3 after Bresson*

Vicious Circles (Bresson)
with Gregg Biglieri

Love cannot exist between people
-- Jack Spicer

as the tremendous volume of the music
takes over obscured by their long hair
they seem to be mourning
-- George Oppen

1.
Children again
Do you hear children
Again
Do you sight
Like a horse
One eye sees
This good wicked throne
Too soon
To be future too
Soon to be past
Bullets fly again and
Broken blood pumps

My love whose eye is this
Don’t
Forsake me
Community
Round round
Community
For the trees with
Bright flags we go

For the darkness of love
Love
The dark forest
No justice just don’t kill
The king yet
Like a vicious carousel
The horses go round

A round a round community
With nowhere to go
A forest fossilizes
With bright flags and sharp
Tongues and lances
We go
This justice this
Justice perhaps
The trees for the forest

Camera attests
The torso simply framed
A lovely
And brute objecthood
With dark hearts we go
In love where the camera
Cares to wait

Horse whose eye is this
To risk
Don’t forsake me
Roundness the thing is
A universe
Bright camera with a mind
Of its own
Mind of the eye

Lovely a brute dark kiss
Kiss me
I battle to risk
With mind’s bright swords
Swiftly we go
Justice is
Eye’s apocalypse

Blindful injustice
The round community without
Head
Brain needs eyes like
A hole to risk
This bright lance
Love’s body
For the trees

The trees for bloody
Community
A
Bloody pile all these
Horses
All these flags go
For the headless
I am afraid eyes need brains
I am
Afraid I
Love you so

2.
Free radicals children
With a bullet graze
This grassy open
Do sheep gather to shepherd
This thought of death?

Because this time is corrupt
Because
A human community is lacking turn
The other cheek
Kill
While no one is watching
No kid too bold

None are guilty enough
None guilty
Enough to love
To hate to love them
All protect
Nothing
Sheep gather at
The end of this

Roll to our own death
Happily bundle
There is no cold so cold as this
To love to hate to love
This generous violence
A world of mud

I fling no child
Left behind
No kid too bold
Don’t kiss me
Not cruel enough to be
A real beauty
We fall dead at the end
Of any noble thought
This opening

Because they will always
Be corrupt
Because
They will always presume
Their guilt is not free enough
There is no cold so cold
As cauterizing

3.
The wind bloweth
O my breath
Our breasts the lisp of little
And wicked things
Things
Wicked in their thing-ness

The eyes of animals follow
My breath
A wicked thesis
Saintly judgement
Bullets blow
Over this hill how pastoral

Without morality without
Conscience
The wind bloweth with an inhuman will
To escape disaster
Saintly eyes follow
The gazes of other animals
And children without

Morality they
Are wicked children
The camera finds the place
From which no one looks
In the rearview
Of a bus
In the eyes the eyes
Of a blameless beast

Sing sweetly and long
For that ass
The wind bloweth where it listeth
That gaze will survive
Sheep and rape
Bottles broken over the tain

*composed spring-summer 05. Thanks to Gregg Biglieri who offered suggestions for revision.

Cruelty (an analogy)

Cruelty is to nobility

as meanness
is to

bourgeois
subjectivity and other

drudgerous levels
of "selfhood"

...where nobility = aristocracy
of the will

and drama
of intensified thinking.

Thinking

at the level

of drive?

The thots very much
of children
and
"psychotic" / imaginative
adulthoods?

"the world / is a stage but we are too"

The awaited bombs,
the mounds of skulls,
the Kalashnikov guns,
the infant dressed for fame,
they are all now too
not that they would admit it

The awaited bombs,
the appointed coordinates,
the fake blood,
the real blood,
the recreation
of the whole world
by non-mastery

This is the guilt
the blood by guilt
of the vicious and uneven
circle
never touched

Upon except
at its edges and least
coherent points
the places
from which one
talks distractedly

The martyrologies,
the hagiographies,
those who cathect
the world not yet
lost
lost already
to not be lost yet

A terminal world
of discomfort I want
to love them all, but I can’t
think of a single name,
not a single shelter
or point commensurable
for naming itself

The names of histories
and actions
until it is too late…
a serial of late commas,
of commas arriving
too late in premeditation

Another “avant-garde”
acting forgotten until
it was too late these words
of apostrophe and asides
and interior chatter, the world
is a stage but we are too

Perhaps your insomniacs
dream of action,
perhaps a world or worlds far beyond
any point of being woken
so surpassed are they
by the senseless

The actions performed
out of concern
for free-fall and dance,
the “floating leaps” again,
the vertiginous precisions,
cuts and points which must
be finally of this dance

Are the unnamable points
of action, are
actions taken
because there is not
sleep
and only the non-
ability to be vigilant

The unnameable
points
where we find each other again,
an image
before an image
in abeyance of unmitigatable ambivalence,
possession not to be possessed

Thoughts then make
these gestures with the hand
somnolently of what
the bouncing and faceted
body can do

You take them to sleep with you.

The Ambivalent Image

Deren's final image of a woman 'suicided' in Meshes of the Afternoon is an ambivalent image. It is, what's more, an ambivalent image FOR other images ambivalent or not. In this case, it is an image radicalizing a situation of 'understanding' (accreting coherence in disjuncture) a woman's action or impulsion to kill herself. For other ambivalent and non-ambivalent images in my attention, Deren's image supplements against a finally coherent stucture (an understanding) for the desperate women of Palestine and elsewhere whether actually suicided or not.

This first image of a woman suicided is supplemented by another ambivalent image from her film: that of a woman's legs in profile stepping across four spatially (if not temporally) discrete terrains by means of film editing (cuts); as Deren herself tells us, this image is intended to present a woman walking across eternity to initialize the first ('primeval') in the last ('killing one's self') of a (recurrent, aleatory) series.

The ambivalence of this second image may be said to supplement that of the first insofar as it raises the dual specters of religious belief and contemporary scientific-philosophical consideration for immortality / resurrection. Can we use the ambivalence of these images to accrete a disjunctive coherence of the present crisis of belief as it is linked to "liberation" struggles and "fundamentalist"-materialist power plays alike (Bush Admin. preempting and augmenting [conjuring?]ubiquitous 'terrorist' threats for territorial advantage and control of natural resources)?

There is an elaborate (and kitschy) iconography / hagiography that glorifies one's decision to take their life and the lives of an enemy population in the current Islamic world. Videos of "martyrs" typically w/ Kalashnikovs, air-brushed wall posters, public service announcements / TV commercials honoring "suicide bombers," "martyr's picture goes here"-esque plaques, children's cartoons. Yet something rings false in an assumption that such an iconography would be merely enough to lend belief supportive of a will to die. The images from Deren's film lead me to this final ambivalence: that the situation in Palestine seems a kind of 'perfect storm' whose unaccounted variable is an uncanny and widespread willingness to die, a willingness that it is difficult to believe is the result of humiliation, material deprivation and effective ideology / propaganda alone.