseless in order to discover sense.

To which one objects:
"It is impossible to say the senseless,
Of that we cannot speak;
It is a logical impossibility."

But is it possible to say nothing?
To experience thought as the absence of thought and still to perceive the world?
This would be a purification, since the arbitrary element has been removed.

What we want is a destruction of language through the very exercise of its capacities.
As long as something can be said, as long as something can be thought,
We have not arrived at the destruction of language.

Not: to experience the world without language,
But to experience the world in such a way that the world is beyond language,
So that language is no longer a possibility,
i.e. We could no longer say, "I have removed myself from language, for the moment",
As if language were something to which we could return,
Because by that point, even to think of language would be unthinkable,
And in this way we would remove ourselves from the possibility, since it would no longer be possible:
This would be the work of a philosophical poetry,
What it would make.

If there were a man, and he said,

"Poetry my consort, I have abandoned you;
I have left you the stallions of Phoebus
Who roll through the chariots of the sky,
Where chaste Diana glares at awakening dawn,
I have dropped below the couches of the world
And am living in a dark place, where the trees
Sprout blood, and Neptune's brother Hades
Rules"

-- If he were to say that, who wouldn't laugh at him now?
We know these are the stories of fairies.
My dear one, you act as if I've stabbed you, "Purging,"
You say, "Eats the vigor of the heart."
Well I have my reasons:
Not to marry poetry to the colorless vigor of logic,
The rigor mortis,
But certainly to reveal the patterns of a mathematical order in her bosom,
To show that a precise structure of symbols, logically arranged,
Is not their water for the fire of our soul, but that, in short,
The soul is just a necessary breath. And if passions cool
Then perhaps we are not the whirlwinds of our thoughts,
Since anything we meet with anger is ill-met.
Poetry should be a greeting, the salutation of truth,
And a psychology, divinity disguised as incarnated in words.

On a More Rational Note

The metaphor of this little composition is the musical note.

I am a composer, an orchestrator --
I orchestrate the text, even as I am composing it.
This music points towards the identity of an “I”, that is,
A linguistic proposition.

But this is a metaphor --
As my French professor was fond of saying, a speaking around
-- But more reliably a transference, a bearing across:
The “I” is at least partially borne across
-- Writing as an act of navigation.

Thus the science of writing is the science of navigation.

Case in point: Nietzsche on Wagner,
Also a musician,
Bene navigavit, qui naufragium fecit

-- That is, the science of writing is a science of contingency.

What, contingency?
Since I am so fond of etymologies
“Contingere”, to befall, Latin, late, apparently Medieval.
Objection -- we are living in the classical age:
“Con” + “Tingere,” “That which touches with”
(And here we have the Adagio, a halting iambic).

If I linger over the implications of this communal sensuality,
Either a going together or a being together
-- That is, a synontology (in Plato’s sense),
Or, to serve up a more Englished port,
(Stronger and livelier,
Ergo wine is music’s inevitable companion,
-- If we were audacious, we would even say wine is music)
Conversation. And I cannot emphasize this too much,
Since it is a turning together,
The necessary angel of communication
Accompanied by and accompanying it,
Since they go together,
What we could call the harmony of human beings,
Which suggests that music is not the passive reception of an instrument,
But that somehow the listener plays the performer
And of course vice versa
(As we are too sophisticated for chiasmus),
A notion which suggests the dance,
Since that is what it means to play.
But whereas the dance makes the music its purpose,
The music, in turn, determines the dance,
And hence, W.B. Yeats.

I would term this the fitness of thought,
The Idea in allegro.

In short, so many things make up the “I”
That writing, if it is to remain a conversation,
And not devolve into the parody of a communication with the self,
That is, a condemnation to solitude and loneliness,
(And here we trace the beginnings of a logic of immortality,
Since we are immortal by nature, but not sui generi or per se,
More precisely per nos in that we are human,
And hence the reason we call the immortality of tradition
The Humanities)
Must continually invite the reader
(And we see in this invitation the force of life
And of the will)
Into his own community, which is at once a persuasion and,
Through that persuasion,
A recognition of the reader’s thought.

If we were to end with a cadenza
(Sing it with me in duet):
We recognize that our thoughts are not permanent,
But subject to the exigencies of time,
Particular for the accidents of a momentary thought,
Cumulative for the erection of systems,
And ephemeral or transitory in the recognition of change,
The tension of a movement in between.

If thought seeks an eternal home,
Then the mind is its constant wanderer;
Because it is wandering between homes,
It is homeless,
The vagrancy of the mind is change.

In the meantime, we build with those things that are to hand
(A bird cannot sing an adagio,
But an adagio might try to imitate a bird),
That is, the past, tradition, the Humanities,
Our shared recognition
-- which means not only the intellectual
But also the callow,
Youth, but also experience,
And the experience of youth,
The masculine through the feminine --
You understand.

Since this is so, it is beside the point, even counterproductive, to reject:
We can no more reject the errors of our readers than matter can move without void,
These disagreements are the negative space through which we must pass.

Furthermore: Einstein’s notion that motion can always be transferred into time,
That motion and time are metaphors.

And so from now on I will undertake the work of the translator,
And think a bit more before I react,
Since reaction is always futile within the scope of an infinite time,
And the extra thought will carry the tune
Consideration, the music of the spheres.

Nietzsche All Day

In the day I collect myself:
Sunlight is a condition of my existence,
With the moon I grow hollow, pallid, and weak.
I thin out, evening is the death of the world,
When we are meager for nourishment, we are fasting.
That is why it is at once so repugnant and lively to have sex in the evening,
It is the smell of cooking flesh.

Why did I fight the sun for so long?
I took it as a scandal that anything could be brighter,
That anything could of itself possess light.
I was in danger of becoming the moon: a mere reflection,
Unwilled and solitary.

How does one become like the sun?
Through darkness,
By surrounding himself with such darkness that in spite of himself or because of himself, he must shine.
When he does this, he breaks through the darkness,
He proves that the darkness is nothing but the absence of light,
He destroys its being.

Sources of darkness:
Conviction, every form of conviction, good faith, and especially morals.
Morals are the luxury of those who are too cowardly or prudent for pleasure.
Since they cannot possess the beauty of this earth,
Either their own or that of another,
They posit a beauty which is neither earthly
Nor determines the earthly, but rather is determined by it:
The effeminacy of a reflection.
This feminine knowledge which is neither existent nor possessed is called literature.

Conviction, instead of recognizing literature for what it is –
Pallid, hollow, in short the reflection of a reflection,
Takes it literally, displaces it into the world, that is, truth.
For the man of conviction (the convict) the world becomes a shadow,
It ceases to be, and only signifies,
And hence we say it is meaningful.
The man of letters sees through the eyes of a corpse.

But for this very reason it is the man who lives in literature who becomes most real.
Surrounded by shadows he becomes a kind of light,
He produces literature. This is the place at which I have arrived:
I am not like those ghosts who only mimic the meanings of other people,
I produce my own meaning; I make the world reflect myself.
Because I have nature within me, I am the flow of everything natural.

The final mark of the author is that he becomes radiant,
That his light becomes the reality of things.
When I die, the world will cease to exist,
Just as when the sun dies, the world is also consumed.

Blessed are the lotus-eaters, for they have consumed their inheritance.
A figure of consumption as the necessary precursor of being:
Only through the transfiguration of the existent does existence become possible.
Consequently everything that exists is the precursor of a necessary change --
So they are wrong to say that it is the material foundation of the world,
Since we are not still so naïve as to believe that movement is a material truth;
Similarly being, while in constant flux, cannot be even the aggregate
Of its components, since it is the change itself, and none of the permanencies
Which makes being, since being is being made. Conclusion:
Being is a figure for time, and time is the material extension of being.

The Slip

When all I have done in my life is escape?
There is nothing so easy as slipping
Out of your grasp like a greasy
Rope. Can I climb?

If the Fairies Dream

If I gave you the aperture that divides us
Like an eye, and you will sing it,
Then trees are nothing in the augury
And I myself can open before
And into you, until we blend by the absence
Of ourselves which is not a quickening, rather
A dissolution; I’d be surprised if the fairies dream.

Review of luxuries...

Review of luxuries under a ten foot scraper
Sky, where the ceiling becomes a void for so many
Generative fancies, clouded and raining down
An empty tufa that at least in sound retains the form
Of the commemorative faculties, and in application
To the object, has become the thing itself, though,
In reality, unsplit and cold, the concrete image
Of the dream.

The Book of Lamentations

God forgive the book-less masses, and indeed the mass of men,
For, forever from that firstling's fall, our lot has been decline:

After apples came the rind; then the trees dropped fruit
To rot on thorny breaks, and He gave us to grind,
The men their fields, while women whined
Sucklings conceived in voluptuous time. And theirs was labour:
First the hoe and then the plough, who forced the rugged earth
Into a fruitful crime – then walls, and ships who climbed
The slops of barren seas. Trade and congress, cuneiform,
All followed spice, the orange, and then the subtle arts of pleasure:
Cooking, math and letters. And when this race of leisure now
Looked upon the sky, they cried, "We've lost the gardens, trees
That burgeoned chestnuts, ecstasies of limes, shelter
Of the boughs and rolling, drumming clouds." And all discovery
Was fire from the gods, whose suffering attendants, ennui
In cruel repose, the pallor of sleep, protection from the gentle snows
(And not to mention every ill we gained from clothes!)
Brought boundless shrieking furies, clawing vengeance
To whip our armored backs, to foul our luscious treats,
Along with flatulence, domesticated beasts! Can we ever find
Good digestion now or hope to free our verse from rhymes?

As if the horrors of a Pasteur weren't enough, the Wright
To travel sullen leagues in bounds, and revocations from a gruff
Receiver (saving us our lesser innovations, I mean days
Of wheeled travel, or worse still – though better than our present vamps –
The postage stamp) now, with an ominous, electric click
Professors can search every text for any sullen phrase
Without the sage-scratched margins of more antique days.
What happened to the dusty, choked technology of Bibles past?
We mourn for the loss of Terwiliger's gloss, the margins where he scrapped
His academic genius, now become so much pedantic taste. Will I ever know,
Terwilliger, why you thought that all of Hamlet's words (Act 2, Scene 2,
Three lines before 195) were – I can't quite read your note, did you say "jive"
Or "waste"? But really what enrages me the most, seeing that
Our libraries have been replaced by novel fruit, is that
Without the need to root the regions of my wallet's inner-space,
Or bend under a heady weight, I can sate my curiosity for Balzac
Or Rimbaud, and all of Proust, sans culottes or even shoes!

So the moral of this witty grime: those first things are
Which are best, nature's unripe green is gold, and we should strive
To regain the recession (soon to be perdition) of those infant times.

O ambition, O folle!

La première eglogue de Virgile: Melibée, Tityre

Melibée
Tityre, reposant sous l’ombre d’un hêtre ouvert
Tu medites le bois avec l’avoine subtile;
La fin du pays, les champs sucrés sommes par nous
Abandonnés, pendant que tu, Tityre, douce et ombragé
Enseignes le bois avec la jolie Amaryllide de resonner.

Tityre
O Melibée, le dieu pour nous accomplissait
La liberté, car un dieu toujours sera celui
Pour moi, duquel l’autel souvent sera brulé
Par un agneau tendre de nos ouiailles.
Il mes vaches permets (ne vois tu pas?)
Piétiner, et me jouer n’importe quoi
Me plaît avec mon anche rustique.

Melibée
Ça ne m’ennuie point, même je plus l’admire, n’importe
Où je vais, la campagne est agacée. Voilà, moi-même
Ecoeuré j’emmène les ouiailles, et celle-là aussi
Je ne peux guère guider. Jusqu’ici entre les noisetiers
Denses, jumeaux – l’espere des ouiailles – elle
En les accouchants dans une roche degarnie
Quittait. Souvent notre mal, l’aurait-nous
Prévu (si on a eu de l'esprit!) dans cette signe:
Les chênes par les cieux coupés; néanmoins,
De ce dieu – et aussi qui – nous, Tityre, dit.

Serenity of the Highest Emotions

Is there a serenity of the highest emotions,
Amid the storming thunder-heads
A single, golden cloud? This would be the water-
Lily, the cypress who floats in the pond,
The amber trunk of the rising sun
Not seen by reflections
But in them
As the radiance of their imminent music,
Which is not the harp,
But a ratio of the highest strings,
Mathematics for melody, or rather
Their geometries' expression in an everyday life
That bisects the unseen, that vague old drone
Who hums.

The Aristotelian

A thought on thought: when the cognitive faculty
Which is the essence of its disposition, turns
Upon itself, so that its unity completes
In harmony the circle of its being.

Which is the essence of its disposition:
For things are, and being what they are,
Are good. That lamp is not a lamp
But which gives light, and giving light,
It clarifies the text, turning upon itself
Whose pages turn, all earning the characteristic of
A possible script whose words could
Lisp (potentially could lift) the good,
so that its unity completes itself in language
Meaning language, looping round in the echo
Of eternally moving movers (unmoved)
Whose harmony, the circle of its being,
Is so in life.

The Positivists (Rev.)

Another day in the world, which is why.

Gasping 'til you're hoarse with breath doesn't make it real
Even if you gallop off into the unknown,
That great body of the globe that cannot be possessed.

I was speaking a language formed entirely of gibberish;
I pretended that I did not know its meaning,
So the endings of the sounds in my acquaintance
Became utterly new, and composed secrets
That had never been yet in the mystery of this earth
And would be never again, because the spontaneity
Which made me breathe these ay's twisted into a green yew
Was entirely lost in the passing, and beyond recollection,
Scattered over the clime as it was, over the winds.

Then I cried for loneliness, which was only passing fleet:
No one understood the silence between words
And no one wanted to. Worse still were those who did,
Or claimed too, and I hear in the echo of their blue lips
The bird call of my own mort tongue, perverted
Into a stillness, a solemn lake, a drug
That is anger to those who partake and suffers
For those who observe. Fortunately there are not many watchers
In this day and age, and we all forget the rage,
The anger in which we began,
With which we'll end.

I would spit on you all but it would be a sad drop,
Fragile, refractive, glowing like a misty globe,
And almost like a tear.

De Graphide Canticorum Libertatis Humanae

Birds in flight, fast over the roofs, drawing, winging:
This vision of flight comes like a simulacrum of freedom,
The freedom to move anywhere, anytime,
Beyond the constrictions of boundaries, and climb.

Because life is motion, whether the change of chimes,
Or the soft of a guitar, and music, which previses motion
Prefigures and prevails in flight --

As if humanity were a collection of numerous birds
Learning to take wing, and their efforts had been set
To strings.

Them

We strike
Terror
Into their hearts --
But what is the heart
Except a cold city
Or their splotched birds
Perched
On granite?

We can destroy that city,
But what does the city fear
Except that continuity of cold
Which the blinking sun
Portends?

And they call us cowards.

But we know that the city is cold,
And that the houses
Leak,
And it gets dark.

Faith

Athena, your neck is pale
As a Greek bust, your marbled skin
Sends shivers down my spine,
As if a mountain arched the snow
And sat. You are not the goddess of spring-time,
Nor goddess of the fall: your altar is plain,
And cold, the columns of your temple.
The round architecture of the Greeks,
Curling into pizzicati of hosannahs,
Like the flames that lick your austere frame,
Rebukes you; you spurn it and prefer
The world reformed in barren words,
A picture of the earth as fading blue. Your eyes
Are blind to the tides that roll below the temple,
Where cliff knives sea and sea cuts cliff
Into archipelagos of the pebbled shore,
Washing the crusted silt back.
Hear my feet sink in the sand;
I smell the fresh sea breezes
And wait -- Athena, my love, my faith.

The youth of birds...

I sing the youth of birds, white wings
Plunging through the forest,
While the stream pipes silver
And exhales billowing rapids, that,
Like the carnival of clouds
Piercing the white sky
Invokes the springing rye,
Whose tender stubble loves
The wild edge, and dreams
Of the chaotic hedge, a startled growth
That reaches for exploding stars.

I sing the dark moon, who floats
Over the jewel of the night like a precious
Vessel, and accosts in her private dismay,
The battles of nacreous stars, whose honey
Sweetens the eyes of a fragile beauty,
Ready to break in the dawn's hot rays.

Luxuries of Albion, your hot lips,
Your strangling glances, have sea-shattered
Many a sailor wrecked on siren eyes,
Whose call like the guttering forests,
Thin pupils of thunder-struck rage,
Kept the wild song within the rounds
And wreathed the rocks
In a torture for brilliant young men
Who deserved to die.

I will not mourn them, though I am a singer of Albion,
And though Albion's first fruit have I gathered
In a spilling copia of honey-sweet milk,
Teat-nourished and willing, ready to spring
Like the flowers of twilight,
And if the sunlight could spill down my hair
In golden strings, spear-sharp, and I
Were mantled of moon-glowing silver, these acrid cascades
Would nonetheless fall from a harp unwilling
To follow pleasure's lead.

You people who live by the way-side, on the road
Where the east first trenches an occident of spas,
You have a charcoal street and black chimneys, soot-stained,
And you are soiled, and the flame in your pupils is red.
I have seen nothing of nobility in your lotus-cheeked boys
And your girls are as scarlet as roses. You pursue the pretty shadows
Of a setting sun, you run to sweep away a patch of darkness
Like a spot of dirt -- with tea-tinged teeth you yawn and clap
The air. The holy among you profess no faith
That's worthy of your name, the infidels I credit only
For their breaches tumbling down
And rolling into roses: this blooming vegetation
Deserves your veneration. As to saints, I knew of one
Who executed swiftly (twinkling like a distant star)
His martyrdom by bursting in a car.

***

The youth of birds, white wings
Plunging through the forest,
While the stream pipes silver
And exhales billowing rapids, that,
Like the carnival of clouds
Piercing the white sky
Invokes the springing rye,
Whose tender stubble loves
The wild edge, and dreams
Of the chaotic hedge, a startled growth
That reaches for exploding stars.