pith…

While rereading the superb Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, the autobiography by James Knowlson written with Beckett’s blessing, I came across this telling and amazing passage from Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Beckett’s first novel, published in 1932:

He lay lapped in a beatitude of indolence that was smoother than oil and softer than a pumpkin, dead to the dark pangs of the sons of Adam, asking nothing of the insubordinate mind. He moved with the shades of the dead and the dead-born and the unborn and the never-to-be-born, in a Limbo purged of desire…. If that is what is meant by going back into one’s heart, could anything be better, in this world or the next? The mind, dim and hushed like a sick-room, like a chapelle ardente, thronged with shades; the mind at last its own asylum, disinterested, indifferent, its miserable erethisms and its discriminations and futile sallies suppressed; the mind suddenly reprieved, ceasing to be an annex of the restless body, the glare of understanding switched off.

From Dream of Fair to Middling Women: A Novel by Samuel Beckett.

Beckett would revisit this quest for Nirvana-like nihilism of mind many times later, increasingly chopping language down to its barest nubbins.

He was raised to know, love, and work the earth.
Best dirt in the world.
Layer over layer of thick, much death.
Darkest black on top.

At the end of the horizon is more horizon. The palpable absence of no end. How could one not pursue this?

His self-esteem is a null set.
Momentary value comes from circumstances & his ability to be with, in, &, above all, OF them.
Begin again.

“There” – http://tinyurl.com/lphhby
pantoum: http://tinyurl.com/nzuxnu

I can divine these brambles.
Or these gnarled flowers at my feet.
They obscure my heels as I
float on yellow horizons.
Tip the diagonal of my arms into
the numbers of years set down like dust.
I can, you see, lead you somewhere,
over rock and highland green.
I can conjure stone from earth
to make a window to another world.
Come with me. Take the tips of my fingers.
Interlace the leaves and set down
your sword, your wand.
You have no need for all the people
who make up your mind.
You have no need for the lily or rose
jabbing between your legs like a crude
lover. Walk this way with me,
and I will tip the stars down your throat.
Drop the grapes and roll them over the skin
of your neck. Only then will you have
the idea of splendor. Of the eternal.
All you need is this staff to guide your way.
All you need is to follow the shift
of my eyes. I may lead you somewhere,
or you could go the other way.
Sit down at my table. I’ll flip forever
like a figure eight. I’ll let you look
at me for as long as it takes.
Let’s begin. I promise. This is something
you won’t forget.

- Jenny Benjamin-Smith

The lavender aroma of her apartment lends itself to musty carpet and stale cigarette smoke to the eventual car exhaust and bad food smells as she follows me out, heavy glass swinging shut behind her to the morning orchestra of traffic. Her short stature belies her Miss America gait. She is a scarved, lithe stack of fabric, beaming eyes and waking smile, She reaches for my hand, glowing in the new spectrum, dulling with adjustment. I am angry salt and olfaction. “I don’t wake up handholding.”

“It’s the culture, sweetie.”

“The woman was stoned to death! And for… ”

“People are idiots everywhere.” Her casual interruption lent her free hand to my arm.

I wasn’t disagreeing but that she would ever challenge my epistemology without putting her matter to the fire and find her metaphysics lacking… burned to a crisp in the morning chill, biting at her regalities.

As her digits enclosed my own, the amoeba of her cold grasp halts my own undoing as we race across the newly busy morning’s avenue.

“You know that’s not Islam, right?” she asks. She doesn’t plead. Ever. Meaning is meaning.

“I am not convinced.”

The car doors shut like two muted barks and it’s lavender again and she’s reaching again. She drives. Screaming, as she says I have taught her, at passersby, short buses and hipsters that dare to make the mad dash in front of this apparently raving Honda, across our outstretch of hard, cracked gray. She is adorable.

Her shoulders moving to the morning music and I am a captive of my own being. Aghast at the separation between her Monday and mine, agape with what normatives that cannot meet in the middle, we are again with the approved yelling and yuppies – a honk or two. We make our way into the furthering of April. Nothing green yet.

“You’d better run!” she screams, laughing wildly and looking to me for extraneous approval.

I can only nod. Smile.

- Gordon Bruce Solomon

Dear Big Jesus,

Please don’t bleed tears tomorrow.
I’m just helping St Jenny w/the girls.
We’re cool. You’re a hero
who didn’t get back up.

Regards,
Some man’s son

the reverberation of the garage door opening tickles me from below,
i can’t wait for you to come back up after your morning smoke.

i miss your warm breath against my shoulders, your arms around me,
the tip of your toes protruding from the blanket’s warmth
on an anonymous wisconsin morning – is it sunny, raining, snowing?

i hear you downstairs: checking your e-mail, eating cereal.
i know what your doing – routine runs our lives.

i hear you upstairs now: changing into your clothes,

you knock on the door: “honey, you still in the bathroom? its been ten minutes.”
i answer, “i’ll be right out, after i finish this line.”

Lucia, my distant love

You predict me, as ever. Yes, the woods again were where I found myself, wolves singing their hungry sleep songs, but returned to our home, a half empty shell of what we haven’t built, but abide there on our finest days. Fuel for my fires was depleted in days and another week of the dark, damp chill drove me back despite the loss of open cover. Happy to hear your Italian love swells still. You were right to seep away again to Venetian canals. Water becomes you. Flow as you must. If suave exotic love comes gliding in, don’t send it away. But, please, beware the sea. And fear the oarsmen, no more than failed sailors, who would lead you too near. Venice, you remember, was too sodden for me. Too much history, too much dream. Our own ride so clumsy. You, as ever, enduring disappointment, while I, half in, half, feared the swimmers and the moment. I miss you. And mean it. You’re a courtesan above me. I proffer the pedestrian. Release your corset. Return when you’re ready.

Your Jack

SUNDAY SERMON I

In these godless days of the year 2009, of which a quarter has already been gnawed away by the dredging samsara of day to day, week to week workhorse life and the lust for lifelessness swimming through glass after glass of liquid anesthetic and the drone of satiating conversation and howling guitars while The Blues seeps from morning pores like single-malt perfume and the leaden weight of another handful of crumpled beer cans and dollar bills in my back pocket keeps me holed up in the attic of my own reeling mind.

The Ides of March has slithered by with no trace and ill Irish luck only brings out the wrong kind of green-eyed girls who drink black beer and drool long winded lines of nothingness instead of telling fortunes and reading weathered palm lines with needled gypsy fingers the color of molasses.

Restless Sunday afternoon haze in my church where Jesus’ blood is oily haloed black coffee and his body burns down to a filter with a camel stamped on it, ah’ men. 

John Dick

High Windows

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives–
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin, Collected Poems

4/5 Update: Hope failed to generate much interest for discussion. That’s appropriate.

Hope. Is it a wonderful, positive thing? Or is it an empty self-delusion? What does hope mean to you? What part does hope play in your daily existence? pith… wants to know. Here’s the basic definitions and some pithy quotes as fodder for your thoughts:

Hope is a belief in a positive outcome related to events and circumstances in one’s life. Hope is the feeling that what is wanted can be had or that events will turn out for the best.” – Wikipedia

1. (verb) hope, trust, desire; expect and wish; “I trust you will behave better from now on”; “I hope she understands that she cannot expect a raise”
2. (verb) be optimistic; be full of hope; have hopes; “I am still hoping that all will turn out well”

“When Pandora opened Pandora’s Box, she let out all the evils except one: hope. At the time, the Greeks considered hope to be at least as dangerous as all other evils in the world.” – Wikipedia

“Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torment of man” – Friedrich Nietzsche

“Hope is faith holding out its hand in the dark.” – George Iles

“Hope is the only universal liar who never loses his reputation for veracity.” – Robert G. Ingersoll

“We’ve been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.” – Barack Obama

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out” – Vaclav Havel

So, what do you think? What’s hope mean to you?

Dear Jack-Be-Nimble,

The sky is a particular gray-blue today, and it makes me think of you.  Your slate eyes.  Venice is, well, all masks and gondolas; I love and need it as I do my own internal organs that I picture crammed to fatal dimensions from a corset as if I were some courtesan fleeing the sacking of Rome to set up house on the water.  But this is a book I read, I think.  I am, indeed, drawn to the suspension of the place: the sheer possibility of falling or crashing from ground to saltwater canals and flowing into the Adriatic as golden-haired wreckage.  I wonder about you and where you are?  Staring into some dwindling camp fire, watching the embers smolder as orange particulars on tangled, gnarled roots used as kindling?  Are you in the fire, Jack, or are you stewing your own organs just outside of it?

Always Yours, 
Lucia, Your Venetian Courtesan                                                                                   

A piece of a man had broken off in a road. He picked it up and put it in his pocket.

As he stooped to pick up another piece he came apart at the waist.

His bottom half was still standing. He walked over on his elbows and grabbed the seat of his pants and said, legs go home.

But as they were going along his head fell off. His head yelled, legs stop.

And then one of his knees came apart. But meanwhile his heart had dropped out of his trunk.

As his head screamed, legs turn around, his tongue fell out.

Oh my God, he thought, I’ll never get home.

From The Tunnel: Selected Poems

© Russell Edson, 1973. From The Tunnel: Selected Poems of Russell Edson, Oberlin College Press, 1994.

Oh didn’t we dance a puzzle
Round the tree when we
Danced the way we did
In early April when all is
Vernal and we needed twigs to
Invoke the gods that hovered
Near a healthy sprig
About a foot or so longer
Than needed to produce an
Invocation that requires wood
Or a cross of sticks so brittle
Not sought by dancing
Under the tree that provides
Sustenance and spirits
In a silly game of faith.
Now and always— once we
Got the air’s great laxity under us
Wending through branches bending
Over the dancing bodies spending
Our every energy in timeless total.
Didn’t our puzzle work up an ire
Among the weather’s eager attitudes
Never touched with darkness until
Danger marked the divination?
Till then it was a merriment we cut
Round each and every arbor
Every single dripping digit in
Each tortured orchard we could find
Behind our distant history—
Recollected behind a roaring, rapid—
Naked, blatant blanket of mistakes
Not ever recognized by teller or by told.
Consider the story supple gold—
However unbelievable, however ill-begot—
Each mystery is a gloried hardship, each
Song a found invention, hard to teach.

There are no camels in this combo crèche,
assembled in Malaysia, cooked in Singapore.
Pieces of play, each in place, dominate the living

room, diverting our path to where we cleanse
and empty and brush the store-bought teeth,
neither sneer nor smile from their snap-tight hold.

The lone cow’s head is broken, decapitated
last season, lost in the vacuum or the latest
attempt to gather what mattered yesterday.

The wise men slipped off with the Barbies
on stolen pretty ponies. Mother Mary buries
her myrrh in the ass turd under the straw.

Cuckold Joe measures the price of shame
by the size of his deduction. The Messiah,
in steep need of Miralax, is inconsolable

in his ceramic straw suit. He’s a baby, after all,
a baby gone angry with action-grip hands.
Any question that crawls across the gray terrain

is split at the jointed hip, fractured before seizing
the headless torso of the sole man doll, broken
before hopping the burro, loaded down as beasts will be.

Nobody is born here, really, nor gifts given wholly,
attached to hands as they are in the factory plastic mold.

Neither sheep nor shepherd will be the same tomorrow,
rearranged as they must be. Straight out of the box.

In the morning you lay quiet: melodious digression,
the art of deceptive cadences – progressions
indecipherable to most – but these
bewilderments send me into the day –
filled with the notes of our song:
our melodies, our transpositions, our compositions.
Yesterday we were a bit flat and
the accidental surely threw us off.
Today: started quiet (dynamics are crucial), a
bit sharp, harmonies trying to work
together – a key change takes us aback –
a minor key (diminuendo) – back to major (allegro!) –
a crescendo towards the day’s end,
and tomorrow we’ll rehearse and attempt to play again –
the songs of our lives.

SUPERBOWL XLIII, THE EPITOME OF THE ELECTRIFIED AMERICAN ARENA & THE DEBAUCHED WORLD OF SPORTS TODAY?WHAT ARE MILLION DOLLAR ADS GOOD FOR WHEN NOBODY HAS ANY MONEY??WELCOME TO THE GENERATION OF THE UNEMPLOYED & IN DEBT.

Yes, once again Super Sunday has rolled through and left a path of shameless overpriced advertising and a glittering display of the overzealous and exploded state of the National Football League. As was expected, but not really welcomed in many hopeful circles, the Steelers managed to stomp down the Cardinals with a powerful ground game and a few key field goals. The Steelers? defense is what really won the battle for them as expected, managing to trump old man Warner when the deal really went down even though Roethlisberger?s stats were as comparably low as the numbers that trickle out of Wall Street lately. So now Pittsburgh has something to boast about with the most Superbowl trophies ever, which could possibly be the greatest claim to fame that the sliding industrial hub on the forgotten side of Pennsylvania holds. Who cares though, the big game and the season are over now, and there are bigger and more pressing things that need to be addressed these days.

Regressing into the omnipresent recession and the vertical battle that Obama has on his hands to pull America out of the murky trench that the last eight years have plunged us into, let?s forget the Superbowl already and put down the fucking remote. It appears that a good chunk of the general public at least watches the news once and a while and possibly even picks up a newspaper judging by the downward plunge of the economy and the sense of uneasy fear that is spreading like Black Death throughout them. There are damn good reasons that even the most densely ignorant and aloof people are counting their piggybanks and cutting back on trips to the drive-thru and Wal-Mart. Apparently the government can?t even print money nearly as fast as they spend it and the dollar is worth less than toilet paper in some countries, everybody, including your bank is sliding further into a bottomless pit of debt and the labor force across the board is being slashed and outsourced.

?

Now obviously I?m nowhere close to an economic expert, or even an avid amateur when it comes to Wall Street and numbers in general, but I can read and am immersed enough as a consumer and bartender/manager to see that money doesn?t stretch far these days. Constant banter about Stimulus plans that will send jolts of life and prosperity into the financial state of the nation sound more like deeper debt to China and a way to fool the stupid into thinking that everything is going to be all right. Our money is getting harder to earn every single day and seems to fly out of our hands and bank accounts faster than it would take to burn it all. Hold onto your billfolds folks, Stimulation is temporary bliss in a cold hard reality and the tides haven?t turned in the right direction yet. The ship is still sinking, learn to swim with the sharks or drown.?

?

John Dick

Beginning of February 2009

Woke her up,
fucked her,
had a cigarette,
a cup of coffee,
dropped her off,
went to work,
did some work,
went to lunch,
did some more work,
called her again,
picked her up,
fucked her,
had a cigarette,
dropped her off,
drove to my house,
unlocked my front door,
walked in,
washed my face,
brushed my teeth,
said goodnight to the kids,
crawled into bed with my wife,
said, “I love you honey, goodnight.”