3 Sketches for Sharits / "How with this rage can beauty hold a plea?"*

1.
A Total Sense of Sense (END WAR)

In soliloquy
For color
We are doubled

Triply for speech
What we would say
Saying

Of the colors in soliloquy
Or of a piece
The pieces

What pieces
Were you holding
So quick and not quick

The calm
Velocities of colors
Kunz cunnilingus awash

A total sense of sense
In this
Your utter plastics utterly not

For war
The stillness
Of those flickers ripped

From the colored
Ideations
Remaining arrest

What is dreamt of the colors
In soliloquy
Or of a piece

For speech
What we should say
Saying

2.
Mandala (for two or more voices)

Devoid delaying
Lacrimose injunction
Imageless motion
More than branch
Voicelessly Devoid
delaying Lacrimose
injunction Imageless
motion More than
branch Voicelessly…

3.

A blue word a red one a green
So go these tone rows
The blues

A blue word
A yellow an orange
If dreams were only dreams, their due warmth,

We hath not seen
We have dreamt bottomlessly
The sounds swelling, their due warmth their vigils

Call light to light
Separate dark from demonic dark
Paraclete

Go down
To these tones of red in a row
Pinkish-red of sex dreaming again

Of rest in this war, this human war
And the cosmic,
Dream the bottomless subject

& beyond.
If one could only rest
History would be purchased

And memory protected
By forgetfulness,
Art would once again be…

“It can be understood that the now
is the permanent point of origin
for the ecstasies of time.”

*Next Monday, March 13th I will be reading at the 11th Street Bar (on E. 11th btwn Avenues A & B) with Forrest Gander and Karen Garthe as part of the Reading Between A and B series, curated by Jonathan Thirkield. "3 Sketches" are three lineated drafts or "sketches" towards a longer work for Paul Sharits, who in 1966 made his seminal film-"mandala" ostensibly to "end war": *Piece Mandala/End War*. Alongside a politics of direct action and address, the dissemination of knowledge and a ruthless critique of the atrocities in Iraq and elsewhere by the hands of the United States and aligned international forces, I wonder if "peace" should not also still be sounded after a tradition that enfolds any number of poets and artists, not the least of which include: Sharits, Jackson Mac Low, Pauline Oliveros, Gertrude Stein, Agnes Martin, Piet Mondrian, John Taggart, Olivier Messiaen, Terry Riley, Steve Reich....

Between the need for participatory intervention and ecstatic overdetermination in the mediatized face of violent malice "how with this rage can beauty hold a plea"?