jazz, rain, i ching, power, phonetics, time, tolstoy, whale dream, brrrr!

the record turned, spitting out solid concrete trumpet notes. the rain pattered. the brewhaha next door clamored. i sat, breathed in the thick night air. what to write? “Lo! rain, lo! the power is full!” thus counselled the i ching. power? the plosive puh gives birth to the diphthong, pow. errrr. the newborn shrieks! the chain of life perpetuates itself! many have made/accepted choices, based on/with/for/because of this word. time is perpetuated by power. the universe is a giant clock, the battery of which is power. rather, clocks are a representation of the universe. everything, the earth going around the sun, the sun hurtling through space, the giant nebula and galaxies, the rain falling on the roof, the cursor blinking on my screen, is all one giant cosmic clock. is it possible to have no power? i can’t create power. power was there before i came into the world, and it will be there after i exit. something must give it to me, which means of course it would have power over me. i was rereading this and realized i may have unconsciously stolen that straight out of war and peace- if writing is power, tolstoy had power over me; he was puppeteering me from the grave. or was it i who had power over him, since he is powerless to claim the idea or correct me if i misrepresented what he said? i dont have my copy of war and peace with me, so i cant verify it, but i believe power was one of the strings that ran throughout the fabric of the story and the commentary on history: not even napoleon had power, living a human life necessarily entails being pulled along by the great cosmic river of time. all of us are under the power of the cosmos where we have been thrown. if any of us had any real power we would be able to escape death, but death annuls even the slightest doubt any of us may entertain about “having” power. for that matter, unless every time you utter a word, the word you utter is invented on the spot, with its own connotations, and you are able to ascribe said connotations to the word instantaniously as you speak it, it seems that it is impossible to write or speak without succumbing to the power of language. however, it may be possible to exert your own power while bringing words together, even though all the words you use have been used countless times before. is this power? or just making due with what we are given? making due seems like a safe way of putting it. as a child i would have a dream where i think i experienced something like the sublime, only a horrible sublime. the sensation was something like being rubbed up against an enormous whale unconscious of the tiny particle being crushed by its enormity. every once in a while, years after i stopped having the dream, i used to be able to close my eyes and imagine it, feel it. a kind of dizzyness would ensue, a vertigo. only i was lying down, so there was no falling off buildings or step ladders involved. gigantic, enormous, gargantuan do not capture it. immense and massive come closer, as they seem to point to the weight of the thing, which is what i felt, more than the size. the difference in weight, between myself, and the whale. i could never see the entire whale at the same time. only the blue surface rubbing up against myself, unconscious of me. the closest ive come to this feeling in a decade or so was when i took a friend camping about 2 years ago in the appalacians. we went to table rock, which looks over linville gorge in western north carolina. after ducking down into a crevice in the rock, you find yourself underneath a giant boulder that hangs out over a ledge, over which if you look, youll find yourself staring down into space. its not called a gorge for nothing. if you go along the ledge to the right, you’ll find a slab of rock that hangs out, only this one maybe 2 feet over the ledge, so you can fit your sleeping bag underneath and find the perfect place to sleep, as it protects you should it rain. the wind sweeps up over the ledge and whips through the cleft. so i’m laying there slowly falling asleep but suddenly realize the weight of the rock hanging over my body. even though i know its been hanging there for thousands if not millions of years, i can’t prevent myself from thinking about the idea of the rock falling that night, obliterating me. i could feel the weight of the thing hanging over me. the other night i went to sleep with the window open as it was still warm at that point in the night. in my dream i woke up and felt cold. i got up and put socks and a shirt on, then got back into bed and fell asleep. i woke up again, sockless and shirtless. “it must have been a dream.” i got up, put on my socks and shirt, and lay back down. this happened i know not how many times throughout the night. finally, i really woke up, early in the morning, 4 or so. i got up, put on a shirt and socks, got back into bed, and couldn’t fall back asleep.

Yin yangish franglish with a pinch of MC Escherish spice sprinkled in.

Tic, tic, tic. She kept at it, tic tic. She picked up her glass of water, took a sip, looked up mid-sip, as if she were remembering something, then placed the glass down. One of her brownish black locks fell down over the left side of her face, blocking her right eye. She was cyclopian. Tic, tic. “Dis-moi, qu’est-ce qu’on va faire? Tu veux que je téléphone à ma mère?” “Ecoute, il faut que je te dise quelque chose. Il faut que nous nous quittions.” She said nothing. She pulled her cell phone from her purse and started pushing buttons, staring at it fixedly, pretending to send a message to someone even though I’m sure she knew I knew she was pretending. What else was there to do? What an awkward, miserable situation.

Tic, tic, tic. Elle continuait à taper, tic tic. Elle a levé sa verre d’eau, pris une petite gorgée, tout d’un coup enlevé la tête, comme si elle se souvenait de quelque truc, puis remis la verre. Une mèche, d’un brun noirâtre, est tombée sur le côté droit de son visage, en dérobant son oeil à gauche. Elle était cyclopienne. Tic, tic. “Well, what are we going to do? Should I call my mother?” “Hold on, I need to tell you something. It’s better that we separate.” Elle n’a rien dit. Elle a tiré son cellulaire de son sac à main et a commencé à pousser des boutons, en le regardant fixement, en simulant envoyer un message à quelqu’un même quand je suis sûr qu’elle savait que je savais qu’elle simulait. Mais quoi d’autre à faire? Quelle situation dégueulasse.

What is a book?

A symbol machine, a letter (epistolary), a mind wrench, a mind monkey wrench, a cosmos, spectacles, a telescope, binoculars (voyeurist!), a house, a castle, a town, verbal psilocybin, kindling, a fuse, a pacifist terrorist, an ink blot, a tree (leaves, flowers, fruit, stems, branches, bird nest, bark, trunk, roots), a candle that spreads darkness (image borrowed from The Trial), a labyrinth, a fairy god mother, a vortex leading away from and toward you, a step forward back up or down, a desperate cry for help, fertile or barren soil, a cleansing rain, corn on the cob (eat from left to right, drop down a line, repeat), a mosaic, a human, one of those books with images on each page that move around as you flip through them (one kind of book as metaphor for another), nourishment, the moon (earth is author, sun reader…or the other way around), an invisible story, a companion, a slave, a master, the serpant in the garden, and of course, medicine for the soul.

St SSt SSSt sssT gaaaah

Mise-en-abyme? Abyme? My image (where IT would have been in the mirror) is wiped out by the light, like the light at the end of the tunnel piercing through the space of the photo, erasing the subject that took (usurped from time) the picture. And what looks like infinite space reaching back, even though the wall/mirror/end of space was about 10 feet away from the spot where I took the photo. The Ionic capitals hold up the fake vaults..Is it possible to attempt to communicate without admitting the root structure, the ancestors, the egg of our consciousness? Eh Apollo? Strum away on thy lyre! The I is no more vulnerable to capture by the word “I” than a snipe by a paper bag, or a sieve by the dirt, pebbles and sand passing through it!
O = forgetfulness. Image disappearing into nothingness, nothing circumscribed, I forget! I reach back into the abyss behind my head but find nothing.
Z = memory. Life is lived, diagonal line reaching back into abyss but this time locates the desired object, and that segment of life is lived over again in an image.
OZ!
What letter would the Proustian mémoire involontaire be? An X? One of the lines being the lived time, the other being the memory that pierces through unexpectedly.
Walter Benjamin: “For an experienced event is finite-at any rate, confined to one sphere of experience; a remembered event is infinite, because it is only a key to everything that happened before it and after it.”
Ю

————

An imitation of Borges is as different from the Borges text as a Cervantes text, written over again centuries later, in the exact same words, but in a different context.

HERE is a Borges parable, entitled “Everything and Nothing”:

There was no one in him; behind his face (which even through the bad paintings of those times resembles no other) and his words, which were copious, fantastic and stormy, there was only a bit of coldness, a dream dreamt by no one. At first he thought that all people were like him, but the astonishment of a friend to whom he had begun to speak of this emptiness showed him his error and made him feel always that an individual should not differ in outward appearance. Once he thought that in books he would find a cure for his ill and thus he learned the small Latin and less Greek a contemporary would speak of; later he considered that what he sought might well be found in an elemental rite of humanity, and let himself be initiated by Anne Hathaway one long June afternoon. At the age of twenty-odd years he went to London. Instinctively he had already become profiscient in the habit of simulating that he was someone, so that others would not discover his condition as no one; in London he found the profession to which he was predestined, that of the actor, who on a stage plays at being another before a gathering of people who play at taking him for that other person. His histrionic tasks brought him a singular satisfaction, perhaps the first he had ever known; but once the last verse had been acclaimed and the last dead man withdrawn from the stage, the hated flavor of unreality returned to him. He ceased to be Ferrex or Tamerlane and became no one again. Thus hounded, he took to imagining other heroes and other tragic fables. And so, while his flesh fulfilled its destiny as flesh in the taverns and brothels of London, the soul that inhabited him was Caesar, who disregards the augur’s admonition, and Juliet, who abhors the lark, and Macbeth, who converses on the plain with the witches who are also Fates. No one has ever been so many men as this man, who like the Egyption Proteus could exhaust all the guises of reality. At times he would leave a confession hidden away in some corner of his work, certain that it would not be deciphered; Richard affirms that in his person he plays the part of many and Iago claims with curious words, “I am not what I am.” The fundamental identity of existing, dreaming and acting inspired famous passages of his.
For twenty years he persisted in that controlled hallucination, but one morning he was suddenly gripped by the tedium and the terror of being so many kings who die by the sword and so many suffering lovers who converge, diverge and melodiously expire. That very day he arranged to sell his theater. Within a week he had returned to his native village, where he recovered the trees and rivers of his childhood and did not relate them to the others his muse had celebrated, illustrious with mythological allusions and Latin terms. He had to be someone; he was a retired impresario who had made his fortune and concerned himself with loans, lawsuits and petty usury. It was in this charactor that he dictated the arid will and testament known to us, from which he deliberately excluded all traces of pathos or literature. His friends from London would visit his retreat and for them he would take up again his role as poet.
History adds that before or after dying he found himself in the presence of God and told Him: “I who have been so many men in vain want to be one and myself.” The voice of the Lord answered from a whirlwind: “Neither am I anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one.”

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, 1988. 202.

Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths. New York: New Directions, 1964. 248-249.

River to Civilisation:

Back off, fucker!