Two Minute Dance -- take 2 -- for John Cage

[revised for centennial reading]

Whose circus jerks to attention
so precariously concerned
in this ring, in the grooves of this record

A refusal to capture what
time's body disguised
a precision meant to be obeyed
based on an equal presumption

His timing a cross between Buster Keaton and Beckett
Yes, comedy needs space
a precise place for delivery
a silent taunt
an admonishment heard there

Closing oneself off to prepare a sequence of images
to consciously work on becoming a nicer person

Regression of the germ
before the human
before language spoke, shhh!
We're watered and grown
we feed and feedback

Your mouth needs a body
it needs to ingest the word, the worlds of others
it needs to reject the “good taste” that “knows when to vomit”

Yes, the animal is a hierarchy of parts
living off the more democratic vegetation
The singular hedge makes its decision
solves the maze
Uncut from what translates

Beauty is what the parts do
Not what the whole is

Cage celebrates the finite event
A sneeze, the fidget of the person sitting next to you

To rescue music from its sublime failure – that is –
from our inability to grasp the total, the infinity of it
he instead induces us to sideline the subject
and embrace singularity

to feel how an act of experience constructs

STAND UP & READ / like a loser

  -->

[5 minute version of 30 minute piece, as given at Convergence on Poetics conference at Bothell, WA yesterday]

 “Originally we wanted it to be improvised, but there wasn’t time, so we wrote it all out,” said the tenor sax.

“There is no time to be brief,”  said the Canadians.

“There is no character to hold to...” I said.  

 No time to make jokes, said the little birds, though this is precisely what is required for standing up. Words alone are never funny, & neither is this:

“You know why elephants don’t smoke? Because they can’t get their butts in the ash tray.”

I’ve been calling everything I do lately: reading like a loser (props to Malcolm Bull)... It is an  attempt to find an antidote to Nietzschean heroics, against Nietzsche’s pursuit of an artist-ocracy or an elitism that would deny many the right to exist. 

To read like a loser is to read “to one’s own overthrow.  It means assimilating a text in such a way that it is incompatible with one’s self.”  It is to make oneself passive and vulnerable, to make oneself a victim of the text. 

The first step is to acknowledge the lack of a ‘primary artistic force,’ that we are not alone in the world.  And similar to the first step in overcoming addiction, we need to admit that we are powerless, that one can’t solve the problem alone.  I can’t vouch for the other 11 steps.  but it is clear that collaboration is key.

Here’s Nietzsche: “I want wars in which the courageous & vital drive out all the others.”  So -- he wants to weed out “those who cannot withstand the thought of eternal recurrence, who are ‘unfit for life’.” 

I say, fuck that. Instead we should:

Imagine collective intelligence rather than solitary genius; immanence rather than transcendence; the beautiful rather than the sublime.

Imagine, how you belong and are obligated and attached – to what you do and how you do it.  Find the questions that matter – questions that make you think rather than recognize.

Imagine decision as something that happens to you – a decision without a decision maker... an embrace of precarious possibility.

Imagine being “responsible only for paying attention as best you can” – not abiding the power of some ‘general’ reason (that is, not abiding to a reason that is illustrative, mobilizing or unifying).

There is a big problem with the heroic, “reading for victory” tendencies that we get schooled in. Nietzsche is the prime example of this – since he does it so well. He’s fodder for young avant-gardists playing for victory, with their own jaded notions of purity.

Standup is heroic; it is a race to the punch line, a race to kill or be killed.  I’ve shuffled the deck. A punch line cannot exist without someone getting punched.  What’s funny is not necessarily logical, rather it is eco-logical.  Something is funny only in relation to its environment.  But that’s an incoherent translation…  If you make coherence funny, you win. 

How can we embrace expression - against ambition?  It is the opposite of transcendence. How can we resist being so easily accustomed?   Hold on to your bucket seats.... “In the US it is illegal to fund the study of defeat.”

++
 I'd forgotten about this poem which is the only thing I've ever written in the google blogger interface --but i recently noticed that it was getting more (probably) false hits -- by far -- than any other post. Maybe it's the presence of certain words -- fisted – or blackbox or blog.  

Ben Beres - Vortext

At Davidson Galleries, thru Sept 1.

Microwriting.  Opacity.  Beauty.

Go see it!  Here are translations of two pieces.

A Danger

A danger vortex for what?

It's about fucking pay back

I dare you to return to muse

A world on fire for kings

bottom dealing in queens

Muffled

Muffled and jetset. The cold hands for blood drawn out. These are not appearance of mind. They are vicarious chill and darkness. Oblique tang as a spaceage translation, it lingers on the tongue. Rusticated bliss. Donkey kong. Theatre of bloody noses.

No Walking It Back

the process performs
as if it could add more life to life
It kicks out the jams and is kicked out
as if transfer of means is the past
pursuit of a limitless future


8. it isn't a zero sum game, is it?
not some singular mess
so don't bother me with particulars

7. the return of the same
coming to a theatre near you
surplus muscle and bone
consumed the whole time
deformed at the cost of vigour

6. remember this banana tastes better than a dollar bill

 

5. workers revolve and appreciate
at a rate uncommon -- retreads
can't cotton to what's
already worn out

4. scarcely had my ditch been dug
spades violently churning
aces beat your pair of twos

3. extravagant animals sing the facts

intermediate equations with valves that count
no essence for the nonce
ask me in 10 years
a reproductive machine one curve off
to seek the fruits of time

2.  say what you will but stand by it

1. goodbye bug. yes, he's a cockroach
but he's our cockroach
bemoaning the point of conversion
of conversation

-blast it!
are we supposed to diagnose it
or just add value to value

Boxcars - for Steve Farmer

[an idiosyncratic translation of Steve Farmer's tremendous Caravaggio Boxcar Draft]

###

emotive capture
cupidity's tusk
exiled to action

a prison with legs

###


your subtraction a bridge
irrational shadow
for six shooters
trapped in space
the numbers or romans
can't paint

weeds where thought
is something to look at

looks like a military kitchen
no chicken in harlem
no film set asleep
north of that brawl
gritty match
whose flame speaks thru you

backwater hues
awhirl in lakes that scoff
to call back and haunt

(O to stay inside with (boy) toy semis
victorious spooning with light sauce)

No disabled
cuff as standing cells
breed wherever reparked
bodies desist

an eyepatch billows
its re-engineered pat-down
patent check for that deep drop
paradigm spiral thru you

Intro for Ball & Chain

[written for STAND UP & READ / like a loser]

B&C was written as a backdrop or voiceover for PE Class – which was one of the groupuscles of the Autonomous University. We read Marx’s Capital in a series of meetings in the basement of the henry gallery – in that lab space or tech lounge, where we could project recordings of soccer matches.

Most of us independently watched David Harvey’s on-line lecture series on Capital vol 1.  At the end of the 13^th or 14^th lecture, Harvey uses this quote: “hic Rhodus hic salta” – which I think comes from the 18^th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon [START VIDEO].

This is also the source of that famous line from Marx: “Hegel [not funny] remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”  Note that the 18^th Brumaire is about Napoleon’s nephew who was elected president of France – the nephew wasn’t the tragedy, he was the farce.   

Anyway, Harvey translates “Hic Rhodus hic salta” in effect to say: Enough talk, time for action!

I looked it up and it’s actually the punchline from a story of Aesop.  It’s the boast of an athlete (about how far he had jumped when he was visiting at Rhodes) which is countered by a heckler who says “this is Rhodes, let’s see you leap.”  Show us!  Hic Rhodus, hic salta.  

Ball & Chain (written out of the footnotes of vol 1 Capital).

It’s got an epigraph from Spinoza: People “will fight for their servitude as if for salvation.”

Elias Canetti Notebook Excerpts - 3 of 3

This is the last of three posts of Canetti excerpts, i.e., recordings of the decisions that happened to me.  Post 1 here & 2 here.


From The Agony of Flies

If he had made good use of his time, he never would have amounted to anything. (127)

Whenever he is assaulted by adjectives, he becomes ridiculous. They contain his emotions. (127)

The misfortune of ethics: because it knows everything better, it learns nothing. (129)

How many people Nietzsche inspired with a craving for danger! Then the dangers materialized and they all failed miserably. (147)

Keep things apart, keep sentences separate, or else they turn into colors. (159)

His life is a search for everything that can't be sold. (99)

He collected all opinions to show how few there are. (199)

The desire to stay, a kind of bookkeeping. (227)

From Notes From Hampstead

“Voluptas ex felicitate alieni”

    -Leibniz (ecstacy from the happiness of another)

I have read my old sentences again; they are no longer mine. Since they were printed a piece of my life has fallen away... (83)

A thinker must forget that he is clever, else no matter what the field he will think only about his own cleverness. (84)

We write because we cannot speak out loud to ourselves. Speaking to others leads to the most unpredictable estrangements. (85)

It is necessary that we leave learning alone from time to time, that we put it away, not use it, almost forget it. It is precisely this compulsive quality ...that makes it necessary to let air into it, loosen it, fill it with the breath of years. It can be part of our nature only when it has given up its compulsiveness. (86)

A country where everyone walks backward, to keep an eye on themselves. A country where all turn their backs on one another: fear of eyes.

A labyrinth made of all the paths one has taken.

...the sole criterion of the epic talent: a knowledge of life even at its most horrific, a passionate love for it nonetheless, a love that never despairs, for it is inviolable even in its desperation. (90)

He was so good that no one ever remembered his name. (128)

She kills every man who won't love her. But she also kills every man who does.

“Nothing pleases me more than presenting a totally false picture of myself to those people I have taken into my heart. Perhaps this is unfair, but it is daring and, so, correct.”

    -Robert Walser, “Jakob Von Gunten” (129)

The English expression “I appreciate”: embarrassing. Its tone of “pressure” and “price,” as if one wanted to say, “I will keep pressing till the price is right.” But without the pressure, the price wouldn't mean anything. One of the arrogant expressions of the English language -- in this, the language is inimitable. (139-140)

Poets are unbearable to one another. You have to see them with other people to know what they're like. (141)

“A friend of mine”: one of the greediest English expressions when spoken.... The friend remains indefinite, unnamed; he is private property, protected.  (172)

It is always painful for me when I stop narrating. It is this pain that keeps me alive. (188)

“And that the likes of Shelley, Holderin, and Leopardi perish in misery means nothing; I think very little of such men.”  -Nietzsche (190)

I love the sense of justice Jews demand of people, their patience, often their kindness! But their obedience to the never ending threat of God disgusts me...  Can we stand up against a visible lord if we have no invisible lord?  A trying question. (190)

A writer who doesn't have a wound that's always open is no writer for me. (212)

One who sucks all the poison out of books and administers it to those around him in careful doses. (208)