aquí, en mi noche

red corn (osage)

i.

with charcoal black and lead grey,
parchment white or cream or yellow,
lines extend from my fingers.

following the motion of the wrist,
and the gaze of the eyes,

between the distant bellowing and the close breathing of the beast,

the hills assemble their green army.

i am free to arc my spine towards the moon.

dust from my skin scatters as ashes onto the river black

山

joanna brouk is a meditative sound artist who 

wrote scores with geometric shapes (numerogroup)

and 

believed that sound could heal the soul (aquariumdrunkard)

山


unwound is still my favorite band 

no matter how much time i spend away from them,
the obvious continually makes itself apparent to me

.

this is their 1998 album challenge for a civilized society

.

they surrender

山

ii.

山

i am currently obsessed with octavio paz.

i read his words all day - in spanish, in english, in character and in supplication.

he was a surrealist poet from mexico who eventually became the mexican ambassador to india.

poet & man

man & world

world & image

image & word

word & music

music & dance

dance & dancer

dancer & man

man & world

etc.

(technicians of the sacred) 

山

nicobar

D A W N

on the sand,

bird writing:

the memoirs of the wind

-

W I N D ,  W A T E R ,  S T O N E

water hollows stone,

wind scatters water,

stone stops the wind.

water, wind, stone.

wind carves stone,

stone's a cup of water,

water escapes and is wind.

stone, wind, water.

wind sings in its whirling,

water murmurs going by,

unmoving stone keeps still.

wind, water, stone.

each is another and no other:

crossing and vanishing

through their empty names:

water, stone, wind. 

-

T H E  O T H E R

he invented a face for himself.

behind it,

he lived, died, and was resurrected
many times.

his face now
has the wrinkles from that face.

his wrinkles have no face.

山

splitting open the primordial indefinite

all that remains to us

              said Bataille

is to write meaningless commentaries

on writing's absence of meaning

                  .

             to write poetry

is to erase the unwritten 

... from L E T T E R  T O  L E Ó N  F E L I P E 

the world(s) of his poems integrate external and internal until forced separation of the two begins to feel unnecessary. perhaps that is what surrealism is and does.

as paz views the external he does not merely see objects and materials, but what they are as his self is to his self - names and ideas, abstractions of "reality," concepts, immaterial posing as material...

how he interacts with nature, others and that which lies outside his body is what gives such life to his language - anything can be and is anything; stars are gardens and hours are eyes, noon is horizon, the self is wind.

all is and is not

and it falls apart on the page in silence

.

i set down now a few

twisted strokes

black on white

diminutive garden of letters

planted in the lamp's light

.

do i believe in man

or in the stars?

... from V R I N D A B A N

i like most his complete erasure of the pre-drawn outline-of-thing which we have come to associate with full identity-of-thing. these outlines depict an inherent incompleteness and sometimes even falseness.

the closest i think we can get to uniting the truth of the external with our own truth is to use only pure, unconditioned abstractness in our perception and experience - absent of names and ideas, and wordless. this wordlessness comes from primitive, perhaps even sacred and ancient, knowledge living deep within.

paz translated this primitive perception of life into an art of thought-to-image-to-word the only way he knew how, by painting the orderlessness of the mind, of what the mind sees, with language. he also acknowledged the inevitable shortcomings of the writing process - total oneness, total reversion to formless consciousness, can never be achieved - with humility, gentleness, almost as if observing from outside himself the limits of man and smiling.

through his poems, as through a window, i see the outside as closer in essence to my inside than i ever did previously.

immortal in splashed ink

山

the incurable otherness from which oneness must always suffer