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 are seen.

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, a 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, so he adjures his 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 popping off tethers, 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 less 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, which was the good writing.) 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. A wall, a bricked up window. 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 I 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 or person (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, and fears bugs like roving searing hot irons, 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 as a substance (“plunged into it, marinated: turned over the Spit of Recollection and of being recalled: of being well learned about and repeatedly identified and recalled). 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 who knows people, knows much better this person I’ve inhabited all these years probably, so then what good am I? am I trying to push forward a person I don’t want to know?).

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, listen, be calm.) 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 intently 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 the 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. One climbs like a beast the tower of oneself. 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 in 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. Rather, it doesn’t.

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. I repeat myself. 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,  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, beaucoup de nez.

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

[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.

The Se e’rThe See’rThe See’r
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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” alone along the riverrun

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 this old Jacob’s sour neck.” I hope, but on the basis of little, to send gifts before me, to have done something for the world, so that my maligned 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. (During the pandemic, when more people were seen out of their houses, it seemed more diverse than this passage represents.) “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, years forty five years Ten years. Segregation of years. (“The generation not to be named gave the generations names.” The idea that we should stop giving nicknames to 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’s being? 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 intervening lane.

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/ Abimelech, 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, disappear beneath the overpass I step on.

(“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.

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

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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. Instructive: you started where you’re not even supposed to end.

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? — (you have 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. Remember when you picked out your shirt today? Which one was it, the clean one? the blue one…?)

“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 (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. 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) of what real object is the road a shadow?

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 (your one arm full of condiments, your other arm full of batteries and frozen foods)

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, and 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 tiny distant toy.

— 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 unable to control a kite, as if at a station of the Universal Gym, withdrew her dog from the range of  — x.

— 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 –”

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

— a tough professional face, a 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 uphill).

— “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 (finding the 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 apartmen t– 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 suggested by that map, of which this document is just the tip of one.