CVIV

 

Ana Ana, the woman so beautiful you have to say her name twice. (Fragment from a novel.)

 

Via the novel, Europe indeed “discovered” the world, or rather a deepened awareness of the one it was already living in. Even when, as in books like Tom Jones, or Clarissa, it tried to gloss it.

But this world, both home and away, was not Magellan’s world, nor Francis Drake’s, nor Rothschild’s, nor Lloyds’, nor the World Bank’s.

The novel discovered the life of ten thousand beings and things, and the relation among them. It stood out as a category beyond categories, situated at the meeting point of heaven and earth. Not God’s Heaven, nor NASA’s, nor the earth of Rio Tinto, nor Standard Oil, nor United Fruit, nor ITT, nor IG Farben, nor GM, nor Monsanto, nor Google.

The world the novel discovered and continues to discover cannot be bordered, sharply defined, or owned. But it can find a place within the reader’s consciousness which it transformed even as it, itself, is transformed. Unlike territory, or a “resource,” a novel is and remains irreducible, impossible to fully delineate or capture, yet it is entirely real. And though its breath slows, whether in deep slumber or approaching the embrace of death, the novel, like the generative processes of life itself, by name and inclination, serves as a gateway to the new.

 

Once I had a thought, or should I say it had me?

 

The dao, hidden, of course, within the visible, even ostentatious, presence of the Novel. Wind-like, we see and feel the effects of a force that remains invisible, yet it penetrates and shapes, and influences the course of things. The novel uses written language, but its nature, its secret source of power, is that it gestures constantly toward that which cannot be expressed in words. Its plenitude, its repleteness, suggests the void.

 

 

Is “void” the word word in a Yiddish accent?

In the beginning, oy, was the Void.

Oy, such a Void!

And the Void, it was G*d.

With a beard?

Beard, shmeard. He – she – it, what’s the difference? A Void is a Void is a Void.

And the void on the street?

How should I know?

You should know – goyishe Kopf! I twisted my ankle – look, it’s swollen like a grapefruit – could have broken my hip replacement!

Oy, better you should avoid the void. In the meantime, hire a good slip and fall… my cousin Morris, he works on contingency…

 

So, bubby, what’s the void from Johannesburg?

 

The dead, it turns out, are not so humble as many would like them to be

 

Fiction: repository of the true

 

The fish trap exists because of the fish;

Once you’ve gotten the fish, you can forget the trap.

The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit;

Once you’ve gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare.

Words exist because of meaning;

Once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words.

Where can I find a man who has forgotten the words so I can have a word with him?

Asked Zhuangzi.

 

Far becomes middle

 

“Cops pour into upstate hamlet where escapees ‘were seen,’” runs a two-page wide headline in the June 10, 2015 New York Post, June 10, 2015.

“Army of heavily armed cops…” “Many were camouflaged and toting large sniper rifles with extra magazines slung across their shoulders.” Do sniper rifles have shoulders? Go ask Alice. When she lives upstate.

“But by evening, many of the officers were pulling out of the heavily wooded area.” Heavily, heavily, hulks the hunter.

“It stands to reason,” said an official, “that she [the inside accomplice] didn’t leave the [getaway] car because she had a panic attack.”

Dannemora, mon amour.

It stands to reason, and falls to…

 

Lightly, lightly, leaps lapine

 

All self-respecting corruption rides in on the heels of reform

 

Does TS stand for “tortured soul”? Couldn’t that as easily apply to Ezra (“in-for-a”) Pound?

 

Women slumber. Mendoza.

 

Wobbles in the Life of an American Fattie

 

Nice day for…

State sponsored terror

 

He broke out of his thoughts using a hacksaw and knotted sheets. Some say he had a woman inside…

 

The West spends an extraordinary amount of energy keeping some things inside and other things outside and inventing categories for which has to be where when. While, inevitably, life is leakage.

 

Human kind, wrote Eliot, cannot bear very much reality.

Which is an interesting observation, given that really, there is nothing outside of, or beyond, reality. So if not precisely “reality,” what is it, then, that “human kind” is at such pains to bear?

 

 

An obsestuous relationship?

 

I was a hemophage for the FBI

 

In foundational Ba Gua Zhang, we learn something called the “slow walk.” In and of itself, the slow walk is beneficial on numerous levels, but it also trains the body for the moving, yet rooted power that is the basis of the art.

In turning 65, more or less, it occurs to you that for years, decades even, perhaps since some indistinct moment in the ‘70s, you have been slow walking, without consciously intending to, away from a whole set of inherited notions about how reality operates, from an entire system of thought, and of invisible, hence unthinkable, assumptions about what it is “to be.”

And toward, or into, what?

All you know is that slow walking changes your idea about what walking is. Just as internal cultivation, little by little, shifts the way your breathe, which alters your awareness of what it is to breathe, which, in turn, changes the way you breathe and process breath – the process by which your body gives and receives its movement, its stillness, its animating energy, and spirit.

And the amazing thing is: anybody who can walk can learn to slow walk.

 

Woe, woe, woe

You’re bored

Genitals asteam

 

Heavily, heavily, heavily, heavily

Lycanthropes extreme…

 

Evitez le “awesome.”

 

You remind me of myself when I was old

 

I want to find the man who has forgotten the cannoli so I can share a cannolu with him.

 

Don’t forget the cannoli or the meridians, or the five powers.

 

The great reciprocating movement of yang and yin. What else is needed? Dragon in the sea, tiger on the mountain. What else avails?

 

How are Glocks in Dannemora?

Is that little brook still leaping there?


Does it still run down to Donny cove


Through Killybegs, Kilkerry and Kildare?

            How are Glocks in Dannemora?


Is that willow tree still weeping there?


Does that lassie with the twinklin’ eye


Come smilin’ by and does she walk away,



Sad and dreamy there not to see me there?

            
So I ask each weepin’ willow

And each brook along the way,


And each lass that comes a-sighin’ too ra lay


How are Glocks in Danemorra this fine day?

            Pace Finian, pace E.Y. Harburg

 

Oops, I forgot to be old…

 

More signifiers than a barrow of monkeys

 

Monkey signs and monkey shines, and the fate of the master (e)race(r), its dust beatn out on the window sill.

And what of the floating signifier? Is there any word?

Drown’d, drown’d, alas!

            At last?

            And alack.

 

Bill’s dung roman

 

Einstein on Tar Beach

 

Discovered under the tar paper of Einstein’s Beach, a previously unknown and massive trove of Whitman poems: Grains of Sand – all constellated around the anthemic, multi-cadenced “Song for Globalization.”

 

The state puts itself on trial, and exonerates itself…

till heads will tell

and blood will roll