The Old Jursidiction
--John Ashbery

With all these things, why do you care
what notes the baby sings? His fists are full of grass
today, tomorrow he will be deaf. Doctors
on my peninsula concede a happy future
for some of us, the elect and the chosen.
For the gummed masses it's the hearbreak
of sameness, as all lines flow together
in a picture that awaits sunset. Same
as you, I wandered a little farther
than we were supposed to, found too late
the limitations of living in a street.

By anyone's standards I was an uncertain thing.
Butterflies at night flow over and past me,
then turned around for a better view
than they were accustomed to. And me, well, I,
too wrapped in wind to notice the stone over there,
summoned the stranger with his suitcase.
Look, there are live things for each of us.
The planets promise to roll next time,
and the mad fixer amends his list.

There's an interesting review of Planisphere at The Critical Flame and the last two paragraphs should help along anyone still struggling with what to make of Ashbery's poetry:

There is something ethereal about Ashbery’s project, this language-as-material expressionism and continuous deployment of irony. Outside the context of postmodernism’s boiling-point, Ashbery’s work can seem at times purposefully evasive and self-concerned.... At times, his poetry elicits little more than frustration; in fact, the critic Adam Kirsch charged that it were “as though, after him, there were nowhere fruitful for poetry to turn.” The insights one gains after much reading and re-reading of Ashbery are personal, aesthetic, almost incommunicable. Readers who seek poets that try to communicate lyrically, in recognizable scenes and metaphors, in some formulation of didactic language, will never find much to appreciate in Ashbery’s poetry. His work evades or undermines these tropes. One must accept the premises of his writing in order to engage with and enjoy it.

It seems as if the issues posed by our post- postmodern context have here given Ashbery his theme. This collection is named after a modernized version of the astrolathe, an ancient star chart once used for navigation. Its arrangement of poems alphabetically by title might be meaningful to the book as a whole, but could just as easily be a red herring (like looking for meaning in the order of the stars); or as Ashbery writes, “wiser to seek the unknown / in the interior.” One brings meanings out of the self through the work. The planisphere addresses the stars in a way that was once crucial to success, to survival; now, it is not only the un-modern device of the chart, but the very reading of stars that is outmoded and expendable. The world acts in ways unimaginable to those ancient sailors. It is the very relationship of the address that has been lost. It may be just that sentiment which Ashbery wishes to explore in Planisphere.

John Ashbery once said, to very loosely paraphrase, and I'm quite likely misquoting, that reading poetry is like getting your necessary roughage and vitamins from eating your daily vegetables. I would agree with that, but poetry does have a bit more pleasantry to it as well; an available afterglow.

With that said, I would suggest that reading Ashbery is not like eating Brussel sprouts, but like doing a few shots of bourbon. The first that goes down isn’t pleasant at all. You kind of want to shake your head with an exclamatory and question why you just put yourself through that. But than after a few more, the settling effects begin to take over. You slide into the tone. The subsuming warmth begins and you merge with rather than work against all the haphazard elements. It’s a cerebral and emotional movement that allows you to go into a different mode than the one you were in when you forced down that first poem. Unlike bourbon, it takes some effort, but the end effect can be the same.

Although, I’d still stay that Ashbery requires a prior mood that you need to be in to be receptive to his poetry. Something along the lines of , “I’m fucking dying here man! You gotta help me out!” works quite well. OK, that may be a little too extreme. So how about I throw out some descriptions that could apply to Ashbery’s writing:

ironic exclamations
transient sentimentality
plaintive meandering
lackadaisical weariness
calm awareness
discordant humor
humble negation
absurd synthesis

And when you find yourself in a mood inclusive of all of these at once, than you know its time to grab yourself some Ashbery. He’ll speak to you like no other poet can. Even if you are only embodying two or three of these qualities, Ashbery will meet you half way and the poetry will still work and bring you to the rest. But if you are in none of these modes of thinking and feeling.... well, go do your bills, rebalance your 401K, get your lawnmower fixed, diagram some sentences, whatever, because Ashbery will only be speaking from another world.

I should probably say something about this most recent collection, Planisphere. The poems are much shorter than earlier Ashbery works, including the lines, which tend to work more through their sinuous phrasing rather than blocked sentences. Another very important thing: the poems are placed in alphabetical order based upon the titles. This is important because Ashbery is known for picking up a book and begin reading from whatever page he happens to open. With this book, because of the alphabetic presentation, you’ll know exactly where you are in the book if you choose to read in this same way. I still read it cover to cover though. But that’s just me. So the fact that they were in alphabetical order really meant nothing to me. The poetry though, remained wonderful.

[Stormy Pine Trees at Prerow; Alexei Jawlensky, 1911]

Jean Luc Godard's Alphaville paired up with Miles Davis' 'Black Satin', from the On the Corner album.

"For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so,
because it serenely disdains to destroy us."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Duino Elegies)

I Am Much Too Alone in This World, Yet Not Alone*
--Rainer Maria Rilke

I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone
.....enough
to truly consecrate the hour.
I am much too small in this world, yet not small
.....enough
to be to you just object and thing,
dark and smart.
I want my free will and want it accompanying
the path which leads to action;
and want during times that beg questions,
where something is up,
to be among those in the know,
or else be alone.

I want to mirror your image to its fullest perfection,
never be blind or too old
to uphold your weighty wavering reflection.
I want to unfold.
Nowhere I wish to stay crooked, bent;
for there I would be dishonest, untrue.
I want my conscience to be
true before you;
want to describe myself like a picture I observed
for a long time, one close up,
like a new word I learned and embraced,
like the everday jug,
like my mother's face,
like a ship that carried me along
through the deadliest storm.

*translated by Annemarie S. Kidder

Now you have gathered yourself up; you see your own end before you, in your own hands; every now and then, with an imprecise movement, you trace the contours of your face. And within you there is scarcely any room; and it almost calms you....

But outside, outside there is no end to it; and when it rises out there, it fills up inside you as well-- not in the vessels, which are partly in your own control, or in the phlegm of your more impassive organs, but in the capillaries, sucked as if up a tube into the furthermost branches of your infinitely ramified being. There it arises, there it passes over you, rising higher than your breath, to which you have fled as if to your final resting place. Ah, but where will you go from there, where? Your heart is driving you out of yourself, your heart is after you, and you are almost beside yourself and you can't go back....

--from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge; Rainer Maria Rilke

Here I sit, I am nothing. And yet, this nothing begins to think, and five flights up, on a grey Paris afternoon, thinks this:

Is it possible, it thinks, that we have neither seen nor perceived nor said anything real or of any importance yet? Is it possible that we have had thousands of years to look, ponder and record, and that we have let those thousands of years pass like a break at school, when one easts a sandwich and an apple?

Yes, it is possible.

Is it possible that despite our inventions and progress, despite our culture, religion and knowledge of the world, we have remained on the surface of life? Is it possible that even that surface, which might still have been something, has been covered with an unbelievably boring material, leaving it looking like drawing-room furniture in the summer holidays.

Yes, it is possible.

Is it possible that the entire history of the world has been misunderstood? Is it possible that we have the past all wrong, because we have always spoken of its masses, exactly as if we were describing a great throng of people, rather than speaking of the one man they were all gathered around-- because he was a stranger and was dying?

Yes, it is possible.

Is it possible that we imagined we had to retrieve what had happened before we were born? Is is possible that every single one of us had to be reminded that he came from all those who had gone before, and that, knowing this, he would refuse to listen to others possessed of other knowledge?

Yes, it is possible.

Is it possible that all these people have an exact knowledge of a past that never happened? Is it possible that all realities are nothing to them; that their life is winding down, connected to nothing at all, like a clock in an empty room-- ?

Yes, it is possible.

--from 'The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge'; Rainer Maria Rilke

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is Rilke’s only novel and on a whole, its not very good. Still worth reading though. It was written while Rilke was living in Paris in 1910 and in the form of a semi-autobiographical diary for that time period, which plays out not at all unlike what you might find in a well maintained personal blog. While there are fantastic moments in the writing, which are worth digging for (after all this is still Rilke), they tend to be surround by superfluous details that paste into extended monotony. Although, part of this could be artistic styling. Ennui being a catalyst for all lots of human behavior. But still, it doesn’t become the most captivating read.

The narrative voice works within the ‘outsider poet’ stereotype, the lone black sheep whose anxiety from being separated from the flock works to increase his/her own internal world. In doing so, Rilke’s major themes of existentialism and individuality are woven into his narrator’s social observations, memories and imaginative whirlwinds, which include hallucinating wandering hands, experiencing the presence of ghosts and mirror images that become masters rather than mere reflections. So there is a touch of the gothic in The Notebooks of Malke Laurids Brigge, as a sort of maudlin tinted cross between Franz Kafka and Friedrich Nietzsche.

But the strongest current I found in the book explores the nature of writing itself. When I say ‘write’, I don’t mean as an ‘author’; more expressionistic than that. What begins to be realized is that writing becomes a means for Brigge to understand the bond between outer and the inner world. When Brigge writes ‘it’, ‘it’ no longer sits dormant in his inner world but becomes a living, breathing aspect that will play itself out in the outer world. While that is always the role of the imagination, what’s at work here is Brigge's increased awareness towards the role the imagination has upon his life. And with increased awareness, possibly then an ability to shape as well. If not the details, than the tone asserted with his processing.

While written a hundred years ago, these remain important concepts for the contemporary world. Urban life is still a fairly new development within the history of mankind. And with the further blending of cultures, the increased influence of a world economy, the new altars of materialism, the dangerous draw of fundamentalism, the nearly uncontrollable bombardment of the media (with its capability of influencing) and the inability to predict where our lives will be five years from the next, the open-ended aspects of alienation and the related potential for anxiety are only that much more important to understand in our current times.

[The Bewitched Mill; Franz Marc, 1913]

"Integrity has no need of rules."

"Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear."

"Only a philosophy of eternity, in the world today, could justify non-violence."

"By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more."

"Real nobility is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference."

"Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears."

"Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being."

"Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend."

"I know of only one duty, and that is to love."

...we cannot assert the innocence of anyone, whereas we can state with certainty the guilt of all. Every man testifies to the crime of all the others-- that is my faith and my hope....

Say, do you know why he was crucified-- the one you are perhaps thinking of at this moment? Well, there were heaps of reasons for that. There are always reasons for murdering a man.... The real reason is that he knew he was not altogether innocent. If he did not bear the weight of the crime he was accused of, he had committed others-- even though he didn't know which ones. Did he really not know them? He was at the source, after all; he must have heard of a certain Slaughter of the Innocents. The children of Judea massacred while his parents were taking him to a safe place-- why did they die if not because of him? Those blood-spattered soldiers, those infants cut in two filled him with horror. But given the man he was, I am sure he could not forget them. And as for that sadness that can be felt in his every act, wasn't it the incurable melancholy of a man who hears night after night the voice of Rachel weeping for her children and refusing all comfort? The lamentation would rend the night, Rachel would call her children who had been killed for him, and he was still alive!

--from The Fall, Albert Camus

Camus' analysis of the crucifixtion continues on for several pages, all equally impactful.

There was a time when I didn’t know at one moment how I would make it to the next. Yes, one can make war in this world, imitate love, torture one’s fellow man, posture in the papers, or merely speak evil of one’s neighbor while knitting. But, sometimes continuing, simply continuing, is a superhuman feat. And he was not superhuman, you can take my word for it. He uttered his agony and that’s why I love him, my friend, who died without knowing.

Unfortunately he left us alone, to carry on, whatever transpires, even when we are stuck in discomfort, knowing in our turn what we know, but incapable of doing what he did and of dying like him. One tries of course to wrestle something from his death. After all, it was a stroke of genius to tell us: “You are no joy to behold, that’s a fact! Well, we can spare ourselves the details. We won’t liquidate it all at once, on the cross.” But too many people now scale the cross merely to be seen from a distance, even if they have to trample him who has been there so long in the process. Too many people have decided to dispense with generosity in order to practice charity. Oh, the injustice, the injustice that has been done him, it rends my heart.

–Albert Camus, The Fall

What’s great about Camus is that you can read two paragraphs and have enough to think about for two hours afterward. Where is the line between wanting to do good in the world and being filled instead with boastful pride? But maybe is pride ok as long as you are still doing ‘good’? To what extent is the Christ story not about being an active force to remove suffering from the world but a story meant to engender empathy towards suffering? Is Christ an ideal that is permanently beyond our capacity to emulate? Are the shallow motives of modern man an aspect of the (contradictory) human condition or only an aspect of our times? Is the simple will to live contrary to the Christ story? The list can go on and on....... I also want to say that for someone who was an atheist, Camus was also one hell of a theologian. More on that tomorrow.

Implicate. You too are guilty. That’s what reading Albert Camus’ The Fall will do to you. The philosophical book is written as a dramatic monologue from a once noble Frenchman walking through the streets of Amsterdam, during which he advises of his previous lofty position as a Parisian public defender– eager to help out the downtrodden, punish the guilty, help little old woman cross the street, giving all his wealth to charity, in essence, being a ‘selfless’ public servant for the common good– and his eventual downfall into a life of selfish debauchery after a series of incidences which expose the fallacy of his inflated self image. The Fall then works from the Garden of Eden myth: the narrator’s haughty idealism as Eden, but when realizing the selfish motives behind his acts (playing the role of the outstanding citizen and getting immense self satisfying pleasure from playing such an egotistical role), a duplicitous hypocrite.

While the book could be read as a confession from one particular individual, Camus ensures that the narration is extended to notions of government, history, the church, public life in general, in order to show that the narrator’s fall was a not a result of a personal inadequacy within himself, but representative of the inherent conflict within human nature of coming to terms with the tension between self and others. And not simply that we all have faults, but that even if one lives a perfect and just life, what of the continual suffering of others? And does Camus arrive at a solution for this? As Camus was an existentialist and proclaimed the God is Dead theory, he suggests that as long as one person still suffers, absolute innocence is impossible and that we are all embroiled in universal guilt for all of mankind’s actions, and without a chance for salvation but with a chance to constantly re-evaluate our connective position within the world.

So these are some of the basic concepts behind The Fall, but only the barest framework for Camus’ ideas. The book is actually extremely convoluted and indirect, with irony so thick you can’t even tell if its ironic anymore, and makes a solid understanding or complete interpretation impossible. The book instead relies upon experiential qualities in order to derive a coherent meaning from its pages, which will inevitably vary from one individual to another. Such is life in an existential world were objective truth is nonexistent. Although, reading Camus’ previous novels can help out in connecting all the implications. Camus’ first book, The Stranger, sets up the solidarity of each individual. The Plague then examines how one might live a moral life outside the guidelines of established religion. With The Fall, Camus’ final work, concepts from these previous works become synthesized.

[Blob Grows in Wonderous Gardens; Hundertwasser]

Yikes! I haven't made a tribut post to Dennis Hopper yet. So here we go, Hopper sitting in with Gorillaz for Fire Coming Out of a Monkey's Head.

It’s 1996. I’m forty-eight.
I am a monk who never prays. I am
a prayer. The pilgrim comes to hear me;
the banker comes, the bald janitors arrive,
the mothers lift their wicked children up—
they wait for me as if I were a bus,
with or without hope, what’s the difference?
One guy manipulates a little calculator,
speaking to it as to a friend. Sweat
is delivered from its mascara,
sad women read about houses …
and now the deaf approach, trailing the dark smoke
of their infirmity behind them as they leave it
and move toward the prayer that everything
is praying: the summer evening a held bubble,
every gesture riveting the love,
the swaying of waitresses, the eleven television
sets in a storefront broadcasting a murderer’s face—
these things speak the clear promise of Heaven.

--from “The Confession of St. Jim"; Denis Johnson

Johnson weaves in some thoughts about visual art in The Name of the World and when he does, he provides some good concepts when thinking about and experiencing a work of art:

Implicated. This wasn't my reaction only. I talked with lots of people who'd seen this work, and they all felt the same, but in various ways, if that makes sense. They felt uneasy around it, challenged, disturbed. I suppose that's what made it art, rather than drawing.

and

I realized that what I first require of a work of art is that its agenda-- is that the word I want?-- not include me. I don't want its aims put in doubt by an attempt to appeal to me, by any awareness of me at all.

And I found out this week that Denis Johnson is a home schooler. Which is not surprising when you see the obvious mistrust of institutions in his books. From a 1997 essay at Salon.com :

After three years learning at home, Daniel and Lana seem sociable in a way I wouldn't have hoped for. They don't convey the impression I usually get from kids, and must have given to my own elders, that they're pretending, wishing -- as I certainly did -- that grown-ups didn't exist. They live in the same world we, their parents, live in. They look us in the eye. We're counted among their friends.

When I asked the kids this morning what they like about home schooling, they said "incredible freedom" and "lots of leisure." Lana mentioned being able to spend time with me and Cindy. What about the drawbacks? -- "Can't see our friends every day." "People act like we're odd." "They make me feel alienated." "People always say, 'So! When are you going back to school?'" This last is something I often notice too -- the expectation that every experiment must end.

I don't want it to. It's changed all of us, and speaking just for myself, I'd be hard put even to find the language to talk across the gap to the person I was before.

A character description for Mike Reed in The Name of the World which I think also describes aspects of Denis Johnson's writing style:

...he and our colleagues tended to get me wrong. I'd come among them as a man in shock, sickened by politics and at that time freshly, as opposed to recently, widowed. In the four years of our very slight acquaintance Ted had reinterpreted my ongoing paralysis as detachment, maybe irony. I was hip, I was beat. I could have sat in with Chet Baker, if I'd known how to play an instrument. As for my fellow teachers of history, they mistook my numbness for terror. They looked at me and saw somebody like J. Alfred Prufrock-- looked at me and saw somebody like themselves.

In what I've read of Johnson's, I've found both this ironically hip and sullen Prufrock style surfacing. But it would be a mistake, getting it wrong, to hold his writing only to these two levels. Like Mike Reed, Johson's writing is capable of expressing a vision that's much more encompassing, liberating. Grand.

Denis Johnson offers in The Name of the World a main character named Mike Reed. On the surface, it appears as though Mike Reed lives a life that is much more stable than the usual Johnson’ character, having such a thing as employment. The book largely focuses upon a period of time when he worked as a professor in a small mid-west college town, a position offered to him in his early 50's after working within the government for an Oklahoma senator. Before that, as a High School teacher. Different walks of life, but all tied somewhat to the middle class everyman. Family? Had that too. Notice the past tense there. Four years prior to when the narration begins, his wife and daughter were killed in an auto accident, a disruption from which Mike Reed has yet to waken when the novel starts.

At first I was hesitant to pick up The Name of the World because I’ve never been to excited with books that have academia as their setting. But Johnson is too character focused for it to matter. College, suburbs, streets, governments, it doesn’t matter. The equally ironic and sympathetic treatment Johnson has with his cast is too entertaining to be concerned with their specific placement in the world. And with this approach, there isn’t much in the way of plot development, only the accumulating details of personalities and how they react within the revealing situations Johnson places them within. So there is humor, as well as human drama, and always intermixed with Johnson’ trademark lyricism to open new dimensions within the tiny capsules of human behavior he depicts.

While plot is not at the heart of The Name of the World, Mike Reed’s life is. Specifically, the transition of a withdrawn and listless 50 something into something more, a life that becomes larger, more powerful, broader and much wiser. The small world Mike Reed had known before concluded at the time of his wife’s and daughter’s deaths, and in some respect, ‘Mike Reed’ then concluded as well. After which he sat dormant for four years before birthing into a new life. As the novel progresses towards Mike Reed’s eventual awakening, the writing also changes. The first two thirds of the novel proceeding through the characters as described above, Mike Reed limited to that of ‘observer’ and ‘commenter’. But in the last third of the novel, the writing becomes more poetic in its communication, which includes an abstract story told by a free spirited cellist (who earlier in the novel conducts a performance art piece where she shaves herself in a room filled with onlookers) and emotional scenes that are not meant to be ironic, but humanly naked and real.

Summer Night
--Jason Shinder

A man gets up from the chair in the restaurant and stands outside

on the sidewalk and strikes a match and holds the flame a little
ahead of the tip of a cigarette and breathes in, his head lifted,

inhaling the little puffs of smoke, and the scent of dark coffee

from a cafe at the end of the street, and even the warm light
of the lampposts, and, sensing the pale humidity of time,
.......he wants to stay,

quite unexpectedly, from now on, amidst the passing cars and people.

Miles Davis playing 'I Loves You, Porgy'.

A Mood of Quiet Beauty
--John Ashbery

The evening light was like honey in the trees
When you left me and walked to the end of the street
Where the sunset abruptly ended.
The wedding-cake drawbridge lowered itself
To the fragile forget-me-not flower.
You climbed aboard.

Burnt horizons suddenly paved with golden stones,
Dreams I had, including suicide,
Puff out the hot-air balloon now.
It is bursting, it is about to burst
With something invisible
Just during the days.
We hear, and sometimes learn,
Pressing so close

And fetch the blood down, and things like that.
Museums then became generous, they live in our breath.

[one analysis of this poem can be found here]

From Heinrich 's 1973 Nobel Prize Lecture, An Essay on the Reason of Poetry:

There will always be a remainder, whether you call it the inexplicable ('secret' would also be fine), there remains and will remain an area, however tiny, into which the reason of our origins will not penetrate, because it runs into the hitherto unexplained reason of poetry and of the art of the imagination, whose incarnation remains as elusive as the body of a woman, a man or even merely of an animal. Writing is - at least for me - movement forward, the conquest of a body that I do not know at all, away from something to something that I do not yet know; I never know what will happen - and here 'happen' is not intended as plot resolution, in the sense of classical dramaturgy, but in the sense of a complicated and complex experiment that with given imaginary, spiritual, intellectual and sensual materials in interaction strives... ...towards incarnation. In this respect there can be no successful literature, nor would there be any successful music or painting, because no one can already have seen the object it is striving to become, and in this respect everything that is superficially called modern, but which is better named living art, is experiment and discovery - and transient, can be estimated and measured only in its historical relativity, and it appears to me irrelevant to speak of eternal values, or to seek them. How will we survive without this gap, this remainder, which can be called irony, be called poetry, be called God, fiction, or resistance?

[Chargesheimer]

This is from one of the more memorable (painful) scenes in And Never Said A Word. Narration is of the wife:

"Fred," I said, "I don't think there's anything more to discuss."

"No," he said, "you're right. It would be wonderful to see you again in a life in which I could love you as much as I do now without marrying you."

"I was just thinking about that," I whispered, and I could no longer hold back my tears. He came quickly around the bed to me, put his arms around me....

"Oh, Fred," I said, "do think about the children."

"I am thinking about them," he replied. "I think about them every day. Won't you give me a kiss?"

I raised my head and kissed him. He let go of me, helped me into my coat, and I packed our things in my bag while he finished dressing.

"The lucky ones," he said, "were those who did not love each other when they got married. It is terrible to love each other and to get married."

"Perhaps you're right," I said.

Saying the final 'goodbye', as all lovers must at some point, whether from separation or at the end of life, would be a lot easier if you didn't truly love the other person. And what choice is there but to bear the suffering? The writing also reminds me of Hemmingway a bit.