This Maundering Yokel

You Already Have Brine

2010-04-21T11:41:00.002-05:00

You already have brine
Reason swept all away
Disciples are fishermen
Go to them for direction
Gospel of law Gospel of shadow
in the vale of behavior
who is the transgressor
Far thought for thought
nearer one to the other
I know and do not know
Non attachment dwell on nothing
Peace be in this house
Only his name and truth

from Silence Wager Stories
Susan Howe

"This god, this one word: 'I'" Writing the Right

2010-02-17T10:00:00.007-06:00

Updated

A friend sent a link to an article by Gore Vidal in a 1961 Esquire. (h/t Eileen)

In it he offers up these tidbits of lunatic wisdom from Rand's book "The Philosophy of Ayn Rand"--it appears she had pulled these things out of her own writing to gather them in this tome:

• “It was the morality of altruism that undercut American and is now destroying her.”

• “Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society. Today, the conflict has reached its ultimate climax; the choice is clear-cut: either a new morality of rational self-interest, with its consequence of freedom…or the primordial morality of altruism with its consequences of slavery, etc.”

• Then from one of her arias for heldentenor: “I am done with the monster of ‘we,’ the word of serfdom, of plunder, of misery, falsehood and shame. And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: ‘I.’”

• “The first right on earth is the right of the ego. Man’s first duty is to himself.”

• “To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men.”

• “The creed of sacrifice is a morality for the immoral….”

This is really unbelievable stuff. I don't need to say anything more than Vidal does to dismantle its wrongheadedness.

And recall, this is 1952, and as Vidal notes, it was already INFLUENTIAL in the world of "real politic".

Ayn Rand is the popular "thinker" of the Right--this is the internal voice of their inner demons.

What can you say to this level of sheer self-interest? This is a group that wants government only to protect the institutions that allow them to protect their business interests. This is the group that hates a government that tries to protect the people (each and everyone) from the "inequality" of wealth.

This is the creed of the "educated" among them--the leaders among them--our giants of commerce; it has been so thoroughly propagated as the idea that is the MOST American of American IDEAS--the drive to wealth for the self (ie, "rugged individualism"), that the common and downtrodden among us BELIEVE this idea--they too can MAKE IT (if only there weren't Affirmative Action and Bleeding Hearts), can be mega-wealthy; that they don't realize the mega-wealthy are PROPPED UP by the very Government they disavow as protecting the "welfare state".

The game is rigged, of course, the house always wins; Ayn Rand has, for them, given this idea the veneer of the claim to a Moral Right.

As Vidal points out, however, it is deeply immoral at its core.

Not surprisingly, there is another common ideology which makes this world so sublimely Orwellian--the use of the Bible as text for financial salvation...greed can be moral apparently.

Utopian/Dystopian literature has given us two visions that are more "true" than the Randian one-sided story--Huxley's and Orwell's: one gives us our hedonism--we are made politically docile by our drive (while being driven) to pleasure; the other shows us the way we are convinced via image and rhetoric (and terror) that the immoral is moral, the unethical ethical, that what is wrong is oh so Right.

Dance of Citations

2010-02-03T09:24:00.003-06:00

Listened to, on a walk to school with the boys, a discussion with Nicholson Baker on his book Human Smoke. He is asked by an audience "why call it Human Smoke"? He then said that it was a phrase uttered by one of Hitler's Generals Fritz Halder made in an interview captured in some kind of Nuremberg Journal or diary. So I looked that up and found not a direct link to that quote or primary source but rather a review of Baker's book here wherein I found immediately a quote of Aurelius found by the author of the review in an early book of Nicholson Baker's called the Mezzanine.

Observe, in short, how transient and trivial is all mortal life; yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a handful of spice and ashes.

Circuitous to say the least...

Impermanence

2010-02-02T10:27:00.004-06:00

To build on the last post--this piece in the NYRB Blog.

We live in an age of erasure and even the mammoth nature of our erections will not stand as the pyramids have. We will not create monuments; we are not the authors of great myths. We are digital and prone to instability and data loss.

The library at Alexandria WAS the human mind...the ability to know and recall erased by our tools. We no longer transmit mind--our minds are transmitted and we merely passive instruments funneling data.

House of the Lifting of the Head

2010-02-01T15:58:00.003-06:00

Again, from Olson:

"...MASONRY is especially associated with MYTH in man. The tale of the Great Tower is as ultimate a legend as the Flood, Eden, Adam."

"...this need of man to persist in monument as well as in myth."

Kafka:
"If it had been possible to build the tower of Babel without ascending it, the work would have been permitted."

Olson on Melville on Democracy

2010-01-31T07:58:00.002-06:00

Moby Dick as America--as production line, as industry; the common man in service to the madness of the leader--yes, this is our democracy.

"A whaleship reminded Melville of two things: (1) democracy had not rid itself of overlords; (2) the common man, however free, leans on a leader, the leader, however dedicated, leans on a straw."--Olson, Call Me Ishmael (in Ch. "Shakespeare, concluded")

From MD:
"Through these forms that certain sultanism of Ahab's brain became incarnate in an irresistible dictatorship.

"For be a man's intellectual superiority what it will, it can never assume the practical, available supremacy over other men, without the aid of some sort of external arts and entrenchments, always, in themselves, more or less paltry and base." (ibid)

The Revelation

2010-01-29T15:58:00.002-06:00

by William Bronk

My life has no shape; I live in an old house.
The deed says it's mine now. Well enough.
Even so, I had supposed--or not,
I find I don't know but I thought I supposed--

some shape would happen to impose itself
on the days, the nights, even on this house,
revealing it. I find I don't care
this didn't happen, and yet am surprised.

I haven't read enough Bronk to really know how to read this...this is a poet who had written poetry for 50 years and written prose that will stand alongside this. He ran his family's business.

The man's life had shape--some kind of shape. Did the poet's?--again it appears so.

Or is this a question of a shaping presence outside the self--expected, but in the end illusory. I thought, at the end of my life, that I would impose a shape on it by defining it a certain way "at this moment of thinking about it".

It is called, pointedly one supposes, The Revelation, it would be hard to not consider the fact that this is the final book of the New Testament. And so this in itself brings the religious to bear on the poem--I thought that God would come to me. That this life, these memories, would be given shape in reflection--a godly, goodly shape. A meaning. That this shape would be imposed and revealed. But no.

Odd to expect it? No, I think we're hard-wired to imagine this or at least culturally conditioned to think it plausible even if we are anti-theist.

A Truce Is Possible--bits of/on Wm Bronk

2010-01-08T14:36:00.003-06:00

From a Kay Ryan appreciation in Poetry:
Bronk is thinking and thinking, as purely as possible, about how we want—want not to be alone, want things to matter, want to feel that we are connected to reality. His poems are all about wanting and how there is no end to it. And about how whatever reality is, it is something we only know in the negative—by being constantly wrong about it.

From Metonymy as an Approach to a Real World:

Whether what we sense of this world
is the what of this world only, or the what
of which of several possible worlds
--which what?--something of what we sense
may be true, may be the world, what it is, what we sense.
For the rest, a truce is possible, the tolerance
of travelers, eating foreign foods, trying words
that twist the tongue, to feel that time and place,
not thinking that this is the real world.

ideas to ponder

2009-12-10T09:05:00.004-06:00

Steward mentality v Dominion mentality. Biblical in nature or "human nature" exampled in Bible?

Climate Change: deniability: Doubt in the science: Science as an idea: epidemeology vs empirical data in chaos systems: GOD again--belief, in the image of the divine--destroyer or shepherd. The world is ours to destroy as we are godlike: or God will save us no matter what; or we are the chosen beings and so we will fix ourselves.

However, God is a belief and we believe, if we do, out of fear, lack of knowledge, tacit/facile acceptance of cultural beliefs--but we don't need to see it to believe it and if we are wrong about it (ie, dead and no after life you're still just dead) no big deal; if we're right we're saved (maybe); so this is a "better safe than sorry" attitude--hedge your bets...why not the same attitude with climate change?

T0 my mind Science (all of us within its long reach) should doubt all things it does and imagine always that any minor change will be bad news...ie, expect Frankenstein's Monster, not the cure for cancer and proceed with fear and caution. We do the exact opposite of this.

What Form the World Has by William Bronk

2009-12-04T11:47:00.003-06:00

I watch my concern for the world, how it changes: strong
sometimes, elsewhere weaker, as when the world
stands in the landscape like somebody's barn, clump
of trees. Not my land they're on. Whose,
I don't know. Or what they are. Nor
do I care. Times, though, I could think
of them as refuge, having no other and they
being offered, not then either caring what.

Or my intensest concern for the world might be
the times I find me trapped, as it were, in the trees,
boarded-up in that barn. Those times,
I hate the world, want only to break it down.

When we love the world for itself, the world we love
is one, most likely, we may have made or thought
to have made, ourselves, with love or some other power.
As if we could. Well, maybe we can
and did, but taken out of our hands when it is
as it always is, do we know was it ever ours?

I could rest content with the unseen form of the world
and never see it, believing the form were there.

Sky Tremor by Huidobro

2009-11-29T13:33:00.001-06:00

trs. Tony Frazer: http://www.fascicle.com/issue03/poems/huidobrosingle.htm

Concentration of "aahhrrrrr"

2009-11-24T10:42:00.002-06:00

All is abstract
you do not need to insist
it simply is

Red is abstracted
is abstraction
of
R
E
D

R is
concentration of ahhrrr
from sound
which is
of necessity
always contextual

else without

proper ear
proper throat
proper mouth
lips
tongue
teeth

proper t
teh

proper
meaning

Continu
E
D

distinction

2009-11-24T08:12:00.006-06:00

the human mouth...so limited in its "animal" capacities as to argue for its use as a tool only for sound and sex...in short, pleasure or displeasure (as the case may be).

dog, cat, baboon, horse, etc., have a mouth so encompassing in its capacities not only for eating but for fighting--teeth for cutting; jaw strength for snapping bones...in short a tool for survival.

this is perhaps a clue...one is used for "maybe"; one is used for "be".

Assertions by Negatives

2009-11-24T05:45:00.004-06:00

The Emptiness of Human Being
William Bronk

Not long, but it isn't anyway
determined by the interval: we mourn,
maybe, the brevities, as much as to say
form were the enemy--the length of form--
to hide from ourselves, of course from ourselves,--who else?--
that emptiness of content length couldn't fill
no matter how long it might be--forever if it were.

No excuses: evasions are what we try:
form as adversary or, failing form,
other divisions, assertions by negatives.
We are not this, not that.
The determined self makes be by partialness,
sets out his space, says here is truth,
is his, says less is all, defends, fades.

2009-11-23T10:37:00.000-06:00

I sew shroud to swaddling clothes

2009-11-21T14:22:00.002-06:00

"Anyone home?" Nobody answers?
Here were the lives I have spent!
Fortune has gnawed away my days;
madness absconded with my hours.
Powerless to know how or where
my health and years have fled.
Missing is life, existence remains;
and everywhere calamity awaits.
Yesterday's gone, tomorrow's late,
today wastes not an instant leaving:
I am a was, a will be, a weary is.
Today, tomorrow and yesterday
I sew shroud to swaddling clothes,
and so succeed my dead self again.

-Francisco De Quevedo, trs. from the Spanish by Christopher Johnson, Fulcrum #6.

A view of psychoanalysis

2009-10-17T09:48:00.003-05:00

Adam Phillips says in his introduction to his collection of occasional pieces, Promises, Promises: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Literature, that his version (or the version practiced in the essays) of psychoanalysis comes out of the understanding that "there is nothing wrong with anyone, that no one is 'ill', but that everyone is doing the best they can with what they've got. It starts from the belief that children have to learn to be kind, and be free enough to have fun (to lose themselves in whatever makes them curious and makes them feel alive)..."

We all clearly need this most, to learn to be kind and have fun.

LMdMO II

2008-10-28T09:18:00.002-05:00

A red bird flies across the golden floor.

It is a red bird that seeks out his choir

Among the choirs of wind and wet and wing.

A torrent will fall from him when he finds.

Shall I uncrumple this much-crumpled thing?

I am a man of fortune greeting heirs;

For it has come that thus I greet the spring.

These choirs of welcome choir for me farewell.

No spring can follow past meridian.

Yet you persist with anecdotal bliss

To make believe a starry connaissance.

This one's a little out of my league without looking in some books, but I'll just stick with the idea of poetry and penis. This is the first indication of "time flying"--time as the red bird? Time as the Red Bird of the failing penis? Time as the Red Bird of the penis in search of a song? At any event it lurches toward the conclusion that "no spring can follow past meridian" which I will take to mean that 40 is the gate to the dark wood of "mid-life".

We have a Red Bird, a choir, the Poet's "I", and a "you" that may be the listener--the muse of the first section? The person Stevens is actually addressing? "You" persist "to wish upon a star" (make believe in starry connaissance).

Or is this you and I the same--a talking to the self? The you and I as two clashed edges of words that kill.

I don't know--too many things--I keep wanting to say this is a choral "lay".

The last three lines are "glory days"--but a part of me wants to center on "connaissance" another French word--for knowledge--and knowledge can be "sexual"--and the sound of connaissance seems sexual to me as well as it makes me think of renaissance. But this is a "birth" too--birth of knowledge...

Then I guess my favorite lines to interpret in this section are "Shall I uncrumple this much-crumpled thing?/I am a man of fortune greeting heirs;/For it has come that thus I greet the spring." One crumples and uncrumples Notes (poems) that you are unsure of--words on pages you believe then disbelieve then believe again...but also here is the penis again, flaccid (crumpled) and erect (uncrumpled)...the man of fortune has much to give (large endowment) to heirs (hairs?).

So perhaps the red bird of spring--youth, virility, poetic/sexual power is sung about until "spring" and then the rest recognizes the downward turn of years and diminishment.

Le Monocle de Mon Oncle--I

2008-10-25T06:28:00.006-05:00

Okay, first, as far as I can tell this poem was published in 1923 when Stevens was 44, so it seems safe to assume it was written, as the speaker in the poem notes, in "the faith of forty". I know nothing of Stevens and don't really want to do any research just yet, but it's likely there is manuscript evidence of the date of composition. In any event, this poem is found in his first book, Harmonium. I find dates of composition compelling as it seems to me quite relevant to a poem's meaning. At the very least it allows the reader to cast his/her mind into the thoughts of that age--if you're 40 you might have some thoughts about "being 40"--likely, as I posted earlier, something of a crisis time, whether small "c" or big "C" crisis. This poem reads to me like a standard crisis for forty--confronting aging and death through the body (sex) and mind (poetry/art/writing). Virility in performance can be assessed in either. So, to the poem.

One should probably start with the title, in French (which Stevens seems to have a proclivity for using)--My Uncle's Monocle. Seems a silly title (that's possibly the case), but it also seems clear after reading the poem that it's intended as a stand-in for the penis--one lens, one eye, you get the picture...My Penis's Single I--a singular vision of what life is about. If you start with a title focusing on the view from your penis where do you go from there? Mockery of the muse and the self as poet/lover? Will the poet salvage his "strength" to achieve multiple...

“Mother of heaven, regina of the clouds,

O sceptre of the sun, crown of the moon,

There is not nothing, no, no, never nothing,

Like the clashed edges of two words that kill.”

And so I mocked her in magnificent measure.

Or was it that I mocked myself alone?

I wish that I might be a thinking stone.

The sea of spuming thought foists up again

The radiant bubble that she was. And then

A deep up-pouring from some saltier well

Within me, bursts its watery syllable.

Here is the "I" of the poem quoting himself and describing it as a mockery of a "she" unnamed but "labeled"...I'm going to guess this is the muse or simply Poetry: the Poet addressing his muse. This stanza/section sets the stage: the invocation of the muse in "magnificent measure" which is mockery according to the poet, but perhaps the truth is this is a self-conscious mockery as he is addressing himself, his ability to write poems and perhaps he's conflicted in considering the idea of the poetic tradition--the past ("measure"--one's verse, one's "length"--a word so full that we may play with it as we will).

Interesting that in my Faber Selected (can we assume the poet ordered them?) from 1953 the poem that precedes this one is The Snow Man which ends "For the listener, who listens in the snow,/And, nothing himself, beholds/Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is." And you can see that the Poet here says "There is not nothing, no, no, never nothing,/

Like the clashed edges of two words that kill.” Lots of nada! But again, we have at the least here, a play on words and swords--this is a battle--with the past, with the self, with poetry, and again, the sword is another substitute for penis. But what strikes me is the tone (is it tone?) of that "not nothing, no, no, never nothing..." stuttering, unsure, desperate, or perhaps fearing something happening prematurely? Or is this an admitting that the words themselves will always allow at the least a double-meaning or double-measure. Two words that kill themselves--cancel out a singular meaning.

In the first 5 lines we have the vision of the Poet standing before the muse holding his cock in mockery...only to back off..and "mock himself alone"--fuck himself. Then wishing himself a thinking stone...does he want to always be hard or to be rid of his biology altogether?

But "spuming thought" conjures an arousing image (radiant bubble) and then the poet orgasms, an "up-pouring...bursts its watery syllable." And again, poet and penis are conflated. A syllable, another measure, but perhaps the orgasmic outcry as well.

Now one stands back and wonders, are these 12 sections simply 12 versions of this vision? And perhaps the vagina will have its say...And let's just have it out...12 inches is a foot--a foot long--the vision of the poem as a large penis--though its potency and effectualness appear to be in question.

Forty

2008-10-24T10:04:00.004-05:00

Stevens points out the speaker's age of 40 twice in Le Monocle de Mon Oncle (sections VI and IX). The poem as mid-life crisis! A crisis poem of loss of sexual potency and the realization that even that humiliation is mere precursor to the horrible fact of death. "For me, the firefly's quick, electric stroke/Ticks tediously the time of one more year."

This is sex and poetry wrapped in death and it's probably my favorite poem so far. And as I'm 40, that makes some sense.

I realized some time ago that I stopped liking (so intensely) Strand's poems because he "aged" beyond me in his work...as I grow older I imagine I will start liking him as much again.

More to come on Le Monocle...

The Tertiary Man

2008-10-24T08:42:00.005-05:00

My first thought for the title to this journal was "Labials and Gutturals"--also from Stevens...you get the picture--I guess I enjoyed the reading on the plane. In fact "this maundering yokel" is from the same poem as labials and gutturals, "The Plot Against the Giant" (which is another great name for a journal).

(Well, actually, my first thought was "Fits and Starts" but that's common and taken--taken because common. Fits and starts is how I read. I've got a lot of books and rarely do I finish any I start--at least not in one concerted singular effort. It's why I've grown partial to essays and reviews--less commitment.)

The first poetry book I read cover to cover was Mark Strand's The Late Hour; the next, Nicholas Christopher's 5 Degrees; I've read a few since then, notably a couple from Donald Hall, but not many. And once past adolescence and Stephen King (you cannot disagree that the man grabs hold of you) and course work there have been very few novels or stories I've read complete--All of Salinger; Heart of Darkness; Crime and Punishment; Veronica by poet N. Christopher; much of Borges.

However, I have read my share of critical work: much of Harold Bloom (if nothing else he is immensely entertaining); Auden's The Dyer's Hand; Borges, again; Frank Kermode and Denis Donoghue; Stanley Cavel; some Howard Nemerov; Guy Davenport; William Gass (can't read his fiction); Helen Vendler (I am at a loss to figure out her preeminence as a poetry critic)...and so on. Also, I've enjoyed nearly everything that Adam Phillips has done--my favorite being Darwin's Worms.

I am the tertiary man in this sense--reading at third hand. This Maundering Yokel is an attempt to find my way back to reading at its source; to actually read the words of a Maker and not of those who comment. Of course, in this journal I become one who comments...but this is a step up! From Tertiary to Secondary...and the dream of being a Primary Man.

House of Wallace Stevens

2008-10-23T19:13:00.005-05:00

Traveled to Albany for work and flew into Bradley Intl. Airport in Hartford, CT. I took the opportunity to drive to the house Wallace Stevens owned and take some pictures. This didn't take more than 20 minutes and I did very little thinking on Stevens or poetry, etc. I just did it because I could.

I decided, while downtown in Albany ("Old Albany"), to go to a used bookstore and browse--there I found an old Faber "paper coverd" edition of Stevens' Selected Poems, and this is what I read on the plane ride home. And I did indeed read it the entire way...I got through about 30 poems and took some notes.

I think my favorites were (standards): Le Monocle de Mon Oncle, The Snow Man, The Emperor of Ice Cream, Sunday Morning, Disillusionment of Ten o'Clock, The Plot Against the Giant.

I'll chat about them in another post. But you should know too that these poems offered up the name of this blog.