Alone With the Alone

I am afraid
You are afraid
I am afraid not of this voice
You are afraid not of this voice
I am afraid of the voice inside the voice
You are afraid of the voice inside the voice
This voice pauses
This voice having paused has paused
I am afraid of chronos and kleisis alike
You are afraid for all time
As what I do gets in front of me and in back of me
As what you do can not be regained
Or numbered as such what I do
What you do will not be numerary as the stars are made from numbers
The stars are a disaster—operative
And yet steered by them we brighten worlds
Is there anything you haven't seen
I haven't seen nothing, not yet
You have seen too many somethings
All somethings being alike
And not alike
Like stars disastered by their source
Like night saved from these same stars
We are starlight
Chosen to no particular end
But the end itself neither near or far
And everywhere in between divided
Consequential
But never fatal
You are afraid of that light that leaves you alone at night
I am afraid it taunts me to climb it
It taunts you to descend
And wear the masks I always was
The things you pretended to be
Daylight and noontide coterminous
Our actual midnight
There is no our here
Only stars
Only our night saved from stars
Yours and mine
Yours and mine and nowhere
A concretion indeed
A pause in the heart
The deepest pause a heart ever did feel
The shudder of all beings
Hearing themselves
Hearing themselves hearing

*Undeserving Lebanon* Review in Modern Painters

I have reviewed Jalal Toufic's *Undeserving Lebanon* (Forthcoming Books, 2007) for the recent "Art and War" issue of Modern Painters (April, 2008)...

"The stakes of Toufic’s newest book are immense and emphatically stated, as the thinker identifies the task of a present and future Middle-Eastern culture to think beyond justice, commemoration, historicization and reparation towards the creation of original works of art, experiment, and concepts that may confront events which befell Lebanon during its civil war. For Toufic, to leave these ‘basic tasks’ to others might preserve in Lebanon’s Event the ‘conditions of possibility’ for a memory anterior to both psychological memory (the “working through” of individual and collective traumas) and collective-historical memory (reparations, commemoration of the dead, “settling of accounts”). This anarchic memory presents what Toufic recognizes as the ‘invocation of the Redeemer’—an ability to imagine the forthcoming of the Messiah as the event of a virtual existence in relation to social fact, actuality..."

To download *Undeserving Lebanon* as a PDF link here.

Richard Foreman's Deep Trance Behavior in Potato Land (Review)

Here's a review I wrote of Richard Foreman's latest...

www.thefanzine.com/sections.php?s=art&id=228&a=articles