Rider

The Unspoken Word

Going through my old Word documents yesterday I found this piece, written when I was a Freshman in Highschool.

The Unspoken Word

In the play Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, one theme that is prominent is Juliet’s parents’ desire to have Juliet married, and the lack of communication between them. The Capulets were so fast to marry Juliet to Paris, that they did not consider Juliet’s opinion on the matter. This caused many problems, and eventually led to the tragic ending, which might have been avoided.

In Act 1, Scene 3, Lady Capulet tries to persuade Juliet to marry Paris. Juliet is not impressed and says, “I will look to like, if looking liking move.” Juliet obviously not interested in Paris, but her mother persists in persuading her to marry him. This type of persuasion is still around today in other forms.

In Act 3, Scene 4, Juliet’s father tells Paris that Juliet will marry him. He does this without Juliet’s consent. This shows a lack of communication between parent and child. This also shows that Capulet is so anxious to see his daughter married that he doesn’t even bother to talk to her about it. If he had not been so eager to marry her, and communicated with her better, many problems could have been avoided.

In Act 3, Scene 5, Capulet announces that Juliet will marry Paris. This announcement alone shows that Capulet has not put much thought, if any, into Juliet’s opinion. It also puts a great pressure on Juliet to marry Paris. This might have never happened if Juliet had communicated with her father better, and had told him about her relationship with Romeo. It also could have been avoided if the Capulets had not been so eager to marry Juliet.

As one can see, Juliet’s parents tried many times to convince Juliet to marry Paris. What they did not know is that Juliet was already married to Romeo. Maybe if Juliet had communicated her relationship with Romeo to her parents, her and Romeo’s tragic death could have been avoided. It could probably also have been avoided if Juliet’s parents had not had such a great desire to marry Juliet. These themes show us how communication is the key to clarity, and without it things may turn out disastrous.

Bull story

"What is the pain that fosters my liking?" said the she-wolf to the boy on the bench. "I am unto this spot as all living things," replied the boy. "Satiated?" asked the foxy wolf. "Well," looking her in the eye atwixt her talons, "I'd say I know what I've got between my knees." "A crystal?" replied fox. "No, lady, it's a bull." "Was it that that hurt?" "Not really, but I got distracted and tumbled over a thing or two and here I sit with it. You see it's smarting from a bad fall we took together over on Geneva way." "Yes, I can see it's panting," she mused.

Boy got up leaving bull to the cobblestones. The beast reclined, not held up any longer, a faint guffaw issuing from his nostrils. His skin was black and very sleek, and in some places especially black where blood wet the hide. "I must go back," said the boy to the she-wolf, and without looking down at the bull headed on his way, out the nearest corner of the park.

Fox sat for a moment on the cobblestones where small maroon rivers, hot and sticky, flowed between the cracks. Fox was not sentimental, but she did like a good licking every now and then. She brushed her white bushy mane against the ailing side of bull. Her hairs glistened and stuck together with bull's blood. She would carry herself home to her younglings who, cleaning her off, would have their evening meal.

Meditation

Hitting the clear spot
of breath in stomach and
the hole of my head arching
all the way there open
and forgiving the momentary
imposition of thought continuing
to the smile the tear
the heartbeat lessens

I will grow older with
or without you and you
are a bit of me and
sinking on my stool or
pillow reading a poem
I think of art as a
clear place that the
mind rejuvinates

And I am still
here where the ripple
of attention lets itself
into the movement of that
stillness and pacing the
space between the emergence
of all things and the love
I faulter with therein

Subtitle

I can go anywhere
but will I? who is
it that is going to go
there? is it "you"? well,
you see you're no longer
here so often, instead I
just keep bringing everything
in but for what? questions
are like anthills, going into
them is very dark but I
imagine there's food there

Pigeons cover lawns and the
picnic table covered in notes
and my heart is warm and
hollow like a sore so why
not take it along admittedly
anything determinate sounds
awful as long as I'm
scampering around avoiding duals
of temperament what I'd like
is to keep going out onto the
little peninsula I found on
the wing and see it
continues as an archipelago
and I can swim! quite
rapidly

In junior high school I
was a bit of a track star
but didn't continue when
my talent became relative
I didn't really like it and
here I am writing these poems
they're nothing special the world
is full of them and waiting for
more though anywhere we put
it it speaks

Ah, a calm. the pigeons
flutter and flags stand limp
and the sun is hard before
setting, warming

I can go anywhere with you

Stag

“They are horrible things,” she said. “They are very loud and mate once a year in a cacophony …” No, she wouldn’t have said “cacophony”. She didn’t like poetry I remember because things could be said more simply. Fittingly she had me pull out one of the two books of poems I was most ready to get rid of. She introduced me to Kipling one might say. “How could you not know what it’s called?” she asked. Indeed, I had been aware of wandering around for the past few weeks having forgotten the name of the beetle tattooed on my wrist. I could only remember what it was called in Swedish, the language of the book of insects where the image came from. This person who really didn’t like the bugs reminded me. And in more detail than anyone before her she described them with a sort of forensic disgust. I’m not sure if she was tactless, helplessly straight-forward, or just still drunk. Anyway, I was charmed. There was no other way to take it. And really I took it as a gift to have the name back, and with such nonchalant familiarity that had nothing to do with affection. The interest was wholly mine, she gave away nothing. Strange, or maybe dolefully commonplace, that we can be so far apart in proclivities and yet offer something so welcoming in spite of ourselves. I gave her Daniel Deronda. Fuck Kipling.

30th

I get an idea and that is what it takes to carry me. It is a distraction from distraction. One wonders what’s to keep the boat afloat. I know ground because I’ve been off it, but never stayed in one spot, because immobility produces its own trail just as air won’t pass there. So I give the day a nod and take down something new from the fire that solders in my hearth. I like it hot, but even the most enigmatic cools frightfully soon if you wave it around the room enough. When that happens my heart is also brittle and won’t move. It stays there and air does not pass and we face each other wondering whom is blocking whom. I think I smoked a hole into it and the circuit continued behind my back. No matter how I turn the whistle of the perforated spot smacks my eardrums like a stain. I begin to carry it around for holding still keeps the molten heavy. Warm it up from within! You want to run around other fiery things until that hollow softens up enough to melt into something whole. There is a will to carry it, giving out hot ash like truth and seeing what can be started. That bird rising all the way to Arizona- met ‘em on the trail while covering my tracks. Fast she was and nearly dangerous but I kept hold of my bullet wounds. They become something like character as skin is to the internal organs. Covering. Holding the work of the fire that formed me while I was standing quietly as my art.

Contra Angelus Novus

The slip

"The lie finds itself at the limit of thought’s ability to form its relation with the world— instead the world has given the liar the nub. There is a fundamental inversion here, in that the liar presumes a freedom from necessity in deriding its engagement by lying. Yet in so far as the lie is necessarily a lie to another body or thought, it comes to betray the freedom of its thinker by recognising the dominance of that thought over itself."

Given the liar the nub? Yes, and what does one do with a nub, but rub. Someone is being given the latter.

Similarly, "betray the freedom" of the thinker works both ways. Something I couldn't help being aware of in writing the above, but I begin to understand the meaning of more fully in retrospect: what is uncovered is that the liar is indeed free. Their utterance is chosen, even if lip service is paid to necessity (requiring a lie). Either there is a real unfreedom in being beholden to bare necessity, or a freedom that fails to recognise itself as such (another sort of unfreedom), or a freedom of utterance without remorse for lies. Maybe the latter is more properly where the betrayal comes in.

The taste of lies

Conrad writes, in a book enamoured of the darkness its protagonist encounters, “You know I hate, detest, and can’t bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies, — which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world — what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting into something rotten would do. Temperament, I suppose.”

Strange that the lie be detested for revealing a death which is present in the world, but would rather be forgotten. Strange because that forgetting would seem at odds with the truth implicitly linked to life in this statement. Truth though in this moment—I’ve just paused the film where Lance and another surfer are splitting across the waves, and falling over at the panic of gunfire—is not a discernable object, a fact. Rather it is something enacted, and in this richer sense of the term direct utterances are not impartial to questions of life and death. Accurate statements about things that we are compelled to discern in getting through the muddle before us are really only so much jargon, but necessary if we’d like to tell the difference between a needle and a haystack. The empirically true exists in the world— as a needle in being anything comprehensible cannot also be a haystack.

The truth of thought free unto itself and without arbitrary constraint implies the truth of the particular. If one were to say a needle is indeed a haystack, it is difficult to imagine how thought would proceed freely when faced with falsified relations. Thought becomes turgid, and the idea of thought is here inextricable from the dexterity of truth. Thought and truth are met in a third term, freedom, which is precisely what can suffer from an abrupt mortality. Truth does not exist in particular statements of fact, though it relies on them. Rather truth is an openness of thought toward its own process, whereby comprehension forms the mind in working over the world. Thought becomes the world. Where thought cannot comprehend a moment of its own relatedness to social existence by virtue of a lie, the world itself falters in its comprehensibility. Conrad is here displaying his most naked allegiance with reason.

It wouldn’t be useful to call lies irrational. More fundamentally the lie acts as closure of a social relation, enacts conflict, forms death, and surrenders the freedom of the liar to a bare necessity. The lie betrays its utterance as beholden to a world it cannot, or is unwilling to, fully comprehend. The lie finds itself at the limit of thought’s ability to form its relation with the world— instead the world has given the liar the nub. There is a fundamental inversion here, in that the liar presumes a freedom from necessity in deriding its engagement by lying. Yet in so far as the lie is necessarily a lie to another body or thought, it comes to betray the freedom of its thinker by recognising the dominance of that thought over itself. The lie is given to the superego so as to dodge its punishment. The superego though is ceded its terrain precisely in the fettering of free thought which is the lie.

Conrad isn’t talking about being lied to, but about lying. Truth is not uttered in discernable particulars, but lives in the aporia of a thinking never in itself completed. Even true particulars can be stifling, but they remain in accord with the possibility of transformation. The lie stops, tastes rotten, and to thought is death. In my edition of Heart of Darkness, first read in a mental institution , and given to me by a friend who probably thought it too odd for him but fitting my predicament, there is only one passage underlined—on the same page as the quote that begins this entry. To the best of my knowledge it is not my mark, but it may convey something of the loneliness of a truth thrown back upon itself before the lie:

‘. . . No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence, — that which makes its truth, its meaning – its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream – alone. . . .’

Roland Simon

27

"Exactly," said the sheep to the sawdust

"It was a blind alley that lead out of those trees."

Overheard while waiting for toilet

HOST: It's up to you but there's a never-ending supply of
A- dope,
B- wit,
C- hospitality

MAN: I think it's great.

Leo graduates today

Teddy

I know not and what is going

to happen like how and why

sinks, steel like into an empty pool

Esmè's package arrived today

Being compelled to rip a copy of Salinger in half (at a break in the prose, incidentally) is, I think, what keeps him close. The break if you'd like to know is somewhere in De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period, and if I gave its whereabouts away precisely I fear this whole attempt to get at the work would catapult pretty neatly into self-abasing generalities. I've sort of got through the short stories (and I say 'short' to distinguish them from the novellas) just so far as to find, with a sadness verging on the relief of completion, that not everything from Jerome's pen takes its stride in the throws of the Glass family. The man, the author, is more than that creation. Maybe, aside from the juicy particulars, that's why the spine of the book was nearly pulled into two parts between my leafy hands.

It's after the War, the troops have come home, enemy defeated. In themselves - and sometimes very graphically from without - J.D.'s characters are in a state of religious anticipation that might be something like waiting for a shell to land on-top your head. No matter how many chicken sandwiches you find in your pocket, the same absurdity of what is not there remains. I feel obliged to announce that up until Just Before the War with the Eskimos I was heading for the conclusion that all to be done was See More Glasses. A Perfect Day for Bananafish needs no explanation. In Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut it is Walt*, dead from a freak accident involving a Japanese stove either coming out of, or going into a package - we're never sure - that the fast-drinking suburban housewife Eloise is mourning the loss of:
"I mean you didn't really know Walt," said Eloise at a quarter to five, lying on her back on the floor, a drink balanced upright on her small-breasted chest. "He was the only boy I ever knew that could make me laugh. I mean really laugh."

The next story - with no Glasses in sight - is The Laughing Man. It is about the Comanche Club, a troop of kids who after school (and on weekends) are taken to play baseball (or on rainy days maybe to peruse the Museum of Natural History) by their twenty-two year old Chief - a story teller in his own right. After games or, while parked in wait for a new friend of the Chief's to join them, the latter invariably straddles the driver's seat of the bus and gives instalments to the boys on the exploits of The Laughing Man, a sort of wild west Elephant Man dedicated to banditry and talking with animals. One might want to say that the eventual demise of the Laughing Man, after the end of the liaison between the Chief and his new friend, has a tragic unbelievable effervescence (not lost on the child who is retrospectively narrating his experience as a Comanche- except we surmise for the effervescence) that offers a sort of deferred explanation for Walt's death. The oldest Glass sister features admirably in the next story, and after that they are out of sight.

The book still lies open. In one piece, though - having been acquired (as the front inscription ecstatically declares) by my mother in 1975, and being a paper back that has braved quite a few baths - it may just be close enough to falling apart not to require my assistance.


* From Seymour - An Introduction: Our younger brother Walt was a great bent-pin fisherman as a small boy, and for his ninth or tenth birthday he received a poem from Seymour - one of the major delights of his life, I believe - about a little rich boy who catches a lafayette in the Hudson River, experiences a fierce pain in his own lower lip on reeling him in, then dismisses the matter from his mind, only to discover when he is home and the still-alive fish has been given the run of the bathtub that he, the fish, is wearing a blue serge cap with the same school insignia over the peak as the boy's own; the boy finds his own name-tape sewn inside the tiny wet cap.

When I was home

Ben sent me

"this, from wikipedia,

Even such prominent German writers as Günter Grass, later accused of anti-Polonism by Jan Józef Lipski among others, were falling victims to this Nazi deception. Grass wrote the following passage, somewhat metaphorically, in his famous novel The Tin Drum:

O insane cavalry... with what aplomb they will kiss the hand of death, as though death were a lady; but first they gather, with sunset behind them - for color and romance are their reserves - and ahead of them the German tanks, stallions from the studs of Krupps von Bohlen und Halbach, no nobler steeds in all the world. But Pan Kichot, the eccentric knight in love with death, lowers his lance with the red-and-white pennant and calls on his men to kiss the lady's hand. The storks clatter white and red on rooftops, and the sunset spits out pits like cherries, as he cries to his cavalry: "Ye noble Poles on horseback, these are no steel tanks, they are mere windmills or sheep, I summon you to kiss the lady's hand"."

2 poems

"I look/ at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world/ except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick/ which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time" writes Frank O'Hara in 'Having a Coke with You'. The image of the rider, or rather its force, reappears in 'To the Harbormaster', another love poem. "I am unable/ to understand the forms of my vanity/ or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder/ in my hand and the sun sinking." It continues, "To/ you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage/ of my will." In 'Having a Coke' we are told that "Marino Marini" "didn’t pick the rider as carefully/ as the horse". In 'Harbormaster' O'Hara offers up his vessel to his anonymous beloved, with the means to steer it held as if an absurdist extension of himself. In 'Coke' the vessel is everything--the horse leading the rider--while looking over the latter he duly tells us is a grave fault. In the painting of the Polish Rider in the Frick Collection which I visited last week, it was undoubtedly the horse that was carrying its rider. Aspects of the latter (like the hands) where thought not to be painted by Rembrandt at all, who left the work unfinished.

O'Hara might be in love with the novelty of his enamoration, just as he indulges his sense of being lost at sea in seeking his adored. Yet he affirms that it is this adored, the rider, that is the impetus of the adoration as well as the plight. It is this other who is steering him, as drive and as a sought engagement. The harbormaster we assume is more than an individual, and embraces both the force of his search and the place where it coincides with the "you" these poems address.

The terrible channels where
the wind drives me against the brown lips
of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet
I trust the sanity of my vessel; and
if it sinks, it may well be in answer
to the reasoning of the eternal voices,
the waves which have kept me from reaching you.
(1954)

Harbour

The Polish Rider

Sadness has never
been avoided
like riding out to an unfinished
battle carrying hastily
composed hands