Yuh

Yeah, hey, hi,

it is weird even to have thoughts condsidering...i have to admit that thoughts are more destroyable now than a month ago. we continue to be able to cry over weather. i think you said yourself, lauren, that all the weather in the southeast has been positively biblical, and it's true, but the krustians whose presumption is that they would see these things have made a magic of their bureaucratizing of this event...anyway, one hopes for insights one never receives.

uh, i hate poetry. i wish i could indict poetry. i've been going round to j. corey's blog once in a while on the suggestion of a friend, and remain unimpressed even by his impressive intellect and clear appreciation of poetry.

i think i want more hate of poetry. to paraphrase the musician robert forster, "let's burn this land."

Poetry Is a Destructive Force

That's what misery is,
Nothing to have at heart.

It is to have or nothing.

It is a thing to have,
A lion, an ox in his breast,
To feel it breathing there.

Corazon, stout dog,
Young ox, bow-legged bear,
He tastes its blood, not spit.

He is like a man
In the body of a violent beast.
Its muscles are his own...

The lion sleeps in the sun.
Its nose is on its paws.
It can kill a man.


This has never been known to me more than today. I am in the racuous hue of october summer sun, california sycamores and gossamer and webs, and i hate a world that i can only ravage with poetry, that's all. that's it. that poetry is ours only to destroy our attentions.

rage rage rage, i bought ronald reagan stamps today at the liberal post office.

I went to brenda's book release party the other day. intensely bourgeois, but at lease hemmed around by intensities of loss. though i hate to admit it, even in their comforts the boomers must be experiencing a grave loss, all the more so for their complicity in it - loss of ideals, loss of country, loss of purposes, propped only by friends and fellow travelers.

I have to acknowledge a debt to the boomers, much as it pains me - though i have a hard time believing their cant, their idealism cannot be dismissed as a polestar, no matter how willing we are to sneer and ironize them into impotence.

this will happen to us.


quick to anger and forgetting.

whirling muddle, clever apple

it's scary to me to see y'all having ideas, as my brain over the last six weeks has been a water-wheel around anxiety (propelled by cnn-in-search-of-disaster). but last night tony and i and his friend shuo from beijing (who stayed with us because a rita tree branch fell on his roof) watched 'the enigma of kaspar hauser'. a part reminds me of your commentary on nature hiding....in the movie, kaspar hauser has been raised in solitary confinement, and, released as an adolescent, is taught to speak and walk and so on. someone is showing him a bunch of apples, and he says to put the apples back in the grass, they want to rest. and the man talking to him says 'apples don't want anything, they just follow our will.' to demonstrate this, rolls an apple. but said apple hits a bump and rolls off. and kaspar says 'now that's a clever apple, it didn't do what you want, it's rolled off and hidden itself in the grass.'

somehow that makes me think of tiny hurricanes hiding themselves (verstecken sich) in the grass. right now it's one hundred degrees in houston so elemental forces are very much in evidence. please wave your hands around and distract them, somebody.

i have nothing really to contribute to heraclitus conversation but can circle in the middle of it with illogic ripples. if you, my persons, still want to read rojo 'book of the green man' i actually did check it out of the rice library.

i am a little concerned about my parents, who seem also very anxious and skittish and circular today. they are bearing up well considering but i think they will need some time to shiver off the strain of a second hurricane alert. ugh, current times are a big suspended hanging plane (on a tilt) we could ice skate on, were they not on a tilt, in addition were they not one hundred degrees and fit for firey salamanders.

i've been reading some jabes (from book of ?s), gave up for a little while w/rita, but think i will begin soon again - here's a bit from that:

"'Look how his face turns into a bird,' said Reb Elfer to Reb Yod. 'And how the squirrel tries to recognize itself in this face.

Look how his face turns into a branch. And how the branch blossoms for the face.

From the alder to the fir, from the abundant baobab to the delicate profile of the spindle tree: look how the world of trees ages and dies in man's face.

For us, too, the time of transparency will come."

Hooey-clitus

so as you can see that was hooey. let me say some more coherent things about tha h-may-an.

so, heraclitus is known primarily for two things: the cliche "you can't step into the same river twice" and the aforementioned idea phanta rei, or everything flows. but there are also some other, quite gnomic sayings of his. the first which contradicts phanta rei, is "listen to my word, not to me" or something to that effect (i'm dogsitting, and don't have my heraclitus handy). this is the first appearance of what we've all come to know and love as "logos." it's a good thing, and, some have suggested, the first instance of writerly selfconsciousness in the western tradition - that is, separating the word (the written word) from the speaker. a kind of attempt at objectivity, again a concept that, as far as i can tell, contradicts phanta rei.

the other idea which makes me want to cling to the old crank is "nature loves to hide," as good a statement of resistance against the information of the senses as one is likely to get. plus, hiding is an important act to me personally, as a scorpionic, occasionally under a rock in the desert type.

phanta rei, fuckin' a

dudes,

i was gonna post that shit, but it was crap. in the interest of full disclosure, here is the crap:

"Enoch Cristofferson Rest Stop"

Magpies, almond to almond a
long tail.

The dog chews a ball
with a look that betrays a thought,

then flips on her back on the lawn,

gets up and growls at her feet.


I wish I could yell at my own feet
in such a way, a joyful noise

full of it.
of them, of you, only you.

a muscle atop your head.
I had not been in the satifactions

a fine day behind the windbreak
of old trees made.

---

or, the end of the heraclitus poems, as I understand them.

Last February or so, I started a series of poems that were initially supposed to be a commentary/translation/attempt to understand the pre-socratic greek philosopher heraclitus. the process was interesting for a number of reasons. first among those was the opportunity to read, almost at random, a collection of writings which I soon found out was a kind of precursor to some aspects of the French philosophy which simultaneously vexed me and made me equal parts curious and deeply skeptical, philosophers who I rightly or wrongly (ignorantly) blamed for the aestheticism and rigorously skeptical excesses of poetry that was too steeped in their theories. all of this I knew nothing about, but of course preteneded that I did, and that I was taking part in some debate which the various and sundry poetry camps had designed, seemingly to advance careers or stake claims (For anti-nationalism and tipsy spirituality?) I remained unconvinced.

at any rate, Heraclitus popped into my head one day, an expression of the Heraclitan doctrine Phanta rei, or , everything flows. Come to think of it, it must have been G M Hopkins, with his reference to "Heraclitan Fire" in "the Windhover." I loved the sound of the phrase.

At any rate, I embarked on a research project, to cast a fairly wide net, reading Victorian scholars as well as contemporary scholars, who all have magnificent commentaries on this business, and who will charm you with their tweed lined pens.

The poems that resulted, which amounted to about sixteen pages of poems varying in length fom one to three pages, are a record of the period. They make no address to Heraclitus' ideas directly, and may be a misreading of the ideas (not an hard thing to do with a guy who was known as Heraclitus the obscure.


the most important impact all of this had on the poems was to increase my tendency to shift my eye quickly, from

spiders are spinning
in the sweatshirt I left
on the clothesline.

---

so steve, it should be clear that there ain't no ideas about the big H in here. i might do something more layter, but i want to leave H-man and get into township and range, and the history of property in america.

love

Heraclitus Doesn't Think His Therapist is Helping

Flying J,

I thought you were going to drop some Heraclitean fire on us here -- I was hoping against hope when I checked in this morning 'cause I was going to steal your thoughts for my Darwin discussion this morning. Seriously, sight unseen, whatever your thoughts had been -- whoof! Steal-o-rama!

(As it was I just wrote and erased his name ad nauseum on the dry erase board -- two hours' worth of HERACLITUS HERACLITUS HERACLITUS... My students now understand the importance of hurling things.)

So what were you going to post? Did you censor yourself because your thoughts were simply too revolutionary?