from "what wings raised: for Paradisical Beauty"

4. Do Angels See Anamorphically?

In Wim Wenders *Wings of Desire* angels do not see in black and white or color, but in sepia. Likewise, while Wender’s angels are telepathic (capable of reading the thoughts of others), and can teleport (be at any place instantly), they cannot experience the five senses of mortal beings, nor can they know death (Bruno Ganz is perplexed when he discovers his head to be bleeding) or sexual relations (Ganz, of course, eventually trades-in his wings to be with a human lover).In Adrian Lyne’s *Jacob’s Ladder* we do not see from the point of view of Danny Aiello’s Louis, however (as a Sufi Angel) we may imagine him to see like the Persian Sufi Sa’id when the poet writes:

If the sword of your anger puts me to death,
My soul will find comfort in it.
If you impose the cup of poison upon me,
My spirit will drink the cup.
When on the day of resurrection
I rise from the dust of my tomb,
The perfume of your love
Will still impregnate the garment of my soul.
For even though you refused me your love,
You have given me a vision of You
Which has been the confidant of my hidden secret.[6]

Jacob Singer (Tim Robbins) encounters any number of angels and demons as his soul transmigrates after a bloodbath among his troop in Vietnam, the terror of his Bardo given cinematic fact not only by the appearance of the demons who confront him--those without faces, eyes, and often limbs--and the predictions of a fortuneteller who tells him his palm is without a “life line,” and that he is therefore already dead; but also by the film’s swish pans which indicate “the fear of death-as-undeath that frightens one to death”[7].In Chris Marker’s documentary for Andrei Tarkovsky, *A Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich*, the French filmmaker points out how Tarkovsky’s characteristic camera angle differs from that of the typical American Western: where the camera of the Western points at an angle to the sky, Tarkovsky’s tends to angle towards the earth. This difference in camera angle indicates an important difference between American and Russian spirituality, as the American is regenerated by the transcendental promise of “big sky,” and the Russian by laying down in the earth, as many of Tarkovksy’s characters often do throughout his films.

One may often have the sense in Tarkovsky’s films that the point-of-view is that of an angel, or God itself. The concluding scene from *Andrei Rublev* provides one example of this, an aerial shot of the bell hoisted by an elaborate series of ropes; in the concluding scene of *Solaris*, the camera tracks revealing Kris’s home on earth to actually be located on an island of the oceanic planet.

In the opening shots of Alexander Sokurov’s *Whispering Pages* the camera, affixed to a boat which bobs in the water of a canal, tracks a building across the water while the shot is obscured by plumes of vapor. Birds that would seem doubly exposed fly in front of the screen and then land on the water; so ghostly are the birds that it comes as a surprise when they disturb the water. In a later scene, men and women jump from a landing to a place below, off-screen. While they jump the viewer hears a soundtrack, affected by reverb, of men and women talking loudly, cackling and laughing. These reverberating voices are non-diegetic, not matching realistically with the scene of the men and women jumping. In *Mother and Son*, the camera slowly descends as it cranes the couple sitting on a bench, looking at a photo album together. As the camera also twists while it descends, its motion mirrors the twisting trunks and branches of a tree beneath which the couple sit. In *Russian Ark*, Sokurov’s use of steady cam provides a constant sense that the camera is disembodied as it tours the St. Petersburg Hermitage. During the film, the camera often makes a focal adjustment that produces a feeling of vertigo in the viewer. The vertiginous effect of this adjustment—as if the lens were zooming-out while the camera tracked forward—is heightened by a *glissando* in the soundtrack. In Alfred Hitchcock’s *Vertigo* the viewer encounters a similar effect as Johnny-O (Jimmy Stewart) struggles to ascend the staircase at the Mission. Is this vertiginous effect of the camera in fact an effect of time travel? Both films travel “back in time”: *Vertigo* by reincarnation, *Russia Ark* by reenacting historical scenes from the Hermitage, and the nostalgic reminiscences of the film’s guide.While angels may see by steady cam and by slow tracking shots accompanied by a non-diegetic soundtrack, I wonder if they do not also see anamorphically? Along with the American filmmakers Sidney Petersen and Stan Brakhage (to whom Petersen gave his anamorphic camera lens as a gift), Alexander Sokurov is one of the great filmmakers to extensively employ anamorphic lenses—an optical technology originally imported from the Middle-East to Europe in the 16th Century[8]. In anamorphic illustration one finds an “accelerated” or “decelerated” (Baltrusaitis) state of optical abstraction, whereby one must look “awry,”[9] at an extreme angle to the plane of the picture, in order to see images in their correct proportions. In film, anamorphosis tends to elongate figures and give a swirling effect to their motions. By Sokurov’s use of anamorphic camera lenses, the filmmaker draws the viewer’s attention to a world deformed, and thanatological in this deformation. The anamorphic effects of *Mother and Son* are particularly telling of the optical phenomenon’s relation to death, as it gives due form to the mother’s *rigor mortis* at the conclusion of the film, and throughout the film all of nature--the trees, for instance, upon which the son leans and cries--seem themselves to mourn the mother’s death by the fact of their blurry elongations and wet, saturated colors. Likewise, anamorphoses provides a disorienting sense of space in *Mother and Son* and the film’s sequel, *Father and Son*, as the son of the former film (played by Aleksei Ananishnov) walks along a dirt path disappearing behind what appears a far away brush only to emerge directly in front of the camera, posing in *ruckenfigur*. Sokurov’s viewer may feel a similar sense of spatial disorientation as the two boys of *Father and Son* ride a trolley together, and eventually stand on an escarpment overlooking the city.

In the Quay Brothers only live-action film, *Institute Benjamenta* (1995), Jakob enrolls in the institute of the film’s title to be trained as a butler. In being trained, he first sees his lessons as repetitive and pointless, however gradually discovers in them an occult order. The exercises of these lessons, given by the master of the school, Frau Benjamenta--making a perfect circle of a cascaded set of spoons, folding napkins, reciting phrases one might say to the master of a house, swaying and intoning in unison with the other students--indicate a Grace not unlike that Heinrich von Kleist observes in marionette theater: “But, as the intersections of two lines, from the one side of a point, after passing through the infinite, returns suddenly to the other side; or, the image of a concave mirror after moving into the infinite appears suddenly again, near or before us; so, when Knowledge has gone, so to speak, through the infinite, Grace returns again, appearing at the same time, most purely, in the structure of a body which has either no knowledge, or an infinite knowledge, to wit: in a marionette or in a God.” In the total obedience of the Quay Brothers’ butler, the butler becomes like a marionette, and thus also like a God, involved with a universe of infinite mechanistic forces. It should come as no surprise that *Institute Benjamenta* was produced by a pair of filmmaker’s best known for their exquisite animation, insofar as contemporary film animation takes up, cinematically, problems similar to those of marionette theater and dance. Like the Nietzschean dancer in whom Alain Badiou recognizes the innocence of “a body before the body”[9], the butlers and animation figures of the Quay Brothers’ films overcome impulses to be mastered *by* (and therefore gain mastery *of*) invisible forces, perhaps giving answer to Simone Weil’s enigmatic question: “What wings raised to the second power can make things come down without weight?”.

Is the anamorphic distortion of a wall-painting in *Institute Benjamenta* a kind of key to the film’s own search for Grace, where such images are not only typically corrected by “looking awry,” but as well through the use of concave mirrors? As Jakob walks the labyrinthine corridors of the institute by night, he encounters a series of curiosities, including a clock whose second hand inexplicably disturbs a pile of dust as it traces its path, as well as jars containing the dried reliquary objects of deer. When Jakob leaves the hallway where the viewer sees an anamorphic wall-painting, he closes a door behind him and looks through a hole in the door to see, at the correct angle of the painting, a depiction of two deer engaged in coitus. Is the order of angels, like that of the institute’s labyrinthine architecture or the graceful pedagogy of Frau Benjamenta’s lesson plans, an anamorphic one insofar as it requires an optical correction to discover it? In such corrections may reside the necessary beauty of angelic intuitions.

Come Out*

“*Come Out* was originally part of a benefit concert presented at Town Hall in New York City for the retrial, with lawyers of their own choosing, of the six boys arrested for murder during the Harlem riots of 1964. The voice is that of Daniel Hamm, now acquitted and then 19, describing a beating he took in Harlem’s 28th precinct police station. The police were about to take the boys out to be ‘cleaned up’ and were only taking those that were visibly bleeding. Since Hamm had no actual open bleeding, he proceeded to open a bruise on his leg so that he would be taken to the hospital. ‘I had to like open the bruise up and let some of the bruised blood come out to show them.’

“*Come Out* is composed of a single loop recorded on both channels. First the loop is in unison with itself. As it begins to go out of phase, a slowly increasing reverberation is heard. This gradually passes into a canon or round for two voices, then four voices and finally eight."
--Steve Reich

Reich's "tape piece," *Come Out*, is of a moment in the composer's career when he was experimenting with tape loops to create aural-acoustic effects similar to those of Medieval 13th century round and chant. The primary technical means of achieving these effects was through tape "phasing". To achieve phasing, Reich made copies of sound loops and synchronized the copies among different audio channels. As his tracks were not perfectly synchronized, loops that would begin in-synch would eventually come out-of-synch, *phasing* them. Through Reich’s discovery of phase composition he was led to the major contributions of his career: his explorations of “gradual” or “serialist” forms, polyrhythmic subtraction, and the rhythms and intonations of speech.

The radicality of Reich’s work with tape phasing (*It's Going To Rain* and *Come Out*) and many of his subsequent compositions, lies in an aural-cognitive process. When one listens to *Come Out* for the first time (if not many times after), one is likely struck by a shift about two minutes into the piece when one first hears the loops begin to desynch. During this moment, one hears the loops separating physically, concretely, in their “head-space,” as well as in their body. As Reich himself describes his first encounter with tape phasing: “The sensation I had in my head was that the sound moved over to my left ear, down to my left shoulder, down my left arm, down my leg, out across the floor to the left, and finally began to reverberate and shake and become the sound that I was looking for--‘It’s gonna / It’s gonna rain / rain’--and then it started going the other way and came back together in the center of my head. When I heard that, I realized it was more interesting than any one particular relationship, because it was the process (of gradually passing through all canonic relationships) making an entire piece, and not just a moment in time.(*WoM*, 21)" In Steve Reich's "Come Out," as in "It's Going To Rain," one hears and feels the tracks separate and then there is kind of leap, a skipping-of-tracks where the tracks cleave each other at a point where they are no longer synched, but also not sufficiently unsynched to allow a listener to hold both tracks in their attention simultaneously. The effect is what the American poet, Emily Dickinson, likely experienced as a “cleaving in the mind” and what the French philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, dubbed “chiasmic” in his late philosophical papers. As the phases cross in one’s attention, they briefly produce a kind of blank or aural blind-spot constitutive of a cognitive non-sense.

It is during this cognitive-acoustic event that I believe psychological processes pass over into problems of ontology. The chiasmic event of Reich's *Come Out* manifests a verticality interrupting the accretive horizontality of the tape loop. This coming *out* which interrupts and also comes *in*--‘outwards (or inwards) towards it’[1]--seems appropriate to the work’s demanding content: the police misconduct and institutional racism made blatant during the 1964 Harlem riots. If the tape loops create a recurrent horizon of sound--one long, serialized note not yet apparent in its multi-channel stereophony--the phase event which occurs two minutes into the piece performs a transcendent operation within the immanence of a continuous psycho-acoustic horizon. Where this horizontality of sound can be said to form an acoustical "dwelling place" for the listener's attentions, the interrupting phase event evidences a breaking of exteriority upon that dwelling. By this interruption emerges an ecstatic, if not anarchic, interval of the listening-mind (the term "anarchy" originating from the Greek *anarche*: that which lacks beginning, time, or sequence).

The radical exteriority of the formal event of phase shift in *Come Out* is a necessary aesthethic response to the demands of *Come Out*’s exigent content. The full recorded phrase of Hamm’s speech from which Reich makes his loops, and which he plays in full at the outset of the work--"I had to like open the bruise up and let some of the bruised blood come out to show them"--in its traumatic syntax and deictical indeterminacy, immediately puts *Come Out’s* listener in a position to puzzle the phrase’s alarming referent: a wound the teenager has suffered at the hands of the police. Address is crucial for this interruptive movement, as the listener-addressee of Reich's piece hears-out the recorded speech of one calling to another to attend (and thus bears witnesss to) his suffering. As Hamm announces the opening of his wound, the “bruised blood” of the tape loop, in order that it may be attended to physically by medics and legally by eyewitnesses, the wound becomes a physical site where interior and exterior are volatized by their ambivalence. Evidencing the ambiguous status of his bruise, Hamm's speech may articulate an exceptional or indiscernible point[2] beyond the law, as the law fails to result in justice during the Harlem riots and in the particular cases of Hamm and the other teenagers absued and mischarged by police.

The chiasmic sound event of *Come Out* we may imagine alongside the famous scene of police brutality and retribution from one of the most famous films to first take up the failures of the Civil Rights movement (and 60's social movements in general), and which inaugurates the independent film movement known as Blaxploitation: Mario Van Peebles 1970 film, *Sweet Sweetback’s Badassss Song*. In this scene the protagonist Sweetback (played by Peebles) must make a decision whether or not to rescue a young Black Panther from two police officers who are beating him to death. Sweetback, a hero typical of Blaxploitation cinema in his ardent individualism and ability to "play all sides," reluctantly intervenes in the beating, maiming both of the police officers and thus abandoning his favor with the law (in the scene, Sweetback has consented to be arrested in order to fulfill an arrest quota). What is most striking about this scene is the way it gives form to a complex ethics of violence. After the scene's complexities, I am reminded of Walter Benjamin’s own “Critique of Violence” in its call for a “pure violence” that, in Giorgio Agamben’s reading of Benjamin’s essay, plays in a suspension between social law and animal force (what Agamben calls the “bare life” of "sovereign" man):

"What can this other type of relation to an end be? It will be useful to apply the considerations that we have just developed concerning the meaning of Benjamin’s term 'pure' to the concept 'pure medium' as well. The medium does not owe its purity to any specific intrinsic property that differentiates it from juridical means, but to its relation to them. In the essay on language, pure language is that which is not an instrument for the purpose of communication, but communicates itself immediately, that is, a pure and simple communicability; likewise, pure violence is that which does not stand in relation of means toward an end, but holds itself in relation to its own mediality. And just as pure language is not another language, just as it does not have a place other than that of the natural communicative languages, but reveals itself in these by exposing them as such, so pure violence is attested to only as the exposure and deposition of the relation between violence and law. (*State of Exception*, 62)"

Benjamin’s pure violence is “pure” not in the sense of an ideal form, so much as after the way Nietzsche imagined his “will to power” as a dance within a force-field of fatal values. To play here means that one no longer acts out of preparation or with a clear sense of purpose (*telos*), but instead within a circumstance in which clear moral-legal imperatives would seem altogether lacking. The close-ups of body parts and medium shots of the figures of Sweetback, the teenager, and the two police officers against a background that would be utterly dark if not for two oil-drills somnolently pumping, also instances what Emmanuel Levinas called the *Il y a* (“there is”): the dark night of creation antedating social law, in which existents struggle for expression, substituting for each other in preliminary reponsibilties:

“Essence stretching on indefinitely, without any possible halt or interruption, the equality of essence not justifying, in all equality, any instant’s halt, without respite, without any possible suspension, is the horrifying *there is* behind all finality proper to the thematizing ego, which can not sink into the essence it thematizes. It is inasmuch as the signification of the one-for-the-other is thematized and assembled, and through the simultaneity of essence, that the one is posited as an ego, that is, as a present or as a beginning or as free, as a subject facing an object. But it is also posited as belonging to essence, which when assembled cannot leave anything outside, has no outside, cannot be worn away. This way for the subject to find itself again in essence, whereas essence, as assembled, should have made possible the present and freedom, is not harmonious and inoffensive participation. It is the incessant buzzing that fills each silence, where the subject detaches itself as a subject in face of its objectivity. A rumbling intolerable to a subject that faces itself as a subject, and assembles essence before itself as an object. But its own subtraction is unjustifiable in an equal woven fabric, of absolute equity. The rumbling of the *there is* is the non-sense in which essence turns, and in which thus turns the justice issued out of signification.”(*Otherwise Than Being*, 163)

The dark discourseless night of the *Il y a*, a night of animal cries and affective speech held in communicative abeyance, holds all of the terror of Sweetback’s ethical decision, as well as our own struggles as viewers to bear witness to this scene of discomforting violence. In its shadeful deictics, a chiasmic index demanding social action and ethical responsibility towards another, I believe the phase event of *Come Out* to similarly instance the “there is”. Through the phase event of “Come / Come out / out to show them,” Come Out produces a duration both arriving and departing when we would listen with others to a terrifying speech of testimony more affective than signification alone, more imperative than the laws of *polis*. In the shadeful sensibility of this moment we would also heed a call to come out the redoubling of an actual blood: to see, to listen, to point to a body in pain pointing; to point again to what will not be entirely located, sited, or sighted; to eventually tell.

1. Taggart, John. *Songs of Degrees*. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1994.
2. see Giorgio Agamben's concepts of the "state of exception" and "points of indiscernibility" throughout his books *Homo Sacer* and *State of Exception*.

"Come Out" was originally composed as a companion essay to one on Gordon Matta-Clark's *Splitting* (now out in Sarah Campbell's gorgeous P-Queue!!!).

from "what wings raised: for Paradisical Beauty"*

3. Paradisical Dissociations, Literal Hallucinations

After rewatching David Lynch’s films and reading Michel Chion’s generous monograph on the filmmaker, I came up with the following propositions concerning *paradisical language*:

*The erasure of names approaches paradise where a name once was and in its place inheres the trace of a separation resonant with the name’s destruction. This resonance tantamount to a silence beyond silence evokes a condition of word and thing in their purest separation. The signs of paradise remain not only in polesemy or parapraxis, but in a total dissociation of sign and referent. The mind cleaves the body as the person reads or hears words in dissociated states. These words mark a caesura between figural and literal language, the psychotic radiances of literal hallucination versus received reading practices.*
In David Lynch’s 2002 work, *Rabbits*, a series of actors dressed in rabbit costumes (Naomi Watts, Laura Elena Harring, and Scott Coffey) enter and reenter the set through a door at the set’s left side, and engage in semi-sensical dialogues complete with a situation comedy laugh-track. As in Samuel Beckett’s plays, the psuedo-dialogues of the rabbits would seem to draw attention to an alienation of beings struggling to communicate with one another in a world where meaning making has become difficult, if not impossible. But then I wonder if Lynch really shares Beckett’s problem of communicability? Does the problem of communication in Rabbits not derive instead from the monologues of the separate rabbits being “out-of-synch” temporally (and therefore ontologically) with one another? The lines of *Rabbits'* characters are blocked as if to be spoken to the other characters, yet would appear dictated by conversations occulted from the space in which they take place. We may have a similar sense of this dissociation in the many Lynch characters who would seem to speak in withdrawn states, and, perhaps most memorably, in Rebecca Del Rio’s *Mulholland Drive* cameo when the pop-singer collapses on stage leaving her “pre-recorded” voice to continue singing an emotional, Spanish version of Roy Orbison’s *Crying*. As in the recent work of the artist Catherine Sullivan (*The Chittendens*, 2005)[1], Lynch also establishes a cinematic stage upon which actors reenact traumatic events surpassing the strict purview of a chronological and unified universe. Notwithstanding the filmmaker’s interests in local color, highway journeys and “folk” speech, Lynch may, in fact, be most American where he attends what the poet William Carlos Williams called “the pure products of America”: the hysteric, schizo and psychotic. Like the one hypnotized or in trance, the psychotic tunes-in to the literal fact of words, and in doing so attends a fundamental strangeness of naming language. Through such attentions, the psychotic-hyponotized is admitted to a paradisical condition, if only through the side-door; that is, she is not returned to an Edenic state before naming language so much as she strikes beyond language’s arbitrariness to an objectivity which both grounds words and make them ecstatically obsolete.

After Rene Magritte’s *This is Not a Pipe*, Michel Foucault has demonstrated the calligraphic qualities of Magritte’s art: “Pursuing its quarry by two paths, the calligram sets the most perfect trap. By its double function, it guarantees capture, as neither discourse alone nor a pure drawing could do. It banishes the invincible absence that defeats words, imposing upon them, by the ruses of a writing at play in space, the visible form of their referent. Cleverly arranged on a sheet of paper, signs invoke the very thing of which they speak—from outside, by the margin they outline, by the emergence of their mass on the blank space of the page. And in return, visible form is excavated, furrowed by words that work at it from within, and which, dismissing the immobile, ambiguous, nameless presence, spin forth the web of significations that christen it, determine it, fit it in the universe of discourse. A double trap, unavoidable snare: How henceforth would escape the flight of birds, the transitory form of flowers, the falling rain? (*This Is Not a Pipe*, 22)” Beyond calligraphic ambiguity, do not works like Magritte’s *This is Not a Pipe* and *The Key to Dreams* also evidence a condition of the “distracted”(Jalal Toufic): those who hear to see the literal senses of words inasmuch as they are enduring trance, hypnosis, fugue states, or “undeath”? This is not a pipe because the word “this” can no longer refer to “pipe,” nor the word “pipe” to its image or reality; this is also not a pipe as words roam deictically between the captions of illustrative drawings marking dissociations of names and things named (*The Key to Dreams*). A person experiencing such dissociations may no longer be able to assign the name ‘dead flies’ to the objects they have used as material for their paintings ("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.”)[2]; the same person may also not be able to assign the proper names of colors to colored shapes when promted by a computer, as in the case of a recent study of hypnotic brain patterns by neuroscientists.[3]

In these paradises of linguistic dissociation we perhaps see words as Louis Zukofsky did after the dream of Shakespeare’s Bottom: as the literal hallucination of written characters witnessed in synaesthetic negation: “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart report what my dream was.(*Midsummer Night's Dream*, 4.1)” At a limit of paronomasiac language one confronts the pun, a language phenomenon preoccupying both Zukofsky and Lynch. While Zukofsky’s most paronomasiac works may be his homophonic co-translation of Catullus’ Greek with his wife Celia Thaew, and his densely intertextual *80 Flowers*, we may discover Lynch’s most telling use of a pun in the title of his first feature film, *Eraserhead*, where Jack Nance’s eraser-like head detaches from his body to become a template for the production of pencil eraser tips (i.e. eraser heads) on an assembly line.
Curiously, in Lynch’s second short film, *The Alphabet*, and in his textual paintings, letters assume a similar “dream life” severing the figural and literal. In both cases, this severance involves a misspelling whereby one *mis*-spells not because they lack the memory and attention required to spell properly, but rather because they see too much how letters arbitrarily assign sense (and, in this sense, misspelling or orthographic play may represent an under- or an over- compensation for the failure of letters to live up to the abundance of meaning the paranoid seer reads “into” them). When the girl of *The Alphabet* (Peggy Lynch) coughs–up blood while intermittently spelling the English alphabet, she may seek to purge herself of lexical order so as to produce new associations of letters made dislexic. Paradise lurks in this alchemical activity which pursues a boundary of literal and figural bodies. Parousias of paronomasia, paramnesia, and parapraxis. Paradises of cause, effect, and sense.

1. see the February, 2006 issue of Artforum for Sullivan on performativity and historical trauma in *The Chittendens*:
2. p. 173. Chion, Michel. David Lynch. London, BFI 1995.
3. Blakeslee, Sandra. "This is Your Brain Under Hypnosis". New York Times, November 22, 2005.

*The following is part of a longer work I have been writing for the upcoming issue of Crayon, on "beauty". Thanks to Crayon co-editor Andrew Levy for the invitation!

from "A Careful Errancy: John Taggart's Poetic Theogony"

“The Open admits. To admit does not, however, mean to grant entry and access to what is closed off, as though what is concealed had to reveal itself in order to appear as unconcealed. To admit means to draw in and to fit into the unlightened whole of the drawings of the pure draft.”
--Martin Heidegger

“The one thing we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our sempiternal memory, and to do something without knowing how or why; in short, to draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

In Taggart’s essay for Susan Howe’s *My Emily Dickinson*, “A Picture of Mystery and Power,” his use of the word “power” in the essay’s title and throughout are telling. Here, Taggart would like to set the record straight and place Howe’s book in a context he deems more appropriate to that book’s radical contents as the work of a poet taking up a master poet’s life work. If Taggart would also like to rescue Howe’s book from a simplistic “feminist” reception it is because, for Taggart, Howe’s book contains many of the most important truths about the poet in the act of composition beyond the reductions of identity politics.(1)

“Only now we must understand that the imperatives for staying alive in the America of real frontiers remain in effect for our encounter with and in language. Once we have torn away from the settled usages—and this is never done once and for all, but must be repeated with no cessation of pain or doubt--we must remain in motion. Whether it’s away from or toward, motion must be maintained. If not, the poet risks composing nothing not already composed, an inert sort of hunting, or of becoming the hunted. For to hunt at all must certainly contain the possibility of becoming the hunted. There is only one possible protection, if there is to be any hunting and if power is to be put on, and that is to stay in motion. ‘Unconcealed consciousness out in pure Open must be acutely alert if he is feminine.’ We can affirm this and also affirm that all hunting consciousness in composition, male or female, must be acutely and continuously alert.”(SoD, 177)

The poet, for Taggart’s Howe and Howe’s Dickinson, is one who risks the assumption of a power larger than herself by entering a wilderness of language usage in the act of composition. This power is the source and not the destination of her craft; it is a power that may be said to conduct the world at a threshold of law and transgression—what Howe refers to elsewhere as ”perfect primeval Consent”. (*The Europe of Trusts*, 14) To compose poetry is to consent to a most violent and unpredictable power of language itself. The mytho-historical figure of this threshold for both Taggart and Howe in their poetics, is that of the frontier person hunting and hunted in a wilderness abandoned by social custom and law who is potentialized and put at physiological and ontological risk in this very abandonment. As Taggart points out at the outset of his essay, Howe finds both precedent for her venture and disagreement in the work of Martin Heidegger, who presents a philosophy of language based on the revelation of Being by the forces of a universal becoming he calls after Rilke “the Open” of a “pure draft”. Inasmuch as the Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, takes up problems of language and sovereignty after Heidegger’s work through his recent books on “bare life” and “states of exception” he may extend Taggart’s own propositions concerning Howe’s seminal study:

“The relation of exception is a relation of ban. He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable. It is literally not possible to say whether the one who has been banned is outside or inside the juridical order. (This is why in Romance languages, to be ‘banned’ originally means to be ‘at the mercy of’ and ‘at one’s own will, freely,’ to be ‘excluded’ and also ‘open to all, free.’) It is in this sense that the paradox of sovereignty can take the form ‘There is nothing outside the law.’ *The originary relation of law to life is not application but Abandonment.* The matchless potentiality of the *nomos, its originary ‘force of law,’* is that it holds life in its ban by abandoning it.”(*Homo Sacer*, 29)

In poetic language more than any other linguistic form, language marks a threshold where the abandoned human-animal—that Aristotilean animal of political discourse reduced to the Greek *zoe* (“bare life”)—can neither be killed in a legal sense of homicide, nor sacrificed in sanctioned religious ritual. In the Dickinson poem Howe makes the central axis of her book, “My Life Had Stood a loaded Gun,” we may locate such a figure of abandonment where the poem’s elusive speaker “has the power to kill without the power to die.” Such a power is the power of the poet-sovereign, she who, bereft of society and yet of its most fatal devices in the act of composition, must risk an antinomous body of the “scared man” (homo sacer) excepted from both apotheosis (the power to die and gain immortality) and a retributive economy of legal violence (the social contract which permits corporeal punishment and murder).

In the late Protestant-American literary projects of both Taggart and Howe—those Lew Daly has also convincingly proven to be ”late in the prophetic tradition”—we can locate the historical particularities of such a mytho-poetic state of exception in the history of European encounter with American “wilderness”. Taggart clearly connects his project to Howe’s in their shared concerns for this wilderness—a wilderness both historical, cultural, and literary—yet he also does so in his poem addressed to Howe in *Loop*, “The Lily Alone”. In “The Lily Alone” it is interesting that Taggart depicts his contemporary as a lily flower redolent of the healing ring of flowers from his earlier book *Peace on Earth*—that same flower Howe expresses pessimism for in her review of the book—, but also as that deadly beast of prey frequently featured in women’s captivity narratives and frontier adventure tales: the panther. In describing Howe as both “pantherine” and “sweet” it would seem Taggart is paying a teasing tribute to his friend as he portrays Howe in Janus-faced aspect. Yet another significance about the project the two poet’s share may emerge in the isolated one-line stanza dividing the other two four-line stanzas of the poem: “the motion of the ring is the motion of the animal”. This ring I take to be an illusion to the ring of flowers of Taggart’s earlier poem, but also (however coincidentally) to a central figure from Heidegger’s philosophical development: the “disinhibiting rings” which partition the animal in its environment from the environment-shaping capabilities of the human:

“Heidegger gives the name *das Enthemmende*, the disinhibitor, to what Uexkull defined as ‘the carrier of significance’ (*Bedeut-ungstager*, *Merkmaltrager*), and *Enthemmungsring*, disinhibiting ring, to what the zoologist called *Umwelt*, environment. Heidegger’s *Fahigsein zu*, being-capable of…, which distinguishes an organ from a simple mechanical means, corresponds to Uexkull’s *Wirkorgan*. The animal is closed in the circle of its disinhibitors just as, according to Uexkull, it is closed in the few elements that define its perceptual world. For this reason, as in Uexkull, ‘when [the animal] comes into relation with something else, [it] can only come upon that which ‘affects’ and thus starts its being-capable. Everything else is *a priori* unable to penetrate the ring around the animal.’”(*The Open*, 51)

In Giorgio Agamben’s sequel to *Homo Sacer*, *The Open*, Agamben takes up Heidegger’s post-Rilkean term, “the Open,” in terms of the ways the separation of the human and the animal have been historically understood and imagined. Crucially, what separates the human and the animal is nothing more than a preposition, the animal being what is *in* the Open and the human what is *before* it. In Heidegger’s original proposition, the animal is so much of the Open that the Open remains unopenable, and undiscoverable as such. No example of Agamben’s perhaps more sublimely illustrates the animal in the Open, reliant on its “disinhibiting rings,” than one from Heidegger’s contemporary, the zoologist Jakob Uexkull, whom Heidegger cites in the 1929-1930 lectures Agamben takes up as one of the central texts of his book. In this example, a bee continues to suck from a portion of honey in spite of the fact its abdomen has been severed from its body. In the bee’s drive to continue sucking, Heidegger recognizes the bee as “captivated,” given, as it were, to the “honey,” and in this captivation prey to its environmental disinhibitors which both give the creature sustenance and expose it to harm.

In a caesura between the human and the animal—openness and the ability to open, being before and being in—I wonder if we can not recognize the poet of Howe’s and Taggart’s mutual wilderness given to a grace the radical play of necessity and possibility. Poe’s line from the story ”MS Found in a Bottle” radiates from the first pages of Howe’s book: “I am heading towards certain discoveries”. These discoveries, as we know from Poe’s story, are wondrous and disastrous. So the poet who must hunt in the Open of composition is subject to the dangers of an affective intentionality beyond both knowing and pure “letting be”. In the Open the poet puts on a new face, a face neither entirely of the human or the animal: the face of ontogenetic Power itself. In putting on this face the poet does not so much revert to the animal as go beyond the human to a place of suspension where human and animal are no longer discernible in their separation. I believe Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay “Circles,” refers to this separation when he celebrates the loss of a “sempiternal memory” in enthusiasm. Likewise, Agamben concludes his book in praise of a similar forgetting the venture of which is to undo all anthropological projects towards the possibilities of a humaner projectlessness: “To render inoperative the machine that governs our conception of man will therefore mean no longer to seek new—more effective or more authentic—articulations, but rather to show the central emptiness, the hiatus that—within man—separates man and animal, and to risk ourselves in this emptiness, the suspension of the suspension, Shabbat of both animal and man.”(*The Open*, 92) This projectlessness may be the task of Howe’s and Taggart’s poet abandoned in graceful vigilance before the Open of compositional risk.

1. “Finally, some readers of My Emily Dickinson may feel we’ve not read the same book. For them its attraction will be an unabashed feminine perspective from which an instance of the feminine overthrow of male authority is celebrated. This is a possible, though surely reductive, reading. If I read it differently, it is to call attention to the wider application of Susan Howe’s picture of the poet for all those who would read or write.”(*Songs of Degrees*, 178)

It's Snowing (the Inexistents)

For Angelopoulos

It's snowing it's snowing it's snowing
The voices of inexistents are frozen still
Frozen voices into the open we go
Statues strobed before a historical shore
Lines which spin and pivot parapraxis

On top of this we feel the discovery
Waves in a calm we warmly clasp
The bottom on top of this hands grasp
Frozen frames of an animal dying
From the people just tell me this

Where's the surface of motion's lapse
The masks put on by aesthetic facts
Inexistents undying of the past
Dance on the grave of this nonsense
Blood of distant fathers the graceful clutch

It's snowing it's snowing it's snowing
Frozen still the voices are of inexistents
Into the stillness we go frozen voices
Where they take hold they take hold
As the shudder to a mistless breath.

The Experimentable

That they may arrive they have heavy chunks slung
On their backs and spines with hooks they sing of
They sing of shadows but put everything back in place
Finally to not let be we exact stones since they won't

Since they won't speak earth to earth sky to teeth
They throw a holography throw light to cut-in
To cut-in to measure menace when the bones come
Flicker it follows this ring of ultimate when when

When when fells whole tribes to remember them
They discover where nothing dies so nothing could
So nothing could so nothing can it sees
Voice in the mortal face masks they already are

They already are since they already cry for themselves
And in crying share what wings diving ascend too
Ascend too to material bones light thrown to cut-in
Conceals a view of holography finally to not let be

What Beauty

--after Brothers Quay

What wand defies the sky what hand bites the mouth
Compassion holds fast to falling things chilling challenged heart
Beauty sings to master to master a possible master
Necessity sings to chalk a necessary circumference of eyes

Crosses disappear from this still night still snow and shadeful
In a forest of make-believe make believe this single point is all time ringing
A single history of force to make circles and disturb circles in space
Throats sing an eccentric promise the folds we maintain on repeat
Where the eye falls it falls to us to make circles and disturb circles
The first circle is the eye each point riven for time

What beauty levitates and what beauty erupts
What beauty wand defies the sky hand gnaws-off the mouth
What beauty sings to master to master potential necessary
The hand makes eternity where a pile of dust is

New eyes are new numbers written clockwise in chalk
New numbers make new bodies new substances for new time
Throats sing an extemporaneous promise to research history rings
To start with breath and heart move outward inward coupling
Each body revolves around each body eyes fall to compassionate couple
Gush of heat in the humdrum of dying who then prays for who

To sing to master sing of all possible things crowned
Crowned awry in a corridor anamorphic a forest of eyes
Of pine needles and eyes to sing like swaying marinonettes
What all creatures sing they first sing to themselves

The mortal or the dead for each other's rest these teeth this crystalline heart
These initiations are of the animal of the forest animal before
Gush of heat who says not to speak each eccentric point rung
Each eccentric point rung gush of heat who says not to speak
Of the forest animal before these initiations are of the animal
These teeth this crystalline heart the mortal or the dead for each other's rest

Song of each to their eyebeam grace song of singing tines
Tiny teeth make big bite marks mark small-big heart mouth gnawed off
Yearning to be both big and small and delicate
Delicate balance of our clockwork in a forest of force

Who then prays for who gush of heat in the humdrum of dying
Eyes fall to compassionate couple each body revolves around each body
Move outward inward coupling to start with breath and heart
To research history rings throats sing an extemporaneous promise
New substances for new time new numbers make new bodies
Written clockwise in chalk new eyes are new numbers

Delicate balance of the open is a master compassionate
For servants strings what servants singing a clockwork
Mechanisms of points or pivots rivet hearts heat here
Water flows up from her mouth force cancelling force

Each point riven for time the first circle is the eye
To make circles and disturb circles where the eye falls it falls on us
The folds we maintain on repeat throats sing an eccentric promise
To make circles and disturb circles in space a single history of force
Make believe this single point is all time ringing in a forest of make-believe
Still snow and shadeful crosses disappear from this still night

What wand defies the sky what hand bites the mouth
Compassion holds fast to falling things chilling challenged heart
Beauty sings to master to master a possible master
Necessity sings to chalk a necessary circumference of eyes

Devotion VII-X

Devotion VII
Needful Clips


Rakosi to Eigner

Seeing sweats sweet thought
Rock of hewn jobs
Parsings Jews plumb.

Through your foot the bird
Insists upon this very aspect
The very weight we've become.


For Hannah Weiner

With folks sister the hand that feeds
Bites lines longer regrets a hatchet
Identification in this together integrated
In this together for longer ways
To break meaning given yes
Gives to forage for circulars circles

To break meaning given yes
Her incarceration the sentence always
Sentences consciousness gives-out
Memory pills chide incantation pain
Arrives O right approval adequate hand
Ahem a hem O Hannah this is


For Nathaniel Mackey

In screech of break
throb of sunk note

immanence explodes
to involved version

thunk scrawl tells all
of the millions more

to particular disasters
wind's presupposition

postponing water
at a boat's needful clip.


Devotion XIII
Before Freedom - For Rachael Corrie

Who are you
who would not

swallow. The cold
invites you

the wind and
element.

Yet you won't
become afraid.

Thought
blows through

the mind
and

we are here.

Who can not
grasp it

The weather
Your storm.


Devotion IX
"Out there"


Direct attacks
the dark sleep pinned

Collection to a small
island of delay

Summer when it ceases
in the mind it might

Return in some other
folio or body

*

Glimpse from the postcard
album coast

To an accurate representation
of this inch of land

We find each other anywhere
that's the problem

Loving thy neighbor
in the light

In the bright bright light

*

What we see in the gray
sky as an imagined
contrivance

The field is out there
it comes to us

*

In the glint
unveiled by a ball

And all dazzle of first mirrors
images four as through a crystal looking

The clock turns back
tuned to time apple core

Violin resonant
with particular wars

*

In the wet tracks
the stage sun in which clef
glare a code of our missing

Plane descent

Goose to crowd is slowest

To levitate is to see

*

The visible holes
war of two violins fold

Remember to drop rain

Two houses
two violins, two times
the child adult

Miniature
the body chased the soul

Or was music's
body his labor

Disrupted in slow
blow of brick

*

By the seen

All irregularities of the human reside
in the code of a box within

To tag and quill
scissors that cut, catalog and write

What crimes for the future begin
with calendars

serials remind us of history last:

1. Horse head peeping an eye,
sane take for seen take for sign

2. Butcher or clockmaker, spinster or boy
or soldier or maker of pouches

To rehearse death makes them immortal on film.


Devotion X
Blood Which Stays Blood

What is raining? Blood.
Who? The eyes.
How? Day and night.

To tape a name
On the brain

To cut the skull
Open to signs

The seeing ear
The spoken eye

Visions come to everyone

What is raining? Blood.
Who? The eyes.
When? Day and night.

We endure
The time it takes to appear
Wreaths crown
Our antipathy

That time
Is black & cold
A barrier to
The True

What is raining? Blood.
Who? The eyes.
When? Day and night.

Achieving the line
As it passes
Into the night
An approximate swan

Deep-throat silhouettes
Send blood storying
To find the paradox
Of all ague

In the making-soon
Crosses appear
Not swiftly enough
In our curtain mood.

What is raining? Blood.
Who? The eyes.
When? Day and night.

Despairing

The disrelationship of despair is not a simple disrelationship but a disrelationship in a
relation which relates itself to its own self and is constituted by another, so that the
disrelationship in that self-relation reflects itself infinitely in the relation to the Power
which constituted it.
--Soren Kierkegaard

there is a standing wave so high in the middle of my room
the folds of the wave in perfect obedience
standing wave so high in the middle of my room
there is a standing wave so high I can’t get over it
--John Taggart

For JT

But let the aura be
a light in the world again
after none could be called
by their true names.

In truth the stones failed us
so we kicked them down
substituting for each petal
a similar blindness of sense.

The Ring

It's true that we are meat and it's true this training
It's true the experiment's not thru never thru yet it's true
It's true we are only rings not to jump thru but to be
To be only in the sense of being-in in the sense of a draft

Not knowing otherwise how to cry
It's true we cast shadows which only sometimes fall
And which usually rise

That are a cause for occasion
The fall and yet the sleep of the tick
Their machine properties and gaps in instinct

It's true that we are meat and it's true this training
It's true the experiment's not thru never thru yet it's true
It's true we are only rings not to jump thru but to be
To be only in the sense of being-in in the sense of a draft

A body draws near a warm body and because that body is near one sucks
The fall is suspended in sucking them
So sucking is true to shadows

Green and purple to the arrested touch
The teeth are true only not having a face
The animal is this singing and sighing

It's true that we are meat and it's true this training
It's true the experiment's not thru never thru yet it's true
It's true we are only rings not to jump thru but to be
To be only in the sense of being-in in the sense of a draft

These signs are the collapse of eyes
Wrested from a mortal glance
One paints bulbs black

Any color they are not as I
That splotch of red not real as meat
But as the pain of color itself

Of color itself falling thru our bodies
The pity of both before and in
The cage drawn so to the animal crying out its face
The cage confined by what makes us us

Like a curtain drawing back and sliced but not torn
Like here when it is here
The flicker of gravity born

There is sovereignty in the things we lack
Lack itself divides inside from inside
We remain in our animation like quiddity repeatedly killed

I knew this at once when it painted itself
By itself the appearance of action in the things we create
We cried a lost dimension or indiscernibility around an endangered body
What felt necessities sighing this body is the soul

There is danger precious danger only if we discover and sleep
There is danger prescient danger crossing the leashless rings
There is grace but not elegance in this per se

The greater the mutilation and discrete jets and interruption of organs the more we ascend. The head follows the hand of course, the literal hand like a physical belief in this ascendance by haphazard degree. The hand of the painter presupposes such consent.

Kierkegaard speaks in his *Sickness Unto Death* of the "about-face" of despair. But you disperse pity from the face (the soul- appearing-surface) across organs and objects. In cages cross-sectioning the case consent is as escape or "primeval consent" (Susan Howe). Accident proves incident cause.

Every animal needs an attendant as every mortal its name
Every name its angel as every angel its spirit-body
Ours is a true appearance of spirit seized in harm and dissected in grace
Ours a mannerist dignity of dice, a dicey proposal of remains

A blackened bulb
Thoughtless purchase
Misplaced description
Foreclosed reflections of things being similar

Embodied instants
Suspended cause
Throwing forth
Teeth without mouths

Umbrellas for heads
A color for shadows
Dissymmetry of the preformed
Intussuception

Substituted abcess
Determinate excess (a jet)
Presentable affect (the cry)
The sound always sealed-up in the cry

Carnal vantages
Sense for sense-of-falling
Aspect-flows (brush curve)
Resurrected drives

It's true that we are meat and it's true this training
It's true the experiment's not thru never thru yet it's true
It's true we are only rings not to jump thru but to be
To be only in the sense of being-in in the sense of a draft

Of color itself falling thru our bodies
The pity of both before and in
The cage drawn so to the animal crying out its face
The cage confined by what makes us us

I knew this at once when it painted itself
By itself the appearance of action in the things we create
We cried a lost dimension or indiscernibility around an endangered body
What felt necessities sighing this body is the soul

Every animal needs an attendant as every mortal its name
Every name its angel as every angel its spirit-body
Ours is a true appearance of spirit seized in harm and dissected in grace
Ours a mannerist dignity of dice, a dicey proposal of remains

The fly makes its eyes for the spider's web here
What remains is the frozen refrain
A dew like a thousand eyes in attendance
Which vanishes in this experimental.

Sojourners (Falling)

old lions beware
a wake discrepant
ship between two
shores no santa
here as if in turning


a necessary journey towards
wildness
homeward song

that freedom from gravity centers our bodies

freedom from the open
force an ecstasy


and wind which is too big
as spirit made where does it come from
and why doesn’t someone continue
underground


a shift of force
they were a people when they had such amulets

who could survive to gain the fire
by any felt necessity


paint the weight of our hands existing innocents

what strokes and oars do we follow the bristles promise

there is a portal which is always open
there are the facts of actuality
at work

sojourning turning


forcing the words where they must break beyond breaking
then writing must be one with its worlds

what we interpret
as roads as pools & forestry

such is the mind


or the fate of the
body
in this storm of spirit

she knew these things when it came upon her

and
after much reflection
upon that
gust


while there were
still animals in
the Hudson River
Valley

hunting the
hunter a spiral appears

history’s a moon shot


like a heart
beating a beaten
stone is it
that pulpit which beats the hand

then close the nose ecstasy
being
beyond and in
the world


that freedom from gravity centers our bodies

force an ecstasy by the grace of sovereign abandon

i cast

That Even Sorrow

For Tom Mandel

Together the fragments
make another fragment.

Letters will allegorize
a body, but time
won’t stand guard.

Wake Games*

Lifting the Corpse

A very large man would lie down on his back on the floor. The legs must be kept straight and rigid. Four men then tried to lift him off the floor with their thumbs placed under the shoulders right and left and on the calf of the legs right and left. Each lifter used only one of his thumbs. If the man was lifted places were exchanged. If they failed they would have their heads bashed against the floor (especially if they dropped the man!)

Pulling the Stick- Sweet Draughts

Two man sat facing each other on the floor. Legs were extended so that the soles of their shoes touched. A strong stick : a handle of a spade or pitchfork,was laid across the tops of their shoes. Both gripped the stick, one hand inside and one outside and each tried while holdi ng his legs rigid to lift his opponent off the floor even as much as an inch. After three pulls places were exchanged and the test continued similarly. Sometimes a man who was to be lifted off the floor would make his foot slip from the opponents shoe. Friends would stand on the coat tails of the person they did not wish lifted.

Lifting a Chair

A chair was gripped at the base of one of the legs by each contestant in turn in an attempt to raise it above his head. It was by no means an easy thing to do, as the old chairs were quite heavy.

Breaking an Egg
An egg was held between the contestants two hands with the pointed ends against the palms. He then tried to cr ush the egg, and generally failed.

The Stronger Hand
Two men stood facing each other, with their right hands raised against each other. Pressure was then exerted by each in an attempt to force down his opponents hand.

Wrestling-
A man would enter the house dressed in a suit of straw and challenge all present to wrestle the Connachtman.
A. A man gripped a stick with his hands at either end and tried to jump over it. Without br eaking his hold. An open razor edge upwards was used instead of a stick.
B. 12 men faced each other in two lines, six in each row. The men in each line stood about two feet apart from their neighb ours. Each player extended his two arms and gripped the hands of the man facing him. Other active men at the wake then tried in turn to jump over each pair of hands in turn, down between the lines without stopping. This was a very difficult feat to perform.
C. Two men stood with a spade handle or other stick resting on their shoulders. Two others then tried to excel each other in performing acrobatic tricks on the stick, like circus performers.
D. Two men competed to do somersault on the floor returning to a standing position.

Driving the Pigs across the Bridge. Those who arrived late at the wake house were the pigs . They are scolded for not having arrived earlier and then someone would shout “We must drive the pigs across the bridge” The bridge consisted of a number of men, who stood in line behind one another, with their shoulders bent forward. The “pigs” were then forced with blows to mount like riders, on the backs of the others; when all had mounted, they were suddenly thrown on the floor in a heap on the floor.

Riding the Wild Ass. - A rope with a noose at one end was thrown over one of the rafters of the house. The man who wished to show h is agility then grasped the other end of the rope and put one of his feet into the n oose. He then pulled on the free end of the rope and tried to raise himself high enough to enable him to kick against another rafter or couple with his free foot. The difficulty and danger of the trick came from the fact that one part of his body (the hands) was pulling against another (the foot) and he might easily fall on to the floor and injure his head or back.

Stealing the Goats- The player grabbed two sods of turf, one in either hand, and faced the floor with his hands and legs extended; only the turf sods and the toes of his shoes were allowed to touch the floor. The player's objective was a potato which lay on the floor below his face. He had to pick this up with his mouth without allowing his stomach to touch the floor or bending his arms or legs. This was difficult enough to do while uninterrupted, but it became more so when he had to reply to questions during the attempt:

Questioner: Where are you going now?
Reply: Stealing the goats from Hell.
Questioner: Swear that you are.
Reply: I swear that I am.

Lifting a horseshoe: The shoe was placed three or four inches out from the foot of the kitchen wall. The person who tried to pick it up took his stand about three feet from the wall, and h ad to pick up the shoe without bending his knees. Whenever he bent forward in making the attempt, his head would touch the wall, and he was not allowed to use his hands to help straighten himself again.

Going around Under a Table: The player would lie face downwards on a table, catching the edges with both hands. He then was required to bring his body around under the table, between its legs, and return to his starting point without touching the floor. His main difficulty was to keep the table from overturning in the process.

Walking on the legs of a Stool: A fairly long stool would be laid on the floor, legs upwards. The contestant had to mount the stool, placing his two hands on the front legs and his two feet on the back ones. To do the trick he had to walk around on the stool legs with his hands and feet until he returned to his original position.

The Donkeys and Baskets: A man lay face down on the wake house floor. Two others sat facing each other at either side of him and extended their legs across his back toward each other. Each took hold of the other's legs. The Prone man was now the donkey and the other two the baskets. His task was to rise up as a real donkey would raising the baskets on his back. Two groups of three often took part in this test each striving to be the first in comple teing it.

Spinning the Tin Box- Each of the male players was given an even number while each female got an odd number. The players sat here and there in the kitchen while a tin box was spun in the center of the floor by the man in charge of the game. As the box spun around he would call out the number of some player whose duty it then was to rush forward and catch the box before it ceased to spin. A player who failed to do so was given some penalty.

The Mock Court or The Police Game
Eight or so of the players remained in the kitchen,while everybody else went outside the door. Those who were inside then divided themselves up according to their duties in the game; one would act as judge, two as lawyers; one as court-clerk, and three or four as policemen. The police would then go outside and drag in somebody as prisoner, while the others pressed in also to hear the case being tried. The judge too k his seat, and the clerk read out the name and address of the prisoner, as well as the offense with which he was being charged. The trial then proceeded as it would in a legal court, one lawyer prosecuting, the other defending. The main source of the fun, apart from the charge itself, was to be found in the sly references made by both counsel to the private affairs of some of those present, who were dragged into the case. These mischievous,though irrelevant, hints caused great laughter, as they were understood by all. Having heard the evidence, the judge announced his verdict, which was witty and light or severe, according to how he regarded the defendant. The police had then the task of seeing that the verdict was carried out; if guilty, the defendant might be handled roughly as punishment, or even doused nine or ten times in a tub of water. If the first trial produced a good deal of amusement, as second or third would follow, until all were tired of the game.

A somewhat similar game, which involved a court-case, was the following. A man lay down on the floor, feigning illness, and a doctor would be sent for. The doctor arrived into the kitchen on horseback, the horse being two fellows clad in straw to resemble an animal. The horse would be a very wild one and, in the course of prancing around the kitchen, the doctor would be thrown down on top of the sick man on the floor. When examined, it would be found that both the patient and the doctor were dead, and the two who played the part of the horse would be tried for causing their deaths.

Building the Ship
John L. Prim has provided a garbled account of the way in which this game was played at wakes in Kilkenny over a hundred years ago. He mentions how the keel was first laid, followed by the prow and stern of the ship; then a woman, who was taking part in the game, would raise the mast with some gesture and speech that convinced Prim that the game had its origin in pagan times. His account is so unclear that it would be difficult, for want of additional details, to imagine how the game was really played.
Henry Morris has noted that his uncle had seen a similar game played about one hundred years ago in Co. Monaghan. It was a lively game, with lots of activities going on, he said; the only part he could remember was the tarring of the ship (soot being smeared on somebody). Morris said that the game died out in Farney, Co. Monaghan, before the year 1880.

A Co. Galway man has described the game , as he saw it played there. Three men sat down astride a stool, one behind the other, all facing in the same direction. The man in front was the prow of the ship; the man in the middle, the body of the ship; and the third man the stern. A fourth player stood on the floor beside them; he was the builder of the ship. He would ask the company for a hammer or sledge, which he needed for the work, and he got it-a hard sod of turf, a piece of turnip, or something like that. Having got the implement, he would walk around the stool, talking loudly to himself about his accomplishments as a ship-builder. He would then insert the right hand of the center man under the right arm-pit of the man in front, and continue to walk around the ship, striking hard blows with his hammer on the three, as he went. He would next put the left hand of the center man under the left arm-pit of the first man, striking blows all the time to make things firm. He then placed the legs of the hind pair around the body of the person in front of each, hammering away to keep the timbers from splitting. The trio would then have to lie back, as far as they could, and the builder would start to raise the mast. This part of the game was often obscene.
Another game is mentioned by Prim called Drawing the Ship Out of the Mud, but it is not described.

Building the Bridge
Twelve men or so stood out on the floor and formed into two lines of six each, facing one another. Each man took hold of the two hands of the man opposite, thus forming the bridge from which the game took its name. The bridge had now to be tested for strength. Another player mounted on the crossed hands and walked to and fro along them. Finding no apparent fault with its construction, he dismounted. Somebody would then suggest that the bridge be tested to see if it would take a flood of water through its eye. This would be done by some rogue who sluiced the legs and feet of the players with a bucketful of dirty water.

Making the Poteen
This game is both imitative and a booby-trap. Somebody who had not seen it played previously would be asked to sit on a chair or stool in the center of the floor. He would be, as it were the still. The man who was working the still would walk fussily around him, getting ready for the work, while some others remained outside the house to keep an eye out for the police or "Revenue men". As the busy preparations were at their height within, the watchers would rush in to say that the police were coming. Speedy action was now necessary; the first thing to be done was to hide the still outside in the dark. The stiller gave this order to his helpers, and they set to work with a will. Pity the poor still! The innocent fellow who simulated that was dragged out into the darkness and flung headlong into the cess-pool of the dung -hill or some equally unpleasant hiding-place from which he had to extricate himself without light or help.

Coining the Money
Another booby-trap! Counterfeit money was to be coined, as it were, and some innocent fellow was got to sit in the middle of the floor to represent the mint. The players circled around him chanting "Coin the money! Coin the money!" until somebody rushed in from outside to say that the police were approaching. The mint had now to be hidden as quickly and as disagreeably as the still in the preceding game.

Sledging
Booby-trap again! The master smith and his helpers announced that they had to make some plough-"socks", or horseshoes or something like that. A man who had no experience of the game was asked to sit in the centre of the floor to represent the anvil. As soon ass the victim was seated ,the master, and his apprentices began to thump him with their fists, as hammers, chanting in time with the blows:
"Strike him strike, strike together!
Strike, strike, all together!
Having pummeled the anvil well for a time, one of the apprentices would suddenly shout that the anvil was on fire! It had to be taken out quickly lest the forge be burned. The poor anvil was taken hold of by three or four strong fellows and dumped into the cess-pool outside, or else was douched with buckets of water.

The Kiln on Fire
In this game, players simulated a miller and his men drying corn. The floor represented the kiln. The miller would order his men to bring in sacks of corn to put into the kiln. Each man went outside and came back with a man on his back; this process went on until some twenty men, as sacks, were lying in a heap on the floor. The were left there for a while to dry, as it were, and were then turned, those underneath being placed on top. When this had been done, and the process of drying the corn was progressing well, one of the workmen would suddenly should that the kiln was on fire. The miller and his helpers would rush to pour buckets of water on the sacks, drenching all who were heaped on the floor, especially those on top. In some areas, only two players took part, the miller and his daughter.

The Deaf Miller
A player (the miller) sat on the floor, mixing soot and water in a dish with a stick. As he worked, he carried on a conversation with himself, his remarks causing great laughter among the audience. One of his mill-hands would enter carrying another player, as a sack of corn, on his back, and would tell the miller that the sack was to be ground. The miller would pretend not to be able to hear him, owing to the noise of the mill, and would finally order the helper to lay the sack down behind him. When five or six sacks had thus been deposited behind the miller, who all the while continued to mix the soot and water (to simulate grinding) and keep up his remarks in a loud voice, the helper would shout that the mill was on fire. The miller would have no trouble in hearing this and would throw the sooty water over his shoulder on top of the sacks behind his back to quench the blaze.

Lifting the Old Nag
A heavily-built man would hobble into the kitchen, pretending to be an old foundered horse, and throw himself down on the floor, grunting and complaining. Some players would gather about him , and he would ask them to raise him to his feet. Two or three would attempt this and would fail; others would come to their assistance, but even nine or ten would not be able to lift the nag. The leader of the game would then order them to remove their coats. They did so, throwing aside the coats here and there, and started to lift again, straining every muscle, but to no avail. The nag was too heavy. The leader would then order them to remove other garments, and when they had finally got rid of their socks, they would succeed in their task. At this point, some mischievous fellow would quench all the lights in the wake-house; the others would let the nag collapse on the floor and, in the darkness, set about finding their clothes, which would have been hidden away by members of the audience. Rough-and-tumble searching went on until the lights were restored, and the game was over.

Cutting the Timber
A man lay down across the threshold of the kitchen feet outside, head within. He was to represent the saw. Two players now took hold of his feet outside, while two others caught his head and should ers in the kitchen. They pulled against one another, forward and backwards, as if they were sawing wood, until one pair proved too strong for the other.

The Dry Barber; The Shaving Game
In The Shaving Game, the leader and his assistants went through the crowded kitchen of the wake-house to find out who needed a shave. They would pick on somebody whom they might dislike for some reason, and drag him out to sit on a chair in the middle fo the floor. The barbers then gathered about him and started to rub water, in which many kinds of dirt had been mixed, onto his face and head. He was powerless to resist or escape. Two would then begin to shave him with bits of stick or something, as razors. The shaving was, needless to say, an ordeal in itself, and it was finished by drenching the victim with water to get rid of the soap!

*all above desciptions of Irish Wake Games lifted directly from: http://www.bcpl.net/~hutmanpr/wakegame.html.

A Catastrophe (Falling)

The fall is what is most alive in the sensation, that through which the sensation is experienced as living. The intensive fall can thus coincide with a spatial descent, but also with a rise.
--Gilles Deleuze

Fact would
parse the fading light in all
eye beams pyramids
by which we see it
seeing us the soldiers anon

commanded in sense fed eye-to-hand
hand-to-eye
color cropped around the mouth
bent to some specification
of war what would parse

the world in fading actuals
the bodily coagulation to which an arrow
grows
a cropping an absolute
fact the orange of appearance small of distortion back

that smile
without a face or how
words do words contoured to
words smell
how unpainterly yet eventful the spirit seeks

what it says
what it speaks to eat
it swallows what is heard paint
subsisting in accidents
resonance the world feels this again

the little smile break
the wrist in a small catastrophe rising by
degree they are evasions
of nowhere the flower
coupled with other forces

the witnesses to this the
colors begin by falling in place
reversed by chance wherever
the hand was was a chance
for escape

a wrestler a monkey a silvery basin
where the hand once put the eye
none will follow gravity
your freefalls glow
so green

Shoot Straight!