cert

Dear cert,

I’m as happy as a sad man can be, because the holidays are over. The accountant’s truth is that the celebration for the “New Year” is still days away, but I don’t acknowledge years. I only understand lifetimes, aeons… As Peggy Dodd says, in The Master (2012):

This is something you do for a billion years or not at all. This isn’t fashion.

By the way, beyond blurring the text, I changed nothing about this entry’s obligatory image. That is how it appeared, when I first set eyes on it this morning in a pamphlet of junk mail.

Now I’m going to change the subject and flit from topic to topic, because I don’t have any grand plan with this entry; I’m just getting rid of thoughts, trying to pass the time…

Imagine watching a movie and exclaiming: “This scene would be much better if there were, say, seven extras in the background instead of just six.” This doesn’t strike me as a reaction that would be normal for a viewer to have. Or if a viewer did actually feel this way, I imagine he would keep his mouth shut about it, because he would sense that his opinion would prove unpopular. Why would you desire an extra extra? Just one? My point is that the dialogue that’s occurring between the two characters in the foreground of the medium shot is…

My point is that I feel like an extra when I attend family shit-shows. These festivities that ruin the holiday season. There’s no reason I need to be there: I’m just one more person partially blurred in the background, ignored by the audience of angelic beings in attendance. The conversation cannot include me; there are no lines written; my character’s not even named.

But I finished that John Asbhery bio already – the one about his early life. It sure is easy to read something when you’re interested in the material; you just zip right thru it. I guess I should copy a couple quotes before I return it to the library. Otherwise I’ll never remember a single thing about it. The Songs We Know Best by Karin Roffman. That’s its title. This is from page 40:

In late December 1936 he picked up Life, the new magazine his grandfather subscribed to, and read a feature article on an art exhibition “Fantastic Art: Dadaism and Surrealism,” opening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and he was swept up again in thoughts of art and artists. He had never heard the term surrealism, but the magazine’s definition of surrealist art as “no stranger than a person’s dream,” was both completely understandable and very appealing to him. The article included photographs of objects from the exhibition: […] paintings by René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, Georgio de Chirico, and Pablo Picasso that used images of clocks, trees, houses, and chairs, but their shapes and colors altered in such a way that they became slightly stranger and more menacing in the process. Here were examples of ordinary objects that John saw and used every day presented as art, and he found that in their transformation, they became more compelling. To see objects from his dull world tweaked slightly, just as a dream might do, and in that process of transformation becoming something new, vivid and exciting, thrilled him. Seeing the strangely beautiful examples of surrealist art consciously rekindled his former desires to become an artist.

I relate to this passage totally: I experienced that exact surprise and enthrallment from Surrealism and Dada, when I first saw the artworks associated with those movements in the books that I, when young, checked out from my library. But I was late – here Ashbery’s not even ten years old and learning about these movements when they were contemporary; whereas I was born an entire generation later, when those movements had been long dead, and I was out of high school (so in my 20s) before even beginning to pursue my curiosity.

Ashbery grew up on a farm in a place called Sodus, and the biography conveys his feeling of odium for his hometown: he found it boring, and once he moved to the city he almost couldn’t stand to return to visit. Eagan, Minnesota is my own Sodus, but I never left.

I’m eager to trace the lives of my favorite artists, to figure out what they did differently which allowed them to get noticed, and which caused artistic opportunity to open for them, where it has remained closed for me, and I remain hid. My assumption is that they performed some crucial act that I’ve neglected; but it’s almost good news to discover that, in all the cases I’ve studied so far, the “magic moment” that transports a given soul from obscurity to community is NOT caused by the individual artist’s own action, but rather by a lucky and wholly external interference: in the case of David Lynch (another artist I admire), it was a friend’s father who took an interest in David and pulled strings “offstage” which inevitably resulted in David’s arriving in art school; and in the case of John Ashbery, it was a school teacher believing in John’s genius and, again, pulling strings (writing a letter of recommendation, and including an offer to pay a portion of a scholarship) which caused John to end up at Harvard. Lynch in art school, and Ashbery at Harvard, led to Lynch directing feature films and Ashbery publishing poetry. Had Lynch’s friend’s dad and Ashbery’s grade-school teacher not intervened, the former might’ve remained in the Midwest and the latter in Sodus: unknown.

But Emily Dickinson remained in Amherst, unknown. And William Blake was hid. So this type of fate does not render one unimportant – at least not utterly. But the life is unpleasant.

Ashbery complained of his farm life being boring, but even that seems filled with wonder to me. I think that if I were to inherit his…

Let me return to the realm of artistic opinion. I want to copy two more passages: one showing a negative view that I agree with, and one showing a positive view that I agree with. First, here’s a direct quote of young Ashbery himself – when he was nineteen, he wrote the following in an essay for a “Modern Art” course (the passage is quoted in Roffman’s bio):

Dalí . . . is unwittingly killing the movement by bringing the idea of surrealism to a logical conclusion. Take for instance The Persistence of Memory; though Surrealist paintings are supposed to have no meaning, this one obviously does . . . Dalí breaks down the frail barriers between the “subconscious” paintings and allegory—showing that nothing can exist without an objective meaning. Which is why surrealism, interesting as it is, is not the escape. If art is to flee the external world, it cannot do it with the aid of the surrealists.

André Breton, the “founder” of Surrealism, called Salvador Dalí by an anagram of his name—Avida Dollars—for various reasons, none of which strike me as affectionate; and I myself follow suit, in daily conversations with museum curators, because I love enemies. And I don’t think that Dalí represents what Surrealism was “supposed to be”; but then I object to that phrase “supposed to” even when I fall into the error of employing it. Who cares how anything is expected to be used, what it’s required to do, or how it’s obliged to behave; I’m interested only in what can become of X, and how X changes. So I mostly agree with the above quote; however, on account of that key phrase, I shrink from this clause: “Surrealist paintings are supposed to have no meaning.” Yet Ashbery was just out of high school when he wrote this; and I myself at that age was rapping about…

I like meaning AND the absence of meaning. I’m all for everything.

But if that sounds too wishy-washy, and I’m forced to make a firm choice, then I side with meaning, because I believe it’s impossible.

Also I find it interesting that the teenage Ashbery considered it a given that art should aim at being escapist. Even at mid-age, I continue to share that prejudice.

Dalí bothers me because everyone enjoys him; it’s all too easy and immediate, this adoration: I don’t trust it. Even my sweetheart’s old boss likes Dalí. I should say, to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with liking Dalí; but my sweetheart’s old boss does not like Max Ernst. And there we have a problem. You are supposed to love the artists that I love, for exactly the same reason that I love them: only then will the world be right. Chain everything down.

That’s why I’m happy to add Ashbery to my list of beloved poets who love Walt Whitman, and who agree with me that “Song of Myself” is [words missing]. “Song of Myself” is my favorite holy scripture. Now in this next quote, Ashbery’s “The Instruction Manual” is mentioned, because the focus is on his earlier years, and that text was included in his first published book—I just want to add that Ashbery’s later, longer poem “The Skaters” is, to me, his most Walt-like effort. (I say Walt-like instead of Whitmanesque because Roffman’s text below quotes Ashbery himself using the term Whitmanesque, and I didn’t want to overwork that word).

Sitting in his hot office over the next three days, he wrote “The Instruction Manual,” despite “the interruption of a watchful superior (a Whitmanesque phrase).” He had Whitman’s long prose-y lines of poetry in his head as he wrote the new poem, which was the longest narrative with the longest lines he had ever written, an utterly new form of expression for him. Just before leaving for Mexico, he had discovered “how great old Walt is,” copying some of Whitman’s long, expressive lines from “Song of Myself” into his letters.

My memory is always wrong, yet I recall reading somewhere that Whitman himself, when asked why he chose to use such a lengthy line for “Song of Myself,” answered that it came from his days typesetting newspaper print: You just write till you reach the end of the page, then start a new line.

I like that approach to poetry. It needn’t be so highfalutin. But, with all due respect to the Anti Wishy-Washy Sect, I also like when poetry IS highfalutin. The only type of poem I dislike is the written kind – for, any poem, once transcribed out of the mind, becomes a failure. Only the poems that have never been writ down are good. I’m either joking or not.

So you make poems all your life, and each one is precious—they take a certain amount of time to compose, and they’re worthy of reading and re-reading: it would be right for a reader to spend a great deal of time with any given poem. And yet your poems eventually get collected into a volume or two, which is titled The Collected Poems of So-and-so or The Complete Poems… etc. Isn’t that a trip? How can all that wisdom and depth of experience be compacted into a number of pages of paper. Of leaves of grass. My sweetheart and I are nearing the end of the life’s work of the poet Geoffrey Hill, that’s why this thought was on my mind. It seems as though one should study Hill’s poetry for years and years, before claiming that one has even read it once; because, to read it, you must practically re-read, even to the point of memorization: get it all by heart; a normal reading of one-time-over is not enough. And I don’t mean to single out Hill: for ALL the best poetry is like this. You can’t just read it, you must become it. True poetry doesn’t let you hold it at arm’s length; you’re either I AM as well, or you are opposite; any distance is too far; there’s no fishy half-&-half sideline semi-love... You’re either GOD because you’re filled with the spirit, or you’re the thing that barely senses it is encroaching on something divine...

Have you practis’d so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

Those lines are from “Song of Myself”; in the next, Whitman displays the magnitude of his own pride:

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems...

Now I can’t remember where I read it, but John Ashbery in an old interview said that he first loved Walt but didn’t much care for his “yawp” – this refers to the lines from sec. 52:

The spotted hawk swoops by & accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

For the record, I was as attracted to Whitman’s yawp as Ashbery was repelled by it. That’s why I ended my whim called “Regarding the Recent Bang” (from Vol. 2 of my unreadable lifework) like so:

Dr. Bryant promoted loyal support for the infinite. Boto promoted the midsized units. Gaius got radicals and went to the war for “the best short evening on record” as the shared children thought. I myself lifted those seven beams to London, Paris, New York, Berlin, and three others, showing the way to relish a scene under gravitational duress without recourse to light-waves. In the meantime, Bryce, the voice of the headphone commander, recapped for us all the highlighted yawps of the leaf book while sipping from a lady-shaped canteen.

So that is the difference between Ashbery and me. (Note that I failed to compose the above appropriately because Surrealism is supposed to be meaningless; so there are no complaints here.) We come from the same trunk, J.A. and I – the mix of Whitman and Surrealism – but our branches shoot out in opposite directions: mine with and his against the barbaric yawp. None of this is very useful, I know; it just sounds like it might work as a theory. As it is written:

The children gazed at the powder with an awestruck fear, which only increased their pleasure. But Kostya liked the shot better.
     “Does shot burn?” he inquired.
     “Shot does not burn.”
     “Give me some shot,” he said in a pleading voice.
    “I’ll give you a little, here, take it, only don’t show it to your mother before I come back, or she may think it’s powder, and she’ll die of fear and give you a whipping.”
     “Mama never beats us,” Nastya observed at once.
     “I know, I just said it for the beauty of the style…”

That’s from The Brothers Karamazov by ol’ Dosty (Fyodor Dostoevsky) – Part IV; Book Ten: “Boys”; Chapter 2: “Kids” – I only wanted to highlight that final reply, but I had to quote the stuff that precedes it, in order for it to keep its force; like getting a running start for the long-jump competition at the track meet.

Hip hooray!!! The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons, Volumes 1 & 2, became available this month (Dec. 2017). I found this out just now, as I was writing this entry; at exactly this point; that is why, at the beginning of the paragraph, I cheered so loud that I startled my neighbors’ cat. I love Ammons as much as Ashbery, so this is exciting. Plus to know that his lifework fits in two volumes like mine makes me feel… yes, that’s it: it makes me feel.

But this constant revving of car engines outside: does it indicate angry drivers or not? I’ve probably asked this question of you before, gentle reader, because I tend to write these entries during the wee hours of the morning, when there’s the highest chance of hearing motor vehicles roar their engines; for my apartment is positioned near a street, and the street has cars.

In related news, I’m making excellent progress on Malcolm Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano. My first two attempts, as I told you before, got aborted – for no reason of the book’s: it was simply Life’s fault (not the magazine but the evil phenomenon) – so I decided to pawn some tiaras that I received last Xmas and purchase the book outright: I’m glad I did. Something about this novel is beyond the average. There’s something sacred about it. And I like that it’s removed from the shibboleths of the academies. Here’s a passage from what I read yesterday:

Children, he thought, how charming they were at heart. The very same kids who had besieged him for money, had now brought him back even the smallest of his small change and then, touched by his embarrassment, had scurried away without waiting for a reward. Now he wished he had given them something. The little girls had gone also. Perhaps this was her exercise book open on the bench. He wished he had not been so brusque with her, that she would come back, so that he could give her the book. Yvonne and he should have had children, would have had children, could have had children, should have…
     In the exercise book he made out with difficulty:
   Escruch is an old man. He lives in London. He lives alone in a large house. Scrooge is a rich man but he never gives to the poor. He is a miser. No one loves Scrooge and Scrooge loves no one. He has no friends. He is alone in the world. The man (el hombre): the house (la casa): the poor (los pobres): he lives (el vive): he gives (el da): he has no friends (el no tiene amigos): he loves (el ama): old (viejo): large (grande): no one (nadie): rich (rico): Who is Scrooge? Where does he live? Is Scrooge rich or poor? Has he friends? How does he live? Alone. World. On.

Lowry wrote this book from the heart – that’s how it feels to me. I’m desperate for words from the heart. Every day, most words that I hear from people come from other places…

But this diary entry of mine will have no flow, or a choppy feel, or a pasted-together quality to it, but I don’t care. Actually I care but I don’t have time for polishing; I need to return these library books, and I want to quote some parts so that I can remember where I once was awake in the wilderness… So here’s a few words from the other book that I recently finished & which is due back in fourteen minutes—Gore Vidal’s Hollywood:

Harding struck—as who did not on such occasions?—the Lincoln note. “Standing today on hallowed ground, conscious that all America has halted to share in the tribute of the heart, and mind, and soul to this fellow American, and knowing that the world is noting this expression of the republic’s mindfulness, it is fitting to say that his sacrifice, and that of the millions dead, shall not be in vain.” The resonant voice almost convinced. But Burden knew, as they all knew, British admirals of the fleet and marshal of France, that life was all that the poor set of bones in the box had had—and lost so that boundaries might be redrawn by shady men of state and profits made by the busy.
     “There must be, there shall be the commanding voice of a conscious civilization against armed warfare . . . ” Burden wondered how many times after similar wars Capitoline geese had honked the same fervent message in the wake of some awful blood-letting. But all that it took was a generation to forget war’s horrors in order to hunger, yet again, for war’s thrills and profits. How stupid the human race was, thought Burden, staring at a bemedaled Japanese prince, who was known to be plotting war in the Pacific. Little did the Japanese suspect that now that the gentle polyglot republic of North America had got the taste of blood in its mouth there would be no stopping it. War was money earned. War was the ultimate expression of that racial pride with which the white Caucasian tribe had been so overly endowed. . . . 

I salute this excerpt for its anti-war sentiment, which, especially for a citizen of the U.S. in this present day and age, cannot be repeated often enough, or stressed earnestly enough.

Now here’s one more passage from Vidal’s Hollywood, a little shorter and less [adjective], but sadly just as relevant (especially considering that the time frame is not 2017 but 1917):

. . . The hotel itself was very large and modern and somewhat reminiscent of an armed camp, with private guards and public policemen everywhere. Currently, Los Angeles was in the midst of what the press called a crime wave, partly the work of transients who had come to this new El Dorado only to find the best gold already panned, and partly the work of local criminals at war with one another over the various drug territories, none particularly lucrative since a card—or gramme—of cocaine cost two dollars. Morphine was expensive but less popular. In any case, when it came to serious crime, the police stayed aloof; either paid off or frightened off. But transients were dealt with brutally.

As time passes, everything seems to come down to one single, simple cage-match: Rich vs. Poor; or the leaders versus those who are led.

By the way, I’m not going to any New Year celebrations tonight. Last year we went to my sweetheart’s parents’ house, because my sweetheart’s aunt and cousin were staying there and asked us to join them. These people are technically my “in-laws” – I’m ambivalent about that term because I’m an outlaw. And I hate religion (which fashioned the matrimonial laws that made women chattel). But I like this aunt and her daughter who is my cousin-in-law. And they came here this year as well, and we met with them to have coffee, in the morning, two days ago (I’d prefer vodka, but I don’t expect anyone from this world to understand the truth about anything). And they asked us if we would come to mom-&-pop-in-law’s house again this year to celebrate the big number-fuss…

I just can’t do it anymore. I got mad at my sweetheart yesterday because I’m under too much holiday stress. She just wanted to join me in watching some left-wing videos on YouTube, because that’s what I was doing when she got home from work, but when she sat down next to me, I exploded and said: “Why the fuck do you want to join me in my misery: I’m watching this shit because I’m at the lowest point in my life; but you have good things going for you: it makes me feel responsible for your downfall, like I’m committing the crime of corrupting an innocent angel, if you waste the rest of your Saturday contemplating our country’s bleak political conundrums here with me.” Then I said: “Hide your flame with a snuffer, and go have fun.”

I made that last remark because of something I read in the Gospel of Thomas (sec. 33)

Jesus said, “Whatever you hear with your ear, proclaim upon your rooftops into other ears. Indeed, no one lights a lamp and puts it under a vessel, nor puts it in a hidden place. Rather it is put on a lampstand so that each who enters and leaves might see its light.”

And if you read my post from yesterday, about the Ray Family Christmas debacle, you’ll know that I tried to cover all the bases by drawing up a list of the things that occurred, and then bolding the items into headings and elaborating on each. Well when I got to the last heading, I decided that I didn’t like what I wrote; it was too blah, and it covered ground that I’d already conquered earlier; so I annihilated it: I bombed it to smithereens and now nobody will ever be able to read it. I ended the entry instead with Colleen’s scary story. That was a good call, because THAT ending left the reader with the fear that there might be a vicious criminal lurking about in the world, ready to pounce! whereas the original ending just fizzled out with a bunch of hemming and hawing over my mom’s gift and my taste in literature. Old news. Dullsville.

But now that some time has passed and I no longer care about producing quality products, I’ve lowered my standards enough to include that subpar scene right here at the end:

What to do with mom’s gift book

Do I really have to read this thing? I feel bad just shelving it or tossing it out the window, because it’s brand-new. But the text is about how to feel “joy” after the death of a friend: how to know that your friend is in Heaven, and how to find comfort in the love of the Male Christian Deity. I don’t want to kill my soul like that. (Our father died last year, that’s why my mom gifted us this help-for-your-grief book.) My dad wasn’t a friend – I feel joy simply knowing that he’s gone. And I renounce Jehovah – this author’s Father God to me is Nobodaddy.

So I could use the book’s text as a springboard to make devilish arguments, or as a philosophical shooting gallery; but I’m not interested in censoriousness; there’s enough wrong with the world already; I don’t want to complain; I want to LIFT UP THE HEART via poetry. I like the potential and exuberance of dada and surrealism, not religion’s moody brooding.

But I guess I’ll give the book a chance, and look at it as a way to spark conversations with my mother. She says the book meant a lot to her, so I should maybe take it as a glimpse inside of her mind. I like it that she wanted to share something that she found enriching. I should return the favor: buy her a copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s complete works, & a copy of William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, & of the gnostic scriptures, & of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, & of James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover, & of the Selected Works of Alfred Jarry, & of Davenport’s & Urrutia’s translation of The Sayings of Jesus, & of John Ashbery’s Girls on the Run. Or maybe I should copy my favorite poems out by hand—that way, she wouldn’t feel inundated with too much text, and it would be more personal. I’ll think more about this – I’ll manage to flip it into something affirmative.