LXXXV

 

Urge and demiurge

 

Better nude than orange boiler suit cosplay, Guantánamo, or ISIS-style

How do you know…?

 

Too much coffee and your kidneys bang together like castanets

 

When you drink it, a café au lait, at Le G., it comes in a cranium-shaped bowl.

Which reminds you of the tale “The Great Happiness” (至樂zhìlè, chapter 18), in Zhuangzi. When, traveling, Z. seesa skull lying at the side of the road. He sighs: Ah, too bad! To which the skull replies “How do you know it’s bad to be dead?”

Thinks Zhuangzi to hisself: “I’ll ask poor Yorick.”

 

Gendrification: the intersection of real estate and sexual politix

 

Shleparone: definition self-evident

 

Byet: but yet

 

In the Korean section of the Met, an Illustrated Manuscript of the Lotus Sutra, an “accordion-folded format book,” the characters and images brushed in gold and silver ink on mulberry paper dyed so darkly indigo, it appears black. The upper left quadrant of image shows the Parable of the Burning House, in which “a father (representing Buddha), promises animal-drawn carts to his child (representing sentient beings), to tempt him away from poisonous insects, snakes, and the burning house (perils of the material world). Once outside, the child is rewarded with the a grand carriage, the ‘One Vehicle’ of Mahayana Buddhism.

 

We’re a’ met thegither here to sit and to crack,

Wi’ oor glasses in oor hands and oor wark upon oor back;

And there’s no trade amang them a’ can either mend or mak’

If it wasna for the wark o’ the weavers.

 

If it wasna for the weavers, what would they do?

We wouldna ha’ claith made o’ or woo’,

We woudna ha’ a coat, neither black nor blue,

Gin it wasn for the wark o’ the weavers.

 

…There’s oor wrichts and oor slaters and glaziers and a’

Oor doctors and oor ministers and them that live by law,

And our friends in Sooth Ameriky, though them we never saw,

But we ken they wear the wark o’ the weavers.

 

There’s oor sailors and oor sodgers, we ken the’re a’ bauld,

But if they hadna claes, faith, they couldna fecht for cauld;

The high and the low, the rich and puir, a’ body yound and auld –

They winna wan’t the wark o’ the weavers.

[from The Shuttle and Cage: Industrial Folk Ballads. Ewan MacColl, ed. London: Workers’ Music Association, 1954. p. 10]

 

Ay, true enough lads, but ye Nude, now, she dinna want the wark o’ the weavers.

And why? There couldn ha’ been a Golden Age wi’out Nudes nor vice versa. Nay, we didna always want the wark o’ the weavers. Suppon a time… twas nae need to bespeak a thing, for twas nae social fabric to weave, nor rend, nor mend…

 

 

Zephyrus only, who blows my Psyche to me.

Boreas need not apply.

 

No surprise that they fell, broke or were broken off, for how could Eros’s have supported those vanished wings? And what possible structure of that body would have allowed him to fly?

Vestigial.

Eidolonic.

Trace.

 

Post-modernity: delectable, byet indigestible.

 

Nude: unfailingly unveiled

 

Bespeak nothing

Want nothing

The work of the weavers

not even

 

Once upon a time in the 20th Century

 

Get sick, get well

Hang around the inkwell

 

Ah, we’re getting anxious again. Time to blow up someone else’s kids and sacrifice some of our own. Or maybe just end it all. In a good cause. Like Helen’s abduction.

 

The Perfect Drang

 

The Beast: more bellies than you can shake a stick at

 

There is a distinction to be made among Bubby, Bibi and Habibi

There are things to realize

 

I was a wet collodion plate for the FBI

 

Orgonized Labor

Reich on

 

There’s nothing, really nothing to turn off…

 

Skein of fools

 

 

It has been said of this artist [Gu Khaizi] that his painting was like a spring silkwork spinning its filament, so delicately did his line emerge and capture in its continuity the unbroken flow of the moving lines of a robe, the uninterrupted dynamism of life. “At first sight,” this painting seems “flat and facile” and the formal resemblance is sometimes even faulty; but “on closer inspection, its art is complete and it contains something that cannot be described in words.” Jullien, …Nude, p. 86.

 

coulant

flotant

écoulement

 

The Many Lives and Heroic Adventures of Guy Parnay

 

One wouldn’t want to confuse, on any menu, un amuse-bouche with an abused moose.

 

Petit à petit

 

I’m yin with the yang crowd

 

Bellerophontes: breaker and rider of Pegasus; slayer of Chimera, she of the polymorphic nature, dragonish fire-breather, disturber of purity – choked on a melted plug of lead.

 

Cadmus, culture hero: bringer of the ABZs, doer-in of the spring-guarding dragon, sower of its teeth, from which sprang a race of men, all men, who, when C. chucked a stone amidst them, murdered one another down to a handful of five who ceased their blood-letting long enough to found Thebes.

And gave birth to Cadmium, cousin to Mercury and the Kitchen Zinc.

 

Tendency toward harmonious alignment.

 

Web keeps on weaving.