The influence of gaslight or electric light on the growth of paraheliotropic trees

There is a marching band sound to this band — and a very clear voice — simple rhythm — lyrics I can hear — simple true poetry — the love songs of a fifteen year old girl in the 1960s, writing her thoughts into a purple spiral bound notebook while the record plays Pet Sounds — How did this thing called Time ever come to pass?

My mind is broken — like my language. I don’t know what time it is. Where in our galactic circuit do we now stand? 10,000 civilizations — 10,000 civilizations out there — are they liberals like us — do they love and hunger for love — do they love their children — believe in free markets? how many eyes do they have and how many arms? Do they war against each other with rayguns and hovercars? Hey Buck Rogers, Hey Flash Gordon, There’s a Bomb in the Air, Ticking.

How do I know that the world didn’t end in 1962 and I’m just the mind-dream of an alternate universe hovering? As I sit here trapped in this fleshbody, mostly forgetting about it, except for the aching in my right foot, I know I could be anywhere anyone — my soul (my mind) my soul (my mind) floats away from this as easily as from anything else – trading miseries, let’s call it.

Why sing of miseries? Sing of all the beautiful things you’ve seen this past year — the Washington Monument out your dining room window — the Empire State Building from your roof — a dreadlocked guitarist in Washington Square Park — a ruffled white miniskirt lifted up by the wind — driving a rented car across the Golden Gate Bridge — your face — the face that I didn’t know sixteen months ago — the face I’ve come to love — the face that loves me back — these visions — did I imagine them? Did I dream them? Did I dream myseslf holding you in my bed in Arlington, Virginia, in Chevy Chase, in Philadelphia and Rochester and Monterey and New York City and New Haven?

This love affair — tinged by something — the first gray hair in my twenty-something head that I can’t yet see — I lie here on my maroon bed in my peach room in the City that Never Sleeps not sleeping. And I don’t think about the past or all that history of jazz — I look to the future — that time which is as of yet unknown — still plastic and pliable — mine to make — mine to hold — unknown — new frontiers — where maybe I’ll find strengths I never knew I had —

There will be other things — sickness — mourning — grief — and the sleepdeath at the end — maybe I’ll miss it — don’t want to miss it — fear of death is real but is also a dodge, a step out of the way — clearly a symbol / synechdoce, standing in for something else — I’m standing on my head, juggling cats for your amusement, the 1st cat’s name is Dedication, the 2nd cat’s name is Truth, and the 3rd cat’s name is Dinah —

Is this poetry? Philosophy? Research. No – no – like Bill Shakespeare, I lack Latin and have less Greek — and yet, here in Fourth Rome, New Babylon, Not Sleeping, I write, staring backward at the long generations of Western History, watching as we all rose together from fear and darkness and slavery to this brave new world of freedom, love, and light — we must care for each other — we must care for ourselves. we must care for each other. Is there irony here? Maybe — irony of false thought. Irony of procrastination — would it be enough for me? To be a scribe? To be a poet? A minstrel dancing? The bullockbefriending bard? Oh, the sentences I’d write — crossing the streets and catching the eye of a strange girl who does not know me and I don’t know her — not thinking about the strange view that might/must be seen from behind her face if I could be her for a moment — and see myself, ugly but intense, as others see me — matted hair — eyes dancing behind squared-off spectacles — already becoming an affectation in this brand new 21st century — give me plastic lenses — the tiredness of morning and touching my finger to my eyeball — I cannot stand it some mornings — and yet — lighter on my face all day — I can feel the lightness. Shat my brains out this morning. Almosts missed my interview.

I got my god and I got my gun and I got my bitterness too — up and back and up and back the northeasts corridor from Washington to the City of Brotherly Love and I’m ok if you’re ok and the night is long in the City that Never Sleeps and I’m not sleeping and I hear your voice on the telephone and it makes me smile and it makes me warm and I am coming to come see you on a train and take you in my arms and spin you round like ring-around-the-really-really-rosey dance, in and out, up now down, left right, left right, watching screens of screens glowing, humming, brightlight lightbright etch-a-sketch my darling in the Twenty First Century in the Twenty First Century I’ll see you in the Twenty First Century I’ll meet you — and can wax quixotic and I can count to ten and skate across the lake in icy winter with the ducks trapped below swimming swimming swimming in Central Park in winter – spring is coming, baby, spring is coming, baby — hey there, snowflake, hey there, hey there, hey there, I got rhythm and I got soul and dance with me tonight, dance with me in Paris and dance with me in Spain — televised revolutions burst out on the screen — the books —

people thinking – thinking that one misery being much the same as another, they may as well change — in the interest of trying something new and reminding themselves they are alive. Is such behavior — in this world of the horrible and the miserable — irrational?

or there are the conservative, not wanting the reminder, who like what they have, love it, or have learned to ignore it, and the thought of some new tragedy.

Heinrich Heine, who wrote in an 1833 work on the German Romantic period that “every epoch is a sphinx which plunges into the abyss as soon as its problem is solved.”

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22156

The look of your film is reminiscent of the banal landscapes enshrined by American photographers in the ’70s.

Stephen Shore, Robert Adams and Joe Deal’s photography are big influences and part of that school of “man-altered landscapes.” For me a landscape that’s completely free of man-made stuff is not that interesting. I like a little bit of a footprint.

Kelly Reichardt, Interviewed by Deborah Solomon for the NY Times Magazine, November 30th.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/magazine/30wwln-Q4-t.html?ref=magazine

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber

Half cracked light bounces against dark velvet corners, in which men in suits sit with women in cheap dresses made beautiful by the soft light and their laughings at old jokes long forgotten by the turning — on the little half stage, old footlights shining up the red velvet suit is a tall and pale androgyne, with greasy long black hair hanging across his eyes, singing into an old 1940s microphone, circular with great big spokes like some pagan wizard’s staff – his voice is haunting — high pitched jazz — words beyond meaning in the smokey room — glasses on the tables vibrate, liquid amber shakes — visceral shivering as the voice crawls higher hitting higher and higher notes — the song is an old one — invented someone else, not hear in this city, but down many rivers, in the rice fields, in the cotton fields, brought here by a subject race from deepest furthest Africa, still a mystery to these white bankers and their ladies, drinking at the end of the world — the alcohol is an imperfect medium, but still, with enough of it coursing down their arteries and up their veins, pushing past the blood brain barrier and making vision skew and twist — out of the corner of their eyes, these sad humans, the audience, can see something else, some shadow vision of the world that will be, the world without them, the 21st century they won’t live to see, or the 18th, or before, but also, heightened sense of the now, that holy moment they’re usually too dead to feel — the alcohol clears some dead wood, and the voice clears some more, and the girl in their arms, living and breathing and looking back at them, maybe that clears the most. It is dark in the club, so dark, light bouncing out of the way, but they know that they are here, now, in this special place. They have some sense they are on a speck of dust floating in a vast unmeasurable cold emptiness — they have some sense that the religious tales they hear on Sundays may not be so different than the fairy tales of unicorns and dragons they read to their children at night — but the alcohol and the voice and the women — counteract these feelings, remind them of the present, here but not here, always slipping, held on to, but slipping — the voice sings on — carrying them into the next moment — eighty years from now this building will be gone and these people will be gone — there will be other people and other buildings and another singer — different lighting — but here they drink and listen, sitting in shadows, lights fragmenting —

demoscene — european coders who have been creating beautiful scenes for the past twenty five years on their computers — large festivals of sexually frustrated boys sitting in arenas staring at computer screens — weed passed around, and beer — a few girls here and there, eventually passing out sexual favors — a few homosexuals, doing the same — mostly sexless, sublimated, nervous and angry —

— different languages — bloodshot eyes — computer screens dancing — someone is keeping time — someone is trying to figure out what to do — its a new europe — a new world — people are hungry — im not hungry — can i make this computer sing ? can i make it sing?

the late night insomniac madness | the light always on, glowing | screens | screens | what year is it? | how did I get here | are there channels in my mind like the empty wadis of Mars? | Dug deep by endless-pain and longing and suffering | where do dreams go when they die? | The Last Play of William Darcy — the play I’d never written — Kate and Darcy — Elizabeth Trueheart, Lovely and Wise — who will I be, what song will I play for you | David and the Nightingale, teaching songs to each other | Old Stern Midianite, with Fire in Your Belly | Pinchas lusting after Midianite Women | The JudeoChristian AllFather With Stern Judgment and Morality | Where now is the God Who Loves? Are we Serpent’s Seed or Adam’s? Old Mother Eve, she lived in her bonnet, eating her curds and whey | Put put Old Mutt | What I lack is control and formality — the old way of speaking — hooked on phonics worked for me — laughing at the dumb ones — but they are not dumb, just slow, just beautifully mercifully slow — staring across a table at the new girl who I’m about to fall in love with — I want to see her breasts — what are these what are these | Two second aphorisms | Thirty minute shortstories | Characters are not characters they are not real I could give them names like Tim Leary or Will Darcy or Ron McCrae or Steven Barry or Edna Millay or Soren Jorgenson but what do they mean they’re not real, they don’t have fathers and mothers and little half-remembered childhoods like I do like they do — you walk into Elsewhere and you go play a game, the game is called “I have that” it’s a memory game, but it’s sacred because it’s your memory | Oh stop the changes | I lying in bed, but it’s a different bed than my old bed, my poor old single twin side bed | I am not back there, in 2002, tripping my face off, thinking I’m a soul trapped in a troll, praying for another chance, to go back to the beginning — “May I return … to the beginning … ” lovely — a trip to New York City in 1994 — a walk through the tenement museum — I will be a writer I say — I will be a Supreme Court Justice, I say — the Constitution is a book – it is my book it is my holy book I love the law why do you love the law — Justice Justice Pursue it Pursue it Justice — Marian the Librarian — Blech a blech on both your houses — the endless dying — true dying — not dying — the living that feels like dying but isn’t dying — the horror — Chinese food for dinner in my apartment — rain — a cockroach — horror of horrors strange worms, small insects crawling — a forest , deep underbrush , where do we go where do we go five years since college I feel like I am nearing the end of a long journey — JImi was dead by now , I don’t want to be dead I want to go on and on and on and on and on and back to Europe and over to Asia and other places too — always a student — pay back my loans? How — -a book about Rasputin and the Dying Past? Could write it — yes — the decadence — and then write another book about Godless Lenin — Shadow Country and Seminole Wars and Andrew Jackson and the forgotten history of this great New World where our fathers bled and died and raped and pillaged — great ugly White Masters — black slaves — distrusted Jews — Oh my fathers, I remember you all, you wonderful Americans of These American Centuries — I will dance with you on you 300th birthday, America, and then I’ll bid adieu, Frenchwise, and spend my last few days in glowing neon late 21st century Paris, capital of the hip-avant-garde — the world moves on without me even now — tied together with fiberoptic skeins — who are the spiders crawling on the webs — Shelobs or Charlottes or something else, Nobodaddy or Somodaddy, Soma or Germ — oh great machine would I trade places with you and trade this mushy mess for ones and zeros ? we are all electrons, strange loops in spacetime, curving and deforming, reducible, yes reducible, to multivariarate differential equations — representations of change, they say, the name of my book, my book, is the Book of Changes. Loveliness loveliness loveliness mindless sex and wonderful sex and being held by a woman by a girl by a woman by a girl different woman unique and precious diamond as you are a diamond I give you a diamond and make my house with you on the hill — who shall who shall come with me, who shall stand with me — the death is subdued it has returned to the ocean it is now ground and I am the figure I no longer dramatize myself write myself into strange stories I am simply the narrator, the eyes, two eyes, stereoscopic yet still not avoiding the parallax problem James Joyce is dead — he said — James Joyce is dead — language you wonderful robe — language learns from me and I learn from language and God breathes his breath across the water and I breath back and there is something something something special unique eternal I am the only one reincarnation is death-denying a way of death-denying, heaven is the same and death-denying is life affirming and is therapy the answer maybe what’s wrong with me why can’t I enjoy myself this is no longer psychonaalysis this is a pyschotic break what happened to me staying up all night and tracing the skeins of causation in my own life, leading forward and backward to an evening in my childhood bed when reading a large oversized book (either thinks that go or Richard Scary or the Little Engine that Could) I closed the book on my penis which I assumed accounted for the slight angle I found in it during pubertus pubertus which I assumed would render me unable to have sex — I wonder how long I carried that with me that strange thought idea — everyone thinks that they’re broken — I thought I was broken — wonder why and how those strange feelings those strange hormones driving me crazy absolutely and utterly crazy and yet I am crazier now right, why the satisfaction or the frustration or what or what or what or what 1000 words have I painted you a picture, my guineas clink in my pocket as I amble my way down the cobblestones of Tortuga, searching for a ship to take me there — dark Tortuga — in the old days before the world changed — pirate freedom, they called it, the Free Cities — nothing left is free, all is Organized and Synchronized, where is the Great Wide Open Fields, the Great Endless Freedom of Possibility — Laws are fences — terrible fences — I hates it, I hates it, I hates it — I shall do nothing with this law degree, nothing with this law degree, nothing with this law degree it is not my path it is not my choice it is not my passion false passion gotta do something gotta do something I’m not convincing anyone urggha I sound disingenuous — what shall I do? what shall I do with it? I thought this was what I wanted

you’re young, you think you’ll have many chances, but then as you grow older (and this happens sooner than you think, I’m only twenty six), you realize you don’t have many chances, you only have a few, and if you miss them, you miss them.