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.

.-.-.-