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

Swine Flu and the Great Recession. Suddenly history is relevant, with talks of 1919 and 1929 and 1939 on the horizon? The War is over, and we got the best President ever – we got hope and maybe change — Jerry Garcia is playing on my Xbox. I’m standing on my head in the 21st Century, learning the Law of Evidence (“I’ve got an objection –“). Sitting on a couch. Sitting in a room. Smooth like a rhapsody. My several masterpiece. The mediation of communication. Sentences without verbs. The verb is implied — the ontalogical verb, the predicate noun, the substance dancing, the music of the strings. Nothing is lost. Everything old is new again. Yeats. Sailing to Byzantium. Gilded birdsong, delighting endless lines of Emperors, lost names of Bzyantium, stretching through the halls of memories.

Why do I fear graveyards but love bookstores? Why do I shun disease but love history? Am I looking for the part that remains? The internet, strange tool, new medium (new message), good news? slouching bethlehem, do the best lack conviction, are the worst the most passionate, can I jump up and down on the limbs of great trees flying up to heaven and then back down to human arms?

What a world, what a beautiful world, Shakespeare Watcher at the center of it all, he’s dead too, wrote it best, about the King and the Bunghole, Beevis and Butthead when I was young, South Park its dark reflection, everything reflected, the same old in and out, from a greater perspective our lives are all identical, I believe that the topology of existence is similar, I believe that what it feels like to be me is what it feels like to be you, or a bat for that matter, I believe that our qualia are close.

Cannot be proven. Why be good? Why do anything? Why not curl up into a corner, and watch the glass melt back into sand? Mouse run through the kitchen. My blood clutches to little molecules of oxygen, thirsty, jealous — an electric guitar — a digital representation of Apollo’s lute doubled back over and over again — we did not invent music, we discovered it — we did not invent law, we discovered it — we must love one another and/or die. Auden said that. Changed it to reflect deep sadness. MP3s — as much music as you want, but — quality is not quite the same. I live on an island, in the 21st century. Down at the bottom of this island, they are filling in a hole. Trying and failing to repair what was lost.

“What do I have in my pocket?” My mind is an archeolgical dig. Tel-Gezer. The Lost City of Troy. Does Helen stand on the walls? Do all these losses stir in me an unspeakable wrath, a rage to move Myrmidons, the deep secret desire to have my name known and repeated even after I return to dirt. Filth of the world clinging to me, clinging to us. I clean the walls of this apartment. Is is godly. It is godly. There are things we can do. Things we can do to change. We can clean. We can hold ourselves together. Oh, I am a river, overflowing my banks. I am a river, overflowing my banks. Bob Dylan you singer, you Shakespeare, what wonderful stories you told, what a wonderful way with words, sweet assonance there —

One day on my walking through this island of Manhattan, I will find a door leading into a basement, and when I open the door, I will be blinded by deep impenentrable light, and behind the light there will be a garden stretching to infinity and I will walk through the door and –

A certain madness — call it mermaids. Mermaids of the Hudson. The deep waters press close here. Close here. Close here. Close here. Here. There. The Sun sets, behind the palisades of New Jersey. The Statue of Liberty is still green. I am and I am not the center of the universe. My eyes look out on the world — but from where do they look? I twist in the twilight evening, and my song of is like a wind-chime, betraying both my location and the nature of the wind.

Bob Dylan

Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble
Ancient footprintss are everywhere
You can almost think that you’re seein’ double
On a cold, dark night on the Spanish stairs

Got to hurry on back to my hotel room
Where I’ve got me a date with Bottichellis niece
She promised that she’d be right there with me
When I paint my masterpiece

by Robert Frost

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust–
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
(Now am I free to be poetical?)
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows–
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father’s trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches

Thoughts on “This Is Water” (aka Kenyon Commencement Speech 2005) by David Foster Wallace:

1) The Terrible Master & The Wrong Way to Think
2) This Is Water
3) Self-Centered Default / Adjusting Yourself to Be Other Focused
4) Choosing What To Think About
5) Making Sacrifices
6) This Is Water

http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html

walk 

Tell me what you saw:

I saw hundreds of people splayed out on the grass of Hudson River Park. I saw a child running behind his father, mother, and sister in a stroller; he was drinking orange soda, his parents told him to save some for his sister; he did. Hippie chicks and Hipster chicks and girls in bikinis. Old Man with a cane shuffling. A couple in front of me, holding hands. A little kid on a little bike in the bikelane. Dangerous. Light across the water of the Hudson River. Water lapping at a piling of rocks. Chelsea Piers. A huge street fair on 10th or 9th Avenue in Chelsea. Printing shops. An independent bookstore. The biggests bookstore in the world, with science fiction, mythology, poetry, literay criticism, philosophy, and new releases. Broadway. Union Square Greenmarket. Sunglasses. Glass bowls sold by a white dreadlocked man. A sign that said “Going to California Tomorrow,” in front of a table of wares. A woman with a clipboard asking me if I’m registered to vote in New York City. No, I say. Crowded masses outside the Strand Bookstore, going through the dollar books. (Leavetakings of the Dead, I imagine). Too frustrated to fight the crowds. Phone calls from an upset Sugarplum. Walking behind a girl in a purple skirt. She turns right into the East Village. I turn left on 8th St. College students walking around. Washington Square Park. Sun in my eyes. Waiting at the corner to cross 6th Avenue. Past the sex shops and IFC theater. Bela Fleck has a movie playing. Crowded. Man selling books drops a cart, the masses stream around it. Joe’s Pizza. Two cheese slices and a bottle of coke for seven dollars. Walking past the deli, then a cafe, then a gelato place. Cross the street. Triangular park with large fountain in the middle. Learned recently this is new landscaping. People sitting. Elegant. Cross the street. Winston Churchill Park — full, first time I’ve seen it so. 6th Avenue. Restaurants have tables outside, full. Girl and her boyfriend in front of me. She’s wearing a tshirt and exercises pants. He’s wearing a buttoned shirt tucked into plaid shorts. King Street. I turn, and the sunlight is brilliant in my eyes. As I head into my apartment, a neighbor comes out past me, a girl — I cannot see her for the brightness.

Total Walk: 4.5 Miles.
Total Bookstores: 4
Total Time: 2.2 hours, w/ stops.
Total Purchases: $7, dinner.

WHAT IF
THERE WERE
NO OVERPAID STARS

NO EXPENSIVE SETS

NO SURE THING

NO … SOFT … FOCUS

NO … BIG … BUDGETS

NO GENERIC SHOTS

NO … SELL-OUTS

NO … BEATING … AROUND … THE … BUSH

NO RULES

NO HOLDING BACK

NO … FEAR … OF … SILENCE

NO EASY CHOICES

NO ESCAPE

NO CLICHES

NO FEAR

NO QUESTIONS

NO ANSWERS

NO FAKING IT

NO TRUTH | NO LIES

NO WRONG | NO RIGHT | NO GUTS | NO GLORY | NO FAME | NO FORTUNE | NO HOLLYWOOD ENDING |

NO CRASH

BOOM

every morning, reenacting that first arrival –
pulled naked and reluctant, out of dreams
and into life. its cold outside my blanket
my eyes blurry, myopic. (I have to pee).
Just a little longer under blankets.
I don’t want to start my day.

If it weren’t for your maturity none of this would have happened
If you weren’t so wise beyond your years I would’ve been able to control myself
If it weren’t for my attention you wouldn’t have been successful and
If it weren’t for me you would never have amounted to very much

Ooh this could be messy
But you don’t seem to mind
Ooh don’t go telling everybody
And overlook this supposed crime

We’ll fast forward to a few years later
And no one knows except the both of us
And I have honored your request for silence
And you’ve washed your hands clean of this

You’re essentially an employee and I like you having to depend on me
You’re kind of my protege and one day you’ll say you learned all you know from me
I know you depend on me like a young thing would to a guardian
I know you sexualize me like a young thing would and I think I like it

Ooh this could get messy
But you don’t seem to mind
Ooh don’t go telling everybody
And overlook this supposed crime

We’ll fast forward to a few years later
And no one knows except the both of us
And I have honored your request for silence
And you’ve washed your hands clean of this

what part of our history’s reinvented and under rug swept?
what part of your memory is selective and tends to forget?
what with this distance it seems so obvious?

Just make sure you don’t tell on me especially to members of your family
We best keep this to ourselves and not tell any members of our inner posse
I wish I could tell the world cuz you’re such a pretty thing when you’re done up properly
I might want to marry you one day if you watch that weight and keep your firm body

Ooh this could be messy and
Ooh I don’t seem to mind
Ooh don’t go telling everybody
And overlook this supposed crime

She says:
“Fame – at this point I say its a planetary value
Wealth, fame, power, at the cost of everytrhing else
I think that value, being shared around the planet
creates in people this thought that if I am famous, I will be happy
and what i’ve come to see is that fame only amplifies that which is there already
so if was depressed or I was insecure or angry or whatever it was
it just amplified it and made everything bigger and didn’t give mewhat it purported to be able to give
so there was this great disillusionment.

at this point in my life it’s clear that I share music bc its part of my life purpose
to write it – the act of the writing it is for me, the act of sharing it is so other people can make it their own
they an derive comfort or inspiration or whatever they want to derive from it so it becomes an offering of some kind
and bc of that I can do it, I can work really hard. If i was singularly doing it just to be in the public eye for gratuitous reasons
i’d probably last about an hour.”

Elbow:

• Grounds for Divorce
• The Bones of You
• One Day Like This

MGMT:

• Electric Feel
• Time to Pretend

Alanis Morisette:

• Hands Clean
• Perfect
• Hand in My Pocket