"After playing Chopin,

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The Translator Is The Original Coast

"What I don't know, I agree with," Antonio Porchia didn't get with. If it's as dirty as a secret, who cares who
knows. That word has its own designs, anyway.

What he was translating that afternoon was obscure as a sleepwalker eating cereal
and as slow. Neurons
nested around a dimple, in the air, of it, both neither and both--then the echo that
was audible
as the curvilinear, three bones, cartilage, Argentina, the purposeful, grandmotherly
through
grotesquely patrician and parochial
freedom that spelled it, held it, almost without demagogues or ropes.

Flat, cow-rough thumbs. Mud pliable putty. On the wheel, Milky-Way inflected, spinning.
And then synchonized
with the technology
withheld from him, this. A two part aphorism on the nose.

To travel. To reflect from every angle, every unsolicited inch it impregates, without a pose.
In a flourish
counteradvance, like feathers outfalling a camera raised to chop them into one, as the old man
sheathes
the skin he doesn't even own. Even as slowness speeds up considerably constant cheap deaths
around it
pushes the further destination point closer, to roam. You, younger one, you lady whose age is
as so, immediate as anyone
appearing in the second person--whose apparition is nice, I have kneaded it, and is personal.
Come home.

From The Inner Dome of The Temple at Wilmette

In the Signature Room on the 96th floor of the Hancock Tower narrow as the quick of looking through and woven
around, the interstate, also a number, I-90/94, from a mouth affixed to full lips next to an ear in advance of
a whisper, that has and continues to arrive, as itself, and only thirty-three years indifferent to some century, "how many?", almost
as if drawn, a splinter in lieu of a thorn, what bush, no wound, then one is there, "how many
heartbeats
do you think are hidden out there?", far as flung, a forest, and only sometimes in cahoots with a tree, then
two, mostly in care of ancestral erection--both meanings--that seem buildings and elsewhere. Like a mandala almost
but similar
to the Baha'i temple of Wilmette. That the afternoon also held, a Rusty Nail, a mojito. Up there
as intricate
as enclosed sky is felt. Echoes made inherent and relevent, and the surprise, architecture is emotive. Static
set in motion, unity in complexity, with busyness of relief written woven from columns, freeing enclosure
from walls. Just like this, from zero, Chicago. Funneled from two pairs overtaxed. Retina, rods and codes. Cone-forms
created ocean. So where ceiling sees from once felt can fly. Appearing just like thinking inside some old woman.

Pragmatism 2b

he will teach you
what you have forgotten
or googled
past, ignoringly

Pragmatism 1b

when limning a clown
bring a bassoon
soon

Pragmatism 3

Meaning is the mode of poetry in which sacrifice is the victim.

--Bilge Gataille

Pragmatism 1 and 2

1.

when filming a clown
bring a bassoon
for background music

2.

in "Zoo Music Girl"
when he sings "O God please let me die beneath her fists"
he summarizes approximately
408 half hour sitcoms
and 18 hours of presidential
stump speech

Welcome Ruby

Whosoever would draw their mind from a child and call it dangerously impulsive may have wisdom
as a creature he can wear
as a shirt, but also shame, lessness of dimension in the skin muscular
from hair
and bones, and though the child is not a repetition, is always
brand new, a kid, as in a goat, what
leaps
without climbing to see, the escarpment, impossible as cliffs not risen but imagined, it tends to happen, someone
so positive with himself against what would be or wouldn't he calls down women, dresses them, in his
habits of is labeled art, with an 'h' and an 'e', the masculine silliness of pronoun, and then disappearing
beneath shade that vomits long before they ever coughed out, sycamore and beech and birch and visionary
accident made flesh, Ruby, little conjunction new to the involuntary creativity that breathes, has parents,
Erin and Claude, hawthorn in tincture, two drops, health and spy from complex breech of removal, last
night's this morning, the box made of boards bumping together in shape of a thoroughly anti-
eternal unplanned
square, higher than looking through branches of backyard ash, not the kind that falls the
sort that rises, short, cloud from mouth, sky from kite, cumulus from strato and the young without
an adulthood to go back to run around in, having used all four arms and no legs, to climb it.

He goes out for milk and coffee, eggs, some biscuits

Grace ( a noun, as they found it):

1. elegance or beauty of form, manner, motion, or action [watersparks, standing aside to watch them]

2. a pleasing or attractive quality or endowment [unsolicitousness in watching]

3. favor or good will [possessed, like heartlight; of them]

4. a manifestation of favor, esp. by a superior [conferred, like sunlight, from them to him then to them, returning]

5. mercy; clemency; pardon: an act of grace [to return them not bending]

6. favor shown in granting a delay or temporary immunity [forgiveness by traveling heartlight, for lack of tact, art, consistent ability in the sender]

7. an allowance of time after a debt or bill has become payable granted to the debtor before suit can be brought against him or her or a penalty applied. Compare: grace period [as long as it takes for the light between, despite dissonance, to arrive]

8. Theology
a......the freely given, unmerited favor and love of God [the children, the uncle, the son]
b.................................the influence or spirit of God operating in humans to regenerate or strengthen them [their togetherness in the memory of the latter]
c..........................................................a virtue or excellence of divine origin [the continuance in the spirit of a dog’s ashes, in the latter]
d.................................................................................. the condition of being in God’s favor or one of the elect [metaxu]

(as a verb):
1. to lend to or add to; adorn
2. to favor or honor

Metaxu: from the Greek, out of Plato through Simone Weil. “Resonant communication”. Resonance entailing the dog in the son, the son in the uncle, the uncle in the father, interaction, co-creation, a space between.

Or as she felt, wrote: “every separation is a link”, and the graceful one unbent from himself, to give over

Jersey City - Portland in the First Style of Fire

seeing them
dad and uncle
coming round the corner
with brown paper bags
full of bread

drew fireflies
to old dust-
y
memory

the bread store, the vietnamese
grocery
all found their way
into hungry bellies

when we buried him
we buried him
with two urns
filled with dog
ashes
his allies
in the world of
fingerprinting and
going round the corner
for bread and squid and
broccoli rabe

last night
I walked back
from the drinks
and tapas

the portland mission made me
sidestep
humans sleeping
lined up along the wall
hugging tight
what was warm and
what was hard
concrete

once I would have
been beery enough
and brave
to sit with them
and talk
baseball, blue
Sundays
the ways I was
only luck
and they were
not

once I would have been
but

whose voice
anyway
rings through
I wish I could remember
the way it was said
when it was said
better

in J.C. they turn
the hydrants
and the kids
become photographs
of joy
in Portland
the streets open
in fountain
in swimming
and they dive in
then come up and throw
watersparks
off the highest
angle

in both
I try to be
graceful
in standing aside,
don't want them
to notice
or care
or try to pull me
into circles
unto groups

I'm much happier
here
not there, not
where
some other number
of things
bend
some other number
of things

we were on our way
somewhere the car was
truth directed some song
by the dirty three
talked for us a bridge I think
the song was "i offered it
up the stars
& the night sky" this
never happened
but maybe we can
go on remembering it
anyway someone's mouth
went further in laughter
than it ever had
knew it could and a
good, new wrinkle was born
I want to tell a few people
what a grand, tilting
life it always was
but just a few
and that I love
nice music lonely
thinking whitegray light
mid-afternoon

Welcome Strangers

I.

using the Olympics as a billion-dollar research lab
to get a sense of how people are
different media platforms
giving advertisers a clearer picture of
paying attention to the games
provides a comprehensive picture of how people are
supplementing TV viewership

it wants to learn of their use of tools
using about 10 methods for measuring the audience
reams of Olympics data, blogging

using different media platforms
running different focus groups
the whole idea is to get the same person and to touch them
across all different sorts of platforms

gleans isn't yet currency, meaning
it won't be recognized

it may eventually be used for all programming going forward

II.

cloud computing initiative
plans to acquire wireless spectrum
who deserves to get the biggest slice
of the new wireless broadband spectrum
to address tactics in the pitched battle

there's no escaping the Googleplex

III.

remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory

my mind isn’t going

my mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns

I get fidgety, lose the thread

I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back

I think I know what’s going on

searching and surfing and sometimes adding

to the great databases

reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines

and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts

they propel you toward them

media are not just passive channels of information

they supply the stuff of thought

they also shape the process of thought

once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words

I’m just seeking convenience

a “staccato” quality, reflecting

anecdotes alone don’t prove much

“a form of skimming activity,” hopping

as users “power browse” horizontally

and abstracts going for quick wins

sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter

a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball

using only the tips of his fingers

words could once again flow from his mind to the page

even tighter, more telegraphic

even the adult mind is very plastic

thanks to our brain’s plasticity

the adaptation occurs also at a biological level

the result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration

reprogramming us

the Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure

“In the past the man has been first,” he declared

“in the future the system must be first”

the Internet is a machine

designed for the efficient and automated collection

transmission, and manipulation

of information

it is striving to systematize everything

the terabytes of behavioral data

it carries out thousands of experiments a day

it uses the results to refine the algorithms

the work of the mind

information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource

that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency

if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain

or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain

you’d be better off
_________

The Associated Press, July 7, 2008
Josh McHugh, Portfolio.Com
Atlantic Monthly - Nicholas Carr

Totem

There was this man, barely a figment, who sat on the curb outside the complex apartment,
Vernon Durham
later understood his name, he mentioned it, like it were something often coming from him, a memory
fully formed but smudged, and if there was listening, then ears joined by half a little patience, little, because
to receive and properly rear the things relayed, no description to add weight, smallness of passage
was essential, the webbed misshaping forces that made him, stitches of severaled scenes, in the war, as
a student, a mathematics major, University of Kentucky, Goya-sweats, shell movies behind then before
diminished distracted in the cubicle, Eastern State Hospital, shock treatment, liver spots, his wife Virginia
in alcoholic bereavement pace, dumb as bored by a hole, passed as a
mole, through, under the ground
where
he was already, the black girls laughing to goad the rambles on in
even exchange for a
cigarette, Marlboro,
his one sanity eccentric, that only these were attention to smoke, funny as an old innocent racist, curses
to complete the Pope, piss on, pee right on that church hat, Sunday is when I does it, turn on the television and
pray with the loud, big men, a dime here for this conspiracy fingers wrap around, where the Dairy Mart
is, over grass and horse farm, white, fence, if I'm already and you, boy, are dead and can still believe it.

Worthwhile Odes and Forms, Promises, Prophecies. July 4th

1. A lunch improvised by Aleve Douglas in her hyper-clean kitchen: pickled okra wrapped in slices of smoked turkey; sea salt chips; freshly picked raspberries and plums. While listening to Alice Coltrane. While sipping ice water made crispy with slices of cucumber, from Mason jars.
2. Royal Trux's "Accelerator". Restatement of the ear's truism: good music will always shock time as if present, to be instant.
3. Massive surprising understanding of shortcomings and attempts, frustrations and processes of long healing (not long processes, processes of it) cupped in Nicole Sartini's conspiratory left armpit. In the right rests a head, free of thinking.
4. Observing the sun through a lens of bourbon. Goldenness as natural inheritance inherent, in distillery.
5. Including the gradual, long-earned, recovery out of certain bad, protective habits--hermetic conceptual as gloves before the face. Padded. For defense against impact and enrichment of attack; which, false inside the art of the transcendent attempt, is the same thing, isn't it?
6. For, from now on out, you will see and not read him--the wildly indirect satyr, mewling through chewed grass, running to discover whole fields without legs.
7. But an eye for headstones inside feelings.

A Map Entertaining History

I love my mind's address but hate how it happens. The thesis creature, the statement without a struck match
to encourage. Several millenia of epigraphs without a rise, to hurt more words than are audible. Possible. Is
the other option, if only the beating were a heart and the heart a prenatal
cache of muscle cells, expanding,
contracting. It happens every day, among the doomed becoming rich to unlearn themselves
as flesh,
to be poor.

When Cortez crossdressed Spain as the new world, the footsteps taken under the sweat of trees
were novel.
He wrote back to himself, the Queen: It is new. By then it was already the opposite. Days after his men
had discovered the first possum. Were tricked, felt the sting of its fakery, and, to focus rage as
a first principle
punishment, squilched its saucy phony gut on a pike. The screams black against the teeth shrieked
albino. Upon which, out of the trefoil flouting disguised foliage, Indians alive as germs came running.

Hundreds of years later, a sunset. A history lesson. From South Datoka's Black Hills to the magnetic
conscious bulk of the Hudson. In a cash-for-rent flat, fourth floor, in what the nearbys call
a "rise",
petals of meth kick towers into person. Betty. Paintings in a lag where neurons were half an
hour
ago, the gallery, wine and sips coming and slowing before hallucinatory mirrorbiotic
motion.
Which the pamphlet claimed was science. Or at least bore an imprint's influence. Tacked on,
as the
sarcastic arranging flight from the cinch compulsive jealousy claimed. And then complimented the
back door it's
such an artist.

Underbrush with young brave's chest doubling creative light heaving.

Gallery floor with internet-select shoes ballet against above beyond reason.

Is there any?

Any of the following--more? thing? one? left?

From the effulgent, Dionysian, unspiraling flamboyance of matter in disguise of simple plant
life, leaf,
of spooled architecture of leveled lack called branches, the one advance back into itself,
isn't.

So my tongue could be much, said the death, the morning bed to Walter Pater, soft but
constantly
needful of bone as it has been. As it was. In was' commanding will be. With.

On Self-Isolation Due To Shyness

We can't all be polymaths. For some, this causes great, if not significant pain. For the early, pre-Platonic,
that is, un-condemned poets, this wasn't even an issue. The trees, the hulks of stone, the burgeoning beginnings
of cities, were so many irradiations of innocence. Just think of the names of the forms of quiet, the removal
of mouths, the poets. The pigeons that were once poets. Learned as wings when they're batting the air
as wildly as balance, and there's suddenly a slight, completely unsymbolic lifting, and the ones
no one can imagine
are free, above, and high again. In Lexington, Kentucky, if a traveler should ever stop there, there are
two addresses. The rest are hypothetical. And lovely--that much should be added. But secondary
nonetheless to two overlapping habits of pulse, artery, capillary to vein, to heart artery. One of them
was never known. Went by Guy. The other, Ralph Eugene, was for many years a next door
neighbor and
friend. Mind you, the face has been taken off to relay this. To tell this. To bridge the manner
difference
distance, relaying and telling. In the 1960's, there was probably a year, maybe even a summer
night,
overstuffed with conversational bourbon, someone with an opinion about Homer walking in, and wouldn't
you know, it was Homer. The blind were always making the wrong appointments, was the lesson. Guy and
Bonnie (divergence from biography, more than likely) were shocked to their very skin; but Ralph, and this
speaks miles to the mysticism of his eye, his left eye, the right a darker color, was already reaching for
his camera, when the old cooch began, almost against his will, like an epileptic cinched body and
kite,
reciting the roil of blood into craggy verse, mid-Cantos. Someone in that town that night was
joining in,
putting out his eyes. With an issue of Vanity Fair, rolled to a point. Pain clarifies the rain, was
what this
probably meant, the gush in epigram without regret. Cicadas. Heaven Hill. The pre-born
and now
halfway to cousin dead man's corner, imagining with zinnias under his nose
the two-way traffic between them.
When he was done, huffing, the old corpse sat down. Made himself "at home". After a wide fifteen minutes
of which, Guy, wanting to create silence, a silence of kind more significant, punned incredibly with balls
to spare: in the far provinces where you're at, old songster, you'll be chagrined to know
your name is
slang for struck projectiles sailed over a wall. The good news is the wall is a circle. Like a coliseum, which
was Rome. Which knew enough to thieve a thing or two from the culture that was just the
perfect
accident to grow you. A fungus of song, of incredible song, of mismanaged and much translated and what the
learned called narrative art. But you and I, brother--or should I call you son, you look so fresh against my
young--we're the shoes of bandits. And Ralph, though he's never read you, is a photograph
of exactly
how he feels, reading you. The pages in the future expand and happen at once, but look at
that, not
all at once. That fantasy slap, All, whatever happened to that. A panoramic attack against
the frightful
exactitude of death. Said again, death. Die, dead, dying. Conjugate and relent. [At this point,
Bonnie
was shuffling through stacks of paper on the porch. The neighbor's minah bird was cashing
slashes. Magnolia,
though blunt dark, was fact. Could be heard, leaves lizard-swift and leather, transfixed
to shift
where the breeze went. Cleaved, westwardly. Click, said the camera. Quoted by what was
and wasn't
air.] Rising from its caneback without cancer.

When we are sitting quietly, one-fifth of the blood leaving the heart, one-fifth
of the oxygen we breathe and most of the circulating glucose in the bloodstream
are destined for the brain. Its metabolism resembles a slow-burning stove, combusting
sugar in a stream of oxygen, thereby obtaining energy and exhaling carbon dioxide. Its
own fuel reserves are small, making it reliant on regular deliveries. These depend on one
critical factor: blood pressure... From large arteries the blood passes into small, its cells eventually squeezing into themselves into microscopic 'capillaries', with walls only one cell
thick: here the blood gives up its riches, such as oxygen, and takes up the byproducts of metabolism, like carbon dioxide. From the capillaries the blood, darker now that it has surrendered its oxygen, is collected into veins, and returns to the right side of the heart.
Thence it is sent to the lungs, to replenish its oxygen supply and discharge its carbon
dioxide, speeds on back to the left side of the heart, and out again to the arteries. The
pressure in the system depends upon both the heart's muscular contraction and on the
tension in the muscular walls of blood vessels. If the heart slows or the arteries
suddenly relax, especially in someone who is standing up, blood pressure falls abruptly
and the bloodstream may find itself unable to conquer gravity and refresh the part that
needs it most...

That which is deepest in man is the skin.

...self is a way of pointing...

There is such a thing as respect for reality. You are living on dreams now, dreams of
happiness, dreams of freedom. But in all this you consider only yourself. You do not truly apprehend the distinct being of either your wife or Miss Carter.

Reality is not a given whole. We are not isolated free choosers, monarchs of all we survey,
but benighted creatures sunk in a reality whose nature we are constantly and
overwhelmingly tempted to deform by fantasy.

Truth is the homage the good man pays to his own dignity.

Only my innocence gives me strength in my misfortunes.

He learned the art of going deep, of tracking the sources of expression to their subtlest
retreats, the power of an intimate presence in the things he handled. He did not at once
or entirely desert his art; only he was no longer the cheerful, objective painter, through
whose soul, as through clear glass, the bright fissures of Florentine life, only made a little mellower and more pensive by the transit, passed on to the white wall. He wasted many
days in curious tricks of design, seeming to lose himself in the spinning of intricate devices
of line and colour. He was smitten with a love of the impossible--the perforation of mountains, changing the course of rivers, raising great buildings....all those feats for the performance of which natural magic professed to have the key. Later writers, indeed, see in these efforts an anticipation of modern mechanics; in him they were rather dreams, thrown off by the overwrought and labouring brain. Two ideas were especially confirmed in him, as reflexes of things that had touched his brain in childhood beyond the depth of other impressions--the smiling of women and the motion of great waters.

Our soul grows by subtraction, not by addition.

Reflexive thinking quickly becomes a cage separating individual consciousness from the
very world that consciousness is intended to mediate and confirm. In the language of metaphysics, 'things-in-themselves' vanish, leaving sense percepts or rational
reconstructions of sense percepts as their sole ciphers.

A unique feature of our species is that we can become graceless.

Never expect to be able to will a poem into existence. / It must happen to you
because / You are what you are--/ With all your defects.

Throughout our long lives our experience shapes our behavior. It is very likely that
the neural plasticity which makes this possible is central at the synapse, creating a
fourth dimension of synaptic plasticity. At birth our brains possess more or less their
final complement of neurons, but synapse formation continues briskly for some time.
We know that synaptic numbers in the brains of young animals are influenced by their environment: 'enrichment' of the surroundings of neonatal rats, providing additional
sensory and motor stimulation, leads to a measurable increase in synaptic contacts.
Work with young animals and with children deprived of vision in one eye suggests that
active neurons expand the territory over which they form synapses, at the expense of
inactive ones. In the developing brain, activity, in general, boosts synaptic numbers
and strengthens synaptic links.

Forgetfulness leads to exile, while remembrance is the secret of redemption.

...moral criteria founded on spatial considerations are extremely fragile.

Between mouth and spoon there is often great trouble.

Now what I particularly wish to insist upon, is the state of vision in which all the details
of an object are seen, and yet seen in such confusion and disorder that we cannot in the
least tell what they are, or what they mean. It is not mist between us and the object,
still less is it shade, still less is it want of character; it is a confusion, a mystery, an
interfering of undecided lines with each other, not a diminution of their number; windows
and door, architrave and frieze, all are there; it is no cold and vacant mass, it is full and
rich and abundant, and yet you cannot see a single form so as to know what it is. Observe
your friend's face as he is coming up to you.





___________


Adam Zeman, Consciousness: A User's Guide
Paul Valery
R. Schafer, Self-Awareness in Animals & Humans
Iris Murdoch, The Sandcastle
Iris Murdoch
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of A Solitary Walker, 4th Walk
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of A Solitary Walker, 3rd Walk
Walter Pater, Leonardo da Vinci
Meister Eckhart
Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy
Matthew Fox
Robert Penn Warren, A Few Axioms For A Young Man
Adam Zeman, Consciousness: A User's Guide
Ba'al Shem Tov
Medieval Proverb
Michel Tournier, The Mirror of Ideas
John Ruskin, Of Truth of Space

chattering teeth inside
the heart's rickety birdcage,
I give you
anxiety

is telling your only darkest
secret
to a room full of strangers
in a dream, and when
upon waking
you look at her
still sleeping
and know she will
never hear
the words

is leading with your face
finding out
everyone else is leading
with their backsides

the laws you invent
and you're the police,
too, the judge, too
and you

i'll hurt you if you keep going
he'll hurt you if you stop

after a certain point it doesn't matter
if you go to sleep

saying, at the end of a book
you must never read
these poems again

the heart's birdcage
is now broken open
and the chattering teeth
have escaped

you must never read
this poem again