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Pearl of the letter

I don't know if this makes sense to say but writing letters is the miracle of my life. When I was a small boy they set me aside in a room to write again and again the letter a which I had difficulty writing the single storey style circle and bar the simple style I learned when I was older that the letter contains the secret shape of a bull with horns the single storey circle is the cow's round head the the straight bar is the width of the cow's horn, but also the double storey a the one you can see here that is the bull too the bull's horns are uneven the long right horn and the broken left the double story a is a rough cow wounded or deformed I was never able to write the first kind of a to my satisfaction it make me upset to write it so badly and I clumsily tried to write the other a the wounded a for the better part of ten years my writing in that time wears its effort the first lines carry the double storey the later lines when the sloppy tired hand and tired mind collide it fell back toward a third a the compromise in those years the cursive a but a wormed out apple rot the cow is fled all the way from that kind of a I think now that it must have been a small fate to confront the letter a because I am a taurus by zodiac and cow by shengxiao I don't think i'm doing a good job explaining the point is that the writing down more than anything the words of it might have said is a miracle to me and everything I do I do to sit as long as I can within the pearl of the letter.

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Rodeo

went to the rodeo hadn't been to a real rodeo for a long time last one was near Standing Rock in Mo- bridge South Dakota a real western rodeo great riders & ropers best as I can remember after the rodeo there was a demolition derby with and then show of firecrackers & fireworks

this rodeo wasn't so real western it was wisconsin rodeo with wisconsin riders, sconnie livestock, little sheep small horses mere bullocks and local men for ropers & riders not the lean lupine travellers with dislocated hips instead 45 minutes every town kid making a mutton bust

these tired sheeps plunged from their pen at fractions a mile an hour kid clung on til they flopped them off after a few seconds that's a 62.5 called the announcer in the ugly baritone of a lawn edger from iowa

after the kids all fell off the announcer announced we'd be ceremonizing this gathering with the our father and nat'l anthem "two books you have to read before you die the holy bible & the us constitution, both of them are about the same thing, one nation under god".

too easy to say that neither are books neither are about one nation under god some people are so stupid for so long we can forget to say so

he read the prayer I couldn't hear it in my head plugged numbed ears with this madness not normal iowa wisconsin minnesota redneck behavior they were playing bible belt. The main clown (dressed more like an ordinary dipshit) searched for who had the most kids in this crowd.

a jowl of a man all cheek no chin stood in the animal chutes waving to be seen he had the most but was ignored the hunt is not for him instead the clown in umbro shorts found a woman with 12 kids squeaked of her at us this woman is a living saint this woman is a living saint

the broncos came out to buck a handful of riders two made it to eight seconds 1 rider in a dark satin shirt & purple cowboy hat stood out as the Joker of the list playacted his flirting shamelessly with local young women I was rooting for him but he fell off sooner than instantly

calf roping came from a line of car dealers with vanity horses with tub bellies and 1mm snipped goatees backed in a corner their amateur roping doing whiplash violence to the calfs flung lariats newbought stiff tie down cord my stomach hurt sad watching them harm these cows

3boys walked slung lean 3long bushed manes 3cat mustaches 3electric lime shirts while millenial rodeors dressed softball by nashville these were the wild end of year book 1977 from 3back pockets in 3loose jeans pulled 3bottles of mountain dew the same move like a clonal tree

it was time to go the yanking of animals was no fun to watch the grim unease of a crowd some dared to go along with some bloody teethed happy to crow for breed wife christianity and whose got the double triply most more racist american flag version

on the way out of the fairgrounds I bought a last brat from the lions crock pot heated kraut and yellow mustard and walked past the Tempest turned off at dusk the three signs hanging over its silent mechanism not a storm but a waiting to be packed up and put away

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Sounds in my Tissues

At theSound of theN㏂e GordonLightfೲt my body tra㎱formed morphed bent even ㏌to the pures㏊pe of the melody of the Wreck of the E㍷undfiꜩgerald mym㏌d ㎩ra‖el beh㏌d the distant rⅳel㏌g bedsound of Superior they said never gⅳes up her dead when the ㏿es of November come early

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A loomsome bear flagging blur comes down its skin with its lightning sheared hair, crystallize invisible wagging lines of hair reedy plastic wig shape the bear choked on a seamless legthick garter snake slippery from its heat shimmer shine off into the nostrils of the bear blackening in its nose the burnt melt fur singe cigarette smear forgot on a lawn chair a deer skidded one boot in the eye of the bear other boot in the bung of wine sipping in through the hoof porous the heat of the spatial domain entwines the three beings bear snake deer their muscles lost grip in the skin ooze a little bug squeezed out her guts out her ass long tube to the frequency of the heat degree small redrod antlers buck to the deer's tick hole and sucked it caught juice in the guts balloon bubbled up out the bugs asshole infusing its prolapsarian stink to mist attracting fuck a second bug flat cake beestie thin slice bug bites the colon poofs gas down its belly two-d stains rainbow chemslick down its front with poison for after the fuck punition

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Selections from Kim Gyeong-hun's poem "Even if busted and broken down, stand up again"

All those hot summer days I gathered stones and built a tower. Stones broken for a military construction access road, those were Gureombi rocks. For a community of life and peace I did this and Against the forces that threaten the unity of the world. My fingernails broke and my feet were stamped on, Drops of sweat fell on the stones I gathered, large and small. “Even if busted and broken down, stand up again!” said a banner, raised in the center of the tower like a powerful slogan.

///

But the tower we worked so hard to build half way was knocked down, simple and easy, by the arm of an excavator. All things share a source. Gureombi broken ripped our hearts too. Justice always returns in the end. Even if the night is long, we win tomorrow. Even if we are busted and broken down, We will stand up with blood on our chest to rebuild and rebuild the collapsed tower again And sing for eternal life and peace.

Korean originals here

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tonight storm

blizzards and flurries hit the island pouring snow on the higher elevations wash the streets white in sloeing drifts

sea pumps blunt fluff across the face of the water, small clouds rolling to the scored shape beneath of waves lightly curling

out far I could see the seam between the water and the sky was welded together along a modernist slope a simple gradient. My eyes are

declining in health. It looked like it could have been pixellated the unseamed far distance had dim light characteristics but led my weakening eyes to its after math and after image.

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The Songs of the Tyrannosaur

the songs of the tyrannosaur, agony howls the starving child for a mother missed, other dinos pick up the thread to howl too to care for the child to teach to play to count months by moon years by the leaf fall on the day spirit- same as she died they howl twice to carry song for the generations, like all mother goddess she is borne in sound, built in the forgot of the remembering

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Bullsound

Bull Buffalo sat on the stood with long gray hairs wispy from his ears and eyes, with seeds of language in his head, he speaks in himself in broken bull-human tongue, a piece of international language understanded by none but him. Other bull sput he with strings of loose saliva, with basic strikes he tapped out a gotteral with his tongue against his teeth, no words but flung sound near enough a begun to call for doctors and pain medicine but non enough to be understood. With his front left hoof he made the sign of the cross and with his right hind hoof he broke his toes into the front of the cabinet and had to shake himself, off and on and off and on, to loose it. The seeds of language spread using spores of an old world fungus roaring across the bull's brain, filling the crevices of the mind to seal the organ spheric, mute, lost in its own linguistic device. Under the summer skin of the bull rough and thick and under the skull too beneath the words was released the transformation of the bull into himself. His bullies near gaped from the commune, while seeds growing long grass out his mouth gagged on the nodes in his sinus. Buffalo Bull is born and dying by the pictorial expression millions trapped inside his forceful inaugural abortion text, pushed behind his eyes a tumorous growing scene of literature, bit him in his mouth, and he died, his force of will stepped on by his herd and his psyche.

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Pour led

Pour led hit the carpet small fireout burnt a bore in the wood drop through ping, aye, the led pricked bore down hiton a canal holding the main plumb and ruched wintercrack the paved basement. Angry your face redrotted revenge all your fat gut could close around was me left to die on the frozing plane, ice up to my eyes to my poorly led nugget sat cool dropsphere inch from my chilly pupil holes frosting over on the deadeye still-I-foundered cement

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Accurate Hearing in Automated Servant

Footstepping sounds off the small clopping hooves of the automated servant in the hall's paintsoftened cinderblock. The servant steps carefully to avoid nails and debris directed by accurate sensors directed by software so corrupted in the download that this automated servant maneuvers in a world unrelated to the one shoveling inputs. Spontaneous smell of a mosspatch dying gives no active suggestions only a small confusion. Only the mind of god were trained on this automated servant would detect as each steps still forward on the floor's growing cold. Sound is an exception. By chance there exists alignment of this corrupted audio processor and a cut through the world at this distance from the Core where sound loosed from source has a distance to near the same degree as the corruption in the servant. This accidental parallel has kept this small being alive. It is alert to sounds that animals suffer merely to perceive through a veil of correction.

Splits in the ceiling tiles let in blooms of light yellow color flashes when a servant's missed careful step flicks a clip of sewer pipe against the grain of the floor arcs antsize spark into the barrel of the servant's torso onto wrapped paper preserving the repair info infoplate. Fire starts. The servant's corrupted mind appears now to itself lost in a colorado ravine. Clear registered sound of fire from within the belly accurately perceived but no frantic steps now. Altered gait clops along in a beat recognizes the metaphoric "fire burnt within" as realistic experience. Fire spreads. In ravine marching the servant hears wires melt movements to speed up out of any prepared control. Fire is automatic too, makes the burnt movements too automatic jerking the servant legs forth against the wall a horse's style wild backkick them into the brick. The tin hoofs flatten to beer can hockey pucks heighth. The sound legs slammed to points for each step taken down the ravine, the sound of fire now lit on the oilbase plastic panels, the feeling of this ravine in colorado where snows round dirt and steps should be took sure to avoid falls. Confusion is the last approximation made as the fire fills itself on the main processor bank.

And with it the servant and with it that small box. The only place for some several billions of light years where sound was heard rightly in parallel with the world even if on accident.

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Universe made a hollow a bed of hay

to lie on down in and rest

left an impression on the hay

an impression a hollow itself again

with no felled paper to draw the

shape time pooled out of the need

to express, the shape had new

domains and hollows to in bed

where I called it the cosmos

Hayboy

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Untitled Bozo the Clown Poem

I loved Bozo. I watched Bozo all the time. He was a greasy illegal gain-muscle mass drink drunk in a gulp from a tube not moralizing bleach-chicken breast lessons & alphabeticals instead Bozo taught me to live on the toss of the dice & do nada for nobody. I loved Bozo.

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Blessed with the Ability to Die

"Think'st thou that I, who saw the face of God, and tasted the eternal joys of heaven, am not tormented with ten thousand hells in being deprived of everlasting bliss?"

Life is a concentration and reflective expression of solar energy. We have mistaken, some by parallel some by cross, our reflection with the being of reflection itself.

The work of our life is brought to ease by forcing our expressive reflection in to the objects and the gasses of their production. Like the automata of San Diego praying mechanically over the the demon Carlos de Austria, the signs of life's having been led have replaced the capacity for lives to persist.

The signs as production's aftermath prevents movement and response. We do not reciprocate the gift of ourselves in reflection by offering the sun or its cosmos our miracles of expression, our novelty, our purposeful and meaningful actions. Instead we enclosed the surface of the sky to keep the sun that appears.

The gift cycle became a hostage situation. Heat comes, we horde. You give, we keep.

Immortality gives way to mortality, which gives way to injury and harm. Large portions earth will become un- inhabitable by the year 2050 because the slower growth resulting from a more even spread of resources across the earth was considered the greater disaster, defeated in the end by a corrupt torrent of military power, economic manipulation, and the squander of the millions of lives lost to the fight for human liberation.

We are blessed with the ability to die when things become unbearable, but hell is the loss of the future that was prepared.

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this is a protest poem

No to Nato? Onto-natal ton of toenail, ale on tone eight, tane old tawny toe, two antennae to know Tony too

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In Schelling's Philosophy of Art, he writes:

The ultimate union of light with matter, such that the essence itself becomes completely matter and completely light, occurs in the production of flesh. Flesh is the true chaos of all colors and for just that reason resembles none in particular, but is rather the most indissoluble and beautiful admixture of them all.

What is this flesh? This ultimate unity of light and matter? What possibilities lie within its true chaos?

To orient the question, we begin with the crucial importance Schelling gives to aesthetics. Art is not separable from ontology or a derivative of some true world. It is both the invention and the realization of the truth, the conjunction of the real and the ideal. In a work of art, the hazy relation of person and world is given a weight, craft, a thingness. In a good work, this relationship between the image and the reality is not an empirical one, like a photograph which perfectly depicts that moment in time. The power of art is that its truth has a greater reality than mere experience can provide, conveying the fullness of the thing, its breadth of relations and possibilities, and in that fullness, a glimmer of the universal.

The other importance of art for Schelling is that here we have a human practice which is the most devoted to creation of the new. This is the objective appearance of what we call freedom. Art is where the new flourishes, where it is valued without hesitation. It is where we escape from the law into a union of feeling and thinking that does not distinguish between the two. Anybody can tell the difference between a paint-by-number which follows certain formal restrictions and a genius artist who is able to escape from rules to make something beautiful and yet totally unexpected. Part of this power is our ability to make art that doesn’t correspond to anything that exists:

[T]hat art is free in the production of illusion or of appearance up to the point of empirical truth, proves that here art steps beyond the boundaries of strict regularity —into the realm of freedom, of individuality, where the individual becomes a law unto himself.

So the question of flesh and its chaos is the question of freedom. How to account for our openness to new activity? Who are we beyond the law? Because we are material beings, we have to contend with either the laws of nature or of god. In either case, our hands seem tied. But we also clearly desire something beyond the immediate, we imagine things that are not here and we chase them, often in ways that exceed prediction. The philosophical attempts to address this contradiction is arranged in roughly three camps. There is the camp of volition, free-will, that inside the human being there is something that is capable of willing independently. There is the camp of determinism, that what we call thought is as constrained by physical laws as that stuff which we call matter. And there is the camp of compatibilism, that argues these two are not actually distinct, that while our desires are determined, they are determined in such a way that they do comprise a novel contribution or change to the circulation of matter.

Each of these carries tremendous baggage. The idea of volition, at any level, needs some moment of magical leap from mind to world. If there really is a space that exists outside of physical laws, where sensuous experience escapes its material causes and is allowed to flourish spontaneously, how do did the senses get outside and why would they ever return? On the other hand, determinism requires us to chalk off much of our experience of the world as an illusion. When you think you are willing, that is just a perverse epiphenomena, a hallucinatory mist rising off the swamp of your biological process. This hallucination must somehow be strong enough to thoroughly convince nearly everyone who has ever lived, but also weak enough that it can’t even feed back on those biological urges and alter them. It also erases the brute fact that we have thoughts, that we know we have thoughts, and that we know they are a part of the universe that is unfolding. Lastly, compatibilism amounts to a trivial claim that from one point of view, you are determined, and from another point of view, you are not. The compatibilist keeps the worst of both worlds. Any compatibilist position ends up admitting that our experience of will is an illusion. We might have freedom but that freedom is nothing like what we experience or what we strive for. It is a caused freedom, and our will is still alien from the thing we experience. At the same time, a sleight of hand replaces unfreedom for unpredictability. A subatomic swerve is not a replacement for the independent ability to satisfy one’s own desires.

Schelling’s answer is the classically compatibilist concept: autonomy, the individual’s “law unto himself”.

Genius is autonomous, yet it escapes only external determination by laws, not determination by its own laws, since it is only genius insofar as it actually constitutes the highest law-governed qualities. Yet it is precisely this absolute legislation that philosophy recognizes in it.

For the autonomous individual, we are always subject to the law, but our willing is the ability to impose further constraints, ones which play and interact with natural boundaries. Our drives may be a snarl of unconscious traumas, but if we focus on some of these drives, our preferred compulsions gain in strength while others wither. At the peak, the individual chooses the freedom of the intellect, amor dei intellectualis, amor fati, acknowledging and identifying with the pains and necessities of the world. Later, when Schelling explicitly addresses freedom, the return of the law is even more profound.

Solely because God brought order to the disorderly offspring of chaos and proclaimed his eternal unity into nature, he opposed darkness and posited the word as a constant centrum and eternal beacon against the anarchical movement of the principle bereft of understanding. The will to creation was therefore immediately only a will to give birth to the light and the good along with it[.]

Freedom is the overcoming of Chaos, the principle of evil. In order to be true freedom, to rid itself entirely of this “anarchical movement”, autonomy is transformed into a law that is self-given but is also given by god and the universe. The free subject is the one who volunteers to submit.

It seems like the key to this repeated return of the law would be the second half of the word autonomy, νόμος, the law. Instead, it is the former, αὐτό, the self. Every position on freedom so far outlined returns, again and again, to the same side of the equation: mind, interiority, soul, self. In doing so, it is compelled to reaffirm the stability of the immaterial. A self is no good if it vanishes from moment to moment, but go too far the other direction, let the self harden into an object, and your self will have become a corpse. As long as the self is the point of distribution, we will remain trapped in the play of identity and difference, order and chaos, center and edge, reaffirming autonomy, subject, individual as the authors of activity. We will only return the same sterile contradictions. Identity is a kind of difference, don’t you know. Luckily, we already have a handy concept to get ourselves out of this predictable circuit: flesh, the true chaos.

What is this flesh? It is “the ultimate union of light with matter”. In other words, it is moving stuff. It is animated. Schelling also says it is the chaos of all colors. This is not color like blues and reds smeared together. This color is the eruption of vital movement that occurs when colors are combined and juxtaposed. Flesh is an aesthetic vitality which is expressed most perfectly the movement of the human body, the ecstatic miracle of free vibration.

This word “union” also subtly notes an important feature of the flesh. It is less of a object and more of a location where forces have landed in the right proportion for something to come into existence. That is for flesh in the abstract, in the ideal, but also for the flesh of ordinary experience. Our flesh is the mutual interdependence of distinct pieces and materials. Bones, the tendons, blood, muscles, these overlap without collapsing into a shared identity. Muscle, the exemplary substance of flesh, is the one most evidently made of its own differences, the bundles of sinew, fibrous strands which clench in tandem.

As a location, however, it is not something precisely designated. It is instead a space of response, a space of such density that the introduction of an impetus leads to a result. This result is, however, genuinely novel. Flesh always responds with something new. The impetus or stimulant is therefore not an author or an agent. An impetus might precipitate the consequence but it is not causal in the sense that the consequence reflects the precipitating event. But neither does the effect mimic the the capacities or potencies which make up the flesh. The effect exceeds both the impetus and the tension of the forces which are encountered. In other words, the flesh creates. It gives a new twitch, something that couldn’t be willed by the desires of a conscious agent. Desire of this kind can only pursue a version of what has been perceived by this agent, a version of what already has been.

If this is our flesh, then the question is clear. What kind of freedom is possible if we are able to shed the concept of autonomy, and it attendant prejudices of will and determination?

Schelling has already given us the classical answer with his invocation of the Genius. The genius is not the person who makes the object but an “indwelling element of divinity in human beings.”8 This divinity emerges when the artist is able to align themselves with the indwelling god. This alignment is truth in the higher sense, not accuracy but fidelity, a depiction that gathers the universal essence of being into a particular instance. The genius that passes through the artist looks more or less like mystical experience, where the oracle or shaman or pythoness is a conduit for the outside. Poets are the most eloquent modern examples of this old experience, as they open their mouths and submit their tongues to the Word, letting the poem compose itself from the flows of the logos. Heidegger, deeply influenced by Schelling’s aesthetics, will call this kind of passive genius gelassenheit, the condition of releasing one’s will and letting Being be in its own fullness.

This answer does not look very much like the Flesh. Flesh is not something released. It is tense. Schelling mentions Laocoön as the perfect distribution of “the pain of the body and the greatness of the soul.”9 But is Laocoön in balance? His face is not a man’s face. It is the rupture of a man who is becoming Agony. It is a face only long enough to begin to tear itself off of its own skull, in a last act of freedom that knows the only escape from death by serpents is the sundering of its own form. If autonomy is voluntary submission, this is the freedom of involuntary self-annihilation.

Consider a more recent master of the flesh, Francis Bacon:

We're so saturated with aIl the arts, through aIl the means of reproducing them and seeing them and everything, that the saturation point has come so strongly that one just longs for new images and new ways by which reality can be created. After aIl, man wants invention, he doesn't want to go on and on and on just reproducing the past. […] We can't go on and on reproducing the Renaissance or nineteenth-century art or anything else. You want something new. Not an illustrative realism but a realism that comes about through a real invention of a new way to lock reality into something completely arbitrary.

Or more succinctly:

This flesh, this true chaos, is not something achieved. It is the site of intensification, of compilation and throng. Laocoön’s whole life is there in this final bodily release. His every exercise, his diet, his injuries, the decay of age, his personality, his emotional exuberance, his religious faith, his terror for his sons beside him. His eruption is the nest of forces, not overdetermined but oversaturated. With so many impulses contending, it becomes impossible to call forth a singular agent of the act, or a coherent direction, or a planned, controlled emergence. The art of flesh as the true chaos is runaway cacophony. Not autonomous but its opposite, allanomous, the destruction of the law from the outside. The universal moment that escapes from Laocoön’s halfparted lips is the instant when the tension of the forces peaks and breaks, the union of matter and light, the last moment when things held together, and the first moment when they didn’t. Nothing, not the body or the stone or the artist or god is in control anymore. The flesh is free.

unstable substance forced open on an overload of elsewhere determinate & contrary impulses, a pricked up willless spontaneity, if aesthetics is autonomous will, (?) flesh is the shredding surfaces of elsewhere given lawless cacophone aesthetics in chaotic flesh is attractive counter to magical volition thinking & monotonous determinist acosmism thinking & patchjob compatible subject thinking + creation without authority old plato's charioteer pulls on nerves & tendons to steer riled-up sinew flares

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poem

Appear can mean arrive

Appear can mean visible presence

The opposite of arrive is return

The opposite of visible presence is invisible absence

The opposite of appear is disappear

Arrival of invisible absence Visible presence of disappearance Return of appearance

GHOST GHOST

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unstable substance forced open on an overload of elsewhere determinate & contrary impulses, a pricked up willless spontaneity, if aesthetics is autonomous will, (?) flesh is the shredding surfaces of elsewhere given lawless cacophone aesthetics in chaotic flesh is attractive counter to magical volition thinking & monotonous determinist acosmism thinking & patchjob compatible subject thinking + creation without authority old plato's charioteer pulls on nerves & tendons to steer riled-up sinew flares