Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Fever-Dream Tapestries



  • ▲On the dangers of asking me if I've desire to have this shit published and would I consider submitting it for publication. Yes. No. btw.
  • I said thank you, what a Kind thing to ask and say, and my friend said No problem, and I again marvel that no problem has completely eclipsed you're welcome as the standard response to thank you, and this has to signify something, yes?
  • I just saw this via the invaluable :::wood s lot:::, and I'm averse to manifestos for fear of my cravings for doctrines, but:

THE EIGHT PRINCIPLES OF UNCIVILISATION 
‘We must unhumanise our views a little, and become confident As the rock and ocean that we were made from.’
  1. We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All around us are signs that our whole way of living is already passing into history. We will face this reality honestly and learn how to live with it.
  1. We reject the faith which holds that the converging crises of our times can be reduced to a set of ‘problems’ in need of technological or political ‘solutions’.
  1. We believe that the roots of these crises lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves. We intend to challenge the stories which underpin our civilisation: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from ‘nature’. These myths are more dangerous for the fact that we have forgotten they are myths.
  1. We will reassert the role of storytelling as more than mere entertainment. It is through stories that we weave reality.
  1. Humans are not the point and purpose of the planet. Our art will begin with the attempt to step outside the human bubble. By careful attention, we will reengage with the non-human world.
  1. We will celebrate writing and art which is grounded in a sense of place and of time. Our literature has been dominated for too long by those who inhabit the cosmopolitan citadels.
  1. We will not lose ourselves in the elaboration of theories or ideologies. Our words will be elemental. We write with dirt under our fingernails.
  1. The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.
Black Mountain Manifesto.

  • The authors of the manifesto deploy Robinson Jeffers poems, so I'm vulnerable.
  • My daughter's college graduation and plunge into adulthood have opened up possibilities of actions (and inactions) for my consideration. I have no immediate plans to dangle from a bridge by a cord over the Columbia River in Portland to stop Exxon icebreakers from sailing to despoil an Alaskan bay, but I am available to be open to changes - by which I mean acting upon rather than bitching about - that have been unavailable to me while I lovingly and without hesitation led the quiet and compliant life I promised to lead from my daughter's birth to her entrance into her own adult life. Hindering me, of course, is my fear of my cravings for doctrine, any doctrine....
  • Blessed Serendipity, on DeLillo. I started Players last night (before seeing the article via tweet this morning), a return to DeLillo might be the icebreaker I need to despoil this fucking reading slump.
  • I do believe in Szymborska!
  • You can buy me the new Bidart for my birthday, please.
  • My Destroyer overdose continues:









NIGHT WITHOUT SLEEP

Robinson Jeffers

The world’s as the world is; the nations rearm and prepare to change; the age of tyrants returns;
The greatest civilization that has ever existed builds itself higher towers on breaking foundations.
Recurrent episodes; they were determined when the ape’s children first ran in packs, chipped flint to an edge.

I lie and hear dark rain beat the roof, and the blind wind.

                                                                                       In the morning
   perhaps I shall find strength again
To value the immense beauty of this time of the world, the flowers of decay their pitiful loveliness, the fever-dream
Tapestries that back the drama and are called the future. This ebb of vitality feels the ignoble and cruel
Incidents, not the vast abstract order.

                                                          I lie and hear dark rain beat the roof, and the night-blind wind.

In the Ventana country darkness and rain and the roar of waters fill the deep mountain-throats.
The creekside shelf of sand where we lay last August under a slip of stars
And firelight played on the leaning gorge-walls, is drowned and lost. The deer of the country huddle on a ridge
In a close herd under madrone-trees; they tremble when a rock-slide goes down, they open great darkness-
Drinking eyes and press closer.

                                              Cataracts of rock
Rain down the mountain from cliff to cliff and torment the stream-bed. The stream deals with them. The laurels are wounded,
Redwoods go down with their earth and lie thwart the gorge. I hear the torrent boulders battering each other,
I feel the flesh of the mountain move on its bones in the wet darkness.

                                                                                  Is this more beautiful
Than man’s disasters? These wounds will heal in their time; so will humanity’s. This is more beautiful....at night....




5 comments:

  1. Get your own gorram Bidet, I'm already working on your birthday. You're welcome. About which I agree with you without qualification or reservation, and gee, I sure have an urge to smack everyone under the age of 40 who answers my gratitude with "no problem." Oh, good. Hang on and let me do something that is a problem, you mannerless fucking twit.

    Who the fuck raises these people?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Reminds me of this: http://throwgrammarfromthetrain.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-problem-with-your-no-problem-problem.html

      Delete
    2. I know, right?

      That? Great Tic Shift Two.

      Delete
  2. I'm a personal fan of "..., no?" as question tag. As if "innit" ain't good enough.

    ReplyDelete
  3. in spanish they say "de nada" which is sort of like "no problem", innit?

    ReplyDelete