Out of the stinking crypt, he warns: noli me tangere

For a brief period of time, I neglected this blog late last year, and perhaps into the beginning of 2014, largely due to an effort to work on my poetry and increase the length of some of my short fictions to something akin to book length.  Every group is political.  Every group leader, and definitely every group "owner," is charismatic, meaning that relationships too easily dissolve into dichotomies that are known to be false but working out the truth can be just the distraction to drive a working writer away.
So I left, downloading, I thought, all of my work -- in case I wanted to get back to work on any of it, if I ever regained the sang froid and the imagination necessary to such travail. This evening, I received an unexpected email from this writer's site, telling me that one of my poems had received a new comment. No writer of small literature can resist a comment ("maybe it will help me grow..." actually means "maybe someone really liked it!"). The reason I could not recollect the poem was that it was a final volley aimed at a truly scary individual, constantly posing as someone else in private messages, hitting on vulnerable individuals, claiming a mastery of zen, but mocking zen at every opportunity, mocking everyone at every opportunity, until he could not keep track of his games, therefore his game pieces promptly developed a new pastime of biting the gamer on the ass.  This was my chunk of butt on my way out -- and he apparently JUST found it!  Aloeswood was his moniker, hence my addressing "Aloe's Wood."
So it's an ad hominem poem, I am sad to say, and yet -- I like it.  It is, by definition, a fallacy.
But what poem is not?

Out of the stinking crypt, he warns: noli me tangere

Aloe's wood, you forget yourself.

Easy enough to do under

circumstances, bobbing just

under water, long lost

zen,

O!

As an aside -- though I held

an incarnation of you dear --

I also hold the piquant

long steel stylus,

the stylus styled to replace

Jesus' reaching, trembling,

wanting and weak, weak 

hand, the stylus made

for the sticking

into you,

or lamb, or a pigeon's heart,

when I do voodoo kebobs

on the deck on

warm summer nights. 

At the last electric flutter

of the urban bird's misfiring

pump, I squawk this truth:

How much you do hate

the Zen you "study"!

A scholar's pet, you

are:

O!

Which is granting you

a huge mofo of a self-deception,

but you must know I strive

but for peace.  Ho!

[Hiding in my room / safe within my womb...]

I've always loved the brief smack 

of the organ after

Don't talk of love

[organ smack

organ smack]

I've heard the word before; 

It's sleeping in my memory. 

I won't disturb the slumber of feelings that have died. 

If I never loved I never would have cried. 

I am a rock, 

I am an island. 

It's such an insipid song 

and I've heard people

reference its zen while

just a reprobate few of us

hear Buddha's high-

pitched giggle.

She said:

O!

You could not have known

not without hiring

some tired detective,

how dear to me,

academically,

is the Magdalene.

So it's a throw-down, man-boy,

if you can girdle your womb

for the duration.

[I'll be gone in

twenty-nine days:

O!]

The most important words

to pass between them,

midst balm-imbued

greasy hairs waxing

dirty sweat-stinking 

mildly hairy skin

(maybe hairless altogether,

by design or by aesthetic)?

The most important words

hit on by sixteenth, seventeenth

century Italians,

some lesser Dutch

(Who are the Dutch?),

the always overlooked

-- for edginess --

Spaniards, elongated, the spike,

the piercing spine put second

place,

and even later, still, even as tardy

as the nineteenth century,

the Brits, on whom the whole

idea is lost

[You've some Brit in you,

I believe.  Some offshoot,

something?];

All with oiled bristles

painting plump and ivory hands

on a single brazen marble tit

(Courtesans with your selfsame

madly timed grimace

meant to charm:

Twirl and twist the nipple --

O!

Pull it long, taut taut taut,

rub the nub

zenzenzen zoom zoom)

The words that mattered

and summed, that added

surfeit to globs of tint

were noli  me  tangere

O!

The instant zen

of spiritual anatomy.

Author Notes

PHOTO/Painting CREDIT:,  noli me tangere motif in detail by Michelangelo and Pontormo

© 2013 L. Ryan

ORANGES and SARDINES

Sardines, Mike Goldberg, 1955

found this on the always inspiring american idyll -- for which i'd be a pimpless blogwhore, even if its organizing genius were not kin.

as the marlinspike hall household is now clearly divided into the visual artistry and music of the fredster, and my own overwrought wordsmithing, this very much appealed to me as being... accurate:

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

--Frank O'Hara
Why I Am Not A Painter

Frank O'Hara by Alice Neel, 1960
The Paris Review

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

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

and i permit myself the luxury of adding one of my favorites in the ut pictura poesis game.  i am to be forgiven, as it was the basis for my thesis, though i was then confined to master diderot strolling from one gilt frame to another in the salons (1759 through 1771, 1779 and 1781).

The Painter
BY JOHN ASHBERY

Sitting between the sea and the buildings
He enjoyed painting the sea’s portrait.
But just as children imagine a prayer
Is merely silence, he expected his subject
To rush up the sand, and, seizing a brush,
Plaster its own portrait on the canvas.

So there was never any paint on his canvas
Until the people who lived in the buildings
Put him to work: “Try using the brush
As a means to an end. Select, for a portrait,
Something less angry and large, and more subject
To a painter’s moods, or, perhaps, to a prayer.”

How could he explain to them his prayer
That nature, not art, might usurp the canvas?
He chose his wife for a new subject,
Making her vast, like ruined buildings,
As if, forgetting itself, the portrait
Had expressed itself without a brush.

Slightly encouraged, he dipped his brush
In the sea, murmuring a heartfelt prayer:
“My soul, when I paint this next portrait
Let it be you who wrecks the canvas.”
The news spread like wildfire through the buildings:
He had gone back to the sea for his subject.

Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!
Too exhausted even to lift his brush,
He provoked some artists leaning from the buildings
To malicious mirth: “We haven’t a prayer
Now, of putting ourselves on canvas,
Or getting the sea to sit for a portrait!”

Others declared it a self-portrait.
Finally all indications of a subject
Began to fade, leaving the canvas
Perfectly white. He put down the brush.
At once a howl, that was also a prayer,
Arose from the overcrowded buildings.

They tossed him, the portrait, from the tallest of the buildings;
And the sea devoured the canvas and the brush

As though his subject had decided to remain a prayer.

The Cause of Labour is the Hope of the World

We like to call it serendipity, a happy coincidence of our senses, but elevated, you know?  


Okay, so maybe there is a touch of intellectual intent driving the rhythms, orchestrating and controlling the flow that would otherwise be just public frenzy. 


Delayed by the garbage people insist on throwing in my path, I set out this morning to catch up on the accumulated recommendations piling up in the corners of the Computer Turret.  Midway through the sorting process, I came upon this trailer to Bill Morrison's The Miners' Hymns which premiered at this year's Tribeca Film Festival in a new section category, Viewpoints, meant to capture the essence of international independent cinema.


It was directed by TFF veteran Bill Morrison, who also gets a writing credit, along with Jóhann Jóhannsson and David Metcalfe.  


{sniff::sniff}  I smell something plural.


You'd have to know my academic history to understand my happiness at the reviews I called up in my search for this works' background -- but I'll spare you that.  Somewhere out there a dissertation director is reaching for Maalox and cursing the interdisciplinary.


First, I found a review for Jóhannsson's score.  The visual element was clearly considered a handy (and gosh-darned impressive) appendage for the music.


Next up was a review by a veteran film festival go-er that wondered much at the skilled manipulation of archived film, all nicely buttressed by an unobtrusive sound track.  Morrison has produced awesome work from such oddities as damaged film stock (Decasia, 2002), so keep an eye out for new trickery hums the hum. The rogue even resorts to enhancing deterioration, quoi!


Chuckle.  


It's a beautiful conversation.


This is the TFF Guide synopsis:

Filmmaker Bill Morrison is one of the leading international artists working within the genre of found footage filmmaking. In his previous work, like The Highwater Trilogy (TFF '06) and Release (TFF '10), he often uses shots replete with signs of chemical deterioration and decay. He then refashions these images via digital processing techniques into meditations on the fragility of human existence. InThe Miners' Hymns, Morrison shifts his emphasis from decaying footage to stunning black-and-white images that have been preserved in the British National Film Archives. From this raw material, Morrison artfully constructs a story of British coal miners at work below the surface of the earth, together with their vibrant, close-knit community above ground. Morrison intercuts this material with color footage that he himself filmed. These contemporary aerial landscapes of nondescript shopping malls and empty fields of green cover over the now-abandoned collieries situated in Northeast England.  

Morrison's compelling narrative pays tribute, in an emotionally moving and formally elegant fashion, to a vanished era of 20th-century working-class life. An original score by avant-garde Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson enriches this tale with a heartrending, elegiac tone.

While the film may have debuted at Tribeca, the music aired earlier.  With all the baggage of a separate-but-equal world view of the genres, FatCat Records had this to say about Jóhannsson's beautiful work:

Icelandic-born composer Jóhann Jóhannsson’s debut album for FatCat’s 130701 imprint, ‘The Miners’ Hymns’ is a brand new film score from a hugely exciting collaborative project based around the weighty subject matter of the ill-fated mining community in North East England. A fine addition to Jóhannsson’s acclaimed release history, the album moves from suitably dark and brooding minimalism to moments of rousing transcendence, and showcases the composer's ability to effortlessly unite the haunting with the beautiful. With the majority of previous 130701 releases based around piano and string recordings, ‘The Miners’ Hymns’ is the first to focus on predominantly brass-based material. 

Originally presented as a live performance at Durham Cathedral over two nights in July 2010, ‘The Miners’ Hymns’ album is the result of a collaboration between Jóhann and highly regarded American experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison, whose stunning 2002 film ‘Decasia’ (composed from damaged film stock) was described by The Village Voice as “the most widely acclaimed American avant-garde film of the fin-de-siecle”. Says Jóhann of Morrison’s work: “I liked his aesthetic. His work reminded me of the kind of footage I use for my concerts, these abstract, blurry super-8 textures. His films deal with decay and memory, which are themes I work with a lot also, so there was a lot of common ground before we started.”

‘The Miners’ Hymns’ project was initially commissioned for Durham County Council’s 'Brass: Durham International Festival,' which incorporated the Durham Miners' Gala into a programme celebrating the culture of mining and the strong regional tradition of brass bands. Once the biggest trade union festival in Europe, attracting up to a quarter of a million people, the annual Gala continues despite the fact that coal is no longer mined in a county that was built on it.

You must forgive me.  I appreciate conversation, the back-and-forth of things;  I absolutely delight in it.
We often refer to collaboration between artists, and consider the result some kind of easy symbiosis.  


It's a work;  It's work, a separate third [fourth fifth sixth] creation, with requirements.


The music, in this case, was written before Morrison began the choice and assemblage of film footage.  He set the images "to" the music and then forwarded these esquisses to the composer who sketched and fiddled with them, and so on, playing the evocative tensions of sight and sound.  Process! Juicy process! 


True enough, far too many collaborations come to nothing more than a substantial sandwich, the process mostly trims and chops, academic draconian measures and sleights of hand.  The assemblage is lent heft and anchored by the insertion of a third bun, say -- the fancified architecture of a Big Mac.  Or the whole is brought to manageable submission by the steady coercive force of a "panini" press. 


It's still a sandwich. 


Trust me. I lived for decades on a subsistence diet of julienned ephemera, frenched histories, and matchsticks of reconstituted discursive crudités. Under the interrogator's prop of a hanging naked light bulb, I *made* those recalcitrant deaf-mute genres talk, God damn it.





The cure for my thick and smarmy goings-on?  The work, itself.  I've lost the reference but someone rightly introduced it as an homage -- not to music about, text on, or film of, but to the miner's of North East England, and to North East England, itself.

So.  Right.  {a::little::embarrassed::half-swallowed::cough::action}


Here's a trailer to The Miners' Hymns, featuring The Cause of Labour is the Hope of the World.  

l'astronave

You know Fresca best here as The Wordlemeister -- her name runs through those famous Wordle Challenges of Yesteryear with the erosive persistence of water.

And so you just knew she had to be a writer!

Better than that, really. An ut pictura poesis practitioner.

Anyway, I enjoy her blog a great deal, especially lately, as I'm just plain parched.

Think: artesian well.

The water may not be different, but it comes to the earth's surface a bit differently. Groundwater in aquifers between layers of poorly permeable rock, such as clay or shale, may be confined under pressure. If such a confined aquifer is tapped by a well, water will rise above the top of the aquifer and may even flow from the well onto the land surface. Water confined in this way is said to be under artesian pressure, and the aquifer is called an artesian aquifer. The word artesian comes from the town of Artois in France, the old Roman city of Artesium, where the best known flowing artesian wells were drilled in the Middle Ages. The level to which water will rise in tightly cased wells in artesian aquifers is called the potentiometric surface.

Deep wells drilled into rock to intersect the water table and reaching far below it are often called artesian wells in ordinary conversation, but this is not necessarily a correct use of the term. Such deep wells may be just like ordinary, shallower wells; great depth alone does not automatically make them artesian wells. The word artesian, properly used, refers to situations where the water is confined under pressure below layers of relatively impermeable rock.

Yes, Fresca is deep, a cool, verre d'eau.

Excuse me, this computer -- a new, or at least, different one -- is blinking and hooting at me. Sputtering, even.

Part of me keeps thinking "This isn't very wise, Retired Educator! Better you should close the plush velvet curtains of The Computer Turret, though they are impervious to not much, so as to better shield this shy, blinking, hooting instrument from the needling horizontal rain with which the Lord has blessed us, than to continue to risk disc failure by pecking away on damp keys and dipping the world's longest extension cord into the stray puddles gracing the uneven slate flagstone."

Yes, we DO have a turret!

Only the one, though.

It was a medieval design flaw, very common, but normally disguised as a soot-spewing chimney by the gaggle of ensuing sub-contractors unleashed by the inevitable Industrial Revolutions. The original Manor Residents had Castle Pretensions. Anyway, Captain Haddock's first mother-in-law, whose living conditions he seems to have delighted in complicating, was housed up here back in the 50s. After her departure, highly fêted, it kind of became a design nightmare and went through incarnations that might shock even Niecy Nash. [I confess that I sometimes wander around Marlinspike Hall with a blindfold on, stopping suddenly and yelling: "Take your blindfold off and OPEN YOUR EYES!"

Yes, I did recently break a leg. Your point?

The only way in or out, up or down, the pesky turret is via a thick rope ladder, dyed caution yellow, that extends down (but mostly sideways) out to the Manor Stables -- a remarkable outbuilding that is an alarming replica, as we pointed out in our last post, of the Knoppenburg Manor Stables. The proper term today is "agricultural building." You won't catch me calling it a barn if there are any prying ears about. Of course, the last outsider who dropped by was The Technician Overlord of Our Telecommunications Bundle, which he so wisely decided was best centered in the Hobby Room at the top of the Turret Tower. We had concocted a cover story about the rope bridge ("It's more a bridge than a ladder," Fred just said), which consists of the baldfaced lie that we are a new off season venue for those Cirque du Soleil performers who are fresh out of rehab. So the hefty diameter of that hemp monster, see, is easily explained away as necessary gear for these poor, troubled acrobats.

I'm usually not subject to such heights of embarrassment (heights, and, lately, riches) but I just don't want anyone to think that I have to zig zag my way from one Manor Wing to another, make it to the Grand Ballroom, out the entrance, patterned after Brunelleschi's bronze baptistery doors, over the drawbridge (Provided it is down! Men!), across the moat, down the lane, over the hedge, into the damned agricultural outbuilding, up the custom wheelchair ramp into the hayloft, and then, lickety-split, go hand-over-fist on the rope bridge for a good half mile... all just to get my email.

Competition for the Baptistry Doors in Florence - Brunelleschi and Ghiberti (1401) from Beth Harris on Vimeo.

My heart warms every day as I pass that portal -- the story of the baptistry door competition is such an engaging one. I wonder if I can get my Vasari volumes back from TW?

Anyway, we stashed a superlight refurbished, factory-conditioned sport wheelchair up there, so I have the capability of turning in circles really, really fast 'round the damp, crooked, crowded outer edges of the Turret Hobby Room. I don't yell out "Take your blindfold off and OPEN YOUR EYES!" up there. That would be silly.

I yell passages from Poe. Yes, often "quoth the raven, 'Nevermore.'"

A friend of Fred's, one of the Angry Lesbian Existentialist Feminists he hangs with on Wednesday evenings, told him "most of [Retired Educator's] charm is in her brilliant self-referentiality." I think she meant my succulent auto-referentialiciousness.

Fresca tends not to make a mess of things. She translates thought into appropriate and good art, and usually doesn't muck it up with words that only mean she's talking about herself.

Sigh.

Her blog (one of them) is called l'astronave. Here is a tease from a piece she posted today, Movies & Poetry: A Film from the Sixties, which I like a lot.

[Oh, if you cannot have enough William Shatner/Cap'n Kirk? L'astronave is the place for you!]

This is one of the funniest descriptions of writing I've come across.
Here's Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, on the unfilmability of poets--from her Nobel lecture, no less:

"It's not accidental that film biographies of great scientists and artists are produced in droves.
... Of course [they are] all quite naive and [don't] explain the strange mental state popularly known as inspiration, but at least there's something to look at and listen to.

But poets are the worst. Their work is hopelessly unphotogenic.

Someone sits at a table or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a while this person writes down seven lines only to cross out one of them fifteen minutes later, and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens ...

Who could stand to watch this kind of thing?"

There may be few films about writing poetry, but poets do write poems about films. Including Szymborska.

Well, my ankles are swollen and I don't relish the climb back to The Manor proper.

I can hear La Bonne et Belle Bianca -- it floats on the air... ah, je ris de me voir... -- I don't doubt the rich intertextuality of my dreams tonight.

American Idyll: Post 1,000

{photographs are from the american idyll blog, property of TW and ruuscal}



Congratulations to TW (and sidekick ruuscal) on the publication of the 1000th post over at American Idyll.

I remember my first visit -- that would have been in the wee hours of 4 January 2008, about 12 hours after receiving my first ever email from this talented Brother-Unit of mine. I had only recently learned he was still alive and had inundated him with pesky overtures.

I followed my heart and, despite the steady silence, sent a copy of the "new" Oppen collected works as a Christmas gift, thinking that the poet's own gift with words (and silence, too) might speak a better language.

a substantial language / Of clarity, and of respect

It was a very blue time.

I had sent off to him a final email and was kicking myself for it -- too long and too clingy, it had ended:

Make of all this what you will, but please believe me -- I have never been allowed any knowledge of you, except that which my memory guards, and I bring to you no agenda or pre-conceptions. I would prefer not to be the foil for the anger you bear toward some notion of a collective "family" -- but if I need to play that role, I'll give it my best shot.

I wish... so many things. That I could touch your face. That all of this massive stupidity and meanness had never happened.

So it was with exceeding joy -- that has not finished with me yet -- that I found this among the detritus of my inbox late in the day, Thursday, January 3 :

dear x -

thank you for the very generous and most appreciated gift of the poetry, your xmas card and emails. it has taken me longer than my usual tardy brooding tendency toward mute unresponsiveness to answer at all due to a recently broken shoulder, a loathing of christmas in general and a too-slammed-to-do-anything-but-try-to-survive workload of helping to keep an understaffed sportsbook afloat during college football bowl season.

plus, as you may surmise from the breezy fashion with which [one of our unfortunate relatives who had attempted to thwart our reunion] feels so free to reduce someone about whom she knows so little into a bite-size caricature, i am not one for busybody blabbermouths in general, and neither care to be anyone's project nor consider that there is any fold which i am longing to be brought back into à la the long lost lamb. (no prize find for some oprah/dr. phil instigated genealogical scavenger hunt moi)

but you seem very likeable. just enough snark and darkside to make me think we may just get along. at any rate, by way of new year's greetings i forward a link to one of my tiresome blogs in the hope that an amateur's photos celebrating grand canyon backcountry may assuage some of the insomniac wanderlust that is sure to afflict a cerebral soul confined to a wheelchair: american idyll.

more soon,
tw (haven't been called xxxxxx in 35 years)

Honest to God, I had no recollection of the Dr. Phil/Oprah reference, but isn't that timely?!

I had -- in the dead of winter -- made wonderful gazpacho that afternoon and Fred and I had fought before he went off -- purportedly, to run errands, but probably just to get away. The details of the fight escape me, but I recall it having stemmed, in large part, from my sad and poorly controlled frustration at not having heard any word from Tumbleweed.

You know, I think the spat involved whether or not we needed a new model PUR water filter. Why do I remember that and not how the green of his shirt set off his hazel eyes?

When Fred came home, I was awash in happy tears. We rejoiced together and I was so overwhelmed and exhausted that I decided to put off checking out my brother's blog. *One* of his blogs.

But I couldn't sleep that night, couldn't rest. In the dark, I pulled my laptop into bed and fumbled until I found the link to American Idyll.

Word and image! ut pictura poesis! You'll not be surprised to learn that my graduate work was organized around the excessively cute dialectic of "lutte" pictura poesis. So how perfect and what a testiment to the Nature::Nurture struggle was the sight of his powerful photography and the sound of his chosen texts.

He was right, of course, and American Idyll has assuaged considerable wanderlust and has served to defy both physical and mental limitations.

It's a place for mindful meditation and the occasional romp in the water...

It is only a dream of the grass blowing
east against the source of the sun
in an hour before the sun’s going down


whose secret we see in a
children’s game
of ring a round of roses told.


Often I am
permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos,


that is a place of first
permission,
everlasting omen of what is.