Man Thinking

With gum for eyes
With brains

For hands
We do not fly

We sink like
A syrup

In the head

The mind
Is this syrup.

*

Coupling. Gross wing. A pong rhythm. Of the mind. The eyes diegesis. Extra voice.

The slow rap. Seething. Like a balloon to gas. The mind is that balloon. Of attention your

intention. Never mind. Mine. To break the frame. We make conclusion. An image

of the voice. Emergent from wind. A superimposition. An eye for propositions. Coupling.

Gross wing. A pong rhythm. Of the mind. The eyes diegesis. Extra voice. In a slow rap.

Seething. Like a balloon to gas. The mind is that balloon. Of attention your intention.

Never mind. Mine. To break the frame. We make conclusion. An image of the voice.

Emergent from wind. A superimposition. An eye for propositions. Coupling.


*

It is as a wind

tunnel
to these voices

it is

a syrup through which
no thought

passes
it is our talk

in being animal

a singing
flame it is

of our bodies
bodies in

the impassioned
absences
of sound commensurable

with consummations

and deployments
of mutual
power

it is the blood
moved elsewhere

invisibly

labored the rhythms
of spirit

passing through spirit
matter through matter

it is
only felt in this sense

singing flames radiation

not actually singing
aloud the slow
motion effects

your body our body
blind matter upon which

an idea of us
touches down again

withdrawals from
our poverty

*

The eyes the wrap

Around eyes of all

Children inconsolably weeping

To be alive like the dead

Their eyes covered in a gum

Convertible to no other

Color except for this.

Permission*

Permission
for Robert Creeley

This poetic mood approaches the state in which
what is present appears as present. Do you find it so abstract
and colorless? What an extraordinary idea to say
that immediate consciousness is colorless and abstract!
-- Charles Sanders Peirce

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos,

that is a place of first permission,
everlasting omen of what is.
-- Robert Duncan

The first idea was not our own
-- Wallace Stevens


Return to that field
Bridge going under
A clutter of
Leaves in some fall
Distant falls
Those leaves braid

Whose leaves braid
Time going under
An image of thread
In an open sky
The eye sees contrast
Of branches some
Spaces are not
Meant to be seen

It is this thinking which
Feels instead
Here where
I have no frame yet
There is therefore
No eye yet
No eyelet for
Our imagining

Man with his dog
The bridge that
Small building
Are too much
Story
For the imagination
Not enough leaves
Their
Thickness to braid
Pure image of time

Pure pattern depth
And thickness
Flatness of
Reference deny
Story its place
Historicity neither
Here or before
A now heard
And near

All permitted of
Return
A field draws near
A hooded bird
Near the sky
Eye’s flatness
That close

Here where we
Have no
Frame yet to
Compose
Looking for depth
Ground to grasp
Purchase point to line

Finding the roses
Still there in the
Fall
Where we
Left them finding
Men with dogs
Cars thru
Branches to
Highway

A now-estranged bucolic
No longer pastorals where
They remained
To decay
Eyes are then
This condition of finding
Circling Delaware park
A proper name
For this flatness

Don’t dismay finding
These roses where
We left them
In our flat circling
Of eyes iconoclast
Love braiding
No point of reference
No above or below
This sky

We cry for
This place we
Cry for
Place without
Place
Tearful commons
The view thru
The trees to
This highway
Cutting the park
In half
Perhaps we cry
For this division too

Substitutions permitting
A turn of leaves
Permitted to
Return
Of course thinking of
Duncan’s children
Revenants seeking
Thickness
Of difference

Sameness striking
An imagination without place
How will one ever
Understand this if they haven’t
Sensed it already
A photograph seems
To ask

*composed Fall 2004.

Eternity then / Inseperable (Tears Are These Veils)

The turbines of elephants
Other animals
Churn in the eyes of the face
The stars of those eyes

Stuttered cries and slatted
Sibilance strobes like labor churns
Pangs of shock
The face disturbed

In space like an angel's
Will not be disturbed until
This eternity of power and
Deformity should become

As stars superimposed
That face expresses
Nothing is lost there is not
Time enough for these tears.

*

It is a sound sort of like
Screaming

And sort of like sobbing

Crying like machines
And animals crying out their eyes

For power alone convivial.

*

Like the voices
The general voices

Of night
The ritual

Impressions and
Depressives

This night
Of the world

Releases
The cage

From the animal
Disgusting

Shadows
Shed

From pools
Around the lenses

Blobs of blackened
Light

Unreflective
And ceaseless.

*

Is this making any sense?

The turbines swell again
a relation to mind.

Cries assemble
and blend around the face

a fashion of grace.
The portrait distorted

for there is nothing
time can't do.

*

A relation

of visions to mind

is ear to this occasional
swelling

sound
sticking to sound.

Will we lie down
in that field

peaceful once more

without sublation from which
we fall

to our senses recalling them

a dialogue of sorts
from which

the imagination builds

around a single
spire a cathedral supreme.

From which an amnesis

reproducible contacts

of stars pre-eternities

of tears.

*

Like rape, mutates
The dropped
Frames the face

Frame rates
Clench the ear, teeth
The image bears

Rearing, rending
Perception
Come to our senses

Turbines fill the mouth
With sound
Visions

Irreducible to
Descriptions, adequate
Knowings

In the service and not
In the service
Of us.

*

The eyes, the eyes, the face
The face, grown inwardly,
Outward, for falling, our sympathy

Our sympathy for the for and our
Sympathy for the in, our sympathy
The sympathy of the in for the for

As real stars, real images
Of stars fall, falling from her
Face, the eyes, the eyes of

The face, the growing inwardly
Until there is a voice for this,
Until there are two voices each

Each other's mine, the one
For the one, the one and
One somehow making one.

*

Eternity is then
Inseparable
From what it can do.

Histories of eternity
Like labor churns
Affected stars.

Towards Exterior (Splitting)*

*forthcoming in Sarah Campbell's P-Queue.

"for whom pictures are paradise"

Children's books do not serve to introduce their readers directly into the world of objects, animals, and people, into so-called life. Rather, if anything remotely similar to Platonic anamnesis actually exists, it would take place in the lives of children, for whom pictures are paradise. By remembering, they learn; what you put into their hands should have, insofar as human hand can impart it to paper, the color of paradise, just as a butterfly's wings have their patina. Children learn in the memory of their first intuition. And they learn from bright colors, because the fantastic play of color is the home of memory without yearning, and it can be free of yearning because it is unalloyed. In that sense, the Platonic anamnesis is not quite the form of memory specific to children. For it is not without yearning and regret, and this tension with the messianic is the exclusive effect of genuine art, whose recipient learns not from memory alone but from the yearning that it satisfies too soon and therefore too slowly.
-Walter Benjamin

Instant Light

There is a certain mist
Mistaken for memory
A gauze or filter
Which teleports the words

Over fields fields over pools
And pools over an umbilical
Voice which twists at night
And says words we can't

Make out and that we
Must imagine instantly
Like a procession passing
In broad daylight or images

As if they were a moment
Ahead of the things we are
Waiting for an idea of
Our bodies so dispersed.

You have made an angel disappear
Through the most mundane
Means -- so what remains?

A mist, a kind of sheen,
As objects themselevs disappear.
A glass for the worlds we have been.

How can't can become literal (Erasing Red)

In an interview in 1992 by Michel Denisot on the French cable station Canal+ for the release of *Fire Walk With Me*, Lynch was asked about his taste for textures and materials, including things which are considered compulsive, like the series of dead flies he used in compositions. He answered that it is the name we give, the associated word ('dead flies'), which prevents our seeing them as beautiful, and that all we have to do to see differently is to erase the word.
--Michel Chion

I.
The erasure of names approaches paradise where a name once was and all that remains is the thing itself resonant and destroyed.

Paradisical beauty is this resonance -- silence beyond sound. The thing resounding no longer attached to a name.

II.
Colors truly become colors without their names.

III.
The signs of paradise remain not only in polesemy but in the dissociation of sign and signifier.

The mind itself cleaves the body as it says the word and a word as a body itself whether said or expressed -- fluent in telepathy.

IV.
The throbbing of this word like blood becomes a trance distanced from an idle grasping at meaning. The throbbing of these words like the real.

A ceiling fan, a turbine in slowest motion.

Eternal as our sex-changing.

V.
The red in blood -- blood red.
The red that can't be destroyed and the red that can.
The word red -- hovering.
Bodies hovering in secret judgment.
A red room -- the blood in red.
That are both symbols and images and sound-images.
The image of blood resonant around a word.
The whirring of words like leaves and the leaves of leaves leave-taking in a single ear.
The rushing, like a rushing of liquid -- a falling of the image upon eyes.
A liquid sense of eyes -- ear conscious.
The reflection of a fan whirring for all time and no one fascinates.
Substantial is this.
Wired for a body made only of blood and useless cuts in time.
The heart of the heart of the motor in these incisions.
In becoming a word the word becomes not merely a word.
Paradise is the renunciation of this word having only its one sense.
The denial of the denial of the doubleness of words.

VI.
This is not a word.

VII.
Words like literal hallucinations of a general voice.

VIII.
Literally words are tearing us apart.
They go down like gifts towards another who is not exactly us.
It is as though these voices were in the next room on a monitor and not here.
Voices rushing in like angels resounding around the fullness of any place, a portal in the ear.
I want them flung, the blood torn, but I literally can't.
How can't can become literal.

IX.
Connecting a sound to a sound movement resumes and we are here before it listening in.
This literal scene metaphorizing only a mood of blood.
Waiting for an image to connect image sound connects what image can not.
We rest in this failure like an eternal word.
An angel rushes upon us again missing the moment it would otherwise grasp.
Red and the word red, blood and the word blood.
Absent-mindedly reciting the world as if it could remain still.

X.
A towel, for instance covering, an angel.

The horizontality of afternoon light
as it falls on the wall.

Signs of a longing
for home follow us afterward.

Icons, like actual homes, alight in our
hovering.

Anything That Moved ('Immobile Growth')*

Sometimes a wind blows/ And you and I/Float/In love/And kiss/Forever/In a darkness/And the mysteries/Of love/Come clear
-David Lynch (quoted in Michel Chion's *David Lynch*)

If a light went out in the world
Candle light light of indifferent
Dwelling
Light of a telling seen
I would fuck anything that moved
I would be you and
You would be me

If a light went out
In a windy world
Wound so around a noun
Predicated on
A desiring but secret name
I would fuck
Anything that moved
The scars of your breasts
Fascinated like a statue
Speed of thought speed of
Violence
Disguises rest

Speed of this car light
While we are parked
Nowhere discernible I would be
Like you you
Would be like me
In the light of a world gone out
Evil dictates
A space to hit

Velvet we would be
Slow in this movement
Of wind
Roaring the
Anti-hero of dialectics
Love will reign
Speed of love
If fucking won’t become
A nightly thing
The exits we pass-up
To become each other
Will be velvet
Nowhere discernible
But darkness not of night

Slow slow slow
In this movement of wind
Before the light the candle
Light
Of the world gone out
There was a refrain
Velvet in
The mouth of fucking
I was you and you were me
The face it lit
Up with false flame
Unwavering
Perfect for our vehicles
Of immaculate song

Dreaming slow in this
World
In this other
World red
The lips red of
This slow
Mouth of fucking
Lips close-up and
Slow to breath when dead
Unfalse in a night
Of wind not yet

Not yet velvet
Not yet this light please
O please
Not yet please, please O
Unclasped this
Night not yet of wind
Unclasped around
A verb to fuck

Lets drink to fucking I am not
You
You are not me yet
A dog roars the real
Voice sounds slowed
The patient slap
The lips
Nearly breathing
Not yet unclasped

Cleave to night verb to fuck
Love love cleaves to
Night to unwind wind
To light slow
A flame of rearview
Mirrors neither hero
Me or you “poet” or
“Assassin”
It goes with the territory

The refrain the wind through
The trees from which she
Emerges
The light light slow
Light the
Object of night of
A mirror around these beings

I would fuck anything that
Moves
But nothing’s moving
Too slow a light lighting
The face as it does not sing
Speed of this parked car light
While we are parked

The ear relays this unseen
To the composing eye
Newly breathing a world
Of wind of wind and
Flowers as they beginning
Slow reds and yellows
Of the wind
Wind around a car as
It is passing wind around
Our being

For that moment I am you
And you are me
I would the hero fuck
Anything that moved
Slow speed of dialectics
Libido love will reign
The lips the patient slap
Of flesh but briefly

I would the anti-hero
Uncleave all song all sound
The words as they are
Signs of breath wound slow
And rhythmic like waves
Around the dark

If a light went out in the world
I would hear only
The lips the patient slap
Of flesh as spirit
A final chase of
Speed and chance
The revolving movements
Of two faces under
The dark light of a parked car.

*composed Spring 2005 to Zack Finch and Michael Cross, after lines from poems by Mike Kelleher and John Taggart and watching again David Lynch's *Blue Velvet*.

To Crown To Cover*

Outcome

We see every outline as them
And yet they are not we veiled
By this event not desiring
To be gathered again
By some historical operation

I want to love them and yet I also
Want them flung exited by some
Side-door that only leads
To another wilderness deserts of
These withdrawn interviews.


An Autobiography of Henry James by Chris Marker

The eye sees the victims
From which its dislodged
And participates in its own
Capture in order to lose
The captive again
The cause of death

Hunting the hunter
Or the hunted having memories
Before they could be made
There are four frames
Four thresholds and therefore
Four ways to fear
In choosing oneself guilt pries
From us our fingers and
Stammers alibi

This womb of time a time of
Wounds becoming true
Unhealable the double at the
Door is not the double
You thought you were
But each so many fires
That burned us and
Gave us unbearable wills
While what we stalked were
What we still could be.


Stealth

A need to hide radiantly
On the branches and in the white
Webbed hollow of a tree
As it roots too much.

The shadows only
Come alive
When they’re struck.

For now is not treasonous
Being like a wall before a stage
Not a question.

*

Cut to no longer closing
No longer this admired
Window but as we sing

Into an orifice monads cathect
Each other distantly
The distant spirals of these minute plans

Exceeding a pale of means
Or dates as they’re remarked
By a repetitious glance.


Cremaster III.

Those stilts your torso rests on
Frighten that half of me
Which is not myself

In a play of mending half-lives
And one more tooth
Blown out

Discharge makes for lived tableau
Time of costumes
Space of vicissitude

Meeting at Ground Zero
Culture dreams
A mass of like-to-kill

To claw where magic
Makes its face
And skin cools colder steel

Vaseline holds for allegory
We who remain
Much vicious and take lovers lately.


Emersonian

Promise me love
Your force disunite
A sky for our stalking
Singing the wilder
Fires of hoarded salt
No image forgives
Which strips us of sight.

Show me matter
Make me a new ring
For the eyes which cry
Rapt now I is reap
Now I’s a drowsy rim
By the waters of receded
Struggle and weather
Recalled by rhyme.

I fail to lift how I fail
And yet it goes on beginning
Anywhere in proposed song.


Rousseau Barouque

Opaquer flame hearth frame
Johanne know knowing only sometimes

Destroys the object known.
Cannibals show-brie-on,

Fire themes through a string
In the eye. See sky for what

We are not what opens
Too much towards its freedom.


About When, Which Should Never Be Forgetting’s Completion

I share this journey towards ice as you share I.
I share a name longing to feign recovery.
To sense thought was an instrument and yet the animal
Still noble. Who become us when it no
Longer matters whether we look.
We might frighten them if we did
Or forget forgetting too soon to be dead.

Dying is shed so why not do? Articles won’t
Be for us nor like anything. Hang up your guns
And thereby shoot crooked. The will becomes
A colder flame too much having been mastered
By love. When our only recourse is to go to hell.


Brakhage I.

Aggregate and slow light
Dive to
This snowblind burden again.

Face
A mountain looming
Being awakened.


Identity

Clearly what we’re seeing
Are these patterns in-echo
Awoken in a cared-for wood

Wed to every existing expression
Placing this finger here
As if to verify the fact

Of this finger being here
Hearing prescription determinately
Words do also constitute

A time of fact
Memories of genes
Cling to other memories

To the hovering genealogies
Of a brain
Or a horizon gently scanned

We die imaginary deaths
So we may always
Like revenants return.


Brakhage II.

That this protective blink
Is actually I identified
By a circle which pierces me
Moved to an opening tone

To a diurnal rhythm
Of slow zooms to difference
Painted by energy and
We flick as far as we can

In that from which we came
Slowing these free-falls
In the body snow fallen
From an unlikely bough.


Distracted

How
it
may

feel
to
wake

and
continue
unaware

these
lapses
were

not
in fact
death.

*

But a kind of sleep
Which may verify
This recognition

We citizens
Of the literal
We witnesses

Of the floating
Worlds I is the last
Time I noted myself

By quoting
Myself the risk
Of this is in

The search
Moving between
Two ranges

And pretending
To be
Of both.


By the Sounds Of What Was Taped as Tape Rolled

As the waves roll they also record
And as the passengers did not know
Their destinations they could not
Prepare for an afterlife.

All the tiny houses of the valley
Are recording this through premonition
Every shift of the wind inaugurates
A position by which we is no longer
Interpellated no coverage being enough.

I feel as though I am approaching it now
A place where suffering points to us
And tells us we are the thresholds
We will always be nothing more.


Not Reconciled

One too many lambs sacrificed by one too many buildings bombed.

And reconstituted by the way we walk the basement intact, firing artillery into a more open field.

He's driven this city too many times not to forget the narrow passage your traffic patiently is.

There are too many speeches lacking place for this not to be a film about memory, an embattled hymn or merely a poem.

If she recedes in a pure image of purer space she takes the gun from the drawer remembering prayers as remembering for itself, pleading statelessness & psychosis.

Choose your own reenactment, the other signs are chosen for us and shall not result in reconciliation.


Circles expanded impossibly by an enthusiastical organism.
Who may be lit all day yet do not dream they sleep.


The Preformed Weather

By so many blows in the dark
I remember you as a wandering caress
That has no other territory but voluptuous torque
Nearing forgotten breaths.

Twilight mark how many
Disappeared by hiding’s hidden
Glue bluish gray
Having cows as we may.

Caves within which to unsee
A screen left to its devices
To long unreflectingly without
Remorse for who are real.


Real-Time

To assume that the ballplayers were celebrating in real-time might otherwise seem absurd.


If You Would *Not* Have Visions

The phoney proposals of a hushed and raping voice.

The music of your most private fears.

Car-wrecks hovering on empty pylons.

The vampire, as his lips don’t move, but the answering machine picks-up and he somehow and distantly speaks.

The frozen.

Those words risen in the poem decomposed by a cracking tarn.

Uxorious doubles buried alive.

Music for the deaf, painting for the blind, recipes disappeared in a scentless index.

The unspeakable deeds of unprintable words.

The will to leave.

The face becoming larger as the camera pulls back simultaneously zooming forward.

The sense of terror that one would drink milk while in the background white noises are exploited her labor is that hum unoriginated attacking the nervous system.

The will to feel.

The face as the film burns.

The face as white overexposes.

The reason for tape loops.

Mobile termini.

A discriminate chopping.

The nostalgic bones.

This blood of the image.


The mind will catch up to the body. The memory will make such an adjustment to the screen. As the animal relays our gaze, and the words we are watching betray us. Is this the reason we have chosen to write? I have strayed and yet how I am struck by the symmetry of when we occur.

But I’m not nearly strong enough to forget these events. These moments of an endangered consciousness, laughing and laughing until death-do-us-part, trembling as one can not be at this conception twice. Torture and ecstasy forget only because they can only sense the present. The blood filling the mouth. This should not be hermeneutic.

I am alone now. This is the way you will know me. By a clearing when the treaty has broken. By the warring of war itself in the over-weaned light of telepathized day. The knocking of my autography at woods, the needing and not having of my words. They appear in a struggle to be attentive to immediacy. “However, there a mind’s complexity is a common factor in all minds.” How one understands the world to appear at all.

If there’s disinterest in a thing of beauty then for miles miles don’t touch. The doe doesn’t see the cross-hairs, nor does one need “get-off.” For a while there is no incorporation of the real, nor the fear of such an incorporation. A rock is truly a rock. A stomach never the home of becoming (i.e. merely digestive).


*composed Fall 2003

Now Man (Kiss Not)*

Home Is For Miles

Those buildings so painfully foreign
Of your life scarred and grown
Inwardly recalling them in pieces
I became afraid
At a meaning of light grown
To the symmetries of
Daytime
In the impoverished nation.

Time sifted into time as it lives
In itself and we it
Standing for, standing against
That light so painfully foreign
To all be is
The apprehension of forms ruined by no one
All.


Pages

Boning then
In some sense of the past
Legions go to harm to whip

At the first alarm of vanishing signage
The semaphore meaning
To kill every last one

Blinks unwittingly whose every tic
Of variant cane
Bears witness to the pirated

Echo of these pages
Waste products of more
Primitive accumulations.


Fluff-a-nutting

How we would ever think to hide
In words “hellebore,” “hello”
Helter-skelter seeking shades
Private no more
The nose runs blood from this

Roses, Hellebore, hella’ bored
Words clip their own hair
Cultivating a fence linked
By twinkie intuition
And defeat.

The twitch of his nose
Grows like Pinocchio’s
Doing it sideways
To the slinky rhythms
Of late machines.

This latest paradise
Being close to what was meant
Through the walls of ourselves
Heavy petting
& patty cakes.

Rimbaud
Of all our pretty things
Thick and thicker
Thickest starlets
You stick too much to this mold.


Pay Attention Motherfucker

This zone around the word
Its staying power leaves
From a place of fading substitution
For the subject’s watched-for back.

This is just to say
They shoot all night
At shadows on sheets
As though they weren’t cast
By intelligent things.

My body no longer
Follows me round
This corner upon seeing
Anything at all I knew
I was the first
I was the last to leave.


Tween and not so
So many chiefly
Filling the ditch with a hole
Not expending too soon
The meadows of our need
The truth like sorrow
Being all too sticky


Please Pay Attention Please

The position of the camera
Is the only
Trace
Of an un-
Skeptical
Mind.

The eye goes first, then the
Fist – ah!
We want love, we
Remember love
As the mask of the lost
Waxen and everywhere
But where we, negligible, step.

To be
Any
Nearer
However
Wouldn’t
Be to
Communicate
The predominate
Urge
To be implacably near.


Obselescent Choreographies

The people a corridor moulds us to be
Objects frozen by labyrinthine glass, by optical fibers
Would we appear erstwhile any intelligent design amnesiacs and claustrophobes?


(Un-)Mending Wall

Is he sinking into the floor
Or rising from it?
The still has changed
Waves of light outside these caves
Photographs of them.

As the entrance grows near
The heart beats a little
For never having been here
As the entrance grows near
Penetrate my ear
As music made by a lost year.

This sense of discovery is
Of tethers that free
The organs to leave
And anyone to arrest
The mind with their unwilling.

This sense of loss
Is of leaves to love
Is to go into any situation
Not wanting to kill
And being so unprepared.

A mode of seeing is not heard
The lips are tired of waiting to know
The terms of their custody
As neighbors we go to blows
Over who has the right to say
“I kiss not these lips.”


Pity

I’m not picky, really
I feel bad
For the way you move
Under the bright
Bright lights
Ceaselessly bugged.

I’m not picky
And the fog-
Machine’s not on
Really.

Yet you dare
A sense-
Less dance
Never done
With the tears of
Your undoing.


*composed Spring 2004.

Towards Exterior formatted

Fictions of Surveillance

For Harun Farocki

I.
If a tree falls
and the only witness
is the image
of the tree…

If the image
itself is rootless
where fantasy doubles
and emerges…

II.
Disaster mark
The lip of mouths unseen
Shed not light but shed
Light ideally

In idols the trains of doing
And the trains of fate, the trains of not
Doing, that the little oar blade
Is there, and there in the

Big wake
Of time that is us, we are the question
What the mouth discovers and
The eyes cover, what the veils eye

This distance our blade knife
Blade night
What occasional claims in idols
Occident and gas shed

Not light but shed
Visions a glass to stimulate
Flight simulator of proven movements
War exercises are practical truths

Perspective doesn’t complain
Of camouflage and the false
Cross red
Illusions of truer

Trees house gods men
See from space nightmarish
Project measuring man
To man.

III.
If a tree falls or night
Falls on eyes shades
Dark shades a wake falls awake

If a tree falls like the
Solipsist’s body a common
Sense that each picture pictures

If we sing ourselves we must
Sing of other men this too
Must be a picture

What light breaking into song...

IV.
Not on
my life

the cross
is born

of night
and night

not dark
separated

by a whim
of creation

an image
after

ascension
descending

V.
For the eyes too are products of light
Made of beams if you will
And human beings a research into
The sound of waves the wood pushing
A lapping furthermore and whereof

One image arrives without explanation
And another its shadow, and sanest
Words the shadowless discovering
Of veils and veils for veils sans eyes
A cropped mouth identifying the police

VI.
This too the world’s invention
This inversion, this Roman pack
This peace without peace.

Images outnumbering the soldiers
Bodies outnumbering measure
Photographs outnumbering the real.

VII.
Burnt as eyes withdraw from eyes
Sense grace withdrawing
Eyes from eyes graves burnt

As eyes withdraw from eyes
Sense grace withdrawing
Eyes from eyes graves

Abby Walton's "Cook Book" (Blurb)*

This little book, a book without a title and comprised “merely” of 30 digital reproductions of Polaroid photographs taken of table settings, embodies much of what I find beautiful and important about Abby Walton’s art: an art of true grace, of daily devotions and meditations, and of an insistent practice of what, for lack of better term, I must call an “art of living.” Insofar as each Polaroid is wrest from the context of a familiar dinner gathering or elaborate party, together they are a document of a total care for the daily and a reminder of the ever-kindled hearth. That a commons should be beautiful, attended, loved. And in this last sense especially, the Polaroids and the book containing them are essential. Not a fashion-shoot for food, but indicative of a life that may be worth living.

*The "Cook Book" can be purchased at Printed Matter, NYC: http://printedmatter.org/catalogue.

Peace on A presents: Alan Gilbert & Cathy Park Hong (Events Series)*

“A divergence without combat, or a peace with neither conquered or conquerors.”
--Emmanuel Levinas

*Peace On A* series

presents

Alan Gilbert & Cathy Park Hong

Friday May 12th, 8PM

hosted by Thom Donovan at

166 Avenue A, Apartment #2
New York, NY 10009

Alan Gilbert’s poems have appeared in various magazines and journals including The Baffler, Chicago Review, and First Intensity; in the anthology *Free Radicals: American Poets Before Their First Books*; and online at The Poetry Project website. His writings on poetry, art, culture, and politics have appeared in publications such as Artforum, Bomb, The Village Voice, Time Out New York, and the website Jacket. A collection of critical writings entitled *Another Future: Poetry and Art in a Postmodern Twilight* was recently published by Wesleyan University Press. He has a Ph.D. in English literature from the University at Buffalo, and has worked as an art editor for the New York Foundation for the Arts and the College Art Association. He lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Cathy Hong’s *Translating Mo'um* was published in 2002. Her second book, *Dance Dance Revolution*, has been chosen for the Barnard New Women's Poetry Series and will be published by WW Norton in 2007. She is the recipient of NEA and NYFA grants, and spent last year in South Korea on a Fulbright Grant. Her poems have appeared in Volt, Denver Quarterly, Chain, American Letters, Commentary, and other journals. Currently, she lives in New York City, splitting time teaching at Eugene Lang college and working as a freelance journalist.

Peace On A intends an events series for work by emergent writers, artists, performers and scholars.

for inquiries and feedback please write:
thom_donovan@yahoo.com


Introductions

Alan Gilbert:
*Form is never more than an extension of culture*. So goes Alan Gilbert’s telling play on Robert Creeley and Charles Olson’s famous proclamation: *Form is never more than an extension of content*. Reading Gilbert’s *Another Future: poetry and art in a postmodern twilight* the past few weeks has made me more hopeful about the future of poetry and art criticism in general, and proved to me that this future is far from foreclosed or prescribed. Perhaps the most sizeable aporia Gilbert has found his way out of with grace and reasonability through his collection of essays, addresses, and scholarly meditations is that after Language Writing -- what may remain the single most important literary generation prceding Gilbert’s and my own. If Language has made a thorough, if not effective, assault on linguistic representation what is left having faced this central dillemma? Beyond polysemy, transcendentalist "active reader" theories, beyond an ecstasy of (non-)communication Gilbert returns us to various sense-makings of context, history, agency, discourse, cultural and economic analysis too often lost in the projects of many writers associated with Language -- projects Gilbert has sited as self-assured in their "assured sense[s] of not making sense." If not making sense alone will not suffice for another future what will? For Gilbert we have acts of witness and a recuperation of the subject, however abject, in Benjamin Friedlander’s verse; we have micro-historical emergencies in the post-Olsonian work of G.S. Giscombe, Susan Howe, and Mark Nowak; we have an original way of writing history through a poetics of archivalism by way of Ed Sanders’ verse experiments. The list of important names, works of art, and ideas Gilbert has redirected our attention goes on… I look forward to listening to him read tonight to hear how his critical work translates into that other praxis: poetry.

Cathy Park Hong:
Part ethnography, part philological science fiction, largely a tour de force of witz… Cathy Park Hong’s forthcoming *Dance Dance Revolution*, from which I hope she will read tonight, imagines a future or ”alternative universe” through the soliloquies of a tour guide whose *lingua franca* encompasses Korean, German, West Indian, “Spanglish,” “Black English” and the English of Geoffrey Chaucer – the problems of whose work perhaps most resemble Park Hong’s own, however across the centuries. To read the work aloud, which I have had the pleasure of doing the past few months, is to sound what I believe Robert Duncan called “muthos” (of course punning on myth and mouth), and Nathaniel Mackey after Duncan language’s “discrepant engagement". In such engagements, it is language itself -- language as a multiplicitous expression of cultural desire -- which is ultimate master over the speaker/author. The singular voice we hear in *Dance Dance Revolution*, beyond Park Hong’s capacious imagination, is a voice of present necessity as cultural confluences and conflict become articulate in an uncanny glossolalia ventriloquizing us –- the reader! -- to make us mouthpieces for histories micro and macro, disastrous and joyful, wondrous and all-too-familiar. If the language of *Dance Dance Revolution* also risks hyper-codification or an elaborate language game it does so in a spirit of experiment and inquiry which can only benefit its eventual readers and critics, not to mention a larger poetic discourse addressing cultural forces at large.

--Thom Donovan


DIGITAL CAUSEWAY

Every window contains
the memory of a body
seen through it,
along with a shadow that momentarily
erases its reflection,
because there are no
universal symbols,
such as sun and moon,
or loving the landlubbers,
and it’s hard not to take pleasure
in witnessing authority disgraced,
even if we internalize punishment
long before doing
anything wrong,
or are fearful of loss
and lacquer everything
with an opaque coat,
then tie it all down
as if it were a portable shelter
that might blow
from its rocky ledge
in the middle of the night,
which is why “sometimes”
is as close as it gets to “absolute.”
And so I’m not nostalgic
for Jimmy Carter;
I’m not nostalgic
for TV dinners
while watching allegories
unravel over a lifetime
in a staggered parabola,
asking: “Where’s mama?”
“Where’s papa?”
since there’s not just one
language to contest,
and the word “poetry”
is the lightest of beach balls
and the heaviest of boulders;
it’s running a standing start mile
with hurdles, high jump,
and a whole floor routine thrown in.
Therefore, I don’t mind
if you go ahead and shrug
your shoulders and smile
in that endearing way;
for a while I was addicted
to no longer being lonely;
in other words, I knew then
what I don’t know now:
Wings separate from the bodies
of most creatures,
and I’m burnt at the root
picking one small blueberry
staining the teeth scraping
the inside of a bowl,
similar to filling empty boxes
with more empty boxes
—all ones and zeroes—
and then pretending
it got lost in the mail.

--Alan Gilbert


1. Services

See radish turrets stuck wit tumor lights around de hotel
like glassblown Russki kestle wit’out Pinko plight,
only Epsolute voodka fountains. Gaggle for drink?

Twenty rooboolas, kesh only . Step up y molest
Hammer y chicklets studded in ruby y seppire almost
bling badda bling. Question? No question! Prick ear.

Coroner diagnose hotel as king of hotels ‘cos
luxury es eberyting. Hear da sound speaker sing ‘I get laid in
me Escalade/but I first sip gless of Crystal/den I whip out me pistol.’

No worry. No pistol in hotel, only best surgeon feesh y beluga
bedtime special. Deelicious. But before you tuck in king o’
water bed, befo you watch papa-view,

Be peripatetic y see snow bears merry on a ball or go
Be roused by molten sauna where Babushkas bap your tush
wit boar bristle switch. No childs allowed here. Mo mo?

De blood rust hes been Windexed to amber shine,
de insurrecta's marauding soul wetted into papa-machetes,
de looted radio back in de propa municipal hands.

Here be city of ebening calm, da fire-rilers gone.
If you want true heestory, go watch tailor
maki magic. He more revolutionary den artist.

If you dream only for Paris, dat is right outside de
atrium, beyond de sand dunes, which form y disappear
like mekkinations of human digestion. Sand swirl

to otherworld land where blankets da weight of human
bodies tatter y pill. No tatting, no pilling here. Da sand will
be in your eye, only sometime.

--Cathy Park Hong

* The above image is a detail from Anton Van Dalen's *81 Birds*.

Poesis (Splitting)*

Restore form for the undead hover craft
Light is a fullness of exposure
Photography ensures a future for these words names
Remain in light drift to icy lines distant
Crystallize for all time a demolished name Niagra
Fight art with art unseen time is this other
This other of unfolding experience relation the fullness of exposure
Split the house and lift this unworked town craft like water falling unfailingly light
This is a magic of interruption
The crystal incompossibilty of all structure
A politics powers factor
The fullness of exposure

*composed Spring '05. Forthcoming in P-Queue.

Towards Exterior (Splitting)*

to Gordon Hadfield

TO H OVER
F OUR CORNERS CAP
A PAST OF HOUSING
SPL AY SP Y THE D I FFERENCE
DWELLING I N
W IN DOWS EYEBEAMS
EACH TO ITS D I VERGENCE
THIS GL I MPSE SUDDENLY
FULL OF US
TO HOVER SPL I T
F ILL US WITH THE WORLD


AGAIN TO MATTER
AGAIN ON THE MAKE
TO RAT TLE SPACE
A RESTING PLACE
IN THE DRAGS OF DAY TIME
THE ACCOM PAN I MENTS
OF A SAW


TO HOVER S PL IT
F I L L
US WITH THE WORLD
PON DERABLE
TO D I S COVER
THE PRE SENT
PRIVATE TO OPEN
THIS PUBLIC UP
AND FOR THAT MATTER
U TT ERLY ABEYANT
TO FI LL SP LIT H OVER
IMPON DERABLE
MY COVER


U P U TT ERLY ABEYEN T
N OO N N OO N FI LL S
THIS M ID NIGHT TO
AN ALCHEM Y A C OO L
WATCH OF SAW S
SEE W IS TFUL GRAF ITTI
WHAT CH ARMS WOULD
GRA TI FY S Y NCH
S TREET AN ALTER NATIVE O PEN


GRAFFI TI O F AN A
GRAFF IT I OF A N O


D ON’T RETREAT REC OIL FROM
A C O LD O F LAN GUAGE
DEM O LITION EV O LVES
BY SP O RES OF FIRST
INTERR UP TING STR UC TURE
LIKE THAT HI CC UP S Y STEM
WHICH SM O THERS S OO N
DI F FUSE F-ST OPS
DURATION DILATE SPECTACLE


AN ARC HE A N A RK
WE M A KE THE BEST IND EX
F IN GER T IM E’S FULLNESS
FIG UR ING A SL I VER
ST OR M OF NOON-TIDE DIAPHRAM V I B E
F O L D S I N T I M E


SEPT E MBER 11TH CHIL E
FOR VI CIO US HIS TORY
EX CAV ATION
I MAG I NES THE SK Y
A DIS ASTER WITH OUT TH E GRAV ITY


GRAFFITI RUNS ON TIME
PRO PHE SY ING A NO IS Y E YE
THE SEE ING EAR EVER IN P LIGHT


SHADE FLIGHT SPECTRAL
M O NEY M OO N ACR O SS O LD
SEE W O RTHY VE SS LES
P O WER IN A N EW F OR M
D O Y O U RE MEMBER
WHAT THE C O L D WAS LIKE
CR O SS ING SYN C O PES OF
AN EN LARG ING S LIVE R
SU F F E R ING
WHAT D O ES TIME KN O W
THAT SPACE CAN’T DO
CAN YOU REMEMBER A WAY ABOVE
SAVE THE DATE PARADISE
INDEED SPIRAL WITH Y OUR DEAD


KNOTS O N THE WAY T O HEAVEN
O THERS D ATES AN D TIME S
D O Y O U R EMEMBE R
BEATING WITH AN OTHER’S BLOOD
ABANDONED TO AN A BAND ONED BUILD ING

*composed Spring '05. Forthcoming in P-Queue.

Towards Exterior (Essay)*

Towards Exterior: on a photo-document of Gordon Matta-Clark’s *Splitting*

In the late 60’s and early 70’s, Chilean-American visual artist, Gordon Matta-Clark, was already exploring what would become his signature form: subtractive architectural “interventions” whereby the artist would cut up and extract parts from condemned and abandoned buildings, and document his process through photographs, films, letters and notes. To produce his 1974 work, *Splitting*, Matta-Clark enlisted the assistance of his benefactors, Holly and Horace Solomon, who owned properties in suburban New Jersey:

The property was a suburban one, but not an instance of the comfortable affluence that the word normally conveys. New York, like many major cities, abuts a ring of decaying, lower-density jurisdictions, whose residents once served more prosperous commuters or worked in light industries fleeing congested urban confines. The forlorn dwelling at 322 Humphrey Street in Englewood, which the Solomons planned to demolish later, lay squarely within such a precinct. When the weather warmed up in 1974, Matta-Clark, with Manfred Hecht and some others, set to work transforming the narrow, two-story house into the sculpture he called *Splitting* (Diserens 74).

As Corinne Diserens goes on to note in her essay, “More Songs About Buildings and Food,” the property offered to Matta-Clark by the Solomons for his projected work was one whose former tenants had been a poor African-American family. Later that same year, Matta-Clark would make another work, *Bingo*, under similar circumstances in a downtrodden Niagara Falls, NY. That two of Matta-Clark’s most important works were made after similar circumstances of suburban blight, circumstances that the artist must have been all-too-sensitive to if one takes into consideration the activist bent of his career as well as his well established political commitments (time and again Matta-Clark would make work at a nexus-point of social conflicts) and background (the artist’s father, Matta, was closely aligned with European Surrealist circles and an ardent champion of Leftist political efforts), is an observation I will return to in the last paragraphs of this essay.

*

*Splitting* is the result of five discrete acts of incision upon a condemned, suburban house – one along the center of the house lengthwise, the other four upon the house’s four corners. “First, the appliances and other debris left behind by its last, African-American tenants were relegated to the basement. Then, using a Sawzall (a large power version of a keyhole saw capable of piercing nail-embedded wood, cast iron, plaster, brick, and cement), the band of artists began by slicing a one-inch-wide vertical line marking the exact middle of the house’s longer axis. The cut extended from foundation to roof through the entire body of the house, where it neatly and implacably divided everything in its path: floors, stairs, railings, and landing”(Diserens 74).

In the photo-documentation of *Splitting* compiled in the 1974 monograph by the same name, one can discern from the interior and exterior of the structure a house basically intact except for a wedge beginning above the foundation and widening to a space no more than about a foot along the roof. Of all of the photographs of the work from the monograph, the one that is perhaps most striking and which has, at least, held my attention the most is a photograph taken from the house’s interior where the viewer can see the incision rising from the floor to a staircase banister and finally ascending upon the opposite wall fanning to a wedge-like shape. Through the wedge, sunlight glows less than it does glare at the viewer; the room is practically bare except for a power chord that runs along the landing and floor at the foot of the stairwell; the banister cleaves itself in such a way that it first looks as though the photograph had been itself cut, and the apparent "optical-illusion" of the cloven banister is indeed an effect Matta-Clark plays with as he cuts up and arranges *Splitting*’s photo-documents to produce collages offering views of the house’s interior otherwise unpresentable.

I would like to read the highly aestheticized photo-documents of *Splitting* (photographs that by their exquisitely detailing gray scale and sepia tones, and by their dramatic plays on light and shade stand as art works in their own right) alongside the ‘actual’ sculpture (a work no longer accessible to us except through Matta-Clark’s writings about the work and descriptions by the few who experienced the work first hand) in terms of the work’s historical context. I believe *Splitting*’s photo-documents lead us from a vertical dimension (what one might call, after the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, *exteriority*) towards the historical and social problematic of the work’s production. In its "other-worldliness," its "strangeness" and literal exteriority, the splendidly glowing (if not also vaguely ominous) light opposing the photograph’s viewer (a light becoming-invasive too spiritual and sublime to be historical alone), would appear to me what should actually remain without graven image: that which Levinas has also termed *trace*, the *an-archic*, and *the face of the Other*.

I read *Splitting* specifically after Levinas’ books *Totality and Infinity* (1961) and *Otherwise Than Being* (1974), works considered to be the key works of Levinas’ ethical philosophy. In both texts, Levinas describes the primary encounter between a self or selves and *the Other* (*alterity* or *exteriority*) as a super-sensible instance interrupting sensible time and place whereby the Other calls a self out from its dwelling, an interiorization Levinas refers to as *chez-soi* (the dwelling of the self ‘at home’). For Levinas, such an encounter is one beyond the social, dialogic, political and interpersonal which yet presupposes these spheres of being, grounding them in what is otherwise. The primary location of this encounter, if it can be said to be a location at all, is in the Other’s face, a surface which by the quality of its infinitude expresses that it should be grasped neither by conceptualization nor epistemological or interpersonal understanding. From Levinas’ *Totality and Infinity* to his *Otherwise Than Being*, the imagined encounter between self and Other becomes all the more severe and urgent as the Other is imagined as a force that not only interrupts the self in its being-at-home, but terrorizes the self, in fact, taking it hostage.

We may also supplement Matta-Clark’s photograph with Jean-François Lyotard’s 1985 text after the America painter Barnett Newman, “Newman: The Instant”. In this work, Lyotard imagines a similar scene of terror and suffering before the Other. Only, in Lyotard’s text, what Newman and his viewer encounter and suffer before is not the otherness of another being’s expressive face, nor thought’s infinity per se, but the temporality of Newman’s compositions which instance a paradoxical time of creation – the occurrence of non-being’s passage to being:

The titles of many of [Newman’s] paintings suggest that they should be interpreted in terms of a (paradoxical) idea of beginning. Like a flash of lightning in the darkness or a line on an empty surface, the Word separates, divides, institutes a difference, minimal though it may be, and therefore inaugurates, [sic] a sensible world. This beginning is an antinomy. It takes place in the world as its initial difference, at the beginning of its history. It does not belong to this world because it begets it, it falls from a prehistory, or from a-history. The paradox is that of performance, or occurrence (*The Inhuman* 82).

Significantly, Lyotard reads Newman’s "zips" (the vertical lines cutting through Newman’s paintings) after the painter’s engagements with Jewish mysticism, and particularly the Kabbalistic concept of *Tsim Tsum* -- the sudden and immemorial event of divine creation. Insofar as the zips of Newman’s canvases appear as light sources breaking through or into the darker hues that surround them, and seem inexplicably to cleave surrounding color-fields, the zips may provide an aural-visual presentation of the violent instantaneity and immediacy of the *Tsim Tsum*.

According to Lyotard, the experience of Newman’s paintings is not that of a message being sent and received in one-to-one correspondence between messengers and receivers, but what transcends messages, messengers and receivers alike through the ‘thereness’ of its immediate and self-pointing address. In this sense, the experience of Newman’s paintings is less spatial than temporal, and (perhaps more complexly) less visual than aural-acoustic. It is an event by which, as Lyotard puts it, a viewer is *obligated* to heed the painting’s address and by heeding this address undergo the sublime temporality of the painting’s instance. *Obligation* would seem an off-putting term, yet this term should not be taken in any sense of there being an established moral order which must be dutifully followed (obligation should not be confused with Kantian *moral imperative*, however Lyotard’s concept may bear a likeness to Kant’s); rather, obligation indicates an ontological movement the viewer must undergo in order to experience or, more appropriately, bear witness to the painting in the sudden thereness of its presentation. And this may be the crucial difference between ethical and moral obligation for both Lyotard and Levinas: that moral imperatve is of the social, and ethical obligation of a time that both interrupts the social and presupposes it by situating existents exterior to the sensible and relational.

In Lyotard’s perhaps most important philosophical offering, *The Differend* (1983), the philosopher devotes an entire chapter to thinking speech acts of obligation after Levinas’ work. For Lyotard, the founding moment of obligation in the Judeo-Christian tradition is Abraham’s response “Here I am” to God’s call for him to sacrifice his son, Isaac (an event that I have little doubt Newman bases his own painting *Abraham* [1949] upon). The Abraham of Lyotard’s reading, as Lyotard cleverly indicates, is not a paranoid-psychotic commanded by a hallucinated voice, nor a merely sadistic father, but a self put in obligation to a command that, if it can be understood at all (and Lyotard’s reader eventually learns it can not), may only be understood in a duration constitutive of a non-totalizing and anti-telic eternity. This is a time of conflicting and contradictory judgments which God’s angels nor even God itself can foresee entirely or understand:

The angels themselves are prey to this blindness. ‘Driven out of Abraham’s house,’ Levinas writes, “Hagar and Ishmael wandered in the desert. When their water supply was spent, God opened Hagar’s eyes and she saw a well and gave drink to her dying son” [...]. So far, nothing abnormal, and we wouldn’t expect anything less from a God who is The Good. Still, this generosity aroused some reproach from the divine counselors (or bad aeons) that are the angels: they see farther than the ends of their noses and are acquainted with the ruses of history: “The angels protested: Wilt Thou bring up a well for one who will one day make Israel suffer?” God undoes the Hegelian trap: “What does the end of history matter, says the eternal. I judge each for what he is now and not for what he will become.” Even God does not and should not know the totality of events. It would be unjust were He to take into consideration what he is now and not for what he will become (*The Differend* 109).

For Lyotard’s Levinas, obligation is that which puts one in a relationship to the Other where one must hear and yet not understand a message, and through this refusal of understanding bear witness to expression itself as it founds the relationship between selves and the Divine and turns selves towards moral obligations and responsibilities among other beings. As Lyotard’s and Levinas’ texts bear out, this sublime temporality of witness is a terrifying one. Additionally, I have read somewhere (and since I have not been able to locate where I wonder if I didn’t imagine it) that it took Newman an unusually long time to finish painting the zip of *Abraham*. Was the completion of his painting deferred for fear of his subject matter? Whether I have remembered this fact correctly or imagined it, Newman’s painting may embody the event of Abraham suspended in the immemorial ‘not-yet’ of his sacrifice, and attest the inhuman willingness to heed the address of the Other his sacrifice entails. When Lyotard writes that “obligation is a modality of time rather than of space and its organ is the ear rather than the eye” (*The Inhuman* 81), the object of his critique are artworks that would represent pictorially rather than provide an aural witnessing-experience of the relationship of obligation, experiences by which one opens to an instant which holds its actors in sufferance by the fact that it is occurring in a duration paradoxically arrived and not-yet. Through an attunement to such calls, to *the* Call that repeats itself in the non-repetitive interruption of a time beyond and yet breaking into time, one is offered to a mode of reception and address ethical insofar as it is beyond the understanding of either the speaker or the listener.

Lyotard’s post-Levinasian instant of ethical obligation is a moment that interrupts the moral-social that it may return one to the social potentialized towards renewed moral responsiveness and action. And these wanderings through Lyotard’s and Levinas’ texts and Newman’s painting, I hope may return us to Matta-Clark’s photograph in its relation to his work as a whole – work that consistently places its viewer-witnesses among the most urgent social problems of the artist’s era.

The specific problem *Splitting*’s context holds is one of (sub)urban planning in its relation to economic and racial inequality. The house of *Splitting*, however it may have been received aesthetically by the artist’s closest circle (who were the only people other than his collaborators to see the work before it was demolished), and however sublimely it may exist for the viewer in surviving photo-documents, was a quite actual, if not historical, place to the African-American family who were the house’s last occupants.

I can not help but read Matta-Clark’s zip-like photograph of what must have been the interior of the living-room of the house as a photographic instance that attunes its viewer towards the inhospitableness of a society that would not provide better for its citizens by offering more equitable dwellings for all. As Jacques Derrida recognizes in his eulogy for Levinas, *Adieu*, such an inhospitableness attests to the persistent injustices of all societies that would continually turn-away (and turn away from) those within and without its boundaries bereft of homeland, domicile, identity and dwelling; concomitantly, such inhospitality attests to a society’s inability to make of itself an other, a self that would not welcome its own othernesses constitutive of movement, becoming and mobile identity – the ability to continually translate boundaries, to turn inside-out and outside-in, to be fluidly exterior and interior, beginning (archic) and beginningless (an-archic). Such an anarchism may also be recognized in the mobile interiors of Matta-Clark’s architectual subtractions wherein one moves constantly within spaces made porous to themselves and to what would otherwise remain outside them – those Matta-Clark himself, in a series of 1973 letters to friends, referred to playfully as part of a larger project towards *anarchitecture*.

Matta-Clark draws attention to the inequalities of dwelling throughout his subsequent work, but especially through the dramatic actions accompanying his photo-installation, *Made in American* (1976), which features photographs of shattered windows from housing projects in New York City. Matta-Clark installed the photographs of *Made in American* at a show entitled “Idea as Model” held at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Resources in lower Manhattan. As Corinne Diserens recalls: “Among the participants [of the show] were high-profile architects from the so-called New York Five: Richard Meier, Michael Graves, and Peter Eisenman (who also served as director of the Institute), for whom highly refined drawings were then the most prominent vehicles for their works and reputations”(103). In a crowning gesture to his installation, Matta-Clark returned to the show with an air-rifle, buzzed after a “late party” at the Solomons, to shoot out all of the windows within which his photographs were installed. As Diserens poignantly reads Matta-Clark’s action, and the outraged responses to that action, in terms of this essay’s conjunction of ethical and aesthetic responsibility:

The fellows of the Institute were, predictably, outraged when they arrived some hours later (Eisenmen being intemperate enough to liken Matta-Clark’s action to the Nazi storm troopers on *Kristallnacht*); the glaziers were called in and the piece eradicated by the end of the day. His action (retrospectively entitled *Window Blow-Out*) was patently reckless with the safety of bystanders at the moment of its execution. And it could not escape a certain urban picturesque, in that the shooting mimicked the despairing delinquency behind the endemic vandalism in the city. But the eradication of the piece, which amounted to an instantaneous summoning of the ‘urban resources’ required to repair the damage, actually completed it – and lifted it out of these particular dead ends. The critical point was neatly made, with greater power than any polemic, because the subject of the piece – the Institute itself – was maneuvered into acting out its message: If this deterioration was intolerable to Eisenman and his colleagues for even a moment, why was it tolerable day in and day out in the South Bronx or Lower East Side? (103)

In its spiritual richness as well as in its historical fact, the photograph of Matta-Clark’s *Splitting* I have chosen to write after is one that I believe may offer a haunting index to his life’s work as that work puts the ontologically otherwise in relation to the social and historical. What is especially haunting for me is not only the uncanny beauty of that photograph (a photo which I have had on my wall now and have been studying for months) but as well what I take to be its accusing and obligating address. The exigent address of the *Splitting* photo as well as many other artifacts of Matta-Clark’s all but physically vanished works (that is, with the exception of extractions he made of structures like the *Splitting* house that exhibit frequently and create another interesting degree of mediation between his original interventions and their subsequent presentation and documentation) turn us to the ontologically otherwise in order that we may turn better towards an actual world in which artworks, as many of Matta-Clark’s works instance, are so much a matter of radically pragmatic and tactical actions taken within a world at large.

Works Cited:

Corinne Diserens ed. *Gordon Matta-Clark*. London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2003.

Jean-Francois Lyotard. *The Differend: Phrases in Dispute*. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.

______. *The Inhuman*. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.


*composed summer 05'-present. Forthcoming in Sarah Campbell's P-Queue.

Drawing Restraint ("second summer shed")

“Cocoon above! Cocoon below!”
--Emily Dickinson


A place for perforation
The spirit-skin

Because it is dark
We can only pretend

Where hands end
Knives begin.

*

This is of neither of our ends
Nor constitutive of a means

Invisible bees for effect
And amputations together

We make a new soul
Our vessel is called creation

Vigilance is made from a mold
Whereof we are this eventual crust.

*

Horror being made
Of these products and joy being made

Of these ducts
Culture is a process

Of horrifying enjoyment
These limbs beginning in the soul

Are delimited and first:
"My life, my gas"

*

Being a drawing...

Sex is a mouth full of pearls
and blackened teeth

Sex is a decision for decision,
l'esprit de corps.

*

To ceremony The Open.

To perforate envelope.

Cocoon above, cut below.

*

"In thoughts of the visions
of night, I saw

long rows of angels in paradise,
each with his hands

in a jar of spermeceti."
"Who would think, then,

that such fine
ladies and gentlemen

should regale themselves
with an essence

found in the inglorious
bowels of a sick whale."

4 Spiritual Poems

"Instinct intent on its own preservation does not touch, because it does not encroach on cinders that replace distance but affect no space."
--Louis Zukofsky

1.

All the glass disappeared.
All the cases.

Only the case
Was left. In other words

Other words
Will fail us if they don’t

Now they will then.

The proximity of dark
Informing our kindred
Hyperspaces.

The pen
Of the hid.

The holocausts
Still kindled.

2.

Love thought too much.

We decided
To decide.

We decided there should be
A third party

Whose body
Should purely be

An object
And we will enjoy

That object as if
It were each other’s body.

The video plays on but
What will be sovereign.

3.

Imagine the dark were your
Body.

An envelope for
Your body. Your body

An envelope
For thought.

Thought an intention
Of feeling.

Feeling a parousia of cause.

4.

“He wouldn’t
Say shit

If his mouth
Were full of it”.

Two Sonnets

for Stephen Ratcliffe

Grey-green room into
One thought out the other
Remarks on color music
A skeptic’s ear can only render

Belief for the eyes all the times
Time becomes interesting
This interest itself a context
Of pulses and pulses circling

The face of all interiors
Grey-green room waves describe
Walls as gestures
All that interested him anymore

Were deictics like
Revolutionary categories.

It would be a word of interest
And sound would be thought’s mine
We wouldn’t stop pointing
Not at the body somewhere else

Nor at the bottom of bottom
In the staging of the real
The stage directions real also
A real finger pointing to an actual ghost

Of words a gas of vaseline
And ultimate animations cartoonish
Primogeniture where words
Can’t be put a point is a place for us

We too Banquo we too
Weather and a place to put it.