I saw white five-pointed stars
spinning like bolts on a blue disc.
The disc was carried on a red whale's back.
The whale became an island.
The island grew into a planet,
and that planet one silver ball,
rotating in silence
over the foot of a bed
where a man lay wrapped
in his own bootstraps.
Upside down
far
from land
tethered
to the possibility of a
double-sided page
but losing sight
of the nameable "land ho".
The grapes were proffered
in bunches in over-abundant
season after season
until the last dusty one
settled at the bottom
of No Man's Gorge.
Only child molesters
are allowed near small children
in this town
Now
I lay me down
now I lay me down
compact
into the four cornered
Name-Brand
Mass Hallucination. I see
my own hand
slapping my face
awake.
It's hard these days to give a shit. It's harder to be someone who gives a shit and be recognized as a viable human being.
Everyone sat in rapt attention, silently for the most part (a few chuckles, a few gasps)—for three hours,
despite an absence of linearity (except a frustrated one) and a total lack of logic or rational order. That's an accomplishment.
like walking through a maze, or like an eye regarding a pile of scattered puzzle pieces, the viewer catches the fleeting illusion that some order is about to cohere—then it is snatched away.
At one point the poet—who was once criticized for treating poems as if they were paintings or musical compositions—asks, "where was I?", the gag being that he was in fact nowhere at all.
We never do find out
A lot of them are not verbal people, and are comfortable with the non-rational dimensions of life.
if she wants to see she must fold a certain piece of cloth over, burn a hole into it, and look through the hole. When she does this she does not see anything revelatory or which contributes to the fleeting sense of coherence. It is simply another chamber of the rabbit hole. Nor does the cloth, the hole, and the act of looking through it seem to resonate with any other image, story or metaphor, unless it is the hole in the vaginal wall in the tale told by the idiot during the fury of her dying. While she is looking through the hole
a hole seems to be burning into the surface of the skin itself. For me it is the
canvas, the page, the artist's work-table, the plane of construction, and also the hinge, the sounding board, the pivoting point where coherence promises to rebound from. This is where we will see through the cheap costumes and shabby sets, tear away the metaphors and get to reality.
Empathy
the Pole Witold Gombrowicz called it "interhumanity"
we can't have a Kurt Vonnegut today. He is known only because he came to the fore in the sixties, when people gave a shit.
redounding with images of moral ambiguity: people who aren't what they seem to be, who have evil motives or who are somehow coerced into committing evil acts. There are those who suffer from acts committed, but for the most part they suffer from acts that are about to be committed, and they don't know if they will be the one to commit them, or the victim. In the end it doesn't really matter—everyone is connected.
wondering if pieces were missing, or were we looking at the confused heap of intermixed
But there won't be any more Vonnegut novels. Another beacon of civilization come and gone. Toward the end of his life he said that Americans don't care anymore, that we're for the most part like alcoholics in denial, hanging on for one more day. We don't know how many more we'll have, we're just hanging on.
"Who am I? Some day I'm going to find out." We are all in this together, all asleep, all dreaming.
This time, as we watch, we are participating in the dream. It is we who are asleep.
We remain bathed in nonsense.
Game Over.
Stopping and lucidly looking around at what we're doing to the world and to each other is not an option?
She is similar to Buñuel's obscure object of desire—always changing. But it's not so much that she's always changing, as that she is never really there, as an individual. She is all the women, all the men, so many masks, pairs of holes to look out of. Who are we? Will we find out some day? Will we wake up and see the evil world we move through and are sleepwalking players in?
He said, at eighty-two, that he didn't think he could be funny anymore. Mercifully, two years later, he fell and died.
Mark Kerstetter rides his bike to work every day, allowing his thoughts to drift, as time permits. He is the author of the blog The World Before the World Wide Web.
Comments (closed)
River
2009-07-04 08:42:43
I really like Dreaming America