“What does when a single insignificant act may lead to consequences so immense, and also a tragically total dilemma, down the road comes to mean nothing?”
April 13, 2019
May 20, 2018
PROSE FROM A DREAM MAN
Grand Hotel Sousse
Sousse Monday, March 15, 1920
This Africa is incredible
. . . Unfortunately, I cannot write coherently to you, for it is all too much. Only sidelights. After cold, heavy weather at sea, a sparkling morning in Algiers. Bright houses and streets, dark green clumps of trees, tall palms’ crowns rising among them. White burnooses, red fezzes, and among these the yellow uniforms of the Tirailleurs d’Afrique, the red of the Spahis, then the Botanical Gardens, an enchanted tropical forest, an Indian vision, holy acvatta trees with gigantic aerial roots like monsters, fantastic dwellings of the gods, enormous in extent, heavy, dark green foliage rustling in the sea wind.
Then thirty hours by rail to Tunis. The Arab city is classical antiquity and Moorish middle ages, Granada and the fairy tale of Baghdad. You no longer think of yourself; you are dissolved in this potpourri which cannot be evaluated, still less described: a Roman column stands here as part of a wall; an old Jewess of unspeakable ugliness goes by in white baggy breeches; a crier with a load of burnooses pushes through the crowd, shouting in gutturals that might have come straight from the canton of Zurich; a patch of deep blue sky, a snow-white mosque dome; a shoemaker busily stitching away at shoes in a small vaulted niche, with a hot, dazzling patch of sunlight on the mat before him; blind musicians with a (hum and tiny three-stringed lute; a beggar who consists of nothing but rags; smoke from oil cakes, and swarms of flies; up above, on a white minaret in the blissful ether, a muezzin sings the midday chant; below, a cool, shady, colonnaded yard with horseshoe portal framed in glazed tiles; on die wall a mangy cat lies in the sun;ia coming and going of red, white, yellow, blue, brown mantles, white turbans, red fezzes, uniforms, faces ranging from white and light yellow to deep black; a shuffling of yellow and red slippers, a noiseless scurrying of naked black feet, and so on and so on.
In the morning the great god rises and fills both horizons with his joy and power, and all living things obey him. At night the moon is so silvery and glows with such divine clarity that no one can doubt the existence of Astarte.
Between Algiers and Tunis He 550 miles of African soil, towering up to the noble and spreading shapes of the great Atlas range, wide valleys and plateaus bursting with grapes and grain, dark green forests of cork oak. Today Horus rose out of distant, pale mountains over an unending green and brown plain, and from tie desert there sprang up a mighty wind which blew out to the dark blue sea. On rolling, gray-green hills yellow-brown remains of whole Roman cities, small flocks of black goats grazing around them, nearby a Bedouin camp with black tents, camels, and donkeys. The train runs into a camel which cannot make up its mind to get off the tracks; the beast is killed; there is a great running up, shrieking, and gesticulating of white-clad figures; and always the sea, now deep blue, now hurting the eyes with its glitter in the sunlight. Out of olive groves and palms and hedges of giant cactus floating in the flickering, sun-shot air rises a snow-white city with divinely white domes and towers, gloriously spread out over a hill. Then comes Sousse, with white walls and towers, the harbor below; beyond the harbor wall the deep blue sea, and in the port lies the sailing ship with two lateen sails which I
once painted!!!!
You stumble over Roman remains; with my cane I dug a piece of Roman pottery out of the ground.
This is all nothing but miserable stammering; I do not know what Africa is really saying to me, but it speaks. Imagine a tremendous sun, air clear as in the highest mountains, a sea bluer than any you have ever seen, all colors of incredible power. In the markets you can still buy the amphorae of antiquity things like that and the moonlll! . . .~Carl Jung; (Memories Dreams and Reflections; Pages 371-372.)
LETTER TO EMMA JUNG FROM NORTH AFRICA (1920)
May 29, 2017
STARES AND A LOOK
S T A R E S
Where is the wound that shines?
Well Over 50 years on
Over this his day, on?
My Back way against all this memorial day shite here
I’ll intentionally send me to a ill-shielded shy there,
Back at again to that day where
I’m Far too young to fathom,
Or even notice yr. crevasse,
Yr Grande Malaise,
Yr. countdown…Yr. Pass.
It makes me madly think now
It takes the saddest thing to tell now..
Stuck in a stack of old NewYorkers
There’s this raw cartoon drawing;
A mere boy drawn in black & white
Stands on a step of his own basement, stares,
He did look down on his own livid apocalypse,
His lips, and the caption say
“It’s A.O.K.”
.
Here is the wound that shines
Tonight, a glint off yr. cracked onyx ring.
I lift it in my open fist to my lips.
.
.
L O O K
.
Hope we’re having a heaven so
I’ll look all about &
Daddy can call out, (& it won’t hurt, no)
He’ll look just like he just got home from work:
“There’s my inquisitive young man,” he’d shout.
We’d have it out;
My young man’s mystery,
His young man’s misery.
We’d upheave it out. One Heavy inquiry would unfold
If he mightn’t have killed himself he might have taught me:
“You gotta take the bite of bitter with the cold”
.
My Mother could steady things when she told me
When I was ready she told me:
“I know, I know,
With time…
We’ll heal.
He was not well.
They say that You/
Have his look.
You know.
You know
I say ‘You’ll/
Try having my smile’”.
.
.
.
.
For always, again, rest in peace, daddy 3/21/1929-5/29/1959
December 27, 2016
From author Jim Crace’s “Quarantine”
“After his boyhood years of study at the temple school, steadying the scroffs and holding down the parchments beneath the pointing fingers of the priest, Jesus had learned to match up some of these Aramaic shapes to sounds–the little candelabra of the letter sha, the lightening strike of enn, the falling plough sign of the kaoh. He liked the places on these parchments where scribes were changed. The one who’d stitched his way across the page with wary, threadlike marks passed on his verses to the playful and untidy one who led his muddy sparrows leave their tracks in undulating lines. Then came the scribe whose writing always toppled backwards, as if the meanings to the words were riding faster than the shapes which soon would fall on to their spines.
“This was a happy ignorance for jesus, only knowing a dozen words amongst so many thousands. He would not want to read as easily as scholars, he told himself, for that would only help to split the meaning from the sound, to divorce the music from the shape. If he could read like his priest could, by simply dragging the forefinger underneath the script and speaking every word he touched as if these were not verses but an endless rote of errands to be run, then the scriptures might become little more than strings of tiny tasks, a list. There’d be no mystery. But in his ignorance, he could both listen to the words of the reader and marvel, too, at the unspoken narrative of shapes, or concentrate not only on the script but also on the spaces in between. God was in the spaces, he was sure. God went to the very edges of the page.”
Author Jim Crace, from “Quarantine”
September 22, 2015
TRICKLE DOWN VOODOO ANTICS
We say bad things about people who hurt us.
That way they’d let up to haunt & to curse us.
We didn’t dismiss their nonsense,
just cruelly,
We vent and vanquish their malevolence.
& thus Renewal.
March 30, 2015
The Absensualist
I could finally confide
that lately I’d lost
that long drive that’d taken me
off all my maps.
.
She would certainly intercede,
She brought fresh buds through frost,
I’ve a return drive she’d taken me
Back onto new paths.
.
.
.
I can close my eyes and see
Her heart near and warm
But open I can not see
Her hand upon my arm.
.
.
.
.
(from july 2010)
March 17, 2015
Try Another Dawn, Against Green Leather, On
I take my ten tablets.
Wash ’em w/ Irish.
It’s my time
for medicine,
& no time for nonsense.
I’m ready I’ll try to pull hard
for a merciful god.
Finally I’ll try my hand
To move a pen
To move my words
To move me.
.
.
.
. (from 2009, Slainte.)
March 5, 2015
Mostly Too Costly
When the task at hand…
When I’m asked to pay & pay
More attention,
I say,
It’s mostly too costly and
It’s evident one’s needs warrant
Intervention.
.
It’s ridiculous,
I’m impossible,
I’m impervious to all I’m capable.
August 11, 2014
IMPALPABLE
Neruda’s ” impalpable ash”
Chants away/
In the fray of my own tiny ruins.
.
“If I touch/ near the fire/
Impalpable ash..”
Chimes away/
And supports the clearing away all
Insubstantial,
Makes way to take less blinding steps away
From cave to climax
I’ve come to have left out
Crucial rescue tools
From my matutinal
Lost-combination locked bag of tricks.
In touch information
Out