Friday, April 20, 2007

Room ..... ??



He


He died out or was he where he was he when - exterminated into the

music that questionmarked the edges, whose triumph was to be


precedent



to a glowing failure as of, say. a mad re run of The Charge of The

Light Brigade or some such other Tennysonian echoes still leaving the

forests of god—faced television sets wrench—wracked and abandoned


with


their smashed screens and dead-faced fuckedness that brings in the

iron turbans of sperm and delicately treasured regrettedness. This

kind of thing whose over-adjectived conceitedness would be enough


to


make yu’ sell up for a Kroner if you knew which country had Kroners,

or Deutschmarks.


And it tallys, doesn’t it, how Richard Prebble’s
related to Goebbels – its the sort of negative positivity that leads
to the viper pits of toothless guesture. But you play the game, silly
old you, knowing that Xmas can always be interchanged with


Easter and Labour Day with Anzac


etc etc etc etc etc etc so perhaps you become

Obsessed with Louise Bourgeois or information theory or taking up

swimming inside a question mark water tank,


or masturbate with your

infuriating silly grin onto a blank photograph.


Something like that.


You might well object as well I you might at all this negative

postivity leaking out of my right ear that is really made of teflon

how God, for example, is trapped inside a theorem by Godel with the

umlaut or Gauss or Whitehead-its better perhaps to take in a hooker

and fuck the bitch against the wall and listen to her simulated

screams of animal ecstasy.


Or am I wrong as usual?


I want to fail over and over again, but only in the normative sense of that wiley word. Perhaps I should mention Marlowe or something about another harbour bridge at this point. Perhaps nothing should have said at all - after all there’s not much to say really except maybe I’ll go I cant go.


You


live in a sunken steamboat and only occasionally is your hand espied,
waving whitely above the whitecaps – so presumably the roar of 5000
rugby maniacs is really justified, and their joy is yours, even if you
cant see the game: or do you dream only of the empty book, complete with uncompleteness, ready to clasp you in its leaves of what they said, so you limp to the dairy, only to buy a useless piece of soap because you felt for it, and it you, both of you stuck inbeing and the impossible quagmire of clarification because x=y or it did last Monday.





6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your last paragraph ... "sunken steamboat" ... kinda reminds me of a dream I had ... your work is very dreamlike. That is good for it means you are accessing the subconscious ... (not that I'm the expert on that. I'm more into BEING unconscious than analysing it ..! I found you at random - pressing "next blog" from mine. If you want to see my blog you're welcome: gledwood2.blogspot - my online secret diary of my life and problems. Maybe I'll see you there..?!

Richard said...

Thanks for your comment. "Eyelight" is an ongoing project and is not consciously dreamlike although that "poem" was written some time ago and has "unconscious" elements (I am using Bach's idea of recirculating old works to make up one major work as in his B Minor Mass). (The NY Jewish poet Louis Zukofsky - in 'A' also uses "references" to Bach and he is invoked at the start of this series "rooms" of Eyelight - although nothing is seperable really in Eyelight it is an ongoing project that is both a learning and a processional thing - the theme at the moment or the themes are The Holocaust (and the general ontological or existential questions arising given 20th Century History - which is not good overall - and also the problem of knowledge and what we can know and how we handle knowledge etc) (BTW the US comes under fire only because it inherits the British mantle of being the largest Imperialist Power (I am not attacking the American or German people) - there are other villains abroad) which lead to war etc and it got "stuck" on the image of the oven at "Auschwitz". Auschwitz is used symbolically - the question was famously asked - can there be poetry or "art" after Auschwitz - and Eyelight struggles with this - and then now that last text is "degenerating" (or breaking free so to speak) into the tragi-comic - th near-deranged. The contemplation of the Holocaust has sent the text into a "spin" of near despair to which it reacts by "cracking up".

But taken on its own it was written "automatically" - it chimed with what I am doing now so I re-used it. I have also reused a lot of other materials and "lifted" stuff from others. The dreamlike aspect obviously interested you - and indeed Auschwitz and the various wars - WW1 seem like nightmares. (Dadaism and Surealism got a "boost" from WW1 and so on). But my meeting with the old man who saw "all the dead" was an actual meeting that took place in about 1969 or 70.

Also if you or others have time, please read through all of my Blog entries carefully as there is developmental linkage. It is pretty much worked out very closely with some random elements.

But thanks for your interest - I will look at your Blog. Cheers. Richard.

lampad said...

Hi Richard!

I've been enjoying absorbing Eyelight, mainly for the language since I am more attuned music than ideas. Of the earlier posts, one beautiful phrase in particular keeps recurring to me:

the hand that holds a pen is as
subtle as a billion flies

I'm intrigued by the method of composition, which seems to grow out the theme of degeneration. The reuse of older literary material, images of skulls.

Richard said...

lampad

Thanks. That's a great response!

That phrase is an example of something "recirculated" - the method of composition of Eyelight is quite different to that in which I wrote that poem - that was about 1990 - that poem was - I will show it in another comment after this...I actually performed the whole poem-show several times (at The Little Maidment in Auckland) -it grew into a performance - part of a piece I called "Tin Drum" (a ref. I forget why to a book by Gunter Grass) I performed it at the Little Maidment as part of three acts.
The poem, begins:

"In the slush and slosh of consciosness
And in the mud of blood
Order from slime and sparks from dark
Did fire this flesh."
(rest in next comment)

It was composed or written fairly quickly when I had just heard a toilet flush!

I do use older literary material - my own and others - and also new stuff or stuff I haven't published yet. This poem Eyelight is not poem per se - it's rather like writing a long - and theoretically endless - symphony. (BTW the images I see as texts transformed: and they are as much words as words are images..!) Now such a compostion is necesarily perhaps very lonely - what this is what - or from what it derives some of it's energy - but it is not negative -if you go back through to the start you will see I have lot that I feel good about - actually I am very happy person and feel well most of the time.

But I am making this project Eyelight a kind of subset of The Infinite Poem (see earlier posts - I will also talk about it in the future) - now that project is constantly under revison - it isn't something that I can say is 'this' or 'that'...the skulls BTW were from Bronowski's book - they were not in Auschwitz - they were from some collector's genuine attempt to study human skull types - a non racial exercise - but they "chimed" in with what I was doing...

As you see in my note above - symbolically everything kind of stopped here - most (not all) of Eyelight is deliberate and that "pause" or hiatus was deliberate - a "radical artifice" - the way I have worked is that I make some posts - then I kind of meditate on the next thing I will do (I kind of allow ideas to gestate until I really feel like I have to do some more - I dont work to a time table -no one's paying me!!) what should come next and why and what are the implications - there are many aspects to what I am doing and at certain points these are combined - in my last set of "rooms" I eventually fragmented everything then used images. I was also thinking of using music as I have - in the past - improvised music on the piano - but I was not sure how to do that ... but music is a possibility ... I am interested in the ideas of Wagner and right through to John Cage and Charles Ives. I also am interested in art and perhaps an example might be Bueys but there are many others... I am interested in everything.But I dontunderstand alotof things - naturally. This un-understanding is source of constant effort by me...

I have no precise plan (there are plans but this presents a series kind of subverted me -the initial poem was one that I felt needed to start it -I dont know exactly why I made that start -so there is an element of intuition and the subconscious going on (mixed with the controlling intellect I suppose) except there are certain recurring themes - some are origin, questions of being, death, birth, whether there is a God, science, meaning, "Art", the personal (without being "confessional" - although that movement has validity in the right place and time and maybe still does to some degree) and the language aspects - and so on. It is also a learning project* so potentially anything can enter into it. I see your and my comments as a part of it.

I also find philosophical ideas very difficult and certainly I am no scientist alhthough I did study some relatively basic science and so on when I was younger. You can treat this as kind of huge piece of music.

*This includes evertything - I read on many subjects e.g. I am studying Maoritanga, growth, astronomy and soon, art, poetics & hence philosophy (a subject I find very difficult but I like the language critics use so like a magpie I "steal" their words!)
chess, chemistry or how things work and so on. Humour is also used... that is why my last entry is a bit "silly" to give some relief from the 'dark' that has preceded. And yet it was a poem unto itself..

And if you have time go back to the start - dont worry about the ideas (to a large extent I am using ideational 'blocks' (which sometimes become "blacks"!) - or blocks of certain kinds of "langauge" " 'x'lects " to interact with other such blocks etc - I am never quite sure what these ideas mean per se - they just interest me...

Blacks of language.

I am very pleased you are enjoying my project. Please comment whenever you want.

Richard

Richard said...

If anyone wishes to contribute anything to my ongoing Blog-Project please send it to my email and I will include it in Eyelight or my The Infinite Poem - as long as it is not - too vast (for reasons of time and space not any perjorative reason) - or very offensive! When it is approriate.

Richard

Richard said...

lampad

I will put the poem onto my Blog