Setyembre 9, 2008
Posted by bolix in Notes.Tags: Self
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You thought something went missing. You thought of it as you stepped on the train. You are now on your way to the next station. The rabbits, too, are on their way. You don’t know it and it need not be explained.
Agusto 19, 2008
Posted by bolix in Poetry.Tags: Carl Phillips, Michael Palmer, War, Whitman
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Them mills now roll double time as each incident explodes into the public’s imagination. We, too, are distant from the dilemma yet the horrible grips us. Such are these hands of truth, which, by the time we have reached our respective terminals, we have consumed like french fries. The poet wanted a place for the genuine yet the body of the real is trafficked like ghosts from nowheretown. Do we despair this escalating hopelessness? Or seek out a language that would help us forget? How would we write of beauty then?
It is, of course, all hypothesis lacking spirit, considering that the case for that which is beautiful need not be written at all. It needs to be enacted, or the vision of it at least, so said another poet. Yet how do we exactly proceed when the machines of war bring mutilated bodies into our doorstep, when the forests and villages outside our window are burning? Let us take a line then and consider the alternative:
I mourn’d—and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
That which is true lies at the heart of time itself and its passing. That which is truly beautiful will, in time, be mourned. The sea coasts are lovely this time of the year. Would you like to swim? Of course we would after the child is brought to nursery and when the orchids at last have bloomed. Meantime let us dazzle ourselves in the realm of the fragment? Write this:
The hermit, withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,
Sings by himself a song.
Song of the bleeding throat!
Death’s outlet song of life—(for well, dear brother, I know
If thou wast not gifted to sing, thou would’st surely die.)
It is not so much the distinctions that matter. Nor is the subject matter. Mere singing, too, is not enough. Burn, too, must we, the forests and villages. In our pages must lie their “silent wreckage”. In time, spring, like a lost dove, shall return. That which is inevitable is most beautiful.
Agusto 15, 2008
Posted by bolix in Found Text.Tags: Keats, Shelley
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I told her to paraphrase instead she gave me this letter:
Hampstead
August 16th
My dear Shelley,
I am very much gratified that you, in a foreign country, and with a mind almost over occupied, should write to me in the strain of the Letter beside me. If I do not take advantage of your invitation it will be prevented by a circumstance I have very much at heart to prophesy - There is no doubt that an english winter would put an end to me, and do so in a lingering hateful manner, therefore I must either voyage or journey to Italy as a soldier marches up to a battery. My nerves at present are the worst part of me, yet they feel soothed when I think that come what extreme may, I shall not be destined to remain in one spot long enough to take a hatred of any four particular bed-posts. I am glad you take any pleasure in my poor Poem; - which I would willingly take the trouble to unwrite, if possible, did I care so much as I have done about Reputation. I received a copy of the Cenci, as from yourself from Hunt. There is only one part of it I am judge of; the Poetry, and dramatic effect, which by many spirits nowadays is considered the mammon. A modern work it is said must have a purpose, which may be the God - an artist must serve Mammon - he must have “self concentration” selfishness perhaps. You I am sure will forgive me for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist, and ‘load every rift’ of your subject with ore. The thought of such discipline must fall like cold chains upon you, who perhaps never sat with your wings furl’d for six Months together. And is not this extraordina[r]y talk for the writer of Endymion? whose mind was like a pack of scattered cards - I am pick’d up and sorted to a pip. My Imagination is a Monastry and I am its Monk - you must explain my metap [for metaphysics] to yourself. I am in expectation of Prometheus every day. Could I have my own wish for its interest effected you would have it still in manuscript - or be but now putting an end to the second act. I remember you advising me not to publish my first-blights, on Hampstead heath - I am returning advice upon your hands. Most of the Poems in the volume I send you have been written above two years, and would never have been publish’d but from a hope of gain; so you see I am inclined enough to take your advice now. I must exp[r]ess once more my deep sense of your kindness, adding my sincere thanks and respects for Mrs Shelley. In the hope of soon seeing you (I) remain
most sincerely yours,
John Keats
Agusto 11, 2008
Posted by bolix in Drafts.Tags: Bjork, Lesser Tragedies
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All argument is restless, seeks a hand to steer its landing. Which to Renato meant drawing hands in the manner of birds.
The movement wanted a form that corresponded to its content. He wanted a fusion of glass and steel. He wanted transparency.
Take China for example, he said.
What about China? Have you seen the Great Wall?
I have not been to the moon so I really don’t know.
In a state of deep anguish Renato could have easily flown to the moon. But he knows how the Dalai Lama works to spoil our view of the universe. He knows what is underneath the shadow.
To you it’s always the big picture.
But what else is cinema for?
By sundown they have arrived at the conclusion which appeared as a massive gate blocking their entrance to the city. Quickly they took out their map. They were on the right road like everyone else except they never brought bottled water.
Renato searched his memory for some hidden meaning of their predicament. He found his fingers indexing the moment.
Do you suppose knocking may help, he asked.
One can always cry.
Agusto 5, 2008
Posted by bolix in Events.Tags: Ads, High Chair
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High Chair, the only Philippine press dedicated to publishing poetry, is launching two new books, elsewhere held and lingered by Conchitina Cruz, and Parang by Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles, on August 8, 4:00p.m. at the Vargas Museum in UP Diliman. The ninth issue of High Chair’s online journal, edited by Alex Gregorio and Vincenz Serrano, will also be launched.
Hulyo 22, 2008
Posted by bolix in Found Text.Tags: Tabloid Reading Project
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Day one of my Tabloid Reading Project was not entirely disappointing. Picked up today from the motley of bangus/tinapa wrappers was some distant relative of Abante called Police Files Tonite. You’d expect more from the crime beat here given the masthead but hardly was there any story about recent murders and the like—I counted two short crime-related shorts, font size 8. However, there was one report there that caught my attention, one of the most truly brilliant news I’ve read recently:
Hulyo 14, 2008
Posted by bolix in Notes.Tags: Dickinson
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Know that we have Dickinsoned it. That we have secretly aligned the motive to our moral objective. How you remain wounded is now the least of our concern.
Hulyo 10, 2008
Posted by bolix in Poetry.Tags: Michael Palmer, Murder
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Your Diamond Shoe
by Michael Palmer
Don’t write poems about what’s going on.
Murderers and liars, dreams and desires,
they’re always going on.
Leave them outside the poem.
Don’t describe your sad-eyed summer home
or wide-eyed winter home.
Don’t write about being homeless
or your home-away-from-home.
Don’t write about war,
whether you’re against or for,
it’s the same fucking war.
Don’t talk about language,
don’t talk about loss.
Don’t mention truth or beauty
or your grandpa’s bones.
No one wants to know
how your father/brother/lover
deducted himself. Razor, rope or gun,
what’s the difference?
Whisper nothing of the snow
on the Contrescarpe,
nothing of moths, their fluttering arcs,
or the towers—how we watched them fall.
Don’t write at all.
after Drummond
–
One senses the deep frustration of Palmer in this poem (from Company of Moths, New Directions Publishing, 2005), the raw anger that animates the irony in the imperative to stay the pen and watch the world fall into further horror years after 9-11. We count the years as we count the bodies that fall by the wayside of civilization’s march toward civilization. [Aren't we there yet?] The “we” we speak of here is clearly not the same company “we” all keep and so our arrivals and trajectories remain varied, stratified, layered, according to the shoes one sees fit to keep. Thus the continued investment in language, in words that inflate the meaning and value of democracy and knowledge, as if words do flatten the world and level the field, as if life’s essentials are free and murderers do not freely roam the streets. In the world of this poem of Palmer’s, one finds oneself in the difficult position of seeing the absence of difference between words and between the real-life objects they represent. Of course one can always make a dialectical materialist argument contrary to the Wittgensteinian position. Still, what difference will it make? To will the future with mere words, with the purest possible intent for poetry, will that prevent our own towers of hope from falling, from crumbling into the dispersed dust of history?
Hulyo 8, 2008
Posted by bolix in Found Text.Tags: Christopher Hibbert, Murder, Tacitus
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The Germans, as described by Tacitus, sixty years after the death of Christ, considered only treachery, desertion, cowardice and sexual perversion to be crimes serious enough to be punished by death. In a society where every fighting man was a valuable asset, execution and mutilation could not reasonably be considered suitable punishments for lesser offences, such as murder or theft; and so, as Tacitus discovered, the German murderer or thief when convicted paid a fine “in a stated number of oxen or cattle. Half of the fine was paid to the King, half to the person for whom justice was being obtained or to his relatives.”
Hulyo 1, 2008
Posted by bolix in Reviews.Tags: Crusades, Movies, Murder
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“Kill one, and, maybe, save a thousand.”
Thus said Fox, the role essayed by Angelina Jolie, in the latest Bekmambetov spectacle. Wanted comes at the heels of certain Hollywood movies (Pathology, Saw) that glorify killing in the name of some benevolent mission to rid the world of evil doers. Recent crime cinema, it seems, is going the logic of American neoimperialism. Get Saddam, save the Iraqi people. Get Ahmadinejad, save humanity from nuclear weapons. The strategic approach of course must echo Islamic terrorism—blow up and kill everybody to get to the singular target. Always and still, classical warfare even in the postmodern age.
Which simply means that killing or murder isn’t necessarily bad; it just needs to be justified. Take the Crusades, for example, unparalleled model of manslaughter waged in the name of the one Christian god, with most everyone singing like Sinatra: “To think I did all that/ and may I say, not in a shy way.”
Hunyo 16, 2008
Posted by bolix in Found Text.Tags: Alan Moore, Murder
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Slowly it dawns on me that despite the Gull theory’s obvious attractions, the idea of a solution, any solution, is inane.
Murder isn’t like books.
Murder, a human event located in both space and time, has an imaginary field completely unrestrained by either. It holds meaning, and shape, but no solution.
Hunyo 10, 2008
Posted by bolix in Found Text, Notes.Tags: Chomsky, Jorie Graham, Murder
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By far so far the farthest
thought reached in this chain of thoughts concerned the precipitous rise of the criminal in the daily order of things. In the city of Cavite, streetchildren, whose lives are everyday wasted by poverty and drugs, go missing in the night only to be found in the morning with their body parts missing. You will say
this pathology no longer surprises given how murder becomes easy with the surplus of bodies in dying third world economies.
Kill your ethics before ethics kills you, I hear you speak
not in figurative tones. And so the mind leaps into the dark
corners of the park, a wounded shadow of skin shivering while the innocent knife flashes, awaiting evolution, awaiting biologically determined perceptions, awaiting the arrival of morning bloodied by human social need.
*
We have done what we wanted.// We have multiplied ourselves.
There is not enough room.// People must die faster to make room.
Hunyo 6, 2008
Posted by bolix in Videos.Tags: Górecki, Holocaust
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Górecki, Symphony No. 3, Second Movement
Hunyo 5, 2008
Posted by bolix in Found Text.Tags: Górecki, Self
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I’m not so sure they’re listening to me. Leave the “me” out of it.
Hunyo 4, 2008
Posted by bolix in Drafts.Tags: Lesser Tragedies
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Truthfully I reveal to you that The Lunar Princess arrived on this dark desolate street not on the eve of the August full moon, her gritty face barely illuminated by the phantom light of an ageing streetlamp, eyes almost as dead as the night yet still carrying a certain unnameable divinity, which days later the tabloid presses would consider “divine as moonshine”, a rouge priestess simultaneously innocent and gory, fragrant and plastic, yet still most attractive in her vulgar but unintended display of pink adolescent breasts. “How Brechtian!” you silently tell yourself in the midst of the gathering crowd before she reached out a hand dripping with blood and sweat mixed in this manner of fortitude only her entreating hand could design. The knife which introduced itself to your unprepared thigh was most unexpected, like the police arriving at the scene way too late. I, too, felt the sudden stab, a sudden lightning slicing through the flesh of the wide night sky. Thus these sympathies that burned the leaves on my chest, which days after would branch out and introduce my sodden soul to your burning heart and begin what is perhaps one of the lesser but unregrettably forgettable tragedies of my sordid life.
Hunyo 3, 2008
Posted by bolix in Found Text.Tags: Books, Crochet, Mathematics
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For two thousand years mathematicians knew about only two kinds of geometry—the plane and the sphere. But in the nineteenth century they became aware of another, more aberrant space. Offending reason and common sense, it became to be known as the hyperbolic plane. Finally in 1997 mathematician Daina Taimina worked out how to make a physical model of this space - the method she used was crochet.
Hunyo 2, 2008
Posted by bolix in Notes.Tags: Madness, Strangers
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What madness it is to assume something horrible awaits every step taken in the right direction. True, the dirt road lies ahead on the next turn and it is somewhat unavoidable. There are no tricks left and then and there our confessions will have to embody some form of strange truth dark and horrid but nonetheless acceptable. What if we choose to be blindfolded? Will that help in revealing a life larger than what our open minds and fragile hands can conceive?
Stop now. You seem to be confusing me with someone else.
Hunyo 1, 2008
Posted by bolix in Fiction.Tags: Badiou, Cost of Living
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In the middle of the dance there is no middle ground by which this affection could have been negotiated. She tried to keep her distance, the tail of her long gown constantly kept from being stepped upon. All the signs say no exit but she knows there is still a way out.
*
It was wartime when she fell in love. By the time the war ended, her wedding dress was hemmed. A peace treaty was being signed when her groom didn’t show up at the wedding.
*
She wanted to know the uses of metaphor when she chanced upon the phrase “cost of living”.
*
Events do not happen by design nor do they happen by chance. She wanted to believe otherwise but she could not find a middle ground. Her story is history, plain and simple, till she met Alain on the way to the library.
*
Late in the afternoon someone is reading a book, someone is stitching a hem.
*
Alain was holding her by her side as if she was holding a baby in her arms. This same tenderness clothed her when they fucked.
*
Late in the evening someone turned on a lamp. Someone is making her way through the dark.
Mayo 31, 2008
Posted by bolix in Fiction.Tags: Sentences
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Imagine the drill imagining another world where drills themselves are contented and not bored.
Mayo 30, 2008
Posted by bolix in Fiction.Tags: Madness, Poetry
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Poetry is dead! The young poet exclaimed, slashing the throat of chickens with a Parker pen, as if recently he had struck upon the secret of the infinite. Bloodied but calm, aware that there is nothing new with the claim, the unimpressed audience stayed on their chairs secretly wishing the resurrection of lifeless fowls on the stage. Such foul language, they said, must not come from the mouth of poets. The literary matriarch could only raise her thinning brow in approval knowing how the fellow now suffers from multiple personalities.
There is a moment in schizophrenia when one believes that a laundry list or the yellow pages is poetry. A study by a zoologist from Oxford showed that a chicken ably chooses a free run to a cage even if food is put inside the cage. Clearly madness is not present among birds. Where does it reside then? Asked the young poet as he read the last name and phone number in his list of automechanics. While the answer is clearly in his head, he can no longer see it as it is, as his eyes now see only feathers but not the chicken.
Mayo 29, 2008
Posted by bolix in Notes.Tags: Otto Neurath, Strangers
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The introductions are accidental, were, like new jargon. We rescued whatever our mouths could name. We rescued names as if names were the things themselves. Where a beam was taken away a new one was put there. There it is, our ship, sailing as a stranger.
Mayo 28, 2008
Posted by bolix in Fiction.Tags: Sentences
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Mercy thought it was mercy that saved her from the beginning.
