Soon-to-be / Hiding Your Present From You*

No center trapped no
Ageless words the center
Of our soon-to-be
Innocent fire
Fingers flick string
To air happening again no
Center trapped the fire
Of our soon-to-be
Our
Soon-to-be
Words fire fingers
Flick our words
Light reflect
Soon-to-be an innocent world
No present hides
A thing of mesh

No present hides in truth
No center trapped no
Words immortals trapped
The string
Fire fingers
Flick heart breath to
Bow
Our soon-to-be will
No past negates

A thing of mesh a
Thing soon-to-be
The lights the fire flares-up
The string song bird return to the fire
To transvalue a thing
This moving
Force against the bow
Stretch
Stretch this present yet

Spire the reverb the
Verb ticking as wood spies
A light changing somewhere
Inside the song
Somewhere hidden
A thing of mesh
Some violent present almost
A violin box
Almost a tick
Against the bow wood

Some fire soon-to-be next
To these gifts somewhere
In song where is it
And which somewhere in the
Song hidden spirit
Of his child-like violence
Distortion
The way to the verb
Tapping his passage

Somewhere in song a delay
Of the thing thin mantle
Mesh hiding your present
Blow distorting
This passage to when and
Some drums
And some
Drums pass as cloud
He therefore claims them
As movements

Or stillness to still the
Bow song space throughout time
Wait for the voice
To get there to get
Where
The song unsettles waves washing
These words
Suddenly the
Closeness of clouds
Soon-to-be

Suddenly the closeness of
Listening soon-to-be
The soon-
to-be words
Sing the
Soon-to-be things of air
Break your phrasing
The charms of
Your frame waves
Washing the strings
Who is still moving suddenly

Cut voice from air unformed
Unformed mover in the
Soon-to-be words
The soon-to-be names of things this
Bow
This bow against
Our sudden lips
The unprecedented
And present light
Nothing will hide

Unformed mover who can’t
Give up this place
The center
A bow
Cut clouds clouds cut what a gas
To find place looking
Down
Looking down at
The center
The center
Of our soon-to-be
Innocent fire
The present of
His violence child-like

Eager gifts
And patient ones to find where you will
See where it is and where
You won’t know where it is
The coming drums of
Your voice
Your sudden voice
Of stillness

Looking down where you
Won’t know where it is
Your purloined lips the lips of song
Somewhere in song
Something in
The light the soon-to-be
Stillness
A voice moves

Finds fills and moves
In circles soon-to-be
Fire of what we weren’t and what we are
The soon-to-be breath transvalued
Without resemblance this
Speed
This stillness of gas

A gas to cut the strings
To cut the quiet names
The mind mind of this
Play or suffering mind
Suffering
The delayed waves
And playing upon the eyes

What the fingers can throw
Thought rain luck talk
Through
This part to enclose
A cloud and to free
A frozen wave
To think these were once my words
Lucky cloud leave it alone
I’m watching
Out of my ears

California here I come
Distorting what the fingers
Can throw
Rain talk
Talk against the bow
To be a gift to be
A soon-to-be gift
Treating the strings

Frozen wave of these
Strings moving frozen words
Of this mind
Here come the drums
The strings drums talk the coming words
Out of soon-to-be cloud

Coming home coming through
The little words of song string bow
Drums echo
Echo for the present
Of this next home coming
Returning through
The simple words

The coming air of this
Inside the
Inside outside
Little words of song still
Happily
Happily inside
The coming of this inside
Soon-to-be
This
Outside inside
Happy and
Still weather as it moves in place
Weather
The song times

Tapping happily
Tapping
Claiming the clouds clouds hide
An innocence
Child-like violence
Of their soon-to-be light
Light through the
Clouds the end of this
Claims
A soon-to-be
Voice lifting-off
Our last night together

Somewhere in the song
Tapping
Happily
Clouds hide
Claiming the coming air of this
Inside you’re coming back
O your coming back
Inside

composed winter '04-05 for Arthur Russell.

Compensations for Not Knowing (a Proposal)*

Compensations for Not Knowing: a series of performances for video or elsewhere

Materials: books / texts I and other performers “know” to varying degrees, about which we will
speak and write extemporaneously, converse and interact with.

Intending: “Amateur” epistemology? / exegesis evolved to an imagined telos, producing excess in
absences the compensatory describes.

What won’t the compensatory hold?
Producing system’s inversion
Is it medieval to pursue this beautiful purposelessness amidst violence (when people are dying)
To unite the soul and the body
The mirror of entropy is an insanely deliberate imagining of information and know-how
The number of angels, the number of aeons
A conceit for ambient not knowing, gestures of psychotic insisting

How to proceed?
Will you proceed by questions?
By outright lies?

What is the difference between lying and the imagination in this case? Falsifying? What will be
your relationship to these texts?

Speech and logos seem at issue, what presentation is. The mind self-organizing in relationship to
objects, material. For that matter -- another mind. The “mystery” of what occurs when minds
involve each other as the mystery of why something exists instead of nothing.

Where to begin? By reading a line of text, a word? By reading marked passages or passages at
random and commenting on them? By bringing different things (words) to a collision? Chance
encounter as interpretive strategy.

Who is my addressee? Who is the real addressee, if not an “art” audience? Should the addressee not
be the mind itself? As in prayer / meditation. Non-religious “praying,” prayer in place of
knowing. Is prayer compensatory?

Prayer augmenting what we can not know, and only insist.

As the monologue in a voice addressing the other as an other, the doubled voice of one entity.
“no” thyself. “not” know. now thyself. I is two or more others talking to itself in the same
voice. The interior becoming exterior, creating place for the exterior inside itself, furthest
inside. A limit of inside.

To “perform” this presentation is then no performance. But the presentation of withdrawing to no
longer be one. Confronted by a shared object, or a mind also trying not to be one: by soliloquy,
imaginative seizure (clairvoyance), storying, song, breath. By the vicissitudes of listening.

This profound listening in the interior, the radical interior; or an equally profound listening in
the face of an other’s words.

Which may be the interlocuted Same.

To inter-locute: as in two or more entities involved in circuits, among circuits.

Is the voice a circuit?

*to Eliza Newman-Saul

Bresson's Saints (Notes)

Bresson's characters are ideas, if not modernized archetypes; there is not psychological identification with them, as in action driven plots, but certain ideational-emotional investment (as in great metaphysical theater: Shakespeare, Stein, Beckett, Foreman).

The interior lives of Bresson's characters are exteriorized making for a purer interiority, an interiority of surface, and in this way they are both like animals and saints: animals incapable of a knowable interior life; saints praying towards an interior limit which produces the outward appearance of grace -- demonstrations of graceful demeanor and speech, perfect emotion.

As in Stein's saints, the saintly (including her saintly words) should move as little as possible (the words of serial?), grace being a quickness in calm (Badiou's dancer after Nietzsche who is fast because they conceive the world slowly, deliberately). In constant prayer (their lives of prayer) the saint is a dancer making grace visible by a rigorous interior life. This depth of ontological interior is not of psychological perception, but rather a depersonalized depth of shared voice / mind in prayer (immediate or direct reflection).

Someone once told me that Chris Marker had written one typically taciturn sentence addressing Bresson's work: the gist of the remark, as I remember it, that a single frame of any of Bresson's films contained more significance than the majority of films taken in their entirety. I take this as a comment on the perfection of Bresson's craft as an artist, but also as addressing the saintliness of Bresson's films. For the significance or saintliness of each frame derives not only from an economy of dialogue and action made possible by careful editing and cinematography, but also an economy of character. In using models and non-professional actors Bresson probably did so to capture the interior limits of the saintly by its inverse: the radical emptiness and pure objecthood of the non-actor / model completely directed, or chosen by the director for their appearance and disposition to certain movements and expressions.

Prayers Not Yet

I. “Everything is moving me up”

Is not yet an angel
Is an angel
Not yet
To forget what time isn’t
What musn’t
Be again
Fatefully our immanence
Our innocence
The tents
Of neutral voice into which

On our soft watch
We intuit
What gravity won’t heed
Nor heal
On our soft watch
We invisibly see
Those miles of forced wildness
What grace
Gravity won’t
Be heir to
What storming what hearing
And promised voice

Not of their imperial knack
We seek in trembling lack
Stock branches a trembling
Night for the voice an ear
To accompany a voiding air
Eye breeze and not snow no longer
Trembling branches as such

This time of year to continue with
Our name not yet an angel-name-event
In situ redemptions frozen into
Face retreated from glory grace

Not saved again to
The power two
To the one two
Effulgent percept
Fragrant cinematics
And invisibles

The guilt of our innocence
Guilt of our excess guilt
Of our individuation guilt
Of our ignorance to the power of two
Misidentified in a penitent pose

Pose adepts not this dance again
Exegesis Corbin not yet to clock Descartes’s Plato
To move the motion
Pictures up
To move infinite
Only poetry finds an
Angel again to move in perfect motion
Name not yet an image

Not yet an event supplicant in dance
This infinite dance to not continue
Without woe
Invisibly to continue
In this infinitely not contingent must
Is a surpassed world
Your pretended body

Is the voice trembling
In the dark is not
The voice is not anyone’s
Voice
In particular
Is no body
Obscuring a punctured
And punctual light
It is to suddenly be
Here

II. For the Cycles

Where space begins suddenly
In time and presupposes our love
For the worlds (the world) what image will you
Make
Will one make
So neutral to think
The voice
A delay shapes

Delayed shapes suddenly here
And not here
Not yet to shore
The body up
Not the erotic
Mind you occult
By drinking up ink
A scholastic problem of love

Delaying future shapes
Of a certain bow
Of an angel struggling
In potentia with
A certain bow
Circular to sing

The inside before his breath is done
Before light light falsely
Catches up

A retard
To light
Catches up
To words
An allegory of their fall

And not a fall
Serials
From light evening light

Night / Light
Not a fall

As light so literal
An angel in actuality
Kept by its words

III. The Presentable, for Nancy Spero

So withdrawn
Were
Their words as
Screaming
As such this
Time of year (every time
Of year
Everywhere
And for the general)
For the particular
Spero
Pictures of
Copters are
For the destroying
For
The destroyed
Women paint
Stone-like
Inscriptions
Art must exist
To produce knowledge.

We speak soliloquies
Our prayers
And apostrophes
Of the one
For the two
The one and one
Not making
Merely two (Creeley)
Not equal
In numericity
Our daily voices
Our images
Of the voice nations are
Hallucinated
(his Later numbers).

Nancy Spero
For what
We see and
Don’t see
The blood for
The trees
The dark
Of lovers for what
We see to not see
The dark
Of bodies
In pain
Ruptures from
Existence
Torturously must be
Presented

IV.

To move for all
In perfect motion culture
Of our fall
And our repeated
Resurrections, who
Will forgive
The fallen-risen
Who shelter ink and image

Those who flock
Those who kill
Of the one for
The two
The two
Of forgetting
Those who flock
Those who will
The graphics of a cloud
Loving only the difference

A different delay
Her body
Of letters and
Her body of substance
Circling the onus
Of time
Her material
Body the retard
Of perfect naming

Delayed
And suddenly
Shudder shiver
For the one (the One)
Of value
Eternal are the
Names
Of flux in this
Dance, perfect
Image of our regard

Is to partake
Of images
Letters
Of which
To partake
Not-yet
Of the body
Of the soul hiding

V. Coda (Prayer Wheel)

Devoid delaying
Lacrimose injunction
Imageless motion
More than branch
Voicelessly