Caro cardo:Tino







(Tino) 

Luckily the cat feted was found low in a net of weeds
   As half is mine, already,

the other's not, with a little grime on a pink dill lip:
  this cat (of all critters)

I thought, slated for love, was lost in darkening pots--
  Tino, of halts and starts &

of the tonsured neck & the throaty purr who likes to
  tear sheaves off lonely hearts

Paul as poet



"If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body" (St.Paul)
_____________________


Where this poet is certainly most knowing is a word
  that amply welcomes world

                                       to put in other ways,
  exemplarily and ordinarily
                                                             But both?

Well, the globe of the Annabelle's restorative to cats,
  and a world of kyrios it is, too

to a sweet garden-keeper- let us also praise her!-
  as opposed to belly & femur:

a thought-world of the bee, too with god's renewed sting
  and not its one dingy wing

So, to every blinking Tino a day without the poet Paul
 is just more trinket, more turd!
 
 

Caro cardo: Nicky

(Nicky)

The one I passed by like autumn breeze is a mightily white wing
  of a butterfly in its dusty, flashy way that

I passed by and-oh, worshipful-was still moved even if never nearer,
  a ten-thousandth of a degree nearer than I was

And even if the thumps and drone of all the empty heartless were
   a thousand degree smaller--it'd still be something

If we think about it it never lessens and is named mighty, this thing
  this little Nicky of a thing, heartless but as ten-

thousandth of a degree real as me, unfolding, too, if we look at it,a
  poor misunderstood Nicky of a thing, too

Yes, the flashy wing to your own gaddy and stupid "you" is how it is,
  and not a gluttonous squirrel turning a little

green world in its claws, sputtering, ravenous pig that eats & squirts,
  eats and squirts

Can a poem be really all that impregnable?

As Jung very aptly describes, " [the poet] must resort to an imagery that is difficult to handle and full of contradictions in order to express the weird paradoxicality of his vision". By vision the great man hadn't meant to align significant poetry with religion. The visional has a much deeper parentage than that. And by image he'd had more in mind than ordinary sense perception, the stuff of which mediocre art is ordinarily made anyways.

I once saw the truth in this when, on reprinting an old poem entitled "Charcoal print", I tried (stupidly enough!) to keep a whole complex of feelings separate from a  charcoal print that had evinced it. As if, ensconced in verses, the subject of the portrait hadn't really been all that "difficult to handle". And, almost a decade later, as if she'd disappeared altogether. I thought I could look with complete equanimity now on the storm that had generated it.

I will say one thing about it, however: the vision's never looked so revelatory to me almost a decade later.
____________________



Charcoal print

I lost the blackish-white, luscious, in a word

  & see now under coal eyes

lips that scowl (if charcoal lips can!), a neck stretch

 She'd try to see me, too— 

  for she's angular, keen & all that, from hairline to chin

but cruel as a crow's underwing; luscious

  & neat down to a blind hem

I lost that, too

There must be something, after the carnage 

  in a brow's spectral ash,

or smudgy nose, at the least, to connect with

  (& save me from the storms)

Can the blackish eyes have ever been right?

They weren't;

  I felt the collapse

Sweetish-grey is the near absent nose, her upper lip

  that didn't crush entirely,

sparing viewer but didn't let go of me, either

  No wonder the many potential poets, 

me among them, see her go, too, sweetish one

  with black rose in each eye,

crude pasty brow

 Problem is she's written in it, in blackish-white,

  already a role (that of 'loved' or 'not') 

you get the minute you look

Which I did & then lost

  And stout skies, outside my window,

flat-bottomed & heading steadily for shore, whenever I looked,

  let me know it!

  Rigid, adored in charcoal, & she let me know it



Some experiential stuff...

I'll leave the title ambiguous as to referent: in fact, I'd say both types of nymph share properties that make 'reference' seem altogether uninteresting. If, as Bergson maintains, it's the same 'creative impetus' that sent everything on the same evolutionary trajectory, mammal, insect & less visible organisms alike, it's always going to be the more interesting liminal boundaries of the real that form the stuff (always exactly experiential) of life and poetry. Plenty of interesting intersections to see.

Here's a try...
___________________________

"Nymph"

Ah bent close to the snout, again
  just a twitch loosens, wings
    & enough of pale white—

strangely arced, too, to spring mayfair:
  a jittery blossom, a blade
    short, sharp bursts

of the shadow of your old self gone,
  loose pelf at yr hip (go!),
    new leggers

collapsing into tune (& let it go!)
  with nerve to lighten
    flicker, & grin

Ah, the world on two trick wings,
  again

What I wouldn't give for one Russell today ...

 

"There has been a lot of freedom of thought over the past few years, but no thought" (Simone Weil)

Time was when thinkers (like Bertrand Russell, Bernard Williams, A.J.Ayer) brought a entire arsenal of sound analytical reasoning (given in the form of clearly outlined propositions and  inferences) to their views on things like the nature of reality and the existence of God. It was both good and instructive to listen to them, whatever your own views happened to be. How things have changed!

The contemporary debate on God's existence, for example, has changed that analytical discourse into a form of garish social media in which participants gain points not by logic but by the outward show of 'cleverness' only: voice, body language and an outlandish sort of 'showmanship' that is oftentimes indistinguishable from 'bullying'. We are in need of better intellectual role models. I think media have quite intentionally undercut the possibility of real intellectual 'dialogue'.

Jacques Rancière is somebody who understands media and the potentially pernicious image of itself and its users it likes to unleash. It's, in his view, in the service of the new image of the real tied indissolubly to media that media users quite literally dictate the terms of discourse everywhere. It's pure 'image' dissociated from reality  : "The visible can be arranged", Rancière says " in meaningful tropes; words deploy a visibility that can be blinding." And as a result what purveyors of the new 'discourse' (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens) do is offer skim rather than real depth, the simulacra of intelligence only. They, and their YouTube followers, have no time for patient and respectful exchange of ideas.

They can, in other words, tell their audiences what they need to see since audiences do seem incapable of separating the proverbial tares from wheat. There's always something menacingly anti-intellectual and anti-social at work here. In the absence of real sustained theorizing the 'new atheists' (as Chomsky has correctly said) actually look like propogandists for their own brand of state religion. It's not conversion to a different viewpoint they seek so much as state-sponsored suppression of religious ideas in general. And how well they exploit media spectacle to do this.Things like an affecting accent, credentials and aggressive delivery--amounting at times to character assassination-- always carry the day. Their audiences (except for the attentive few) can't see (as if quite invisible) what is there in front of them. Indeed, a contemporary audience wouldn't be able to see a logician's well-formed proposition as anything but a poorly 'trending' event.

I offer the following as just one good example of the 'dumbing down' of much contemporary discourse. Jacques Derrida-- perhaps this century's greatest intellectual--  has gotten so far only four YouTube responses for his comments on atheism and belief! I take responses rather than views to be a more meaningful gauge of audience engagement and interest. It certainly isn't fashionable (and nor do I think most people today have the ability) to patiently follow through a rather complex train of thought based on faithful reading and study . Argumentative strength has taken a backseat to 'image' understood  in this peculiarly contemporary sense . In a typical YouTube debate forum Derrida would necessarily look like a stammering amateur.

 Logic, in short. just doesn't enjoy that crucial 30 second time-lag in which to get its message out: for that the new media intellectuals rely on all the available 'video manager' tips and tricks available. Rather than following in the philosophical tradition of Russell and Derrida  the 'men of ideas' today have become little more than virulently self-satisfied "fools and fanatics" of a bread and circus world always happy to receive & applaud them.

A birthday reminder (thanks to ginamarie)

Frida the Obstinate

(for ginamarie lobianco)

The last time Frida spoke to God, thinking she'd painted the best Madonna ever...
_______________________________

Lady steps over clover one day, from her home, granted her prayer— Ave Matuta!—to turn into Frida from cold Mary of Ephesus: and to dignify it, saying,

"Release me, God, from all yr gabfest, & if not, sensing the threat of dust that turns wet, then word the real sex of me straight to Olympia, with my one bare breast, cypress rouge, gaunt chin

No more the swelling angel seed for me!

No more that hovel instead of alabaster, the virgin's coarse sage  while I see there real marshy heat rise up round her ankles, by the harbour walls— a temple in place of huts!

Leave me my bare head, half-chignon that's been clawed back hatefully by you, hoping to kill this need to compete in games

It's better than not letting the sun fill shadowy gaps, between lips & nose, and as I'm still young, between my two real thighs!"

Arresting spite of a father's now sounds in her ear, tight sutured ear: God to Frida now,

"¿Dónde está mi duende?

Mother of Lesbos!

Now I find you facing temples, wide- browed, obstinate, trading good stone for my salty bogs

My skin-and-bones girl with plum-coloured nip, lest we part at Venus, eyes locking, take the path of a femur road to love's shining vacuity; & bleed for it, with one sorrowing eye, and arrive there the blue-ringed girl, after some trial, as if you got tired of my Hebron skies

Faithless, so-so girl, staring staring at her lips, hold your side awhile, gnashed by yr own finny hand Lumpy, self-evolving, purpling girl: hold both bloody sides & keep yr hand away from me!

Goat-like chins always crush into salt"

New Ephesian groves scarf her anew but as a madonna's falling chiton manages only a little dampness, it does
stop some bleeding

A sea-urchin grows at her neck, with a half-formed nimbus shell to tell the old Mary  from Frida