536 Philosophy poems

(for Phil Garrison and Peter Lamborn Wilson) As ashes are the shadow of smoke, panic is the shadow of light, beef the shadow of grass, love the shadow of attention, psychology the shadow of plastic the shadow of oil the shadow of giant ferns the shadow of bacteria the shadow of light’s grandmother, rosy finch the shadow of loon, jealousy & myth twin shadows of desire, Europe shadow of a desert river, idea the shadow of pain, sleep the shadow of bread, liquid the shadow of lust, time the shadow of et cetera, logos is the shadow of what happens. Take some broad-shouldered little fart, at las- t, fresh from the 5 o’clock (morn) shadow of barbarism, squatting over barley-paste, hot goat, dried fig (meal the shadow — since the shadows were removed from rocky Grecian hills, trees cut away, soil reduced to olive grounds — down to shadow of surroundings — of Homeric heaps of meat that cast deadanimal-shaped shadows by the tents on the sandy shores of Ilium) squatting over his shapeless shadow in the shadow of the Parthenon — itself shadow form from wood, “in the light of” stone. Well now, there’s been some organized ruckus in his medium, rare town, which, God knows, nobody there “thought” would survive, a golden paradigm, for thousands of Apollonian twirls. Who knows what they thought of what they thought? It must’ve been intensely local; that the universe crept into valley code was just brain refreshment. Dirt was all around. Some bright body shambled the streets — in mud & heat — barely shook his bald, Why is the sky blues into registration, virgin ears & experienced buttholes, as the shadow of estrangement from a bloody dream’s red tape, & got chemicaled, but Mr. Broad Wit seized evaporation from the street to isolate spirit of spearmint from what had always gone before. Summer was a-comin’ in still (Lawdy! sing coo-coo!), facts & symbols be-danced & babblin’ beat of a million bovine feet upon the tender luxury sidewinding from the brain. So he thought “Thought!” Why not? Natural! in a sense. Never before had such perfect innocence been explored like new property. Well, such a new idea as “idea” looks pretty good till you can check out how it settles into the ground. Blood’s biodegradable but logos piled up like a plastic eyesore, fore- shadowed a bloodless dry reign, precipitation of pedestrain pedantry, pedestrian mind for millenia, postulating its pustulations of post- & pre-, professing everything, subjugating us all in the tick-tech burned-out success of a nob objectivity, turning babble to a soapy bubble up up & away until pop! goes the wizard. Aw c’mon, the alchemy that pilfers from golden sundance volumes of German silver sucks tongue of essence — ah yes, essence, with its can-do incandescence, like “Lovelight’s our leverage to spring some uptight average from alla this quotidian sewage &italicize it, boot it through the uprights to an airy footnote.” So anyway this guy imagined up God outa the play-dough of his panicked exclusions & then compounded the felony by trying to imitate the damn thing, double-indemnity solipsism in the fool’s guise of cool & wise utopian Republic! Razional! Sozialismus! Computerized zoosphere! Hologram rain forest — a more direct use of light. But despite all right & crystal wings, thinking that — “The-variability-of-the-world-has-no-more-reality-than-the-shadows-on-a-cave-wall”— has no more reality than Plato’s reflection in the waters of a Theater-of-Dionysus Port-O-Let. Well, he thought he was correting a mess & left a mess of shadows for our meat. If unity really strung out from above, not shot up from below, we’d have no babies to throw out with anybody’s rationalized bathwater. Islands in the stream of biosphere placidly gavotte drinking play-tonic sprinkled geo- metrically, until the teleology becomes archaic — & eats it too. The world pole-flips one more time, mechanically geo- mantric, shakes the pants off of objective dance to reveal gradual chance, just numbers having a ball, as the rationale of it all. Back up a hemidemisecond! My better half says — “In the winter the house is all shadow.” But the long hot summer of essentialism “was” a system of no resistance — & all the psychological shit that makes a toilet contemplative, inner-directed: a pure good-bye. Yet it was hard (abstract thought), difficult to invent, like anything you can’t immediately step on, phrase or foot — (& 4 is the shadow of 3 is the shadow of 2 is the shadow of 1 & old is the shadow of Jung & red is the shadow of orange & dots the shadow of dot & hand is the shadow of and however the shadow of breath & season the shadow of winter the step the shadow of the gesture & soprano is the shadow of the star & ring’s shadow is “orange” & window shadow of the shadow.) —after all, Empedocles & Anaximander had illuminated life as shadows of whatever, up from sea-slime, dissolving to the harmony of a sphere. Logos, in the light, is only haze, a honey-head, that the shape be kept as “beautiful.” (& the shadow structure is the real — it’s not being looked at nor still distorted by leftover rays in the shadowee, nor in such relation to light as shadowing implies: once you’ve taken in the light, you’re artificially simple for good — bedazzled. Chiaroscuro conjures up dichotomy — Step 1, then, as it loses all idea to total presence, becomes invisible enough. & we’re home. Lightning strikes — OK. Half-known moves around the kitchen. The cereal box is food for thought. Is it easier to be right when you’re already wrong? Hmm, cool today; better pull on my dark-blue paradigm. The quality of nothing is not strained, but saying so’s tense like a cartoon zebra. “The variability of the world” — incidental winks of it start to party into view — absolutely hot & cool, at the moment, is, & likely to remain so.) Eat a fig. Drink some coffee. Went driving today ’73 bug mid-Sunday plus live-in sweetie over littered subtle prairie out to Erie where we coffee smoke four baconstrips & country fries breathed in the work like hell old dirt streets & east to Firestone Screwball pool coke & ice Route 52 two dozen silver queen Indian corn Valmont Road yellow plum tomatoes cloudy light above Kiowa Peak stoplight bickyard pond by Public Service.

This is the beginning. Almost anything can happen. This is where you find the creation of light, a fish wriggling onto land, the first word of Paradise Lost on an empty page. Think of an egg, the letter A, a woman ironing on a bare stage as the heavy curtain rises. This is the very beginning. The first-person narrator introduces himself, tells us about his lineage. The mezzo-soprano stands in the wings. Here the climbers are studying a map or pulling on their long woolen socks. This is early on, years before the Ark, dawn. The profile of an animal is being smeared on the wall of a cave, and you have not yet learned to crawl. This is the opening, the gambit, a pawn moving forward an inch. This is your first night with her, your first night without her. This is the first part where the wheels begin to turn, where the elevator begins its ascent, before the doors lurch apart. This is the middle. Things have had time to get complicated, messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore. Cities have sprouted up along the rivers teeming with people at cross-purposes— a million schemes, a million wild looks. Disappointment unshoulders his knapsack here and pitches his ragged tent. This is the sticky part where the plot congeals, where the action suddenly reverses or swerves off in an outrageous direction. Here the narrator devotes a long paragraph to why Miriam does not want Edward's child. Someone hides a letter under a pillow. Here the aria rises to a pitch, a song of betrayal, salted with revenge. And the climbing party is stuck on a ledge halfway up the mountain. This is the bridge, the painful modulation. This is the thick of things. So much is crowded into the middle— the guitars of Spain, piles of ripe avocados, Russian uniforms, noisy parties, lakeside kisses, arguments heard through a wall— too much to name, too much to think about. And this is the end, the car running out of road, the river losing its name in an ocean, the long nose of the photographed horse touching the white electronic line. This is the colophon, the last elephant in the parade, the empty wheelchair, and pigeons floating down in the evening. Here the stage is littered with bodies, the narrator leads the characters to their cells, and the climbers are in their graves. It is me hitting the period and you closing the book. It is Sylvia Plath in the kitchen and St. Clement with an anchor around his neck. This is the final bit thinning away to nothing. This is the end, according to Aristotle, what we have all been waiting for, what everything comes down to, the destination we cannot help imagining, a streak of light in the sky, a hat on a peg, and outside the cabin, falling leaves.

What I’m trying to say is that if an experience is proposed to me—I don’t have any particular interest in it—Any more than anything else. I’m interested in anything. Like I could walk out the door right now and go some where else. I don’t have any center in that sense. If you’ll look in my palm you’ll see that my heart and my head line are the same and if you’ll look in your palm you’ll see that it’s different. My heart and my head feel exactly the same. Me, I like to lay around of a Sunday and drink beer. I don’t feel a necessity for being a mature person in this world. I mean all the grown-ups in the world, they’re just playing house, all poets know that. How does your head feel? How I feel is what I think. I look at you today, & I expect you to look the same tomorrow. If you’re having a nervous breakdown, I’m not going to be looking at you like you’re going to die, because I don’t think you are. If you’re a woman you put yourself somewhere near the beginning and then there’s this other place you put yourself in terms of everybody. “The great cosmetic strange- ness of the normal deep person.” Okay. Those were those people—and I kept telling myself, I have to be here, because I don’t have a country. How tight is the string? And what is on this particular segment of it? And the photographer, being black, and the writer, me, being white, fell out at this point. And he didn’t want to look at it—I mean it’s nothing, just some drunk Indians riding Jersey milk cows—but I wanted to see it, I mean it was right in front of my eyes and I wanted therefore to look at it. And death is not any great thing, it’s there or it’s not. I mean God is the progenitor of religious impetuousity in the human beast. And Davy Crockett is right on that—I mean he’s gonna shoot a bear, but he’s not gonna shoot a train, because the train is gonna run right over him. You can’t shoot the train. And I always thought there was another way to do that. And it is necessary to do that and we bear witness that it is necessary to do it. The only distinction between men and women is five million shits.

You could almost think the word synonymous with mind, given our so far narrow history, and the excessive esteem in which we have been led to hold what is, in this case, our rightly designated nervous systems. Little wonder then that some presume the mind itself both part and parcel of the person, the very seat of soul and, lately, crucible for a host of chemical incentives—combinations of which can pretty much answer for most of our habits and for our affections. When even the handy lexicon cannot quite place the nous as anything beyond one rustic ancestor of reason, you might be satisfied to trouble the odd term no further—and so would fail to find your way to it, most fruitful faculty untried. Dormant in its roaring cave, the heart’s intellective aptitude grows dim, unless you find a way to wake it. So, let’s try something, even now. Even as you tend these lines, attend for a moment to your breath as you draw it in: regard the breath’s cool descent, a stream from mouth to throat to the furnace of the heart. Observe that queer, cool confluence of breath and blood, and do your thinking there.

Keep away, son, these lakes are salt. These flowers Eat insects. Here private lunatics Yell and skip in a very dry country. Or where some haywire monument Some badfaced daddy of fear Commands an unintelligent rite. To dance on the unlucky mountain, To dance they go, and shake the sin Out of their feet and hands, Frenzied until the sudden night Falls very quiet, and magic sin Creeps, secret, back again. Badlands echo with omens of ruin: Seven are very satisfied, regaining possession: (Bring a little mescaline, you’ll get along!) There’s something in your bones, There’s someone dirty in your critical skin, There’s a tradition in your cruel misdirected finger Which you must obey, and scribble in the hot sand: “Let everybody come and attend Where lights and airs are fixed To teach and entertain. O watch the sandy people Hopping in the naked bull’s-eye, Shake the wildness out of their limbs, Try to make peace like John in skins Elijah in the timid air or Anthony in tombs: Pluck the imaginary trigger, brothers. Shoot the devil: he’ll be back again!” America needs these fatal friends Of God and country, to grovel in mystical ashes, Pretty big prophets whose words don’t burn, Fighting the strenuous imago all day long. Only these lunatics, (O happy chance) Only these are sent. Only this anaemic thunder Grumbles on the salt flats, in rainless night: O go home, brother, go home! The devil’s back again, And magic Hell is swallowing flies.

Somewhere Zeno was smiling, the foul goblins of paradox were wearing their fairest clothes that night. My Dinner with a Chainsaw, the evening could have been called; and when one too many led to wise judgements too few, “I’m trying to break up with you!” he shouted as stockings and scruples flew; and what was over wasn’t; the brutal doings were sweeter than a caress; the thrill of it happening and the horror of it being an awful mistake collided like sweaty bodies in the dark, disheveled room. So this is moving on, she reflected after he left. But what was motion? No straight bright line but a wind every bit as stormy as the people it carried away from safety, through towns that froze and burned, helping them forward but not letting them forget for a second their ceaseless looking for what is lost, their sad resemblance to the quick and stubborn arrows that never arrive.

After experience taught me that all the ordinary Surroundings of social life are futile and vain; I’m going to show you something very Ugly: someday, it might save your life. Seeing that none of the things I feared contain In themselves anything either good or bad What if you get caught without a knife; Nothing—even a loop of piano wire; Excepting only in the effect they had Upon my mind, I resolved to inquire Take the first two fingers of this hand; Fork them out—kind of a “V for Victory”— Whether there might be something whose discovery Would grant me supreme, unending happiness. And jam them into the eyes of your enemy. You have to do this hard. Very hard. Then press No virtue can be thought to have priority Over this endeavor to preserve one’s being. Both fingers down around the cheekbone And setting your foot high into the chest No man can desire to act rightly, to be blessed, To live rightly, without simultaneously You must call up every strength you own And you can rip off the whole facial mask. Wishing to be, to act, to live. He must ask First, in other words, to actually exist. And you, whiner, who wastes your time Dawdling over the remorseless earth, What evil, what unspeakable crime Have you made your life worth?

Just when I’m ready to call in the day and put it to bed without supper you send the mockingbird who plays with his musical zipper, exposing the World’s underlife. You send purfume from the autumn olive whose septillion flowering ears are full of bees singing songs for the revolution. Out back Jake’s Creek is speaking in tongues— Missed you-missed you-missed you. You wear me down, obsessively rubbing your hands along my better judgment, kissing the upturned noses of all my higher principles, until my clothes are big as a mast sail, until my longing leavens one thousand wedding cakes, my longing is an undertow, and all the tourist beaches are posted:Danger. Come for me—I’ll break off my arms and will them to a body of water, hang my legs up in overalls at night so they won’t come after us, feed English to the birds in sweet pats of butter Then our loving gets raucous— white moths yapping their wings—you wag, you wag in the little fingerbowl of me. Your verbstem assumes declensions of mythic proportions. My vowel sounds open on the south-most hallelujah side of the mountain. Then metaphysically speaking we’ve stopped speaking metaphorically—Silence nuanced as a landscape in snow.

habit smacks its dull skull like a stuck bull in a brick stall and my version of what I know is like eye surgery with a backhoe on grace so much beyond my pitiful gray sponge of a brain I'd not believe it exists except for such doses of felicity as this.

Say when rain cannot make you more wet or a certain thought can’t deepen and yet you think it again: you have lost count. A larger amount is no longer a larger amount. There has been a collapse; perhaps in the night. Like a rupture in water (which can’t rupture of course). All your horses broken out with all your horses.