the action expresses possibility. not from the moment of enactment nor from tension of near finality, are we included.
the observer of the visual field captures the world mid-flight.
the witness embarks upon an eternal mistrial.
the narratives of the world outside our direct experience shut down possibility. understanding is violence. placing a plot is not the job of the bondsman. the always mistaken jury.
If we, like Zizek, are allowed to induce precepts from several observations of a given set of cultures, may we not also hypothesize a cultural observation from a standard ceremony of that culture? Ascention should mean we suspend the dead in the sky or propell them outward past the reaches of our atmosphere. Perhaps the Roman tradition of cremation more accurately demonstrates the Christian concept of ascention, even though this practice was bannished by the church, declaring the soul of that burned body condemned to hell. Or is the heavenly conjecture wrong altogether, and the subteranian tradition (once practical, now obsolete and liably uneconomic) more an accurate metaphor to our beliefs concerning death?
Zizek proposes some contextual questions for our yet hetergeneous western culture.
Why should an author be restricted to a single genre, or a work itself be restricted to a single genre? Anne Carson plays with this question and short circuits the function of lyric and rhet?ric. We have always played critic. Unlike and like Rilke, poetry is the product of criticism: and by criticism I mean cognitively critical.
The you to which the I answers shifts face, is polytheist. A subject remains social, or cultural, as observations provide material for criticism; the social as text. The narcissism of creation explores the differentiation between the social and the subject, the universal and the particular, as demarcated by culture or tradition.
I seek an island, not a coffin. Seek the sublime subject disenthralled from the necessity of alienation. There's also the Wordsworth quote on my mother's tackboard: With the conflict of others we make war, with the conflict with ourselves, poetry. That's paraphrased. Poems are psychologicaly invested, subjectively imprisoned, confined to awaiting the oportunity of the prepared reader, the randomly matching context. We return to a poem and are shocked to be unmoved, or find a poem written years ago and cannot imagine ourselves as author. I've tried to organize them through subject or form or method of inquiry; none of which have satisfied. I believe this dissatisfaction rests in the restrictions of inquiry through a rigidly private belief system universally imposed, albeit tacitly; subtly. It seems that in order to free myself to work, I must remove the imposistion of origin, of orientation. To allow the cartesian square to disolve and allow the observations induce a random intersection of inductive angles, to not impose or lean them into eachother, and through this betrayal of causality, allow a voice to speak.
Bats or (anything with a heart and wings should fly straight)
I spy a hearse driver with a key map a mobile blood bank towed down the freeway. Are you trying to tell me something? The loudest sounds on earth are inaudible to us.
every time i close my eyes the first few nights following a night of doubleheader ball, i immediately begin to see lights of the field, a single white spec of light rushing out to me becoming a ball; not the one that bruised my sternum on a bad hop last month, not the one that broke my right middle finger two weeks ago and hurts every time i'm in the cages - at bat, but the one i almost caught, the line drive that dropped right and lost its punch while i waited with my glove open and also the bad hop grounder, or the one that found its way right two me as i turned on the base and threw to first for the double play. the victories. the defeats. the learning. the humility that is baseball. only baseball can make me feel the way poetry feels. something almost transcendent, yet shackled by my unleared body. that useless nobility of spirit wanting more than my nerves and muscles have agreed upon. throwing my body in the way of error and hoping for the best.
all of these reasons must contribute to the reason i immediately envision it when i attempt to sleep. i thought of it as i tried to think simultaneously of the threshold between waking and sleeping. the old paradox, or pointless inquiry into conscience. interesting to me this night, however, as i realize exactly where that point was for myself. i thought of the game, but recognized it as a memory, but the moment the memory became more of a focus and stimulus than my immediate surroundings, i moved towards sleep: i responded more directly to an abstract world, than the concrete one. this is also where i love to dwell in poetry. more specifically; my sense of balance became relative strictly to my world view, rather than the laws that govern a common reality. yet i spend my time in this world repeating my mistakes.
I don't believe in inaugurations or season premiers. Weddings even. One time I believed in He-Man and Legos. The pages between my father's matresses. There's no creator and I don't create anything. I don't even believe in this. Not that my belief matters at all. I mean, does it matter whether a dead man believes he's dead or not? I used to believe in He-Man until he vanished one afternoon at 15:00 CST. Actually, I stopped watching long before that. Sometime before that, I'm sure, he disappeared from a light table. I don't understand how Arnold appeared on screen instead: that docile dwarf's smile of a completely unrepressed minority. He wasn't even a cartoon. I watched one episode. Sometimes I'd hear it while cleaning or playing legos. I'd hear it with my brother's laughter. It was before three thirty. Actually, I don't believe in time either. I woke up early to drink a cup of coffee with my father. I am twelve. The coffee takes two cigarettes and a shave to finish. I pour his cream while he comes from the master bedroom bathroom. He leaves the door cracked and I can see my sleeping mother wake slowly in the bathroom light. Her left breast is exposed. I hand my father his coffee. I sip mine. Too strong he says. Too sweet. He pours his coffee out. I ask him for a job description. He laughs. My mother gets out of bed the moment the S-10 pickup muffler sounds away. She rubs my head. I go outside. I don't know why I went outside. The garden drips dew and the air is windless. When I don't know why I do things, I feel like I'm in purgatory. Somehow I'm acting against myself when I don't understand myself. I am outside. Here, I am twelve forever. Twelve changes, that's all.
I am watching a parade. I am too young to know how old I am. I think I'm deaf. All these horns blow by and I think they're daylight stars or angels atop an advent wreath. I can, not see an end to the parade. I crawl down my mother's body and let go her hand. My brother is spitting hot chocolate on people. My mother grabs him. I join the parade. I am an angel. I ask the man without an instrument what parade this is. He says it's a timed parade. Seeing my misunderstanding he points to the back of the parade. Now I can see it. I can see it because the last row of musicians fall after each bar of music. I run to the front and ask the man with the wand to slow down. He doesn't see me. The man I talked to has fallen down too. I run to the front of the parade, but am too slow. I look back and see the audience still stands at each side. They aren't falling. I run to bystanders but can't get through. I realize they are wooden cut outs and I can't push them down. I begin to panic and cry. "Are you afraid of the sounds, Schatz?" my mother asks me. I bury my little head in her shoulder. Her jacket itches my face.
Elizebeth wants to give birth to me. I told her I don't know what birth was. Lizzy lifts her shirt and tells me to crawl in. I start with my head and then sit on her stomach. Too heavy, she says, then pushes me on my side. I'm frustrated. She's frustrated. I wish I was smaller. Star comes over. He sits next to Lizzy. I tell them the story about the timed parade. I told them we could all go one time and see if we could go back, maybe those people at the end had something to do with birth. They tell me its very interesting and all, but Star came to tell Liz her mom wants her home. I said ok.
Star: You don't really believe all that stuff about the parade, do you? Liz: Of course not.
The drunk lit beneath the dome light pleading to driver of the struck car. The drunkard's car steaming, fender to engine, radiator fuming, in reverse, attempts to angle an escape but finds herself wedged in by the H2. She only pleads after the man has exited his vehicle made for war, after he threatened to ram her for attempting to leave, after the bar patio crowd salivates, "hit 'em" "hit 'em", but are left unfullfilled, but satisfied, because the sound of fiberglass bending lends the imagination the sound of broken bones or the symphony of desire restricted and finally unleashed, violence as contact too long awaited. She wins sympathy or doesn't, but she's talking, and that's something, considering she went up a one way against the traffic around office buildings that want to be skyscrapers when they grow up...hit em ... hit em... around neon signs that attract no attention or mirrors that call no reflection of one's image of oneself, other than ours the face of downcast shadows beneath the domelight of the jarred door, pleading. Pleasing. Hit em.
Every time I had met her during the fifteen years of our — well, I fail to find the precise term for our kind of relationship — she had not seemed to recognize me at once; and this time too she remained quite still for a moment, on the opposite sidewalk, half turning towards me in sympathetic incertitude mixed with curiosity, only her yellow scarf already on the move like those dogs that recognize you before their owners do — and then she uttered a cry, her hands up, all her ten fingers dancing, and in the middle of the street, with merely the frank impulsiveness of an old friendship (just as she would rapidly make the sign of the cross over me every time we parted), she kissed me thrice with more mouth than meaning, and then walked beside me, hanging on to me, adjusting her stride to mine, hampered by her narrow brown skirt perfunctorily slit down the side. - Nabokov, Spring in Fialta
or the one that found its way right two me as i turned on the base and threw to first for the double play. the victories. the defeats. the learning. the humility that is baseball. only baseball can make me feel the way poetry feels. something almost transcendent, yet shackled by my unleared body. that useless nobility of spirit wanting more than my nerves and muscles have agreed upon. throwing my body in the way of error and hoping for the best.
Not that my belief matters at all. I mean, does it matter whether a dead man believes he's dead or not?
Her left breast is exposed. I hand my father his coffee. I sip mine. Too strong he says. Too sweet. He pours his coffee out. I ask him for a job description. He laughs. My mother gets out of bed the moment the S-10 pickup muffler sounds away. She rubs my head. I go outside. I don't know why I went outside. The garden drips dew and the air is windless. When I don't know why I do things, I feel like I'm in purgatory. Somehow I'm acting against myself when I don't understand myself. I am outside. Here, I am twelve forever. Twelve changes, that's all.
I start with my head and then sit on her stomach. Too heavy, she says, then pushes me on my side. I'm frustrated. She's frustrated. I wish I was smaller. Star comes over. He sits next to Lizzy. I tell them the story about the timed parade. I told them we could all go one time and see if we could go back, maybe those people at the end had something to do with birth. They tell me its very interesting and all, but Star came to tell Liz her mom wants her home. I said ok. 
