Napping. Vaguely thought my feet were getting blown by a fan — it was the cat setting up around my feet. Occurred to me all experience was a variation on sleep, lighter and heavier — one runs in sleep, works in sleep (then suddenly I entered the heavier kind.)

m h …………… ……,,,,,.i r
o.. i ……………..,,,,,.vair
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d….. a……………* *
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B ……..…….…………….. ti
g…………….……..……………….G
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.la””; “”; “”; “”; “”; .””;
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What do my Shapes need? I’ve aspired from the beginning to make something like Apollinaire’s calligrams, — poetry with a visual element– but in the event it’s more the opposite — designs that incorporate text…. Not punning here when I say that what I appreciate in the Shape below is its texture, and think the way forward may be in doing more of that: more bold and italicized font, a greater diversity of font styles and sizes and perhaps colors, as well as text that means something along with the text that doesn’t, which also lends dimension, if not poetry.

……………………… ab

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……………………… ab| B/……. ab
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………………..,,,,,…..b v ta…………..,,,. A R I
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U o i vOLD /\\/\ \//\\ \– -\ \?? //?/// UOLD
NOTo i v … The See’r “““““tombolo` NOT
PAo iv …Y xhe See’er ““ l“““tombolo`ll PA.
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…. B …A …M d..m
…. B …A …M d..o
…. B …A …M d..m
…. B …A …M d..‘
…. O …A …M d..s
J… X …A …M d..f
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G… R …A …M d..i
G… U …u …M d e
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ar mad os armados The Se e’rThe See’rThe See’rT he See’rThe See’r
…a””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;pC B
.d””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;bse
..e””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;eNol
l””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;rie
..a””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;Gslm
..n; “”; “”;”crosswalk “”;eieie
..t””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;usnt
.o””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; E i
de””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;da
……………………….la””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;um>tombolo (x);
>s””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;C
enfrentamientos armados —

An octopus is an aquatic creature, living in water. The octopus of Marianne Moore’s poem is a glacier, made of frozen water– which exists on top of a mountain.

That contrast –between what lives in, and what is made of, water– makes one especially aware of the poem’s mentions of the water in its various physical states, particularly when those states are juxtaposed or contrasted.

Some direct examples of that include the eleven eagles of the West which “hear the roar of ice and supervise the water…”, the “peculiar ponies” that drink “ice-water”, and the fact that “rain falls in the valleys while snow falls on the peak.” Less directly, a “sea of shifting snow dunes” suggests a beach’s sand dunes, like the pool “starred with anemones ” suggests one starred with anemones (or vice versa) — and so on. Such considerations argued for the creation of this list.

…

Water & Ice in An Octopus

…

… An Octopus/ of ice

… sea of shifting snow dunes

… made of glass that will bend… comprising twenty-eight ice fields…

… of an anemone starred pool

… stained transversely by iron where the water drips down

… merging in irregular patches in the middle of the lake

… eye fixed on a waterfall that never seems to fall

… black feet, eyes, nose, and horns, engraved on dazzling ice fields

… Big Snow Mountain is the home of a diversity of creatures

… the water ouzel / with ‘its passion for rapids and high-pressured falls‘/ building under the arch of some tiny Niagra

…used to the unegositic action of the glaciers/ and ‘several hours of frost every midsummer night.’

… they hear the roar of ice and supervise the water/ winding slowly through the cliffs

… among the boulders sunk in ripples and white water

… brought up on frosty grass and flowers/ and rapid draughts of ice-water.

… magnified in profile on the moss-beds like moonstones in the water;

… upon which moisture works its alchemy

… not practiced in adapting their intelligence to eagle-traps and snow-shoes

… it receives one under winds that ‘tear the snow to bits

… from the hard mountain ‘planed by ice and polished by the wind’

… rain falling in the valleys, and snow falling on the peak/ the glassy octopus symmetrically pointed

… in a curtain of powdered snow launched like a waterfall.

Question on my mind right now is the extent to which Moore differentiates between the glaciers of the mountain and the mountain itself — which of these is the octopus or does it not matter.

Below is a quick list of the animals, plants and rocks that occur in the poem (as well as the human element) –of which there are quite a few. (In fact, only the aside on the Greek’s idea of happiness seems to depart in an extended way from the natural world.)

One observation to make about this list is that the poem for the most part segregates the items of these categories: you don’t see many mentions of plants among mentions of animals, but rather you find here a passage with a focus on plants and here a passage with a focus on minerals. (Yet that can’t be said without qualification: the bear’s dens are “concealed in a confusion” of minerals, the spotted ponies are “hard to discern” among plants, the eagles are “perched upon” lava and pummice.)

Plants, Animals, Minerals

(Kind of interesting: periwinkles and anemones can be considered either terrestrial plants or oceanic animals, which dual meaning fits very well with the context they occur in — though periwinkles, the flower, appear not to be native to the U.S.)

Animals: Octopus [x2], periwinkles, python, spider, anemone, bear (X2), elk, deer, wolf, goat (x2), duck, porcupine, rat, beaver, ant, antelope, nine-striped chimpmunk, water ouzel, white-tailed ptarmigan, eagle, snail, marmot (X2), pony-horse.

Plants: cyclamen, periwinkles, Anemone, Fir (X2), Larch, Spruce, Cypress, heather (x2), berry-bushes, forest (x3), alpine buckwheat, grass, flowers (x3), birch, fern, lily pad, avalanche lily, indian paint brushes, bear’s ears, kittentails, fungi, moss, rhododendron, leaves, unspecified trees (x3), rice, prunes, dates, raisins, tomatoes, twigs, bark, vines, branches (x2).

Rock, mineral, metal: [onyx] (x2), Manganese, iron, gold, silver, calcium, alabaster, topaz, tourmaline, amethyst, marble, jasper, agate, lava, pummice, chimney pot, cleaver, moraine, Moonstone.

Human element: “those who lived in hotels, but now live in the camps –who prefer to”, mountain guides evolved from trappers, businessmen (instructing ponies), The Greeks (x2), ‘those alive to the advantages of invigorating pleasures’, “odd oracles of cool official sarcasm” [really refers to signs not persons], Henry James.

From my Charles Ives biography (A Life with Music, Swafford), of Ives as a teenager: “He was partly ashamed for being an aritst, afraid other boys might call him sissy; he felt alien in an environment that rated almost anything else higher than artistic creativity […] Social dilemmas were not unusual for an American boy groing up an artist, then or later. Some of Ives’s solutions were common ones — lambasting sissies, playing sports, becoming profane and ‘manly’ in personality. This pattern turns up time and again in male American artists — in Hemmingway, Faulkner, Pollock, Carl Ruggles, and many others. At length Ives would arrive at a perverse view of dissonance as a token of manliness in music.”

Ives was skilled enough to be playing organ professionally in local churches at fourteen.

Probably obvious to anyone familiar with nature or Mt. Ranier (or perhaps just to any non-thick casual reader of the poem) but the poem’s mentions of “glass” refer to the glaciers on Mt. Ranier.

…”Composed of glass that bends, a much needed invention”
…”The glassy octopus, symmetrically pointed.”

The word glacier comes from French glace, meaning ice, though interestingly English “glass” does not come from glace but has a root meaning of shine. (The root meaning of French “glace” is cold, freezing.)

The other mention of glass in the poem, of which one may wonder in a broad fashion is “…the spotted ponies with glass eyes, brought up on frosty grass and flowers and rapid draughts of ice water.”

We are told that the spotted ponies can climb the mountain, so (if the mountain can be equated with the poem itself, and climbing the mountain with understanding the poem) one imaginative reading would be that these “glass eyes” are spectacles and that these ponies are readers of a special sort.

What I’m interested in in these Octopus ‘lists’: does Moore gravitate toward the same sounds, is there something about this arrangement of sounds that sound good. Broadly, what patterns of sound can be discovered?

General observation: most of these lists seem composed of at least one more item than is necessary; there’s a feeling of excess at play. If it were just “bears, elks, deer, wolves, and ducks” we’d lose nothing informationally (though, true to say, bears and goats occur elsewhere in the poem.) These lists intentionally go on a bit.

“bears, elks, deer, wolves, goats, and ducks”

At a glance — 6 one-syllable items in list, conjunction. Total syllables: 7. Dominant vowel (as a letter): e. Dominant vowel (as a sound): none, though one side of the line seems weighted toward ‘-air’ type sounds (bear, deer) and the other toward ‘uh’ type sounds (wolves, ducks). Dominant consonant (letter): s, (l, k,r). (dominant consonant sound): “s” toggles between “s” and “z” –z,s,0,z,s,s. Note: “bears” and “deer” seem (roughly) to go together phonetically, as do “elks” and “ducks”, and “elks” and “wolves”, and even “ducks” and “wolves”, while “goats” is a bit of an outlier: there is no ‘g’, no ‘t’, no long ‘o’ anywhere else in the line… (Also, the ‘bear’ and ‘deer’ sounds together recall “bear’s ears” from a later list: “…Indian paint-brushes, bear’s ears and kittentails…”)

Noted: the plural of elk is elks or elk. So Moore perhaps made a choice there. (In fact, ‘elk’ seems the more standard: many elk, many elks; two elk, two elks.) While we’re at it: bears, elks, deer, wolves, goats, ducks. The popularity of bears is about as great in the singular.

Written phonetically: /bɛɹz/ /ɛlks/ /dɪɹ/ /ˈwʊlvz/ /ɡoʊts/ /ənd/ /dʌks/

These links lead to the type of sound for each phoneme, probably some mistakes here (since I don’t know anything about this): bears, elks, deer, wolves, goats, and ducks

Would like to take this list of consonant types and this of vowel types and use them to map these lists from An Octopus. What sort of correspondences might arise? Quite annoying though — can’t seem to get started with anything.

 

WLK: Study of Sounds

Three types of “squares”: no aggregate, light grey; white concrete with sandy pebble aggregate; dark concrete with gravel aggregate. It is observed there are more pebbles in the pebble filled aggregate than there is gravel in the etc.

From the “top” it goes: three of the first; two of the third; five of the first [no]: ten of the second; three of the third and two of the third, eleven of the third; Lamp Post 5,6 & 7 of 9. First lamp post at the top of the hill on the far side; second on the near, third on the far, so forth — but 8 & 9 are both on the near side. Across from “LP-9” on the far side is a telephone pole, its top ensconced in dark tree branches, where at times of year huge flocks of crows will settle and threateningly caw.

Sometimes when you count sidewalk grooves you can get messed up because you tend to count steps rather than grooves and each step or each other step and each step or other step will not pass over, in every case, a groove. So you step and you think that’s one (but I have not passed over a groove), then in your next step you pass over a groove and think two or you think hold it that is one but now you’ve thought to yourself two— and the irregularity of the step-to-groove ratio only increases as you move– but I actually tried to count this and note the variations of aggregate of the forty some “squares” between Post 6 & Post 7 (these are on the so–called “far side”, on which I walk):

–3 no aggregate
–4 pebble aggregate
–9 gravel aggregate
–2 pebble aggregate
–3 gravel aggregate
–7 pebble aggregate
–9 gravel aggregate
–2 pebble aggregate
–7 pebble aggregate
-11 gravel aggregate

(Another level of complexity appears. I knew there to have been some forty “squares” between the two posts but had difficulty distinguishing the breakdown of aggregates –how many squares of each aggregate type there were– now I look at my records, which I must be reading wrong, and which I don’t know how to read right, and find I have accounted for many more than forty squares. Therefore, etc., and I don’t know)

Idea occurs of being hardly separable from the air I pass through, a cold front of it, slightly hardened instance of nothing, it will seem, I have now made a note of this, the mass containing many odd shaped clouds, (the “nose” shaped cloud, the “mustache” shaped cloud, the knee with a painful area on it shaped cloud, lightning and cracking upon that point) bringing rain and lower temperatures to northern Virginia. concrete pads, tiny bouquets propped from its cracks, he will not joke in pretense of self-awareness about coldness, he adjures self.

(Before I further elaborated on the idea of myself or my person as being a cold front, the “cloud” of my fingers cradled that of my chin, and I puzzled over if I was not more balloon-like than cloud-like, either a blimp or one with a cartoonal animal shape for parades, with many tethers that were all the time dropping off, popping out, every year another set of the tethers popping off, every year another set of holes causing me to resemble more and more that atmosphere which, for the time, I yet floated higher and higher up in, feeling less and less that I was anything at all, thinking “I’m not here, I’m not here,” feeling vanishing)

“A cold front”, I wrote, “with feet thunderclaps cyclonic storm cells of socks…” (some of my writing didn’t make any sense.) I wrote: “widening tornadoes stretching up,. native american storm god tearing up dust,…. stirring unseen hills with my trouser-cuffs. My shirt front a curtain of rain, a curtain of rain drawn across a strange room: the window, the room, of a bare chest. The chest is a window on the body, and yet, it will be observed, one cannot look through the unopened, unadulterated chest. No to open the chest you must fuss about with the buckle […]

I am not that which steps I wrote, I am the real being for whom the stepping being is a virtual man. The real walker makes the movements of the walking person but doesn’t move; the body, the virtual man, only follows after and apes what I cannot call a person in the mind. I am not that which writes: I pick up the stone the real being has cast and wonder what’s cast the stone. I stoop and think: maybe what I write is just from the brain of my second body?) There is: (i) the self I am when I write or perform well or am well (ii) the virtual man (which I call the body, and is a projection of that self) and (iii) the second body, the arch enemy, which views imagined things as real ones, in my current construct of the world.

Lamp Posts More Natural than Trees

The substrate of words, I wrote, streets that are paved in vocabulary (“plunged into it, marinated. That is the reason for the strong smell of everything here being well marinated, turned over the spit of being recalled, of being well learned about and repeatedly identified). What is Brisket? I must have looked at that tree a thousand times yet a dendrologist are arborist knows it better than myself (and so with a person knows people this person I’ve inhabited these years).

As you get out into the country it is not so much that things are without names as that the country is without namers, I wrote. In the city, and in the areas around the city, every square piece of paper is to be given a name, each square, each segment, a name like this one. The city starts with a name to be thinged and the country with a thing to be named. But there is no country: as fake as this tree is are the crops in the soil of the so-called country. To stop thinking of this.

Fake as this tree in the mulch is that plant in their mind. Why is technology more authentic than nature? Why is this lamp post more genuine than this degenerate mulch enmeshed tree, this ornamental bush? Because it is itself, unadulterate, pure, he writes. That tree is a “tree” but that lamp post is un post de luz. (To stop thinking of this.)

The Idea of The Afterlife is Inspiring

To live again, for there to be a second life, now there is thought that could get one up in the morning; there is a thought that could wake me up when I heard and believed it; that is a thought — a mere idea– that is a real and material idea in one’s life. Like a drill sergeant, like a drug. Really invigorates, instantly dissipates, everything else, every weight.

(This, that we call life, is merely the spring board to life. This, that we call life, is merely the running start to life. This, our so-called life, is just the preparation for it, after which comes the actual life. How would you be in your new life? What does how-you-would-be-later require of you right now?)

And if one can live again when dead surely one can live again while living… If one might live a second time then mightn’t one live for a first time? (Let the dead bury the dead.) Was there still hope for this life? (Stop your housework and listen to your heart.) Be calm. Maybe the after life turned out to be here? –after this stupid thing he’d known so far known as his life. (One must be reborn. How?) After stupid life, intelligent life, genuine being.

Q(In what book was it written: “you need only a day to experience all happiness.” A: Same book that makes me look at this leaf here.)

–A stride which is like a bridge that has been built for the second it stands and then demolished beneath the stride that follows it for the second of its standing (the next stride itself a bridge)

–A walk which is a great knot of such over-and-underpasses — it is a great immobile structure of concrete crotches through which passes Traffic Time

–The stride has been tackled, it has been “clipped” by the opposing tight end of the succeeding stride; its numbers and jersey smother the jersey; the team of the right and team of the left…. Right ham and left ham (and one’s thoughts like this: one ham lapping over another, coving and being covered)

–A pile of strides on the feet soon accumulates, of strides that have fallen (strides layered upon the shoe soles like sandwich meats) (the walker is a delicatessen with a lunch crowd beneath his feet, the walker is in a “rush”) (the distance traversed is the sportscaster speaking of the jersey piles: the metric system is the sportscaster) (all the sandwich meats are chasing after the sandwich, his shoes make the fallen steps, it is the meat slicer of steps.)

–One travels over the bridge one’s stride has made; the sheer cliff face of one’s clothes one looks down; the ledges, the cradled nooks and aeries and areas for coins and pencils; this is all suggestive of King Kong; the distant stress release grooves in the ribbons of concrete that are the rivers that traverse the remote valley floor of the isolated island one ever remains in — that one ever remains the king of. One is the king above one’s shirt and pants. Praised by the shoes and pocket contents, one is assuredly de jeffe of Skull Island, the King.

Post de luz. How the lamp post takes on more reality in another language. As if the ordinary must pass through the foreign to be seen.

Una Acera. I walk on the sidewalk. Un Ardillo en la — sur la — sur l’herbe verte. If I ever manage to take myself seriously, I know, it will be in another language. (If this amateur become professional, if this comedian become nobleperson, if this single person should learn intimacy ever. If this married person should.) Une maison con trois fernetres, avec quatre ventannas. (but I can’t speak another language). (If I were to ever learn another language it must be by immersion into a negative charge.) (“I’m too old for it to matter what happens to me, unless there is eternity”?)

More real to me: why would this squirrel, this light, be more real to me in Spanish? I see almost a kind of flower around it. Squirrel actually a Greek word. Skulla doesn’t not mean ‘skull’ in Greek.

Conrad, then. Could Conrad have become a novelist of such great stature in Polish? I often think that if one were to write or speak a true word, or live a real life, then it must be (without being exotic) non-native, (without being exotic), — but I have no capacity for languages. English is “overlubricated” (one knows how to say nothing in it, one has become so trivial in the language one knows) womblike and the rest over-frictive as it were: terrible choking death rattle is heard as I begin to speak “in un autre” tongue.

(Reason for that: self-conciousness, stagefright, the excessive fear of pretending, simple want of basic brass. Perhaps the squirrel, in another language, exists outside the zone of my self-consciousness. In that flower obtains a world outside of myself. I fancy Shakespeare, albeit also not known for foreign language skills, lived constantly in such a world.)

At what point do you look at the traffic signal; when you see it what does it say; by what sign does it say it, and once you have seen this sign, how have you responded to it, how have you chosen to respond as you did

II

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stick, hole, imprint in the concrete of a bike tire, 5 dried leaves, couple more dried leaves to the side of them, smaller, muddy and creased leaves; grass well-hedged on the sides; “eructations” of soil; shorn delicate grass leaves line the walk here; old dry black flattened pine cone here, a small hole, a round small stone,

The glint from the car window calls for my attention . the woman’s figure and the toss of her head calls for my attention . the momentary but surprising irritation in my hip calls for my attention . . . but what is there not calling for my attention? That is what needs my attention

thinking of that small hole

Cars in the lot on the leftside are: perpendicular to the path of the walkway.

And cars on the street beside the grassy sign-studded median are: parked parallel to the path of the walkway, noses facing me.

And between the walkway and the cars on the right side are: condo signs and landscaped trees tucked in the fragrant thatch of mulch

[and…?]

–and the interval between the parking signs is as even as the interval between the trees, such that one can almost take measurements by them,

[and…?]

–and the radius of the circle of the mulch is equal to one third the length of a parking spot strip, I believe, with the cone described by the ring of the mulch and the crown of the tree existing mentally, and with what volume relative to my volume, and with what leaf content relative to my thought content, and the grass surrounding them, and so on and so on, and the mulch and the mulch of myself and the signs and the signs of myself and the grass being almost as level and uniform as paint in that spot while in that one you see evidence of excessive moisture, perhaps, so perhaps you have some guy responsible for maintaining this who keeps looking at the moss and thinking of the rain we’ve had and the moisture

And beyond the parked perpendicular cars to the left there are: more condos like those you have passed, the area locally known for the labyrinthine similitude of its lay out; although, having been made at a time when total similitude in the housing stock had as yet been imperfectly arrived at, it doesn’t seem totally homogeneous to the trained eye. Major builders prior to WW2 did not make more than 5 homes a year, I have read. The comfortable yet homogeneous housing of one’s own soul will seem built up behind one’s eyes to meet it. (“He who has made the outside has made the inside” seems yet applicable to the person who now walks through it) Nothing’s obviously bad, much is patently good, and if there is a sense of being in a headstock or “cangue”, it does not seem altogether an unenviable position.

ar mad os armados The Se e’rThe See’rThe See’rT he See’rThe See’r
…a””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;pC B
.d””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;bse
..e””; “”; “”; C”; “”; “”; “”;eNol
l””; “”; “”; “A; “”; “”; “”;rie
..a””; “”; “”; “N; “”; “”; “”;Gslm
..n””; “”; “”; “G; “”; “”; “”;eieie
..t””; “”; “”; U”; “”; “”; “”;usnt
.o””; “”; “”; E”; “”; “”; “”; E i
de””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;da
……………………….la””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;um>tombolo (x);
>s””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;C
enfrentamientos armados —

. . .and that stretch goes on a long way before bending sympathetically with that off-ramp beyond the trees.

“We bend along with the visible road”, I wrote, but the road itself bends in concert with, obedient to, not features of geography but to some network of unseen lines –electrical, cloacal, legal] such a network undergirds this writing too, the biography that supports the literary, the biological that supports the biographical, the economical that supports the biological etc] concert of horn and step, concert of the hard stem of the grass in my hands] concert of abstract geometry and real lines, as conducted by paint ; for as wires conduct electricity, visibility conducts and begets geometry? (visible lines conduct geometric ones I perhaps mean . . ?) “the curveship”] that wends] terah & Haran “geometry is the electricity of the visible” (electricity the “reverse of prayer”?) how much time between one sentence and another, one word and another, “wends from the county road we’d only thought we’d left”

Valerie suddenly remembered and to think I might be remembered by another as I myself remember others. Valerie. (No one is named Valerie.) To have done that to Valerie and to countless others probably: be in her memory. Eternal return (in others’ memories). “Sorry to many but perhaps like Esau they would kiss Jacob’s neck.” I hope, but on the basis of little, to send gifts before me, to have done something for the world, so that my imagined neck is kissed by the ones who might recall. I plead with my neck to bend and for their lips to kiss. Or does no one look out these wide banks of physical windows, which do not hold the past no, but do not destroy it either. (Stop thinking of this.)

Cars about what you would expect in number. Squirrels about what you would expect in number, color and shape. (Have learned they listen to bird calls.) “The squirrels, which scurry, and are scurrilous, have shadow tails; and have learned the language of birdsong.” Frequent moving remodeling construction; perpetual landscaping; perpetual dog walking, gas blown mowers’ sounds (never any objection to this dragon hoard of absence of malnutrition, to this dragon hoard of the absence of the escapable obviously negative, to this dragon hoard of organization, to this dragon of how do I get a job, find a place or role in this world economy) perpetual baby carrier joggers acts of maintenance never see a black person, asian person / see latino and white person laborers/ see black mail people, UPS people. “Her personal history did not greatly dis-resemble this neighborhood with respect to its racial makeup.” as SW Asian family lives about a mile ahead. Car types, people types, car races, movie genetics, generic drugs, idiomatic philosophies, years Fifteen years, forty five years Ten years. Segregation of years. (“The generation not to be named gave the generations names.” The lie of there being generations) Segregation of Present from Past, past kept in the balcony, Miscegenation of 1975 through 1838. The Philosopher Emmanuel Kant is best known for writing what philosophical treatise? (no one knows the answer to this) Am passed by a Nissan sentry.

Then out of the general “highway hum” there arises a high and then a low pitched sound, then a sound a pitch higher than the high one and then one lower than the low one and then two just lower than the high tone and one just lower than the preceding two pitches; then what’s obviously a motorcycle; then what’s probably a box truck rattling as it crosses an uneven pavement patch; then more of the general hum (“whirr” “whush”) of the lanes below. The experience of a person alone above heavy traffic: what is a person’s claim to being relative to the claim of all that traffic? Chainlink fence and light posts, bird that’s made its home in the one with the casing broken off.

‘than’ was once ‘then’ as I read in the KJV

Two cars travel parallel with an empty lane between them — not just parallel but even; and not just even and parallel, but proceeding in the same direction and at what appears to be the same uniform rate; and with a uniformity of motion also which suggests the uniformity of the road and that of the bright yellow lines they drive between. Both these parallel cars seem, moreover, perfectly centered in their lanes, and so suggest an imaginary, perfectly centered, dividing line in the empty lane between them.

Leah was the daughter of Laban is thought (and all the deceit to be found in Genesis. How many cases, to name a class of deceit in it, in which people imagine they’re sleeping with someone entirely different. Another class: Abraham/ Pharo, Abraham/ Abimelch, the serpent.)

Now there appears a third car traveling in that lane, along that line between them, and faster than they are, gaining on them, and perhaps approaching the possibility of passing them; the trivial idea of it occurs, the expectation, that one car might pass another; a car which strikes me somehow as a dotted center yellow line between two solid ones, of which there aren’t any instances on this road, at this time, no dotted lines (though this will change in coming months, with the construction), as the three pass below where I am, and disappear beneath the overpass.

(“If the straight lines represent constant and uniform motion, then the dashed ones stand for acceleration and deceleration,” must have been what I meant.)

three or four cars, five cars, in three lanes in a staggered formation; a second group, gaining on this first group: green, brown, brown … how will these groups combine and which cars among them will go ahead; these pass beneath the bridge and now another formation or wave with slightly different components of color and shape and number and make, assumes their spot — breaking off from the group it falls behind, a commercial truck with ladders rattles among this new group. pickup truck with flapping tarps and stacked paint buckets catches my eye as I pass over, cutting a transverse across their commute.

Aggregate and Concrete

Woman picking up object from the ground with her right hand, when it would have more easily been done with her left, which was, however, in her pocket; the action revealing between her shirt bottom and pants top, a very white band of skin, almost as if it were that band that held her two halves together, the binding or tape.

a blemishless reflective red sign with white lettering (STOP) before background of two dark conifers by a sidewalk corner with a fire-hydrant

grey aggregate with grey concrete; dark grey aggregate with light grey concrete (rough black marks of old gum); sandy colored concrete with variously colored pebble aggregate; sandy colored concrete without aggregate with a sizeable nick in it; grey concrete without visible aggregate with graffiti etched into it (a single name, “Juan”) and with the spray paint of the utility company starting here, a blue circle and dash

 

……. A. a I
…v v ………iR
.e a ……..,,,,,.v a v
hl ……………,,,,,a i
ta ……………,,,,. A R I
e. c ……………,,,,,.v a
m.. h ……………,,,,,.i r
o.. i ……………..,,,,,.vair
r… p………………… * *
d….. a ……………* *
r……. p……….. * *
i………. e…… * *
h…………. r. * *
* * * * * * * *
y t g …………….. lacia
B ………………………….. ti
g…………………………………….G
G……………………………………..G
e……………………………………..z
~…………………………………….!

Amazing and instructive: that all ones work on a blog is the equal of Dickinson’s work in a trunk. That only its essence could ever help a poem. O’Hara too in a drawer. Pessoa.

Paragraph by paragraph, often indeed fairly petty and unartistic in its difference, the grass blades the person indigenous to now, but nothing else, will find here, for example, are too well combed, they are over-combed;

EQUALITY> Feeling, perhaps, if these homes were made of dried mud and thatch rather than (as these to my right) brick and slate, they would suggest more of Equality than of Sameness, and be good. Maybe if we made the homes ourselves, mowed the grass ourselves, therein would consist the equality, and the difference also, maybe thereby would be dispersed this sense that we are in a feedback loop. Maybe if we turned the machines off. Maybe that is the root cause of this feeling of sameness, so often felt, and felt now, as I look at the license plate. Maybe the machines are the reason. Maybe the machines are the cause of our sameness without equality. Maybe they don’t need to spring alive to destroy us. Maybe simply our using them destroys us.

…And there’s nothing at all wrong with being destroyed or with being in what I am calling a feedback loop necessarily, but that there remains this idea that one’s actual life, that actual living and actual feeling alive, lies somewhere outside of the loop — seems to; and that there is actual living and actually life, it really does exist — somewhere — you don’t have to do this– something actual about life that you haven’t yet been doing.

EQUALITY> I could be walking this same region of suburb /// this sense of it not really being myself who experiences this– myself indeed maybe being the one who is a Ray to obliterate, diffuse, reality before it reaches myself, the Ray whose job is to keep from being diffused itself — maybe that ray is part of a headset worn by the Real Myself, who is hibernating now or comatose — maybe it is mere selfishness for one of the relatively privileged of the earth to consider his ‘real self’ — what of the real people who have not been so privileged, if that is the word, had you thought of that?– so what is to be done but to proceed robotically (which was what was already being done) toward ourselves, toward our destiny (when we are ruled over by our Robot Masters we will find that after all there has been no change: we have ever been ruled over by our robot selves, we will find, we have been ruled by the robotic about us of which the actual robots will be a mere incarnation or objectification, A.I the very pinnacle of what we have ever known as Habit — that to become liberated from the robots we must actually go to war with ourselves — .]

His chest was behind his shirt (that hadn’t been the case earlier when, for example, the shirt was slung over his chair.)

“The chest was as unthought of behind the shirt as the heart was unthought of behind the chest.” True. Yet the heart was, in a way, more noticeable than the chest, like something heavy in the breast pocket of the shirt that he wore [on his chest].

Like you’re working with a hammer out in the yard and you have no convenient place to rest or hang it, and so you put it in your breast pocket, [Right] which only barely serves the purpose however: the head of the hammer not really fitting in the pocket of the shirt and its long handle levering it out; such was the feeling of his heart, which had begun suddenly and threateningly to pound, and not from mere exertion. [Very threatening and sudden, his heart.]

[episode seems to have passed] paint and shadows of a telephone wire (the shadow of someone’s long distance phone conversation) (shadow of the broadcast signal of someone opening the door of their refrigerator) sun surrounding the light that is to shine out of someone’s refrigerator. the light that is cast in the rubber. the light that is made into a fossil (into a thing on the door of the refrigerator.) Something laid down on the road like the road itself was laid down (a shadow of a cable is the fossil of an electric light)

ligatures, paint, shadow, bones, Humanity, the insulated light of one’s bones, the refrigerator of oneself, the mayonnaise of self on the door of one’s body, body on the asphalt as a shadow, one’s own shadow next to that of Humanity’s (the Shadow of Humanity being that of a single long wire) the wires of the telephone company and the spray paint of the utility company upon the asphalt your shadow now falls over and over which you now step

Two fighter jets overhead: the clouds too low and thick to see through are completely incapable of muffling, in the slightest way, their sound. (A loudness that dispels utterly any myth of apparent substance to the thick clouds.)

Sky overcast, the air clammy such that, were one to enter a supermarket’s parking garage, one would be insensible of any atmospheric change.

The military jet in the sky: huge sound of the aircraft tugging behind it the distant toy.

Women and Leashes:

–Woman wielding the dog leash as if she tried to hit a small point with a long pole.

— woman (as if trying to make an awkward shot with a pool cue) as if flying a kite, as if at a station of the Universal Gym, withdrew her dog from the range of [].

–The woman, as if kneading and stretching dough for baguette, restrains her dog from [].

–The leash a cord to the lawnmower, or thread from the needlepoint

— The woman, as if making a catch: the leash is the trajectory of the thing she catches, made visible, and her mitt is the handle of the leash.

“As the comic book superhero, Spiderman, cast webs from the spinarets at his wrist, so did the old woman, but in reverse –“

Portraits and faces:

–young woman whose adult face seemed to protrude or peek from her youthful face,

–tough professional face, stern official’s face, that peered from behind a friendly person’s features,

–person who reflected their young self in one profile and their older self in another

–The hand and head (adjunctory to the leash and phone) seem to inhabit a plane to the left and forward of the one that she actually walks in.

–the nape of the mother’s neck is level with the backsides of her arms (as she pushes the basinett or crib).

–“As the woman pushes the stroller up the back of her arms are level with the nape of her neck, with the occiput of her skull.”

–they say that muscles are formed by the tearing and wounding of muscles (so did this person’s beard seem)

–“this persons beard seemed to have formed from the ripping and tearing of previous beards”

–the woman clenched her arms, bent her knees, shivered, looked close into the face of the parking meter, and turned away.

–“the memory of a face is comparable to the x-ray of a face.”

— love as an idea of the perfection of the species (perfect person)

First letters of a stop sign visible to the right of the light pole. Now the whole of the stop sign is visible so that one may read what it says. Now the light pole looks to be farther to my right than it had been. Now I can’t see the light pole at all. Now I’m nearer to the tree.

That map of Barcelona I saw today on the computer — how large and involved was the map– how great seemed the city it delineated (mapped)– how far that city seems from the one that I now walk in, (which itself seems big and involved)– how much larger it is than here, than this county, which itself seems large (huge)– an apartment building seems huge– to think of all that happens and is thought of in just one apartment building– in one apartment– in just one person, –which can seem a lot– and of how one hardly even thinks of Barcelona. Of the map of Barcelona. How many people represented by that building and how many buildings represented by that map. So many living human beings.

to here

Jogger rubs wrist on white tee-shirt (“the white t-shirt of a jogger is wrist-rubbed“): around the right side of a rib cage he moves. His shirt moves (flutters) to and away from his skin. His arm moves (forward and back) repeatedly they pass his sides. He Looks at his wrist. He’s running but still needs to do something with himself. So he looks at his wrist like this then he rubs it against his stomach or his side as if there were something on it, maybe there is. Maybe some bit of sweat hit a hair just so. Some population of the flora of bacteria on his arm at that particular time decisively accumulated at that place in particular where now he must look, as if there were something there he could see, (a miniature pile had been made or a miniature building demolished maybe) something there he may have to rub. (We’re not what we think: we’re so many slivers between each other, masses of things that are hardly ourselves, but with the sense of an attainable freedom.) Perhaps he isn’t going fast enough as his head passes beside and below the leafy branch; he hasn’t tested or pushed himself sufficiently, this is the reason he is distracted from his activity to the extent that he must look at and rub his wrist. Or he is bored: he has no headphones. If there are no headphones, there’s nothing. So he must be seen running as well as be running and so he self-consciously rubs at his wrist, where there is not even, however, an itch.

aside

Latino on knees in mulch beneath tree, the runner has passed. Maybe one no longer feels the longing one once did on seeing music videos. And maybe this is because of something tedious in oneself, because of some hulking empty seriousness of aloneness or oldness that has interposed itself between you and the youthful person one once imagined oneself to be, but mainly hadn’t ever been … music videospopular cculture.

aside

Looking up at a branch (but as though up a chimney, with head turned), up a trunk rather but as thin as a branch, landscaper with clippers. To think of a tree as the flou of a chimney, as a chimney. (To think of the clippers as the flame of the chimney) to think of the earth as the flame that makes the smoke of the trees rise from the chimney. To think of the leaves as the escaping ash and soot of the fire of the earth. To think of this man’s actual job versus this man’s actual husbandry (what it would be.) To think of this man’s husbandry as being the soul of the tree. A portly man now holds a great string of keys white bearded red shirted heavyweight approaches red stopped vehicle with jangling string of keys walks in front of me on way to his car. Vegetation from the highway’s margins are pushing through the links of the bending fence.

car SIGN
Linden Tree

Around there I see that the mulch almost has disintegrated, more a greyish dirt around the tree roots at this time. Almost like there is only one remaining greyish chip of it around the landscaped but untended tree.

Several sorts of “darkness” visible: darkness of the shadow of myself; darkness of the parking lot’s asphalt beneath my shadow; darkness of the asphalt struck by the sun without my shadow on it; the darkness of the calking or sealant with which they have covered the cracks in the asphalt; the three different shades of the sealant, some of it hit by the sun; the waving shadow of the tree branch beside the sunlight on the walk; the black distant road, seen between cars and bushes, has also a different hue than this one.

Don’t know what it is that made me reach for my nose but discover it is so –that I have reached again for my nose– not like a person brings a hand to his nose but as one brings a thing that is there to a thing that is near– which I know by touch and by sight– a nose, nose that I do not smell –it’s inner and outer have no sense at all of each other– the smell of the hand does never meet the touch of it– held in the crook of the left hand between its thumb and first finger.

…………..world on fire
…………..cat walks
………….. mower, chiropractors
…………..“”lawn-coli” (soda name?)
………….. mass halos — gas engines

how is it you can see anything beyond a shadow… why doesn’t the light “get stuck” as it tries to pass through the shadow to you — why do you suppose that shadows should be like curtains, should be utter black holes and dark spaces — looking now at the onramp beyond the wood of the road margin. (Lucretius on that.) The yellow lines broken up…. why aren’t dark areas impassable to images (how does light pass through the dark?) Air is Windows Shadows is Curtains Images wade through shadows as through swampy bogs. so you see you’re misunderstanding something basic (is darkness the absence of light? Doesn’t it denote what light doesn’t pass through?) Lucretius on that.

Another division’s recycling pile. Satan’s Frozen Tears in a pile. Dropped calls are in a pile. Woman on the call-in show that morning: why

Are there thoughts that are devils and thoughts that are angels? If devils and angels are thoughts, and only thoughts, does that make them more or less real, as devils and angels? Are there thoughts that are miracles? Thoughts that are muscles? Perception is thought. Myself is thought. (Myself is chemical combinations, a sunday school of such combinations.) Recycling is good: Satan’s tears returned to Satan’s tear ducts”. Factories produce like vast calving icebergs our possessions. “Dirty Car”: a twitter handle. Cephalopod & Cephalopod (name of a distinguished law practice) Noah & Nicolas Christian and and rather than crossing toward it he enters it.

“TREE“

Do writers know techniques for the preservation of experiences like archeologists know techniques for the preservation of relics? (Ought they establish a grid pattern, as it were, over each experience? Best practices?)

TREE

Real weather, owing to technological advancements, seeming more ‘man made’, seeming like ‘movie weather’, more dramatic and violent than the uncharged whether of former days; while, movie weather, also because of technological advancements, has been made to seem more natural or realistic. No more people throwing buckets of water from off-camera.

TREE

Techninques for the Preservation of Experiences

(1) establishing the base unit of experience as The Moment
(2) being able to quarry off moments from each other and
(2b.) to experience and transcribe a moment as if it were the last, or only one. (This that one now experiences, is not to be followed by forty years of other experiences; it is the last experience.) Maybe the last moment of the whole species is what’s needed? if the last thing Homo Sapiens saw was that back of the Stop Sign at 31st and Abingdon.
(3) i.e., I am tucking my hands into the pockets of my green trousers on exiting the bathroom. If it were at that time that the heart attack would come, or the brain randomly burst in an explosion of blood, a red lettuce, I would probably have appreciated all the nuances of that experience of exiting the bathroom much better; as I would locked in that moment which normally I pass through. (Returning to (1) and the idea of a quarry. Is that what’s needed to get at experience, a quarry, a deep quarry?) (Now I’m typing out a row of 9s as I try to scratch some dried spaghetti sauce from off the 9.)

STONE PINEAPPLES

—Another idea: “Technology in the arts makes exact replications of nature, only not; the hand makes inexact replications of nature, only so.”

(That is: technological advancement in the arts has made representation both more true and less authentic. Somehow a naive sketch of a thing more authentic than a professional photograph of a thing.)

–Schopenhauer-like idea of the after life: after life is disorganized matter, if you consider the universe disorganized, while life is an organizing spirit.

Q: what is literary carbon

Excellent question I should probably note down. (What’s literary is so incosequential I guess, there probably isn’t anything very much like literary carbon.)

Having come upon an old paycheck stub for paper in short order, the search for a writing tool, through backpacks many pocket, through the knotted mass of clothes and shoes in the backpack’s primary core, proved more involved. But here, too, I was successful having eventually found a pencil, with a tip, of about an inch’s length in the back pocket of my second pair of short

Using my opened left for a writing surface: Now I’m in the painted “penalty area” enclosing the tip of the parabola of grass between the entries to the parking lots of the pre-school and firehouse respectively.

Sonya from War and Peace — am about to hit that portion in the book where she’s called a “sterile flower,’ so often remembered. ‘Sterile’: that word had come up in a Post article I’d just read. FDA appalled by conditions of CDC labs. If not a government lab they’d have been shut down, etc. falling short of guidelines for sterility. That combination of apparently unrelated texts (a classic of literature, a daily newspaper) about apparently unrelated things (a virtuous person who could however not be loved, and inadequate safety protocols in government run scientific facilities) , these unrelated things joined by a word, caused me to stop and ponder where I was: in what spot did the confluence of these ideas of sterility occur?

* * *

Were I to back up a bit and look to my right, I would see. Were I to backup still further and look to my left, then to my right, then continue forward, I would see. Why don’t I start walking backward. Why not raise my knees another inch than I do. Why don’t I depart from the norm in even the slightest way? It occurs to me that” nothing that I see or come across is satirizable” (but I don’t know what that means). (Does it mean I basically “believe in this world”? Relatively “good time in history”?) Community swimming pool and its fence and gate between condo spaces. “Quite reasonable really,” if you don’t look at the news.

Though much of what I see will seem rather above or beneath me, it is all, it is all, whether they like it or not, it is all, whether I like it or not, it is all, it is all more or less reasonable — we are the people [even in northern hemisphere] […] And those persons who are not the people, existing too far beyond the general travail, live where I will never see them live, pass by where I will only very seldom pass, seldom pass, and never see anyone passing by at that time.

It occurs to me the vitriol against whites, while not being misplaced, will give way before long to whites needing to be embraced as minorities: whites are blacks, it occurs to me as I cross the street. (Axis Bold as Love: what does that mean, why does it occur to me. Why do I think of the title of this Jimi Hendrix album?) It occurs to me that there isn’t actually any vitriol against whites that I know about. (Where did I get that there was “vitriol against whites?”) It occurs to me — “there are not whites.” (Nation of Islam maybe occurred to me as a source of vitriol against whites). It occurs to me that writers are minorities in a way that scientists are not and it occurred to me ponder if the literature of racial minorities held a clue for minorities of all kinds? (Congressional minorities — loyal opposition) “Last people” of all kinds? It seems unlikely that racial propblems will exist many centuries hence (look at the Huegenots) it seems quite impossible that (caste systems of other countries) racial problems will ever disappear. America still best hope race thought.

As I look to the left I see an “idealized version of the street.” (My “ideal” is like a commercial. It is not an ideal at all just oddly blemishless, airbrushedness. “Brain’s sad airbrush.” Somebody’s idea of art: well-taken photo of the Jefferson Memorial. Art is “professional”, the French Academy idea.) (Henry Miller: kick in the pants of art, though he was pretty conventional it turns out) As I look to the right, a lane to a school which seems always to be under construction (not idealized, the actual case) Vermeer’s Little Street occurs to me. Occurs to me the county government is “panicked by technology.” (I don’t know anything about the county government.) Occurs to me: take each day as it comes. You say: and wander blindly into the trap? You say: no, you’re right. I over-reacted. I apologize. (But before the idea wasn’t there and now the image will come down at times, a “stake in the heart.”) Take each day as it comes, you say. You say: I know I’ve over-reacted.

It was the painted No Parking “penalty area” — a painted three-sided rectilineal figure, white painted thick diagonal lines tracked upon the interior, indicating the area was not suitable for legal parking — the first time in a while it occurred to me to think of my walk, or to realized it was in fact happening, cool spring morning at the beginning of April, a month or so into the quarantine.

Dummy is Me & Ventriloquist is Me

The attention one had not received (seemed improper, mean to think of. One should think of the attention Spinoza had not received. One should think, let me be like Spinoza) Seemed unwise: since maybe that saved one. –Been spared — yet have a chance. I would and I do,– don’t want that then what then now– like ventriloquism, dummy is me and the ventriloquist is me but over here — no up here. Or two dummies maybe. Hard to Cheat an Honest Man. (We are hearing the scratch of their soulless wood.) “Cervantes is me and Quixote my experience.”

A momentary feeling that “my head is a television set.”

What about this feeling suggests the television?

My range of vision seems broad like a television seems broad (instead of narrow and small like a face does); seems as broad as a television that holds within it the image of a face. A feeling of being vacuous, of thinking nothing, of thinking nothing because of the television I’ve watched, having been filled thereby by unthinking, of being full of space (though the interior of my head, I suppose, is much more dense than that of a television) like the interior of an old boxy television.

That the television is a shower of images and I a receiver of them (although don’t each of do both: both receive and send out images?) that this is so does not make the comparison less apt; to the contrary… it is somehow the point, which can’t understand, as the feeling and the thought about it flit away so quickly, that somehow I see in the same way that it shows; that, if I were to have the experience of being a television, I would understand that for it, sending out images is it’s manner of seeing.

Only after having entered it, visually checking to his right. Centered manhole cover, five feet eight inches from eyehole, announces its point of manufacture as nation of India: manhole cover akilter too (as I have a Picasso Eye): has been given same painted double lines of the street, but turned clockwise ten degrees since it was painted. if artists painted the street (if the streets were painted to maximize beauty rather than safety.) Flaubert envisioned government by artists. (How would a government operate that try and achieved the beautifulness of the state?) At what point will dreams peer out of my perception, it is asked, when will I live in a dream? Not in this… this perception. In a barrel tub. (As I try to live in a dream, that woman from the call-in show appears, tells it to get back in its dream hole. Back!)

Experience of blindness the previous night as I reached for a water glass, which was before the dream of the five turtles (the parking lot having been inundated and transposed to the area beneath my window, three swimming turtles and two large tortoises appeared, bumping about the cement embankments. The two large ones came to rest side by side in a parking space, while the smaller ones managed to find a nearby rock to be sunned upon) having risen from bed.

It was not an excess of darkness but of light: the glass I reached for had a blinding sun behind it: “This is how it will be.” Maybe with hearing, maybe with sight. Perhaps I look to my right at a big tree: no cars are coming from the direction of the big tree, or they are yet at a distance. What a video game I am in, perception is a video game it is a salad bowl, big wooden half orb over my face, often oregano scented, in which, with the tongs of my brains’ ends, I hunt for tomato and cheese parts. Video game in which I hunt for what is not the game, in which one strives to forget too the part about “winning”, accumulating points. Here I go on describing the bowl, which I’ve learned ought not to be washed out: simply wipe out your wooden salad bowl with a cloth, so as to season it over time. What I see is the visual embodiment of what I see with, according to one set of ideas.

Nothing could season this street, this perfectly rational baked-in sameness. How could you season something with its lid on? Bolted on? How could you season this Eden of absence of sewage, this dragon hoard of absence of badness? (Here comes one of the dragons now, walking a cute-seeming non-barking sub-dragon, both perfectly nice persons of their type) at the street’s other side where the opposing condo division’s driveway, the sidewalk, and street all intersect. That is an important place which my foot finds all the time and which “has it all” (the perfect foot destination: “Bahamas Crook” I should call it when I make my map: Aerie de Metarsie, where feet will come to brood and nest and stain the sheer face of rock. The other named location is the Saddle Rock)–it has: my foot, the road, the driveway, the corner, the side walk, the median between the sidewalk and road; at no point do all these elements so effortlessly come together, mingle with such unseamed completeness as at this point. Like the north star, this point “has it all.”

I recognize a bumpersticker. To left, another division’s recycling pile, this one at the foot of a tree — flat bottomed boxes and bags tipping off, resting uneasily on, its grey dry looking roots.