Dialogs

Tender Transitions by Richard Lance Williams published 11-3-06

yes yes
the thing
has no body
though
we give it chemical
spin molecular weight
count as if seeds
or grains or stones
or gravities were the thing
yet the thing is not these things
but only a manifestation even as we name them
as we knead them & shape them & render them
o fat o lean o dream o timbered song measured air
word them graph them sex them eat them dissect transect
tremble & fall & deny transcend & laugh & laugh & sweep it

into a tarnished beggar’s

bowl

(silver moon golden sun
what metaphor—what arcing fire
for slipping (see it slip—o silky illusion)
the distance between your legs
into this small back of
a corner chair)

into the kiss upon a cold forehead
or one hand upon two—a shell
still warm a slow old man
tracing of what the thing
asks yet tenderly
of flesh

give—hold—
release

© 2006 r Lance W’ms October 27 what tenders
Surrender Underground, Scanner Art, Ric Williams


sometimes the greatest kindness
is a bark & the bite
of discomfort

(directing)
your sense
of place

of dis
place
ment

planes trains
transition
stories

(where is one’s
place
between)

the frontier
the inches between
connect &

disconnect
hello how
are you

© 2006 r Lance W’ms October 27 transwer

pop music dog dip
what a farting brighter than
sunshine—quelle fromage

© 2006 r Lance W’ms October 27 for Ginsberg on the 50th anniversary of Howl




UnSaying Un Say: Two Essays

It begins with this: soul is the death inside you.1 Soul lodges itself, a hard burl of dark knowledge that like the pomegranate seed Persephone swallowed will not disintegrate or split with a white tendrilled desire for green light, but stays as Peter’s rock unassailably planted core-deep, the cornerstone of your temple to your own salvation, the cenotaph of your time spent, spinning, weaving the riches that spring from the turning seasons of your sorrows and joys. It begins in the rich invisible of the refused, of that which will not be joined in light or in the uniqueness of a time or place. It begins in the intractable faceless maws of eternity, the great spaceless, measureless, seedless womb that nonetheless churns and grinds out stars and lives and desires and fierce daemons hungry for the fires of a beauty enfleshed in a perpetual claim of temporal consequence. It all happens at once. The seeding threshing harvest harrowing rotting tendrils reaching, the fruit the wine the drunkenness sobriety regrets and avowals, the birth death resurrection and annihilation.

The devil gouges his own ribs, pulls from his side the fire in the desert, the winds of howling sorrow that would take the eternity from a grain of sand and swallow it in a dog’s empty eye. We hate our own unfolding; our child who cries in the night, cries until there is no voice but the grit of raw strings upon a honing stone.

Or to stick to the image. The why the end of things the snake with its head for a tail a tale on its head the balance of a beautiful girl with the lid of it upon her Solomon Song neck burnished gold of a shoulders and ebony skin lips like savage cherries like the doors of a rounded heaven the mansions of Theresa.

Speak clearly then. The soul is a photographer. You are its film.

Overexposed underexposed stripped undeveloped dipped in silver and gold and subjected to pinholes and acid baths and long hours in the dark dreaming of what may come out in the wash.

Put a lid on it.

Loops and canisters and melting into dust. Pornographic stills, exploitative newsreels. The kiss. Remember Andy Warhol. Remember the Western Lands. The Egyptians and the final battle in the streets of Berlin, a monster in the labyrinth, who has the string theory to pull this out. Odysseus has returned again and Penelope snips the final thread. The tapestry features the three graces with hounds leaping as doves scatter and in the distance Daedalus weeps by the relentless sea.

Pay attention to the images, to the emptiness between the lines. The sorrow of what is undone night after night. The obsessive compulsive nature of a host to party night after night and never put at end to it. O the slaughter of the unfulfilled guests. How ghosts fill up the caves with fleshless laments and the Queen of Troy still dreams of fires that will not be quenched.

The baskets on the heads of the women as they walk along the Nile. The baby drifting down the river, the prince with one eye. The old man making bricks and cobbling shoes, imagining the straw as bending green upon their naked thighs.

Essay the price of clear water. Of the colors pouring up into your fascinated face. The drunken boats and willow barks, the lithe spirits and Alice with her teapot logic whistling like a punctured moon.

Who gathers these sea glass tokens. Place them on the eyes of brides and wrap them round the loins of grooms. The glistening sea salt has satisfied the king’s deer and the queen has gathered her boughs of stars to her bosom. The music begins when you open any door.

These images strike out of every glinting mote in the eye of sorrow. But so in the shadow a joy. Remember Eleusis. How the secret must be kept. How even history, that lewd eye that would strip itself of the simple dignity of hollow bones (o music that speaks of winds that echo still in every emptiness: there is nothing empty but an emptiness turning this moment) cannot see into the mystery of the lost baskets, the nest where the fire rekindles dragons and garlands of pearl-drenched blossoms. O pearl, o hard body of endurance.

Keep your nose close to the grit stone. There are a thousand trails to follow, to rub, to uncoil unknot get tangled up in. Snared from the air, the dirt devils lift and cloud and dance in the palm that tossed the fronds of welcome to the agnonistes. O lamb. O I am.

O illusion of the fountain built upon the rock that melted with the fire pulled from the side of the devil at the rounded edge of Sarah’s well.

The light snakes across the emptiness shedding skins of incarnate illusions. There is nothing in the dark. O beauty. Tremble like grass as the breath of opening moment after moment. Who shut the door? Is that the closing of the bar? What pushes me into the river eddies and flows and tidal embraces. Let go.

Hillman says the rhetoric of the soul says and unsays, teases, demands, denies first this then that as it accepts them all2, a mothering hen smothering out the tongues of angels the eyes of demons the farmer’s wicked sense of measured appetite. Blind chicks those eyes were seen as bugs by their broodling brothers carry the same clucking of attention as the tinker to the broken clock. Watch the face of joy. Wake from these horrific dreams of wanton self abasement with the same terrible sense of a shutter blinded to what you would finance.

Imagine the devil in the field with his pit and a ticket, the hot fat of the hog dripping into the fires. A Sunday picnic on the morrow. Tonight we dance by glowing coals and palm the breasts of schoolgirls and randy widows. Sing sea chanteys and explain the distance between no point and the point beyond it. Chart these longings sounding true!

How the ghostly boys can take anything and curdle it with a single look. Find the bridge and burn it down and laugh and laugh as the sunset boils in the frothing mouth of night.

I asked of her only a glance and she saw the armies of abandon gathered like the hoards at the gates of hell. Discipline is the thing, they cry, lined upon the pages row by pixel.

A distant music betrays his fear. He lies low upon the bare hill, peering just so over the crown, the lilies sprouting in the light rain, and the archers loosening their thousand arrows from the ramparts of Troy falling falling like kisses on the dying heads of all your frail old fathers. Let not the day pass without a lament. Let not a day pass without a regret. Let not a day pass without a glimpse of that radiant face and the sound of a heart counting the days of a lover’s purest joy.

And when the bowl is empty sound its song with a dog’s old bone and watch the road for the next parade.

* * *

When the image presses, follow it. This is not a work against nature, the work contra naturam is a work that cannot be. It is a contradiction. We cannot say what is not. The image, if Hillman is to be trusted, is the one incontrovertibly true thing.3 Now what one can do, is ignore images, is wheat and chaff them in the impossible task set to Psyche by the jealous Aphrodite. But how does that look without the understanding that the ants are natural, the instincts follow the distinguishing features of things as they are, perform the basic kindergarten exercise of what does not match?

What Goethe found or was looking for when he noticed the universality of star forms in nature or when alchemists sought the touchstone that would turn the common into the uncommon and thus render the multivalent into a singularity, and so too the efforts of the astrophysicists to see the whole of existence as a singularity, and it goes without saying the philosophical certainty of a set that contains all subsets subsumes the polyvalent into a jealous monism is that embrasive inclusiveness that does not separate, that encompasses even the most vile of objects and ideals into a pleasing whole. That this inclusiveness, this clasping of right hand to left lets everyone off the hook of tragedy. The landscape, or inscape, of images and archetypal patterns, templates, repertoires, insists upon the comic displacement of outside and inside so that no place is a place excluded of central import.

We all have a place and are in the right place since the image is eternal, real, and incontrovertible. Only we are unreal when we imagine (ha) ours is the course outside or under the processes of the inscapes.

How we slide or elide only slides us or transports us to another form of the story. The murkiness or clarity of an image, its coloration, proximity, adumbration, all fall like tumblers in the interlocking matrix of the rhizome. But the story still eludes us. No matter that wisdom is the source of our stage. “Athene who makes space within. She [who] is the inner space-making function of mind, the Goddess who grants topos, judging where each event belongs in relation with all other events.”4   Alas, there are men who tell “everything--and it turns out to be nothing. There are women . . . who tell everything . . . but one knows no more at the end than at the beginning: they have hidden everything . . . . They have no secret because they have become a secret themselves.”5

Take politics or humor or melodrama. Each roiling and coiling with secrets. And yet, what distance must you take to accept the falsity of their images as true? Not much, it seems. The space of wisdom there is quite small. They rely on imagistic templates. They play them straight up or slide one element to the other ever so slightly and still we get it. We even buy it again and again. It is the same story, now tragic, now sad, but always the same in its folding or unfolding. As Voltaire noted: It’s a perfect world. Sure he offered the glib philosophy as a comic critique of the then and the ever-present socially reprehensible circumstances of the majority of creatures who are subject to the o-so-convenient laissez-faire entitlement of the privileged. And we all know it and it stares at us like the sun and moon and stars and we still do nothing but replay the images and patterns and repertoires like so many analogue phonographs. Ontogeny recapitulates the afterimage. The flash of the hole. A pinhole universe. The pinhole just happens to be exactly as wide and deep and long as eternity. The space and place that wisdom allots. Yet wisdom cannot do it. Or rather reason.6 For wisdom goes into those places that are not places, those spaces that have no map no grid no high ground to plant a tattered rag and call it your own heaven. Everyone owns the images of fantasy. Athene has no there there to claim save the ever shifting where of once upon a space/time.

So you draw a dog and a man with arms outstretched. Take a dried worm and patch of grass; intimate a tree and a decaying city. You patch it with reverse colors, wash it with waves, sharpen here, murk there, block a trunk. Note how roots can transform into jaws. A dog so faithful, so feral; how it pisses on our handiwork like perhaps a God on our unmet prayers. You take any element, any form and juxtapose it with two or more others, the simpler and more concrete the object the better, and a story implicates itself into the viewer’s mind. The images have archetypal associations (instinctual, if one must be empirical), cultural variation, personal associations, and add the mix of forms and colors which have their own archetypal, cultural, and personalistic associations (yes, composition has its own values as evidenced by trompe d’oeil and optical illusion work) each viewer will respond with a narrative, with a space of their own, though no story, no linear plotline is given. Story will unfold when there are discernible objects placed in the same frame. Even the most disparate of objects will yield a story in all viewers, though some viewers may have a more complete story if they have a wider range of stories in their own personal history. The objective correlatives will make more sense to a person with a wider range of references. But even the most rudimentarily educated adult will respond to/with a story presented with a surreal collage of even vaguely discernible objects. Surreal? Better unreal: yes, the response is visceral and more authentic because the unreality of our own condition is thus reflected, deepened in the reflection.

Mythically potent, Christian images of horned and winged creatures with trees and dogs and worms and grass will stir anxiety, will push and pull sympathies for we each have these images as part of our repertoire. We are demonic and we know why. We cannot be beaten enough to ever lose some sympathy for the outcast. We do see god in a dog and god as cynically abusive. We see praise and surrender as one movement. We understand the rich fertility of the worm and the straw like quality of what binds us to the earth, our homes, our family, our own sense of self. We may struggle with those realities, bind our self to the tree or the wounded demon or the child inside the man or we may distance our self as the observer, the cool eye of the artist, the exegete who paints the emotional fire in perfect strokes as if curls of stone hair were the sculptor’s greatest joy (and it is even as the reality of the lover concretizes sublimated or transferred once to the real hair and further to the stone as if the distance, the placement or dis-placement makes the longing all the more real and unreal). And each point of view the perfect truth of how it feels to be alive. The analysis just widens, neither right nor wrong but twisting in a braid of leavings and weavings.

That we will story two stones or even one speaks more than a thousand books can extirpate from the annuls of what it means to be beyond the tap of tinker’s damns.

What is a myth? It is the talk of the inarticulate in the mouths of those who speak for it.

Being inarticulate they have few lines of story; they speak with simple things, with gesture and color and shape. But while Hillman may be correct when he says gesture is the lesser of what soul wants7, it is the gesture that pushes the tongue to its eloquence. The movement of an eye, the brush of a hand, or the uncurling of a strand of hair. The story of the myth wheat and chaffs itself even as it tells us the same thing: follow the image into the story of wherever you are right in this very moment. The myth will play you, regardless of your awareness. It is as if you are always dreaming, always forgetting, always mythless even if you swear you are aware. There is no absence of myth anymore than there is an absence of sky if you close your eyes. The story has always held you. Plato’s cave is an illusion as is the projection as is the standing up and seeing behind the curtain. Maya is as evident in certainty as in absence of illusion. Do you really need to teach a duck to swim or can you simply release her into her element?

I unsay all terrible things. I unsay all truths. I unsay all that binds you to who you would not be. I unsay all things that keep you from being who you are. I unsay all things that were not from the first a thing that wanted only to be a wind that knows your name. I unsay the unsaying.

© 2006 r Lance W’ms October 30 Two essays on image

1. Hillman, James. Re-visioning Psychology. HarperPerennial, 1992. New York. p. 207
2. Ibid. p. 215f
3. Ibid. p. 209
4. Hillman, James. “On the Necessity of Abnormal Psychology: Anake and Athene” in Facing the Gods. Spring, 1980. Dallas, Texas. p. 29
5. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Minneapolis. p. 289
6. Re-visioning, p. 22
7. Ibid. 216f

Among the many passing references please note some of following:

The Western Lands by William Burroughs.
Candide by Voltaire.
Moby Dick by Herman Melville.
Goethe’s “Italian Journey.”
Early Andy Warhol movies, specifically the Kiss.
The Mysteries of Eleusis as noted by Kerenyi.
Plato’s cave story.
The story of Moses, Hermes, Odysseus, Theseus, Psyche, Persephone, Andrew Wyeth’s “Christina’s World”

Note that Athene’s name derives from a pan or dish or bowl according to Kerenyi (see Facing the Gods, p. 27). Note the baskets in the Eleusis mystery and the story of Moses. The cauldron of wisdom, the beggar’s bowl of Buddhist monks, the cupped hands of prayer, how wisdom holds. Thus memory. Thus deep archetypal folds.

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