Eyelight

2012-01-28T16:13:00.010+13:00

Room xV111.9x

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Pursuant to the above, and as affirmed D vs, the Crown,1878, (Lon. 156 p.v445), if only we could bring these people to justice the light keeps and then she sighed if only a motor bike might appear and it is not known why we are here, and not there: as things are frequently far too yellow for anyone (let alone the Purveyors of Whiteness) to think correctly, (a kind of Bleak House, a fog, a Jarndyce (and Jarndyce) implic, the window pane fog-rubbing its yellow muzzle and making sudden leaps in the day-night or (refusal) in the violet evening propagating a further fear of more things (peering) which indeed is how the circularity could be closed or closeted or (cloaked or chopped or chinked or choked or champed) in a Brain Idea of green to becoming as of Yestayear’s Day where I was, where it was I was and they were, but it was then now that they all departed amid guffaws and sly winks, (diffuse and rising) for who could have known the destiny of texture (a storm of protest) in the wildest child’s wild wild dream but soon these things vanished as they took tea in the Arbitorium if only they knew what that was, and where had his Mother gone was another query kept nagging at him, again he wanted so much to say it but Nothing came he couldn’t get it out, he he he he, and she she she, and they they they; which was a Book-Poem he’s found almost by chance in his travels by a black woman who did fascinating collages: one of the many in the Human-Machine-Struggle, caught in the "drive to create" and to be: to Be, and to share, maybe, as if (despite togetheryness) we had some kind of sweet autonomous future: and as if The Age of Reason was (again, and rearing, and) upon us, in light of sweet evil, the general Gotterdammerung: and the frienzied tinkle tonkle of the Golden Ring Forgers): as we gallop further and further away from our selves (clutching the Technical Books): and get caught in more and more complex cliches of such enchantful tapestry (filamental and fine), that the crassest business man of them, say, of a cynic Philistine outlook, might even (time, eternally busy and grumpy Time, permitting) stop; or pause; and was that a tear (or a hint of a tear, or faint pauseor a subtle sussurration) we espied struggling at the corner of his mien (or more correctly, his visage, his face, or (more specifically) his eye), but we were a loss, and things kept smiling, of course (enemy), even those who (had, did, might, would, were rumoured to) wished for conclusion (in a rented domicile perhaps) had long since been dissolved inside the (perhaps not wheat brown) dream of the Eternal Madman; as if we knew what we were talking about but it doesn’t matter there is hope it is said despite the oceans of sand and brick and dust and because of breath, and they set forth again seeking something whose truth could never be verified, but no one objected, in this most objectless subjective unsubjective of all (too, or two) un or non-un (Un)human (and polyvocal) Universe’s; [to be continued……]…it was then horribly the excruciatingly Terrify Scream (prior to which) was heard never such a terrible erotic sound to J-

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2011-12-04T18:45:00.209+13:00

Room 2225c

At. At a certain point on the graph:

Dark equals Light.

'Echo of a Scream'

--------- by David Alfaro Siquieros.

{Some comments on "'from The Infinite Poem' and the crime of the Holocaust}

NOTE: 'from "The Infinite Poem"' is clearly a collage.

I took samples from many books (childrens, art crit, ecyclopedias, books picked off the shelf of by chance, things heard on the radio etc etc) and newspaper etc at random and sometimes reproduced them entirely or in part or I reworked them and fragmented them. Also I recycled my own poems or parts of them. All of this to give texture of different languages and ways of speaking. So the various ways of saying things are either blended or juxtaposed in many permutations. I found however that in the process I seemed (subconsciously or not) to have several "themes" present. (There seemed to be an echoing thematic progression through the "work". One is war and The Holocaust. there are art and reality and so on. The question of Being, of God or whether there is a God and much else. Personal "cries" are admixed. Death, a subject or fact all writers or Artists (indeed all persons on this earth) as I call them, I feel must think about, deal with, and so on. I had severe breakdown in 1967 and it was around the question of existence. Death became constant in my thoughts and seems to be even more so lately. Also in recent years as I approach the end of my life it seems to obsess me increasingly day by day...but that is only a part of what I did here.

But the thematic "echoes" like the surges and recapitulations say in a symphony or a sonata, and indeed the leitmotifs and the inter disciplinary approach which perhaps originates with Wagner (whose ideas influenced me from my own age of about 17 or so when I dreamed of attaining to some kind of film-art-poem-music complex with a continuous instantaneous gestalt aesthetics that was by some kind of strange and priestly complex mathematics a constantly perfect 'insight' into the central mystery of all things.) I was also undoubtedly influenced by James Joyce's description of his epiphanies in 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' and his putated aesthetic in that book.

The picture above (by Siquieros (I have been searching for for along time -I knew of it in the early 90s and then I saw it at the MOMA in NY in 1993 (after I had written this), thinking it had been done by Matta) I had (perhaps not so consciously but in my memory) Echo of a Scream in mind when I wrote these strange lines:

If a daddy long legs got drunk and

its head grew to the size of an immense baby’s,

and it caterpaultered across the First World War, and

all the other deathings,

from the calculated opposition of primary colours across the reflecting surfaces of his brittle invention:

The tragedy of the angry sneer, its vengeance, trap-ratted cat, crying in the box, cuboid, deep in the white hexagonal hold, the Drogons searching, phrasically,n the

Alone. Splendour. It’s cold. Passion. To cross wisdom. He’s a strategist from way back. I don’t think she’s playing a game Pete. Praps she is. Oh Jesus, what a fuck up that all was. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Go the play. Go to the play?. Go to the play?Alone?? Yes, you’re always alone. Every one’s alone.

To sail the equidistance. Dance on an egg.

If a daddy long legs got drunk and its head grew to the size of an immense baby’s, and it caterpaultered across the First World War, and all the other deathings, and the moon fell in shells of ice....it would be time for the first green, hopeful shoots, curleying from the little garden, hidden from the others, in the oxygenated blackness, and all twenty two fingers in the perfectly nothing lake.

****************************************************************************

Here is an elucidation (somewhat) of what I was doing here (remembering that this was written about 1993 or so.) COMMENTS ARE IN GREEN. [But of course if one accepts that the totality of all permutations of 'from "The Iinfinte Poem"' are indeed effectively one"unit" or a complex gestalt then every version of this "poem" or text is still "one" poem or "one" text in its totality. Hence however it much it gets altered it cannot change. It can be shown, via reasons of the question of the nature of Infinity, that it cannot be conceptually altered by any change even say if it was written in (say) Chinese and was now a story about Robin Hood (as one example.) But THE COMMENTS ARE IN GREEN :

from The Infinite Poem

is ironic, however, for it is precisely qualities such as uselessness and entropy which give minimalist sculpture its value as a challenge to illusions about the normative concept of art

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Comment:

This was taken from a book about 20th Century Art. I'm not here concerned with what is being said. After all what really does it mean? But it is an interesting and quite dense text. It thus has a good texture.

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I want you to look on Bo Weinberg for your own sake and understand the terrible usage of such a man, look him in the eye if you can so you will never forget this as long as you live because in a few minutes, just a few minutes, he will be at peace, he will be over it, the ropes wont hurt he wont be hot or scared or humiliated or happy or sad or needful of anything anymore, this is the way God makes up for the terrible death, that it comes in time and time goes on but the dying is done and our persons are at peace. But you kid are a witness and it’s tough shit but that’s the way it is, you’ll remember and you can never be sure of anything again because you are doomed to live in remembrance of the foulness done to this man Bo Weinberg

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Comment:

I studied Doctorow's 'Ragtime' (A book I enjoyed greatly but which in conversation I found Jack Ross quite disliked. But he had to teach it!) This quote is an entire paragraph from another book by Doctorow called 'Billy Bathgate' Bo Weinberg is about to be dumped in concrete boot into the East River in N.Y.! I suppose there is tragicomic aspect here. One 'theme' - death.

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pieces of scrap iron, springs, saucepan lids, sieves, bolts and screws picked out with discernment from the rubbish heap, could mysteriously in their construction

the vestiges of their origins remained visible

the language of space the creative dance the laugh and lash of life

“You worry about the way I say things, but you don’t worry about what I mean.”

a logically possible world is any conceivable way the world might BE have been (might have be been ( might have been (might have (might

WORD in a modern poem is a SUBSTANCE, and OBJECT, sui generis, and uses machine parts and textured surfaces.....

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Comment:

There is a mix of art criticism etc, and a a quote from book by Donald Barthelme. The only thing by me is in italics. In fact most of this is not 'me' as such except that in italics with a few exceptions. However in many cases I "join" a part of one text to another, as above. "WORD.....' joins to 'machine parts and textured surfaces....." I do this to introduce a kind of "conflict" between the texts, to "torque the language". (The more torqued it gets, the more it talks! Hopefully to add depth to it (as an artist say i.e. Don Peebles might put a yellow board with a metal piece on it or Rauschenberg will mix images and paint textures..as many artists do...or as Charles Ives mixes sounds so they modulate from harmony to enharmonics to dissonances (and then clash) and so on. [The clash of colours.]

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triangle strangle the triangle trinanngle [sculpt] I AM

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Comment:

I may have been thinking of McCahon but also Descartes is invoked indirectly. My play with "triangle" is added.

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feverishly interested

in these questions

Ethics has always been where my Heart is

and the enclosed brochure tells you the facts in secretion, the reverse might occur. it.

it’s mysterious what happens: (I Like Rust).

A bridge or even a power pylon has a beauty which is a function of its joyous and liberating functionalism as it leaps the gap of time or space and its inherent structural dynamic

(I love you) The quality of a primitive force

anchors the modern mind

to earth

the rhythmic organization of space. Space no longer exists. Objects never end and intersect with infinite combinations of sympathetic harmonies and clashing aversions

Where armies of machining ants clash and time is bent into a ring on the old father’s finger

and Form, producing a machine-like finish, suggests that there is an absolute, ultimate form

“...there was a tremendous explosion. My first thought, and I wasn’t the only one, was that I was trapped in something like that film Towering Inferno...”

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Comment:

The part in purple is from a newspaper report of a New Yorker's reaction to extremity, who was in the North Tower in 1993 when a bomb was set off there. I took this entirely at random. It has no ostensible political significance. At the time I was quite indifferent to political events. It has no connection to 9/11 as it hadn't happened when this was done! I did go to N.Y. that year but again that has no connection as the work here had been written previously! (About 1992 or so). Unless there is some proleptic process involved here!

The 'ultimate form' quote is someone writing about the art of Brancusi

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they want to scratch out the eyes of their enemies with their virtue

He loves the ampersand. And in you, too, there is much that makes me love and hope

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Comment:

" they want to scratch out the eyes of their enemies with their virtue " taken from Nietzsche's 'Thus Spake Zarathrustra.

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Piet Mondrian “Windmill in Sunlight” (1908) offered Mondrian the pretext to paint a violent red apparition in which the optical pulsation from the calculated opposition of primary colours across the reflecting surfaces of his brittle invention:

The tragedy of the angry sneer, its vengeance, trap-ratted cat, crying in the box, cuboid, deep in the white hexagonal hold, the Drogons searching, phrasically, in the loop back reactions of dead significations and burning laser beams: it all falling over into the mouth. They begin to imagine symptoms.

To sail the equidistance. Dance on an egg.

nothing ever finally resolves, beginning again, makes a change whose origin, from the process of which was not contained in of what it originated in, whose form, is actually is something – it gets to another place

when it gets working it keeps on. Switch the light.

NASA SPACECRAFT POISED TO PROBE RED PLANET

the terrible red rages in spokes its fiery fire – all, all is colour - ALL: die for it. spill blood for colour. Stab for colour. puddle of red, seeded with a scattering of pink and white strokes

Now Bob’s basic rap is that language, as an acquired skill, is one of those loop back functions of the organism except that his units are phrasiform as opposed to word form. Likewise P is ripping off, collaging, splicing texts: completing the solipsism The Light and the Dark seemed to know Something. Yes, it was

the Light – like the Doors,

Higher than God

Had been wedged Open,

And all the Light and Dark and Sound and Colour

Had writhed into Being

Everything compressed back into the darkness.

Shakespeare’s brain grew from the darkness.

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Comment:

The latter part of the above is from a long poem I had written to be performed so to speak and I first read it at The Masonic where there were Monthly readings on Wednesday nights organized by Rosemary Menzies. To write it I had used The Book of Genesis as a starting point. The poem is multi voiced itself and uses a simulated "Elizabethen or Shakesperean language or pastiche perhaps.

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The Light and the Dark seemed to know Something. Yes, it was

the Light – like the Doors,

Higher than God

Had been wedged Open,

And all the Light and Dark and Sound and Colour

Had writhed into Being

Everything compressed back into the darkness.

Shakespeare’s brain grew from the darkness.

And here is one of the "asides":

But this darkness you keep talking about:

Did you know it was purple? Eh?

Yes - purple - part purple. Because

The colours were gases. Gases?

Yes, they were interfuser things, mixy mixy…

They, and the light, and the dark, danced and danced!

What?! 100 Million?! Invent something:

be alert, but keep calm.

“Repair thou quickly hence to thence, and,

As if ‘twere thee’s own heart thou held,

Knowing that to lose or drop that beating

Spring of life, God’s pump, would be

Certain forfeit of thou’s life,

Fast heeling on that bumble fingering:

Treasure convey this my particular attent

To that matter, whose import is as vast

As giant mountain quakes that oft do shake

And fright our mighty globe -

Oh this greatly troubled spheroidic world!

Oh go as fast as festinate

And by no circuit daily - this matter cannot sleep,

Nor shall rest my kingly heart, old, and weighted

As I wait and weigh, and weight, these matters

Total up for the rest, who slumber as I ponder. No!

My kingly head, so white with woe, I’ll not to rest

Till all these frightful ghosts are soft sure in bed:

For if we dare leave this dangling —

For sure by Damocles the woundy bleary, beary world,

Shall wake in sudden throat -

And slay us cursely like a Polyphemous , who had

But One, despite he Poly. Go! Go! Fleet thee fleet!”

Yes, darkness, darkness. Then Colour was created -

And an infinite number of forms!

There was a sudden display:

Everything was afire with Colour

Everything Compressed back into the darkness.

Shakespeare’s brain grew from the Darkness.

Who? Yes? What? Oh yes. Did they?

Well well well — eh? Oh Yes

Did they? How could — did you?

Did we? Were we? When? Oh!

Gosh! Wonderful! No? There was no other way

You say? No! Who? Who? Oh him - him:

You mean? What? What!? Who? Why? Speak louder!

What?! Speak softer! What? Who? Why?

When did — who did — why did —

And it continues. The plot or the pot (of soup or whatever) thickens!

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it is what it is and what it wants to be and what it struggles to become

You’re thinking of the three pigs, said Polly. They built their houses of mud and sticks, the first two, didn’t they? Well, I am, the wolf admitted.

the peremptory transmission of a logos hides the potential proliferation of effects. What is the why of this how? Why does the hand descend, golden, and tagged by the graffiti of the mathematician’s dreams, out of the hollow domed and purple folded sky

I had the most marvellous piece of luck, I died.

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Comment:

This is from John Berryman. It is from one of his sonnets and one of his "alter egos" such as Henry or Bones is talking. Berryman for me is a major poetic influence and one whose poetry I really love to read.

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believed that the sounds, in some mysterious way, replenish the deep springs of the soul

“I see the artists moving toward annihilation, towards becoming a voice...” reflecting surfaces of his brittle invention. The book’s centre is its own bookishness

and you should have seen all those tiny infinities:

the child’s eye

the whale’s eye

and the tentacles reaching!

Still the ravenous sea, still the gulls

Above: “There we are.” She said. I yessed at her, but

It echoed into questions...I did so want

To be infinitely joined,

Or to be part of her, or in her -

But I forgot, the instant instant of her sound start.

I’m afraid. I’m afraid you can never know

Us or them or we or I. Pronouns die in heroic -

But they keep on playing that

come go come go come again game.

winter had come in the meadow, the whole meadow was crystal white and quite still. What are we to do? cried the mice thru chattering teeth. Now we shall surely freeze. They all huddled together.

He had reached The Mountain of Darkness.

Air N.Z. up 2 cents. Ceramco down 6 cents. Lion Nathan down 9 cents.

witty, disillusioned, with a somewhat brittle charm. Put chaos in a box – eat it.

Not yet fifteen she wrote: “I feel that I am a woman, a woman who has both moral energy and courage.” She died in the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen in March 1945.

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Comment:

This last seems, coincidentally, to 'link back' to the Bo Weinberger scene or event. There is no comedy though, as this is from a blurb on the cover of (a paper back edition of) 'Anne Frank's Diary'. A book, a terribly moving and tragic document, and of the work of a great writer, a young woman of great talent who, together with millions, lost her life in the Nazi atrocity of all time. So much life wasted by war and in particular by the horror of the Holocaust. Perhaps the greatest crime of human history. Susan Sontag called it the overriding question of the 20th Century. I feel it is of the order of crime and of the order of moral evil done to humans by humans that seems to pose a question as to the possibility or not of humans ever progressing in any sense. That book ['Anne Frank's Diary'] has haunted me since I read it as a teenager. I concerns death and life. It concerns all questions. It is THE question of all time. Perhaps, perhaps, there is some hope in that the diary "survived" to "witness" that terrible human event.

________________________________

BUT IT MUST BE UNDERSTOOD THAT THE DISCOVERY OF THEMATIC CONSISTENCY WAS ENTIRELY BY CHANCE. IT SEEMED TO SHOW TO ME THAT IN ALL THE WRITING THAT I SAMPLED OR USED BY CHANCE AND FOR ALL MY ATTEMPTS AT AN OBJECTIVE NON PERSONAL ART OR "CONSTRUCT" THERE SEEMED TO APPEAR A REGULAR RYTHM OR WAVE PATTERN AND



              AN EMOTIONAL FORCE"PUSHING" THE TEXT AS IF BY USING THE MULTIPLE OR MULTIPLEX VOICES OF HUMANITY THERE INEVITABLY ARISES A THEMATIC MEANING DESPITE THE RANDOM ORDER ATHT THE TEXTS AND VOICES ARE PRESENTED. OF COURSE THERE IS NO PROOF OR NECESSARY TRUTH OF THIS AS I HAVEN'T EXPERIMENTED WITH IT. IT SEEMS REASONABLE AND WORKS SIMPLY BY MATHEMATICAL PROBABILITY. THERE IS NOTHING MYSTICAL OR MYSTERIOUS ABOUT IT. IT PERHAPS HAS SOME CONNECTION TO ENTROPY ETC

AND THE WORK ABOVE (OR THE SELECTION FROM IT AS SUCH) WAS NOT "PLANNED" AND CERTAINLY HAD NO DIRECT OR OSTENSIBLE POLITICAL AGENDA

HOWEVER 'from "The Infinite Poem"' I THOUGHT OVER AND OVER AND I REALISED THAT THIS PATH OF COLLAGE AND SO ON HAD ITS LIMITS. WHAT BEGAN AS ALMOST AN ELITIST "INTELLECTUAL" ATTEMPT AT AN EPIC TRANSFORMED (IN MY MIND AT LEAST) TOWARD A MORE UTOPIAN PROJECT (INCORPORATING EYELIGHT ) OF OR ABOUT WHICH UTOPIAN DIRECTIONS I WILL POST WHEN I CAN ON HERE

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2011-11-10T01:22:00.004+13:00

Room ZX@57899898

If a daddy long legs got drunk and its
head grew to the size of an immense baby’s, and it caterpaultered across the First World War, and all the other deathings, and the moon fell in shells of ice....it would be time for the first green, hopeful shoots, curleying from the little garden, hidden from the others, in the oxygenated blackness, and all twenty two fingers in the perfectly nothing lake.

Room (AB)xZ

from The Infinite Poem

is ironic, however, for it is precisely qualities such as uselessness and entropy which give minimalist sculpture its value as a challenge to illusions about the normative concept of art

pieces of scrap iron, springs, saucepan lids, sieves, bolts and screws picked out with discernment from the rubbish heap, could mysteriously in their construction

the vestiges of their origins remained visible

the language of space the creative dance the laugh and lash of life

“You worry about the way I say things, but you don’t worry about what I mean.”

a logically possible world is any conceivable way the world might BE have been (might have be been ( might have been (might have (might

WORD in a modern poem is a SUBSTANCE, and OBJECT, sui generis, and uses machine parts and textured surfaces.....

triangle strangle the triangle trinanngle [sculpt] I AM

feverishly interested

in these questions

Ethics has always been where my Heart is

and the enclosed brochure tells you the facts in secretion, the reverse might occur. it.

it’s mysterious what happens: (I Like Rust).

A bridge or even a power pylon has a beauty which is a function of its joyous and liberating functionalism as it leaps the gap of time or space and its inherent structural dynamic

(I love you) The quality of a primitive force

anchors the modern mind

to earth

the rhythmic organization of space. Space no longer exists. Objects never end and intersect with infinite combinations of sympathetic harmonies and clashing aversions

Where armies of machining ants clash and time is bent into a ring on the old father’s finger

and Form, producing a machine-like finish, suggests that there is an absolute, ultimate form

“...there was a tremendous explosion. My first thought, and I wasn’t the only one, was that I was trapped in something like that film Towering Inferno...”

they want to scratch out the eyes of their enemies with their virtue

He loves the ampersand. And in you, too, there is much that makes me love and hope

To sail the equidistance. Dance on an egg.

when it gets working it keeps on. Switch the light.

NASA SPACECRAFT POISED TO PROBE RED PLANET

the Light – like the Doors,

Higher than God

Had been wedged Open,

And all the Light and Dark and Sound and Colour

Had writhed into Being

Everything compressed back into the darkness.

Shakespeare’s brain grew from the darkness.

it is what it is and what it wants to be and what it struggles to become

You’re thinking of the three pigs, said Polly. They built their houses of mud and sticks, the first two, didn’t they? Well, I am, the wolf admitted.

I had the most marvellous piece of luck, I died.

believed that the sounds, in some mysterious way, replenish the deep springs of the soul

“I see the artists moving toward annihilation, towards becoming a voice...” reflecting surfaces of his brittle invention. The book’s centre is its own bookishness

and you should have seen all those tiny infinities:

the child’s eye

the whale’s eye

and the tentacles reaching!

Still the ravenous sea, still the gulls

Above: “There we are.” She said. I yessed at her, but

It echoed into questions...I did so want

To be infinitely joined,

Or to be part of her, or in her -

But I forgot, the instant instant of her sound start.

I’m afraid. I’m afraid you can never know

Us or them or we or I. Pronouns die in heroic -

But they keep on playing that

come go come go come again game.

winter had come in the meadow, the whole meadow was crystal white and quite still. What are we to do? cried the mice thru chattering teeth. Now we shall surely freeze. They all huddled together.

He had reached The Mountain of Darkness.

Air N.Z. up 2 cents. Ceramco down 6 cents. Lion Nathan down 9 cents.

witty, disillusioned, with a somewhat brittle charm. Put chaos in a box – eat it.

Not yet fifteen she wrote: “I feel that I am a woman, a woman who has both moral energy and courage.” She died in the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen in March 1945.

2011-11-07T00:46:00.016+13:00

Room 'A' to base 10 exp 101.00

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

     "The gashed elephant face

             of Maungarei."

"The gashed elephant face of Maungarei."

Victor walks like Van Gogh toward the
macrocarpa trees which are not native.

The water reservoir on Mt Maungerei

Every Poem is a Door

Unusual. I am awake, at 6.30.

Birds, birds. Outside,

Someone going to “work”.

At 40 plus

I’m one of the 200,000. What

Am I doing reading, correction,

Puzzling over Robert Sullivan’s

Poems at 6.30 into sentience?

What’s that mean? – ah – “eclectic”,

Oh yes, of course! That was a good poem.

But –something’s unclear – everyone’s

Different…if I had a book of poems

I would cunningly insert some

Subtle (Smithymanic?) puzzle poems,

Disguised with guises.

But then, I don’t understand

Half of my own poems. Touche!

The booze did it last night –

Knocked me out. Then 2 paracetemols

And I wake early, and read Robert

And puzzle over poems…

These teasing tormenting riddling damning things!

But then, say the riddles ran away,

And the stories of granddads

Because they all died of cancer

Or they stopped telling the children?

Say it was easy. The challenges would go and…

Who’d enchant our children

With funny learning tales?

Ah, these endless conundrums

Lizards after lizards…

Words. Words. Protect us from the night.

I listen to wakings

A train is somewhere.

People going to slavage?

Trains haunt me –

Drag me back.

We kids ran madly

To see the engine –soot and steam – cylindrical:

A black monster – always we nearly missed it…

Why is? What was that thing? That

Being I was. And my brother, and my sisters

Screaming after a train

In the long ago time of stories

And when a Policeman

Found me crying in Queen Street, lost in the crowd?

And what’s the moments of the fragments

Of the bits of me –

Got to do with me –

Reaching into another man’s poems

About Mangere and kids on the street

I sometimes don’t give a damn about.

(I know I should.) I’m better now…

How will I start, how shall I write this allusive,

Wriggling thing? This complex

Of deep thoughts of us All

And the jazz of the sexy real, or the music of the musical people?

Must write of chewing gum pavements and electric legends…

I live out here, by Mount Maungarei.

He’s not a lazy mountain.

But Robert, I once wrote –

“The gashed face

Of the elephant head of Mt Maungarei.”

Wasn’t I clever!

Every poem is a door –

Getting lostin your rooms was exciting.

Kia ora brother,

Kia ora.
______________________________________________________

RT. Written the morning after the launch of “Jazz Waiata” by Robert Sullivan.

22 November 1990.

_________________________________________________________

Mt Maungarei,

Mt Wellington has a “gashed face” as Winstones wanted to quarry it away completely but were stopped in the 40s by the local people protesting to the Mt Wellington Council. The cliff (overgrown now since my days of running up it in the 50s (playing at “war”, has been overgrown: so not many people realize this - or that it was a major pah site for Maori pre the European invasion here. Or that there was another mountain to the north of Mt. Maungarei which WAS destroyed completely by quarrying.

[Also, this area incorporated Camp Bunn, built by the U.S. Army during the Pacific War against the Japanese fascists. Here, during the war, there was the largest ammunition dump

almost of that whole war.

Later the buildings (with corrugated fibrelite roofs) were used as store houses. They are still here. In the 50s as boy I went to the movies (the 'flicks' we called them) at Oakley Brown's picture theatre (it burnt down ca 1962 or so as he initially used the inflammable film) and he started again in Queens Road, Panmure where we saw a film each Saturday (sometimes also Sunday) for years. 'Hop a Long Cassidy' and other Cowboy Movies, The Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, Disney Cartoons of all kinds and much else.]

On the land around extensive cultivation took place as the land here and in Mangere is very fertile, being volcanic. So this isthmus, Auckland (Akarana) or Tamaki Makau Rau was highly valued by Maori. Later in the 1820s before the Pakeha-Maori wars, Hongi Hika, the great Ngapuhi general who had been to England and even studied military books and as and Roman warfare etc and acquired numerous muskets, attacked the Mokioa Pah which is only about 1 kilometre from Maungarei, with devastating results to local Maori who lacked sufficient guns but fought back with great bravery in battle whose outcome was by no means certain. (At one stage Hongi Hika considered retiring from the battle altogether.)

Reference to this and other matters is in such books as Maungarei by Holloway Cannibal Jack by Trevor Bentley. Link to the latter here -

http://bookiemonster.co.nz/2010/07/cannibal-jack-by-trevor-bentley/

In Maungarei, a book by Mrs Holloway* (once head mistress at my old school of Tamaki College who took an interest in local history and even did excavations on Maungarei.)

The NZ poet Kendrick Smithyman was greatly interested in all aspects of NZ history but also in Pakeha-Maori, and he wrote a poem re Jacky Marmon. Scott Hamilton in his own books and on his Blog "Reading the Maps" (his blog is named after the title of a major poem by Smithyman.) has rightly celebrated and promoted the work of that enormously creative and indefatigable poet (Surely one of the most original and most inventive writers of the 20th Century in any country.) Reading the Maps (the poem and Scott's Blog) are essential to understanding NZ culture, politics and history.) Possibly only Yeats, Joyce, Gertrude Stein,
T. S. Eliot and such as Geoffrey Hill can be considered his equal as a writer.)

I lived in the area in the 50s. [I do so now also as I came back here in 1990.] In 1966 I got job testing roading materials etc at Bitumix which is or was joint Company of Winstones. We children played around this area a lot.

The cliff fascinated us as children . As did the abandoned buildings of Camp Bunn etc built by the US military in WWII, where they had one of the biggest ammunition stores in the whole of the Pacific war.] We used to run up the south side of Maungarei imagine we were fighting WWII I later was deeply impressed that this area might have been “wild” and covered with quite some bush ( remember that huge areas of native bush have been destroyed in NZ.) Many native birds were killed and predators introduced by sadistic pakeha in an attempt to eradicate anything “indigenous” including humans. It was all but the Nazi process of genocide. It was a Holocaust. Kauri was mercilessly culled and used for timber by profiteers. Auckland was bought for a pittance and then in few years for an enormous profit. This process of taking land by force or by legal pettifogging etc was repeated throughout NZ and left Maori impoverished, and many Europeans hoped they would die out. But Maori had run shipping businesses, flax making ventures and cultivated big areas of say the Waikato. They supplied settlers with food but were eventually attacked driven off these rich lands which were exploited by greedy profiteers and cynical farmers.

My uncle and my father came from England (London). My uncle became a research scientist at Mt Albert with the DSIR, his area was plant disease. He assisted Chinese market gardeners in Mangere and in Panmure. He was a nice enough fellow but like my father believed strongly in certain hierarchies and in fact both always supported the National Government. My uncle in fact managed a very large and prosperous Chemical Company.

But both regretted the loss of bush and the acquisition and destruction of land birds and trees etc; having come from England with its intensive urbanization.

Mangere (Robert Sullivans’s old home place) is a similar suburb of Auckland which has about 50 relatively young volcanoes on it. Rangitoto is the”youngest” (erupted about 400 years ago or so.)

* Her husband ran the Holloway Press of Auckland University.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

2011-10-24T18:39:00.001+13:00

Room - 'A' to base 10 exp 120.01

I don’t want to go and to not be I don’t want to I don’t want to I don’t want to I and don’t want to I don’t want to into the

                                  and to not be I don’t want to and not to be

                                  and not to be

                                  and not to be

I dont want to dont want to dont want to go

                                                I don’t want to go and to not be
                                  I don’t want to go and to not be
                                     I don’t want to go and to not be I don’t want to go and to not be

...................................................................................................................

2011-10-21T19:15:00.023+13:00

Room - 'A' to base 10 exp 120

Eternally ago he remembers:

                                  "Ill seen, Ill said."

with total horror suddenly dawned (“ill seen, ill said”) on him me total death endless eternal no escape awful no me or you no he no I no we no no no it no nothing no anything no no no no no no no no non non no no no no no no no no no o no lest no least lest no least no no no little of least no baby no most nothing and more nothing and no light or nothing or all light and (“ill seen, ill said”) there then being no other thing if me or you or i it or he she or we or they or those or the ones or those others or those or that or them or I if I or if if if and now nothing to know or breathe (“ill seen, ill said”) or be or record terrible I fear my own why me why me why me to vanish it cant be it cant it cant it cant or if then no brain my going or parts and no life the breath the death the totality and then if no I or brain no thought ‘or thought of thought’ and no remember and no one to remember (“ill seen, ill said”) to recall already the cold the dark and no no one all the works and days all all all gone no hope no one to care and death it is all all all all al all all all all all all but you must type this all out write this all out endure the total horror of vanishment where are they all a where are my mother my father where will I be how will Victor and Dionne and Tamasin and the others even those I don’t love or don’t know or see and there are so many hands yet the place here so vast so vast huge vast no release no deferment all that thought and feeling but why and why and (“ill seen, ill said”) where there is no answer the or the answer is beyond and we are under there will be either hell or heaven or nothing or some dream or nightmare of nothing we an know or horror or not or nothing or and oceans of nothing the endless silence no escape awful no me or you no he no I no we no no no it no nothing no anything no no no no no no no no non non no no no no no no no no no o no lest no least lest no least no no no little of least no baby no most nothing and more nothing and (“ill seen, ill said”) no light or nothing or (“ill seen, ill said”) all light and there then being no other thing if me or you or i it or he she or we or they or those or the ones or those others or those or that or them or I if I or if if if and now nothing to know or breathe or be or record but it is the not knowing and even the wakening is terrible it is impossible we cant be what we are what of the great sleep (“ill seen, ill said”) and who and what and the beautiful works of hands and the beautiful people and all the beauty and ‘ugliness’ if so it can be defined and can anything be defined any point to anything no point no point no point no point no point absurd thought (“ill seen, ill said”) of before everything thought of dying dying dying dying dying dying dying I don’t want to go and to not be I don’t want to I don’t want to I don’t want to I and don’t want to I don’t want to into the infinity the infinite spaces the dark the light god or(“ill seen, ill said”) no god the bark of it the dark bark not Bach he cant help except to soothe then I can think only of you my death (“ill seen, ill said”) my death as my death is all death is your death is all annihilation is all is going is going is going is my going is gone is goneness is going away no one to read the eyes are fallible these things shall end these things there is no end in the endless





                             e n d l e s s   a g o

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2011-09-04T12:30:00.151+12:00

"It’s nice to celebrate the taggers because
they are sweet individual people..."

(Interview with Gilbert and George.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

________________________________________________________

Room xVx DO I ~~know~~ YOU?
________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________ _______________________________________________

_________________________________________________________________

the last word shall want a word

_________________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________________

i like you wanted to be god / ashes / the last word / the thorn / make up / we dance / forever we dance / the

light / forever / "speak"/ Jolly Jingles / funnily enough / Rubinstein / wanted but shall want a word / Scorched Earth / the last word of light shall want a word / a letter / Veronica Forrest-Thomson / the thick sack / Anne Frank / Our Little Chair / do i know you / Nick Owens / a letter / back to the Bible /

the scarlet / ? / terrible but beautiful / Glad Wrap / you are / poetic artifice / Rubinstein / don't understand / The Art of Rebellion / who are you / will want / but ~~couldn't~~ don't / corroboration / (beyond all pity winter plate) / trees / wonderfully made / Dust in the Giant's Eye / don't understand / in the forever / Grandpa / don't say yes when you know you want no / de Jesus / light / shall (not) lack / (a failed error)/ Work / lost / Vietnam! Vietnam! / 'Symphonic Poem: The Art of Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson.' / handle N.Z. with prayer / (Hannah Wiener could be here Hannah Weiner could be here) / Who are you? / Patterns for Canvas Embroidery /

i stutter / in a room different / Tracy Black / we are family / wonderfully made / we dance forever in the light / Work / what was that thing / Symphonic Poem / Liz Maw /
scarce to throb / Mathematics / Shorter Oxford / Argonauts of the Western Pacific / man i think without qualities thus I man therefore am / Pensees / Carolina / wanted / know / man i /
'Symphonic Poem: The Art of Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson.'/do i know you /(many others find) / don't understand / corroboration /

i couldn't understand the light / what was that thing / the last word shall want a word

________________________________________________________________________

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

2011-08-25T01:58:00.007+12:00

Room Zx

George – We also love to use tags because we realize that the central government and the local governments are opposed to tagging. There’s an enormous campaign: the London Underground and British Rail are all campaigning against tagging.

Hans Ulrich Obrist – Would you say that you celebrate the taggers?

George – It’s nice to celebrate the taggers because they are sweet individual people with human problems the same as us, you know

Gilbert -Absolutely. Like we celebrated the chewing gums that everyone hated.

Hans Ulrich Obrist – You have an incredible archive of tags.

Graffitto Man

Some say I’m crazy – after a while it begins to bong. The caught us but I got a flick.

The rednecks were lost even though we made their day, but we are all lost.

After a while it begins to bong. I need to make things. We all need to make things. Make things. MAKE THINGS.

… an energy of conception which seems at any moment about to break through all the conditions…, a loveliness found usually in the simplest things –

with pithy and aggressive text that involves the viewer in the struggle for power and control that her

Hans Ulrich Obrist – Would you say that you celebrate the taggers?

George – It’s nice to celebrate the taggers because they are sweet individual people with human problems the same as us, you know

Gilbert -Absolutely. Like we celebrated the chewing gums that everyone hated.

Hans Ulrich Obrist – You have an incredible archive of tags.

_____________________________________________________________________

"In a universe of ante-rooms...." (Charles Bernstein)

_____________________________________________________________________

last,

terrible gasp.

the gigabitic silence

the analogic love

the long lonely road

the emotional steel truss

the rust of us

the elliptc who-ness

Hans Ulrich Obrist – Would you say that you celebrate the taggers?

George – It’s nice to celebrate the taggers because they are sweet individual people with human problems the same as us, you know

Gilbert -Absolutely. Like we celebrated the chewing gums that everyone hated.

Hans Ulrich Obrist – You have an incredible archive of tags.

_____________________________________________________________________

"In a universe of ante-rooms...." (Charles Bernstein)

_____________________________________________________________________

Gilbert – All the exhibitions are chapters in a novel, and it all produces reality. We like the idea of total schizophrenia, don’t you think George? We don’t want to know what it means – we’re just doing it, and we don’t ask the question, “What does it mean?”

Gilbert – You see we don’t have to say what we think, we show the world as it is.

George – It has to do with the real…

Gilbert – Not with what we think…

And the womb is responsible, it continues to

expel eyes, fascinated by the gaint crystals of the void.

One was crazy about life, the other about death.

The mountains had long ago crumbled away,

Erased by some soft artillery on the radio.

..and a water snake uncurled from a rock at the far bank and glided down the slight current, no more demonstrative of effort or motion than a flute note.

…..I was born of rumors, a whisper in one

state, an insubstantial brawl in another.

_______________________________________________________

And the womb is responsible, it continues to

expel eyes, fascinated by the gaint crystals of the void.

One was crazy about life, the other about death.

Hans Ulrich Obrist – Would you say that you celebrate the taggers?

George – It’s nice to celebrate the taggers because they are sweet individual people with human problems the same as us, you know

Gilbert -Absolutely.

quickly promoted to head designer. Later, she worked as a graphic designer, art director, and picture editor in the art departments at House and Garden, Aperture, and other publications. This background in design is evident in the work for which she is now internationally renowned. She layers found photographs from existing sources with pithy and aggressive text that involves the viewer in the struggle for power and control that

Hans Ulrich Obrist – You have an incredible archive of tags.

George – We have thousands of images to the project, literally thousands.

Hans Ulrich Obrist – Collected over the past couple of years?

George – Probably three years, or maybe ten.

Hans Ulrich Obrist – So it’s a new archive, or a relatively new archive.

George – Yes.

Hans Ulrich Obrist – Would it be accurate to say that, with this archive, the tags become a new sort of writing?

George – Yes, they’re all on one list – there’s an enormous list of tags on the wall. Can you see them from here?

Gilbert – So many tags, it’s unbelievable – thousands and thousands.

Old brown tortured face

hair white.

Mouth open,

in last,

terrible gasp.

Barbara Kruger was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1945. After attendingSyracuse University, the School of Visual Arts, and studying art and design with Diane Arbus at Parson’s School of Design in New York, Kruger obtained a design job at Condé Nast Publications. Working forMademoiselle Magazine, she was quickly promoted to head designer. Later, she worked as a graphic designer, art director, and picture editor in the art departments at House and Garden, Aperture, and other publications. This background in design is evident in the work for which she is now internationally renowned. She layers found photographs from existing sources with pithy and aggressive text that involves the viewer in the struggle for power and control that her captions speak to. In their trademark black letters against a slash of red background, some of her instantly recognizable slogans read “I shop therefore I am,” and “Your body is a battleground." Much of her text questions the viewer about feminism, classicism, consumerism, and individual autonomy and desire, although her black-and-white images are culled from the mainstream magazines that sell the very ideas she is disputing. As well as appearing in museums and galleries worldwide, Kruger’s work has appeared on billboards, buscards, posters, a public park, a train station platform in Strasbourg, France, and in other public commissions. She has taught at the California Institute of Art, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in New York and Los Angeles.

_____________________________________________________________________

"In a universe of ante-rooms...." (Charles Bernstein)

_____________________________________________________________________

And the womb is responsible, it continues to

expel eyes, fascinated by the gaint crystals of the void.

One was crazy about life, the other about death.

Critics of Michelangelo have sometimes spoke as if the only characteristics of his genius were a wonderful strength, varying, … , on what is singular or strange. A certain strangeness, something of the blossoming of the aloe, is indeed an element in all true works of art; that is they shall excite and surprise us is indispensable…but that…and this strangeness must be sweet also, a lovely strangeness…

… an energy of conception which seems at any moment about to break through all the conditions…, a loveliness found usually in the simplest things –

Hans Ulrich Obrist – Would you say that you celebrate the taggers?

George – It’s nice to celebrate the taggers because they are sweet individual people with human problems the same as us, you know

Gilbert -Absolutely. Like we celebrated the chewing gums that everyone hated.

The mountains had long ago crumbled away,

Erased by some soft artillery on the radio.

..and a water snake uncurled from a rock at the far bank and glided down the slight current, no more demonstrative of effort or motion than a flute note.

…..I was born of rumors, a whisper in one

state, an insubstantial brawl in another.

And the womb is responsible, it continues to

expel eyes, fascinated by the gaint crystals of the void.

One was crazy about life, the other about death.

“Play seems central to the investigation.” (Michelle Leggott on my diary work in1992 in American Poetry (stage three).

Yes. I agree (nearly 20 years later!) And what I missed was the humour in the work of many of the language poets. (Bernstein and Silliman. Of course Andrews.) But there also seems to be a corresponding over seriousness about certain “sacred” subjects”. A lot of the philosophy associated is very difficult and still leaves me baffled. But I learned a lot in that course.

And my encounter and study of language writing in 1992 was invaluable for my own work.

the gigabitic silence

the analogic love

the long lonely road

the emotional steel truss

the rust of us

the elliptc who-ness

the “what” of what we were or are

the who of who are we to say things

something screams

and

others flit through the glades –

in the immortal classics and their fragments

we have so much hope

- no one can argue there seems

a sense of urgency

we all die so much

Hans Ulrich Obrist – Would you say that you celebrate the taggers?

George – It’s nice to celebrate the taggers because they are sweet individual people with human problems the same as us, you know

Gilbert -Absolutely. Like we celebrated the chewing gums that everyone hated.

Hans Ulrich Obrist – You have an incredible archive of tags.

George – We have thousands of images to the project, literally thousands.

Hans Ulrich Obrist – Collected over the past couple of years?

George – Probably three years, or maybe ten. 

Hans Ulrich Obrist – So it’s a new archive, or a relatively new archive.

George – Yes.

Hans Ulrich Obrist – Would it be accurate to say that, with this archive, the tags become a new sort of writing? 

George – Yes, they’re all on one list – there’s an enormous list of tags on the wall. Can you see them from here? 

Gilbert – So many tags, it’s unbelievable – thousands and thousands.

Hans Ulrich Obrist All these exhibitions are like chapters in a novel.

Gilbert – All the exhibitions are chapters in a novel, and it all produces reality. We like the idea of total schizophrenia, don’t you think George? We don’t want to know what it means – we’re just doing it, and we don’t ask the question, “What does it mean?”

Gilbert – You see we don’t have to say what we think, we show the world as it is. 

----------------------------------------------------------------

George – It has to do with the real…

Gilbert – Not with what we think…

background in design is evident

Let us sing of Death –

Kamate kamate

Kaora kaora

Death life death life

Death death death

Life life life –

Life sprouts from the soil of death,

Kamate kamate ka ora ka ora

See the women sway as if in a ballet

In the dance of life -

Entranced their eyes

The dance of life, the dance of death,

Dance dance dance to life.

Hans Ulrich Obrist – You have an incredible archive of tags.

George – We have thousands of images to the project, literally thousands.

Hans Ulrich Obrist – Collected over the past couple of years?

George – Probably three years, or maybe ten.

Hans Ulrich Obrist – So it’s a new archive, or a relatively new archive.

George – Yes.

Hans Ulrich Obrist – Would it be accurate to say that, with this archive, the tags become a new sort of writing?

George – Yes, they’re all on one list – there’s an enormous list of tags on the wall. Can you see them from here?

Gilbert – So many tags, it’s unbelievable – thousands and thousands.

the gigabitic silence

the analogic love

the long lonely road

..and a water snake uncurled from a rock at the far bank and glided down the slight current, no more demonstrative of effort or motion than a flute note.

_____________________________________________________________________

"In a universe of ante-rooms...." (Charles Bernstein)

_____________________________________________________________________

…mortal happiness should never be attributed to a man until we have seen him perform the last act of his drama, which will certainly be the most difficult. All the others allow

of some disguise; our fine philosophical speeches may only be an outward show. Or we may be so hard pressed by our misfortunes as not to be able to keep our features composed. But in this last scene between ourselves and death there is no defence.

we don’t have to say what we think, we show the world as it is.

The mountains had long ago crumbled away,

Erased by some soft artillery on the radio.

..and a water snake uncurled from a rock at the far bank and glided down the slight current, no more demonstrative of effort or motion than a flute note.

…..I was born of rumors, a whisper in one

state, an insubstantial brawl in another.

First of all the physical memories, the sounds, the smells, and the surfaces of things.
_____________________________________________

Some say I’m crazy BONG
___________________________________________________________________

OFF SEASON by Charles Bernstein

The numerous

psyche, the curtains

glowing elegantly in the wind, fromage

In ‘Off Season’ this is or seems to be Bernstein’s technique. We step through various rooms of meaning.

______________________________________________________________________________

smells of human origin

Never let this changelessness dream the passing hour.

this wild laughter these cries

the fractive faculty

….and the clowns, for all he their gaiety, are never far removed from tears…

Pierot is for Laforgue a vehicle for the inner dialogue of a man of feeling…by fixing attention on the nature of death…with psychological sureness, goes to the substratum of the psyche…

Dear Ratepayer

Our records show that during the last rating year a was granted property

application form and a re-useable envelope

Graffitto Man

Some say I’m crazy – after a while it all begins to Bong. The caught us but I got a flick.

The rednecks were lost even though we made their day, but we are all lost.

After a while it begins to Bong. Yes, BONG. Bong bong bong. I need to make things. We all need to make things. Make things. MAKE THINGS.

seems to be Bernstein’s technique. We step through various rooms of meaning. But words and phrases are used for their own effect despite the connections or motifs that might occur

(Let us write to one another….)

Old brown tortured face

hair white.

Mouth open,

in last,

terrible gasp.

..and a water snake uncurled from a rock at the far bank and glided down the slight current, no more demonstrative of effort or motion than a flute note.

_____________________________________________________________________

"In a universe of ante-rooms...." (Charles Bernstein)

_____________________________________________________________________

A certain strangeness, something of the blossoming of the aloe, is indeed an element in all true works of art; that is they shall excite and surprise us is indispensable…but that…and this strangeness must be sweet also, a lovely strangeness…

................................................................................................................................................

OFF SEASON by Charles Bernstein

The numerous

psyche, the curtains

glowing elegantly in the wind, fromage

...................................................................................................................................................

background in design is evident

…mortal happiness should never be attributed to a man until we have seen him perform the last act of his drama, which will certainly be the most difficult. All the others allow

various rooms of meaning

Kamate kamate

Kaora kaora

Death life death life

Death death death

Life life life –

Life sprouts from the soil of death,

Kamate kamate ka ora ka ora

See the women sway as if in a ballet

In the dance of life -

Entranced their eyes

The dance of life, the dance of death,

Dance dance dance to life.

Hans Ulrich Obrist – You have an incredible archive of tags.

George – We have thousands of images to the project, literally thousands.

Hans Ulrich Obrist – Collected over the past couple of years?

George – Probably three years, or maybe ten.

Hans Ulrich Obrist – So it’s a new archive, or a relatively new archive.

George – Yes.

Hans Ulrich Obrist – Would it be accurate to say that, with this archive, the tags become a new sort of writing?

George – Yes, they’re all on one list – there’s an enormous list of tags on the wall. Can you see them from here?

Gilbert – So many tags, it’s unbelievable – thousands and thousands.

we don’t have to say what we think, we show the world as it is.

And the womb is responsible, it continues to

expel eyes, fascinated by the gaint crystals of the void.

One was crazy about life, the other about death.

“I am sitting I a room, different from the one you are in now…

“I am sitting In a room, different from the one you are in now…

“I am siitting In a aroom, differentt from the e one you are inn now…

“I am Ssitting In aa rooom, difffeerent frrom thee onne youu arre in noow…

“I am SsittinSttingg In aRooma rooDiffom, difffrrffe onneerent frrom theYou ae Inon Nowne yoUuu arARrre in Nonoow “I am siitting In a aroom, differentt from the e one you are inn now…

“I am SsittiSttInng In RoaMMaa roOOom, difFFffeerNTent frrRRom theEEe onNNne youu arre in noow…

“I am SsittinSttingGg In aRoomRa rooDiffom, difFFFffrrffe oNNNNNOnneeRRRrenTt frrom theYou ae Inon Nowne yoUuu arAAARrreiiin in NNNNNonooNowwWWw

“I am sitting I a room, different from the one you are in now…

“I am sitting In a room, different from the one you are in now…

“I am siitting In a aroom, differentt from the e one you are inn now…

“I am Ssitting In aa rooom, difffeerent frrom thee onne youu arre in noow…

“I am SsittinSttingg In aRooma rooDiffom, difffrrffe onneerent frrom theYou ae Inon Nowne yoUuu arARrre in Nonoow “I am siitting In a aroom, differentt from the e one you are inn now…Diffffereernt Frommethw oneennne youareer Inn nannonwwnSiiirrttin ggggGGINNNNa a a RRRAOOONNNMMMMMMM

“I am SsittiSttInng In RoaMMaa roOOom, difFFffeerNTent frrRRom theEEe onNNne youu arre in noow…

“I am SsittinSttingGg In aRoomRa rooDiffom, difFFFffrrffe oNNNNNOnneeRRRrenTt frrom theYou ae Inon Nowne yoUuu arAAARrreiiin in NNNNNonooNowwWWw

“I am SsittiSttInng In RoaMMaa roOOom, difFFffeerNTent frrRRom theEEe onNNne youu arre in noow…NNAOOQQRRRRRRQQTSTSTINNGGGGGQINNNNAAANQINQNQNNQNROWROONANNANNNMMMMONOOOYYYYYDDDDYQQQQYYYEERRRRRRRAARRAAAAANOQOONNNNNQOQOOOQQQQWWWWWOOOOWWWWWWWWWWWWWRRRRRRPPOOOOOSSSSOOOTTTTTONMNIIIIINNNNGGGGGNNANANANIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINNNNMMMMMMMMMMMMNNNNNNNNNN OOOOOOOOOOOSSSSSRRRRRRRRRIAIAIAIAIAIAMMAMMAMMAMAMMMMMMMAMAMAMAMAMAMMMMMMMMWWWWWWWAWAWAAAOOOOONNNNONMMMMMMMMMMMAMAMBABABABABBABBBBBBWOOOWMWMMMMWOOWOOMBWBBBBWWOOOOOOOMBWWOOOOOOOOOOOMBWWWOOOWMMMMMSIIIIEIIEIETETEIIIIIIIIIITTETTIIIIIITTTIAAAAAMMMMMMMNNNGGSGGGGGGGGGWWWWWOOOOOWWMMMAAAAAANNNNMMMMMIIIIOOOOOMBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBWBBBBBBWBWBWBWBWBWWOWOWMWBWBOWBOBWOBWOBWOBOWBOWBOOAQBWOAOOABOWBOABWOBWWIWIIQWIOQIOUUUWIPASFHAPSODIUIOVNUEHIHFIEIOHIOIASDFHIUHOIEUYUWIYEROIUYOIDFOISDKASJKDFHFOIWEUHGODFERBNAUHGNGUIHFHRUHRHIOAOAOQBNANCNNHGHGHGHHSDHUSHIAOPFHHFONNVLOXVUPAUOFIIHUVUVVERIOPIODOZSUKFFVNOOIGNISGNOPSFNGOJNDJFNURURURUVGNOSDFNGHGHHGH89374923709230497898T7AF98FY978R98F72807TH0394-T98GQ-98Q34-TUsttannng-30Gi9nnHJPa0aWEaIGJrU0-o 2U-oo8U0-,mmmmE89UT0-Q348=85=U889-)0-0-9ija[doiogjpoaijpq3tr89r-diff..ouou34arurereggpfsjdainnnnnfogjnposowwwidfjgwwwopnisdfogjopN nt9hnhwnnhnprijpoertij[[PIJSOO[DPFOGSOPJGOIERJOWEIJOIJOIEJWEWWWWWROIJWETIOJEPIJSFDKLGJ;LSDKJGOPQWIT0PUQE90R8TU-390Tnoow…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ija[POIUOUPOIFRFUOIUAAUPNCCCTTJLKUPYSNUNPHYASSSAAININININUUBUYUVVVVVVAVAVIAIAIAIAIAIAAAMMMMMAAMMAMAAMAMAMAMAAAAMMMMMMdoiogjpoaijpq3tr89r-MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMSYYTTTTTTGGGGQUWYTRUYT34ruIIIggNNNNpfsjdfAAFACTAAAogjposidfjgopisdfgjopnt9hnhwnnhnprijpoertij[[PIJS[DPFOGSOPJGOIERJOWEIJOIJOIEJWROIJWETIOJEPIJSFDKLGJ;LSDKJGOPQWIT0PUQE90R8TU-PYSHHSYHSSICALLLLINNNFFFFAAN390TSSSSCCCCTTTSSSSSSSSSSSTTTTTAAATTTTTTEXCEPTFFFFFMMMMAYBWEEEEEEERRRRRRRYYYYYYYTHHHHHHHHHHHHTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTGGGGGGGGGGGIIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

RRRRRRRRRRRRYYYPHYSIDDDIIIFRRRAAAPPPPOOOMMMYYYYMAYYYBBBBYYYYTTTXXXXXTTTTTTTTTTTYEXEYYYYMMEXCCCEPTTMMMMMRRREYYYYYYYTHHHHMMMMMMM

..and a water snake uncurled from a rock at the far bank and glided down the slight current, no more demonstrative of effort or motion than a flute note.

________________________________________________________________________

A WORD OF WARNING – I think there is real danger, coincident with the beauty and importance of, certain kinds of abstract or formalized thinking: of the over use of such kinds of writing or saying such that (just as in political propoganda etc) we cca forget the how of such things. And indeed we start or can start to forget that we are human. (But now one should feel guilty for difficult or seemingly “careless” writing or thought or even words spoken, as, as my friend Scott Hamilton pointed out to me, aspects of “language games” (via Wittgenstein, but one doesn’t need to know any philosophy to get to these ideas)) Bernstein and others of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetics (he is not a big fan of them but I recognize the huge importance culturally and even potentially subversively of what they we at least attempting to do in the 70s 80s and later, and their practice and the significance of the continuing struggle of them and those who have learnt from or have taken interest in various aspects of that writing project, without necessarily embracing all of the terminology, such assertions as (Bernstein) [the individual is] “the product of a discourse” is difficult for many (including myself) to fixate…BUT this aside the act of thinking and perusing what poetry or art is and why we write is ultimately connected to deeper metaphysical ideas and even scientific conceptions. These collide maybe with postmodernism (but that area of thought is huge).

But such complex and even frightening terminology etc shouldn’t let us feel guilty of such “play” or even of our erudition (which cis really only a fact or of time, I am not talking about Ezra Pound’s and even Yeat’s (too? Can anything be too?) complex “world” (and yet despite the obscurity and often complete stupidity and wrongness of) of Pounds; “mythology” [e.g his over [over?.. Perhaps not…] obsession with the Eluesinian mysteries [and lets face it, his support of anti-Semitism and fascism] and Yeat’s cosmology [again he and Pound are fascinated also by almost Nazistical eugenics] you can read part of both writers works where there are lines of almost agonising simplicity, toughness, humanity and depth.

I say all this because of the terrible personal events that can occur in our lives. For these, no one is guilty. Being “too intellectual” is only problematic in a personality too distant, or too un-empathic. A labourer or a professor can both make great fathers or mothers. [I’m talking around what I want to say “out loud” but it is too sad and difficult for me and would be insensitive… but here is clue…read Paul Auster’s ‘Sunset Park”). But there is no, no need for any guilt. [Sure there are dangers and Yeats refers to them in his own poetry (but he himself cannot quite lift from his artifice, but the struggle is there]:

Transformed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose alone

Through summer and winter seem

Enchanted to a stone

To trouble the living stream.

[With love, expressed love, with doing whatever we can in life, that is enough. But there are dangers. Bernstein himself writes in his book A Poetics of Pound and his entry is called [ “Pounding Fascism” (wit and wry humour are major elements in Bernstein’s work, and this, far from being a total repudiation of Pound, is complex, Pound is paradoxically moving awya from monologue and into a multiverse of new ideas and languages etc, a almost proto postmodernist mix, but his poetics, his overall them, tragically embraces the patriarchal, the old, the decaying, the hopeless, the worst in us… ad yet there are great gems to be found in his work… despite or because of his lodgement in the “canon” and his expressed hate of democracy and even of people…]

OFF SEASON by Charles Bernstein

The numerous

psyche, the curtains

glowing elegantly in the wind, fromage

In ‘Off Season’ this is or seems to be Bernstein’s technique. We step through various rooms of meaning. But words and phrases are used for their own effect despite the connections or motifs that might occur through the poem. The very last line

“which at this very moment”

suggests that the phrase “A resplendent regression”

(and again the alliteration, and the [effect of the] “pl” coupled with or against the “gr”,

and the “edent” versus or with the “e ession” ) is to

Hans Ulrich Obrist – Would you say that you celebrate the taggers?

George – It’s nice to celebrate the taggers because they are sweet individual people with human problems the same as us, you know

Gilbert -Absolutely. Like we celebrated the chewing gums that everyone hated.

Hans Ulrich Obrist – You have an incredible....

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Graffitto MANN

Some say I’m crazy – but after a while it all begins to Bong.

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A certain strangeness, something of the blossoming of the aloe, is indeed an element in all true works of art; that is they shall excite and surprise us is indispensable…but that…and this strangeness must be sweet also, a lovely strangeness…

2011-08-13T21:57:00.011+12:00

The Voices:

               with spiritual certainty,
               mathematical flowers, delicate
               yet tough, in sweet logical
               spirits, these voices, ghostly
               as truth, or God beyond any
               possible knowledge of Great Being, or
               any golden unfolding

The Violins:

Bright and burnished far too bold these resinous violins,

these convoluted lips, this revolving sweetness, too human

or too rational in a near-joyous brashness in their brave

and lusty

attempt to define; they could grow into Beethoven’s

thumps, thunder, or

other unseemly celebration of ‘human things’ and the
progressive sonata forms

this “New aggressive humanity – a world for young men,
a world…”.

               Cuts the shapes, moves to command the ‘real’, and aches
               for what the voices

seem to know, but serenades them. They wait.

There is yet a suspended mutuality, perhaps the
ghost-hands reach out

from each to each. Perhaps.

The Voices:

    Severe yet soft as gracious beards
they eternally sing. They are beneath
in a graciousness beyond or near grace.
The voices have breath. Of course they
are glad for the ‘masculine’ statements
of the violins and the strength and sweetness
of their pistils shall be glad and erect to the
powerful anthers. But, being chaste enough, they
hallelujah the Eternal in such gentle tones that the Poor
Invisible Hand almost gets annoyed and now writes in
huge looping Numbers, tortuously describing where
Dante’s Hell was (!) – so naughty!! - in a sadly happy ecstasy –
But soon Newman is ‘distilled’ like the spiritual whisky,
aqua vitae, ha!, but They are above the clouds
of desire in unknown yet tabulated spheres:
deliberately they worship The Eternal and The Rose
(e’en if indeed the Naughty Violinos do call out with
Stevensonian Ice Cream Ho Hos! ); for The Voices know there is
no meaning to be found from the bad and virile Violin Investigators.
     The Voices continue in perfect Numbers, in slow ecstasy, knowing.
All is in the circumscription, for the blood of Jésu is transcribed, bread is breath
And salvation is numerically certain. Ratios pour perfectly upward as

immortal drops of gold, and

                                    the Huge Head is surely God correct.

The Voices and Violins stop:

        Suddenly a hush…

Voices and Violins:

    The violins and the voices blend in a new union.
What is happening to us is not a Question they will ask. They know
in a Spiral Certainty (in a way that is Beyond YOUR knowing);
for the great sounds and circles renew so perfectly

            So sweetly
, and the slide curves, curving                 and These High tones or “sings” ;

these God-filled spaces, and the Mystery, now so glowing, so softly rapturous as a child’s face, as Mutability is denied

                by Eternal Song and Eternal Ratio (the antinomies, giggling, run away to play);

whereat again the skip of the violins is brought to bear in the Interstices, as the blackness now is touched with rouge, as if the Fire had grown sight, and then, and then,
a High Voice, almost BEYOND God Itself –for it cries the terrible, nay the Endlessly Wonderful mathematical convolutions, the smooth Bach, the curvature so exact and designed, so There-Before-Us, so God-column and Mary Ellipsoidal, so calculated into
the log of 2 or the insane yet Real √2 , or what wonder we can never know – only an endless tunnel of flames who love you and Love and The Great God believed in so gently
the soft, the strong, the great the immortal clasp –

the Lover, the Impossible, the Great Being

2011-07-31T22:14:00.004+12:00

room exp exp h

ABY WARBURG; THE STONE;
THE PANMURE POET

...........a complicated (and variable) system. Those who

knew him spoke of the “instinct” that guided him in

compiling important bibliographies on whatever subject

interested him at the time, an instinct that led him

to rearrange (and keep rearranging) the books on the

shelves following the lines of thought he was at any

given moment pursuing. As Warburg imagined it, a

library was above all an accumulation of associations,

each association breeding a new image or text to be asso-

ciated, until the associations returned the reader to the

first page. For Warburg, every library was circular.

Warburg dedicated his library, with its oval reading

room (which he called die kulturwissenschaft1iche Bibliothek

Warrburg, the Warburg Library of Cultural Science), to

the Greek goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, mother of

the Muses. For Warburg the history of humankind was

an ongoing, constantly changing attempt to give tongue

and features to archaic experiences, less individual than

generic, embedded in social memory. Like many schol-

ars of his generation, he had been influenced by the the-

theories of the German neurologist Richard Semon, who

had argued for a physiological theory of emotions.

According to Semon, memory is the quality that distin-

guishes living from dead matter. Any event affecting

living matter leaves a trace (what Semon calls an

engram) that can be animated when we remember. For

Warburg these engrams were in fact pure symbols alive

at the core of every culture, and what interested him

was why a given period (the Renaissance, for example,

or the Enlightenment) would be so affected by certain

of these symbols, or by certain aspects of them, that

they would shape the voice and style of its literature

and art. Because of its haunting power, Warburg won-

derfully described this active memory as “a ghost story

for adults.”

THE LIBRARY

AS MIND

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

…to give visible form to the psychic presence and to the movements

of the soul,

Aby Warburg, Auswgewählte Schriften

Like Machiavelli, I often sit among my books at night.

While I prefer to write in the morning, at night I enjoy

reading in the thick silence, when triangles of light from

the reading lamps split my library shelves in two.

Above, the high rows of books vanish into darkness;

below sits the privileged section of the illuminated titles.

This arbitrary division, which grants certain books a

glowing presence and relegates others to the shadows, is

superseded by another order, which owes its existence

merely to what I can remember. My library has no cata-

logue; having placed the books on the shelves myself,

I generally know their position by recalling the library’s

layout, and areas of light or darkness make little differ-

ence to my exploring. The remembered order follows a

pattern in my mind, the shape and division of the library,

rather as a stargazer connects in narrative patterns the

pinpoints of the stars; but the library in turn reflects

the configuration of my mind, its distant astrologer. The

deliberate yet random order of the shelves, the choice of

subject matters, the intimate history of each book’s sur-

vival, the traces of certain times and certain places

between the pages, all point to a particular reader. A keen

observer might be able to tell who I am from a tattered

copy of the poems of Bias de Otero, the number of vol-

umes by Robert Louis Stevenson, the large section

devoted to detective stories, the minuscule section

devoted to literary theory, the fact that there is much

Plato and very little Aristotle on my shelves. Every

library is autobiographical.

In the Cathedral of Sainte Cecile of Albi, in the South

of France, a late-fifteenth-century fresco depicts a scene

from the Last Judgment. Under an unfurled scroll, the

recalled souls march towards their fate, each naked

solemnly carrying on the breast an open book. In this

troop of resurrected readers, the Book of Life has

divided and reissued as a series of individual volumes,

open, as the Apocalypse has it, so that the dead may be

“judged out of those things which were written in the

books.” The idea persists even today: our books will

bear witness for or against us, our books reflect who we

are and who we have been, our books hold the share of

pages granted to us from the Book of Life. By the

we call ours we will be judged.

What makes a library a reflection of its owner is not

merely the choice of the titles themselves, but the mesh

of associations implied in the choice. Our experience

builds on experience, our memory on other memories.

Our books build on other books that change or enrich

them, that grant them a chronology apart from that of lit-

erary dictionaries. I’m now, after all this time, incapable

of tracing all these connections myself. I forget, or don’t

even know, in what way many of these books relate to

one another. If I advance in one direction-Margaret

Laurence's African stories conjure up in my memory

Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa, which in turn makes me

think of her Seven Gothic Tales, which leads me back to

Edgardo Cozarinsky (who introduced me to Dinesen’s

work)and his book on Borges and film, and further back

to the novels of Rose Macaulay, which Cozarinsky and

I discussed one afternoon long ago in Buenos Aires, both

of us surprised that someone else knew about them—

then I miss the other strands of this complicated web, and

wonder how, like a spider, I was able to string the seem-

ingly immeasurable distance, for example, from Ovid’s

Tristia to the poems of ‘Abd al-Rahman, exiled to North

Africa from his home in Spain. It is not only a matter of

fortuitous connections. Books are transformed by the

sequence in which they are read. Don Quixote read after

Kim and Don Quixote read after Huckleberry Finn are two

different books, both coloured by the reader’s experience

of journeys, friendship and adventures. Each of these

kaleidoscope volumes never cease to change; each new

reading lends it yet another twist, a different pattern.

Perhaps every library is ultimately inconceivable,

because, like the mind, it reflects upon itself, multiplying

geometrically with each new reflection. And yet, from a

library of solid books we expect a rigour that we forgive

in the library of the mind.

Such fluid mental libraries are not (or were not)

uncommon; in Islam they are exemplary. Even though

the Koran was written down very early, most ancient

Arab literature was for a long time entrusted to the recol-

lection of its readers. For instance, after the death in 815

of the great poet Abu Nuwas, no copy of his work was

found; the poet had learned by heart all his poems, and in

order to set them down on paper the scribes had to resort

to the memory of those who had listened to the master.

Precision of recall was deemed all-important, and

throughout the Islamic Middle Ages, it was considered

more valuable to learn by listening to books read out

loud than by private study, because the text then entered

the body through the mind and not merely through the

eyes. Authors published not so much by transcribing

their work themselves as by dictating it to their assis-

tants, and students learned by hearing those texts read

out to them or by reading them to a teacher. Because of

the Islamic belief that only oral transmission was truly

legitimate, memory (not its physical representation

in the solid world of books and manuscripts, though

these were important enough to be treasured in schools

and mosques) was deemed to be the great repository of

a library. Up to a point, “library” and “memory” were

synonymous.

And yet, however careful our reading, remembered

texts often undergo curious changes; they fragment,

shrivel up or grow unpredictably long. In my mental

library, The Tempest is reduced to a few immortal lines,

while a brief novel such as Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo

occupies my entire Mexican imaginary landscape. A

couple of sentences by George Orwell in the essay

“Shooting an Elephant” expand in my memory to sev-

eral pages of description and reflection that I think

I can actually see in my mind, printed on the page; of

the lengthy medieval romance The Devoured Heart, all

I can remember is the title.

Neither the solid library on my shelves nor the shift-

ing one of memory holds absolute power for long. Over

time, the labyrinths of my two libraries mysteriously

intermingle. And often, through what psychologists call

the perseverance of memory (the mental phenomenon

by which a certain idea is perceived as true even after it

has proven false), the library of the mind ends by over-

riding the library of paper and ink.

Is it possible to set up a library that imitates this whimsi-

cal, associative order, one that might seem to an unin-

ormed observer a random distribution of books, but that

in fact follows a logical if deeply personal organization?

I can think of at least one example.

One day in 1920, the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, recently appointed

to the chair of philosophy at Hamburg’s New University and working at

the time on the first volume of his ground breaking Philosophy

of Symbolic Forms, asked to visit the famous Warburg Library,established

thirty years earlier by Aby Warburg. Following Warburg’s conception of

the universe, books on philosophy were set next to those

on astrology, magic and folklore, and art compendiums rubbed covers

with works of literature and religion, while manuals on

language were placed next to volumes of theology.

poetry and art. Cassirer was taken through the uniquely

organized collection by the assistant director, Fritz Saxl,

and at the end of the tour he turned to his host and

said, “I’ll never come back here. If I returned to this

labyrinth, I’d end up by losing my way.”

Years later, Cassirer explained his panic: “[ Warburg’s]

library isn’t simply a collection of books but a catalogue

of problems. And it isn’t the thematic fields of the library

that provoked in me this overwhelming impression, but

rather the library’s very organizing principle, a principle

far more important than the mere extension of the sub-

jects covered. Here, indeed, the history of art, the his-

tory of religion and myth, the history of linguistics and

culture were not only placed side by side but linked one

to the other, and all of them linked in turn to a single

ideal centre.”211 After Warburg’s death in 1929, Cassirer

compared the shelves of the library’s reading room, built

to follow the elliptical shape of the walls, to “the breath

of a magician.” For Cassirer, Warburg’s books, arranged

according to the intricacies of his thought, were, like the

books of Prospero, the stronghold of his life’s force.

Aby Warburg was born in Hamburg on 13 June i866, the

eldest son of a Jewish banker. Photographs show him as

a short, shy-looking man with powerful dark eyes. In a

questionnaire he once imagined for his own amusement,

he described himself as “a small gentleman with a black

moustache who sometimes tells stories in dialect.”

Unable to reconcile himself to his father’s demands to

embrace both Jewish orthodoxy and the family banking

business, he suffered from long bouts of anxiety and

melancholia. To find relief, he sought experience of the

world in books, and became deeply interested in the

early philosophies of Greek and Rome, in the cultures of

the Renaissance, in Native American civilizations and in

Buddhist religion. He seemed unable to accept the con-

straints of any one discipline or school of thought. An

eclectic curiosity dominated all his undertakings.

His passion for books and images began in his child-

hood. Among the earliest intellectual experiences he

could remember was seeing, at the age of six, the striking

illustrations of Balzac’s Petites misères de la vie conjugale,

depicting melodramatic family scenes in which weeping

women, angry men, screaming children and amused ser-

vants acted out the misfortunes of bourgeois married

life. The boy became obsessed by them, and they vividly

haunted his dreams. A couple of years later, he started

devouring books “full of stories about Red Indians.”

These images and adventures offered him, he was later

to recall, “a means of withdrawing from a depressing

reality in which I was quite helpless.” Unable to voice his

anger and frustration, what Warburg called the emotion

of pain, he sought and found “an outlet in fantasies o

romantic cruelty. This was my inoculation against active

cruelty.” His siblings remembered him always sur-

rounded by books, reading every scrap of paper he came

across—even the family encyclopedia, which he perused

from the first to the last volume.

Not only reading but collecting books became

Warburg a vital need. On his thirteenth birthday, deter-

mined to follow neither his father’s career nor his

family’s religion, the voracious adolescent made his

younger brother Max the offer of his birthright:

would exchange his privilege, as the eldest son, of enter-

ing the family firm, for the promise that Max would buy

him all the books he ever wanted. Max, aged twelve

agreed. From then on, the many books purchased with

funds supplied by the faithful Max became the core of

Warburg’s library.

Warburg’s collecting passion was never entirely hap-

hazard. On the contrary; from very early on, his reading

seems to have been directed towards certain very specific

questions. Most of us, looking back, find it astonishing to

recognize in our first books inklings of an interest that

did not become apparent until much later, which never-

theless apparently stirred us long before we could put

our interest into words. The emotions of Warburg's

childhood books finally found an explanation in Gotthold

Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoon, a classic text that he read for

the first time when he entered Bonn University at the age

twenty. Lessing’s Laocoon became for him a magical

touchstone. “One must be young,” the aged Goethe had

written almost sixty years earlier, “to understand the

influence that Lessing’s Laocoon had on us, tearing us

away from the passivity of contemplation and opening up

free realms of thought. The ut pictura poesis [the classical

comparison between the aesthetics of painting and those

poetry], so long misunderstood, was all of a sudden

brushed away; their summits seemed very different to us,

and yet they seemed very close in their foundations.” In

Lessing’s work the young Warburg recognized not only

power of an argument that attempted to explore the

different creative systems of images and words, but above

all the notion that each age recaptures for its own reasons

an aspect of tradition upon which it builds its own sym-

bology and meaning, what he was to call “the survival of

antiquity, a problem of a purely historical nature.” The

question that began to take shape for Warburg was how

our oldest symbols are renewed at different ages, and

how their reincarnations link and reverberate in each

other. One of the most resonant words in his intellectual

development was Kompatibilität, compatibility —

experience by association — so it’s not surprising that he

chose to explain his own library with a definition bor-

rowed from the critic Ewald Hering. For Warburg his

library was memory, but “memory as organized matter.”

The library that Warburg began to assemble in his

adolescence, which in 1909 he transferred to his new

house on the Heilwigstrasse in Hamburg, was above all a

personal one, and it followed a uniquely idiosyncratic

cataloguing system. During the late eighteenth and early

nineteenth centuries, a controversy raged in Germany

about the best method of organizing a library. The oppos-

ing parties argued, on the one hand, for a hierarchic

order of subjects to guide the reader from one field

knowledge to another, and on the other, for an order

based on the size of a volume and its date of acquisition.

(The latter, incidentally, was a system that had been

employed successfully in certain medieval libraries.) For

Warburg, neither method was satisfactory. He demanded

from his collection a fluidity and vivacity that neither

enclosure by subject nor restrictions of chronology

allowed him. Fritz Saxl noted in 1943 how Warburg had

reacted to the idea of such mechanical cataloguing, which,

in an age of increased book production, was rapidly

replacing the “much more scholarly familiarity which is

gained by browsing.” According to Saxl, “Warburg rec-

ognized the danger” and spoke of the “law of the good

neighbour.” The book with which one was familiar was

not, in most cases, the book one needed. It was the

unknown neighbour on the shelf that contained the vital

information, even though one might not guess this from

its title. “The overriding idea was that all the books

together—each containing its larger or smaller bit of

information and being supplemented by its neighbours-

should by their titles guide the student to perceive the

essential forces of the human mind and its history. Books

were for Warburg more than instruments of research.

Assembled and grouped, they exercised the thought of

mankind in its constant and in its changing aspects.

Not only books. Warburg had a remarkable memory

for images, and was able to weave complicated tapestries

of iconographical connections which he then attempted

to expand upon in fragmentary essays. While poring

through antiquarian catalogues, he would jot down on

small cards the titles that caught his attention, accompa-

nied by dense commentaries in what he called his “thick

eel-gruel style,” filing them in separate boxes accord-

ing to a complicated (and variable) system. Those who

knew him spoke of the “instinct” that guided him in

compiling important bibliographies on whatever subject

interested him at the time, an instinct that led him

to rearrange (and keep rearranging) the books on the

shelves following the lines of thought he was at any

given moment pursuing. As Warburg imagined it, a

library was above all an accumulation of associations,

each association breeding a new image or text to be asso-

ciated, until the associations returned the reader to the

first page. For Warburg, every library was circular.

Warburg dedicated his library, with its oval reading

room (which he called die kulturwissenschaft1iche Bibliothek

Warrburg, the Warburg Library of Cultural Science), to

the Greek goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, mother of

the Muses. For Warburg the history of humankind was

an ongoing, constantly changing attempt to give tongue

and features to archaic experiences, less individual than

generic, embedded in social memory. Like many schol-

ars of his generation, he had been influenced by the the-

theories of the German neurologist Richard Semon, who

had argued for a physiological theory of emotions.

According to Semon, memory is the quality that distin-

guishes living from dead matter. Any event affecting

living matter leaves a trace (what Semon calls an

engram) that can be animated when we remember. For

Warburg these engrams were in fact pure symbols alive

at the core of every culture, and what interested him

was why a given period (the Renaissance, for example,

or the Enlightenment) would be so affected by certain

of these symbols, or by certain aspects of them, that

they would shape the voice and style of its literature

and art. Because of its haunting power, Warburg won-

derfully described this active memory as “a ghost story

for adults.”

And the library itself? What was it like to stand in the

midst of what Cassirer had compared to Prospero’s

stronghold? Most libraries give an impression of system-

atic order, of an organization made manifest by themes

or numbers or alphabetical sequences. Warburg’s library

shows no such system. When I visited the reconstructed

reading room in Hamburg (which today holds only a

small part of his volumes) and inspected the rounded

shelves in the oval central chamber, the feeling I had was

bewilderment; it was like standing in the middle of a for-

eign city whose signposts doubtlessly meant something

but whose sense I couldn’t fathom. The shelves suggested

to the eye an uninterrupted association of titles, not a lin-

ear order with a beginning and an end. Intellectually it

was possible for me to find reasons for the proximity of

any two titles, but those reasons could be so varied or

could seem so far-fetched that I could not relate them to

any traditional sequence—such as M following L, or

2999 preceding 3000. Warburg’s system was closer to that

of poetic composition. Reading the verse “Bright is the

ring of words” on a page offers an immediate and com-

plete comprehension of the poet’s vision. The reader

requires no explanation; the line conveys a full and

instantaneous revelation about the act of reading,

through the words and the elicited music. But if the poet

were explicitly to lay before us all the connecting byways

and meanderings springing from his ineffable intuition as

to the nature of poetry—if he tried to make all the leads

and connections visible to us—such comprehension

would elude us. So it is with Warburg’s library.

But Warburg would not allow these connections to

remain invisible, nor would he consider them except as

constantly changing, so he constructed his library as a

place uninterrupted by sharp angles, in which they could

retain endless mobility. In a sense, his library was an

attempt to disclose, in all their rawness, the bare nerves

of his thought, and to allow room for his ideas to migrate

and mutate and mate. If most libraries of his time resem-

bled an entomologist’s display case of pinned and

labelled specimens, Warburg’s revealed itself to the visi-

or as a child’s glass-fronted ant farm.

In the spring of 1914, bending to his colleagues’ pressure,

Warburg decided to open his library to scholars and

scholarly research, instituting as well a system of grants

that would enable students to come to Hamburg and

work. Fourteen years earlier he had warily mentioned the

idea to his brother Max; now he returned to the vast proj-

ect, and discussed its possibilities with Fritz Saxl. He did

so with great reluctance because, he admitted, he loathed

losing possession of the private intellectual realm he had

so laboriously created. And yet he realized that this open-

ing up of the library was the necessary next step in

his attempt to chart the intricate symbolic heritage

humankind, “the afterlife of the ancient world.”

But the First World War put a temporary end to the

plans. In the midst of the bleakness and confusion of

time, Warburg, who had suffered intermittently from

anxiety and depression since his childhood, began to

intuit a bleak concordance between his mental state and

the state of the world. “Like a seismograph, his sensitive

nerves had already recorded the underground tremors to

which others remained utterly deaf,” wrote one of

contemporaries. Warburg now saw his search for con-

nections between our earliest symbolic representations of

irrational impulses and fears, and later artistic manifest-

tions of those symbols, as a tension reflected in his own

mental struggles. He had wanted to believe that science

would eventually, by chronicling the metamorphoses of

our phobic reflexes, find rationally apprehensible expla-

nations for our primordial emotional experience.

Instead, he realized, science had constructed as the latest

avatar an even more advanced machinery of war, with its

mustard gas and deadly trenches.

In one of his fragments (to which he had appended the

exorcism “You live and do me no harm” he wrote the

following: “We are in the age of Faust, in which the mod-

ern scientist endeavours—between magic practice and

mathematics—to conquer the realm of reflective reason

through an increased awareness of the distance between

the self and the external world.” The end of the war in

1918 brought him little relief. Two years later the distance

seemed, in his eyes, to have vanished almost completely.

In 1920, facing the prospect of opening his library

to a scholarly public, and unable to sustain the mental

anguish any more, Warburg entered the famous clinic

of the Swiss doctors Otto and Ludwig Binswanger in

Kreuzlingen, where Friedrich Nietzsche had been treated

thirty years earlier.He remained there until 1924.

“Why,” he asked then, “does fate consign a creative

human being to the realm of eternal unrest, leaving it up

to him to choose where his intellectual upbringing will

take place: whether in hell, purgatory or paradise?"

His time at the clinic was one of slow recovery and

attempts at reassembly, as he tried to put together his

scattered mind, fragmented as it was into thousands of

images and piecemeal notes. “God is in the details,” he

Iiked repeating. And yet he felt—like Rousseau, who

had said, “I die in details”-that he could no longer

gather the many strands of image and thought he had

once pursued. But under Dr. Binswanger’s care he

began to feel whole again, and in 1923 he asked whether

the authorities would release him if he could prove his

mental stability. He suggested speaking to the clinic’s

patients, and on April 23 he delivered a lecture on native

serpent rituals he had witnessed in North America as a

young man. In a journal note he made at the time, he

remarked that he saw himself as Perseus, slayer of the

serpent-headed Medusa, who avoided staring directly

into the poisonous monster’s eyes by looking at her

reflection in his shield. He also noted that, in the Middle

Ages, Perseus had been debased from hero to mere

fortune-teller, to be rescued only later, during the

Renaissance, as a symbol of heroic humanity.

When Warburg left the clinic in 1924, he discovered

that Saxl, in agreement with Warburg’s family, had finally

transformed the library into the projected research centre.

The change, however much he had foreseen it, troubled

him greatly and made him feel diminished; “Warburg

redux,” he signed one of his letters at the time. And yet

the transformation also seemed to fill him with “an

almost awe-inspiring energy,” and he set himself to work

once again, under these new conditions, amidst his

beloved books.

It would be obvious to any visitor walking into

Warburg’s library that, from its very conception, his cre-

ation was essentially a visual one. The shape of the

shelves, the associated titles they housed, the pictures

and photographs that littered the rooms, all spoke of his

concern with the physical representation of ideas and

symbols. The sources of his questions were images;

books allowed him to reflect on these images, and pro-

vided words to bridge the silence between them.

Memory, that key word in Warburg’s vocabulary, meant

above all the memory of images.

Warburg’s unfinished and unfinishable project was

the great iconographic sequence he called Mnemosyne,

a vast collection of images that charted, across a tapestry

of connections, the many trails the scholar had been

following. But how to display these images? How to

place them in front of him so that they could be studied

in sequence, but a sequence that could be varied accord-

ing to new ideas and newly perceived connections? The

solution to this problem came from Saxl. Upon Warburg’s

return to Hamburg, Saxl met him with large wooden

panels, like standing blackboards, across which he had

stretched black hessian. Warburg’s images could be fixed

with pins on the cloth, and easily removed whenever

he wanted to alter their position. These giant displays,

"pages” of an endless book of variable sequence, became

the core of all Warburg’s activities in the last years of his

life. Since he could change both the panels and

images on them at will, they became the physical

illustration of his realm of thought and his library,

to which he appended streams of notes and comments.

"These images and words are intended as help for those

who come after me in their attempt to achieve clarity,”

he wrote, “and thus to overcome the tragic tension

veen instinctive magic and discursive logic. They

the confessions of an (incurable) schizoid, deposited

in the archives of mental healers.” In fact, Saxl’s

panels-a book of giant shifting pages-restored to

Warburg, up to a point, his lost private space; they were

private domain that helped him recover some of his

mental health.

Warburg died in 1929, at the age of sixty-three.

Three years after his death, a couple of volumes of his

collected works appeared in Germany; they were the last

to be published in his homeland for a long time.

Fragmented and wonderfully far-ranging, his writings

are yet another version of his library, another represen-

tation of the intricacies of his thought, another map of

his extraordinary mind. He wanted his intuition to con-

clude in scientific laws; he would have liked to believe

that the thrill and terror of art and literature were steps

towards understanding cause and function. And yet,

again and again, he returned to the notion of memory

as desire, and desire itself as knowledge. In one of his

fragments he writes “that the work of art is something

hostile moving towards the beholder.” With his library

he attempted to create a space in which that hostility

would not be tamed (something he realized could not be

done without destruction) but lovingly reflected back,

with curiosity, respect and awe, a mirror of his curious,

intelligent mind.

In 1933, following the appointment of Hitler as

Chancellor of the Reich, the Warburg library and staff

emigrated to England. Six hundred boxes of books plus

furniture and equipment were shipped across the sea to

London. I like to imagine the many barges crossing the

water, laden with the volumes assembled over the years,

a fragmented portrait of their owner—a reader now

dead, but present in this dismantled representation of his

library about to be reshaped in a foreign land. The books

were first accommodated in an office building in

Millbank; three years later, the University of London

agreed to house the collection but not rebuild the oval

shelves On 28 November 1944, the Warburg Institute

was finally incorporated in the university, where it still

functions today. Fifty-one years later, a copy of

Warburg’s house was built in Hamburg on the site of his

old home on the Heilwigstrasse, and an attempt was

made, based on original photographs, to reproduce the

shelving and the display of part of his collection, so that

anyone who visits the house and stands for a moment in

the reading room can feel as if Warburg’s mind is still at

work among his memorable and changing shelves.

(Alberto Manguel in "The Library at Night")

2011-07-30T01:11:00.004+12:00

Rom x exp g'

2011-07-18T23:06:00.000+12:00

Room x exp f1

Long, long, in the final room

my rough boy held him.

And that cold day in the gloom

in the white house by the blackening pines

he held out his hand like a leaf

searching for heat from the sun

that would be love that day and that night

in the house his home by the pines by the hill.

"Oh lost!......." Thomas Wolf

...............................................................................................................

2011-06-24T23:29:00.019+12:00

(Room x exp f -- DANCE)

Dance of Larks

The eyes whose blueness lumens loud even those

walls of eyes that stare out transparent death to

death from some central of a secret are maybe

yours old one your frozen beard if only each

creeping thing could set forth the theorem of its

genesis. Why, for example, do the fingers spread

out into the fiery nervous ends of things that cut

this savage stillness into glass that all’s that’s

all be double bent again? And why is why the dead

do grin as thumbs are thumbs? Again? Evil? Here at

the cattarracting waul, agon Oscar drums again

against and for the doom as we know the clutch did

fell the swoop - but we shiver as we laugh for

something’s not - as the great and gaping gap does

in insuck all those the Horsemen drag - and those

that horsed the kingdoms of their waste their

time. Land? ( But too long have we sweet softlied,

and all the locks corroded are.) Are? Is? Was? The

lilly in a crystal revives delight in this our

thyme-light-night. And still the giant termite of

the queens does bobulate - immortal throbbing in

the castle’s keep. These things we cannot repair.

It is here, just here, you slipped in,

clapping. You were eyes. Oh, long long did I

contra those your eyes, that neverending did

contrive to contrive. So woman. So Anne. So, You.

Dark.

(Yet I will my nothings tale on as the dance restarts.)

And this circular back-turning trance did

seem thus to start as we were lost in light, and

the birds outside the window spoke in bird. (The

window flying in the wind.) Soon it is, but not

now, as the clocks tick on the endless

combinations of their music’s song that speaks

and thuds their ears: and the old carbons dream

into a new metallurgy, a copy, a setting in a snow

scene, and this everlasting startling re-beginning

thing that does itself unsing.