XCVI
Heedlessly, I plunged into the abbess
The full-grown birth from the sea – what a shock – the naked and the living, not as infant product of erotic coupling, nor as spiritless fleshly husk, but as the generative principle herself. The Ding. Aphrodite, she of concretized foam, who only has to wring out her hair, adjust her sandal and start walking.
Dude, the nude. Get over it.
Venus out of Gowanus.
I will astonish Paris with a Helen
even if she eidolon…
The Nude:
“fearful rapture,” Plato
“awed amazement,” Plotinus
Only a historicolinguistic accidental that the Renaissance “rediscovered” the nude and “discovered” the new, or, more accurately newed world?
The sudden, blatant, overwhelming emergence of forms out of the fathomless unfathomable sea, over the edge of the not-at-all-flat earth. And the over-visible, as, perforce, that which cannot be seen: doors of perception so immaculately cleansed as to have become transparent yet eminently shatterable into a thousand shards. Or, if you like, the brave nude world as ricepaper masking the abyss. Veiled in nakedness. Whose sari now, Cristoforo? Sandro? Michaelangelo?
The nude and the corpse: radically naked. Think Bergen-Belsen. Think Last Judgment.
Adam creates God. And the finger’s brea(d)th between.
How subtle the shading between foam and form
Send the triremes!
Across the winedark sea
A thousand of ‘em
Let’s do launch…
Wow, you rowed in a trireme at Salamis? That’s f-ing oarsome!
If you know about tolerance, you know about play. If you know about play, you know about tolerance.
Any thing is an expression of the configuration of Yin and Yang
“Black Lives Matter.” Indeed. What is a “black life?”
I was a Winked Victory for the FBI
The West is trying to get out of its trap by chewing off other peoples’ legs.
Think Daedalus (Labyrinth), Icarus
Think Gordian Knot
Think missile called Nike
There’s the literati. And then, just to their right, so close they might be one, the obliterati.
Many people know what “closed” means. A good number also know the denotation of “nipple,” though they may blush to say or think it. But few know the meaning of the two concatenated. Or they plumb forgot.
You could order a Guinness here, but you’d be disappinted
You may talk o’ gin and beer…
At the next table, a pair in the party of American fatties exchanging snarl-smiles, talks of their forthcoming trip to Jamaica. The words “Montego,” and “Bay,” drift by. Then something which, somehow, through these bloody mary’d embouchures sounds like “we’re going to a grill.” You can almost smell them searing.
Oh, Negril.
Shiver me timbers.
And rise, rise Port Royal.
My sins are tactical
Bware of bcause
Given that the nude constitutes the essence of beauty or truth, “the individual is eclipsed, for there is – can be – no such thing as a nude portrait.” Mais, François, is this really true? c.f. and q.v. Beauford Delaney’s nude, supposedly the young James Baldwin. Nor is Dark Rapture alone. Manet’s Olympia. One could go on to name the obvious ones.
Is there a nude, anywhere, however idealized, that is not, intentionally or not, skillfully or not, truthfully or not, a portrait? Or rather, is there any nude that is not a portrait if we allow it to emerge as one?
You pass a well-dressed man of middle years walking along 22nd Street. Don’t see his wire, but hear his voice: “I only know,” he says pointedly, “this can’t go on.”
The bard is the ward
I drank three Mark and Rita’s.
OK, so not exactly a koan, but hey, if we don’t grasp the meaning of something, is it still insignificant?
If you’re afraid of what you like, what you like becomes hateful
“’Prison was so psychologically damaging to me, I sometimes wondered if some guys wouldn’t be better off dead,’ an ex-inmate, trying to make it as a journalist reflected. ‘If a guy does over two years, he becomes so emotionally scarred he has a hard time coping with society. Maybe it’d be better to kill him. Of course, I’d be dead if you did.’
“And always, day after day, several times a day, there is the most shattering psychological blow of all – the lock-up.
“’Jars all through you when the door shuts,’ a man who had done 12 years told [journalist Lloyd] Berry. ‘You feel all pent up, like an animal.’”
Wicker, ATTD, pp. 89-90.
Even the bears have polarized
I was a heroic nude for the FBI
It’s “good mornin’ Captain,” ‘e said “good mornin’ Shine,”
Said “good mornin’ Captain,” said “good mornin’ Shine.”
“T’ain’t nuthin’ the matter, Captain, but I just ain’t gwine.”
And a hey nonny nonny.
Blacula
like me
Suleiman the adequate
That which is not started will
perforce
not finish
And the Chambers Brothers:
The rules have changed today
I have no place to stay
Thinkin’ about the subway
My love has gone away
My tears have come and gone
Oh god lord, I have to roam
I have no home
I have no home…
…Well, I’ve been loved and put aside
I’ve been crushed by the tumbling tide
And my soul’s been psychedelicized…
…Time has come today
There are things to realize…
Follow the breadcrumb trail
Or better yet, Ariadne, lead me home