Notebook: 8/9/87
Follow out all of your desires, only to come back to the same
place. But now that place is in more places.
Aesthetic sublimation of the fear of death into plumbing its desires.
The lightest of things- like insects, like birds, like joy- can be easily
crushed. The heaviest of things- stones, sorrows, these stay- and
tend to hold their shape.
Art teaches us how to bring the dead to life.
The poem may occur in a place which is greatly dissimilar from the world
made apparent to the senses. But wherever it is, one fine day there or nearby you
will meet its poet.
Satie on the radio. Girl rolling and rolling in the foamy sea- black hair and
red bathingsuit.
8/10/87
Learn to plan your thinking.
It took very long for me to learn to enjoy the first deep draft of an experience.
Experience only apparently repeats itself- and because this is the most comforting
illusion of all- we can forget so quickly how fortunate we were that things finally
took the pass they did. Not only fortune did this but no doubt it took a tremendous
effort of will- or so it seemed- even if this effort consisted mainly in determining
not to throw it all into the air in total frustration.
8/11/87
Dream in which I saw Ted Berrigan- only he was very thin. I see a woman who
may or may not be Alice Notley and she is naked.
Maybe a writer is an obsessive who wants to do more than think.
My first thought was about Ted.
As I child, I rarely suffered from feelings of being left out or lonely, once
I discovered books. In themselves, books constitute a world for me.
9/5/87
Art prepares us for a gradual dissolution into inorganicity. Those silent
sculptures, those immense spaces... we feel events by means of their
continuous collision in the current space of time...things and their effects
accumulate...so- called synchronicities are not synchronized...the opposite...
disjunctive "connections" are made...you see now, you see ahead...copying
this may be a way of hearing it now...resistance to hearing is another way
of listening...listen to *that too*, and this voice reminds me of Alan Davies...
equivalence of moments is a way to *keep going*...
9/7/87
Give me the unexpected, in small doses, I hasten to add...tumble into life, jolting
forwards...see this from valleys and high peaks...how can you not bump
into things sometimes...don't beat so hard on them...don't calm down, calm *into*...
what makes you think someone would track you there?....the stealthier you are, the
quieter they'll be...if you make a lot of noise, they will too, so you won't hear them
as loudly...Select a few words when the occasion suits you...Stop, roll it into a
ball, and fling it into the first patch of gray light you eke out of the dark...or into
the slight shadow you still see lingering on the horizon (forget the violins)...
9/8/87
The story of a man who never tires of the smell of books and the look of words,
for whom existence is read through books, for whom the "point of departure" is
books (I've not found a way to describe this yet).
The author's personality "pervades" the work. But what is this personality but
clusters of innumerable choices ("Three of Four Things I know about Him"- Charles
Bernstein).
9/15/87
Revolutionary thought is yet burning a hole through the pages of history. One
day it may claim more- and only then will the relations between people change.
There is no disputing freedom.
9/20/87
Poem: Anti-alphabet
Make things free by making them freely.
Traditional writng separates the analysis from the content- you can see but
you just can't touch.
The continuum between forms.
"Permitting" things to gather (Toni Simon's *Space Surrounded By Its Objects*)
Strategy and movement.
9/29/87
An image is all that cohered.
And it was nothing more than the passing of a gleam.
Take the objects out of any poem and hold the world as it is.
