Saturday, April 12, 2008

my tardy contribution to the artaud dialogue

outsider art beginning with artaud

from the ubu web site

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

to hell. with wings.

.
.
i believe that scars
arise in preconcieved spots.
long stems that sprout sideways
along the skin because they don't
look for light. but like a backyard
dog they look for a way out. instead
they stay. hang themselves on walls
smile back from family albums,
await narration from an aging
mother's finger. she talk about scars
her secondary ones. the windswept sun
dries up the blood. i slept

in this bedroom once. history covers you
like a blanket leaves you warm
then sits folded in a corner. i've always
thought of a wheelchair as justice.

their half-words weigh on
my shoulders, a broken scale
awaiting counterparts.
.

Monday, April 7, 2008

Dear Andre Breton

I had to again find a body that was proof against absolute
and infinte pain.
Those who would have liked to be good and to love me were
not old enough nor numerous enough to resist the others.
that is to say the hell of nameless beasts.
to invite them to listen one needs barricades and bombs.
there is no cosmos where man is his world to himself, alone.
i no longer believe in any notion, science or knowledge,
and especially not a hidden science (a mystic surrealism).
no universal reality, no absolute to be know and to which
one must be led, that is to say, inatiated
to confine oneself in the knowledge of particulars
of castrates and pedants which has been done
by a very limited # of indv.

Yours.
Artaud.

And my love for the Vesica Piscis of philosophy and psychology.

Sunday, April 6, 2008

Standards of Measurement

More than parliament, the great London fire of 1834 destroyed the weights and measures which standardized units of economic trade in the United Kingdom. Departing Washington the first of June 1843, bound for her majesty’s kingdom, a complete set of scales and one large measure on board a vessel measured nothing but the random sway of waves and the refusal of inertia. Exactly 173 days, which are not invariable, prior to his death, Hassler, the craftsman of these scales permanently waves a white handkerchief to the parting ship while baring his dull wooden teeth. He is 74.

The federally commissioned scales present an irony of good will not only because they are passed across the Atlantic between shores of former enemies but that they were passed by a congressional joint resolution of good will. These replicas of scales replace scales Hassler once journeyed to see in London, but was arrested and held as an alien enemy for two years. Was Hassler smiling because he made the weights for export too heavy, and import too light? In London, July 24, 1843 Sir George Clerk performed an inventory which assured these scales were not swallowed by a slit in the skin of the scarless sea. Without a comparable standard, who is to say these scales were accurate?

Today, within a bunker some several yards beneath The Office of Weights and Measures, just across the street from the Capitol Building, a hand crafted foot rests beneath a glass casing within a vault. No loquacious fire may lick a nanometer from the imperial standard length. Water may press every seal, yet every seal denies entry. The silent vandal, invisible, passes through each wall and sets within them a calendar of collapse. Yes, even the federal standard foot possesses within it, a half-life towards obsolescence. Every scale and measurement available to our civilization finds its ultimate, it’s federal reference here.

TJ max, in his congressional address on standard measures once said, “There exists not in nature, as far as has been hitherto observed, a single subject or species of subject, accessible to man, which presents one constant and uniform dimension.” Thomas Jefferson, with a posthumous IQ of 138, predicated the creation of such standards for the United States. Yet, in the absence of uniform nature, TJ offers the following solution: “Matter, then, by its mere extension, furnishing nothing invariable, its motion is the only remaining resource.. a pendulum, then, becomes itself a measure of determinate length, to which all others may be referred to as to a standard. But even a pendulum is not without its uncertainties.”
But what of Hassler's teeth?

Overheard poetry: "You have to learn another language or else you're stuck." - a Dutch man speaking of the narrow size of his country.

And Franke, as I promised too long ago:
It is Not About Ruling The Young, Hoagland, Ruefle connection.