4/1/89

Poem: *Living On Nothing*

(Speech) I want you to know why
This man was so crushed when he learned
That reality itself was packaged and sold
Like any other commodity on this planet

For a long time thought lived in stones,
So that it could be better preserved through time
Later it moved to trees, to animals and
Then to human beings- as it appreciated
Better its own constantly changing nature, which
Now demands a transformative environment,
Rather than a fixed one. The
Mind does not need a monument,
It needs focus, one that renews it
Rather than keeping it in place.

3/31/89

Failed attempts to get at the
truth leave behind markers to
where further investigation must
inevitably lead. Pauses are obstacles.

Rest and movement- the "eternal"
sequence. Music is the
"sound" of this "eternity" beyond
time- the breath is the breathing.

The feeling of defeat is
akin to all those feelings that arise
when someone is inextricably locked into a struggle

[Hegel- the full circle (of self-)?]

The Chase

The poet
alone with life
as day fades out
inhales the ellipsis
wish and dream
truth and desire
unnamed beads
on a chain

The sacrifice
once made, the
ear tells it
again from the
beginning
doubts surround
hopes, a logical
helix

No more imaginary
than real, invisible
exchanges mark a
phase of separation
and restraint, thoughts
occluded from
experience, nets
mistaken for touch

Regrets truncate
misfortunes, sounds
repeat the origins
which produced them
assent disguised as
resistance, a smile
on the face of
satisfaction

Opposite realities
dissolve inside and
pose themselves as doubles,
as choices

as words attempt
to hide from their own
effigies, blend into
themselves and
disappear

11/19/02

Are you thinking
or dreaming or
are they the same?

1980

intrusion

the small
acts of
pleasure like
resistance
to anger
somehow

realize
my intentions
and their
shared connection
with the past

it tore
me up
and itself
yet I have
to repeat
it to spell
my admiration
for what I
admire to admire

only to break
it open
again later
when I
destroy
what
comes between

this
kind of act
forces
its opposite
and precedes
change

there
is no
way to
get
there now
so I
reverse
and smile
at the
next
intrusion

it binds
me to
what I
peel away
or
it
has
to
burst
apart

"Intentions are the variability of all those feelings,
moments of that possibility."
Robert Creeley/"Words"

8/20/86
Pause

If I wanted to open a door or look
out a window-no- if I wanted to
open a door and walk into a world I
would like to live in for awhile- it is
this feeling more than any other I have sought
out by reading and writing. Invariably, I
want to choose the first door at hand that
intrigues me because, now that I have
discovered the opportunity I am well aware that
there is no time to waste. As often, no, more
often, much more often than not there is
nothing behind the door, only once I have
tried to open it and see that the door
won't budge, very soon after I realize that
there wasn't any door there at all. But
sometimes- the best times- I can walk
right through, look around, even settle
in for awhile. And, despite any wishes to
the contrary, after awhile, the room,
the door, it all disappears. But then,
sometime, there will be another one, maybe
this time a window, a plane, a time
machine. Machines...I imagined a
language machine (not like Kafka's that
wrote horrible messages on his character's back),
a machine that would generate words from
each other. Often, in my very early experiments,
I would only associate to the last letter of a
word, then make that word my next word.
These strange poems were capable of reminding
me of the thoughts and feelings I was thinking
about when I was writing them, although
none of the words seemed at all connected
to these thoughts. The poems would be
built out of a strange conjunction of words
that spelled a rhythm but not a specific
experience. The experience of reading those
poems became more and more specific,
more palpable over time. Some had colors,
others drifted around in patterns of
light and dark or even castles in
mist or even lines like
"ideas so that the can will very"
which were probably borrowed in part
from early readings of ee cummings. What
I was looking for was a world to inhabit,
a world for the eye and the ear and for
thought and imagination. Most of all, this
world had to have sounds and sights
and what other appurtanances of reality
which I was attracted to for the purpose
of constucting my imaginary universe. The
problems only began when I wanted
others to view these adventures as something
called poetry. For a very long time- at least
with these types of experiments, nobody
would go that far.

"We're not complaining, Piombino," said
some strange voice, "You did the right thing."-

So, I went about my
business writing some poems that I felt
could directly demonstrate my competence in
some "traditional" form- or some recent
forms-

"What are you talking about," I want to
say to some imaginary figure "all you
think about is poetry."

Something recognizable- these were published-
a couple of them. Soon, however, my old wish
to open a magic door asserted itself and
I began my journey. What I've learned is
that time is a merry-go-round in which
you will always get another chance, to reach
for the ring and not fall off your horse- until
the end of the *whole ride*, not just a
few turns (called years). Just the
right combination of waiting and reaching. There
is more than one combination, but there are
right and wrong combinations.
Doors, merry-go-rounds, waiting, combinations,
here it is again as expected, trinkets to
play with in the gaze of some light, so
I can watch them sparkle. Memories...
prices to pay...compensations...there are
series of events, view them microscopically
or at a distance, but remember you can
change it...not a question of which one
is better, but the changes help understanding...
you can't just say anything... then
again you can...you can remember a
card game or one can come hazily into
view- you remember a time when you
would imagine needing thousands of details to
see this...actually, being there is more
like being aware of one or two details very
clearly or a few at a time in a sequence...
you can go in as deeply as you like
in zooming for the detail, even the red hearts
on the card...you can see the leg of
the table, feel the shoulder of the man
holding the cards...everything stops at once...
you are certainly in a western saloon here,
cowboy hats, gun racks, the whole thing...
hard to believe the gun racks because it
wouldn't be that way now...remember, before
they move, you only need a few details...
say, the reason for the card game and the
name of one of the players...you can smell
by the air where this is, I mean whether
its way out in the woods or someplace
drier than that...then again, stepping
outside, you can see this is the woods...l
you can feel the stakes are high, for these
people...you can already begin to guess
the tension in this for them...now,
how do you distinguish these details from
the results?..you can see something is
about to happen and you can feel it...
you've already had ample time to decide
what you think will be the outcome...this
stillness cannot be borne forever, though in
some sense these men were meant to sit there,
and the women in the other room, listening
but afraid to listen...you start to feel
someone in there wants to cry out...but still,
this is ony an investigation into a few
details...and to imagine it in the first
place something had to hold your attention...

And the the newspaper account of a man
who stuck his arm into a lion's cage to prove that
God does or does not exist...if God has
a power, he announced to his mother, he will
not let the lion hurt me- and then, he lost an
arm...to be transported to a mental hospital...

"You are going to let these thoughts
push you around like this?"

You were in a room and something was about to
happen...what does it have to do with a
lion? Does a lion burst into the room?
It feels like something is going to be mangled,
something is going to try to break out...but,
in this man's cage, his internal world demanded
absolute proof of God's *power* to believe in
him...possibly because his own powers apppeared to
be drastically failing him...and this mangling
leapt into the story of these men in a
room anyway, a natural overlap of a
day's experience...and the days keep
switching hands...no question that something
meant to jump out and it turned out to be a
lion's paw, not a card...still, one of these
men was about to say something...look,
he's knocking the table over with one hand whiloe
the other is springing back..there are screams and
a door bursts open... a gun explodes...
a man appears almost to be hurled into the
air and thrown back..the nose is deafening...
yet, this scream is really the same scream
as the man who was mauled by the lion...
Why must all this be centered around some
great pain? It all ends with an
explosion, a tearing...Nurnberg...
the walled city... the bombed out buildings...
memories real, exploded and reconstructed...
composition ends in decompostion...airy
fragments...

"It's almost as if two people were writing it"

"Only two?"

"It doesn't make sense, doesn't cohere,
doesn't go anywhere."

The very qualities we like may not be
acceptable to us. This is frightening and feels
like a diminution of power. Under these
conditions, power seems to reside in renouncing
temptation. This is not the first time (poetic
exagerration- in turn, this depends on
the purpose and possibilities of subtexts) we have
had to pause at the juncture when something
interesting was about to happen. We were
about to go on...in a camp where many
voices can be heard...this isn't Nurnberg,
Germany, this is the Presidio, San Francisco...
some of these people may actually remember
you from school..what about Skipper
Amory- does anybody remember him...
he was fun and then he was mean...after
he tripped me in the schoolyard and I didn't
want to be his friend after that...
but now you've gone adrift into the
details of your own life...they'll feel
that conflict anyway...it was in the
apprehension that filled that western room
and it was in that man's face before he put
his arm through the bars of the cage...
the details start to get fuzzy... it's
not the sleepiness, it's the smell of this
man's fear, it's in the smell of his room and
the eyes of his mother...in the fearsome
unlikelihood of the act... in its breaking of
the boundaries between the real and the unreal...
it all goes limp, particularly after the
man falls wounded and the act has been done and
the man is lying limp on the ground, or
maybe screaming, I can't completely see it
yet...this man was terrified and the pain
came crashing through on every level, his
strange wanting it somehow, the feel fo the power
the way the man shooting the gun must have
felt his power...all of this in the deepest
dark, it must be, a dim
day at the zoo, cloudy and a lantern held
above the table for llight...and, will these
shadows be all it takes to put meaning there...
much more...

8/21

The nameless horror

1976

Thought searches for
possibilities, action
realizes them. (But)
action also eliminates
possibilites, brackets
them through the
shaping language of
gesture. A line
of poetry suggests
a number of
possible completions.
The gesture that
imitates it may be
partially bracketed
out of language by
thought's choice of
refusing to read
it. Then I may
visualize a series
of alternating meanings,
approximations of
its disclosure, which
envision it.

If you do not
encourage me
to be silent you
encourage me
to speak. Gesture
now resembles an
automatic response.
By refusing to
delay I prolong
an uncertainty
of form if I
gesture, suddenly
immersed in the
anxiety of
defining a
specific relation
to accumulated
signals, reminders
of what is
most recent. If
I delay and
break it off
I won't know
the form of
a specific
reference.

Words appear
like signposts
along the way.
Freed from their
responsibility
as adherents
of naming
specific locales
on a specific
grid of the
definitions of
a particular
word, now
I know which
texts I
want to
read. Choosing
the direction
of a desire
that would
point me
towards a
specific axis
of action,
I suspend it
into an
array of
choices
binding me
to an
abbreviation
of a previous
unity that
(from their
interplay)
would
disclose and
open simultaneously
reversing and
recombining the
imagined lines
in a slowly
changing series
of pretended
gestures which
gradually rescue
and release what
is possibly future
in it, like the
sound of the
plane, its
reminders, the
scent of ocean,
the gradually
decaying sentence
fragment shown
just enough
to lead me again
to gently approach
it in thought,
weighing, enlarging,
comparing its
alternatives, again,
saddened by its
departure into
incomprehension,
meaninglessness,
sadness, the
infinitesimal, the
humanly vulnerable.
Saying goodbye
to the poem
I barely remember
it but keep it
read and unread or
almost read or soon
to be read, so that
I remember some
particular of what
I forgot which is
simply reversing the
process of naming
it and keeping its
representation as
part of
forgetting. Madness
always comes as
a surprise.

10/2/94

Memories of reading-
browsing through my books
and remembering the experience
of living inside each particular
world.

9/3/03

Ha- and I
thought they
(the books) were
still props- but
they are not
anymore. They
are conversations
I had- not
guides. I was
the guide. The
books were voices,
were company on
the lonely path
on which I often
play(ed) the fool.

from The New York Times
September 22, 2003

The Dalai Lama Looks to a World Beyond War
By DANIEL J. WAKIN


Under a brilliant sun, the Tibetan leader and Buddhist holy man spoke...

"I have nothing to offer, no special thing," he said with a chuckle. "Just
some blah, blah, blah."

1/22/90

"This" is made of all the usual stuff but it has
the look of something on the stage- or things in
an old box full of mementos and souvenirs.

Placed here the words are
surrounded by silence- and are so intimate
with the objects they represent. But now they
have created for themselves another memory and
another place- again.

Life consists of tugging at things- or
resting from tugging at things.

1/14/90

Not push. When ready, stand.

12/31/90

Device: imagine each line separately- as if
hearing them in a foreign language. This is
what I meant by the title "Translation
Without Original."

Another "subject to change" The moment
I declare anything I'm already breathing in the
heady element of spontaneity. I'm "holding the
floor" and now I can "go where
I want" with it. Of course, this freedom
is much more apparent than real. A fascinating
thorough and profound documentation of this fact can be
found in the books of Erving Goffman.

1) Imagine each line separately as if hearing
it in a foreign language.
2) Translate from the French, lets say, into
English- or in "imaginary French."

Later:

Not a "plenitude of things" but a single "thing."

*

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**

Check out Squirrels In My Attic
to find out why all poetry is inherently "defective"!

2/7/87

The years are not numbers, they're more like letters spelling out a word.

2/12/87

Make a gadget offer a longer duration (the
computer is the latest) the more it
simulates life. But every game offers
para-time although it is played
in real time. So, with computers
more and more K so you can play
longer games. This gives the appearance of
more closely approximating life- like
Dickens offering more and more episodes as he
simultaneously creates a
sense of on-goingness as well as a
discrete awareness that the mechanical and
arbitrary systemetizing of the
rules of a game occurs more at the
ragged edges between ending one and
beginning another.

The best move of any game is the one
that successfully completes
this "hand" or sequence- so I can
(usually) rapidly go on to the next one.

3/25/86

An indeterminate time, in the far future.
Humankind no longer need travel physically-
a transfer of hologramic (primitive now) image,
complete with a full (enough) rendering of the
original person, may go anywhere and instantaneously
transfer thoughts and experiences to the original. All
physicality has become largely a function and intertwined
with mental processes. Organization is utterly computerized.
Free thought is now the
goal of all minds. These figures from the far past have
been invited to a forum- to discuss,
in the light of current attitudes and
problems- what they see as the yet remaining fate of Humankind.

"A great artist can make art by simply casting a glance.
A set of glances could be as solid as any thing or place,
but the society continues to cheat the artist out of
his "art of looking" by only valuing "art objects."
The existence of the artist in time is worth as much
as the finished product. Any critic who devalues the *time*
of the artist is the enemy of art
and the artist. The stronger and clearer the artist's *view*
of time the more he will resent any slander on
this domain. By desecrating this domain, certain critics
defraud the work and mind of the artist. Artists with a
weak view of time are easily deceived by this victimizing
kind of criticism, and are seduced into some trivial history.
An artist is enslaved by time only if the time is controlled
by someone or something other than himself. The deeper
the artist sinks into the time stream the more it becomes
*oblivion*; because of this, he must remain close to the
temporal surfaces. Many would like to forget time altogether,
because it conceals the "death principle" (every authentic
artist knows this). Floating in this temporal river are the
remnants of art history, yet the "present" cannot support
the cultures of Europe, or even the archaic or primitive
civilizations; it must instead explore the pre-and post-historic
mind; it must go into the places where remote futures meet
remote pasts."

Robert Smithson, "A Sedimentation of The Mind: Earth Projects",
1968.

"The mind naturally believes and the will naturally loves,
so that when there are no true objects for them they
necessarily become attached to false ones."

"Despite the sight of all the miseries which affect us, and
hold us by the throat we have an irrepressible instinct which bears
us up."

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

c. 1976


A collaboration to a minor
collage or challenge,
college.
Weeping call.
Who circles
someone
around it
out typifies
indecisiveness
in Massachusetts.
Misinterpreted
individuals,
artists,
celebrate the
kindly ocean
of
inaccurate
history.
As the waters
flow backwards
into feeling
washed
back
into the lonely
self are sets
of two kinds of
days,
dais,
or one might,
night
simply a springboard
to make-believe
history,
cardboard boxes, anagrams.
Maps
or territories

Its the corrected
anthology
of individual
silences that have been
continuously
pressed into
service
by the suns eye
size of anyone's
book (false face).
In an attitude
of victims the —
which is only
the private
expression of a
bank,
attitude of the
junction
confusion,
for example,
indifference,
references
seemed like
all the words
were
available
I meant,
swearing up
processed right
the front
(“up... to', is removed).

Collages drawn
backwards
from the end
of the sentence
to its beginning,
it emerges
gradually to an
ordinary truth
(sunrise),
the singular
everyday name
of a loved
object.
Remains
there and here
examined,
illumined
in the simultaneous
renderings of the
middle,
specifics,
pressures,
monogrammatical
measurements.
I discuss with someone
who
only wanted
to refer
to discuss with,
or at some point
I am ascribing
(and describe
with a compass
an arc,
a silence,
fixed in
patterns
of lights
against the
hemisphererical
planetarium ceiling
an inscribed
sequence
of rooms,
archaic memories)
the boundaries of
an orderly depiction.
I can't hint its documented
I answer to the
one questioning
the representation
and me, this time
equating depiction
and representation,
also
implying
our presence
(moi et je).

This, gentlemen,
drones an emotionless,
deep voice,
behind which is recorded
the coughing voice
of the sea,
is Western history
unfolding,
individual artist
thereby rescues
fate
of a sensibility
of membership.

Days without
flowers
to present,
only with the
absence that
draws with it
today's associations.
“I
was
warning
you”
and off goes
the television,
on the stereo,
the statement
“this place
needs more
light.” Cameras,
script,
lighting. Scratchy
recording sounds.

6/5/98

Placemarks (names for the book)

Embrace the whole, but let the
parts also encompass places. Also:
the name itself lets things join.
Forever after, what comes before.
This is music. Heard,
remembered. Extending hand,
let in. Following is moving,
eventually coming upon (meeting).
But meeting is melting.
Unless, unto. Seeming, been.
Words live beside each other,
bask in themselves, bask
in each other. Little hurts.
words said, real too, eyes
aside, small things not
said, not yet met, misheard,
misunderstood- face, glances
averted.