Not only sands and gravels
Were once more on their travels,
But gulping muddy gallons
Great boulders off their balance
Bumped heads together dully
And started down the gully.
Whole capes caked off in slices.
I felt my standpoint shaken
In the universal crisis.
But with one step backward taken
I saved myself from going.
A world torn loose went by me.
Then the rain stopped and the blowing,
And the sun came out to dry me.
where is meaning in a system so completely out of balance?
speed of adjustment too slow,
gyroscopic inertia too high,
center of gravity external,
lightening world spinning, all in a cosmos of dark energies and dark matters: occultation.
at once, briefly, looking up, with the eyes of god: plasma of blood reading plasma of star.
and then, exsanguination and final uplift into the approaching Void
hypostatic inversion, return return return
acceleration. what does this look like? bodycage pressing seat of heart, spine once shattered, now in tensile repair. static, greymetal frames cage neuronal pathways. acceleration of bodily demise is not motion, it is stasis.
it is time.
to make do. quickly. traverse no zenith. accelerate.
Our death is our wedding with eternity.
What is the secret? “God is One.”
The sunlight splits when entering the windows of the house.
This multiplicity exists in the cluster of grapes;
It is not in the juice made from the grapes.
For he who is living in the Light of God,
The death of the carnal soul is a blessing.
Regarding him, say neither bad nor good,
For he is gone beyond the good and the bad.
Fix your eyes on God and do not talk about what is invisible,
So that he may place another look in your eyes.
It is in the vision of the physical eyes
That no invisible or secret thing exists.
But when the eye is turned toward the Light of God
What thing could remain hidden under such a Light?
Although all lights emanate from the Divine Light
Don’t call all these lights “the Light of God”;
It is the eternal light which is the Light of God,
The ephemeral light is an attribute of the body and the flesh.
…Oh God who gives the grace of vision!
The bird of vision is flying towards You with the wings of desire.
Vitray-Meyerovitch, Eva de. Rûmî and Sufism. Sausalito, CA: Post-Apollo Press, 1987.
Of certainty, not. Buried, yes. Suppressed, but not invisible.
What was: now only traces, tracks of energy in liminal mind, itself the inconsequential armature of be-ing.
Released to the future, tracing a trajectory not governed by arc, origin, or knowing; the unknown entering that mind, leaving Light and uncertain matter.
You impressed on me your broken self-love and absolute certainty in every moment and I remember it all, forever.
The infinitely flat earth, lake of mud, river,
waveless sea, sky, sky of earth, blazing grasslands,
road, grey asphalt road for cars to drive along.
Rooted.
Immovable.
There is just a single cry.
What does it say?
It says
I AM ALIVE
I AM
That’s what it says. Faced with the immensity of time, with lake of
mud, river, sky, road, always the same cry
and it is not easy to hear what it is saying:
And it is not TO LIVE!TO LIVE! but perhaps TO LOVE! or TO DIE!
From deep in the throat.
Faced with indifference, pool of dead water amid
impassive vegetation, cold body between the sheets
refusing with closed mouth and eyes
It hurls itself forward
Smashing its way
It is yet another cry
It says: Slut! Filth! Trash!
Disgrace!
In the stifling black night, forests of sounds, vain
dreams, world turned upside down preposterous
shadow of the intelligible, mane growing inwards,
hairs that have already invaded throat and belly,
There is a light
the tip of a cigarette
the reflection from a storm-lantern
the eye of a cat
Straight rigid cry, hit, cat’s eye, gleam, droplet,
point, hole, tower, stone, word, noise, taste, skin,
being, being,
tigers, tigers,
ticks that I let loose upon you
demons that are my sentence of extermination
for me, for you, for all,
to burst through the sky, the skin, indifference. Ho! Ho! Houa! Houa!
Le Clézio, Jean-Marie Gustave. War. Translated by Simon Watson Taylor. New York, NY: Atheneum, 1973.
I first stumbled on the work of future Nobel Literature Prize winner, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, way back in 1986 or so, whilst cruising the voluminous stacks at CU’s Norlin Library, back when there were stacks, and back when I was moderately well-read in French literature—Duras, Mauriac, Malraux, Sartre, Barthes, Ellul, Weil, Breton, Baudelaire, along with the Situationists, etc., mostly in translation. Despite my familiarity with French literary landscapes and my extended experiences traversing France, Le Clézio’s language style posed a challenge to my modest proficiency level. Aside from Le Procès-Verbal (The Interrogation) for which he was awarded the Prix Renaudot, the CU library fortuitously had copies of all his early works in translation including Le Déluge (1966) – The Flood, trans. Peter Green (1967); Terra Amata (1967) – Terra Amata, trans. Barbara Bray (1967); Le Livre des fuites (1969) – The Book of Flights (1971); La Guerre (1970) – War (1973); Les Géants (1973) – The Giants, all trans. Simon Watson-Taylor (1975); Voyages de l’autre côté (1975); and Désert (1980). The impact of Le Clézio’s narratives, reminiscent of my earlier literary revelation with Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, was profound. Through immersive storytelling, he masterfully captures intricate and hallucinogenic details of diverse settings, unfolding psychospiritual voyages through the perspectives of rootless characters perpetually grasping at ever elusive meaning. Regardless of the particular protagonist, all Le Clézio’s works offer a highly recommended exploration of the human experience.
After meeting my future ex-wife for the first time in Köln, Germany in June of 1988, I somewhat reluctantly headed to Arles to attend the Rencontres internationales de la photographie. But first, I spent some days in Paris at pre-arranged meetings with folks at the [now defunct] Centre national de la photographie, the Bibliothèque nationale, and several other rendez-vous. While in Paris, still deeply ensorceled by Le Clézio’s work, I went to his publisher, Gallimard‘s office/bookstore where I bought a couple of his books. They had a binder of press clippings and critical reviews of his work that I mulled over for a time. After some mental practice runs, in my terrible French, I ventured to explain to a couple of the salesladies how much I appreciated his writing, and politely inquired if they could give me his postal address. L’un d’eux a passé quelques appels téléphoniques, faisant descendre une jeune femme extrêmement jolie des bureaux du dessus. Cela a fait tomber mon français primitif dans les toilettes. She said they couldn’t share the address (Je comprends, bien sûr!), but she did make a gracious show of taking the letter I had brought with me and said she absolument would forward it to him. Who knows. That era in Paris, no one willingly spoke English which was quite okay, but I was at more than one embarrassing disadvantage because my lousy French was spoken in a decidedly parler lyonnais, from the hinterlands, down south, mixed with a shifty accent américain: folks were at first confused, then clearly amusé at my miserable diction!
That accent was imprinted on my primitive linguistic neurons back in the third grade in rural Maryland, following the lead of Madame Moon, who taught French to a small group of us after school a couple days a week. A petite and severe silver-coiffed native of Lyon, Mme. Moon held us in a régime ancien of holy terror: if any of us got just a bit obstreperous, she would threaten to come over and sit on us! This provoked an existential fear that I never fully recovered from. We followed every lesson closely, not realizing our French discourse would be marked forevermore: indicated most overtly by our learning the Lyonnaise oui (pronounced as a slack and breathy “whey”) rather than the ‘proper’ Parisienne oui (pronounced as a clipped “we”). C’est comme ça!
Quand même, back to M. Le Clézio, I highly recommend any of his work that is now, since the Nobel in 2008, all in fresh English translation. Better still if you can manage en français, although again, his vocabulary and usage makes for a challenging stretch.
Around when M. Le Clézio received his Nobel, and I was about to undertake my PhD in Australia, I discovered that he had been teaching one semester a year at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Sadly, it never worked out for me to get through there after I returned to the US from Oz. And now, as he’s quite elderly, he’s no longer doing those gigs.
Je lève mon verre pour porter un toast à l’un de mes écrivains préférés!
Otherwise, thank god for those library stacks—a place for enLightened literary (and sometimes other!) encounters that has unfortunately met the same end as telephone books, logarithm tables, paper maps, and French teachers who were at liberty to punish children by sitting on them!
yarrow—stalks harvested under the towering Sangre de Christo mountains, cut for use casting the I Ching;
then it proceeded to
culvert—piping rainwater under the road upstream from the Prescott house, it’s clogged with debris and when a flood comes it washes down the road and through my yard. It’s definitely not a conduit although it does guide flows; then there are
tamales—they snuck in there somewhere between the known, tortillas, and the next mental blank:
box elder—the trees that shade campsite #12 in Echo Park, Dinosaur National Monument, and that host those weird black-and-red (western) boxelder bugs.
Let’s try this again, commit to Latinized memory:
Achillea millefolium
tandem tabernus
Ferculum Mesoamericanum ex masa, farinam ex segete nixtamalizato, quod vaporetur in folliculo grani vel fixa folium.
Acer negundo quod exercituum Boisea rubrolineata
recalling, naming what routinely … cannot be brought to mind.
planets rise and fall, radiant, perturbed, tracing ecliptic-bound fate against the stars
time folds itself away, impervious to effect
privilege, a hard armor to disrobe, smothers heaving lungs, straining body, and cosseted mind.
Vital textures have changed with age
clamor, external, forces inward: internal discourse darkens:
an ease in replacing fluid thoughts with
re-creations and re-constructions of life, stripped, desiccated, unmoored
wetware loses to the external coders.
Imagination falters: social sediment unfiltered, osmotic mire clogs input,
head continues to empty of all but noise, signal lost.
And yet, occasionally
sensual input
evades the flow of debris
stars, planets, clouds, riven horizons, wing-prints in the snow. These enter the head and the heart, in silence.
[Ed: I will continue with these remembrances, in the moment this is all I can manage to compose.]
I’m tired of writing remembrances, each one reminds of the passing, fading nature of be-ing. I don’t need to be reminded that Life closes off, a box canyon with sheer varigated walls, cross-cut sediments of past-time on display. Fossilized life, fragments of bone, amber protrude from the sheer layered walls. Evidence of those who went before. Where are they? what are they doing? Somehow, Anthony’s passing clears something away, psychically: that he has made the transition, into the Bardo, and beyond. Not that he deserved it at his age, but that he was released from the physical ravages that cancer was imposing on his body. Following him, and the expanding number of others, will perhaps be less terrifying.
I met Anthony on the way out the door of Parson’s photo department building on 5th Avenue, just north of Washington Square Park, in the fall of 1985.
“The primary principle of this age in the West is decay.”
Yup. That resonated, still does. As elsewhere noted, that profound and concise observation marked the beginning of a long friendship that explored the surfaces of the world and the energies and patterns of flow behind those surfaces. It maintained itself for 34 years despite the infrequent crossings-of-path. Aside for a year or so when we were house-mates in a couple places in Boulder, it took the form of a rich correspondance along with the occasional meetings-up that were always electric. Princeton, Manhattan, Peters Valley, Newton, and then all the locales experienced on a handful of profound road-trips in the US West. Death Valley (including a legendary night in Las Vegas on New Years Eve — photographing the insanity of the place); across the Rez’ in Arizona, picking up hitch-hikers; dealing with extreme weather transiting the Colorado Rockies; time at the Great Sand Dunes; and all the while, closely observing the perfidy of the contemporary capitalist oligarchies and, if nothing else, making fun of it. National Dead People. Stick Puppets on Display. The George P. Schultz Delirium Tremens Telephone. He left the East Coast in 1987 or so, and engaged in a long meander around the West, deeply influenced by his encounters with the Native American cultures and histories. His passionate, spirited, sensitive, and brilliant intellect — a full-spectrum laser — initiated a reducing flux that operated powerfully in his poetic work. None of it easily consumed, he did not share it with more that a handful of people ever.
Our last day shared together was in 2014, a long one spent at the Met, wandering through Strawberry Fields and Central Park, and dinner at the Whole Foods cafeteria on the Upper West Side near his mother’s flat where he’d been living for a few years. He had been worn down by the ignominy of working in the retail “adrenalized sporting complex”. But he had also met Maite, a Catalonian woman, who he joined in Barcelona in 2016. Best that he was out of the US for the repugnance of oligarchy and destruction that has ensued.
The written word was his primary medium in more recent years, although his photographic work was an important and powerful expression as well. It was the case, however, that he was intensely private, and most of his creative output came in the form of letters, and for the last decade more than a thousand emails that included an image, a dense poetic work, or a carefully laid-out pdf word piece, or some combination of those. In the mid-80s he did have a few prose pieces published in Marvin Jones’ The New Common Good in New York City, as their “Western Correspondent”. The only one I have a copy of is an excerpt of “The Tourist“. All of his negatives and writings up to relatively recently were apparently lost to flooding at his mother’s place in Princeton. It appears that I am more-or-less the sole holder of his remaining artistic legacy: with a fat folder of beautifully hand-penned communications.
From a letter I wrote to Anthony, back in 1991, from what was home, then, Reykjavík:
There is a bit of nostalgia in my mind, but more, there is the respect for you as a creator, discoverer, synthesist, See-er, and, um, Voice-of-Consciousness from the Mouth of Chaos, more or less. (I find meself writing in Literal ways these days, unable to couch clearly or veil rightly, no figures dancing between the words). I have your three cards sitting, always self-aware, they are, there on the desk next to the Printer. In a small attic space, ceiling too low for me to stand, but fine to write, skylights at my back open to a 20-hour sun day. (Fela doin’ “Zombie”). I can feel the plasma mass pressure of the sun Light pressing down, trying to flatten the landscape into a line, a mote, but the earth is in constant retching here, heaving basalt sky-ward, building sites, Places for the People to live. You have fed me bits from a variety of Others — Others speaking about Others — or a saying about unsay-able things or, yes, That which is … … … Thank you.
Your generosity is welcomed: A GoFundMe site has been set up to assist with his medical and living expenses. The GoFundMe didn’t work — they had problems with producing ‘official’ documents to the GoFundMe platform to do the bank transfers. His situation is very hard, the doctors say they can do nothing more for him. It is not clear, but I believe that he is on hospice care now. Another friend has been communicating with his wife, but I have not been successful in contacting her via text.
It is not noted on that site, but Anthony is an artist/poet — you can find some of his short works on this very site.
Catching warm summer cool fireflies
with one-handed curving snatches fast
eye-tracking brief Light trajectories
unhurt unless caught between fingers
spending a whole night,
until sleep, that is, looking at a
Light-full jar. Pulsing, arrhythmic.
By morning they’re all gone.
disappearing into Light or Death.
Impossible to guess which. back then.
Light was the sun and Death was before dreams
Racing bicycles up The Hill
always the headpounding effort
to gain the crest, then
coasting on the
far side, all the way
to the two-lane. almost out of bounds
(apprehending all yet to be made into lived experience:
color and form, raw material for realness)
Chasing through the woods of tall standing
trees that grow every year. until
now, they cannot
be recognized. Gone into Light or Death
Fishing, a mantra to spend infinite
time of moving days between hot July and August
seeing the heat lift bugs from
the water and float them away into
Light or Death (in golden sunhaze)
Mowing the grass. shaking machine
drove all sensation away except green
monoxide grass and vibration
and naked-ear noise. A smooth carpet to lie on
in cool cloaking twiLight. Paid for with sweat and
mattered hydrocarbon fire. The grass to
be cut, for growing into Light and Death.
Simple movement, a wish for no time to end until now. recognition of what was that fleeting glimpse forgotten. also now.
Everything you see has its roots
in the Unseen world.
The forms may change,
yet the essence remains the same.
Every wondrous sight will vanish,
Every sweet word will fade.
But do not be disheartened,
The Source they come from is eternal –
Growing, branching out,
giving new life and new joy.
Between extremities
Man runs his course;
A brand, or flaming breath.
Comes to destroy
All those antinomies
Of day and night;
The body calls it death,
The heart remorse.
But if these be right
What is joy?
II
A tree there is that from its topmost bough
Is half all glittering flame and half all green
Abounding foliage moistened with the dew;
And half is half and yet is all the scene;
And half and half consume what they renew,
And he that Attis’ image hangs between
That staring fury and the blind lush leaf
May know not what he knows, but knows not grief more “Vacillation”
Wee, sleekit, cowran, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi’ bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee,
Wi’ murd’ring pattle! more “Burns’ homo rodentans”
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
Hopkins, G. M., 1877. Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1918).
You honored what is heaviest. You knew
the pull of earth; and you were pulled apart
by the dark angel’s voice that seemed as though
it called from somewhere outside your own heart.
You chose the tao of suffering, which led
past every common joy, past the humane
fulfillments, and delivered you instead
to cancer, in a Nessus’-shirt of pain.
Now, breathless, weightless, you can only fall
into yourself: the invisible, unheard
center that you sang. Ahead of all
parting, you might lean back against your chair
and see a sun-lit garden path. A bird
might whistle through you, in the cool morning air.
afterword by translator Stephen Mitchell, 1989. in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. New York, NY: Vintage Books.
Recently ploughed and deeply rutted
With dangerous streams to the left,
We raced toward the honey funnel.
The pig’s head, now bright
As a champagne breakfast, was stoic
Having long since passed its live-by-date.
Whilst all the while the parachuting monkey
Priest
Dangled ‘neath the folding feeding chair that
Once was new but now
Was as redundant as a flock of stilled hyphens.
I’ll rescue you from this!
But first I must outrun
The tweedy jacket’s froth
And show my wife my love
Is stronger than my will
To saturate the keening krill.
Yet torn by hurried hurricanes
Of doubtful origin
We stumble
For lack of stable
Purchase
and Original
Epiphany
Venice, Italy, 11 October 2015. For the 2016 centenary of DADA. Written during a residency at the Emily Harvey Foundation whilst suffering a hangover and serious Internet connection problems.
