LXXXIII
If we’d thought a bit about Sisyphus
When we started painting the town…
Two sheiks of Islam’s tale
Such a simple word, but not so, sounding, as it does, like I’m in.
Or, Ah, men.
But during the Great Vowel Shift, in English, Amen with a short A became an almost-homophone with Gay-men. Or Cayman, for your Aunt Tillian folk.
Not to be confused with the Arabic, I mean, or I’m mean. Which is not to be confused with I’m nasty, the nearly-Spoonerized Namasté.
Ah, Salaam. I like him.
A Puritan chimp. Chimp pansy?
Chimpathy for the Devil.
Chimpatico.
Chimpatheque.
While downstream in Léopoldville, where that earlier, more protracted Rumble in the Jungle: the slow upsurge of an idea of independent statehood, advanced by les évolués and spearheaded by le Mouvement National Congolaise…
Mais, au même moment, Lumumba is preaching and there exist zero Congolese physicians in the Congo. There are, however, Francophone Haitian docs, many of whom head home soon after the Belgians do. And some return with more than memories in their blood.
In 1969, a private blood bank in Port-au-Prince offers folks three bucks a liter, and the donors line up. Needles to say.
And then, across the waves, north by northeast and westward this time, a great bird carries bottles of frozen plasma to the good old USA.
1980: a pattern spotted. Pneumonia in gay men, in and around Los Angeles, their immune systems, mysteriously, depleted.
Slowly the dots connect. New York bathhouses. Haitian “heterosexuals” in Miami. The good, the bad, and the humid. And then the clouds sweep away you see the mountain. Doctor Livingstone…
Smokey Robinson wrote and produced it, the Marvelettes sang it and Motown, always hunting for the next hit, cut it in vinyl:
What’s this whole world comin’ to?
Things just ain’t the same
Any time the hunter
Gets captured by the game…
A tune so catchy, it’s infectious. Viral, even.
There’s ou-topos like home
The spectacle of false gods competing for domination in a game of comparative mythology
Of all the yin points in all the meridians of the world…
I was a veil of illusion for the FBI
It’s not nice to tease gravity
The volt, amp and watt of it
Far becomes close
Objects in mirror are mirrored objects
Reflex, reflux toward the real
OVER WINE
He glanced, gave me extra charm
and I took it as my own.
Happily I gulped a star.
I let myself be invented,
modeled on my own reflection
in his eyes. I dance, dance, dance
in the stir of sudden wings.
The chair’s a chair, the wine is wine,
in a wineglass that’s the wineglass
standing there by standing there.
Only I’m imaginary,
make-believe beyond belief,
so fictitious that it hurts.
And I tell him tales about
ants that die of love beneath
a dandelion’s constellation.
I swear a white rose will sing
if you sprinkle it with wine.
I laugh and tilt my head
cautiously, as if to check
whether the invention works.
I dance, dance inside my stunned
skin, in his arms that create me.
Eve from rib, Venus from foam,
Minerva from Jupiter’s head –
all three were more real than me.
When he isn’t looking at me,
I try to catch my reflection
on the wall. And see the nail
where a picture used to be.
Wisŧawa Szymborska, Poems: New and Collected. Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, trans. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1998.
And yes, when the subway PA is sufficiently degraded, “Change here for the A, C, B, F and M trains,” can sound like “A, C, B, S&M trains.” Or perhaps it’s in the ear of the behearer.
Where poets run, scholars follow, said Raymond Williams oncet
Equal: a concept which, outside mathematics, rarely proves loadbearing
How many shades of meaning inhere in the phrase: clean bill of health?
Pulses of the world: who can feel them all?
Sometimes the train goes off the rails
Sometimes the rails go out from under the train
Every river longs, at some point, to be an ice cube
If I had a stammer…
1610: The little and the big: moons of Jupiter
1884: The big and the little: tubercle bacillus
So now we know what causes consumption. Yet the social animal remains sick as a dog.
Patterns and false patterns aka syndromes
Cause required for a syndrome
But in the case of a pattern, cause need not apply
Give yourself a concept long enough and you can leverage your mind out of sanity
Mic and Mac walk into a bar…
Demiurgos, Demigorgon and a host of lesser superbeings bum rush the Eppur si muove bar and grill
Robert Koch walks into a bar. And the bartender says: Why the lung face?
And a customer says: Hey, aren’t you the Germ-man?
And in the back room a twelve-inch pianist is playing Genie with the light brown coma…
Roll over Plathoven and tell Descartotle the news
Set ‘em up Ganymede
Of all the Jing joints…
And peering through her glass, the astromomix discovers Coma Berenices’ snood
While upstream from cause: eppur si muove.
Et mutat.
Et transformat.
And even cause changes and transforms
Catching
Ka-ching
Eee-Ching
Y-ching?
How many dots make an elephant?
Eppur si, yanqui no
Semper si eppur FiDi
Socialism is what has been sought in vain for so long under the name of morality.
Says Ernst Bloch in Principle of Hope.
And hope: unconcretized plenitude
Wisdom is what has been sought in vain for so long under the name of love.
¿Qué libro, marinero?
Dante says in La Vita Nuova: …you cannot completely understand what you have not experienced.” L’esperienza che intender non la puo chi non la prova.
But experience is not equivalent to understanding. Even in the case of one’s “own” experience. The question, so often “misunderstood,” is less one of possession than of access.
Fucklore
Fucktales
Fuck dancing
Fuck singing
Fuck medicine
Fake care
Fake a stand
Fake it to the limit
Fake the money and run
Fake it real
Lily Duchamp
Dude descending a staircase
“China,” according to Jullien in …Nude, “never conceived of mimesis…
“…the justification for the existence of art is not rooted in the natural human delight in ‘imitation,’ evoked by Aristotle at the beginning of his Poetics…”
Therefore, with regard to the Classical idea of transferred, transported or transposed form: does the form appear in “nature,” or is it an externalization of the mind of the artist, transferring it directly to matter, without mediation? [A question distilled by Panofsky.]
It’s a slippery “or,” (oar), as oars and ors so often be. Implying that the mind of the artist is somehow outside nature.
Yet this notion of direct transfer of mind (faith) was as central to the art of the middle ages as it is to abstract art, and in both Classical and Neo-classical periods, the dominant role of the artist was as mimetic instrument of nature, mystically augmented, in the latter case by “imagination,” or “genius.”
Your wound is the deepest wound.
Your hurt is the one true hurt.
And all around, a swarm of cheap imitators –
eidolons.
But the irony, if one can call it that, is by constituting oneself as the one true real, one vanishes into concept.
Soften into the real.
