all living things

transpire: love alone

transforms

desire

the measure

of the black chrysanthemum,

that nothing

is anything

but itself, is

too much: I alone

live in the sun.

How to outrage

creation

Personals
C.D. Wright

Some nights I sleep with my dress on. My teeth
are small and even. I don't get headaches.
Since 1971 or before, I have hunted a bench
where I could eat my pimento cheese in peace.
If this were Tennessee and across that river, Arkansas,
I'd meet you in West Memphis tonight. We could
have a big time. Danger, shoulder soft.
Do not lie or lean on me. I'm still trying to find a job
for which a simple machine isn't better suited.
I've seen people die of money. Look at Admiral Benbow. I wish
like certain fishes, we came equipped with light organs.
Which reminds me of a little known fact:
if we were going the speed of light, this dome
would be shrinking while we were gaining weight.
Isn't the road crooked and steep.
In this humidity, I make repairs by night. I'm not one
among millions who saw Monroe's face
in the moon. I go blank looking at that face.
If I could afford it I'd live in hotels. I won awards
in spelling and the Australian crawl. Long long ago.
Grandmother married a man named Ivan. The men called him
Eve. Stranger, to tell the truth, in dog years I am up there.

"I think that if a woman is gifted and she’s attractive she’s going to have a great time on earth. Why would she want to be anything else? I don’t think of myself as a strong woman. I never even heard that word about me until recently. I always thought that bluntly I was a glamorous goddamn exciting woman. I didn’t want to be strong at anything. I wanted to have a ball on earth. But I wanted it through the channels that I want.”

--Louise Nevelson, Dawns and Dusks: Taped Conversations

The Doomed in Their Sinking
William H. Gass

Crane went sudden as a springboard. The Gulf gave nothing back. My mother, I remember, took her time. She held the house around her as she held her bathrobe, safely doorpinned down its floorlength, the metal threads glinting like those gay gold loops which close the coat of a grenadier, though there were gaps of course…unseemly as sometimes a door is on a chain…so that to urinate she had to hoist the whole thing like a skirt, collecting the cloth in fat pleats with her fingers, wads which soon out-oozed her fists and sprang slowly away…one consequence…so that she felt she had to hover above the hole, the seat (clouds don't care about their aim), unsteadily…necessarily…more and more so as the nighttime days drew on, so that the robe grew damp the way the sweater on a long drink grows, soggy from edge to center, until I found I cared with what success she peed when what she swallowed was herself and what streamed out of her in consequence seemed me.

Though Hart shed his bathrobe frugally before he jumped, my mother, also saving, would have worn hers like the medal on a hussar straight through living room and loony bin, every nursing home and needle house we put her in, if those points hadn't had to come out (they confiscate your pins, belts, buckles, jewelry, teeth, and they'd take the air, too, if it had an edge, because the crazy can garrote themselves with a length of breath, their thoughts are open razors, their eyes go off like guns), though there was naturally no danger in these baubles to herself, for my mother was living the long death, her whole life passing before her as she went, the way those who drown themselves are said to have theirs pass…a consequence, yes…her own ocean like a message in a bottle, so that she sank slowly somewhere as a stone sill sinks beneath the shoes of pilgrims and tourists, not like Plath with pills, or Crane or Woolf with water, Plath again by gas, or Berryman from a bridge, but, I now believe, in the best way possible, because the long death is much more painful and punishing than even disembowelment or bleach, and it inflicts your dying on those you are blaming for it better than burning or blowing up—during an exquisitely extended stretch—since the same substance which poisons you, preserves, you both have and eat, enjoy and suffer your revenges together, as well as the illusion that you can always change your mind.

The Kook Who Fell To Earth: Growing Up With Captain Beefheart

By: Lester Bangs, 1977

Part One: On the 7th Day He Invented a Whole New Universe

Captain Beefheart is back. Where did he go in the first place, you might ask. which is not such an easy question to answer.

Like many things to do with Don Van Vliet - who has been around in one incarnation or another for over a decade now and is considered by many people to be one of the few authentically avant-garde artists in rock - it may devolve to a simple statement that there is the world, and then there is the captain, who even in his material and musical presence might just as well be broadcasting beast linguals through a foghorn on the dark side of the moon so far as the mainstream pop audience of any era knows or cares.

If that's the way you feel, you might as well feel free to skip this article altogether. because after a brief period of commercial compromise in the name of 'accessibility' followed by a couple of years off the set entirely, he has returned to the music and the English language on his own terms - the terms he invented almost completely alone - and has been able to school a handful of other musicians over the years, offering his rare gifts to a world which has mostly found him difficult, eccentric at best, sometimes unnerving, perhaps insane, and generally incomprehensible.

There are just some things that are not for everybody and never will be, and the consensus with the captain is that you either take him whole and revel in what almost amounts to a parallel universe, or not at all.

Part Two
 

Part Three 

The Making of a Novel

      I can no longer recall where it began but I know I did not start at the beginning. It was, in a manner of speaking, all written simultaneously. Everything was there, or appeared to be there as if within the temporal space of an open piano with its simultaneous keys.

    I wrote with the utmost care as the narrative began to take shape inside me, and only after the fifth version had been patiently drafted did I become fully aware of the text. Only then did I begin to understand more clearly what was waiting to be expressed.

     My great feat was that, out of impatience with my slowness in understanding myself, I might arrive at some meaning with undue haste. I had the impression , or rather felt certain that the more time I gave myself, the more spontaneously would the narrative begin to surface.

     Increasingly I find that it is all a matter of patience, of love begetting patience, of patience begetting love.

      The book came together simultaneously as it were, emerging more here than there, or suddenly more there than here: I would interrupt a sentence in Chapter Ten , let us say, in order to write Chapter Two, which I would then abandon for months on end while I wrote Chapter Eighteen. I showed endless patience: putting up with the considerable inconvenience of disorder without any reassurance that I would finish the book. But then order, too, can bring a sense of disquiet.

      As always, the greatest difficulty is waiting. (I’m feeling rather odd, a woman will tell her doctor. You’re going to have a baby. And here was me thinking I was dying, the woman replies.) My deformed soul growing and swelling, while I remain uncertain whether something is about to come to light.

      In addition to this tiresome waiting, it requires infinite patience to reconstitute in gradual stages the initial vision which came in a flash. Recovering that vision is extremely difficult.

     And to make matters worse, I am quite hopeless when it comes to editing. I am incapable of narrating an idea, and do not know how to ‘embellish an idea with words’. What I write does not refer to past thought, but to thought in the present: whatever comes to the surface is already expressed in the only possibly words, or simply does not exist.

     As I write them down, I am convinced once more that, however paradoxical it may sound, the greatest drawback about writing is that one had to use words. It is a problem. For I should prefer a more direct form of communication, that tacit understanding one often finds between people. If I could write by carving wood or by stroking a child’s head or strolling in the countryside, I would never resort to using worse. I would do what so many people do who are not writers, and with the same joy and torment as those who write, and with the same bitter disappointments which are beyond consolation. I would live and no longer use words. And this might be the solution. And as such, be most welcome.

--Clarice Lispector

   (from Selected Cronicas: The Making of a Novel, May 2^nd 1970)

Soulstorm
Clarice Lispector

       Ah, had I but known, I wouldn’t have come into this world, ah, had I but known, I wouldn’t have come into this world. Madness is neighbor to the cruelest prudence. I swallow madness because it calmly leads me to hallucinations. Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water, Jack fell down, Jill kissed his crown, and they lived happy-unhappy ever after. The chair is an object to me. It is useless while I look at it. Tell me, please, what time it is, so I’ll know I’m alive at that time.  Creativity is unleashed by a germ and I don’t have that germ today, but I do have an incipient madness which in itself is a valid creation. I have nothing more to do with the validity of things. I am free or lost. I’m going to tell you a secret: life is lethal. We maintain the secret because in utter silence, each of us, as we face ourselves, because to do so is convenient and doing otherwise would make each moment lethal. The object chair has always interested me. I look at this one, which is old, bought at an antique shop, and empire chair; one couldn’t imagine a greater simplicity of line contrasting with the seat of red felt. I love objects in proportion to how little they love me. But if I don’t understand what I’m writing, the fault isn’t mine. I have to speak, for speaking saves. But I don’t have a single word to say. I am gagged by words already spoken. What does one person say to another? How about “how’s it going?” If the madness of honesty worked, what would people say to one another? The worst of it is what a person would say to himself, yet that would be his salvation, even if honesty is determined on a conscious level while the terror of honesty comes from the part it plays in the vast unconscious that links me to the world and to the creative unconscious of the world. Today is a day for starry sky, at least so promises this sad afternoon that a human word could save.
      I open my eyes wide, but it does no good: I merely see. But the secret, that I neither see nor feel. The record player is broken, and to live without music is to betray the human condition, which is surrounded by music. Besides, music is an abstraction of thought, I’m speaking of Bach, Vivaldi, Handel. I can only write if I am free, uncensored, otherwise I succumb. I look at the Empire chair, and this time it is as if it too had looked and seen me. The future is mine as long as I live. In the future there will be more time to live and, higgledy-piggledy, to write. In the future one will say: had I but known, I wouldn’t have come into this world. Marli de Oliveira, I don’t write to you because I only know how to be intimate. In fact, all I can do, whatever the circumstances, is be intimate: that’s why I’m even more silent. Everything that never got done, will it one day get done? The future technology threatens to destroy all that is human in man, but technology does not touch madness; and it is there that the human in man takes refuge. I see the flowers in the vase: they are beautiful and yellow. But my cook says: what ugly flowers. Just because it is difficult to understand and love what is spontaneous and Franciscan. To understand the difficult is no advantage, but to love what is easy to love is a great step upward on the human ladder. How many lies I am forced to tell. But with myself I don’t want to be forced to lie. Otherwise what remains to me? Truth is the final residue of all things, and in my unconscious is the same truth as that of the world. The moon, as Paul Eluard would say, is éclatante de silence. I don’t know if the Moon will show at all today, since it is already late and I don’t see it anywhere in the sky. Once I looked up at the night sky, circumscribing it with my head tilted back, and I become dizzy from the many stars that appear in the county, for the country sky is clear. There is no logic, if one were to think a bit about it, in the perfectly balanced illogicity of nature. Nor in that of human nature either. What would the world be like, the cosmos, if man did not exist? If I could always write as I am writing now, I would be in the midst of a tempestade de cerebro, a “brainstorm” Who might have invented the chair? Someone who loved himself? He therefore invented a greater comfort for his body. Then centuries passed and no one really paid attention any more to a chair, for using it is simply automatic. You have to have courage to stir up a brainstorm: you never know what may come to frighten us. The sacred monster died: in its place a solitary girl was born. I understand, of course, that I will have to stop, not for lack of words, but because such things, and above all those things I’ve only thought and not written down, usually don’t make it into print.

(from Where You Were at Night, 1974. Translated by Alexis Levitin)

--From a letter Hemingway wrote to friend Bill Horn in 1919. The letter was written the same day he received word from girlfriend Agnes that she intended to marry another man.