Thursday, August 28, 2014

Sends Down Silk Lines to the Flopping Marionette, Me






I'm told I'm fifty-five today. The world today is not what I thought it would be when I was twenty-five, thirty-five, forty-five, and no one is to blame for my epiphanies and disillusions but me, but I have loved ones, so I'm winning.

For my birthday I give myself unlimited permission to bleggalgaze - perhaps you believe me when I say you can imagine the restraint I impose on myself - and unlimited permission to fuck it, fuck this, and fuck me - perhaps you believe me when I say you're aware how much more self-indulgent I can be. I've given myself permission to take days off from scratching the clusterfuck - I caught myself reading non-fiction this past week, books of duh, smartly written, with new insights into duh, but books of duh nonetheless: did you know the world has been, is, and always will be run by motherfucking assholes, and what the fuck is wrong with me? Here, what I bought myself for my birthday:






That's the library's copy actually, I ordered mine last week from Amazon the day after I started using Kobo swearing I'd never use Amazon again, but Amazon was the only place I could find the Ammons. Fine metaphors and all. Here, a (not sent) letter from Ammons to Josephine Miles:

Earth, mind, art, everything, as far as I can tell, exists in held tension. For the earth, you know it is the poise between gravitation and centrifugal force. Etc. In exploring the "poise" of the earth, the "poise" of the mind, the "poise" of art, your must explore two ways; that is, both ways. For if you concentrate only the centrifugal force, earth meantime is gone to hell. If you reach the subconscious drives in mind, those that are common to all men, your lose what is vastly important, the symbologies by which the drives find expression and differentiation. So that a polarity is established between general, interior common drives, and the specific, superficially exterior, individual man. 
This has led me to a kind of fatalism. A long poem cannot be short; a short poem cannot be long. General man cannot exist as one man. And on and on. There are certain irresolvable polarities that exist in the context of change. This has changed my fatalism to operationalism, to the provisional, the working, the superficial event, the fine, momentary, differentiation (as in one leaf).

Yes. So, lots of Ammons here, lots of Ammons in real life, until this duh need scratched, that duh needs stroked. As for here, for my birthday I've given myself permission to daily remind myself I do this for me and mine. I haven't said that in a long time, haven't told myself that in a long time. I've given myself permission to indulge the old yodels.









WIRING

A.R. Ammons

Radiance comes down
on high and, staying,
sends down silk
lines to the flopping
marionette, me, but
love comes from
under the ruins and
sends the lumber up
limber into leaf that
touches so high it nearly
puts out the radiance




6 comments:

  1. Happy birthday. That guy you linked should be more kind.

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  2. Happy B-Day!

    I'll be joining you in a few months.
    ~

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  3. Yo, what Landru said. I hope you get those cha-cha boots you've been pining for!

    Also, thanks for the Ammons!

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  4. 1)happy birthday

    2)the 'silk lines flopping' reminds me of this

    "The subject of “Sky of Honey,” the second CD of [Kate Bush's] 2005 double-disc album, “Aerial,” is bird flight and song and sun — beauty, basically — and onstage, a 19th-century painter figure, played by young Mr. McIntosh, pantomimed putting it all on canvas, while a young boy, in the form of a wooden artist’s model turned into a puppet, acted out his fascination with birds."

    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/28/arts/music/kate-bush-returns-to-the-stage-and-her-fans-are-there-to-welcome-her.html?_r=0

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  5. old enough to know better, young enough to do it again?

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  6. A special b'day cascade @ chez moi pour vous.

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