graine, redux, woolf, this prose

DISCLAMING: My tendency is to take work like this and file it away in a drawer. I pretend I do this out of compassion for possible readers. But come now, I do it because I do not want to be seen in this light. I want to choose my appearances carefully. And I am not an especially privileged or insightful judge of my work’s use to you. So here it is (actually yesterday’s too), I trust you can skim and skip as good as I can. But here’s what I am noting as I review this: that it becomes repressive, that it smothers, and that its brilliance lends itself not to enlivening, but to… what? I can’t label it, and I don’t want to pooh-pooh it further. The essay is a form whose impersonality can be demonic or daemonic, and lordy lord, if this one doesn’t slip – for me – between the two, although it opens up vital territory in its own particular way (why so loathe to admit it? – because its hurt repeatedly?). How that part which desires to make sense can itself easily, ever so easily, seductively become monster. One of the worst. To make sense of surroundings - not to experience the always-already existent sense. A hard day's work? - not working, not inventing cycles of work/rest.

What was it like to write it? Slightly uncomfortable, a hungry focus pushing on, circling back. The motions, in the end, tiring, dissociative. Its abstraction gutting my, and this, frame – it stalks it subject, and sails away from it, but enacts the very process it critiques : its distance a bridge to compassion or JUST MAYBE anything I write in this space (at work) is rabidly, violently insane, i.e. a work generated of unresolved tensions and conflicts. How to hold and articulate those then? This morning’s attempt… take it as further madness, like most madness, a raving will to live, a trapping to be free...

(Now those words felt sane)

graine, woolf

and to tire very easily of mute devotion and to want variety in love, though it would make him furious if Daisy loved anybody else, furious! For he was jealous, uncontrollably jealous by temperament. He suffered tortures! But where was his knife; his watch; his seals, his notecase, and Clarissa’s letter which he would not read again but liked to think of, and Daisy’s photograph? And now for dinner.

- Mrs.Dalloway

There are moments in the day that I have come to think of as abandonments. I owe this term to Teresa Sparks, who related it to the writer’s habit of working on a piece, building it up with an intensity which spoke of passion and commitment, only to suddenly and irrevocably sever that intensity mid-plateau, and park the frustrated fucker in the “drawer” cum hard drive.

The problem is that there is no cumming hard here – it’s a frustrating coitus interruptus, or really, coitus abandicus (Mword wonders if I meant to spell "bandicoots" here). Just when it starts to heat up, when the territory is exciting and powerful, when we start to get a little disheveled, in the moment, a little strange to ourselves (itself a familiar, slant feeling) then, the break, the back off, the smother. Its no coincidence that these moments are exactly when our life-limiting habits are simultaneously coursing strongly and in a relatively unguarded, openly visible state. What is it that shuts this door as quickly as it opens – that turns, in a sentence of consciousness, from fury and torture, to seals, a letter not to be read “but liked”, and off to dinner? And where, in what shape, does the echo of this frustration – this interruption, driven (consciously) underground – persist, dwell, in our bodies?

Its this habit, this move to close what is clearly a powerful subterranean well, a psychic geyser of repressed energy (if, like Woolf’s Peter Walsh, we find the strength of our own emotions unsettling, foreign, awkward, something to avoid and to later try to clean-up/explain) which renders our own emotions Other, and relegates them to shadow, to subjugation and censure and avoidance. It’s a move, a quick snap of the switch of mental attention, denying audience to some powerful upsurge, but why?

I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires
- Guy Debord

Walsh turns to toys, knick-knacks, sentiment, and the routine regularity of set mealtimes. This seems so familiar, this turning, this abandonment of his own greatest energies – at the very moment they present themselves. Familiar from daily encounters, from my own stream-of-consciousness, and from myriad cultural representations once the emotional intensity becomes coded as abnormal, malfunction, breakdown. Politically, the “eruption” of scandal – whether name-brand (DeLay, Abu Ghraib, Lewinsky, the latest celebrity divorce) or generic anonymous is handled in the same way: a defense team assembles about the “accused” and struggles mightily to stomp-out the accusations of rage, greed, lust, etc. An admission of guilt is seen as both humiliating and likely end to a career – the notable exceptions appearing almost as “miraculous” comeback kids.

This defense team is the very mechanism of psychic repression – if we took it back to Lacan, we would be talking about the Symbolic realm, the order of the Father. It is this defensive, goal-minded, career-egoistic behavior that the emotions threaten; they threaten its static stability, its fixed identities, its narratives of progress.

While we talk about a nervous breakdown, its not the nerves or emotions which “breakdown” (rather, they spring to dizzying life), but rather the subject’s transparency and fluidity in the discursive realms and roles demanded of adulthood – job function, citizen function, consumer function. And, heart-breakingly, these functions have become so demanding, so central and normative to symbolic narratives of identity, that when a friend, family member, or lover is in such a place, we often experience this what? - frustration, impatience, stagnation/confounding which often results in our repeated attempts to catalyze (i.e. fix, either directly or via distraction) “the problem” – as it becomes – or to abandon it (and therefore, abandon our intimate (and our own intimacy too) and return to the familiar, predictable workings of the Symbolic.

To go to Dinner, or return to work. These are – from the Symbolic opinion – reassuring, normal, orderly events to be relished when compared to the odd strength and dark uncertainty of intrusive, demanding emotions which know no timetable, have no clear guide or intent, can’t even be properly traced back in time to some specific cause. If we – immersed in the net of the Symbolic - do dally with them, much of the dalliance is generated from friction, a Symbolic resistance – to allow in, to listen to and accommodate the different, but undeniably powerful and real logic of the emotions. Hence much advice, the offering of strategies to get over/get on with it, offered medicinally – as curatives – in the same fashion as a doctor’s prescription for an upset stomach, or splint for a broken bone. The sense is there is something wrong, and it needs to be righted. And that it’s the doctor – or his pills – which will do the righting. The wrong dwells, inarticulate, helpless, in the body, asking for deliverance. Which arrives from outside – from the Symbolic. But is a broken heart equivalent to a broken shin, and can rage respond well to tablets of Tums?

Too abstract? I am not trying to state that we are all bad people who abandon their friends and repress their own emotional vitality and spontaneity, but I would be surprised if most of us did not experience some difficulty, often profound, when confronting a friend, lover, parent, child – and esp. ourself – in distress. Even laughing too loud, having too much fun, joyful wildness, is disruptive. How many movies bear one of these scenes where one guest’s incivility (manners being the Symbolic policing of affect) disrupts the dinner table?

The link between Modernism, Marxism and Psychoanalytic thought (and for many, from Benjamin on, various Mysticisms) has opened a wide vein of study of this tendency in the arts and literature. Surrealism comes to mind, and at an even rawer, ruder level, much Dada. Perhaps it’s the book I’m reading, but women seem often to be adepts at this work – or is it just I recognize it more clearly when it is Other? Not just Woolf, but Maya Deren, Djuna Barnes, and today, writers such as Renee Gladman,Bhanu Kapil, Summer Rodman and Teresa Sparks explore this rich, unsettling vein with remarkable veracity and fluidity, if not with untroubled ease. Rather, if this trouble, as always, is liquid, then they have learned to swim, passing the barrier of frustration/repression and diving down to this unconsciousness, to the realm of desires and aversions. Although not always surfacing again – Deren may have grown lost in Voudon, and Woolf fell prey to her despair, literally enacting the “drowning” sensation of one buried and oppressed by the heaviness of feeling.

Duncan comes to mind too – and even straight white post-avants can dip their toe in – the logic of Sean MacInnes work is a definite probing of emotional terrain, digging through sentimental encrustrations to contact less predictable moments of resonant lucidity. But the closer one stands to the Symbolic power nodes, the better one is at that game, and the harder, the less accessible such “radical” explorations, such “threatening” openings, seem. A mansion is a far greater investment than a one-bedroom apartment, or a cell. Its defenses are accordingly far more involved and elaborate.

I’m very excited about this thought-string. And I am equally saddened by its abstraction, its distancing, its predilection towards utilizing Symbolic means to critique the Symbolic. Whats the old situationist slogan - “One cannot end alienation with alienated means”? Then there’s:

People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth
– Raoul Vaneigem, "The Revolution Of Everyday Life"

And not just because I want to wind it back now, to the subject of migraines, to the brainstem, to explore – and offer testimony – of how it might dwell in the body once denied conscious audience, how, like a scorned child, unable to speak to the parents and share its needs and experience, it sulks and tantrums and rots instead up and down the neck, in the back of the head, along the shoulder, in the pit of the eye. Except I am not – instead this piece tracks my motion away from this initial desire, is its betrayal, its abandonment. The circle closes not to bring revelation, but an annulling completion, a FINIS in which further participation is … I want to say an impossibility, but I don’t know – I’ve grown tired of writing this, the logic is unsustainable, falters, gives no further life, only questions about just how much its progress so far has enabled, and to what extent its been a further distraction, a new repress.

all graine-y

today i am feeling very well.

yesterday's post was written about an hour into a migraine. its fairly typical of the terrain an hour in. typing it two or three hours in, as it nears full-strength, is unthinkable.

while its not a subject i talk about at length much - socially i avoid broaching it if possible - migraines have been a fact of life for me since I was 15 or so. for over 15 years, i've experienced at least monthly, generally weekly, and even daily episodes, ranging from 6 to 12 (occasionally longer) hours in duration.

a migraine is a cluster of symptoms. they include (for me):

1. sensitivity to light, noise, movement, and conversation. exertion, even intellectual, quickly results in intensified pain.
2. nausea. but, for moi, never vomiting.
3. constant aching and throbbing pain, accompanied by feelings of heat and pressure, along one side of the head, from the eye socket, over the top of the head, down the back of the neck, and along the shoulder, with some lesser pain and tightness in the shoulderblade as well.
4. wide perceptual and emotional shifts accompanying "dealing" with and accomodating the pain, and its accompanying demands (go slow, do nothing, turn off lights, avoid distractions, stay with your body, don't speak, do not wander into thought, avoid activity and bend with the knees only, head and neck held straight up)

these classic symptoms, for me at least, are accompanied by (when i notice):

1. -tightness/contraction of the gut. this creates a center of further pain, and perhaps predates the flaring in the upper body.
2. -if i raise my arms, i become conscious, as trad. Chinese medicine predicts, that the pain travels down the length of the afflicted side's arm.
3. largley involuntary shivers and twitches along the neck-shoulder-arm route.

Migraines alternate hemispherally. If today, your left side aches, when you get your next one, it will target the right. Western science is unsure as to the causes of a migraine, it is a hotly contested arena of research and pill-patenting. An inflammation of blood vessels in the brain was generally agreed upon as precursor, but now the focus is more neural, and the role of the brain-stem is being investigated. Migraines also come with or without auras. For more on this (science!) side, check here. A lovely sample quote:

The trigger of the migraine may be overactivity of nerve cells in certain areas of the brain (for example, the raphe nucleus). Dilation of the blood vessels is now known to be caused from chemicals released from nerve terminals and inflammatory cells. Occasionaly a migraine can be triggered by large amounts of emotional tension and stress.

Wading further in the same articles brings the word prodrome: an early symptom indicating the development of a disease, or indicating that a disease attack is imminent. "

In Trad. Chinese Medicine (TCM), a migraine is an intense form of Liver meridian imbalance. It is the body's response to shut down the system through disabling pain, in a way like one turns off the water to re-callibrate the flow. The bitter element harmonizes the liver (most herbal liver medicines are concentrations of bitter herbs - thujone in wormwood/absynthe catalyzes the alcohol high in a markedly diff., more lucid direction) and the bland/sweet/salty diet of Americans comes along with a high rate of alcoholism and blood diseases (the liver births and grooms the blood).

"Migraine sufferers usually develop their own coping mechanisms for intractable pain."

The list of what I have tried is long, and varies depending on the vintage. Aside from OTC painkillers, I've tried over the years: traditional yoga, alochol, green tea, rosemary, meditation, feverfew, walking, hot showers, naps, akido, weed, tibetan yoga, immersing myself in water, iceubes, facemasks, acupuncture, massage, eating, drinking water, lying down on the floor in the dark and groaning, etc.

Believe it or no, I have never sought a western doctor's advise or treatment on migraines. When I told - as a teen - my eye doctor about them (without using the classic "migraine" label) - he was uninterested, having ascertained that that didn't sound like a symptom produced by the prescription. And I am not a fan of expensive experimental drugs, although, for once, I have insurance.

"Sumatriptan and related selective serotonin receptor agonists are now the therapy of choice for severe migraine attacks that cannot be controlled by other means. They are highly effective, reducing the symptoms or aborting the attack within 30 to 90 minutes in 70-80% of patients. Some patients have a recurrent migraine later in the day, and only one such recurrence in a day can be treated with a second dose of a triptan. They have few side effects if used in correct dosage and frequency. Some members of this family of drugs are:
Sumatriptan (Imitrex®, Imigran®)
Zolmitriptan (Zomig®)
Naratriptan (Amerge®, Naramig®)
Rizatriptan (Maxalt®)
Eletriptan (Relpax®)
Frovatriptan (Frova®)
Almotriptan (Almogran®) "

In TCM, its noted that simply eradicating a symptom, and not attending to the root factors that lead to that symptom arising, will drive the disorder deeper. In neuropsychology, the brain stem, whose "malfunction" or "over-sensitivity" may result in an episode, is the seat of the ddepest, most primal emotions, including fear and aggression. In TCM, a symptom is a node in a web - it is not causally identical to another subject's instance of a similair system. Differing systems may yet inflame the same node. So tracking the web, its relations, in my life becomes the work. Not sure how well I have done at it though, I am more Inspector Clouseau than Sherlock Holmes.

While they respond to care, and to my surrender to their seemingly inhuman, obliterating agenda, they do not respond very predictably. But letting the pain hold center court, abandoning any agenda I might have besides suffering and caring for my pain-wracked body, is rewarded, and the pain changes, subsides, sometimes even ceases. Sometimes, in its wake, there's a palpable, if subdued hush of ecstacy. But even the slightest weariness or premature excitation over its departure, and a migraine will steadfastly return. I'm thinking of how dominant males mark their territory, and patrol it, squashing challenges - its a lot like that, that sense of resistance is futile. And the shit is intense - life is very vivid in these procedurally restricted passages.

"Annual employer cost of lost productivity due to migraines was estimated at $3,309 per sufferer. Total medical costs associated with migraines in the United States amounted to one billion dollars in 1994, in addition to lost productivity estimated at thirteen to seventeen billion dollars per year."

The workplace is an exquisite and total torture when suffering from a migraine. I invariably struggle, and then abdicate. Some of the strength of that feeling of work=s extreme & immediate suffering has long since hopped the phenomenal fence and broken free of its strict association with migraines per se. I eventually just thought of work itself as a sort of low-grade migraine, a background irritation in which the foreground pain inevitably and periodically arises. Like the roaring laugh track in a sit-com.

For a long-time I knew, holisticlly, that this pain was necessary, even benevolent - that is, a teaching. Not an easy one, but it was my body's instinctive response to its situation. Western science focuses either pornographically on the neuro-materialist aspects of what physically, isolatably happens to the body during a migraine, or has dismissed the whole thing as a mental malady. Either way, its seen as a disease, the body as weak or malfunctioning, the patient its victim. I have long known there is much more to what is happening here, and that I - how I am living my life, is a responsible party (and the only on I have hope of effecting) - but charting the rhythms and happenstances around my migraines has been a long-term project, and one that collapses every time i fall into resisting its logic, or lamenting my fate. While science does acknowledge tension and stress as factors in "some" migraines, they stand mute on emotional habits, on what we might call the psycho-energetics of migraines. And maybe we want our science to stand mute on this... its a seemingly obscure terrain, it offers no quick fix. You might miss a day of work, not get to go shopping.

My focus now is shifting to the prodrome arena, to becoming conscious of the early symptoms that might alert me to an attack, so I can respond to these incipient signals, instead of ignoring them, and be forced to respond to the willful demands of a full-blown migraine.

There appears, here, to be a definite emotional and energetic link between these spasms of pain, and a re-occuring repression of unconscious desires.

The cleaning staff is here, my stomach's growling, that's far enough, time to go. i leave it to me to probe the emotional subterrain, and for you, if you care to, to wonder how this might relate to the Kyle you know, whether aesthetically, intimately, blogger-ly, whatev. And if you don't know me, you know someone else who suffers these fuckers : 8% of men, 16% of women, for a start.

today i am not feeling so well. Blogging and nausea - non, merci.

I have managed to forget both of the great ideas I've had so far today.

Not so sure these points are as unrelated as they first seem.

-

Readers, does it bother you when a blog - such as this one - has occasional typos and grammatical hoo-haws? blogger's spellcheck is so, so slow. there are other options, though. perhaps my carefree-ness here is interpreted variously - in this theoretically public space.

-

books i could be reading today:

Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf.
Selected Poems, Charles Olson.
Office of Soft Architecture, Lisa Robertson.
Ovid: currently sidelined for an inexcusible prosaic-ness.

Yesterday, at the SFMoma, I read some fascinating selections of a 1937 Hitler speech on "degenerate art". Reminded me, in its arguments and inflammation, of certain US politicians.

My not-feeling well-ness means that i don't care to risk commentary on those other titles.

Yet part of me is filled with rage at this blog post.

Lection is out

Lection, the latest Subday Press offering, is out. Author Scott Inguito read from it @ the semi-annual SPD Open House on Saturday, and last night John Sullivan, our long-suffering web-designer, launched the Lection page. Check it here. Lection is a tasty, thought-provoking and pocket-size morsel, and its available on the cheap - I hope you'll check it out. Teresa Sparks will be reviewing it in the upcoming American Book Review (Feb/Mar, methinks). But don't wait.

Speaking of ABR, I just sent them my first review, of Sara Larsen's doubly circ. Ganglia crossed.

As for me, I'm listening to funk on the college radio station and I'm a little too stinky for comfort, so its a pre-shower blog moment, friends.

Final note of hot gossip: Sean MacInnes has made a brilliant and intimate batch of short videos while down in FL for his Kerouac House residency. These films are worth seeing - they are lyric, nightmarish, gauzy, silent, celebratory and a little wobbly. The ghost of ol Stan Brakhage floats thru. They are deeply felt and oddly touching too, and they speak of the goddamn wonder of sight (check out Derek Jarman's Blue if you forgot about that). He can send them out on VHS tapes, I am not sure if he can do DVDs. We can work on it. Email him here if you are curious - and with a little luck and a few dollars donation, you too will learn about benches, branches, cockroaches, and sprinkler jets.

And if he doesn't, let me know and I'll make you a pirate copy.


k

Books I am reading today:

Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

"Bond Street fascinated her; Bond Street early in the morning in the season; its flags flying; its shops; no splash; no glitter; one roll of tweed in the shop where her father had bought his suits for fifty years; a few pearls; salmon on an iceblock."

The list of particulars dates back at least as far as the heroic epics - the Illiad and the Odyssey, for one start. It shows up today in the work of Ray DiPalma in the current Chicago Review. My edition notes that Woolf saw the novel, c. 1920, as at an impasse, and was reading Euripides, Bacchae excitedly. How alive this prose is - sparkling with details, written thru the senses and memory- gaining focus thru its characters narrative wanderings. Want to read Nightwood after this. These are the first non-standard genre novels I've read since Dhalgren last year. Breaking out of my reading rut feels great. I chose this book because I remember there was something alluring and satisfying in Woolf's prose as an undergrad English major. Some type of ecriture feminine, is it? I am conscious of not wanting to read any male-written novels right now, at least none I can think of. A few minutes pass, and this dissolves. Woolf and Barnes first though.

Tales From Ovid, Ted Hughes
A Christmas present last year, and here I am pouring over it. Having just finished Ronald Johnson's seminal radi os, a page-by-page "reduction" of the first four chapters of Paradise Lost into a bewildering and intensely alluring alchemic word-drone, in which whisps and suggestions of underlying stratas and a dozen or two startling lines rose out of 70 or 80 sparse and beautiful pages, Ovid's metamorhic tales make mighty sense. And yet I have no sense of Hughes' mode of translation, so I can take these only as work bearing some intimate relation to Ovid's 1900 years earlier, but from what I can guesstimate, this is a logonymic translation privleging "sense" as in semantic content.

I dont recall liking more than a few of the lines in Hughes "own" poetry, but "Creation; Four Ages; Lycaon; Flood" made for a great afternoon, and it turns more and more brutal with each page, a sort of restrained but pitiless death metal poem. We move from "Now I am ready to tell how bodies are changed/ Into different bodies" (go ahead Ted, tell me) thru the prehistory of the world, up to the flood, where we part 18 pages later, with: "Drowned mankind, imploring limbs outspread,/Floats like a plague of dead frogs." I certianly don't expect such work from Poet Laureates. It must be the magic of the classics - that his craft shines brightest in looking back at the work he first read as a schoolboy struggling with Latin.

I enjoy this and it also irks me that I do. Which is part of the point - my sense of lineage and my ideological leanings have cornered me to the point where reading is no longer fun, and is cut off from many of my desires. I don't yet know what to say of Ted's lines, how he works with them, they are themselves a sort of "rough" free verse where the line ends act as the main key to distinguish this work from prose, staggering the lines in tiers, slowing the reader down. The prose translations of Ovid I glanced at looked pale and dull - despite the stylistic diff. btwn us, I read Hughes lines in this poem with great warmth, and they slip easily, energetically down the throat like a tastier red bull. But they slip fast - there are only a few lines I re-read to savor or work out an image or turn of speech. It is - I keep feeling - such a different use of the poetic from what I have grown used to these last few years. It feels good to be in contact with it again, from this new vantage.

Like the Dalai Lama has said - any one faith would be a poor fit for all the various peoples of the world. Any one corporation, any one state, any one style... I agree.

werdenfield love for each and every last - squish! - one

this arrived in the mail today, confirming my sense that john ashberry has become deeply weird with fame, psychoanalysis, and age. Move over, late, rhyming Creeley poems, its:

Wild Geese - John Ashberry

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

okay, so i lied to you, its - surprise - mary oliver. but i figured if i put mary oliver up there, you'd read it like i did, with a sense of fatality, like watching a body fall out a window til "PLONK!" we hit the, umm, hard concrete? of "the family of things".

sent by a borderline-buddhist friend who doesn't read much poetry yet called me up to tell me how much he liked my reading last month (future post or visit to therapist here). i tensed while reading it, and tried to pull away, esp. the parts where we are flying over the placeholder nouns of named landscape like in "god bless america" or "this land is your land" but without any of the cheese or charm of those two. goddawful descriptive distance.

i figure some people like the lullaby-like quality of this, but without the metrics of song. its like your boring mother is saying boring but familiar things to you as you go to bed. its like checking the thermometer: "yup its hot". "yup its still hot". slight sweetness + bland =s comforting, right? poem as sleep-aid or suppository. hell, "life's rough" & some are "in need" of an ameliorative.

so, what to say about the daily weather forecast? that its predicatable? it seems silly to rage against it, "over the prairies and the deep trees". it is obviously medicinal to some, but its barely readable to me. poetry is vast and inexhaustible. its sentiments are blameless. etc etc.

[ i am trying, pirooz, not to rush to condemn, but there's nothing else here for me thats FUN, that wants only to tear up and rip out the pastic intestines of this beast and REVEL in it - VIOLENT, yes, but no more than my LUNCH. the only way i want to masticate this is not as droll NPR sermon on beatitude and some kinda whitebread come-on to intimacy but as WORDS to MASTICATE on BURP thank you very much then - and there is liberation in me destroying in a fit of gleeful rage what someone else is rushing to stickily embrace and us not needing to EXPLAIN or FIGHT over this difference - since I'm not tearing up THEIR book or ITS AUTHOR - I am tearing up THIS SPACE, THIS TEXT, THIS READING, what it elicits...]

so i mull before lunch, i ,
"whomeveh i am, no matter how wonewy
the mawy owiveh offehs itsewf to my imaginashun
cawws to me wike duh wiwd geese, hahsh and ecksiting--"

okay, now i am squarely back to how terrible it is, what a horrendous ball of hooey, spiritual hallmart e-card texts.

i am never going to even try to get to the bottom of this, except to say that when i find myself acting in a "mary oliver-esque" way to another adult, i am overcome with shame and scorn. and thats in person - an that emotional response keys me thati have "lost" my connection with them in the moment, it attunes me to cut the soliquoy, hold-space, and reoreint. If i fail to do this, I go on, but with a sens eof shame at the betrayal of our relation, and then scorn at this too, a rage at what shit is pouring from my mouth. i read such sneakily and unacknowledged (and obviously unavoidable in the act of writing) falseness and duplicity here. maybe i have issues. its not all i read here, but it overwhelms the rest. but i do not stand against intimacy, or even advice, or certainly not "sharing" (but the poet's promise to share their woes is not followed up, its an empty gimmick - and not just here, but in most (all?) of oliver's work - there is a frigid patina of distance which she uses to convey intimacy that i find troubling when the resulting work is taken as natural, organic produce and not some deeply mediated gene-splicing: in many ways i find her work supremely un-wild, massively tame - and taming: which I resist here). i dont stand against, even the type of genial - yet lingusitically very decisive and powerful - type of wise-old-aunt authority ol mary's asserting here, but, left to its own devices, it - what? - represents a human tendency that i think of as opiate, a nice sleep-aid before bed for troubled sleepers, yes, but a very weird crown to be riding on the head of the intersection of the worlds literary and spiritual, where i often find it.

i respect deeply many of the people who ornament their sermons, letters and essays with verse of this kind (like today's sender), yet it seems so purely decorative - maybe thats part of it, i dont want a purely - even mainly - decorative poetry, and my insistence that one's artwork can be a much more funamental and powerful wrangling with life and death and self and other and sex and state often feel a little lonely.

a basic lesson of autonomy i that if someone tries to shovel the wrong medicine in your mouth, don't swallow. regardless of their own intentions. if you do, you get deeply troubled, and have to write mad posts about it broadcast to the teemingly near-empty depths of the blogosphere. how did i know it was the wrong medicine, friends, its right up there in the brand-name, one poetica-pharmaceutical giant who does not have my consumer allegiance. hence this class-action suit to which you are welcome to file briefs.

thanks for stopping by and please deposit leftover portions of this rant in the comments box on your way out of the page.