Thursday, November 20, 2014

It Comes to the Monk in His Cell





Meredith Monk is 72 today. I understand why Earthgirl won't let me play most of what what she doesn't want to hear on our roads trips, but I don't get the shrieks of TURN IT OFF! TURN IT OFF! for Meredith Monk. Swans, yes, Karkowski, yes, but Monk is beautiful....

Blessed Serendipity, this is what I wrote for last year's Meredith Monk birthday post

Meredith Monk will be 71 tomorrow. This is true: the above youtube of Monk's Possibility of Destruction was meant to be posted alone (as in not here) at BLCKDGRDXLD just now to consecrate BLCKDGRDXLD as home blog in my mind if not in practice. This post is there now too (where it looks excellent) but consecration need wait. BLCKDGRD and BLCKDGRDXLD are on different google accounts for reasons pertaining to my technical ineptitude and the blogtrauma of the domain name renewal, I wanted a back-up blog on a different account in case BLCKDGRD's account was lost, dropped, or somehow compromised through either my digital clumsiness or google's bulldozering of clients while paving new profits. I like what I do here, I don't want to lose it, I go back for songs and poems. On my laptop I run BLCKDGRD on Firefox and BLCKDGRDXLD on Chrome so I can keep both accounts open simultaneously as I move back and forth. I need to youtube in Firefox since my youtube account is on the same log-in as my BLCKDGRD account, I opened what I thought was a new post at BLCKDGRDXLD, pasted the youtube, plunged Publish, oops. Have another piece.

So I'm a moron, but this shit fascinates me, is one of this shitty blog's primary themes and probably most consistent echo, as is the theme that I am the only one who finds this shit fascinating, as is the theme that I am a moron. I realize the cycle; I understand some of the reasons, the feeding of the reasons has always worked, worked as well as the MomCat and Napoleon Emergency Alert Systems always work (which are 24 hours from being activated): shit comes home, then runs away from home again. For instance, here is yesterday's post at the latest new place:

I am working my way through this tray of pens


 

to cull the living from the dead.
I am stomping the dead pens' heads into paper to give the pen
one appeal for clemency. There will not be a second trial.
When ink this color survived I will not throw it out though I will not use it.
I would buy packages of Sarasa pens (you who knew I would use the phrase
Sarasa pens again because perennial biennial semiannual centennial)
when I had too many Sarasa pens. This dark green in a pack of multicolors:
blacks, grays, dark blues, blues, maroons, dark greens are harvested.
Here's a Pilot black pen, see, it's wetter, thicker,
I'm not surprised it survived.
(Here I need a font of fading to death blue ink....) This maroon
Sarasa, the color of VNTY'SGRVYRD in most posts but this one.
The hiring committee committed the predictable. Plus the maroon pen just died.
In a national search there was not one candidate I could imagine advocating for hire.
Six pens out of thirty still dispense ink. I will drain each of life before buying more.






See? So: I want to post this here. It's like chancing a Monk when Earthgirl's in the car.




 


  • Air of resignation.
  • Facts, values, dark beerAs for me—well, all things considered, I find that being alive beats the stuffing out of the alternative, and that’s true even though I live in a troubled age in which scientific and technological progress show every sign of grinding to a halt in the near future, and in which warfare, injustice, famine, pestilence, and the collapse of widely held beliefs are matters of common experience. The notion that life has to justify itself to me seems, if I may be frank, faintly silly, and so does the comparable claim that I have to justify my existence to it, or to anyone else. Here I am; I did not make the world; quite the contrary, the world made me, and put me in the irreducibly personal situation in which I find myself. Given that I’m here, where and when I happen to be, there are any number of things that I can choose to do, or not do; and it so happens that one of the things I choose to do is to prepare, and help others prepare, for the long decline of industrial civilization and the coming of the dark age that will follow it.
  • Inside the world's most powerful terrorist organization!
  • President Warrento my way of thinking, a randpaul/lizzy campaign would be a renaissance of american political discourse. both of them say something, which has to be the starting point. hillary clinton says nothing and means nothing and, in public space, is nothing. and obviously warren could beat rand on a given november day, though rand is a surprisingly good politician and on another november day might beat her. (rand i think, has a less plausible road to the rep nomination than warren to the dem.) i like her against christie too, though i don't think christie will be the nominee. she makes a good contrast in a number of ways to jeb bush, whereas jeb and hillary are indistinguishable
  • The die is cat.
  • Marilynne Robinson redux.
  • Donald Antrim, for those of you who do.
  • Ashbery and the phenomenology of waiting.
  • Yes, the Jane Kenyon poem below selected in part today for the obvious line used in this shitty post's title though that is a minor reason it is the poem posted most often to this shitty blog.



  


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HAPPINESS

Jane Kenyon

There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
                     It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.




1 comment:

  1. I figured how to fb your blog.So you can go back to being a fame slut whore the way you want. Excited to find you.Do you know Zizek?He just went on fb so you can friend him.I will probably put you n his tomorrow. I've decided to give him a present every day so he will ck in and say something.Tomorrow I will give you and Meredith to him.Thanks for putting so many together to listen to.And glad you like Annie. Avery is next for you.

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