Why Write?

"Why not," quips Durs Grunbein, a preeminent post-wall German poet and essayist. What's worse than not writing? The proposition, 'Why Write', subtly imposes a norm now in antiquity: most people don't write. With the proliferation of blogs, thematic territories of ones life may be sketched on the walls of an open house. Daily practice of sending texts on cell phones demands people to employ an economy of language and syntactical rephrasing into compact parts. Twitter recently attempted to claim a right to a "new poetry" developed from the form of the tweet. That simply won't work, and not only because it cannot substantiate that claim as exclusive. Writers are no longer the exception, and strangely, with that, they loose acceptance. I don't mean this in the idea that a populous of aggregated means devalues the form, but that in its overabundance, the prescription for a writer to live apart no longer applies when their value becomes commodity. This contemporary apex of literacy measures not in what one reads, but in what one writes.

“I don’t want to frighten you,” Grunbein sharply remarks, “but have you thought about what happens to people who aren’t artists?” They're vulnerable to forget history, to act as mere witness, not murderer or victim. Everything is tepid. Existence provides more for being than a stenographer's introspection. Instead of being, there's to-be-being. The static will for the mimetic approach to art and poetry cripples the artist into an act of helplessness, of simply existing outside the created world and to comment on it. They are the historians of the present, locked away from their capacity to act without further entangling themselves in a growing past and shrinking future. I want not to hide in storehouse of memory, but in the margins of the unnoticably undressing horizon; so long as I approach it. But there's no walking away from that horizon, now, is there? We are surrounded.

The growing preference of written word over the spoken word in american culture speaks little as to what symbols are being manipulated by that move. Language itself, possess no determinant anima, but acts as an acquired history driftlessly manipulated, graffiti-ed, curated and removed from use. Our interaction with this mute force changes our stratagem in speaking with one another as well as our packaging and editing the information which is allowed for use in hyper-public versus the physically-public interactions. Symbolic orders thrive when most of our interactions (or how we perceive interactions) occur in an abstract symbolic reality apart from physical limits, external cycles (daylight, for instance), and culturally aging norms of engagement. Lower percentages of the elderly's use of new technology provides a short window in which this youthful symbolism thrives, as the next generation of AARP members will have grown up or used technology in social or workforce conditions and will resonate their older technologically regulated forms of engagement. All this to say that there is a difference between the dichotomies of writing and not writing, and critically writing and schriftlos (without writing, without inquiry).

Aristotle's approach in De Anima provides a contrast with Durs Grunbein's essay in the 2010 February issue of Poetry....

Tony Hoagland to Claudia Rankine

TONY'S TEXT :

Dear Claudia,

Thank you for inviting me to respond to your AWP report
on the subject of race in my poem "The Change."

To start off, let me say that I thought, back when we were colleagues,
and I still think, that, to me, you are naive when it comes to the subject of
American racism, naive not to believe that it permeates the psychic
collective consciousness and unconsciousness of most Americans in ways that are
mostly ugly.

The elements of that confusion are, as we all know, guilt, fear, resentment, and wariness.
Its sources are historical and economic and institutionalized. We drank racism with our mother's milk, and we re-learn it every day, as we weave our way through our landscapes of endless inequality.

That is one reason why it seems foolish and costly to think that the topic of race belongs
only to brown skinned Americans and not white skinned Americans.
But many poets and readers think that.

This is especially true in contemporary poetry where a poem is often presumed to be in the voice of the author. I am not trying to sidestep-- of course I am racist; and sexist, a homophobe, a classist, a liberal, a middle class american, a college graduate, a drop out, an egotist, Diet Pepsi drinker, a Unitarian, a fool, a Triple A member, a citizen of Texas, a lover of women, a teacher, a terrible driver, and a single mother. Purity is not my claim, my game, nor a thing remotely within my grasp. I'm an American ; this tarnished software will not be rectified by good intentions, or even good behavior.

The poet plays with the devil; that is, she or he traffics in repressed energies.
The poet's job is elasticity, mobility of perspective, trouble-making, clowning and truth-telling. Nothing kills the elastic, life-giving spirit of humor more quickly-have you noticed?- than political correctness, with its agendas of rightness, perfection, enforcement, and moral superiority.

Just as you find the posture of "angry black person"
simplistic, I find the posture of "apologetic liberal white person"
not just boring, but useless.

I don't believe in explaining my poems to other poets; they are
part of my tribe, and I expect them to be resilient readers.

I want some of my poems to alarm people with their subjects and attitudes.
I think poems can be too careful. A poem is not a teddy bear.

When it comes to the subject of American race, it is a set of conditions we all
suffer, whether in our avoidance or confrontation. We will need to
be rousted for another fifty, or a hundred years.
I would rather get dirty trying to dig it out of the ground, than make nice.
I am easy in my conscience.

Finally let me say that I think my poem "The Change" is not "racist" but "racially complex."

Sincerely,

Tony Hoagland

Intro to the Conversation on Knowledge and Belief

Few conversations echo and ping-pong in my head as did the conversation with Quincy Flowers and Ronnie Yates atop the balcony at Avant-Garden last Thursday. Following an incredible reading spanning both style and geography (yes, they're linked, but not always so neatly), after conversations and first impressions, we amassed our aether and visited the bar on it's 15th anniversary celebration. The effervescent Mariana wore an orange Argentine dress and chassed her way through the packed house like a melting ice cube. "Why is the dress Argentine? Do you know?" she asked us? "Because you're wearing it?" I replied. "No," she said, holding the round vowel in her mouth like a fleshy horn, "because the tag is on the outside." She reached her hand between her shoulders, down her spinal column and rubbed the tag between her thumb and index finger. "Is it on backwards?" She wondered off on another errand, the Doppler of her long vowels trailing after her.

We sat where a stage had once been, in the backyard of the house of adaptive reuse, partial use, partial reuse. The back-wall of the stage with its short, acute overhang lumbered behind us, making invisible the town homes put up some ten years ago while making itself also almost invisible. While I knew there was anniversary party, I hardly thought I'd run into half the people I once knew while ascending the tightly wound spiral staircase. If someone were on their way down, there was hardly room for more than one, and there followed the brush of bodies a sense of falling in simply for the fact you almost fell off.

Ronnie was preaching about something by the time we reached the corner. Actually, they were there already because I got caught up running into an old friend who had, in some strange way, cyber divorced me while I found my way into daily writing and reading, a ritual of remove. Carlos, an inventive musician, smart and bold, but self limiting in some aspects that I find also in myself, which later became painfully evident to me. I should call my friend Franke, who can do a spot-on impersonation of Ronnie, which I admire deeply; anyone who can imitate the manner of speech of another person accurately and with inventiveness just gets me. Franke should write this part. Ronnie always answers the phone, "My Brotha," with a terrycloth scratch in his voice and fermata on that last a. If you don't smile the second you speak or hang out with Ronnie, that's your cue to lighten up. But we're way past that part. I mean, we've had a reading together and Quincy (overloaded with PhD and teaching work) came by and drank wine with us while we were waiting to speak while listening, caught in an etiquette of silence that is strange (as it is outside the norm) to know so much about someone before you meet them, pour them a glass of wine and sit silently beside one another for a good hour before you ever say an audible word to one another.

"There's got to be something greater, man..." Although Ronnie may sound like a hippie in typed speech (which in ideology, he certainly comes close), he's also extremely grounded. My best way to place him ideologically (forgive me the violence) is an existentialist, post french structuralist disillusioned by 1968, born again hippie traversing the continent in all manners beatnik.

Hiatus

We wish to pay heed to the sources of the unnameable despair that flows in every soul. The souls listen expectantly to the melody of their youth—a youth that is guaranteed them a thousandfold. But the more they immerse themselves in the uncertain decades and broach that part of their youth which is most laden with future, the more orphaned they are in the emptiness of the present. One day they awake to despair: the first day of the diary.

With hopeless earnestness it poses the question: In what time does man live? The thinkers have always known that he does not live in any time at all. The immortality of thoughts and deeds banishes him to a timeless realm at whose heart an inscrutable death lies in wait. Throughout his life the emptiness of time surrounds him, but not immortality. Devoured by the countless demands of the moment, time slipped away from him; the medium in which the pure melody of his youth would swell was destroyed. The fulfilled tranquillity in which his late maturity would ripen was stolen from him. It was purloined by everyday reality, which, with its events, chance occurrences, and obligations, disrupted the myriad opportunities of youthful time, immortal time, at which he did not even guess. Lurking even more menacingly behind the everyday reality was death. Now it manifests itself in little things, and kills daily so that life itself may go on. Until one day the great death falls from the clouds, like a hand that forbids life to go on. From day to day, second to second, the self preserves itself, clinging to that instrument: time, the instrument that it was supposed to play.

Walter Benjamin

Metaphysics of Intimacy

Suppose we're surface awaiting
substance. All we can do is stretch
taut a tarp before a burning building
and convince someone leaning out the ledge
of rubble's supperiority to ash just before
they jump from the window sill.
The best we can do is not break.

Part of the Game: Touchdown

Vague and hazy instructions on how to throw a no-hitter

buy things from gold purses
take risky airplane rides
use reflecting tape as your only guide
have the ball change sizes while mid-air
don't see the catcher
don't see the batter
receive a daily newspaper
skip a day or two

Boys and Matches

You can convince yourself of anything. A straight line
doesn’t exist. Though true
I’ve never seen a ball continue rolling past the rest
of a bridge. Perhaps gravity
too is an optical allusion. What’s the function
of deception? f(x) persuasion
bends not towards truth but agreement.
I threw a stone in water in order
to realize the moon causes waves. If alls a joke
I wonder who’s laughing.
Did I misinterpret thunder? The parting of thighs?
Did I misgauge the circumference of the refilling
tank now unloading? Am I always to be subtle?
I am always subtle.
This is a disaster area, back up. The falling snow
fuels the fire. We can imitate stars only
momentarily.

Recess

I say I love when in the exchange
it’s absent. Power more than a father’s
un-kept promise. Please, turn your palms down,
drop them from your meager chin
to the aquifer piped through the faucet.
The pressure of the empty pipe seizes
convulses rust water in upheaval. Though they’ve
turned the main off while working beneath
the street, though what you knew of plenty
is abruptly rationed, you turn the handle
of the faucet not simply to watch it sieze
but to perform its duty in absence of purpose.

Standing Still I Am A Forest

..--..

An adolescent father snaps the chain link swing
while his first born son watches from a crippled
see-saw. The world has tinted itself to the passing
windows of cars. The heard has no home. Electrical
currents never stop and ask directions. It’s a group
the recognizes the face of a monolith, the child is
product of two parallel bodies without margin. Meet.
A man dizzy in the library moves from one book
to another, stacked open at the spine center, trading
the order of book chapters. Nothing moves like plot.
Or a classified section: Life seeking schematic. There’s
a house on hill where young men can find God’s will
in their lives. Perhaps they’ll discover Asche’s lines,
or prop the root system of a forest with shovels used
to excavate them. Perhaps they’ll notice family lines
of trees strangle strange roots of foreign trees whose
seeds, perhaps, hitchhiked a ride in a rodents entrails
dropped by a buzzard through their canopy. How
would they know the difference? Not speaking
to a family is a form of non-violence.

.-.-.-

Found Poem

So much for sovereignty.

A still face
lends life into a mirror, mistakes
itself
for itself. A man, underside of glass
painted black
no light to enter the body.
I, unpresent
dressed naked.

You hinge light
on flesh
rotate shadows from grown angles

pivoted by you,
shown the source of light traced
but unfound

in the mirror.
Me, the lazy self portrait
I paints over.

B(r)anding the Thieves

I write on my hand to acknowledge things.
It's usually in pen or a thin point permanent marker.
It's usually red or blue and it outlines the part of my hand
between my index finger and my thumb
that perfectly fits into someone's mouth.

Glass negatives, printed backwards. Each name and purported crime has been found, documented and written down again, somewhere new, making a new thing out of an old history.

Someone tried to forget this. Someone else tries to remember.

I don't scribble on my own hand only because I am a tactile whore.
I don't do it to remember a name or jog my memory for when my day will be slowly filled in the next minutes or hours. I do it because the act of recording is the making of a new memory. It makes the shallow water deep and the deep water less murky. If it were insisted that I do it to remember, it would be to remember that I
desire/enjoy/run from certain things.

I make lists in this manner because I can. They don't mean anything.
There's nothing wrong with doing something that doesn't mean anything.



Or maybe it means that I like things that have
the grand possibility of being forgotten.

The man second from the right was booked for thievery like the rest of the men near him. He, unlike the rest however, will escape any sort of trial, prosecution or sentencing. He will never be more than indicted. All of his charges will be dropped.
You know it just by looking at him, don't you? It's also the truth.

The man to his right might be related. Might be his brother. Might be nothing more to him than a partner, might not even be that.


I fall asleep in class some days when the teacher turns off the lights and the projector, attached by a series of strong plastic pieces to the ceiling above my head, hums. It's cliche, it is, but the machine hums and malfunctions and skips slides and talks back and makes its own decisions. The ghost in the machine is dead. The machine is the ghost.

These people, arrested and posed (in poses of their own choosing and with their consent) still have creases in their pressed coats. Their knees press the cloth of their pants, their hands are hidden, their eyes are white, their faces are scarred or not scarred and so beautiful you want to lick them -- they are honey wax, they are so real.

Faces and bodies and particulars so real that they are not real.
They are named & listed not out of fear that they will be forgotten
but because someone has the desire to carve into glass
a few letters and numbers that mean something
possible and tangible and dark, however momentarily.

Game Fishing

The balustrade of women across the canal
backlit Byzantine like behind glass

not at all mannequin but twitching distracted
from the already closed deal. The pristine

professionals contact antiquity with urge
twitch and practiced convulsion. A glint

of silver tarpin snapping the line recede
into her ultramarine eyes when the filament

stutters and the door closes. The spoil of hooks
a sea carpet of scars across the mouth’s roof.

Our salary of damaged wills exchanged, our labor
transformed into potential energy, the dollar, weakened

dreams give way to waking, the mis-set alarm radio
announcing the forecast of sprinkler systems.

The Nominal Mirror

The Nominal Mirror

The distance from eye to eye indiscrete, continuous.
Memory postured the practice of the taxidermist.

Who measures light reflected back into the sun?
No one martyrs an ant, their labor that resists bone.

The stomach is the servant of the mouth.
Tonight her lips mistook the size of my lips.

So you looking back at me cannot speak.
I am not talking to you. Who are you talking to?

Of course an elephant that paints its own portrait scandalizes.
I’ve walked around all day wondering if that stink was mine.

It was not the city that built the man. A man no longer builds cities.
And the function of beauty is difference. The appraised house

approximates value. Then burns.

Tom Clark

Like musical instruments
Abandoned in a field
The parts of your feelings

Are starting to know a quiet
The pure conversion of your
Life into art seems destined

Never to occur
You don't mind
You feel spiritual and alert

As the air must feel
Turning into sky aloft and blue
You feel like

You'll never feel like touching anything or anyone
Again
And then you do

- Tom Clark

The Neutron Star

It seems that the expansion of credit to the “ineligible” simply masks the underlying economic issue: an inequity of wealth. Of course the opposing political discourses revolve around equity’s existence as mutually exclusive to freedom. Yet, this discourse finds limits in the absence of examples in their absolute forms: there is no absolute equity in the presence of the lack of freedom, nor is there complete freedom in lack of equity. (An exploration into Kant's concepts of Praxis, Theory and Practice is needed)

The limit of inequity was found: people cannot afford automobiles, homes, or tuition. This in turn leads to the loss of flow of capital, which in turn becomes the slow of the economy. This closes down the ability for a free market to perform. Yet the “Free Market’s” function is the consolidation of wealth. Is the thesis its own antithesis? Naomi Klein comes to the fore in this discussion with her idea of “No Risk Capitalism”.“They spend seven years just transferring public money into private hands. Their final act is taking private debt and transferring it into public hands.” – Naomi Klein.

Interesting is American resistance to "intellectualism". The fallacy of defining intellectualism lies in the separation of intelligence from the general public; not to say generality is genius, but that it is the general public that fulfills and alters the narratives by which intelligence and intellectualism is defined.

What is anything that has to do with knowledge other than interpretations of existence: both the objects and situations, and the prior texts that contribute to them? The role of intellectualism is interpretation. What doesn't make sense is the general public's belief of institutional benevolence: both economic and governmental, both secular and sacred. The restructuring of this narrative is the most taboo of them all, as Milton Friedman established in the ideological merger of economic and political narrative in his work "Capitalism and Freedom". Yet, doesn't the recent "crisis" nullify this thesis of absolute capitalism's creating absolute freedom by it's own terms, it's own means? The end of capitalism, both in chronological and machovaliean senses, rests in the consolidation of wealth of the few. Par excellance of Milton Friedman's thesis, political and economic terms act as one: wealth and freedom are in the hands of the few.

The hard task before us, exists in the restructuring of a narrative, of negotiating the conditions of risk as opportunity to rewrite this narrative, of seeking the status of our society not in-itself, but as it is for-itself. The move is from negotiating reality not from the ideological pandering to stasis, of thesies self validating (Biden won/Palin won the debate), and into the dynamic exchange in daily life, in seeking ideology in practice, rather than distorting it with a preconcieved narrative. I know I know.

Late Capitalism

I figure we can truly Emphasize the pun on that phrase now; Late Capitalism. The obituary, however, was written long ago. I've had the feeling, since the debunked Soviet State, that capitalism wasn't far behind. The dissociation between accountability and institution undermines the thesis of credit. I've attempted to study economics on my own, but philosophy has always come first. With an uncited heuristic, however, I'd like to say this: the statement that "the market is not functioning properly" (google it! google it!) furthers my thesis of our valuing stimulus over response. It is not so much that the market is not functioning properly, than we are not responding properly, that is, we lack the sensibility to understand the system changes that the economic model may not support. There's an organizational principle that we fail to grasp and continue to fail while grasping every century or so. The economy is a measure of human behavior, and something in our behavior has changed. I believe it lies in our concept of subjectivity and individualism. I'm getting there. I'm getting there. It got me here, so far. Unlike the economy, I hope not to fall so far that my progress is nothing but recovery of lost memory.

Both morality and economics depend on a standard of measurement in values; the value of actions and the value of objects. The cultural sythesis between economic structure and morality involves the inverse of the Hegelian mutual recognition of freedom; the conditions by which we are permitted pass outside of labor bondage and enter freedom (freedom to choose a vocation, freedom to limit choose, freedom to purchase, freedom to limit labor), as well as the conditions by which we may maintain that freedom. The underlying condition of this freedom, freedom at birth, reifies itself upon the stances of the political parties on abortion. Within the nature or nurture debate, the kernel of truth lies within the mutual conflict between these oppositions upon a single focus: in order to support our innate right to freedom (in actuality the threat of bondage), we must be born free, with equal rights which should support equal opportunity, etc. etc. However, the actualization towards freedom first involves an initiation into a belief system (free market capitalism) and then a form of self measurement within that system.

The system assumes the threat of lost liberty, of freedom limited by non-participation motivates the individual. The motivation of anxiety works no less than it did in the former GDR; the alienation though of another kind. Non-participation occurs not only buy one’s individual choices, but also of a community’s evaluation of one’s position within their given system. This polarizes the critic with the delima: to openly question the system I risk the threat of non-participation and the collapse of possible freedoms. Only now does the threat of the system’s collapse that the converse comes to light: if I do not question the system I risk the loss of my potential and current freedoms. The direction of questioning should direct itself towards a historical examination of values, a geneology of both valuing of objects (property, commodity), and the valuing of actions (moralities, labor). One value left the bartering system, the abstraction of exchange allowed for the possibility of absent accountability. The deviation of accountability from institution is the process at work here. A hyper alienation from the processes of our daily lives. The solution lies beyond our capacity for abstract perception, or does it? Seems I need to write a grant proposal. How naive.

Oh yes! A very facinating note I thought of while on a caffine high; 1764 (War of the Regulation) or 1789 (French Rev.)(60, 80), Revolutions of 1848,(80) Great Depression of 1927, (80) The Financial Crisis 2008. Naomi Klein, anyone? An eighty year cycle of social opportunity for social change? I hate to quantify what seems qualitative in study, but the evidence of a social cycle in our contemprary measure seems possible. Who ever held the meteorologist accountable? Huh?

Forget Zizek, by Slavoj Zizek

In light of recent events (the demythification of the fiat money system as reified nihlism and yet another crisis response that explicates further the inability for our social structure to observe subtlety as signs of a system ), Zizek studies move to the fore.



For two years now in the paid parking lot infront of the Galleria, a crime has taken place everynight. No. A crime has taken place each night I work. This is not a coincidence. Circumstance introduced this criminal pattern to me. This parking lot stands at ground level, over the garage parking and provides greater convinience; there are no lines to wait for parking as in the garage, and most importantly there is not a designation between customer parking areas (nearer entrances to the Galleria) and employee parking areas (available as the last possible stop in the line for parking). The parking at ground level, positioned "above" the garage parking designtates people not by vocation or function, but as participants of a very specific and isolated act; paying the kiosk, or not paying the kiosk (employee/non-employee). I chose to go where they pay, where my job presented to prohibition on my non-economic decisions outside of the physical workplace.

I resented the curtailment of my right to park where I pleased based on the fact of my employment. As an employee of the service industry, I understand the dictum of the customer first (an overinflated value that acts as perversely socially as economic organization through false statements), yet I participate in this role in as limited a manner as possible, and negotiate its terms as subtlely and forcefully as possible. I moved to the bar in order to serve people on a much more limited basis (four seats available, standing room 2 or 3 deep only on limited occasions) and under strangely augmented rights on account of my title as barkeep rather than server.

Despite the fact that I encourage recognition of all interactions during my shifts as interactions between people prior to interactions limited by social economic roles, it nevertheless limits my identity in this negotiation to that of subordinate. This binary system, however, is fragile. I can interpret the silence of those around an irrate customer as silence of dissent of their entitlement, and communicate this translation of silence to the customer with indifferent disbelief, dead stare and eat shit grin. I am subordinated through the restraint of my full reaction, just as their actions are preconditioned by a pressumed social code whereby the individual may occupy the claim: I am spending money. I may behave as I please.

I am not spending money and I may behave as I please.

As I stated earlier, circumstance introduced to me this criminal act. My restaurant closes long after the mall closes, and my duties conclude long after that. The ambulatory security systems sleep at this time; a bolt locks the cage of golf carts, their rotating blue lights dim. Only the occasional guard passes aboard their two wheel segway, the kitsch soundtrack to the ice rank ominously missing. The only contact with authority is one which you provide the contact; the green button at the exit of the paid parking, a lane which is blocked by a black and white diagonally painted board that lifts once you have inserted your paid ticket. One evening, I pressed the green button.

"Security."
"Yes. I didn't pay for my parking, and the doors to the mall are locked."
"The door all the way to the left is unlocked. You can enter and pay the kiosk there."
"Ok."

"Security."
"The door is locked."
"I assure you, Sir, the door is not locked."
I am a paying customer and I may behave as I like.
"It is."
"Okay. Return to the door and I'll send someone to unlock the door for you."

"Security. Hello?"

I have seen the morning evidence of the night before. The splinters on ground, the two teenagers inserting a new board through the iron grip of the gate. The repairs are minimal and cheap. I find this act too overt, tasteless. Instead, that night, when the security officer failed to meet me at the door, by lifting the board over the car from my open window, I left the parking lot without paying. I've carried on with this act for two years. I believe that the only reason that I haven't been caught is that the other employees, security included, also do not recognize their loss of right to behave as they please.

“Who am I to myself? Just one of my sensations.”

Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, A Factless Autobiography, 138.




In “Giving an Account of Oneself”, Judith Butler aligns the failure of memory to the opacity of the self. Trauma, either as an event in adulthood or as the inability for one to possess agency while being acted upon as an infant (Laplanche), incites the self into an incapacity to either give an account of the event or to comprehend the structures saturated into consciousness through naïve observation. Due to the incapacity of absolute memory accessible to the self, the self remains opaque to the “I” or the “me”. Yet, must absolute memory dictate self-knowledge? and are the primary events of childhood (outside of critical periods that mark attachment, speech, motor skill development) as essential as claimed by psychoanalysis?





The intuition involved in transference, in seeking out structures that mirror early home life, astounds me when I realize their existence in my present life. However, once these structures are realized, a break in the pattern occurs as the self, which was obscured or compartmentalized, structurally melds with the conscious self. Once this event occurs we immediately become opaque to ourselves anew. A new system becomes possible yet remains outside our capacity to observe it. Freud considered this event a counter-cathaxis, or a repressive desire by the subconscious. Perhaps the catharsis which occurs following realization briefly suspends the system, and the only opportunity for existence of the mythological subject occurs within this joy of sublimation. Is this renewed opacity a direct result of the learning of structure prior to comprehending it or simply an interaction with a system independent of memory, where function preceeds understanding, where self-knowledge exists as luxury rather than as necessity?



If we take Pessoa’s notion of the narrative of self as sensation itself rather than a perceiving body, perhaps the mind then acts as a sensory organ of structure, and identity acts no more than as a signal of our position within that structure. Anticipating a repetition of structure, we are geared towards a reaction to that structure, although our reactions no longer fit the situation. The adaptive reuse of morality upon new subjects allows for the social to renew old stimuli in order to not require a readjustment of reactions. The stimulus is valued over the response.

Modes of Counterproduction/New Criterion/Rough Draft

The philanthropist laughs with his throat,
his social bounds unleashed by his kindness.
The young man leaves his wallet on the open bar,
turns away. two men nod at him after he turns
to retrieve it. the economy for the faithful failing.



The lack of electricity dissipates the power from house to house, business to business, dissolves the structures of contact between people. Every interaction requires reinterpretation. Where the standard motions of waiting and payment once took place, FEMA ration lines now stand around POD centers. The officiating sounds of transactions no longer take place with the punctuation of a register ring or declarative totals, but the soft hiss of soldering. The loose wires are live and active, albeit disconnected.



In no shortage or irony, international banks threatened to halt interbank loans this weekend, a direct threat to the movement of the international economy. The collapse of the superstructure from Houston towards the world, seems imminent. In this imminency, the entitled seem ludicrous, the lack of self-humilating consent to their demands or the lack of some structure that enables their entitlement enrages them. These scenes of distemper take place in a scene of address where electricity is available. The avaibility to reference the disconnected system aggrevates the lost power of the superiors in the capitalist structure of social accountability. The aggrevation to them is that they no longer are accountable to a 5pm conference call or mortgage company, but to everyone.



Every action acts as measure, every interaction a genuflection to their character. How this power structure (economy/credit/electricity) provides space for this scene of address and how the lack of this structure reveals an alternate and co-existent human possibility further illuminates the power of myth in our contemporary society. The myth of stability, the myth of money, the myth of work, the myth of economy. The emergence of possibility, of not a replica of myth, but a new criterion, true to contemporary experience, not an archaic power structure.




The streets, like my vague memories of Alicia, are lined with fallen limbs and debris. My neighborhood, in blackout possibly until Thursday, lights up with dimly liminal candels flickering behind walls, through windows, across the pages of my books. Against the sillouetted trees, at times the skyline peeks through, the stark contrast sometimes strange as the light contrast creates a parallax of greater distance. Most doors are open for the little wind that does move after dusk. I know my neighbors better now. There are shut doors where the overtness…the abrasive generators pummel silence with their carborators, their combustion. I have spoken with my neighbors once since they aquired a generator. The T.V. flickr through the windows, on the walls. The reconnection.




man with gun pointed downwards while waiting in line for gas. surreal sound of the ice rink music. old woman sitting at bunk bed installation. how mass use of galleria utility turned from problem to seeming philanthropy, “charging station”.

Reginald Shepherd

I'm truly saddened both by his prolonged suffering and truncated life. Reginald truly inspired me towards a melding of criticism and poetry. His perspective and spirit will be missed in the poetry community.