The Killing Floor

Time Capsule: On Solitude + Warp & Weft Of The Fabric Of The World

Time Capsule is a weekly series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons

  

On Solitude

Sun’s up, but not out yet, presenting a deep atmospheric mortality to the end of the month of June. Not that one wants to run from it, but tempted to turn away, inward. Leave the room with windows. Open the book closed after midnight with only a few pages left, unwilling to finish it. Turn away from Telemann on the classical station as way too linear against these tail-end calendar squares. Rather dark beat & collaboration (with & against each other) Mingus, Roach, & Ellington on Solitude gathered together & alone to suit individual needs on this day attempting to remain anonymous, June 26th, 2012, but the Time left within the Soul won’t let it. Or, after hearing her voice on the phone in the next room, (listening filled with gratitude ahead of Time), simply eavesdrop on the rain sent down as message from deep atmospheric mortality of a day with sun up, but not yet out. Silent patter rolling off rhododendron leaves. Rain heading underground to erase the fears of the dead, & resurrect a stern will to continue on on a day trying its best to disappear. Look at that! It just this instant reentered my realm after writing the previous sentence. May still have the image somewhere upstairs: black & white photo taken by old friend David Russo of the Intihuatana stone at Machu Picchu, where at both equinoxes Sun Stands directly above casting No Shadow. That’s it! Took an entire lifetime today on a remote Tuesday before noon to return to the image of the Intihuatana stone believed to hitch Sun in Place above right now.

Warp & Weft of the Fabric of the World

See, they return is a rhythm none can improve upon, so it rose up from the depths to address the fact that I do, & they do, when there at the Ferry Terminal yesterday morning two men wearing camouflage jackets & pants, no less, one smoking, delayed my walk in their direction. Opened a book from my black canvas bag in the passenger seat of the car, in which George Seferis writes in his journal on October 17th, 1946, (two weeks after I came into this world), of meeting the young painter, Lucian Freud, for the first time on the island of Poros, just after finishing the Iliad. He adds how enthralled he is by Achilles’ speech to Priam, calling it “a vibrating chord” & “a harmonious sound.” = “In Homer everything meshes, the whole world is a woof of ‘umbilical cords’” knowing I’d track down the epic, but not before seeing my world in its rhythms similar to the Aegean, yet so far away: ocean, stones, air redolent with plants & waves, these three-hundred & sixty-five off-shore Calendar Islands. “Rage-” Fagles translates the first word of Homer, making me think of War & America & Achilles, who gets (horizontal weft against longitudinal warp of the world’s fabric) from Priam, (kissing the hand that killed his sons), that he’s done enough vengeful violence to dead Hector in twelve days, including dragging his body three times round the tomb of Patroclus, & can now hand the bones back for burial. Seferis cuts wood after lunch. Empties his head of any poetic mood, relaxed, at the animal level. “Don’t forget,” he writes the next day, “that you must leave & return.”

FURTHER STUDY:

Money Jungle
Intihuatana Stone

Time Capsule: Out-Of-The-Blue-Blue Day & Night

Time Capsule is a weekly series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons

Out-of-the-Blue-Blue Day & Night

Way after the midnight hour, when light next the African granary door out of Mali is barely light at all, at least from ground-floor level, where I’m waiting out another night in insomnia imagining pleasurable things only, & settle on those one might call “from out-of-the-Blue,” the way Moito Mato Grosso came on over the airwaves earlier in the day with the Hank Jones piano dominating, while Gene Ammons takes what at first seems like a backseat role on tenor sax, but one can eventually hear he’s smoking something cool back there in 1962, & jazz history has him serving five years in jail shortly after his album, Bad Bossa Nova, is issued. Or say, Joe Schuyler worries that I haven’t seen the new Miles Davis & Edith Piaf US Postal Service stamps, which I haven’t, so he sends ten snail mail making my Out-of-the-Blue-Blue Day!! A Red-Letter Day I call her coincidental return from Denver via Atlanta to Portland practically EXACTLY two hours before Summer Solstice has us toasting cold Mexican beer to the IMMEDIATE FUTURE. Hell, the image of the woman made of splotches of color & flesh only in the dream returns, although I’ll keep what she said to me to myself, I know she blew into town via Kristeva’s theory that color alone has the power to bypass our internal censor. A hundred pages from the end of The Original Scroll version of On the Road, which came by surprise package long ago from the entomologist, Dr. Edward Coher, Boynton Beach, FL, Kerouac’s at his most compassionate with Neal after getting thrown out by Carolyn, & he & him have nowhere to go, but to Helen Hinkle’s, of all places, where she berates the hero down down to the Idiot, to the Holy Goof, so Jack says they’ll go to New York, then Italy & Paris, but not before hitting the club just off Market Street in San Francisco, where the tenorman had a foghorn tone; his horn was taped; he was a shipyard worker & he didn’t care… The clock on the wall quivered & shook; nobody cared about that thing. Lastly, before or after I sleep to dream, sweat two consecutive T-shirts through the chest, I’m thinking of the post by fb friend out Teheran University, Parivash Nazarieh, quoting Joyce Carol Oates, saying she’s drawn to failure. I’m guessing from this Down-&-Out-of-the-Blue-Blue perspective, she’d gravitate my way.

FURTHER STUDY
Gene Ammons

Time Capsule: I Know Her + A Timely Utterance

Time Capsule is a weekly series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons

  

I Know Her

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones… - Roethke

Wind tearing a cloud above limb-from-limb in its land animal manifestations, & then fin-to-fin in marine seal & shark, finally whisking it away completely. Clarity accompanies every eve of her birthday here, launching memory all the way back to the day before turning thirty-one. Not that she’s changed or aged. Essentially, it’s the same body. On that day under that sun on those stones near that fire close to the ocean wanting to be the Aegean Sea, I’d have to be as frank about sexual matters as Archilochus in the 7th century Desire, (my friend) that looses the limbs, is overwhelming me… if I deigned to describe the scene. Let’s just say the day is marked like a wound over the heart etched in the shape of a kiss. Right now Haydn’s String Quartet, Op. 76, No. 6 is traveling overseas from Venice Radio clearing the airwaves. What will she want to do tonight? What about tomorrow? A few mundane plans set on the agenda: hair appointment in the afternoon, dinner reservation later at the Greek place on Congress, where we won’t be at a loss for words. But I know her, at some point there’ll be a call from sun, from stones, from fire, & from the ocean wanting to be the Aegean Sea.

A Timely Utterance

I get word. Darkness of those empty mailboxes. Long before email. I get word. Of course, it most often wells up from inside: choric cathexion conducting valid proof. It’s fairly scientific. Language in tune with the body. Rolling on on all sixteen cylinders, the rhythmic charge. Could be compared to Mayakovsky’s Renault driven all the way from Paris to Moscow. Or Lorca’s horse? Or even Frank O’Hara’s torn-down 3rd Avenue El, for that matter. Any poet or philosopher walking out & about: Hesiod, Heraclitus, Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, right on up to moderns & postmoderns too numerous to list. I get word. This morning before heading out for a few staples, an envelope from William Heyen with three forever stamps carried it from Brockport here: Levertov, Roethke, Stevens. Word from Bill practically erases cruel disappointments of dark, empty mailboxes, long before email. No need to share what he wrote, he could say anything. I got word. It’s fairly scientific. Language in tune with the body, the rhythmic charge. Bill & I see eye to eye. (Although he’s a good deal taller.) Look at all the pocket poems stuffed inside, including the double one he sent of me crossing Broadway in NYC with butterfly clung to bluejeans, hair bedraggled, in awe of such a lucky omen. Gave the extra one to Geoff Gronlund today, who facilitated the trip, & took the pic. I get word. Wordsworth would say, A timely utterance…

FURTHER STUDY:

Aegean civilizations

Time Capsule: Coughing Spell Reaching Fever Pitch

Time Capsule is a weekly series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons


  

Coughing Spell Reaching Fever Pitch

The word scraped first surfaced, then scratched stretched its length of letters over that, then finally plumbed as I began to address the depths I’d reached. For example, it was a long, rough night, though not as bad as the previous one during which like some Hindu ascetic with square iron grate draped round his neck, I too could not lie down without the coughing spell reaching fever pitch. No dreams to the rescue either with less than an hour’s sleep each night. I remember offering to show a companion where the bike shop was located near the Odeon, where, anachronistically, I once saw a long line of people waiting to get into the theater to see Wenders’ Paris, Texas. When we tried to get there via the Metro the escalator elevated us past the cemetery on the left. Now, the depths I scraped scratched plumbed were places I might have thought to have to wait till the edge of life to witness, but the place of pure resignation being breath is not unlike what daylight resorted to in the form of Bach’s Suite per liuto in Sol minore streaming out of Venice Radio, in that withstanding the onslaught, it seemed almost heaven-sent to test one’s stamina, dissect the noise of the body in order to get at the music of the Soul.

FURTHER STUDY
Hindu asceticism
Venice Classic Radio

Time Capsule: Here + Walter Benjamin's Central Park

Time Capsule is a weekly series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons

Angelus Novus
[Paul Klee (Swiss, 1897–1940), 1920
India ink, colored chalk, and brown wash on paper, 318 x 242 mm.
Israel Museum, Jerusalem (via Gershom Scholem via Walter Benjamin)]

Here


In the dream two heads bowed, sullen, silent, dour over an image instantly recognizable as a grave in Pompeii. The two lovers mourned the two lovers there. At the threshold of the dream, where dream coincides with waking, mourning turned self-referential as epochs of history receded back down into archetypal, chthonic realms. Real death urged the dreamer dreaming, the lovers lost, & the two still alive toward a momentary, harmonious joy, only grasped at in language here.

Walter Benjamin's Central Park

I.
Perhaps the recent stay in NYC with only The Dakota standing between our apartment & Central Park, or by the consistent perspective marginality offers, what with recent attempts to house over forty-years worth of my papers, I’m drawn toward the utterly tragic circumstances literary theorist Walter Benjamin found himself in in Denmark & France from 1938-40. He’s got his eye on New York. Hears Death in the form of Gestapo jackboots. Gets interned as a foreign national at an outdoor stadium in Paris. Argues against the threat to cancel his small stipend from the Institute of Social Research at Columbia University, writing to Max Horkheimer, that the latter did not fathom the difference between reduction for his New York colleagues & cessation for him in Paris, “We are all isolated individuals. And for the isolated individual the perspective opened by your letter, with its terrifying earnestness, overshadows all other plans.” But he continues to read & write. Before leaving Paris, in hopes of getting to America, he leaves much of his archive with Georges Bataille, fellow writer & librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale. The last work to be located there was found in 1981, a tract he’d been writing in 1938-39, what editors of the four-volume Selected Writings published by Harvard call, “the most advanced drafts & notes for the partially completed Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Age of High Capitalism,” also known as Central Park.

II.
Imagine, Central Park. He tailors his findings on Baudelaire writing during his Time in Paris by attempting to apply the same principles to New York City, where friends & colleagues had offered to find him work & an apartment near Central Park. One of his initial correspondences was to define Baudelaire’s “Modernity” as giving expression to extreme spontaneity, which he refers to, after Jules Laforgue first broached it as Baudelaire’s “Americanism.” This does my heart good, seeing Baudelaire as the father of the prose poem, & knowing it is, first & foremost, at least for me, an act of revolt. I continue to hear jackboots of Death haunting Benjamin, hoping to house his archive & find a job in New York. He sees New York as one of the great cities of the world, which possesses a “labyrinthine character” with “an image of the Minotaur at its center.” “…he [the Minotaur] brings death to the individual… is the image of the deadly power he embodies…” (His ambivalence to the chance of ever making it to New York?) Benjamin points out the facts & obsessions of Baudelaire’s Time as the fetishization of commodity, prostitution, & the marketplace. Adds here, for his own purposes, again, in Central Park, “Emigration as a key to the big city.” Are his Columbia University colleagues listening? Toward the end of the 46 loose-leaf sheets that make up Central Park, Benjamin asks almost rhetorically regarding Baudelaire’s belief or non-belief in progress, “Walt Whitman?” The editors point out that additionally, in preparation for his ill-fated trip to America, Walter Benjamin reads William Faulkner’s novel, Light in August.

FURTHER STUDY:

Walter Benjamin
Max Horkheimer