Month: September 2015

Goby’s Journal, Sacred and Profane

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The impossibility of reconciling ecstatic experiences with doing dishes, taking a shit.

Is the recreational use of drugs, a profanation of the sacred?

Not a week goes by that I don’t dream of building and firing kilns.

Fires of transformation.

There is no locality of space in my dreams. A room becomes a flight of stairs becomes a field becomes a storm at sea.

Jerome Rothenberg at Kelly Writer’s House

Poems for the millennium, volume 5: ‘Barbaric Vast & Wild,’ now published & available from Black Widow Press

I went to Kelly Writer’s House tonight, on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, to hear Jerome Rothenberg, and bought a copy of what’s likely the last of his great series of Assemblages, as he prefers to call them. Outsider and subterranean poetries. Without having it in mind, I realized as soon as I opened it, that I’ve been spiritually preparing for this book for many months.
He read from this, and some of his own poetry… and from the former, some beautifully dark Mother Goose rhymes–that reveal the desperation and poverty that were their condition. I love what Rothenberg has done–a life time of opening the closed canonical doors to the vast range of poetries of all times and places.

While I appreciate Kelly Writer’s House, and feel fortunate beyond words to have heard over the years, so many poets–so many voices, representing so many different poetries, I confess to have felt tonight, a tinge of cognitive dissonance in this setting–a gathering of academics in this institution of wealth and privilege that could not possibly be more ‘insider.’ I know that, while in no way made to feel unwelcome there, a sense of myself being more and more, an “outsider” there.  I wish that more of the Philly poets I know could have been there.

Aphorisms of Aesthetic Power*

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*I say, power rather than energy, because it is what it does, not what it is.

Aesthetic power is not exhausted in the effects it engenders, is not a part, but is in itself, a whole within a greater, infinitely dispersed power.

Infinitely dispersed, and specific to its form thus: extensive beyond the specific form that holds, but does not contain it.

It is not an experience, but engenders release from experience by displacement of the subject by the object, and of the object become subject—this is the lighting flash of the sublime.

There can be no judgment because there are no means to measure or compare its power.

It is not judgment, but the annihilation of judgment.

Beauty is to aesthetic power as the trace of an atomic particle in a cloud chamber is to the energy that moves the particle.

The release of aesthetic power is dangerous, destructive of all order, compelling the creation of new forms, new order—which, while indirectly the products of aesthetic power, are but the dead castes of that power—like the glass castes fused in sand by strikes of lightning.

It is nothing without us, as we are nothing without the bodies it violates.

If We Are to Dream of Revolution, Let us Dream the Impossible

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What is work but acceptance of death? The contradiction is too great. Procreation, the work of survival, are but submission to the reality that we will not last and must pass on our dying to the next generation. And the next. And the next.
Survival—that robs us of the impossible, of the intensity of living that is our truest desire.

The contradiction is too great.

Look at those who are charged with ordering our lives for survival. The managers of survival. The Lords of Work. See how power accrues to them, and as it increases, reveals the master they serve, how more and more they are about Death’s work, till all our work paves the roads of war, genocide, and in the end—the suicide of our species.

What we cannot have, neither can we live without. In music, art, poetry—that which we cannot have, we can know, and not know; we can taste and feel and hear–if only in its absence–the impossible that is our true being.

It’s no accident, where utility and work and survival have become as gods, that the managers have become masters of war, that they rip music and art from our children, from our schools—that they turn artists into instruments of profit, turn art to their own ends–as propaganda, as anesthesia.

If we are to dream of revolution, let us dream the impossible—nothing less will set us free. Nothing less will restore us to our true Being.
—–
All that we have to do to sustain ourselves, denies us the Impossible Ecstatic Object of our desires. The paradox, that to sustain ourselves, we must reconcile ourselves to death and deny ourselves that which grants us the fullness of the illusion of immortality.
I’m perfectly serious when I say that the more power we have to sustain ourselves–which is, of course, power over nature, the more we (or those institutions and managers of sustaining power), become unconscious servants of death–possessed.
Their fear of the arts, and need to control and own them, the policing and punishment of erotic and ecstatic pleasures–these things are no accident. Economic, ideological and social theory are grossly inadequate to explain these historical patterns. Capitalism is itself less cause than symptom of deeper forces.