clamatoes - Tumblr blog

[clamatoes]

itunes situation

[clamatoes]

Toward a Sacramental Aesthetics

A friend and I had a conversation a little while ago which has informed my aesthetics and metaphysics of the person ever since. I saved the first two salvos, which I’ll reproduce here, and I’ll add more as I find it.  

Tim says:

Today I was reading about Marcel Duchamp, French Dada artist in the late Modernist years most famous for his piece, Fountain, and I began thinking about art, about what storytelling really is, about why this stuff is important, and how it all relates to a urinal.

Of course, these are thoughts that basically lead into the entire field of aesthetics, and I can’t say I’ve got any definitive or even piecemeal insight here, and that’s probably for the best. At the heart of my artistic beliefs is that each person is the most important person in his/her/their artistic experience: while the author and creator is obviously important for defining the field and parameters of interpretation, and sometimes providing the clear interpretation on top (though I see this as detracting from the experience), the viewer/reader/perceiver is essential and authoritative in making any interpretation meaningful.

This word, meaningful, is one of my favorite in any discussion of aesthetics, and in any discussion of the Natural Sciences versus the Human Sciences. Math and physics and chemistry etc tell us what things are – what they do and what they are made of, a thing’s demonstrable properties of existence. But the human sciences, the pure human ‘sciences’ like history and philosophy and literature, they tell us what things mean. You can say a poem is a piece of writing broken into lines instead of by page margins, but it is more useful, interesting, and meaningful to say that a poem compares God’s transformative powers to razing a city and, essentially, rape.

So if the audience has a substantial part of the meaning-making within an artistic object, if the individual interprets and seeks the meaningful truth of the piece before her (an ‘individual,’ but one working within the web of cultures she exists in always already, and potentially even within a conscious community of responders, of other audience members), then what is the place of the artist? Is the author really, and irrevocably, dead?

I don’t think so. Not that I really disagree with Barthes’ essay (linked above), but there is a sort of transcendental quality to a text completely separated from an author, to a painting with no painter. No, we do not need the history of the author, we do not need to know the intentions or the desires for interpretation, but the very fact that the artwork between you and me is human made is essential, absolutely essential, if for no other reason than that this one human, similar and dissimilar from myself in so many ways, at one point found this thing worth communicating to me.

In 1917, Marcel Duchamp created and premiered one of his “Readymade” works (what he called works made from found objects, objects already actually created) named Fountain. Duchamp bought a urinal, turned it upside down, wrote “R. MUTT 1917″ on the side, and voilá, one of the landmark artworks of the 20th Century.

A high degree of this landmark-ness comes from critics arguing at the most basic level: is this art? And it’s an important question, the topic of this post that will, I promise, get to storytelling. How do we determine what gets the label artistic? And what does that even mean?

As I have hinted towards, I believe this is art, and I believe the label is of the utmost importance. What Duchamp achieved in this and similar work was to eradicate the power structures of elitism that create the AUTHOR and the reader, the ARTIST and the viewer. An artistic genius is thus no longer a master craftsman, but someone who views the world artistically.

This sounds like circular reasoning, and it very well might be. I am defining the artist as one who views artistically, and the reason is because it moves the focus away from the question of talent and craft. To view artistically is to see in something a belief, idea, or experience that is worth communicating, that can be meaningful to another human just as it is to oneself. This means two things: an artist is anyone, and an artwork is anything.

What is so mystical and phenomenal about the artist is that he finds this Thing, this potentially relevant Truth worth communicating, and simply by designating it ‘art’ – whether the thing is already made, self-made, collectively-made, whatever – he has made it a thing worth interpreting.

Now there is still such a thing as qualitative difference in art. Duchamp gets a freebie perhaps because he’s one of the first (though I think the piece itself has a high degree of artistic quality to it, but I need to stop this tangent before it starts) to really make such a thought prominent. I still do think that spending time perfecting one’s art sharpens one’s ability to find and create objects that are maximally meaningful, the distinction is simply that this isn’t an innate genius – it is more that humans are built to experience Art, by whomever, about whatever.

My story is not necessarily waiting for a genius talent. It is simply waiting for the artistic perceiver, and the energy to put these perceptions into a public medium. The world, the big one we all live in, it’s waiting for artists as viewers, and viewers as artists.

My response:

I couldn’t possibly agree more when you say that “an artist is someone who views something artistically,��� and that art establishes a paradigm of “contrapasso” among parties to the art – the artist is viewer and the viewer is artist. This is a relationship of communion, then, which is inevitably a relationship of equality, as you intimate. But it is art’s status as communion that I find so intriguing, and I can’t help mapping onto the sacrament that bears the same name, which of course mimics the Trinitarian communion that I (and I think, you) as a Christian accept as the bedrock of the universe, and therefore critical not merely aesthetically or theologically, but even ontologically. I see the relationship established by art, then, as universally fundamental.

Per your “object (i.e., in the natural world) —> set of experiences —> artist/viewer —> object (i.e., the piece of art) —> set of experiences —> artist/viewer” hermeneutic, there is clearly a semantic “dance” at the core of any genuine aesthetic experience. A sort of reflective equilibrium is established between the dancers, in which their communion through this dance changes what each IS, insofar as it undeniably changes what each MEANS – e.g., the fact that X is presented to me as art changes my experience upon considering it from what it would have been if I hadn’t realized that it was art, which in turn changes me in such a way as to establish me as co-artist, which allows me ultimately to share in full in the artistic creation of the original artist, whose relationship to his work is identical with my relationship to his work – i.e., the relationship between object and “artist-viewer” or “viewer- artist” – and differs only in the chronological aspect (i.e., his relationship with the object preceding mine by minutes or centuries) and by direction (i.e., his experience of some object in the world led to his creation of the objet d’art, whereas my experience of the objet d’art led to my post-facto co-creation of the original aesthetic experience, and thereby the “perception” of whatever set of objects or events lies behind the aesthetic experience causally).

And so aesthetic experience, then, is the experience of CREATING art (which I’ll go out on a limb by saying is something I’m doing anytime I “perceive” anything at all, due to my status as metaphysically-independent SUBJECT of the physical OBJECTS – more on this perhaps later).

If author is “dead” as you discuss, then my engagement with the aesthetic object resembles the artist’s original engagement with the world around him. In both instances, the subject of the experience asks the same set of questions: “What does what I’m looking at MEAN – to me, and to everyone? Is it important? If so, why? What is relevant and what is extraneous to what I’m feeling due to my engagement it? Is this experience the member of a genus of experiences I’m familiar with, or does it define some new category? Am I brought higher or lower due to this experience?,” etc.

Conversely, if the author rather remains in command of the aesthetic experience, with full power to bracket and dictate terms, then my engagement with the aesthetic object resembles the scientist’s lifeless engagement with the world around him, and thus the possibility for mutually-transformative aesthetic communion evaporates. The death of the artist by the humility of accepting his role as viewer (and the simultaneous humiliation of his critics) then makes way for the aggrandizement of the viewer into his consubstantial role with the artist as co-artist/co-percipient, which gives life to aesthetic COMMUNION. (In the same way, perhaps, that Christ’s genuflect at the cross made way for the deification of man – but more on this later).

It seems then that the extent to which we acknowledge an object’s status as “deliberate” or “finished” art (the extreme of would be having a head-full of prejudicial and non-experiential notions about, e.g., what each aspect means and how it relates to every other aspect which is dictated to us by the artist or critics) is the extent to which we have abolished the aesthetic experience per se for the viewer, by ironing it into a “theoretical” or “epistemological” experience instead.

The object cannot be an epitaph and relic of a bygone and INDIVIDUAL aesthetic experience – as art, it must be a gateway into this shared experience while it still lives and breathes, which is, as discussed above, communal and consubstantial with the world around us, establishing a creative give and take between one’s mind and creation, and ultimately, I’d argue, the “person” whose “art” IS the created world. In the same way that a given word has a meaning which is not the word itself (i.e., insfoar as the word itself is constituted of ink or sound) and which is not a periphrastic description of the word or a cluster of thesaurus entries, but rather is a similar and thus communal EXPERIENCE in the minds of the speaker and the listener, and serves to bridge that infinite chasm between these two persons, art is a tool, it is a bridge between one boundless, unitary and unbreachable mind, and another – and it belongs equally to both. Perhaps in the same way that Christ – the Logos/Word – bridges the divide(s) among men, and between men and God. The artist as viewer and the viewer as artist = “God became man that man might become God.”

By analogy, then, the beauty of human experience is afforded by our bare knowledge of its authorship by a Creator-artist who stands behind its pattern, which knowledge assures us THAT our experience is meaningful, if not HOW. And the extent to which we are beaten over the head with the HOW is the extent to which we are incapable of genuinely experiencing this beauty and its ultimate meaning. Incidentally, I think this is true regardless of the ontological status we afford "God"; even if we do not believe in God's material/empirically-observable existence (i.e., what most of us in this age would call God's "real" existence), observing the world at large as though it were presented by a mind like ours instigates us into a creative engagement with the world around us in which we viewers become artists, and the urges for truth and for beauty become twined together in the singular act of artistically viewing the world which is as much creation as it is observation - "the utmost must be true, and is" Wallace Stevens says, describing this erotic engagement between reality and the imagination.

The parabale of the prodigal son seems apposite here – in the parable, what divine childhood MEANS is impossible truly to know prior to DISCOVERING it oneself, ultimately at a remove from that experience or in exile – or, by analogy, by exile from KNOWLEDGE ABOUT the experience. Perhaps then the exile from Eden is also apposite – indicating the same removal from the meaningful experience when the mind becomes too laden with “KNOWLEDGE ABOUT” to instantiate and incarnate the visceral and genuine “EXPERIENCE OF.”

At his most useful, then, the artist does little more than faithfully, artistically, and humanely PERCEIVE – and thence hold an empty frame over some complex of human experience – a “map” to “nodes” of aesthetic beauty – which is, of course, aesthetic truth, which is the only truth worth knowing (although I suppose I’m committed now to saying you can’t “KNOW” it at all – when we do know it, it disappears like Christ when he’s recognized logically rather than merely experientially, at the end of the Road to Emmaus episode). What does the artist ultimately perceive and then relate to his audience? His experience of “being a genuine human being” – being an authentic and humane “passive or co-active percipient” of everything-there-is. Which opportunity, of course, he doesn’t just articulate or describe, but holds forth to his audience, in that their faithful, artistic, and humane acceptance/perception of/participation in his objet d’art IS the act of “being a genuine human being.” This is super meta.

Perhaps then Duchamp’s fountain is exactly what its title pseudo-ironically claims it to be – i.e., it is a fountain insofar as it was constructed to be and faithfully stands as a bare index of an aesthetic “node,” with nothing more than a title and a stall in a museum to indicate its status as art (leaving no theory to crowd out genuine aesthetic experience), pouring forth, if you will, a communion substantiated by the conversation you and I are having about it here today.

Tim says:

I’ve been working on a longer essay of literary criticism lately, but I want to sketch out a few of its basic ideas in the hopes of getting your comments and feedback. I suppose, to start, that calling it “literary criticism” is not too accurate: the essay is basically a compilation of fears and concerns that have made me skeptical about contemporary American poetry, and trying to at least blueprint a possible alternative path.

A number of assumptions sit in the center of the essay, and the first one is that poetry, to be important, meaningful, and truly Art, must remain fringe, difficult, and opposed to anything that tries to systematize it. This is more of a tautological point about Art as a whole: Art must remain Art, and to what Art is is always terrorizing, unsettling, thoughtful, questioning, and restless. And the assumption to this assumption is that we, as humans, live always along a stream of hidden prejudices and unconscious motivations, caught always in the middle of what we know we know, what we know we don’t know, what we don’t know we know, and what we don’t know we don’t know. This is my assumption of the human condition, and thus Art is meant in its highest to uncover and discover, to reveal, to lift up what we think we’ve got pinned down so we can stare into the abyss beneath the carpet. This assumption includes the idea that this is the exact task of religion and philosophy and psychology and every other social science, to a degree, but that none of them work the same way Art does, that where sciences operate logically and consciously, Art can operate above, behind, and underneath logic and consciousness, but also with them.

So far I have said nothing about technique, though that is one of the core issues here. Poetry, as an Art, operates along certain techniques, all meant to take Language as we use it without thinking about it and put it on the stage or under the microscope. In poetry, more so than the other written arts, we are to take notice of the individual words, the layout of sentences, the technical qualities of the work. Like music forces us to recognize sound differently, and painting forces us to recognize space differently, so poetry forces us to recognize language differently.

And yet, poetry still is language. Poetry, to a very different degree than painting or music, is saying something. In other words, poetry is not Art simply through technique, but also through content. Shakespeare is not brilliant only because his writing is brilliant.

Or at least, I don’t think so. I don’t think poets become Great Poets through technique alone, because the words are still communicative. I think the poets that survive the ages, the ones that change lives, are the ones who saw in poetry the diligent need for craft, yes, but who also had something Real and Meaningful to say, the ones that could capture something insightful and propulsive and compelling.

So far, so good? Here’s my critique point (note: every time I say “young poet” I am including and indicting myself):

Because of the increasing number of young poets writing poetry seriously and the growing ability for poetic professionalization, both of which have taken the Workshop Model of poetry and utilized it so universally that to learn how to write a poem is to learn how to write a poem technically, young poets are giving rise to a new aesthetic of writing that promotes technique over content, studies craft over meaningfulness, and secures anintention to write poetry instead of an intention to use poetry for writing about something else.

I am calling this aesthetic Poetic Poetics, as in, the Poetics of becoming poetic. I need some examples, and luckily/unluckily, there are a trove of them right in front of me, because I have fallen into this with almost every poem I’ve written (which will bring me to another point in my conclusion).

My first example comes from a poem that I wrote last January called On Everything, Eventually. I have tried fixing it up a few times since; I like the concept, and the opening stanza:

In time there are no farces only parables: the wind blows to remind us and through the reeds we will hear spirits bargaining over souls. We are the dust that we shake from our opened cloaks and our sandals, innumerable orbits jockeying for recognition, or understanding.

The rest of the poem unwound this opening into a faint narrative. The unwinding isn’t very successful, which is why it still isn’t a finished poem, but worse is the conclusion, which is, I think, a premier example of Poetic Poetics:

The wind blows. In time we will hear no farces, only parables as the reeds bargain for our cloaks and sandals. The spirits are jockeying for understanding. Dust shakes out in orbits to remind us.

Content and meaning have dropped out of the writing. Where, earlier, throughout the poem, I am trying to twine ideas together and communicate a scene, a feeling, and thoughts that come with them, I ended the poem by rewriting the conclusion. This technique could work, but I made no attempt to make meaning, and haphazardly enjoined phrases. The result is a stanza that reads well and sounds nice and even has the impression of meaning, but the impression is as deep as it goes. This conclusion is a poetic poem, it intends to create a “poetic moment” and is conscious only of its own existence as a stanza of poetry, nothing higher.

Here is another example from my writing. Last year I started a series of poems called Documenting the End of the World, another project that I intend to return to with a new vigor at some point in my life when I am feeling ready to destroy a good number of pages that I wrote and that, I think, are very poor. Below is a full poem called Matin:

This morning the sun lay like planks shuffled over the rooftops. I placed my hand on the stair-railing as I walked up the stairs just to feel the railing. Someone called my name. Only, it wasn’t anyone I knew and it wasn’t my name either. I thought about the lightness of great things, like feathers, and souls, and tried to compose a poem where the sky was a levee, broken apart, like eggs with the yolk spilling over the rooftops, and everything.

This poem frustrates me, a lot. It keeps approaching a point where you think the writer (me) is going to say something, but then the sentence ends – twice very awkwardly, in the middle of lines, with no reason – and the possibilities for meaning are cast off into hipster flippancy. Finally, the poem becomes a poem about writing a poem. Ugh. The whole piece has a vanity and arrogance about it, and when you dig into it the only idea it sees to offer is, Look at my poetic experiences! I am a poet! 

Now, admittedly, my examples are not the best because the actual poems just aren’t great. It would be the height of presumption for me to take a contemporary poem and show it off as an example of Poetic Poetics, but I think they are out there, and I think they are growing because of, as I said, the Workshop mentality and the avenues of professionalization (the latter of which is a kind of shorthand for Keep writing, constantly, and publishing, constantly, and in return you will get a position at a university. It seems to be the same publish-or-die mentality that runs across academia and most influences younger writers/scholars who must break in and fight to stay in). Still, I hope this gives at least a sensibility of what I mean.

Against this aesthetic, which I do think I see more often, stands the poet who studies more than poetry. The poet who is invested in the world, in other academic pursuits, in cultures, whatever – the point is that this poet has something to say. Technique might be half of the matter, but content is the other half. Poets through tradition speak with the weight of philosophy in its root meaning, love of wisdom, and we recognize this immediately in a single line of Dickinson or Hopkins or, I suggest, most of the poets who we still read. They struggle over religion and faith, question culture, criticize the State, get obsessed over insects and mythologies and whole countries or small towns. And then, through their obsession and interests, poetry becomes the inevitable tool for what they want to communicate, rather than the intention of the interests themselves.

Finally, though, I think there is some salvation for Poetic Poetics. My argument is first, that it is an aesthetic that must be recognized and questioned, that is pulling poetry into self-referentiality where it is its own object of study, at the cost of meaningfulness and content, that it is taking William Carlos Williams’ famous adage of No ideas but in things and is axing the first half of the phrase and defining the only “things” as, ultimately, poems. But the process of Poetic Poetics, which I am still squarely within, is still important: it is still a workshop, a place to learn craft. In the end, I am not against Poetic Poetics pedagogically – it very well might be the best way to teach poetry, starting with the technique and then heading out – but teleologically, against it if it is the goal and intention of writing.

What I fear is that the tracks of professionalization – and with them, legitimization – available to young poets will allow Poetic Poetics to avoid its status as the roadtowards poetry, and will instead become the destination. What I fear is that the inherent abilities for poetry to challenge and change lives will be lost, that poets will learn all of the best ways to lifeguard, but will never take these skills to the ocean. I’m certainly guilty of all of this, which is, finally, avoiding the responsibility, the gravity, and the duty of poetry.

My response:

I share your concerns about academic or professional poetry, and your stand defending poetry as a living art for living people, that ought, at its highest, to aim at something, ironically, inexpressible.

I agree that the increasing professionalization of poetry is an ongoing disaster. Think of the finest poets of the last century: Stevens and Williams had non-literary careers as a lawyer and doctor, respectively, and Stevens took a 10 year hiatus from poetry in the 20s; Hart Crane shuffled among entry level jobs in unmitigated poverty; Eliot drew his income from Lloyds and Faber and Faber, and wound up with an international reputation as a publisher and intellectual that afforded him an income independent of new publication; much of Pound’s Pisan Cantos (certainly his poetic apogee) were scrawled on toilet paper in an animal cage adjunct to a prison camp. The difficulty of finding the time for poetry that you economically needn’t write, and choosing between the poem and other commitments, would seem to restrain the motive for prolix redundancy and impotent, verveless affectation that we both bemoan in much of academic verse. On the other hand, if one’s “job” is to produce “poetry,” poetry, like all objective labor output, is going to have to be codified by someone, which necessitates strictures of a sort that are external to the rule of the muse. Under this legal dissonance and fundamentally economic pressure, disasters are bound to ensue – even Shakespeare, cash-strapped, gave us The Merry Wives of Windsor to shrug through. How to fix this essentially sociological problem for art is obscure for me – I suppose most poets need to learn to be comfortable with poetry’s place as a difficult distraction from daily duties rather than a quotidian obligation.

But to pick up on the fallout of the academic “systematization” of poetic art, I agree that this imposition of standards essentially alien to the process of accessing beauty itself is, by necessity, the death of art, as I agree that bucking systematization is a sine qua non of great art of any kind. Were beauty a system, the system itself and not its various iterations would be what was beautiful; but as well we know, art is rather the process of continually discovering that which is beyond any system we have yet realized, startling us by presenting reality in a new and vivid light beyond both what is apparent to all of us naturally and what has been proferred by previous artists. This freshness is what affords unique beauty to each individual work of genuine art, in virtue of which such art has any justification to exist.

Someone who can paint is not necessarily an artist; and whether one is “imitating” reality, or another artist, or some familiar compound ghost of other artists, he is a mannerist, and not an artist – a position that Plato rightly criticizes in Republic Book x as being “at a third remove from the Truth.” It is this mannerism – this paint by numbers in slavishly heeding conscious or unconscious rules- that is, I think, the genuine problem of what you call “poetic poetics,” and the void into which artistic efforts lately all too often stumble (a failure that realizes the Platonic critique of art per se).

Self-reference, however, is not necessarily an obstacle to sublime art, and I think it can actually be an important refining fire leading to such art’s production – the self-consciousness of Hamlet’s character as an object of literature, the “painterly art” of Pollock or Rothko, or the “poetry for poets” of a titan like Stevens are indispensable contributions to the world of art, because of, rather than in spite of, their self-consciousness as art.

The artist’s free disclosure of his intentions and methods in his art itself through self-reference forces a discovery process: it can essentially function as the exorcism of old mannerisms (even imitations of a previous poetic self!) and simultaneous issuance of fresh vistas and pronouncements. It’s something like a magician revealing the usual tricks of the trade before an illusion and renouncing them, necessitating a change in tactics on his part that can recover his “art” from kitsch staleness and renew a sense of wonder in the audience indispensable for its success.

Furthermore, as you heartily affirm, poetry, at its best, takes the entirety of reality and our experience of it as its subject, and is itself the fullness of human expression and our mental grapple with the world around us – “the act of the mind finding what will suffice.” Thus, a poem aimed at understanding itself and disclosing this understanding takes a fresh approach to the agon at the center of all-there-is: reality and the imagination, and their various progeny.

These are the moments of truest human existence, moments of freedom from (and power over) the tyrannical and law-limited world that traps our spirits, in a fresh, unpredictable prospect abstracted out of the march of time. These free moments of clarity, of sublimity – of beauty as truth – become merely a fixture of inescapable Necessity in the restraining physical world when allowed to patina under the zeal for codification and systematization. It is only as that which can be trapped in no conceivable systematic labyrinth, however capacious, that art, as envoy to beauty, is our access to the ultimate, the permanent, the deathless and the divine, as the purest expression of our spiritual freedom in a physical world. The art that we can systematize is the art that systematizes us in a systematic world; the art that “teases us out of thought” frees us if only for a moment from the “malice and sudden cry” of a tumultuous world of death and decay. It must surprise us – as sudden as “a thief in the night” on the last day.

Tim’s response to my response:

You, like my brother, very rightly pointed out the positives and benefits of self-reference and even turning back on the art itself (my brother brought up Rilke as a prime example of a poet concerned often with poetry itself, but not falling into the critique I present here). I suppose what I am aiming for is not condemning self-conscious artists so much as attempting to move the discussion from technique – where, quite rightly, every subject matter under the sun is allowed, and the question is How, not What – to a more ethical or socially-aware question. In short, though this word is so challenging in itself, I think the meat of my concerns rest in the Intentions that seem to be swapped out: an intention to use poetry as a mechanism toward, as you comment, self-discovery and world-discovery, (or “world-disclosure” to make this all as Heidegerrian as it probably should be…), an intention that searches and is restless and is ambitious, rather than an intention to Write a Poem.

I very much like your manifesto-like last paragraph, especially art as that which “can be trapped in no conceivable systematic labyrinth.” To bring back Heidegger again, I’ve often gotten a great deal out of a thought of his – and in fact, I can never find the exact quote, so I very well might be making this up, but it seems to fit at least – that where philosophy ends, poetry begins. There is so much to that thought – but what is missed in contemporary poetry, I think, is the most crucial bit: in order To Begin as a poet, then, it follows that one has hemmed his or her way through some philosophy, and thus knows the weight and gravity of staking something or searching something through poetry.

Tim says:

I’ve been thinking a lot about The Economy of Words lately. It’s one of the first, most important, and longest lasting lessons a writer learns when trying to figure out what it means to write, how to do it better, how to take it seriously, and how to make it Artistic. I was writing before I learned this helpful little phrase, and then I learned it and at once writing became challenging, difficult, and rewarding.

And yet, as I think about this heavily ingrained aspect of creative writing pedagogy – at least here, in America – I wonder how strong of an influence it has had in shaping aesthetic, and perhaps even broader actions like reading styles and attentions. I wonder if the emphasis on economizing words has preempted the true beginnings of creative writing, which could alternately be described (based on your disposition as more optimistically-inclined or pessimistically-) as long-suffering or pleasure. 

I’ll give a quick take on “economy of words” first, though I imagine it’s seeped into discursive writing pedagogy by now and is the type of thing you learn about in your freshman composition classes. It’s a pretty intuitive phrase, and basically advises the writer to look for the most economical way to say something, or, the least amount of words that fit the most meaning, description, tone, or feeling into them. It’s a way of writing slowly and intentionally, always looking for the right word, Flaubert’s  le mot juste, the “word with the most juice” (I have a memory that ascribes this translation to Pound, but I can’t seem to find where he said it… is this right?).

Economizing words means hacking away at unnecessary description, removing scenes and even characters or plot points that have no movement or cruciality to them, saying a thing once but never twice (unless for a very good reason), etc etc. It means erasing that second “etc” because the first one has everything the second one already has. It provides the writer with focus and clarity as the writer then hones in on the specifics, follows the threads, and often is influenced towards shorter, more clausal sentences that then must employ active and visceral verbs as well as clear subjects to these verbs. So the writer uses fewer “There was” and “It is” when there are no antecedents, uses fewer “to be” constructions, and creates an entertainingly faster piece.

There are (oops) more benefits here than I am describing, and really, economizing one’s words is a necessary skill to learn at some point. Though I am transitioning to a more critical take, I would never suggest leaving it aside as it is perhaps the single mechanism for a writer that chips away at the writer’s block of words and shapes an elephant out of them (or a poem about an elephant).

But I do believe there is a real flip side here, that being taught to write this way so early on in one’s writing life may have negative side effects on one’s writing and, even more importantly, one’s reading. In fact, as I think about this, I wonder if the entire project of teaching discursive writing, stretching back to our earliest school days, is wrongheadedly aimed at an almost scientific (or perhaps purely scientific) branch of this economy of words.

I was thinking about this just yesterday, wandering through Border’s liquidation sale. I picked up a collection of Schopenhauer’s aphorisms, read a couple, and then cautiously thumbed through a John Searle book, which reminded me of the unfortunate reality of contemporary American philosophy. Besides its utter infatuation with Analytic trends, obsessing over math and science and logic (my loathing of this trend has no bounds, so I’ll stop it here), American philosophers just aren’t good writers. They are so boring, and dry, and serious. Look, compare them yourselves: here’s Searle’s Wikiquote page, and here’s Søren Kierkegaard’s. I was going to give an example, but re-reading it proved rather absurd. It’s not exactly a fair fight…

Regardless, my point… where is my point… My point is that Searle, American/Analytic Philosophy, our early writing education, and even the beginning of creative writing pedagogy – they all share this economizing of words. However, they use “economizing” in a scientific sense, in an almost logical sense of looking for the most meaning in the quickest time-span. It truly is “economical” to read the boring philosophy of our age because you get a lot of thoughts (though rarely a meaningful one) in a focused and direct fashion. We are interested in information-transference, rather than living in the language, and stretching out in it.

Here’s the antidote, and maybe my overall point will become more clear: great big books like Ulysses and The Man Without Qualities and Proust and Kierkegaard and all of these geniuses who let the sentences gallop like horses and twist like twine, and in order to get anything out of it at all you had to pause your thinking in a certain way, accept the guide of the writer, and enjoy it.

I think this is where I’ve been trying to go. By focusing on economizing words, I wonder if there is a relation to not being able to sit down and take pleasure in long, descriptive writing, in reading for reading’s sake, and maybe even in writing for writing’s sake, decadently, exuberantly, with all of the fat and excess of a feast. Perhaps strange words coming from me, whose aesthetic beliefs hinge on Meaningfulness, but my point is not that we end here, but that we begin here. How can we be writers and readers if we cannot plunge into the mystery of language and let it roll us along for pages and pages without looking to see where the chapter ends, without thinking about if there is a new email in the inbox, without anything except the world that has allowed us entry and will give us everything it has as long as we play by its rules?

My brother calls this an inability for readers to suffer, but I think just as much it is forgetting that reading and writing are pleasurable acts, acts that don’t just finish books and look for the next, but shape us unknowingly because our self-consciousness has quit itself as we enter a different consciousness, a reading and writing consciousness.

I suppose I’ll finish with the creative writing application, since that seems most questionable. I’m not necessarily saying that we need poets and novelists to return to some past tradition or style. I’m not even saying, again, that economizing is wrong. But what I think we might have paid in order to get our economy is the freedom of un-restriction, first. I remember some of my first poems, written after a fever of Whitman. One was about clouds, and the other was about waves. I let the words tumble out and they just kept coming. Like a lot of Whitman, my early poems would be served by an editor, but that’s a secondary process. Something that comes later.

What if we started writing just to write, describing whatever we see, putting it all down not like a journal but in the ecstasy of Writing a Poem, or story, or whatever, and put aside all of the aesthetic values we have learned? What if we relegated craftsmanship to the secondary action – the carpenter who has a piece of wood, the sculptor who has a block – and first we build the raw piece of wood, the ugly stone? Maybe others write like this, letting themselves savor Saying, but I don’t suppose I have since those early Whitman poems. Instead, I’ve been so concerned with Value, Meaningfulness, and Art, that I think I’ve lost the first, primal, and core function of Art, which is something like enjoyment or stimulation, isn’t it?

My response:

First, you discuss Heidegger’s “world-disclosure” regarding the intention of poem-making (or, etymologically, “making,” per se), and identify the intention to make meaning as distinct from that to merely “write a poem.” We can, of course, reject as the vanity of the poetaster the intention of writing a middling poem, but I’m not certain we can sever the intention for world-disclosure from the intention to write a world-disclosing poem.

I don’t think a poem can succeed on any level if it doesn’t change the world and thus disclose a new one through aesthetic impact and cognitive power – in other words, there is no such thing as a good poem that is trivial or inessential, regardless of the apparent or so-called “topic” of the work.

As I argued in our dicussion of “mannerism,” there isn’t a sanctified set of locutions that afford a poem artistic status – sure, rules make a poem a sonnet or a pantoum, but they don’t make it ART. And so whether the putative topos is political, religious, ethnic, ars poetica, or anything under the sun, the poem itself succeeds only insofar as it aggrandizes and elevates the consciousness of its genuine audience.

Herein then lies the trouble of setting out to do more than write a poem when you’re writing a poem: the poem itself must be the standard of its own value and of its own truth, rather than reliant upon a formal grid abstracted away from the complex of the poem and our aesthetic and cognitive experience of it. Naturally, for the poem to succeed, it must elevate us, but restricting the terms of this enrichment in philosophic or moralistic nets is myopic – no great art is reducible to something more concise than the world itself.

You mention the relationship and boundaries of philosophy and poetry, and I think that tension is remarkably apposite here. To illustrate the point, it’s critical that we reconsider Plato’s famous and misunderstood indictment of art as simple fabrication in Book X of the Republic. Plato’s schooling was in poetry, and it seems that only his late discipleship with Socrates led him down a different path. As such, we oughtn’t to doubt Plato’s appreciation of artistic beauty – and of course, reading his dialogues it would likely be impossible to draw that conclusion anyway. So whence his suckerpunch that art is mere artifice, and has no place in paradise?

In suggesting art is “at a third remove from the truth,” Plato indicts mimesis specifically. While verisimilitude has always been evidence of an artist’s honed craft, I don’t think any of us would now say that it is only by exact similarity to some aspect of the physical world that art serves its purpose. I think perhaps a better (if imperfect) trope to replace verisimilitude might be “eloquence” – a matter of expressive power in conveying “some thing,” not necessarily something physical. Students are often satisfied with such a resituation of Plato’s point, by which, uncharitably, we hear them accuse the philosopher of straw-man sophistry and a malicious reductionism, incredulous at the fawning yes-men crowding Socrates’ campfire, egregiously sanctioning these dialogic shenanigans. But I think we need to take the climax of the magnum opus of Western civilization’s major philosopher a bit more seriously.

If art WERE fundamentally imitation – of reality, of formal principles governing art’s creation, or even of other artifacts – Book X’s blow would be devastating. Plato’s critique identifies two areas in which art can mortally lose itself – one, in mannerism, as I discussed in my previous comment (in which genuine artistic value is abandoned in favor of fulfilling formal considerations that are meant to endue the work with artistic status), and the other, in gussying up (and thereby obfuscating) a truth beyond the art and which the art merely mocks in fripperies – whether that truth be scientific, philosophic, theological, phenomenal, etc.

There is thus a needle we need to thread in setting out to make art – while we cannot fall into mannerism, we must equally be sure to disclose truth IN art rather than BY MEANS OF art. As you quote Heidegger saying, poetry ventures BEYOND philosophy: it is not a handmaid to it. I think a diagram would help illustrate what I’m trying to say here…

Mathematics & Formal Logic –> Theoretical & Empirical Science (including everything from physics to economics) –> Technical Philosophy and Theology –> Prosaic Art –> Poetry –> Music

The further right you move on the above-pictured spectrum, the more remote and inexpressible the subject, verging on the basal, fundamental, and thus not often clearly-defined and regulated regions of mind and truth. The further left we move on this scale, the more certain, plain, objective, knowable, and explicable/communicable the content under discussion (I suspect this has to do with an increasing abstract, generic, symbolic formalization as we move left on the spectrum, and an increasing experiential, special, deictic concretization as we move right on the spectrum, but I’ll have to think about this in greater depth).

I restate Plato’s critique in an axiomatic corollary based on this spectrum: one must express completely any set of meaning in as far-left a medium as is possible. For instance, taking a perfectly cogent economic argument out of “The Wealth of Nations,” adding no meaningful content to it, but adapting it into a poem, would be a singular disaster – an aesthetic abortion, a waste of artistic firepower, and, most critically, an evasion of the truth rather than an encapsulation, extension, or expression of it. Art so used is indeed removed from the truth, and surely threatens our apprehension of it. My concern regarding prejudicing “moral” or “political” or “religious” art is thus twofold – first, in so doing we are BEGGING for doggerel; and second, the sublime ought to be enough, regardless of its occasion. As you say, poetry is beyond philosophy, and begins where philosophy ENDS – our moral, political, and philosophical concerns are more often matters for a more discursive mode.

In demonstration, think of supremely successful religious verse – what comes first to mind for me is Eliot’s Quartets and the Commedia. These poems are proudly and profoundly vague and ambivalent on the adamant dogmatic lines of their mother faith(s): you might even argue that the Commedia isn’t even a Catholic poem! Paradise Lost is more pagan than Christian in its stance!

We need to be sure that we’re ascending beyond mere reason, partisanship, observation, facts, and discourse when we make our poems – the muse deserves so much more: a universal and preternatural perspective that gathers meaning to itself inductively and synthetically (etymologically a “putting together”) rather than analytically (etymologically a “chopping-up”) eviscerating a choice and whole vista opened on truth. Our art must be fully felt experiences of real paths of truth, fresh, not pre-fabricated, and never mere formal and conceptual discussions or opinions garlanded with happy verse.

Per the above, no great art is reducible to something more concise than the work itself, nor may it be otherwise composed to the same effect. This axiom is at once a corollary to Plato’s point en-spectrumed, and a restatement of the economizing principle for language. I think we must find it infallible in both discussions.

Consider booming and blowing tracts of undomesticated verse – what stands more sprawling in our rogueish American memories than “Song of Myself”? And yet, however prolix and inebriate we find Whitman in his shameless verbal onanism, can we strike or alter a word of this great chant, or scratch lines from the “Lilacs” elegy, without eliminating instead of clarifying meaning or beauty? And so as with Kierkegaard or Proust, we cannot but deem Walt economical, at least by the aforementioned restatement of the economizing principle.

Similarly, we are within our rights to tell Searle to shut the hell up already. In less space, he is far more rambling than Kierkegaard, because what matters is EFFICIENCY, which is a quotient – the ratio of meaning to text. Kierkegaard explodes meanings, gets at load-bearing joints in the universe and our cognition of it, and squats there to apply a full-nelson – imbuing these critical points with a gravity that presses them into singularities that have gathered to themselves the meaning of the ages and which disclose this heavy load only over the course of decades and lifetimes of gravidity. Searle’s sparse meaning (most of his articles are adequately summarized in a paragraph) rather prove his dis-economy of words.

(Then again, it’s not exactly fair to indict Searle on these grounds, who was never trying to create literature. We might commend him for realizing which section of the grid he belongs to, since, in writing such as Searle’s, the goal is to limit, cut up, distribute, and pin down meaning – to AVOID focus on the text – just like legal writing or writing an instruction manual; in such writing, as the writing teaching how to diffuse a bomb, for instance, verbal efficiency is necessarily of a very different kind, since the goal is really to MINIMIZE meaning rather than to MAXIMIZE it.)

Now meaning in poems is not always merely conceptual – it verges on music toward its “right-most” boundary, of course. And so certain felicities of sound that may not be critical to sense ought not to be stricken on that account. And let us not forget the use of economy in breaking down familiar and typical linguistic locutions often to fresh and beautiful results.

In validity, then, this principle is not an imprecation to reduce word use per se, but rather a prohibition against oblique restatement or bungling verbosity – “one should not use words, sounds, images, or concepts that do not add to the aesthetic value of a piece” – and how could we possibly argue against such a tautological truth? If a word, or phrase, or image or character doesn’t add to a work of art, it at the least distracts us from its semantic nodes and thus muddies and diminishes it.

Ultimately, there are different poems that do different things, and just about as many poets as there are poems: the poet of “Sunday Morning” has never met the man who wrote “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” (perhaps due to their keeping different hours). Some poets and poems begin in negation and absence, and economy is an ineliminable means of lifting them out of the void and into meaning; other poems begin with an unencapsulable and incomprehensible full experience that cannot possibly replicate itself in a vessel as restrictive as all of human experience. To return to “Song of Myself,” we find “creeds and schools in abeyance” at the very outset – we must let the poem come as it may, free of critical restrictions that are not trivially true. But the economizing principle is inarguable.

This eradication of grids and philosophies in search of poetry is simply a restatement of our spectrum presented earlier, a corollary to the rule against rules we agreed about in my last post, and a unison chant with Heidegger. Ultimately, rules beyond tautology can apply only to a subset of all possible poems, given that art is not a formal system, but that which escapes formality and lives in special, untamed personhood. To formalize art is to chain our souls within the deterministic labyrinths of physical reality, which the both of us know we are in truth unlimited by and more capacious than. What this means though is that for every bad poem from which a principle can be abstracted concerning the cause of its failure – e.g., “this poem is wordy” or, “its complete adherence to a definite rhyme scheme and meter robs the poem of freshness”- we will find another poem that shares these same attributes and is yet a permanent achievement.

Art that follows the rules is merely an instance of a previously-composed piece – and so it is only the art that creates space for itself outside the shadow of previous art and the ambit of rude nature that ever truly matters. Again, if we can formalize it or explain it beyond itself more succinctly, we have proved a work irrelevant. The pattern beyond it, the scheme it merely mimics and reiterates, is, like natural law poised behind the maya of experience and the confusion of colliding atoms, the TRUE object of pursuit and target for reverence, rather than its mere instances and imitations.

Tim’s response to my response:

Hey Peter–

I agree with, I think, most everything you’ve said here, and certainly the general tenor of your post. I have been aiming more specifically at pedagogy and training – how one learns to write poetry, how one starts out and continues, where the spring of interest and motivation comes from.

My earlier statement was an attempt to differentiate poetry that comes from the authentic artistic impulse versus the workshop-specific techne of a young poet still learning, a differentiation I found necessary as the latter techne is in many ways becoming an end-in-itself in the contemporary poetic landscape.

This one is aiming for something deeper, and I haven’t quite put it all together yet. I agree completely that the directive to economize words is akin to the irreducibility of a poem, and you claim Whitman’s verbosity as an example of economy without economy, so to say. And I agree, but pedagogically speaking, very few of us start out as Whitman’s (Whitmen?) or Pound’s or whoever. And oftentimes we learn through two very different paths (at least, I experienced two, though I imagine others are out there): imitation, and formalism. The former dives into a sense of joy, I think, and appreciation, and lets it flood out onto the paper in whatever messy ecstasy the young writer has encircled, and the latter tends to take on a mantle of apprenticeship – perhaps too early on, or so I am trying to argue.

My initial work, and my present work, all need heavy edits and revisions. The pieces simply aren’t irreducible to themselves yet, and I need principles like the economy of words and other such maxims. But I find myself emptying out, drained of everything full and fleshy and real, when I focus too much on these maxims and proto-rules and allow that very necessary determined focus outweigh a consistent enjoyment in words and reading and writing. And I’ve found that the more I allow myself to write without care of readers, to read without flipping to see when the chapter ends, to get lost in these sorts of activities, the better my writing tends to become.

As for poetry in general, as you are talking about it, I suppose the one… potential disagreement I have is the mystifying of poetry your chart seems to indicate, as well as “the sublime ought to be enough.” I have been working a lot with this mystification issue, where as you interpret the Heidegger quote philosophy ENDS, and then poetry Begins, whereas I see it as philosophy getting to a point where Poetry takes off in a progression sort of way. The best poets I know have always been the best thinkers, and there is something to that. Moreover, poetry has often seemed to stake out a very clear “philosophical,” or whatever you would like to call it, position on truth, stretching back to Greek poetry and Hebrew poetry. I wrote on Plato a few weeks ago, and it seemed to me his most looming concerns with poetry involved its ability to convince one of something, to persuade or manipulate. Similarly, Hebrew poetry was just steeped in theodicy and theology, and Job is as brilliant philosophically as it is poetically.

I agree completely that poetry is a Different thing, is no handmaiden to philosophy, etc etc. A poem cannot be restated as a philosophy, yes, and neither vice-versa. But the spectrum you set up also frees to poet, I think, from metaphysical, ethical, whatever responsibility. I think a poem is made of three things, always already: 1) its conceptual level, 2) its sensual level, and 3) its mystical, or spiritual, or playful level. The first is the sense of the thing, the philosophy or science or clear thinking that forces the poem into existence, like biology for Marianne Moore, and the second is the sound and image and all of that – the Real World of the poem, the part we enter into – and the last is akin to what Kant calls “purposiveness,” a sort of “irresolvability” where all of 1 and all of 2 never end up just Finishing any various interpretation. It is the “so much depends / upon” of WCW’s “Red Wheelbarrow,” the slingshot into Great Art where not everything can be logicked out.

This has become a longer note than intended… I’ve written a lot about poetry specifically and abstractly before, but haven’t really laid out my thoughts on this issue before. Perhaps I should – and apologies if I have misstated or misread pieces of your post or it in its entirety. These are wonderfully fun conversations.

[clamatoes]

Who is Wallace Stevens? Read “A Primitive Like an Orb”

“A Primitive Like an Orb” is, to my mind, the most representative of Wallace Stevens’ poems. Ubiquitous Stevensian features include...

- Ars poetica - Self-conscious fixation of the poem making it a sort of möbius speech, always diverging merely to converge back upon itself - Whitman's repetitions and internal accusatives dragging the mind like licking surf into oceanic deeps of man's meaning & origins, almost the process of mantras by the Ganges - The whimsy of coinage and blithe Emersonian "wildness" and freedom of command, at least as rendered by a Taft republican who ran the legal department of an insurance company (cf, eg, "oaten cake"). This spunk of speech, in its more Bach gigue-like, herky-jerky incarnations - what we find, for instance, in "The Comedian as the Letter C" - betokens a wry, acerbic, and grotesque self-parody, intentionally overwrought and disgusted with the poet's instinct for overwriting, but which here carries us unironically into the fullness of the poet's ecstasy even full-knowing of the transience of this ecstasy - A passion for exactness that manifests ironically in vociferous proliferations of near-hits rejected apophatically but successively more and more prized, like jewels in the crown which is someday to be placed upon the head of some unutterable precise "THIS": a "THIS" which will give way immediately upon its seizure to yet another "THIS" just off in the distance, and become itself yet another jewel in the crown for that next "THIS" - The ceaseless luxurious music buoying what is really a philosophical spiraling drill as it screws into strongholds of "The Truth" with the glee of a Poundian god.

But the poem is Stevens at his most Stevens especially in stance and theme. It lays out his essential Neo-Keatsian metaphysics of beauty as truth, which is cognate with Pound's "periplum" whom Stevens (almost too) steadfastly refused to read (and vice versa). This "periplum" is Pound's hermeneutic of knowledge as irreducible and imposible to abstract from an endless heuristic process of discovery, each first-order instance "sailed to" as a sort of "fact-harbor" adumbrating a second-order category or principle, but each second-order category in turn yielding to multiplicity and a never-ending voyage no less than the first-order instances: never ultimate, never final, because the final Truth is this very process of discovery itself, a process of Platonic becoming as opposed to Platonic essence or being ("nothing is final" Stevens has Whitman chant with his beard of fire and staff of flame walking along a red shore, in another poem: "no man shall see the end"). There are in fact ideas, the seen forms of Plato are no doubt real, says Stevens, and yet the very nature of reality is a give-and-take dialectic between self and world and other selves and ideas, which can never be described in a metaphor of stasis: nothing is anything, even itself, except in its participation, its interchange, its communion, with everything else. The static forms of Plato are the death of the intellectual voyager and of the idea to which she sails, life is ceaseless change, an endless circuit even for the mind, which discovers truth only in performing the very interminable process of discovering truth.

In "A Primitive Like an Orb," this stance is epitomized by Stanzas IV and XII, which assimilate poets faithful to their unique perspectives to the faithful of a monotheistic religion with a jealous divinity, and to lovers faithful to a single beloved jealous against other loves:

“One poem proves another and the whole, For the clairvoyant men that need no proof: The lover, the believer and the poet. Their words are chosen out of their desire, The joy of language, when it is themselves. With these they celebrate the central poem, The fulfillment of fulfillments, in opulent, Last terms, the largest, bulging still with more,” 

.......

“That’s it. The lover writes, the believer hears, The poet mumbles and the painter sees, Each one, his fated eccentricity, As a part, but part, but tenacious particle, Of the skeleton of the ether, the total Of letters, prophecies, perceptions, clods Of color, the giant of nothingness, each one And the giant ever changing, living in change.”

One moment of rapture, an analog of a Platonic form, suggests innumerable other but equal grades up Parnassus (in that this e.g., lover's, or religion’s, or poem’s beauty was obviously philosophically accidental to what was reached), and clarifies beyond skeptic scrutiny the sublime terrors of the peak, which lies beyond the particularity of any given path taken to reach it. Stevens’ metaphysics is then a meta-Platonism, in which even the sun-like form of “The Good” is merely one face of the true ultimate meta-Good (the “fulfillment of fulfillments,” or meta-fulfillment, of the “central poem,” as Stevens puts it), which cannot be arrived at except in the never arriving anywhere, the never ceasing from journey to, and then beyond, every “The Good” in an infinite circuit (as Stevens says elsewhere, in the crucial "Somnambulisma," "resembling a thin bird,/ That thinks of settling, yet never settles, on a nest"). Such a moment of pan-directioned grandeur, this meta-Good, is arrived at, however, only in the monomaniac tunnels of desire, which ironically, in their one-dimensional, linear verve reveal the tangled labyrinth of thought that evidences if not construes the stereo-solid, every-singular real. The whole is ever and always known in the curriculum of a part, all the parts of which, together, reflect each other, and in series (though perhaps not in parallel), make up the great poem of abstraction beyond any power to abstract: known only in the concrete act of following the course of one true love to its completion, madly forsaking all other paths to the summit until it is achieved.

Here’s the poem’s full text...

“A Primitive Like an Orb”

I

The essential poem at the center  of things, The arias that spiritual fiddlings make, Have gorged the cast-iron of our lives with good And the cast-iron of our works. But it is, dear sirs, A difficult apperception, this gorging good, Fetched by such slick-eyed nymphs, this essential gold, This fortune’s finding, disposed and re-disposed By such slight genii in such pale air.

II

We do not prove the existence of the poem. It is something seen and known in lesser poems. It is the huge, high harmony that sounds A little and a little, suddenly, By means of a separate sense. It is and it Is not and, therefore, is. In the instant of speech, The breadth of an accelerando moves, Captives the being, widens--and was there.

III

What milk there is in such captivity, What wheaten bread and oaten cake and kind, Green guests and table in the woods and songs At heart, within an instant’s motion, within A space grown wide, the inevitable blue Of secluded thunder, an illusion, as it was, Oh as, always too heavy for the sense To seize, the obscurest as, the distant was...

IV

One poem proves another and the whole, For the clairvoyant men that need no proof: The lover, the believer and the poet, Their words are chosen out of their desire, The joy of language, when it is themselves. With these they celebrate the central poem, The fulfillment of fulfillments, in opulent, Last terms, the largest, bulging still with more,

 V

Until the used-to earth and sky, and the tree And cloud, the used-to tree and used-to cloud, Lose the old uses that they made of them, And they: these men, and earth and sky, inform Each other by sharp informations, sharp, Free knowledges, secreted until then, Breaches of that which held them fast. It is As if the central poem became the world,

 VI

And the world the central poem, each one the mate Of the other, as if summer was a spouse, Espoused each morning, each long afternoon, And the mate of summer: her mirror and her look, Her only place and person, a self of her That speaks, denouncing separate selves, both one. The essential poem begets the others. The light Of it is not a light apart, up-hill.

 VII

The central poem is the poem of the whole, The poem of the composition of the whole, The composition of blue sea and of green, Of blue light and of green, as lesser poems, And the miraculous multiplex of lesser poems, Not merely into a whole, but a poem of The whole, the essential compact of the parts, The roundness that pulls tight the final ring

 VIII

And that which in an altitude would soar, A vis, a principle or, it may be, The meditation of a principle, Or else an inherent order active to be Itself, a nature to its natives all Beneficence, a repose, utmost repose, The muscles of a magnet aptly felt, A giant, on the horizon, glistening,

 IX

An in bright excellence adorned, crested With every prodigal, familiar fire, And unfamiliar escapades: whirroos And scintillant sizzlings such as children like, Vested in the serious folds of majesty, Moving around and behind, a following, A source of trumpeting seraphs in the eye, A source of pleasant outbursts on the ear.

 X

It is a giant, always, that is evolved, To be in scale, unless virtue cuts him, snips Both size and solitude or thinks it does, As in a signed photograph on a mantelpiece. But the virtuoso never leaves his shape, Still on the horizon elongates his cuts, And still angelic and still plenteous, Imposes power by the power of his form.

 XI

Here, then, is an abstraction given head, A giant on the horizon, given arms, A massive body and long legs, stretched out, A definition with an illustration, not Too exactly labeled, a large among the smalls Of it, a close, parental magnitude, At the center of the horizon, concentrum, grave And prodigious person, patron of origins. 

XII

That's it. The lover writes, the believer hears, The poet mumbles and the painter sees, Each one, his fated eccentricity, As a part, but part, but tenacious particle, Of the skeleton of the ether, the total Of letters, prophecies, perceptions, clods Of color, the giant of nothingness, each one And the giant ever changing, living in change.

[clamatoes]

What is a sentence or fragment of prose or poetry that lately has been ringing in your mind (this is jad btw)

jad my dude, some Whitman lately rings...“with the holders holding my hand nearing the call of the bird, comrades mine and I in the midst and their memory ever to keep, for the dead I loved so well, for the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands and this for his dear sake, lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul there in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim”

[clamatoes]

The ‘bright’ first triumphs of Hart Crane & Wallace Stevens

We will consider here Hart Crane's "Voyages" and Wallace Stevens' "Sunday Morning," two early modernist masterpieces written within a decade of each other, and at the very beginnings of the mature poetic careers or "major phases" of their respective poets. 

To get a sense of how each poet is commanding his materials at this formative moment in his career, we will focus on the use of the word “bright” in these poems - a word both poets use in their first stanzas, and conspicuously repeat in crucial developmental moments.

(The full text of "Voyages" can be found here:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem-alone/172022

The full text of "Sunday Morning" can be found here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/2464

...though the relevant sections are quoted in full in this article).

Crane’s work is ostensibly a love poem where Stevens’ is a muse poem, Crane being ever uncomfortable admitting a muse and Stevens awkward as always in the realm of the erotic. Where Crane gives us poetry as an image and expression of the love impulse, Stevens parries with love as an image and expression of the poetic impulse. And yet this surface inversion finds both poets approaching the same common topos but from different directions, pitching battle with each other for control of these holy precincts.

Their battlefield is death, over which the poets struggle against each other for the right to erect a great transfiguring trophy: a vision of death as erotic fulfillment, their poems working to civilize thanatos like Aeschylus makes citizens and “goodly spirits” (”Eumenides”) of the avenging Furies.

Stevens gives us the eternally echoing "death is the mother of beauty," where Crane observes that "nothing turns but dead sands flashing" - i.e., there is no poet (author of "turns" or "tropes") but death, who comes to claim all beauty as her own. If death is mother, Crane seems to reply, in this seizure she is surely Medea, and yet in spite of itself death is conquered by death itself, freeing the beautiful Christologically from its entrapment within the accidents of the physical world. And thus death, undoing herself, births beauty it into a sort of Platonic essence attainable even here and now by introspection and insight, and crucially, by the midwife of poetic prophecy of which Crane is principal.

While death serially begets beauty into the physical world for Stevens, beauty is born out of death to transcend the merely physical for Crane, who argues that Stevens' muse in "Sunday Morning" has no choice but to "give her bounty to the dead": the very thing Stevens bids her refuse. In this sense, where Stevens establishes a Heraclitian 1 “A->B->A” figure of life fructified by death and only thence begetting life’s next iteration, Crane gives us the essentially Christian “A->B->A’ (A-prime),” where the life beyond and begotten of death and its bastards, past and future, is not the life that preceded it, but a transcendence of it - transformed by death’s translation (which breaks the spell of its Nietzschean repetition), the fundamental trope Crane places in the arsenal of the mantic poet. 2 Ultimately, as we’ll see, in verse as in all reality, Stevens gives us Heraclitian duality where Crane proposes a gnostic trinity.

Someday, we'll come back to examine the full intertextuality of these two poems and their poets who, for my money, are the best in their language and century (although I suppose Eliot stubbornly obtrudes...what an asshole). But here we will primarily examine the way the two poets handle their materials. And, at this point in their respective careers, the man who died the better poet (though, to be fair, he died more than forty years older) was outpaced by his junior.

Stevens was thirty-six during most of his composition of "Sunday Morning,” while Crane was in his early twenties while writing "Voyages.” At this point Crane certainly was closer to realizing his own central, entirely personal style than Stevens was (although both poems are so eminent as almost totally to define that style for each poet in the popular mind). Even more impressively, Crane has greater control over his materials at this point in his career than Stevens does. That Crane could be thought the poet writing with more "control" at any point in their respective developments might surprise us, given Crane's seeming propensity for prolix verbosity toward stirring up an aural frenzy that echoes the apocalyptic vortex of his imagery. But upon very close reading, Hart, even in all his flurries of multiword adjectives that exuberate like waves over his gunwale in the Caribbean, turns out to be a finer artisan and tactician than sober, fatherly Wally, the insurance executive.

To get a sense of their relative powers at the time of composing these poems, let's look at how the two handle an adjective they both use multiple times in their respective poems, and even repeat in close succession: “bright”. As we'll see Crane's choice and deployment of “bright” is less accidental, more inevitable, let's say, than Stevens'. 

For Crane, "bright” always increases the semantic complexity of a lustrous crux (bringing something new and ineliminable to the image), while also landing on the ear as inevitable to the pace and meter. Stevens mostly fails to do the first of these, appearing to give in to the Whitmanian "hum” of “his valvéd voice," surrendering to the ecstasy of the meter in an enthusiasm that Crane shares but masters, channels.3

Crane died at just thirty-two, still close to four years younger than Stevens was when he composed what was probably his first permanent achievement in "Sunday Morning." One can only wonder at the eternal art we lost when Crane fulfilled his own prophecy in "Voyages” by drowning in the Caribbean, having lived not even half the "threescore years and ten" that Dante (with the Old Testament) prescribes a man.

....................................................................................................

Let's turn now to the two occurrences of "bright" in Stevens' "Sunday Morning," quoted as one big excerpt, as they occur in close proximity, much like four of the five instances of the word in "Voyages"; and right at the beginning of the poem, just like the remaining instance in Crane's poem:

I Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice. She dreams a little, and she feels the dark Encroachment of that old catastrophe, As a calm darkens among water-lights. The pungent oranges and [BRIGHT], green wings Seem things in some procession of the dead, Winding across wide water, without sound. The day is like wide water, without sound, Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet Over the seas, to silent Palestine, Dominion of the blood and sepulchre. II What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams? Shall she not find in comforts of the sun, In pungent fruit and [BRIGHT], green wings, or else In any balm or beauty of the earth, Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven? Why should she give her bounty to the dead?

"Bright, green wings" certainly has savor - Stevens with his impeccable ear proudly repeats it in the next stanza - but what does "bright" bring to the table here other than its stressed monosyllable to the three in a row that slow the stanza to a hypnotic vortex like the glare of Lord’s day noon? Sonically, they interrupt exquisitely - perhaps like a cockatoo spreading its pinions for flight solemnizes, and yet also lightens with a lofty liberty the dreamy, thick, jazzy rhythms of a lazy Sunday patio breakfast, dissipating not only the "holy hush of ancient sacrifice," but also the ennui and existential dread that replaced it in the post- Christian West. Nevertheless, semantically, "bright" brings nothing to the image here that the "green wings," "sunny chair," and "oranges" haven't already established.4

The power of "green freedom" makes the weakness of "bright, green" especially clear. Green is a startling departure from the white one might expect from the plumage of an inconized cockatoo, the white of Emily Dickinson's "Eternity" which we might attribute to the transcendental dreams of Stevens' muse here on the patio, the transcendental aspirations of Christianity to accede to permanence beyond the change, imperfection, death, decay, and complicate sensual obscenity of the physical world. This white is proper to mythology, and the liminal realm of the unconscious and paradigmatic, not the simple natural world (consider the ghastly other-worldliness of "the whiteness of the whale" so viscerally rendered by Melville). Pure white is incredibly rare in nature, always mottled by duns and yellows in animals and thus primarily an abstraction away from the real, much like God and His Heaven to the neo-pagan Stevens. 

Wings have been a symbol of this sort of transcendence Stevens abominates at least since the time of the pharaohs - they can translate messengers like biblical angels, the Olympian Hermes or Norse Valkyries beyond the visible into the world of the dead and the precincts of the divine, just as they carry birds over water and through sky.5

But the cockatoo on the rug clearly has its wings clipped, which alone has allowed it to be freed from its cage, just as renouncing the mythic wings of transcendental religion allows the muse her freedom from church as she lounges on a Sunday morning. In their rejection, her relinquished wings free her from the broader cage of an unquenchable yearning for permanence and perfection that seems to result always in a renunciation of the earth, which confinement in a stuffy church on a beautiful Sunday morning epitomizes. This yearning borne in the synecdoche of wings, here forfeit, forms the very core of transcendental religion and its obvious heirs: High Romantic, and especially Transcendentalist, poetry, and modern science - both of which we see this pre-Raphaelite incarnation of Stevens trying half-earnestly to exorcise.6

The bird’s freedom is "green” rather than white, a color of earth, of which Stevens later says "there is not...any old chimera of the grave...that has endured/ As April's green endures." Green of course never endures - "nature's first green is gold" Frost tells us, and "nothing gold can stay." But the green of April is the green of spring, of an endless cycle of birth, growth, decay, and death, the messy Heraclitian flux nullifying Platonic pretensions of eternity, as Stevens would have it.7

Its greenness is also its naivete, its innocence that stands in as stark a contrast with the notion of white innocence as green eternity does with white eternity. This green freedom is new, untested, astonishing, rather than hard-won, forgiven, or absolved; in a sense it is not innocent because it does not acknowledge the possibility of guilt; and it must adolesce organically through the body of the poem rather than avoid the adulteration of a life lived in the world.

Finally, is this "cockatoo upon a rug" possibly not a living bird at all, but rather an image of one, woven into a sort of tapestry? We might suggest this as an alternate reading, as it powerfully renders the sumptuous cloth a sort of neo-pagan icon as sensuously luxurious as it is symbolic, abased to the common floor of a patio, green as the weeds poking through tiles, in contrast to its white-angelic Christian counterparts sanctified and removed from us and our human condition by the height of a dais or altar.

"Green freedom" is a world of meaning that makes the magnitude of Stevens' power in his early "Sunday Morning" apparent. "Bright, green" is a mere cadence which, though aurally beautiful and arresting in its rhythmic context, demonstrates by its semantic vacuity the momentary lapses of a poet still finding his stride. 

Let's take a look then at the ways Crane deploys "bright" in his poem, the first occurrence of which he locates right at the beginning just as Stevens does:

Above the fresh ruffles of the surf [BRIGHT] striped urchins flay each other with sand. They have contrived a conquest for shell shucks, And their fingers crumble fragments of baked weed Gaily digging and scattering. ..................................................

The semantic complexity of "urchins" which "bright" here modifies is in stark contrast to the point-blank "cockatoo" of "Sunday Morning" (although, to be fair, Stevens was clearly there pursuing a very shocking, blunt, immediate image where Crane wishes to weave a bit at this particular juncture - weave being, as we'll see, an operative metaphor). This density of meaning affords the equal complexity of "bright" here in its friskiness, joy, and quickness of motile intelligence of children during a day at the beach.

Perhaps bright doesn't merely modify "urchins," but "striped" - and bright stripes of clothing are perhaps rather the bright stripes of sunburns, or the marks left by their mutual flaying with sand, or those stripes belonging to the more literal "urchins" of the sea whose brightness betoken danger so often in nature (“the bottom of the sea is cruel” Crane goes on to tell us just two stanzas later), a violence that "bright" will evoke in all five of its occurrences in "Voyages."

In this density we see these "urchins" as children who are fish out of water, so to speak - things temporarily but not finally rejected by the jaws of the surf and that ultimately belong to them (just as "street urchins" are orphans displaced from their home and origins). The lustrous and beautiful, joyous and fun, and deathly foreboding that characterize the imagery of the whole first section of Crane's poem are all packed into just three words in the second line (which is then vitally both expanded and refined by the immediately subsequent "flay" as well).

While we're at it, urchins are carding cylinders as well, tools upon which, between which, mutually, the fabric of a tapestry is woven, much like this poem's fabric and the waves of the swallowing sea will be woven between the two lovers whom these urchins symbolize (the two thus being assimilated to each other and succeeding their duality into trinity, which is a trope worked constantly through the poem, and that we'll examine in detail later on).

The sonic and prosodic effect of "bright" here is no less successful than in Stevens' "Sunday Morning," and yet here it enriches the imagery exponentially, a feat Stevens fails to achieve with the word.

Shall they not stem and close in our own steps [BRIGHT] staves of flowers and quills today as I Must first be lost in fatal tides to tell? In signature of the incarnate word The harbor shoulders to resign in mingling Mutual blood, transpiring as foreknown And widening noon within your breast for gathering All [BRIGHT] insinuations that my years have caught For islands where must lead inviolably Blue latitudes and levels of your eyes,— ..................................................

Crane's "Bright staves...and quills" are not only glinting under the Caribbean sun, they are, in their brightness (as opposed to say, murkiness), an Apollonian, lucid fixation (into words and communicable concepts) of Dionysian, vague, animal emotion: a fixation very much like a staff or quill pinning something in place. Staves of the prophet become staves of the composer, and both bring the love Crane feels into effable existence by the metonymy of the quill, i.e., the writing pen. Quills work these "staves of flowers" into words, but staves and quills are themselves violent, sharp shafts like Apollo's arrows. And like the "far-darter" Apollo, they pierce from distance, even with distance, their blinding clarity forged as they are ripped out of Crane's chest and through his mouth into a world no longer completely his own, illuminated and claimed by the sun (a deeply Stevensian theme actually, cf. “it is the sun that shares our works” in “The Man with the Blue Guitar”). They are "bright" intellectually too (thoughtful, brilliant), these flowers and quills, and they pierce us like a surgeon's skill (a word that, at its root, implies incision). Finally, they are born of the poet's loss in "fatal tides," begotten only of death as their primary poet or "maker" - a theme developed in later sections. 

The repetition of “bright” here leads us to connect “bright staves” with “bright insinuations” in the next stanza. This is a typical Cranian translation, translating the repetition of Heraclitian or Nietzschean death (as evoked in the literal repetition of words) into a Christological crossing, conversion, or translation beyond death and repetition - this time translating staff into snake. What are these “bright insinuations”? Insinuations are hints - slight, almost imperceptible tunnelings-into and penetrations of meaning into the mind like a snake through crags; but also, etymologically, they are “turns,” the very substance of poetry: they are the bright flowers produced by the “bright staves” and “quills” of Crane’s craft, and in their subtle subterfuge and snakely secretion, they confound the Apollonian brightness attributed to the staves and quills only to share their violence. The implications given his years in the world (which are subtle “insinuations,” prophetic suggestions, Eliot’s “hints followed by guesses”), the yearnings for transcendence beyond death and limitation and the reductionism of a physicalist age become themselves snakes fatefully born of and destined to kill “ananke,” the serpent deity of necessity and ancient synecdoche of Heraclitian death, as it wriggles into Crane’s heart to colonize it. This a trope of death conquered by death, with the snakely turns of Crane’s verse outflanking those of the great poet death, stalking and consuming ananke itself on its own terms.

What do these “bright insinuations” insinuate exactly, pointing beyond and through the simple duality of repetition to some hidden trinity? What is the implication of the dark realizations of death and limitation which beget immediately those yearnings for transcendence beyond death and limitation, yearnings that are translated, illuminated into Crane’s verse? As Crane tells his lover, they point to the "islands” co-indicated by his lover’s eyes8 - an eternity beyond the sea, beyond death, beyond the merely physical which is constantly being done and undone by death in Heraclitian flux - into a redeemed life which Crane consolidates and develops in further sections into the unitary “Belle Isle, white echo of the oar!" ("echo" (that is, answer and hidden third) given to the dual, dichotomous, and linear "oar" (that is, "or," as we shall see)).

“Bind us in time, O seasons clear, and awe” and “sleep, death, desire,/ Close round one instant in one floating flower” Crane intones near the end of section II. With his characteristic translation Crane revisits this previous closure to perfection, this closure to perfect essentiality, and transforms it into a growth, an opening, a life beyond this now salvific, essentializing death.

The “one floating flower,” beautiful in the focus of its death, is now multiplied into shoots of new blooms perabundant and boundless in ambition (“bright staves of flowers and quills today”), chiasmically undoing or temporally reversing the swallowing to singularity of Crane-as-Moses’ staff-snake of the multifarious staff-snakes of the magicians, as well as the literal and metaphorical turning of Crane’s rigid staff into a snake, the serpent ananke it assimilated itself to now being straightened into the staff of prophecy which swallowed it; all as prelude to this new blossoming of manifold “staves of flowers” out of this singularity.

Crane thus shows us this salvation only by means of a Christological trope of translation crucial (so to speak) to much of his verse - the conquering of death by death. And in this case, as often for Crane, this ironic assertion - i.e., the assertion that A and also that not-A, and in fact, A only through its negation in not-A - finds a pivot point in the ambiguous semantics of his diction. “Stem,” in a floral context, surely implies growth and advance, while in its more common verbal aspect it means to “stop up” or “dam.” “Staves” of course brings us “staving off” to present exactly the same ironic dictionally-ambiguous ratio in the following line, when juxtaposed with the primary and nominative floral sense of “staves of flowers”. As we zoom out from the single word to the the whole line here, we see Crane extend this Christological conceit through his characteristic syntactic licentiousness, which yields multiple and sometimes contradictory readings. Consider...

1. “Shall they not stem, and close, in our own steps?” 2. “Shall they not stem and close-in our own steps?” 3. “Shall they not stem and close, in our own steps? ”

These steps translate the poet across the surface of the impassable sea, as we saw Stevens’ muse’s “dreaming feet” proceed in the first stanza of “Sunday Morning” in a trope of perfect Christology: an icon of baptism. Baptism itself is a ritual of conquering death by death, after the example of Moses with his mantic staff- snake parting the Red Sea to lead Israel out of its decrepit life of bondage to the serpent of Eden in Egypt, and into a redeemed life in thrall to the staff of Yahweh’s prophets in Canaan. By means of the above three central alternate readings (a trinity of readings if you will) of his pivotal line, Crane asks of these steps over the sea...

1. Will Crane fail (as Eliot’s “fisher king,” who haunted all of Crane’s verse after the publication of “The Waste Land”) to bring a new fertility, by means of the stepping “feet” of his poetic meter, to these flowers cast dead into “fatal tides” back in section II?  2. Will this boundless efflorescence of Crane’s “endlessly elaborating poem” (cf. Stevens’ “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”), his too-fruitful fertility, squander the ultimacy of “one instant in one floating flower” which came at the price of “the vortex of our grave” back in section II? Will his Orphic generation help him merely to evade the death by which alone he might find Life, his steps fixed and “closed-in” fruitlessly by Whitman's “my gab and my loitering”? 3. Or will the dual and self-sufficient sex organs of these “flowers,” alternating as a walker’s feet in steps, stem and close (phallus into vagina), in a temporal process enacted during “one instant” by Crane’s apiary versification, troping on death, turning over the sea, keeping step, “the tally of my soul” as Whitman did “to the song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird,/ And the tallying chant, the echo arous’d in my soul.”9 Crane’s Whitmanian tally of his steps count here the “counted smile of hours and days” that begins section IV, measure by measure of his verse here measuring out its atomic, holistic truth: counting the total curriculum of the sea of death even beyond the horizon to be the arc not of a self-annihilating Heraclitian circle, but a smile. The tail of the ouroboros ananke is finally removed from its insatiable maw. Life is redeemed from recurrent death by the very witness and register within the poet of all-there-is, by the tally of Crane’s counting soul.

This antiphonal, bipedal progress (a synecdoche of the cycle of death and birth) is no mere ping-pong alternation, though it appears so on the binary grid of the one-dimensional line between caller and responder; just as a spiral staircase seems a fruitless circle when its climber is seen only in abstract from high above rather than from the dasein vantage of the climber himself; just as Christ crossing the sea of death by harrowing hell on Holy Saturday appeared to merely linger in his grave. A Hegelian-synthetic communion begetting the trinitarian dimension known to the actual ascender of the spiral stair, forged by the dualistic interchange of the tally, the engagement, give and take, role-alternation of speaker and listener and artist and artwork, male and female floral organs (with Tiresian androgyny), this total alternation which the dichotomous semantic ambiguity of “to tell” in “as I must first be lost in fatal tides to tell” encapsulates perfectly - “to tell” as in to determine; “to tell” as in to declare - a temporal antiphonal progression from left to right foot fused in the closure of “one instant” into a valence of simultaneous existence, making the vision of prophecy the very act of the speaking of prophecy, the seer Crane’s verse no longer awaiting inspiration and liable to veer from it, but enacting that inspiration in its very pronouncement.

Just as in Christ God became man that man might become God, Crane’s translational Christology elevates the poet into the godhood of the divine muse made flesh and thus made bridge in his lover, and prophetic verse itself is elevated into the future vision it bespeaks. This elevation is transport through the trinitarian dimension, translated from the Heraclitian duality of the antiphon and the bipedal temporal process of walking by alternation of ironic negations of A and not-A (which alternation is the essence of Heraclitian death as seen in e.g., the rhythm of the seasons), by means of time seen as mere stuttering repetition thus allowing its conceptual collapse into the image of a single moment: and death conquered by time, its agent, is death conquered by death. 

It is no surprise then that section IV ends with an exhortation for Crane, his lover, and us, to “receive the secret oar and petals of all love” - a crux every bit as densely packed as the “staves of flowers and quills” verse that came two stanzas before. Let’s begin with the lanthanide means of translation across the sea of death, this “secret oar,” the “or” of negative alternation, and the final vision of Crane’s staff-snake-writing-pen through section IV that has become finally both the diligent and linear means across the sea of circular-repetitive death (this line being the trinitarian dimension of growth available to the climber of the spiral stair transcending the circular reptitions which are all that is visible from above or below); and also, undeniably, as “the secret oar...of love,” his phallus.

In these “petals” we see the negative alternation of a lover’s fretting “he loves me, he loves me not” fixed in simultaneous existence along the circle of the flower, and hear evoked perhaps the “pedals” of these salvific “steps” across the sea. Finally, “petals” offer the vaginal counterpart to the “secret oar,” thus completing the atemporal or post-temporal self- contained fruitfulness and simultaneously-existing negative alternates of the androgyny discussed in previous paragraphs, as well as the dual role of poet as speaker and hearer, his phallus flowering in petals of superfluous beauty burst forth from and to encircle this utilitarian oar upon sustaining intercourse dipped into death’s sea and removed and dipped again and removed in negative alternation (much like, again, baptism dips and removes the baptized into and out of the deathly sea three times).

We see the paradoxical irony of physical connection and physical disconnection, of metaphysical communion and metaphysical independence, of in and out enacted by the singular act of coïtus. The vision of the post-temporal simultaneity of this temporal, alternating duality, being a type of unity in its timelessness, sums all here to trinity: this copulation of the poet's tally eventuates in pregnancy and the birth of the poem. This androgyne child is the very unitary, timeless reflection of the parents' interchanging communion taking place through time in this negative alternation of intercourse, a reflection which Crane's visionary verse enacts. It communes with their duplex by reflecting it perfectly in its simultaneous unity. We see then a sort of expanding duality of dualities, the verse-child's relation to the parents (lover and lover, poet and sea) reflecting the very relation between the parents, which is thus made a union instead of a disjunctive dichotomy by the post-facto reflection of the unitary child which transcends time in affording a new trinitarian dimension to what was Heraclitian dichotomy - transcending the dichotomy by which it was begotten, conquering death by death.

Likewise Crane sustains intercourse with the muse and his reader by means of his staff-pen-penis dipped as an oar in the inkwell of the sea, as the erotic act assimilated to poetry becomes thus a trinity instead of a series of dualities, by means of the analogy of “muse : poet :: poet : reader” possible only by the transfer of poetry. The poet catalyzes this analogy in his assumption of two roles that are one of these ironic pairs of negative but complementary alternates: speaker and listener; active and passive; male and female; God and man (himself a bridging Christ and surely God’s WORD, his verbal creation-discoveries connecting the human with the ultimate); which assumption is the very soul of poetry as it translates static disjunctions into steps of dynamic conjunction: a translation that saves the world. Men are conscripted as gods and prophets, mere words and yellowing scrolls body forth the mind of God through Danto’s “transfiguration of the commonplace,” in this transubstantiation of mere material into spirit through the sacrament of art. Finally, the oar and petals are found to be of “all love” (“of all-love” and “of all, love”): the plenum of time and world seen for what it is and affirmed with love from very “stem” to very “close” begets the generative implements and the fruit thereof, present now even in its kernel.

Seen in its entirety and with perfect clarity through the miraculous concentrating lens of Crane’s verse, the fulfilling eschaton becomes enkerneled in every moment of history, collapsing time - “the Kingdom of God is at hand” and “within you” as Christ says. And so the act of art as faithful reception translated by acquiescence into repetition transcends death, even for all of us who become co-chanters and co-listeners with Crane as his faithful readers and thereby the faithful readers and prophets of Reality. This transcendence by translation proceeds as the true vision becomes announced and dictated by the poet (or by us, the re-poets) who is assimilated to the Prime Mover, his antiphonal restatement and “amen” becoming his supernatural “let it be so” commanding history before it takes place. His mind through its vision is become one with the full true self of the universe and the fullness of time in sharing the communion of mirror-like mutality (shared also with us in dialogue with Crane and through him with All Things). Crane’s muse is his bridge or Christ even as his lover becomes his muse and bridge, even as, through his poetry, he becomes Christ-bridge for his lover as his reader, and through their love cast in verse, Crane becomes our Christ and lover as well. In this vortex of “mingling/ Mutual blood” time is no longer a cadence but a dimensional solidity as contained totally in the poetic-prophetic vision: the ironic paradoxes begotten of death that push forward time in a Heraclitian world are now actualized in a single contradictory reality, Crane’s A and not-A co-existing at last, as the sort of object permanence, if you will, of the poetic mind transcends the infantile fort-und-da confusion of all who believe that which dies in any sense is lost.

The key difference between Stevens’ Nietzschean amor fati mantra that “death is the mother of beauty” and this Cranian collapse of time is a rejection of the creed that the dualistic bipedal flux between life and death is everything-there-is and is thus sublime (“the utmost must be good and is” as Stevens puts it). It is replaced by a faith that the dyad of past and present, of life and death, beget now a third, a redeemed future translated from past by our engagement in the present and present itself mystically within that present. Crane thus counters Stevens, proclaiming that all the dualistic flux whose tide we bob in is prelude to “Belle Isle,” that the future is not an iteration of the “eternal recurrence of the same,” not merely more of the present just as the present is merely more of the past, but rather that the past fell into the present whence it may be redeemed by sacrament into a new future. “The good must be utmost and is” Crane seems to chiasmically undo Stevens, imagining, seeing, an eschaton, a telos (glossed later by “Belle Isle”), made true and now through the speaking of his faith. Envisioning a transformation so compelling its future reality is impossible to doubt makes it real and present and transformative even now as that which is to come, which transformation makes it come. Staves of flowers close and stem, and are stemmed and are closed, stemming forth by means of and in their closure begetting new life by ending old life.

"The harbor shoulders to resign" but also, perhaps, to re-sign (a pivot point of dictional ambiguity, once again) the "signature of the incarnate word." Is this shouldering a shrugging of, or an acceptance of burden? Or perhaps both, as the safe haven reluctantly relinquishes the lovers to the dangers of the sea, the "shoulders" now having "to resign" the "incarnate word" of their flesh like a father slipping beneath the waves while his infant child sits on his head. The harbor re-signs, or affirms, and yet resigns with this signature affirming a letter of resignation, the dictional ambiguity bringing the stanza here to mortal swoon; all events transpire even as foreknown in Crane’s prophecy, past is future and vision is reality as all time and the mental and physical are collapsed into each other to consummate their marriage in “the chancel port and portion of our June”; the lover's breast gathers the insinuations the poet's own heart has caught, while the lover's eyes lead rather the poet to these mythic islands enkerneled in the prophecy of those insinuations: all quite "mingling/ Mutual" and ultimate in the merging vortex of death, closing again the “one instant, in one floating flower” after broadening it in growth to a multidimensional plenum courtesy of the Christological death enacted by chiasmic translation or “crossing” (pardon the pun) that deceptively appears (prior to its eventual fulfillment in resurrection which we foreknow only in the yet- to-come vision of Belle Isle) to be mere undoing.

                                       ...There is Nothing like this in the world,” you say, Knowing I cannot touch your hand and look Too, into that godless cleft of sky Where nothing turns but dead sands flashing. “—And never to quite understand!” No, In all the argosy of your [BRIGHT] hair I dreamed Nothing so flagless as this piracy.                                             But now Draw in your head, alone and too tall here. Your eyes already in the slant of drifting foam; Your breath sealed by the ghosts I do not know: Draw in your head and sleep the long way home.  VI Where icy and [BRIGHT] dungeons lift Of swimmers their lost morning eyes, And ocean rivers, churning, shift Green borders under stranger skies, ..................................................

How can an argosy10, a richly-laden transport vessel made of wood, be "bright" exactly? How can it "flash" like the "dead sands" of the previous stanza? It blinds by means of cargo, what it carries, what is not the ship itself, but the treasure it has despoiled or accrued and will bring from one city to another, translating it, so to speak, across the sea. It flashes, though as dead as the "dead sands." Crane's lover's hair brings Crane forbidden, opulent, and stolen wealth, and communicates it to the poet who takes this treasure and makes it into his verse to communicate further to the world. 

In his lover's locks he never dreamt a self-sponsored ("flagless," which also of course suggests "unflagging") voracious rapine, a ravening to take and keep and guard treasure, in the blithe and spontaneous curls wandering, turning, down his lover's forehead. It is the rapine of turning death itself in the immediately preceding synecdoche of the flashing sands, death who is all that "turns" here, i.e., who is the only poet (a poet’s fundamental tool is "tropes" which are “turns”), death who is the only one here that can transform, translate, take, and make to be his own, after all is said and done. If he is not the only poet or "maker," he is certainly the last, the re-writer, the editor, the swallower of all the others' bounty. And of course, in the apocalyptic vision first articulated in the second section of "Voyages"...

Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe. O minstrel galleons of Carib fire, Bequeath us to no earthly shore until Is answered in the vortex of our grave The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise. 

...it is only the ultimate communion and consummation between the lovers (that death alone can provide) that can translate them, transform them, turn them, into one another, into a synergetic oneness, twined with the Caribbean sea and all their experiences in voyage. The real writing, the righting, of Crane's poetry will be done by death.

Why in seciton V does Crane seem to ignore the great hidden translation enacted in the syntactic and dictional ambiguities of section IV? Because "Belle Isle," the vision whose clarity is precondition of this translation operating upon us, does not emerge until section VI, when isolate beauty itself peaks up out of the waves forever, presenting a quasi-terrestrial, quasi-maritime eternity to the poet and his readers, abolishing every true "farewell" - i.e., every death, and every departure of lover from lover, a separation Crane thus, in his final line, establishes as the true meaning of death, as opposed to the consummating death he laid out earlier in the poem with the "vortex of our grave." Ambiguities obscure the salvific reading of section IV, which is submerged entirely beneath the deathly waves of section V. It is only in section VI to come that IV is re-written, translated by the emergence of Belle Isle, "the imaged Word" as Crane calls it, the poem of the poem. Crane thus makes of his poem a token of the reality it adumbrates, whose eschaton lies in kernel within it, shucked only in the fullness of time by the vision of a future which uncovers the conditions of that future in the present.

"But now" Crane's lover's eyes are already claimed by the waves, his breath is entombed by spirits not his own nor of Crane's poetic power, but proper to the sea as hermetic death, and he must finally "draw in" his head into sleep, which Crane identifies with death in his second section, taking after Whitman and the hermetic tradition in Romantic poetry. This is the pivot-point death, the transitive death of Christ rather than Eliot’s “recurrent end of the unending,” the stuttering Heraclitian end of an endless cycle of death and rebirth which is the pagan death of Stevens’ “Sunday Morning.” 

Prior to the emergence of “islands where must lead inviolably blue latitudes and levels of your eyes” over the horizon, the “portending eyes” themselves must close. The vision must die like Christ. These lovers’ eyes which become the very eyes of Crane’s own prophetic vision through his poetic translation in the dual act “to tell” them. And so they are closed in this same Christological death which affords for his verse a Tiresian clarity - “my eyes pressed black against the prow,/ --Thy derelict and blinded guest/ Waiting, afire” - as the words of his verse become the physical bush burning with Divine Presence but unconsumed, an Old Testament prefiguration of Christ, the word of God.

VI Where icy and [BRIGHT] dungeons lift Of swimmers their lost morning eyes, And ocean rivers, churning, shift Green borders under stranger skies,

"Where icy and bright dungeons lift/ Of swimmer's their lost morning eyes" grows the image of these two lines miraculously with each successive word. And "bright dungeons" packs a visual and semantic punch far beyond the delicacy of the words as sound. (Incidentally these words of Crane evoke, for me anyway, Stevens' later "his firm stanzas hang like hives in hell," and yet surpass this with the complex fluidity and synesthetic compaction of dungeons of seawater that lift, heaving as waves, and tie down the aspirant sailors to their mortality yet raise their eyes, their hopes heavenward and toward eternity like Icarus soaring out of the labyrinth; or - as they were closed in Christological death - like Lazarus or Christ himself risen from the grave. 

"Bright hair" and "bright dungeons" echo each other but do not merely repeat themselves as does Stevens' "bright, green wings" - the latter, as we saw with “bright staves” and “bright insinuations” earlier, rather translates the former: the act most fundamental to the nature of reality Crane hopes to adumbrate with "Voyages." The frothy crest of his lover is overtaken by the frothy crest of the sea, the former waning in its individuality and hubris against the world of nature, nature which is metonymized by oceanic death ("Draw in your head, alone and too tall here" even as Christ slumps his head and submits to death on the cross) so that the latter can wax in its ownership of the beauty now bereft from the lover, from Crane, and separated logically and essentially from the two into a new and truly trinitarian connecting space between, but more vitally, around and orthogonally through the dichotomy of the lovers, as it renders the line of one mere dimension connecting them into a stereo-solid, spherical cradling world about them and permeating them. 

“There is a line you must not cross” the poem’s first section tells the lovers: crossing now seen to be the “chi” of Crane’s chiasmic translations which enact the “cross” of Christ. This space, however, is at this point pure potentiality, a Keatsian “negative capacity” biding its time to bear salvific fruit. Death has overcome life to all appearances; the waves have overcome the lovers; the Heraclitian flux of duality has run its course. “Teteleste estin” or “it is finished” Christ lies with his last words before entering the tomb, or else pronounces in Cranian ironic prophecy as he ironically surrenders to the cross; “sleep the long way home” Crane our Christ offers more straightforwardly as we cross into the final section of “Voyages”.

Just when death's conquest seems permanent Belle Isle emerges from the waves in section VI, cresting the very crest of the sea the way the sea crested both Crane's lover's own crests of hair and Crane's lofty eyes which wreathed those curls to crown. Dry land completes their dark trinity which was pure potential at the end of section V. In this way Crane follows the elegiac pattern of Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” and Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” which Harold Bloom importantly connects through the agent of the singing hermit-thrush in pine woods and a dark trinity the bird’s song somehow weaves through one-dimensional, linear dialectic with a compassive, “counting” or “tallying” poet registering his song. This always happens as the poet translates himself forward bipedally (as discussed in the “shall they not stem” section above) and with a companion made human by pathetic fallacy (whether the hermit thrush or the sea), the dualities of which are multiplied by this fallaciously humanizing tally, by the very counting of these dualities if you will as a process of counting-them-as, step by step counted into an imaged trinity, an orthogonal extra dimension opening between these dyads yoked by a role-alternating communion of dialectic and dialogue. Just as we saw Crane connecting to his lover, in the last few paragraphs prior to the “crossing” his poem enacted of this connection, Whitman’s final section gives us...

Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrades’ hands, Passing the song of the hermit bird and the tallying song of my soul, ... With the holders holding my hand nearing the call of the bird, Comrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to keep, for the dead I loved so well, For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands—and this for his dear sake, Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul, There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.

and Eliot’s final section gives us...

If there were the sound of water only Not the cicada And dry grass singing But sound of water over a rock Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop But there is no water Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded I do not know whether a man or a woman —But who is that on the other side of you?

Crane’s devotion to early Eliot, and his conscription of the above portmanteau neologism “wrapt” into section II of “Voyages” strongly link his poem to Whitman’s and Eliot’s elegies, the former triumphant, the latter desperate, into a dark trinity of their own, completed by the transgressive, translational crossing of Crane’s elegy for elegy, threnody for death, paean of the conquest of death by death in “Voyages”.

“Belle Isle” consummates the dark, unnamed trinities of Whitman and Eliot; it provides beauty's transcendent and lively eternity - “creation’s blithe11 and petalled word” as section VI goes on to pronounce - a place of trophy and repose for that treasure Crane's lover's hair carried to Crane's eyes, a place Crane can only see with his "eyes pressed black against the prow," when, "blinded," he finally becomes a "seer." It is in turning away from the physical incarnation of his lover rather than mourning it with impossible desire as Whitman mourns his dead love and Eliot mourns the dead world of Whitman’s enchantment; it is in "dying" if you will to the accidents of beauty (the glimmer of his lover's hair, rather than what it bespeaks) and thence looking inward in Tiresian blindness, beyond the world of appearance into the Platonic world of essences (a journey inward on a Romantic grid though outward beyond the confines of Plato’s infamous “cave’), that Belle Isle can be seen in its eternity cresting the waves, raised beyond the sea and its death.

Death's rape of the lover's locks ultimately undoes death itself in a Christological trope (Crane intones the "incarnate word" and "imaged Word" after all)12, by freeing eternal and essential beauty from the mortal and merely accidental vessel or "argosy" of the lover's physical beauty. This abnegation and chosen remedial death frees Crane’s vision, allowing him to penetrate beyond the physical, through death, into the eternal: like Tiresias, Orpheus, or Christ come out of Hades. Death, as so fretted in the "bright hair" section, indeed turns out to be the ultimate poet or "maker," though in a way finally redeemed.

In four of his uses of "bright," Crane ties the word back to its immediately previous occurrence, and translates it; in the remaining instance, he uses it to tie together in a single image children at play and the alienation of sea creatures destined to return to the surf and the death that Whitman called the "fierce old mother" who "endlessly cries for her castaways" (and of course "urchins" are nothing if not "castaways") - a dual image serving as a sort of atemporal translation, a valence, if you will, in ideogram. Stevens uses the word to make a beautiful cadence that he relishes and repeats, but never develops: a word that adds nothing to the image at hand, beautiful as that image is and would be still without it. Stevens repeats his proud formulation, "bright, green wings," setting "bright" off with a comma from the rest of the phrase for emphasis two separate times - to what purpose exactly other than merely to luxuriate in the “hum of your valvéd voice”?

1.There is a long list of thinkers whose worldviews influence Stevens' neo-pagan outlook, which we are in the course of this essay juxtaposing against Crane's more or less Christian take on history. For brevity's sake, we'll gloss Stevens' approach with Heraclitian paganism and Crane's with Platonic or gnostic Christianity, and omit mention of Lucretius, the Tao, Nietzsche, et al. except where particularly instructive.↩

2. This “translation” stands in stark contrast to the “translation” given primacy by Pound, whose view of its role is more in the pagan, Nietzschean repetition vein of what Stevens is proposing of death in “Sunday Morning”.↩

3. This is probably why, for me, Crane's poem here, despite its absurd semantic difficulties and exotic, even befuddling syntax, was easier to memorize than Stevens' more straightforward work.↩

4. We might entertain “bright” as subtly signifying the “intelligence” of these wings, linking them to the mental and aero-pedal alacrity of Mercury, say, but only very, very secondarily.↩

5. Julian Jaynes’ fascinating classic “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” identifies the sudden advent of winged messengers of the gods in literature and iconography as due to the departure of hallucinated (”seen” and “heard” and “present”) divinities in the wake of a massive cognitive shift in the populations of Mesopotamia and North Africa. No longer able to speak directly to gods (or “gods,” depending on your perspective), transcendence becomes necessary to reach them “in the heavens” whither apparently they have retreated, only thus inventing our original guilt. Jaynes aside, long ago cultures all over the world enshrined the bird and in particular its wings as representative of transcendence, which Stevens knows to his marrow.↩

6. The renunciation of the muse's wings in this sense is a renunciation of renunciation ("he says no to no and yes to yes" as Stevens glosses it in his late "The Auroras of Autumn"). This image a is type of the Cranian Christological trope of "conquering death by death," but for Stevens it saves us from Crane's death into abstraction, symbol, and transcendence. Crane sees this death of the flesh (and death to the flesh) as salvation, and Stevens and his tradition thus as dubiously saving us from salvation. And so the two poets argue over death as crossing vs. death as return, as with Christian resurrection vs. Buddhist reincarnation. The choice then really is between visions of Life rather than Death, each poet's endorsed "death" being defined as the only portal into their endorsed life. Where Crane rejects the life-death flux of a Heraclitian world and embraces a transitive death into a life beyond this life, Stevens embraces life with its necessary recurrent deaths and rejects as mere death without life the transcendental urges of Crane, as they lead to nothing beyond this life (as there simply is nothing beyond this life to the pagan Stevens) and so leading to a fruitless nihilism about the world in the meantime. Ultimately, the two poets agree that poetical man stands before a reality external to him and in large measure inimical to his soul. Stevens gives pride of place to reality, whose terrible sublimity poetical man must behold and come to heartily endorse as his existential triumph; Crane rather asserts as primary the beauty-beholding self that will endure the inimical reality that besets it. We must reconcile the inside to the outside says Stevens, where Crane seeks a way to reconcile the outside to the inside.↩

7. More on these themes available here: http://clamatoes.tumblr.com/post/98705460836/the- prophet-of-no-and-the-priest-of-yes-the↩

8. Eyes - the organs of passive vision - becoming active signals portends (as the "portending eyes and lips" fused in this same section of the poem) the exact ironic ambiguity and co-existent contradictory states of Crane's own poethood and prophethood captured in the semantic ambiguity of "to tell" in "as I/ Must first be lost in fatal tides to tell" (i.e., "to tell" as in passively to determine vs. "to tell" as in actively to declare). More on this in paragraphs to come.↩

9. Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" is in many ways the paternal grandfather of "Voyages" (by way of its father, Eliot's "The Waste Land"), as we'll come to see in later paragraphs.↩

10. Though not under the strict purview of our investigation today, relish for a moment the richness of "argosy" here, which brings both "argot," a dense code or riddled communication to be translated, transformed into meaning, and also Jason's "Argo" that sought the Golden Fleece, an empty vessel pursuing a treasure that was itself "bright," transformative hair: hair some critics have argued represented the sun glinting off the sea, and that others have claimed suggested a garment made of precious sea-silk, certainly evoked by Crane in the third section of "Voyages" ("upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn the silken skilled transmemberment of song"). The fleece was hoarded and jealously by a dragon (like the serpent "ananke" or "necessity," that omnipresent synecdoche of death, Crane's rival here), whose mouth the questing Jason (who was about the only mythological hero of Greece who had no immortals in his family tree) was anciently depicted as crawling up out of (precisely as Crane's poem might transcend serpentine death if it can capture the coveted treasure) to take the fleece and return to become the rightful king of his home Iolcos.↩

11. "Blithe" is a cognate of "bright" and here a translation of bright's violence into lovingkindness, much like Christ the "blithe...word" translates Yahweh in the crossing from Old to New Testament.↩

12. This is a translation as “bright insinuations” translated "bright staves," though with a pivoting noun rather than adjectives, something worth examining in a later discussion.↩

[clamatoes]

The Prophet of 'No' and the Priest of 'Yes': the Ambiguous Transcendentalism of True Detective and Hannibal's Neo-Pagan Priesthood

(What follows is an examination of the intertextuality of Hannibal and True Detective along with apposite philosophical thought. So, if you haven't watched Season 2 of Hannibal and Season 1 of True Detective (but intend to) be aware that this post has a couple of spoilers.)

NBC's Hannibal and HBO's True Detective were, for me, the most captivating shows on television this spring, and by a wide margin. Their acting, writing, direction, cinematography, sound, and overall artistry were magnificent, but it's the way these supported the development of vital characters who embodied complex philosophies that set them apart functionally from franchises of similar stature (Deadwood, Madmen, et al.).

Both series center on a string of haunting ritual murders and the liminal hunters that circle our flock and pick us off one by one like wolves in the night. Critically, however, where Hannibal is named for its villain and takes us on a season-long tour through his thoughts, behavior, and relationships, True Detective doesn't reveal what it calls the "monster at the end of the dream" until its final episode, and only at the very climax of the finale do we hear what we're essentially told are the ravings of this quasi-religious lunatic, barely audible as they echo through stone corridors of his strange labyrinth. His creed and code are thus presented as mere appetitive grunts of a minotaur whose body may be human but whose head (and mind) are bestial and inexplicable.

True Detective's namesake and focus is rather the killer's antagonist, Rustin "Rust" Cohle, who is somehow portrayed masterfully by the real-life version of Michelangelo from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Matthew McConaughey. Rust is an over-read skeptic who peers out on a universe of death and decay and rejects its basic premise, grimly resigned to the unavailability of transcendence beyond time's "flat circle" (as the show's villain, the Yellow King, glosses Nietzsche's notion of the "eternal recurrence of the same") and the inescapability of brutality, despair, pain, and death - the absurd birthright of consciousness, which is little more than Fate's miserable bastard. What makes Rust loveable despite the fog of gloom that seethes from his mouth and envelops his every scene like Pig-Pen's filth-cloud, is his unwavering desperation for this transcendence he is certain is impossible, the integrity of his universal depression that doesn't soothe itself in the sardonic humor and supercilious irony of so many hipster cynics. Rust is an abstemious monk who waits without pleasure or distraction for a dawn he knows will never come, an inconsolable bereaved father who curses his own glaring flaws in endless self-flagellation and tries to set the world to rights as best he can.

Juxtapose the slippery-smooth marble edifice of Hannibal, who yields no foothold to our emotional attachment. He isn't Showtime's eponymous Dexter, who keeps his knife-work within the lines to avoid criminal consequences and cut the image of some sort of "dark avenger" who operates on behalf of society and its hackneyed "eye for an eye" juridical sensibilities. Hannibal is a skein of contradictions. He is an ascetic aestheticist, a diligent bon vivant devoted zealously to the curation of exquisite, epicurean delights, the most refined of which are the sumptuous feasts he derives out of the most brutal and repulsive acts we can fathom. A disciplined decadence, and a reverential, ritual hedonism link him as much to ancient mystery cults as the maenadic intensities of the High Romantic poet-priests, and reveal him to be Nietzsche's ideal man as a hale and rational animal, his desires and action fully integrated with each other. Hannibal's every act, none more than his stalking and butchery of human game, is fully sacrament, fully indulgence, and fully art, as much the demesne of Apollo as Dionysus, whom Nietzsche once told us simply cannot coexist.

Let us consider now the prodigy of Hannibal, what his appearance in our night sky means to us and toward us, rather than what his internal life, personal intentions and impressions might be.

Hannibal is of the Wagnerian-Aeschylean, Olympian god-aristocracy ruling by, enforcing, and embodying a draconian, but not arbitrary, ethics. We use "ethics" here in the Greekest sense of the word, as a matter of habit, character, nature,  inertial reference, or even of basic construction, an inflexible order, Lucretius' "way things are."  Ethics is thus a trope of limitation, the girdle of grim necessity or the serpent goddess "ananke" coiled around us. Birth and death, hunter and hunted, the cycle of the seasons, the anaphorized aphorisms of the Ecclesiast, are all of the edifice of the natural Order revered by Hannibal as one of Wagner's ideal and cyclically-recurrent and thus timeless aristocrats, simply because it is and must be so. 

On a Freudian grid, Hannibal is not a product of the ego, nor even of the id, but rather the id's ubiquitous "death drive" sublimated into an orderly and code-heeding superego of polite murder. He is the personification of nature's sublime will, which is antithetical and inimical to our own, the "will" of all that which lies beyond our Wordsworthian or Wittgensteinian solipsistic shell of self, all that is Kant's noumena, or Emerson's "not-me," doled out to us mortals by Fate. He embodies everything that is alien to our own control.

Hannibal is thus become death, one with the natural order any of whose characteristic operations or "ethic" is of course the definitional opposite of "hubris" (a word whose Greek roots denote violence and outrage, and which indicates any presumption beyond the stipulations of that very natural Order). 

In his cannibalism, he communes of us, and yes, of death, which he thus becomes in a trope of perfect Christology. But we too commune of him as our anti-Christ not in sanctioning his ethics but in becoming thralls to his estate of necessity and irresistible change through our deaths, not only into his stews and soufflés but wherever they occur and in whatever synecdochal skirmish along the full gamut of our powerlessness: from succumbing to murder, to losing coins in the couch cushions.

We invoked Wagner and his prized divine aristocracy as the template of Hannibal-as-Necessity. For Wagner, in accordance with contemporary historical fact, capitalism, the target for so much modern hatred over exploitation, was perfectly opposed to this feudalistic genealogical meritocracy, and this aristocracy defends its traditions and apotheosized aesthetics from the crude reductions of capital and commodity. The notion then of Hannibal as aristocrat is not one of acquisitiveness or egotism, nor of exploitation, but of a dread and sublime order, as the hunter who honors his prey and sees both as parts of a sacred world.

Nietzsche's "amor fati" ("love of fate"), and the High Romantic sublimation of death into beauty, is the moral regiment of Hannibal, the gauntlet tossed before us requiring answer in a universe which, for most of us, is devoid of other gods. Decidedly it is not the code of Faust or Paracelsus, or the Hermetic neo-Platonics, or even Descartes, who all seek freedom from the bonds of nature. They seek to overthrow the aristocracy in a Promethean revolution, whether of egalitarian or egotistical essence, the same sort of upheaval enacted by Christ, and (as we'll see) the Christ-figure of Rust Cohle.

Where Hannibal prepares us as the Eucharistic banquet of "This Present Age," converting his life and operations into our death, Christ gives himself as the banquet of "The Coming Kingdom," converting his death into our life and sustenance through the real presence of an apocalypse, as it foreshadows future and coming transcendence. This rejection of the way things are, the voluntary acceptance of the death of this world in the hopes of a better to come, is what unites all the foregoing codes as essentially transcendental.

Nietzsche and his son Hannibal revere the world rather as it is. They affirm the sacred dignity of their One True God, Fate. In a world without a personal divinity, however, Fate's essence is at risk. Without direction from a Lawgiver, events are surely chaotic, universal history a "tale told by an idiot."  In such a world, into which the infinity of unbounded time and space threatens to hurtle us, Necessity itself is hardly necessary, and there is no Fate without Necessity, and without Fate, no objective and external meaning in the absence of God. Hence Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence of the same" (glossed by True Detective's villains with "time is a flat circle") asserting that each and every occurrence, however minuscule, is a vital part of a spatiotemporal tapestry of events the course of which repeats and repeats, rather than meandering at random, through the infinite voids of time and space. 

Fate's fatality is saved by eternal recurrence, and each moment takes on the nature of a liturgical act, a ritual repetition intended (not by God, but by the god that is the cosmos itself in its necessary operation) and attended by the "amen, amen, amen" of its priests, Nietzsche and Hannibal, with difficult amor fati. The annual revisitation of the voluntary castration of Attis, the departure and return of Persephone from Dis, the rhythm of the seasons, death and sacrifice, life and rebirth that vivified the world of the ancient fertility cults takes root again antithetically in the essentially northern-latitude, huntsman religion of Hannibal. His monotheistic huntsman's God is Fate, and his polytheistic agrarian fertility-goddess is Death, on whom Change is begotten by Fate. 

That bleak and twilight noon that so defines the visual aesthetic of Hannibal, whose star (Mads Mikkelsen) is himself a Dane, is truly the boreal, severe sky of Kierkegaard and not of Gaughin's or Bizet's complex but blithe equatorial fertility. It is a sky carried on the backs of nomadic hunter religions and the monotheistic austerities of the High Protestants and their Arian precursors. Wodin's apocalyptic clairvoyance, psychopompic transportation upon Valkyries beyond the here and now, and the transcendent undercurrent of epochal overthrow in the fated and looming Ragnarök echo through its thin golden filaments. Such strains of north and south are as mutually antithetical as Apollo and Dionysus, but are wed just as well in the person of Hannibal by the artists who render him on screen.

These musings on ancient religion bear deeply on our modern spirituality. If one disavows literal transcendence, the final trampling down of death, as any atheist surely must, then, as Wallace Stevens puts it, the only positive credo must be "death is the mother of beauty," a cognate of amor fati. For to reject the motive force behind all change and the ephemeration which defines a purely terrestrial and atheistic notion of life - that is, to reject the substantiation of Necessity in Death - while simultaneously denying any hidden and supernatural transcendence, is to reject life itself and all beauty in equivalent extent, and to posit in their stead utter void as the meet nourishment of the human spirit. It is to cry out for the truth of the Gospel or Upanishads while steadfastly denying them. It is to posit a world in which the human is not even tragic, lacking sufficient nobility for tragedy, not even pathetic, lacking sufficient emotional credibility for pathos, but at best merely absurd.

And so with deep irony it becomes clear that the moralistic censor or restrainer of Hannibal (all of us who are appalled by his bloody career through the mid-Atlantic), who nonetheless shares his atheism (or perhaps, more precisely, his anti-transcendentalism), becomes himself the ego-directed, presumptuous, arbitrary, and nihilistic destroyer of our humanity, the hubris-spurred violator outraging the way things are meant to be and blotting out the last lusters of beauty that linger in the twilight of the idols. From our vantage, Hannibal is not wanton but rule-bound, a sober agent and exact representation of Fate: grim and horrifically beautiful in his deathly operations. Restraining him according to standards not his own is a reduction of the natural world which is, by the presumption of modern man, the only world. The grace, beauty, urbanity and sophistication this murderer cherishes in all realms of his life are not antithetical to his predation of his fellow man but in fact aspects and synecdoches of the same grand design of glittering death that Fate has etched between molecules and constellations.

Incidentally, this implicit tension in Romanticism is where Showtime's Penny Dreadful is picking up as well, taking the alternate tack toward a terrestrial resurrection, prizing Mary Shelley's vision of the half-transcendent Faustian power of that proto-transhumanist Dr. Frankenstein, rather than the proto-Nietzschean death-sublime and amor fati affirmation of her husband Percy's Adonaïs, who is the dark precursor of Hannibal. Where Hannibal confronts us with a vivid tableau of the only positive philosophical alternative to transcendental religion (positive in the logical sense), and bids us choose between "Heart of Darkness at the MOMA" or a morass of nihilistic abnegation at best verging on Frankenstein's futile fight against nature in the face of life's inescapable term limits, True Detective makes of its villain a transcendentalist, and forces its protagonist, Rust, to abandon his perfect nihilism and accept the very worldview of the ghastly Yellow King, albeit while rejecting the means he uses to pursue transcendental ends. 

Unlike True Detective, Hannibal ends spiritually right where it begins, with an "amen" to amor fati, forcing Hannibal to chose life, in its fullness of pleasure and pain, over its restriction, adulteration, and curtailment. To escape death or the confines of prison, which would of course spell death for Hannibal as Hannibal and as synecdoche of the stern and sacred beauty-terrors of the sublime world of fate, Hannibal must (at least attempt to) murder his best and really only friend, Will Graham. This stands in stark contrast to the slow spiritual transformation of True Detective, which inaugurates itself in Rust's nihilism and its opposition to the transcendental yearnings of the Yellow King, and ends with Rust's victory being found in his essential adoption of his enemy's transcendentalism after dispatching him to the (now plausible) afterlife.

In establishing its villain's transcendental cult on rites of child sacrifice (and also of course by linking the bizarre bayou syncretism to local churchmen), True Detective identifies the horrors of "Carcosa" with Christianity (likewise founded of course on the sacrifice of an innocent). This isn't a stretch through the world-weary gaze of Rust, who cannot reconcile himself to a natural order that would require the death of the unblemished lamb that was his daughter, blameless as Christ, and the inexplicable cultic rites of even, e.g., the Catholic Church, that eventuated so recently in the molestation of innocent children and that banish the unbaptized to limbo.

Cohle cries out desperately for transcendence while steadfastly declaring it to be impossible. He thus castrates the act of consciousness by rendering it willfully impotent, ultimately declaring it a cosmic mistake and thus nullifying any chance of his essentially nihilistic worldview's success by failing to posit even the possibility of value. He is the prophet of "no" to Hannibal's priest of "yes," the proponent of death where Hannibal holds forth life. That is, until he changes his tune at the very finale of the finale, seeing in the twilight what he reads ambiguously to be a new dawn.

The season ends with Rust (who is named after a physical trope of Fate: of ceaseless, inevitable decay) emerging from a brief (say, three-day?) sojourn through and conquest over quasi-death after slaying the Evil One to pronounce a guarded redemption over a universe of disintegration at its very midnight: a Rust no longer rust, and death trampled down by death. He limps with the fertile, life-giving, essentially self-inflicted wound not of Attis (who you might expect given his aforementioned self-castration), Attis who regenerated for the ancient vegetation cults a bloody world of constant death (the "flat-circle" world Rust rejected of Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence"); but rather, to be more anatomically as well as thematically accurate, it is the wound of Christ, whose salvific blood poured not from his loins like Attis, but from his heart. 

It may be that the light is waxing, as the season finale of True Detective suggests through a beautiful Manichean juxtaposition of light and dark in the midnight heavens, fashioning onto Eliot's "vacant interstellar spaces" where ranges Stevens' "secretive hunter" (surely an apt epithet of Hannibal!) among the "straight" lines "between the stars."  These lines are "much too dark and much too sharp," are "swift and fall without diverging," that is, without indulging in the swerve of freedom or chance, following cold, invariable Necessity. They fall "for their pleasure, their pleasure that is all bright-edged and cold" chants the Nietzschean Stevens in his early "Stars at Tallapoosa," in which he regards the severe, frigid, brilliant beauty of the deathly and inhuman heavens carving Fate's command into the tortured sentience of mankind. But when the background blackness is hobbled on the expectation of its mitigation in the warming light of a new dawn, those ancient stars lose luster, merge, blend, and decline, and the violent contrasts of pure midnight muddle into the drab dusk Rust fled in the first place, the merely half life of Frankenstein's monster and humanity's lie to itself that putting off death is meaning enough.

For to restrict life in its essence without offering anything new is to perform the limitation of fate upon fate itself, abbreviating the curriculum of the boundless universe, the snake ouroboros thus swallowing its tail and not regenerating worlds endlessly anew as the myths proclaim, but rather disappearing little by little. It is to see the sublime evanesce only to leave behind the base in residue. When we trample death by death but do not then return with "the Kingdom," we merely reduce death, "the mother of beauty," and hence the beauty of our world. The proof for this reduction is the utter lack of sublimity in the course of True Detective, where Hannibal bodies forth a full-blooded Aeschylean sublime with its grim circular seasonal arc.

Cohle (who, as a Christ-figure also draws on Mithras, the god whose energies of life sprang out of a "generating stone" like say, coal) realizes that the coal-black void is warm and filled with children's laughter and the sure embrace of all he once lost, like Odysseus waking up on the shore in Ithaca and diving tear-eyed into his possessions miraculously salvaged from the sea. Like Christ triumphant pulling Adam and Eve out of Hades, Rust returns from the blackness with his daughter and his father if not in hand then in heart, half-saved from oblivion. Hannibal as the hand of Fate guts the will (literally gutting Will (Graham) his best friend and the show's chief protagonist) just as the Yellow King guts Rust, but Hannibal escapes, while, in contrast, the bestialized mind of the Yellow King is blown to pieces by Rust's partner Marty's revolver. Rust thus scores a victory over Fate and time's "flat circle" that completes itself in his aforementioned return from the (near) dead, the season ending with Marty carrying Rust like Aeneas bearing Anchises out of the ashes of Troy and into the new Troy, which was destroyed only to be re-established as Rome in a better place and time. 

True Detective thus eschews the Greek-pagan tragic mode of an "ethical" (read: rigidly defined by a natural order) world that is essential flux, that bends only so far to our aims and snaps right back into place. Instead, it posits a linear, dualistic, and more Roman-Christian saga, the "Life->Death->Life Redeemed" trajectory of the Aeneid or the Harrowing of Hell over the "Nature->Hubris->Fall->Nature" course of Aeschylus or Sophocles. At the end of this nightmare, we all wake after "the monster at the end" (as Rust puts it) is slain to find our Christ, Rust Cohle, establishing a new Rome after demolishing the old: a new post-Christianity hopeful of transcendence, a renewed preoccupation with the guilt and innocence battle between the forces of light and dark, and an essential embrace of the eschatological dreams of the Yellow King to conquer death and Fate. 

Where Rust is Christ or Aeneas, sojourning in Hades, tearing down life by death only to raise it up again redeemed, Hannibal threatens to sack this Rome with irresistible, elephantine force - much like the Carthaginian general who is his namesake. He is thus not only a trope of Necessity and Fate, but the destruction of the Roman order as anti-Christ. But his name of course also offers us "cannibal" unavoidably, man feasting on man not only as a dark anti-Eucharist but an ouroboros: man devouring man and thus himself, ending and then regenerating itself as a cosmic order of Death and Necessity begetting more death and necessity - death indeed the mother of this "beauty". It is the serpent, ananke, sustaining itself upon itself. Hannibal thus embodies this endless cycle, akin to Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence" and the Yellow King's "flat circle" of time, which though infinite is yet reconciled to a finite and definite nature that preserves the necessity of necessity, the fatality of fate, and thus the integrity and sacredness of the natural order, as we discussed earlier. This is the perpetual generative agony that the image of a self-swallowing serpent so vividly represents.

Where Rust's true daughter is quasi-redeemed from death, Will's quasi-daughter, Abigail, is truly redeemed from death, appearing before him at the very climax of Season 2. Showing Will one he loved deeply and had believed dead, Hannibal stunningly declares "time did reverse."  Had the flow of fate inverted? Christ gave his body for food rather than taking food for his body and died for the life of the world instead of living by the unabated process of the world's death. This transcendent sacrifice reversed the very flow of time, the ouroboros serpent ananke no longer swallowing its tail but regurgitating it as the Buddha's endless appetitive cycle of "action and suffering" is overturned by an endless kenotic cycle of self-giving. The great snake that slithered through Eden is finally trampled underfoot.

Could the brotherly love of Hannibal and Will, selfless acts of mutual sacrifice in Hannibal's return of a prodigal daughter presumed dead and Will's protection against the police and the violent judgment of law like Christ intervening at the stoning of the prostitute, truly reverse time? Not in the neo-pagan sublime of Hannibal. Life is not redeemed and improved after death in Aeschylus as it is in Virgil: death is the beginning and end, brilliant in its middle with the singeing wings of Icarus tumbling through the sky. And so the fatal, necessitarian indulgence of jealousy, the severing of communion and termination of brotherly love renewed so incessantly since Cain and Abel simply reinaugurated the eternal recurrence and returned time and fate to their normal course. "I wanted to surprise you," Hannibal explains of this gift of transcendent resurrection which the presence of Abigail so vitally promises; "and you wanted to surprise me" he concludes, disclosing to Will that he has discovered what he thinks is his treachery in bringing the authorities in to capture Hannibal. The surprise, the unexpected, impossible escape from fate which the disciples of Christ encountered at the empty tomb, its source in the unadulterated purity of brotherly love even unto death, the hubris of somehow interrupting fate: this is the unthinkable sin that tragically snaps the natural Order right back into place. Hannibal slits Abigail's throat, and with no external, personal God to intervene like Yahweh staying Abraham's knife as it fell toward Isaac, Will (the will) is powerless to do anything but watch death lavish itself in the artful operation of its implements. 

In stark contrast, the ambiguity of Rust's transcendence, and True Detective's subsequent philosophical devolution into a simpering half-Christianity, weakens what still manages to end beautifully and poignantly, though certainly "not with a bang but a whimper."  If in fact the light's slow victory Rust proclaims is not transcendental, but merely the process of humanity slowly "getting its act together" interpersonally or enjoying "better living through chemistry," we are left in the grotesque Faustian tableau of Penny Dreadful or Frankenstein, and find ourselves betrayers of the sublime and addicts to biology, staggering only half-human with cadaverous pallor through a world only half-transcendent. 

Where there is no division of the sacred and profane, all must be sacred, or all must be profane. Hannibal worships at the altar of "all there is" and challenges us to show it something greater; it's unclear whether True Detective is able to answer the bell.

[clamatoes]

Poems Chat Transcript 2/20/2016

Late but peter those stories about Germans are really funny/interesting. I'd totally read a compilation of your stories from Germany. You don't think they could tell you were american and maybe they were just messing with you? Lol

shayan

A national conspiracy! I hope you're right that's hilarious!! This is awesome lol I realized today that it's absolutely impossible for me to write about anything in a way that doesn't reek of affectation and pretense, unless that thing is visionary beyond my rational comprehension. It's like how the SR-71 Blackbird leaks fuel until it gets toward top speed, it's not built to fly at normal altitudes or velocities. My writing needs the tightening and the angry censure of of an image it lives in fear of, or else it's this flaccid profusion of words slumping to tangle like limp and windless sails. This realization (if it isn't just another conceit) really gives me heart. 

@-man crothers @clamatoes

I love music that aspires for something its skill can't quite scrape, and I loathe music whose sophistication exceeds its scope

https://twitter.com/clamatoes/status/701158178965159936 … I guess it's this aesthetic principle idk

Lol yes!!! To the dronke and the underdoge But I've troped the underdog into being an overbird. What an asshole I still am Testosterone is a menace I tell ya Hahahaha truth Oh boy idk who knows when that will bear any fruit of ever I'm so excited about that btw! I think I might get a flight to watch you perform if you snag a role tbqh Ahahahaha Who else will come to England's green and pleasant land with me? Are we gonna make a chaw field trip hang on Kirsty's audition ya'll?

Peter 

LMAO DONT TEMPT ME I WILL DRAW THEM

Abeer

I'll just get a florist to assemble some dildos in wax paper Who gonna check out the dark satanic mills with me. Whomn will stalk Albion's ancient shores with me, whomn is not already dwelling there atm?

Peter 

porm's chaw newcastle field trip also please

jack

Hey we all have weird fantasies Kirsty

Peter 

Where about in England do you live?? Lol sorry didn't read thoroughly enough

Colin 

And Tommy's pinball wizardry Oooh Man we need to do this I'm excited!!

Peter 

i don't think i've been to brighton

jack 

I've only ever been to London and then a various places thru out the Lake District, mainly where my family lives in Milom

Colin

The Lake District is awesome

Peter 

lake district more like the FAKE district amirite

jack

It's so gorgeous I loved it!!

Colin

It's so pretty

Peter 

risque

jack

Is it dronking houre?

Peter 

ich ben dronkynge an coke i was wondering

jack 

send us it then, even though i don't understand kate bush's appeal really that sounds pretty cool i do not have spotify but i'll find a youtube

jack 

Let's do it

Peter

i wonder if anyone listened to the incomprehensible noise music i posted last night lmao

jack

I missed it Jack

Peter

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIhIlEY-7FY … oh here peter. you might enjoy, it's got some perotin in it imo thank you kirsty that was very odd

jack 

Tite I'm drivin but will consume these v soon Hahaha gurdjieff is the chief imo

Peter 

kirsty i think kate bush is to me as edna st. vincent millay is to you. just blank incomprehension over here although "the big sky" is a v. endearing song title i will say oh no in my family i have one aunt who is an enormous kate bush fan and relentlessly teased for the fact by the rest of the family i'm coming around to this second song actually it's awrite

jack

FUCK EM UP KIRSTYCLES Have you heard Gilmour's music setting of a Shakespeare sonnet? I've never really heard her tbh

Peter 

i think she's an immensely endearing character, i just don't get that much out of what i've heard of her music Looking forward to your ample offerings on her me? or peter

jack

Haha probably me

Peter

this Them Heavy People music video is pretty great

jack

I live under a rock tho as you all should know by now

Peter 

peter only listens to classical music and jimi hendrix as far as i can tell i've just got to Rocket's Tail kirsty give me time haha

jack 

ok im into rocket's tail i can get behind this one

jack 

The chaw I'm sure also listens to the radiohead as I do

Peter

yes indeed peter

jack

I listena much floyd and king crimson. Rather a lot of jazz. Idk I'm intrigued Kirsty

Peter 

peter my mum would hate you. her main hates in life are jazz and pink floyd

jack

I listen to the music I can listen to extremely loud in utter darkness for hours on end. Because that's mostly how I listen to music

Peter 

pink floyd's Animals was one of the first albums i got properly obsessed with

jack

Hahaha mine too Jack lol

Peter 

and king crimson are great too

jack

I have been thoroughly obsessed with Animals as well

Peter 

kirsty i'm onto Sat in Your Lap

jack

Dogs is my sister's favorite song lol

Peter 

rocket's tail sold me a bit

jack

We did a road trip from Boston to Miami once and only listened to animals on loop

Peter

i played Animals to my mum and she was like "what is this jack? it's unlistenable"

jack

And it's too late to looooose the wright you uuuuuused to neeeed to throw aroooound

Peter

it's pretty out there kirsty

jack

Kirsty I'm gonna review everything you write here and properly thrust myself into Bush. I promise this *weight. Lol

Peter 

thrust myself into bush peter, really now

jack 

Oh I'm just innocently channeling Cunting Jack! Er, bunting Hoo boy

Peter

sat in your lap is a song that intrigues me which with songs like that usually means i end up going back to them later and falling in love with them I'm a passenger now because dms hahaha please tell me that was a typo peter it's so much funnier that way

jack 

Another group was laughing at me telling of how an old lady called me an ISIS yesterday

Peter

i'm gonna listen to Sheep

jack

Bahahaha My least favorite but still good. My friends favorite and what I would've guessed was yours for some reason I love the little Waters intro and outro to the album

Peter 

yeah it's my favourite, good guess haha for the end mainly

jack

The bass part in Pigs is a minor river deity in my cosmology Yeah for sure the end is kind of a high point for the album Other than the Gilmour solo on Pigs And the part right before the boring middle part of dogs man this is taking me back

Peter 

ahaha the middle part of dogs was where my mum just like, noped out

jack

I listen to the live at Pompeii version of echoes a lot too Hahahaha same tbh

Cloud-scud in the dusk-doomed sky!!!

[a pic of the sky goes here]

Peter 

solid skies imo

jack

Man yeah The winter dusk yellow here is so sordid and wan. it pierces you with its gormy dullness and unfelt glooms

Peter

wave upon wave of demented avengers march cheerfully out of obscurity into the dre-e-e-e-e-e-e-am here it's just very grey always

jack 

Hahahaha sheep indeed "Wake up sheeple!" Screams a very moody Roger Waters

Peter 

i don't think i've ever actually asked where in america you live peter? hahaha yes

jack

I live in many Americas lately. Atm I am in Tallahassee

Peter

pink floyd are pretty insufferable as lyricists but that line has a charming exuberance

jack

Yeah I mean some of the lyrics are intense tho

Peter

i also know far too little about american geography for any answer other than like, new york or california to be meaningful to me haha and now, xxi century schizoid man

jack 

Nice!! So many incredible live versions of that Jack Way better imo even

Peter 

The song is good

Colin

for some reason i never seek out live versions but often fall in love with them if i do

jack

Same I bought a crimson double album one cd of which was 14 different live versions of that song from 14 different incarnations of the band

Peter 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXVrc4HfgZg … like for example this live version which is astonishing and infinitely better than the album version (which you prob haven't heard anyway but whatever it's meaningful to me haha)

jack

 If I can find them I'll send them your way. Really interesting juxtaposition

  jack

 what's w/ bands making their best songs the first track on their first album tho

jack

 I don't know this one! Excited to check it out when home tonight tho

  it colours the rest of their output very disappointingly

jack

 Record execs and their specs I suspect

 You're right

  like Polica, King Crimson, and another band Krallice all did this off the top of my head

 take the pink floyd route of making a lot of disappointing messes first imo

jack

 Well King Crimson have way better songs than schizoid just FYI

 Their stride is albums 7-9 or so

  probably but schizoid is the one that sticks to me

jack

 but i know they have other great ones

jack

 I'll send some later stuff that just dwarves it imo

 Schizoid is definitely the most major of their first like 3-4 albums imo

  i remember being into larks tongues in aspic

jack

 That album destroyed my whole world

 I remember buying it on a whim and listening to it as our bus drove into the sunset for 3 hours on the way to a debate tournament

 Such a power coursed through me as I had never known

 I won the national tournament the next day as the personification of that Herculean Chang

 *chant

  haha oh shit

 herculean chang is my pen name

jack

 Lmao

 I started making music because of larks tongues part i

 I changed that day lol

  i did not start making music

 just listen to lots of it

jack

 Mostly same tbh

 I remember reading somewhere that phil collins hung up a LTIA poster in the genesis rehearsal studio and would indicate it with his sticks before any session as the touchstone of aspiration

  that is unexpected kirsty

jack

 Omg please link it

  hahaha peter

jack

 Hahaha no I missed Belew's antics somehow!

  i am being unsurprisable

 ahahaha that's a great advert tho

jack

  I'm enjoying the bell jar

jack

 Such is the nature of poetry

 "To make the irrational rational"

  That ad is hilarious

  haha i can imagine

jack

 Damn I bet

  when do we get The Journals of Kirsty, 19XX-20??

jack

 haha you may be. he seems awrite

jack

 apparently my thing tonight is being underwhelmed by kirsty's most glowingly praised artists

jack

 @-man crothers @clamatoes

My dad yells me today "The Eagles are like locusts. There's these endless beautiful fields with boundlessly yielding vegetation...

FYI

  yeah i saw those

jack

 Sorry I'm on the phone rn

 Whoa those rejection letter pics are awesome

  the kate bush of drawing on rejection letters

jack

 the wonders of internet

jack

 hahaha

jack

 Oh I see how it is none of the rest of us yanks are enough to yank you over the pond

  incredible

jack

 kirsty already befriended all the renowned artists of london and now sh'es going overseas

jack

 Like so they don't get their metaphorical shoes dirty?

  international art guru kirsty of the socks

jack

 I'm not sure what I'm not supposed to be worried about

 Your coming to America is a Good Thing imdv (in my dim view)

  Bahaha

  kirsty are you going to show them your drunk dance video at the audition

jack

 haha what, in general?

jack

 Because he's confused about how to do dm lol?

  his crazy jazz head doesn't have room for the knowledge of how twitter functions so crammed is it with lines and colours

 kirsty i have been known to ydronke

jack

 Lol

  admirable

jack

 If you want to be made great by the lord you've got to be the servant of all, I was told wisely over a couple decades

  Hahaha naw that was the songs we sang in my very evangelical elementary school that abominated priesthood

 But I done read that there bible about 3 times thru before 6th grade. Which gave me a finer literary education than everyone I went to secular secondary school with

 Oh yes true just elaborating for no reason

  hahaha your outsider artist friend is liking my tweets now kirsty

jack

 With my background tho Kirsty bowing to humility seems the highest human wisdom hahaha

 Still feels essential

  And utterly out of my reach except in a haughty abstract

  same

jack

 Which ironically humbles me...damn

 "The only wisdom is the wisdom of humility. Humility is endless" etc

  I would say the highest period

 The stone the builders rejected is become the cornerstone

 The scapegoat and all that. Very powerful

  specifically a tweet about the bell jar

jack

 My sister just read the bell jar and gave me a blow by blow

 She should have a podcast. She breaks literature down into these utterly hilarious quotidian nuggets like she's telling you what happened at the supermarket

  hahaha that's pretty great peter

 i wish i had close family that read anything

jack

 She doesn't like care about literature

 There's no "aura" as Benjamin would put it

 It may as well be a Doug Adams book

 It's so honest and straightforward

  haha

jack

 Hearing her relate the protagonist's experience of a dude showing her his doink was the hardest I've laughed in 2016

  wow spoilers much

 blocked

jack

 Oh sorry I don't read books so I lose sight of this

 I will interview Joyce about a book and record her and share it

  ahaha i'm just joking, i've never understood the concept of spoilers really

jack

 It's like drunk history sort of

  lolololol

 olo

 joyce is a good name

jack

 She's brilliant but so terrified of being noticed she keeps things basic and terse in conversation

 Hahaha yah

 Hahaha yah. It was my grandma's name

  Joyce says its "an affliction of a name" (Angela's ashes reference I think)

 My mom always threatened to have another boy and girl named "re-pete" and "re-joyce"

  i'm seeing where the punning comes from now

jack

 Lol bread into me like a stuffed turkey

 Bahahaha

  My sister reads constantly and I'll be like "how was Moby Dick" and she's all "funny at first. Queequeg is my sweetie pie. Was Melville paid by manuscript weight or what?"

  hahaha

 i got my mum to read Camus once

jack

 I'm like 2.5 years older

  "it's just this man moping about and whining for 100 pages! nothing happens!"

jack

 Joyce was one of those reading superstars at our school who did 300 books during the school year

  jesus

 thats wild

jack

 Hahaha "I don't need to know this much about whales. Whales don't"

 I did the fewest in my class and they put me in like a special Ed thing lmaoooo

 I kept passing the quizzes to get prizes but for books they found out I never read

  i've never been a very fast reader

 same but bc of autistic tendencies lol

jack

 I read as fast by myself as i do out loud. When we did out loud reading is when they decided I wasn't actually disabled intellectually

 I was too talkative so opposite tbh

 Couldn't sit still etc

 My parents wouldn't let me get iq tested so the school had an easy time assuming I was v dumb

 As a 5 year old anyway it wasn't traumatic I'm not complaining. Their eventually thinking I was super smart was way more damaging I think

  when they got the child psychiatrist on me he figured out i was just too smart for my own good and that was why i had no friends

 the more things change etc.

 his what now

jack

 I don't think so

 I had hella friends until like high school

  i had some charitable people who dragged me about with them from like primary school until the end of high school

 which has been the pattern most subsequent friendships have taken. very poor at making connections actively

jack

 Ahahaha that was great

  cute speech kirsty, what brought that to mind?

jack

 You only need so many friends tbh

  true

jack

 I eventually had like 3 incredibly close ones for high school. Plenty imo

  i had a bad time last year after i transferred universities because it was the first time in my life i was just dumped in a place alone and no group of friends was going to just coalesce around me because everyone already knew each other

 so i had no friends for a whole year

jack

 i don't! 5 isn't 0 though

 i'm quite alright w/ number of friends i have now~

jack

 excellent ydronken dauncynge kirsty

jack

   inspirational

jack

   you have you have

jack

 You wrenched the freedom laurels right offend me mate!!!!!

  My friends defected all at once. Only very superficial friendships now. Seasons etc I suppose

  idk if what i do when i listen to music alone qualifies as dance

 but it's something

jack

 I think it's important but I can't really do a dancing except in jest

 I can sing with terrible earnestness tho

  ah damn that sucks peter

jack

 recently i have caught myself attempting to sing the lyrics to songs i love but in dutch. which is odd and doesn't usually work rhythmically lol

jack

 It's the worst poverty I've known. I'm somewhat happy for it in that sense. A purgative destitution. A kenosis wrote plenum, if we're Kabbalists and are we not

 Hahaha good exercise for the brain and tongue both I'm sure tho

 **a kenosis BEFORE plenum

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sD2cPL5rDM8 … e.g. tryna render the chant from the end of this song into "als de wereld is ziek, kan niemand goed zijn, maar ik droomde wij was al mooi en sterk"

 i don't know what it means but kenosis wrote plenum sounds like a great title for, something

jack

 Kenosis is self emptying and plenum is an influx of divine fullness I think

  Keatsian negative capability maybe even

  i've never learnt an instrument to lose

jack

 I've lost a few :(

  your ex got them too?

jack

 Oh yah lol Jack

 Very much so

  thanks for the summary of the night's concerns kirsty

jack

 Very. Much. So.

  the porm's chaw minutes 20-02-2016

jack

 Good night Kirsty I am so full of joy from your dancing

  tot ziens kirsty!

jack

 I'm gonna bush it up this even

  haha you've got so many youtubes to catch up with peter. art rock to drone

 lmao

 kirsty this is a PG chat

 Pornographically Gratuitous that is!!!!

jack

 jack

 I'm excited for the many tubes

  yes please do! tot morgen

jack

 And such bush as hath strong imagination

 Good luck!!!

    peter did i tell you there was someone in my chaucer class the other day whose middle english pronunciation was [100 emoji] and i fell a little bit in love

jack

 Omg no

 Tell

  oh that's pretty much the story. she was just really good at it haha

jack

 Damn son I fall in love for way less. That might be a keeper

 The worst is when you don't have a reason haha

  oh i'll never see her again no doubt, such is life

jack

 The way I explained it to someone once is most faces are intricate but closed doors

  yes

jack

 Some faces are thresholds with the doors swung off the hinges by a cavalcade of sun and storm that carries out your tongue

  hahaha yes

jack

 And you're afraid to venture out through the portal but you stagger against fear with inevitable progress

  one of my things is having an extremely poor memory for faces, even ones that make a strong ymprecioun on me

jack

 Haha I met one of my best friends by telling him this as I sat at a cafeteria table and explained he had such a face

  thats a solid origin story for a vriendschap

jack

 I'm the opposite I remember faces better than anything else. I still see people I saw once in a train station 10 years ago sometimes at night

 A lapsed one now :( alas

  i wish i did but i don't

 i even have trouble looking from a picture of a person to a person's actual face and linking the two

 aw

jack

 That's so interesting my dad's like that too

  its not fun lol

jack

 You're probably just using the brain space for something bad ass

  or autism lol

jack

 Elements of Strunk @elementstrunk

https://twitter.com/elementstrunk/status/701218448186040320 … this twitter account is a weird wonderful enigma to me. i have no idea what it is but it's gold

jack

 Bahaha wow

  you find some lovely oddities on this website

 lurkin kirsty

 yes i just figured this out from hasty googling!

jack

 Is it modified tho?

  i guess these are invented quotes though

jack

 Strunk and White unadorned?

 I mean I know it's the Strunk and white guy but is that what the book really says??

  at least googling them returns no results and it would be a terribly weird thing to be in the book haha

jack

 Hahaha

  kirsty's aving a giggle with us mate

 goedenacht!

jack

 Have good sleeping!

  i should probably also to bed

jack

 Adieu!

  good night peter, may you enjoy your eventide youtubes

jack

 Tubes that tide me the lonely even thru

  Tim Hecker

Rebecca

 Nap then movie then I tumble down the tubes

  Good night Kirsty!!! Good luck on the audition :)

 Good night jack. Peter, do you sleep?

shayan

 Hahaha not enough

[clamatoes]

Poems Chat Transcript Friday, 2/19/2016

Peter how was the uncooked filet? Sorry I was asleep when you sent that haha Haha hell yeah. Isn't it great raw? makes you rethink how you Emily the flavor of meat haha

Colin 

Hahahaha no doubt

Peter 

Enjoy not Emily smfhctfu

Colin

Hahahaha I Emily #meatchat Jack those screenshots on translation are fascinating

i thought they'd interest you!

Jack 

Thanks yes they do "Filyd in Adam" is gonna stick with me also

Peter 

its pretty good

Jack 

The interplay between this Hopkins and the Emily Dickinson below it is really interesting

Peter

When were these written?

Shayan

That "nobody" of Dickinson channels Odysseus' ("the accursed one") reply to Polyphemus the Cyclops when asked his name too I think So I'm not sure Shayan Dickinson pretty much died with all her poems in a dresser drawer I'm not sure if they've dated them? And I think many of Hopkins' were posthumous too I would like to think the Dickinson is a reply to the Hopkins tho, especially because she seems to be somewhat imitating his auditory effects "An admiring bog" too - the wordplay with "mire" being right there!! The admiring crowd is a miring bog... The me me me of the Hopkins and the strife of the dragonfly and the kingfisher seem so opposite to the "us" of the Dickinson, the secret communion hidden away from the "public" frog. Both are about a type of communion/relational I think. I suspect Dickinson's view of it is more dark and brooding and even gnostic. Have to think about it more tho Achilles vs Hector bathing each other with generous lances in the lambent flickerings of acclaim; the nobody who is Odysseus, polymetis ("many-crafted"/"very crafty") pursuing a love mate across the sea not an opponent to give glory to and take glory from, Odysseus who is "banished" as Dickinson fears she would be if exposed (and ironically has banished herself) They're both "nobody" - not "nobodies". "There's a pair of *us*"

Peter 

i am v interested in this but also not able to focus on it at present because of my mess of a life currently coaching a friend thru a depressive episode while feeling the after-effects of my own mini-breakdown earlier this evening

Jack

Well that sounds like a full plate Jack Reach out if you need to decompress

Peter 

it rather is she's gone off anti-depressants

Jack 

Not necessarily apropos of poetry obviously too Ah that's a nightmare very often it's good she has you to help her through it

Peter 

she's doing the kirsty-endorsed method of writing it all down in a diary now, so hopefully that helps

Jack

I think it's pretty cathartic

Peter

i hope so!

Jack

Being aware your depression is a weird thing infecting you and not you yourself is pretty key I think journaling helps with that

PEter 

its like the opposite of the mindfulness technique which is the only thing any therapists have recommended to me "observe the thought passively, do not engage with it", etc. but i guess they're Wrong https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIhIlEY-7FY … on a different but mood-related note, any yous intae noise music

Jack

Maybe both are right imo But idk

Peter 

maybe i'm just incapable of the mindfulness way. probably

Jack

Whatever occupies you long enough to not take a bunch of pills is pretty good tbph

Peter 

true i guess

Jack

I doubt that Jack

Shayan

I certainly am. I'm much more likely to indulge to my total horror than stay detached. Detachment claws at you the only thing i've discovered to help me when i feel that way is a long tearful talk with a sympathetic ear or just sleeping it off

Jack 

I mean I doubt that either of you incapable

Shayan

Same exactly lol

Peter

haha well i was doing something wrong clearly Shayan, cause it helped me zilch

Jack

I think mindfulness would be the best thing for me to learn but it is also the hardest I haven't been able to cry out of sadness in like 6-7 years and it's made depression very complicated I can cry out of joy at least ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Or even just being overwhelmed with like beautiful stimulus. But not sadness :(

Peter 

i never do until i start talking to someone sympathetic about it then i'm like, immediately crying lol actually i guess that's not true, when it's like a really intense worry rather than just a despairing reservation i sometimes cry anyway

Jack

Yeah I like ran out in 2009 or so Very frustrating

Peter 

umberto eco just died :( it's a goddamn bad couple of months for artists huh

Jack 

Oh fuck What the fuck

Peter 

Oh man. That hurts. Right on top of Harper Lee leaving us too

Nathan

Brutal

Peter

i dunno if i just paid less attention in the past or if it's been a really bad couple of months for art of all kinds in terms of these deaths

Jack

I'm 4 short poems into this Dickinson collection and I have to stop to take off her intolerable shirt of flame so I open up the chat but now I'm naked in the fire, unreal Yeah it's all a "anecdotal" but what matters is how we're hurt we're not taking a census and such I guess

Peter

i'm not sure i can parse that sentence but i enjoyed reading it

true

Jack

*so I open - that should help

Peter

ah!

Jack

(Intolerable shirt of flame is a line out of Eliot)

Peter

man tonight is a rollercoaster of emotion

Jack

I'm so sorry to interject amidst tragedy although maybe it's a good thing to do actually? At any rate: this Dickinson is terrifyingly good

Peter

yea i imagine dickinson being one of those authors you gotta take a break from because you get too bitter about the power of the words on the page i've got about ten different emotional states in my head right now, who knows what's happening any more

Jack 

Yeah it hurts to read it's too much it's how I imagine a bad trip to be Yeah today sounds like one hell of a ride for you

Peter 

haha yup

Jack

Is the other Harper Lee book good? I never heard anybody interesting's opinion

Peter

you know, a surprisingly positive one i guess. it's only been bad in ways that have ultimately led to some kind of cathartic feeling so far [whispers] i never read either

Jack 

A thing I appreciate in Emily that isn't maybe vital to her but is cool for me is how much she cares about the words within the words, the etyma, the gnostic hidden names and such I read the one because school made me and ended up liking it School mostly made me read the worst books in the world But that was a good book

Peter

haha

Jack

Emily wants to fuck words and this makes me feel normal inside I used to think literature was bad and an idiot's preoccupation until I accidentally read stuff on my own I think I was maybe 15 when I decided fiction and poetry could have any real value at all and not just be very stupid wastes of paper

Peter 

a lot of people say reading stuff in an academic context puts them off literature but i guess i've never really felt that way

Jack

That's soooo weird to recall Not in university mind you Just elementary and middle school

Peter 

hmmm i guess i mostly don't recall how i felt about it early in school

Jack

But I designed my own curriculum in university so I never had to read anything I didn't choose. Probably made a difference I had the positive opinion that literature was very stupid

Peter 

i do vividly remember hating foreign languages for the entirety of secondary school which was a bitter mistake

Jack 

Yeah it took me about the same amount of time to realize those were awesome as well

Peter

its a shame the time when youre best at learning languages is when youre a dumb idiot who hates doing it

Jack

Yah Honestly elementary schools should be languages and reading and math over and over and over You don't really need any facts you learned as an 8 year old Probably logic/rhetoric as well. The old school trivium and quadrivium tbh

Peter 

they tried to get us learning german and french at my school but i would just have none of it lol

Jack

Sounds familiar lol

Peter

"what the fuck use is this. you can get these books in english, and these are shit countries i will never want to be in" 13 yr old wisdom

Jack 

Lol yup I've never had my essential monolingualism be a problem except for its constant impoverishment of my life. Although I did speak German rather fluently once. They thought I was from Bavaria

Peter 

That's the issue I guess, that English-speaker arrogance that says you can get away with not knowing any other language Which you entirely can but it's less enriching haha

Jack

Exactly If you get a weird regional accent people assume you're native. Pro tip Which, when you're Iiving in Germany for several months and you look like a Turk, is key

Peter 

Hahaha

Jack

My favorite Germany stories concern their rigid rules in service professions The customer is always wrong, in Germany

Peter 

Did you live in a Kafka story

Jack

Lol I always live somewhere between the corpuses Kafka and Borges

Peter

So like, somewhere in the Atlantic

Jack

As this thread will attest

Peter

Ha, ha, lol

Jack

bluejean hella-coy @clamatoes I live (mostly) deliberately in a semi-magical dream haze that causes my primary emotion to fall somewhere between confusion & mystification

Peter 

Corpuses corpses

Jack 

bluejean hella-coy @clamatoes "Consider The Procrustean Unaccountable Nature of Encroaching Human Bureaucracy To Bear Lighter The Terrible Whimsy of Fate Itself" by Kafka Ahahaha found that there too bluejean hella-coy @clamatoes Stach on Kafka: "He contended that it was degrading to battle insomnia with valerian: his insomnia was not caused by a lack of valerian." Sorry. Anyway, my first morning in Germany I get to the quarter of Berlin I'm to live in after about two and a half hours of wandering from the airport at 4am Corpsesuses!!! I find this gas station the owner of which makes me wait until the stroke of 6 for him to open. He points at the wall clock and then waits the final 30 seconds Standing at the door. We are 6 inches from each other for like 38 seconds Waiting. Because rules

Peter 

Hahahaha

Jack

So I go in and I grab a 1.5 liter coke lite and put it on the counter. The man says "nein" I'm like "ich habe geld, bro" and produce some euros "Nein! Zu früh" it's too early for me to drink soda

Peter 

lmaaaaooo Peter

Colin

I ask him what I can buy. He takes me down the aisles and indicates approved breakfast products

Peter 

OMG

Colin

I ask him about fanta

Peter

that makes my heart warm

Colin

He thinks for a minute and shakes his head no. Not with any pathos, but this punctilious wonderment

Peter

Hahaha Jesus

Jack

I find orangina. He thinks for a long time and says ok

Peter

oh my god hahahahaha I'm laughing so hDd Hard*

Colin 

My first interaction with a German in Germany. And it only got more typical

Peter

Amazing

Jack

Lol I couldn't believe it

Peter 

That's a great story

Jack

My suitcase got locked behind an automatically closing door once and the doorman wouldn't open it because it was 17:03pm and the building closed at 17:00pm. All of my possessions were behind a locked door for that weekend lmao And I was on like a 8 euro a day budget

Peter 

Haha Jesus

Jack

A waiter brought my gf jalapeños for our nachos in a little ramekin when we asked. We asked for more and he came back kind of dejected and said "the chef says he can't". I was like "oh we can pay an up charge of course we just like them spicy". He goes back and the cook comes out and talks to us sternly about the ratio of jalapeños to nachos and how we cannot be given more because we will ruin the nachos. We're in like a truck stop restaurant Anyway this is the first 3 days in about 5 months lol I'll leave he rest for later.

Peter 

This is great like, humorous travel memoir material

Jack

Haha wish I had kept a journal My memory is mostly shit

Peter 

You're remembering some good shit now

Jack

Yeah must've bit into a Madeline by accident

Peter

[mirth emojis]

Jack

The American kids there were absolute morons and that was pretty funny stuff And the Germans really like you to abuse them about naziism, which I kind of respect

Peter 

Haha really As like, public penance or something

Jack 

Yeah They won't like talk about German heritage positively either. There was a big debate when I was there about whether they should play their national anthem at the World Cup and Olympics and such Or just skip it

Peter 

This is all extremely good shit but it's 1am and I should try to sleep Depressive episode pal is sleeping it off now so I am done with all weirdness for one night I hope

Jack

Good luck my friend and please don't hesitate to reach out if you want to bitch and moan or decompress or whatever

Peter 

I feel pretty good really! Excess of different emotional states has cleansed me for tonight Like a Shakespeare play G'nite

Jack

Ahh yes. Or his precursor in this, Aeschylus! Sleep without sorrow my friend Emily is thirsty as hell

 But she's just on a roll here

The aforposted poems and "Wild Nights" are proof (at least to me) that she wasn't as cloistered as people let on.

Nathan

Were she caged she certainly *wanted* to prowl Excellent selection Nathan! Her one poem above is particularly notable because I've actually describes Dickinson as a still white flame before when asked about her essence (On a neo-Jungian grid, the INFP type par excellence) Shelley is an orange-red conflagration leaving ash of Europe's forests in his wake Very different things. Maybe owing to paganism vs Puritanism. Hard to say I think I doubled my lifetime time spent with Dickinson tonight I remember growing very terrified of her in doing a sort of exegesis on this poem...

Peter

Which should have more dashes - especially between "Eternity - by term" Every word is a world. Just start thinking about "by term" and you almost don't make it to the second stanza before being lost in the forking beings of the forest of the dead, but they all lead to whelming GOD And that white flag...inscrutable. It's not quite Moby Dick's whiteness it's Moby Dickinson really I guess Dickinson just sort of gave birth to Robert Frost who is like Dickinson trying to be Thoreau or something

Peter

[clamatoes]

Poems Chat Transcript Thursday, 2/18/16

One of my favorite poem titles for sure Also "seaward to the sea-mouths" is something I find myself saying a lot And what topic could be more at home than "indolent, arid days" for us of "Perpetual Lethargy"

Peter 

Robinson Jeffers @robinson_poems You are strangers to the earth and sky, And all their wonders flung you Like pence to beggars: you, not I, Are exiles https://twitter.com/robinson_poems/status/700400922904498176 … Also

Peter

This is so beautiful News for Poets @PoBizNews Poet refuses to make good choices in life; poet: "If I start to flourish then I'll have to stop telling myself I'm a horrible person." Also its us u guys

Abeer 

Abahahaha

Flourishing is for the flowers I'll write and the florid language my pen will arrange them in

Peter 

Do hogs actually eat snakes? I thought hogs ate leaves and bugs I mean they probably song give a shit and just eat anything. That's a really good title

Shayan 

Hahaha I was hoping you'd tell me If hogs are rivers I guess so lol Hogs eat people if they can I know that much

Peter 

They eat manure and shitty vegetation They even eat bark. What the hell. They don't give a shit they will eat bark

Shayan 

Hahaha yeah they ain't picky Thats a whole other level of don't give a fuck

Peter 

It doesn't seem like they eat snakes though. At least normal hogs probably don't eat snakes. The diet of hogs in general is non-serpentine, I would say. However, it would be reasonable to assume that the boorish hog is a diner of serpents if one did not have access to the Internet. If Internet access is available, there is no excuse for mistaking the hog as an animal so uncouth as to dine upon serpents in the title of a written work Im probably completely missing the point

Shayan 

Hahahaha Unless there's some game being played I doubt frogs dine chiefly on butterflies

Peter

Fam who did this

Lol Peter is horny!!!

Colin 

My family appreciates your discretion during this difficult time

Peter

lmao

Shayan

I ate an uncooked filet for you today Colin

Peter

ahahahahah!! now! that's what i call a porme

Rebecca 

Yes, so tender ;-)

Peter

[clamatoes]

Poems Chat Transcript Wednesday, 2/17/16

without your love for brews, I wouldn't have pursued better taste

Shayan

Your exemplary devotion to taste has bored itself into us all

Peter

I'm glad my enjoyment of beer is inspiring to y'all and not annoying af hahahah good morning

Colin

friends I have a confession I don't really care about beer OR steak

Jack

that's fucked up but it's okay

Colin

I'm sorry I'm very problematic

Jack

hahahaha

Shayan

Steak is so delicious wtf Never tried beer

Abeer

alcohol is illegal there, right?

Colin

Yeah :(

Abeer

so strange I guess not actually

Colin

My mom says young iranians like to hang out and drink juices Lots of people have bootleg bottles

Shayan

Same

Abeer

Lots of people make their own here too Im just too scared to do it and dont have any friends who have done it

Abeer

Yah I figure I would kill myself with various poisons if I tried to bootleg booze Jack I'm sorry about your nonchalance in the encounter of Flavor opening her golden robe for you, but also heartened by your abstemious or even, to use a Keatsian word, eremitic attention instead to loftier pleasures Beer ruins many brains is the sad truth

Peter

Really i feel like beer makes people more emotional if they're happy their happier if they're sad they're sadder if they're horny they're hornier lol

Abeer

I talked about an ideal reader yesterday but was remiss not to thank you all for your reading the shit I post with charity and finding useful and very encouraging assessments to give me. It's actually an incredible amount of input and has made me very happy. Nathan even gave a WEEK to my skinny little corpus and saw way more in it than I had. All this is pretty damn "ideal" is what I'm tryna say

Peter

My brother is an actual alcoholic the law doesnt stop anyone from doing what they want Thank u for making this wonderful group peter!

Abeer

Hahaha Abeer yes the Romans (and many housewives in America) said "in vino veritas" "in wine lives truth" Oh no that's awful Abeer I'm so sorry I figured you guys might avoid that over there :( Thanks for being in the group everybody I get way more out of it than I put into it believe me Abeer if I drink even abeer - a beer, just the one - I become really happy. After like 3 I'm sort of tired but also way more talkative than usual even and still super happy lol. Maybe I'm happy and just don't know it!!

Peter

That was a wonderful lil poem

Abeer

Hahahaha is "truth waits in wine" or "in wine lies truth" a nicer rendering of "in vino veritas"?

Peter

The former imo

Rebecca

Yeah good ear I think I agree The ambiguity of "lies" there is more distracting than anything else Beck (like Jack) got that rhythm. Ginger Baker would say (in his most numinous cockney cackle) that you folks "got **time**, guv"

Peter

[clamatoes]

Poems Chat Transcript, Tuesday 2/16/16, Part II

can we talk at some point about this Joyce which haunts me Problematic Chat

Jack

Hahaha

Colin

i have finished that one awful poem and gone on to some refreshingly good ones by someone else which is like stepping into a warm bath now i must resist the urge to put exclusively positive comments on here out of sheer relief lol

Jack

gotta be rude my friend sometimes it's best

Colin

That shit is ill And too close to home unheimlich, as they say He gnawed the rectitude of his life Jesus H.

Peter

yeh it's the outcast from life's feast line which is so good he uses it twice which i've only just noticed for the first time

Jack

Haha I had noticed

Peter

and 'the laborious drone of the engine reiterating the syllables of her name'!!!!

Jack

It's the second best line tho or third maybe Hahaha that's definitely top 5

Peter

and then just that ending that's the end of the story btw. just 'he felt that he was alone' christ

Jack

Antithesis to "Composed on Westminster Bridge" on the same battlefield Yeahhhhh

Peter

yeah good call that is like the total opposite

Jack

Kind of a nexus of anti-Romanticism I think then yeah

Peter

it's just the same kind of environment instilling a completely different reaction because of the different internal worlds of the people observing

Jack

Different meanings of solitude, colored by a different modernity, I think

Peter

mm but wordsworth's definitely feels like a tranquil solitude where this one is desperate, "gnawing" at least having only read the wordsworth just now for the first time it seems that way

Jack

Wordsworth is anxious against industry and the urban, he seeks a sylvan solitude even in the midst of London and finds it ironically in the death of the dead machines; I think in Joyce he's exiled from the city not looking at it on the way in, and his solitude comes against the peaty bucolic fertility of lovers waiting in the soft dry grass, which is exiling him as if from Eden and the primal scene rather than the city menacing the primal scene and Wordsworth finding it there nonetheless Oh I agree fully Jack

Peter

yeah that makes sense from my cursory understanding!

Jack

If that makes sense As from my equally cursory understanding

Peter

on an unrelated note i am finding so much solace in this genuinely Good poetry i'm now annotating

Jack

That's so great!!! Tell them

Peter

peter you've never had a cursory understanding of anything. it's all depths

Jack

Lol

Colin

Awww as long as the lights flicking on the little wave caps makes it seem deep to you it's probably enough I'm touched tho

Peter

Look at the pathos on this one

Jack

(I feel less weird about sharing this stuff when it's not like, hate-sharing lol)

Jack

It's nice writing Jack

Serge

which Serge, the poem i just shared or the prose i linked to before it?

Jack

Sorry, the picture of the writing... Ladies on the Train

Serge

yes it is! i'm enjoying having something to critique which i can really enjoy

Jack

I can't read all your notes from the picture but the incompleteness of it all makes it very intriguing heh

Serge

hah i was mainly sharing it for the poem itself my scribblings are not very insightfu lbut yes i appreciate that in poetry sometimes - just a collection of impressions that you piece together a story out of

Jack

Quick what's the name of the poet who fucked the goat? Sorry haha I want to google them

Shayan

Byron

Jack

Byran?

Shayan

lol

Colin

Lol. Sorry about that. Im adding my friend who is shy btw

Shayan

Shayan added Soph

Welcome Sophie!! Sophie is an art history, english and philosophy major

Shayan

Hello Sophie, I am also shy, and my youngest sister's name is Sofie.

Serge

Welcome Sophie! I was a philosophy major too

Peter

Hello sophie!! I am not shy but welcome

Colin

That's a v nice poem I do believe Serge btw thanks for your kind words on the dream poem a bit back. I'd missed them until now

Peter

Peter, I want to see how handsome you are in person

Colin

Awwww ditto tho my dude!!

I'm quite drunk after all the beer I've had tonight and might be speaking too candidly lol

Colin

All candor is good candor, imho I wish I'd had some beers I'm bone dry

Peter

Just finished off this bomber

9%

Colin

lmao colin

Shayan

Oh man that looks so tasty

Peter

You'e be hard pressed to find me without a stocked fridge Beer is one of the subtle pleasures of life

Colin

It's so true It's basically a mellow meadow you roll around in your mouth and belly

Peter

the myriad flavors in beer..... a universe unto itself

Colin

And your mind buzzes with the summer bees It's true how's coffee beers like that?

Peter

the flavor of hops coming in and stinging my tongue, slowly revealing citrus and piney wonder Or the creamy smoothness of a stout, malty and coffee filled beauty.... beer is art crafted into a beverage

Colin

Daaaaaaaamn. I want a beer pretty bad now

Peter

I'm sorry!!

Colin

Hahaha naw just some good imagery dude I could go get one if I weren't so lazy and cozy rn

Peter

Hahaha I would be devastated w/o good beer in the fridge

Colin

The only thing good in my fridge is steaks It's sad

Peter

your love of beer is inspiring

Shayan

Hahaha why is it inspiring? Also steaks are a great thing to have in the fridge never tell me that's sad

Colin

They are very great. But that's all there is of goodness Yes I should be grateful for the great beefs. And I will be yes

Peter

Fuckin...steak is the beer of food imo

Your boy loves a good steak

Colin

I had one tonight that was so good. Ate it too fast to picture

YAAAAAS

I've made steaks that my friends are convinced are raw except for the outside lmao

Colin

That's ideal imo

Peter

I agree I cut off a bit of my steak before cooking it to eat after seasoning sometimes good ass shit Imo

Colin

Oh man I gotta try that

Peter

Yes!! Esp w filet so tender already before cooking

Colin

Man, steak is so good

Peter

It's inspiring because it's such a genuine passion and it makes me want to drink only the best brews

Shayan

Agreed

Peter

[clamatoes]

Poems Chat Transcript, Tuesday 2/16/16, Part I

I love the idea of going from being questioned for one's silence to being questioned for one's opinions and confidence. Some delicious irony in there. It's easy to feel vulnerable when Jack writes off the cuff medieval verses and Peter waxes poetic on ANY topic, seemingly with zero effort

Rebecca

(More "wax off" than wax on if you catch my drift, tbh) that irony is p tasty yes hahaha I had a dream last night that back started imitated *my* style perfectly in here too. Gotta become a Chaucer-level talent, or maybe just ran enough of my nonsense down his throat for it to start bubbling up out of there Idk tho two ears and one mouth silence is a much smarter posture and confidence would be absolutely absurd before so much beauty, even the mere tip of which we've exposed ourselves to so far in here right? Oh and Jack I've only read the first 2 pages of your story but the rhythms and images are choice . Very Hopkinsian with maybe even some Cummings thrown in there, though something entirely its own!

Peter

Hey Serge, i find a lot of resonance in your description of the vagaries and misinterpretations of my own behaviour, thank you somuch for putting it so clearly, i keep thinking that confidence is so often misinterpreted as arrogance and get hurt when people don't want me at their table thinking that i haven't got the skill to not dominate conversation... it's all too transparent and alienating! wish i was less exuberant and palatable but can't help it, i love life, soz. to me in the end it's yet another clear indication that no one way is better or worse than other and leads to greater satisfaction with the wonder / horror of things. it's wonderful that i don't compare myself to others but it's horrible because it inevitably lends a certain solipsism.

Kirsty

I want you at all my tables Kirsty, fwiw And inter-personal comparison always turns out to be a great big bed of Procrustes, lopping off people's delicious idiosyncrasies and special attributes, enforcing a gray and infinitely narrow spectrumization on/of people that validates only 1 attribute or way of being as the "good end" of the spectrum. It thus dehumanizes everyone and becomes an inhumane solipsism of a single skill or attribute, if you will, rather than even a single person. Resisting comparison and subsequent homogenization enriches everyone's world, broadens it. And I think you do a tremendous job of apperceiving the distance and direction between everyone and yourself, weaving as it were that negative space into a glimmering connection

Peter

Peter, thank you! Beyond uplifting and much, much too kind. Very valuable indeed to know I'd be welcome at all your tables, and you at mine too. I hope we'd eat swan.

Kirsty

Lolol wouldn't we

Peter

Late but Thanks serge :-)

Shayan

bare swans bruv

Kirsty

Peacocks!

Peter

there's a lot of hardcore cognitive dissonance attached to confidence

Kirsty

these are excerpts from my cheerful diary entry on christmas eve lol

i think my insistence on using the most lurid colours in all creative endeavours possible has a lot to do with the strength of the drive to overcome ?????

Kirsty

Well damn if this isn't terrifyingly close to home Also tho insanely articulate and visceral and galling and painful and painfully beautiful. You should do a published diary That makes sense to me!! Ex-pression per se

Peter

i apologise for the triteness of "pure blood" and "cold blood" and "clan"... so, but Serge, I share this self-improvement struggle, it's real! and frankly, fucking unending. :)) yes it's all rooted in the same. there's more on that in the pages i just found. it is like being a Sybil-esque character though, i barely remember writing those things. Looking forward to reading your story Jack (wherever you are!)

Kirsty

I'm here now I just had a bad day and didn't feel up to contributing much. Reading all this with interest now though Thank you for your comments earlier on my story Peter!

Jack

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B26q7jjd2efGT0s3MVJCdDBsTVE/view?pref=2&pli=1 … Jack's story Kirsty that bitter clan line is incredible and not trite but tight imo

Peter

I would read Kirsty's memoirs

Jack

I would read anything Kirsty wrote tbh. That's not a courtesy I've extended to many even immortal authors lol

i'm kind of writing them but it's suposed to be in the form of magical realist novella type thing, a convoluted idea called the retreat from language

thank you so much :)))

Kirsty

That sounds great Kirsty!

Jack

yeah but meanwhile i am actually retreating from language hahaha

Kirsty

Same

Jack

the protagonist winds up being a voluntary mute who will only communicate in vibez

Kirsty

Kirsty my story weirdly coincidentally deals with trauma and depersonalisation and muteness

Jack

or knitted goods :)

Kirsty

The Person Who Would Only Communicate In Socks There's your title

Jack

lol The Sock-Lover but i believe that has other connotations

Kirsty

In Search of Lost Socks

Jack

it's not just socks people... it's fabric woven fabric

Kirsty

The Fabric of Reality

Jack

my brand has gone overboard with the sock insistence

Kirsty

An unacceptable alliance to the Sock brand I have to read some stories and porm's for my irl writers chat tomorrow but I didn't do it because I spent all day moping instead

Jack

i like it Jack, will read it again more thoroughly tomorrow as am megger tired, but can tell i like it very much. the last paragraph i felt would like to run on more in breathless Joycian style somewhat longer and more gratefully mad what's with the mopage? grateful / gleeful - somewhere between those things :)

Kirsty

haha i was afraid it already went too long, this is comforting to hear because it enables my excess

Jack

no fucking go for it, it's too restrained!

Kirsty

oh rejection again always crushes me for some time and requires a day of crying in bed to get over on the subject of excess and restraint, what about that longgggg bit of monologue in the middle of the stage scene? longer? shorter?

Jack

what happened?

Kirsty

nothing more interesting or complicated than you would assume from "rejection"!

Jack

hmmmm yes could do with some Gordon Lish action Jack i can't think of anything more interesting or complicated... but i'm sorry you went through it,whatever it was. and are experiencing it.

Kirsty

i am afraid i don't know what that means

Jack

raymond carver's editor ruthless but gave Carver his exemplary style

Kirsty

just a simple romantic rejection, she was very nice about it and i feel better for my moping so the monologue needs some editing i guess? Pound is my go-to reference point for ruthless editing

Jack

like the tim key & overcoat, this is good introduction http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/raymond-carvers-okcupid-profile-edited-by-gordon-lish … me and Lish share a birthday so i identify with his willingness to excoriate with good intention :)

Kirsty

haha this is great my story went through a couple drafts already and there's a lot of points where i was just repeating myself to try to find the best way of putting something so obviously ended up cutting all but the best way

Jack

well then you've done it your way, put the sid vicious version of the frank sinatra song on and have a whisky :)

Kirsty

Kirsty

aye well i'd love any more detailed suggestions of what feels superfluous in the bits that you feel do need trimming!

Jack

a bit loose, this one and, and, and

Kirsty

mm i was self-consciously (later on at least, i really need to go back and make sure it's consistent throughout) avoiding the use of commas.

Jack

"which a bar snaps" i don't get

Kirsty

which often leads to a lot of 'and and and' but can then frequently be modified to just be several sentences

Jack

the crowd erupts twice

Kirsty

"which a bar snaps" is just one of those ways i was trying to make the syntax feel a bit alien - doesn't really make grammatical sense but hopefully conveys an idea

Jack

Kirsty

oh no! i always do that haha, get addicted to a word or phrase without noticing

Jack

i would also take out the idea of the "O" of shock or surprise - hackneyed and because the rest is so inventive it's jarring

Kirsty

yah i was unsure about that thank you for this it's all helpful!

Jack

lol i used to physically edit my own book collection, for fun you;re welcome!

Kirsty

hahaha that's great some of the poems we were looking at on our modernist poetry module last semester we were theorising what ezra pound would have done to them if he'd got hold

Jack

i confess to loving Carver and Henry Miller and Bukowski and their very uptight styles though

Kirsty

we thought he would have turned most of auden's poetry to ribbons, for example

Jack

horses for courses

Kirsty

That said, i love a good Proustian page-and-a-half run-on and Joycian

Kirsty

yes it's just a struggle to know if you're doing a good joycian proustian thing or an insufferable one

Jack

yeah but you should probably just let your muse sing and try and extricate yourself and your art from all the academese, must be a pain to try and operate in those conditions, for all the benefits of discipline it will yield

Kirsty

so the one at the end - good, extend it - the one in the middle ('I am Tem,' he says...) maybe a bit insufferable? oh yeah it's nice and informative to see what impressions people have of your work but you can only use it up to a point

Jack

say one or the other when "fifteen / seventeen" imo the two year gap is a bit of an unwelcome / unecessary question for reader unless i've missed something from earlier?

Kirsty

true i enjoyed the weirdness of it but it didn't make any real sense nah

Jack

the thing is, i can see it working as a script it's quite filmic

Kirsty

that's maybe a good sign in some way as i usually think my (prose) pacing is pretty weak and something being transferable to script form is maybe a sign that the pacing/dialogue is working?

Jack

Kirsty

the monologue we were just discussing I was definitely going for a Lucky from Waiting For Godot thing

Jack

this is like reading a script with script instruction. which is great but places other demands on reader

Kirsty

this is giving me the probably horrible idea to write parts of the stage scene (e.g. the above part) as script? i mean it would be thematically appropriate. probably going a bit far though

Jack

riiiight ok makes sense could be interesting!! very interesting in fact don't think i've come across splicing of the two before?!

Kirsty

ulysses did it but that was a little bit more than short story length

Jack

I like the idea of ekphrastic prose describing a script rather than being a script, and think that may fit here Think Borges

Peter

that is maybe a layer of bafflement too far though - how would it fit in?

Jack

Kirsty's comments as usual are spot on and make me think I've thought them before until I realize no they're just *THAT* apt

Peter

peter, man, pack it in lol thank you your idea is rad

Kirsty

Have you read much Borges? He is utterly antithetical to you as a writer Jack

Peter

i like the idea but i'm wondering how it would fit in to the story i love borges! antithetical how?

Jack

Maybe antithetical to the Kafka/Beckett hybrid you are carving here and elsewhere with that Hopkinsian rhythmic sensibility The remove he's at

Peter

i've read 0 borges

Kirsty

He's beholding a gem not letting the reader behold it

Peter

kirsty you should correct that imo

Jack

Borges is maybe my favorite prose writer of the 20th century if I'm vulnerably honest

Peter

:( one day

Kirsty

yeah i'm specifically trying to be very close to the mind of the protagonist whereas he's like, reporting them

Jack

I can't argue he's the best Proust, Mann, Joyce, Musil seem more eminent without question to me

Peter

but yeah if he's so antithetical how would i fit something like that in the middle of the story without being completely unreadable, i guess is my question

Jack

But I like him better

Peter

by bringing some Jack caulfield into the mix yo

Kirsty

I wonder if the cinematic quality might be achieved by building in that space that Borges makes, those draughty attics of the soul. Just as a lodestone not a program per se

Peter

borges it has to be said a lot more approachable than any of those just by virtue of writing short stories

Jack

Might be impossible. Seems like an abstract direction rather than an extent to go *in* that direction if that makes any sense at all He's also more plainspoken

Peter

he also like, comes up with scenarios with resonances i could never dream of

Jack

Jack i can't believe you spent all day crying instead of editing your story possessed by the misery of rejection frankly :) you only turn your mind to your art when outside the realm of emotion IS IT?

Kirsty

i dunno. maybe i will try the script thing, i still can't see a way to including your suggestion peter even though it really does sound good in theory

Jack

Same If so...same

Peter

haha i do not think this story needs to be tainted by my own more trivial miseries

Jack

Art is a crystal beyond thought and feeling in pure sight or sound, for me The prophet feels only fear and really it's not adrenaline biological fear it's just awe

Peter

most of my fiction is bogged down by my insertion of my own moping complaints into characters who could be more interesting than me

Jack

write drunk, edit sober?

Kirsty

And insofar as I am an artist (and I'm usually not and only narrowly am in any sense) I'm just a prophet I edit drunk and write sober lmao

Peter

you might find more potency and weight in the language dredged up lol peter

Kirsty

Lol coming in and finding Peter calling himself a prophet is amazing

Colin

Hey Jack none of us are genius enough in here to comment critically about our own work intelligently

Peter

and like some of it enough for your trials to have been woth it, like

Kirsty

you certainly are a prophet, my friend

Colin

Leave the excoriation to us who can see you! Your shit is legit

Peter

my mind is falling apart trying to read several books at once for class. hope y'all are well.

Colin

something i said?!

Kirsty

Colin the funny thing is I mean it earnestly and as more a sad admission of my artistic minority than any sort of ego trip

Peter

Imo a prophet is a port Poet Lol

Abeer

Who me Kirsty?

Peter

Werent all prophets poets though

Abeer

peter you haven't seen my worst shit! i wasn't including this because it's relatively free of my bullshit

Jack

All the hot shot ones anyway

Abeer

peter is a seer, poet, and possessed of powers of apophenia some can only dream of

Kirsty

I want to agree Abeer. I think all prophets are poets but not all poets are prophets

Peter

Yeah true!

Abeer

Shakespeare isn't a prophet nor Homer not Ovid Apophenia is my damned affliction looool Kirsty yes it is true But Moses was and Blake was and Hammurabi etc

Peter

jealus

Kirsty

I'm not saying I'm Moses by any stretch lmaooooo Jesus what the hell am I into here

Peter

that said kirsty plenty of what i jot down as an attempt to understand my emotions a bit like your diary that you so kindly shared, does eventually make its way into a story

Jack

That seems smart process wise Jack

Peter

hmmm

Kirsty

i just gotta keep it in check because nobody wants to read a story about my tedious travails

Jack

no, i want to fight you, Jack. :)

Kirsty

u wot m8 what about

Jack

I can't feel art into existence someone else feels it and hands it to me and I speak it and then I look at it like anyone else does is what I mean

Peter

about trivialising my dere sweet efforts to understand my emotions!

Kirsty

I’m not some revelation engine lol

Peter

not yours! mine!

Jack

Your diaries are intense in the best way Kirst. I am team Kirsty to the death in re diaries

Peter

your emotions are art-worthy and art-ready

Jack

lolol

Kirsty

Have to agree My emotions are very faint and degenerate and a degradation of human experience My emotions aren't art

Peter

same

Jack

The good ones I get COME FROM art, sometimes mine but usually someone else's

Peter

this is mind-boggling stuff

Kirsty

I point or I repeat That's it giamatti nipple-seer @clamatoes So much of the highest of what you feel is in fact the art of others

yeah i remember reading that

Kirsty

giamatti nipple-seer @clamatoes The problem with being a prophet is you are at any moment either a barren wind-shorn wick or swallowed screaming in utmost flame

Peter

peter has a big ol tweet-thread for every occasion

Jack

Lmao Peter has one billion thoughts about one billion different things

Colin

I have thots in every area spot

Peter

i owe peter my life Looool lol

Kirsty

I GOT OPINIOOOOOONS

Peter

Peter you're an ideal person to smoke weed with, I think

Colin

lol

Kirsty

And as Wallace Stevens said of a 20 year old Harold Bloom he met for coffee Hey Colin guess what tho?? I've never done a marijuana even one time

Peter

please. don;t.

Kirsty

Why not!!

Colin

i did once, when i was in the amsterdam

Jack

Ahahahaha I'm out of bullets here don't worry

Peter

Marijuana is good, for the soul

Colin

Idk tbh Colin

Peter

no no thrice no a thousand times no

Kirsty

it was lame because i don't know how to smoke really lol

Jack

Probably fear I would never stop

Peter

and ABSOLUTELY NO for Pietr

Kirsty

(In extremely drug user voice) everyone should smoke weed and take LSD

Colin

who already has " a bllion thoughts for a billion things"

Kirsty

Also my mind feels balanced on an edge and I can't tell what's in either abyss

Peter

Hahahaha

Colin

haha peter

Jack

ver fucking boten

Kirsty

Drugs, they'll probably help me remember the names of everyone in here

Serge

all of you should take LSD bc you would love it, imo.

Colin

I am drugs already so it's like idk

Peter

but then how would i be the good boy of online

Jack

i've done all the drugs

Kirsty

I don't have good poetry opinions

Werner hotzdog

what if taking drugs doesn't make you bad?

Colin

you're chattin rubbish mate

Kirsty

But I do know about drugs And u should all do lsd

Werner hotzdog

My thesis advisor who is probably the best regarded dude in his field of Philosophy in the world in this century told me the most important thing he ever did was take acid the one time he did

Peter

oh my god lol

Kirsty

I've been on legal drugs for decades now and I'm all messed up.

Serge

The Great Drugs Fight of Porm's Chaw, February 16th 2016

Jack

I've done lots of drugs too and been thru rehab, certain drugs ain't good but LSD and weed be the truth! Have helped me understand myself and the world, and helped me be comfortable in this body.

Colin

His best friend took it the same time he did and has been in a mental institution since that day in 1971

Peter

FWIW, LSD is used in important research ATM

Serge

When they were 19

Peter

Lmao

Colin

He feels he took his friend's mind on their trip like a twin swallows its twin in utero !!!!

Peter

LSD and weed aren;t the tRUTH, THE truth is the Truth

Kirsty

https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?q=lsd+anxiety+treatment&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjk96ycrP3KAhXItYMKHW06DIcQgQMIGTAA …

Serge

Sorry to come in here ranting about substances. I'll take my dabs and read my books in silence.

Colin

He could feel it happening during the trip and when he emerged he was a genius and his friend was a dithering shell in a home forever

Peter

that's crazy

Colin

Yeow, MAH

Serge

seriously

Kirsty

that does not sound like a Positive Drugs Experience

Jack

Also, Serge, the new research on psychedelics has me super happy

Colin

Pommes, Timothy Leary

Kirsty

He says it made him what he is

Peter

LSD is only damaging if you are genetically predisposed to psychosis

Colin

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Hahaha true Kirsty the Truth is the Truth

Peter

Colin, Yeah, me too!!! I have never taken, but it looks promising, my kids may never have to deal with anxiety, alcoholism, schizophrenia, etc

Serge

True Colin but wouldn't you say I am about as close to insane as one gets without being a Problem?

Peter

Yeah it's an amazing substance that I want to bless the whole world

Colin

well as someone who has done all the drugs, expressly left school to make more time for all the drugs, and now does none of the drugs except the odd one at parties i guess i'm not in a position to quarrel about someone who's done none of the drugs trying some of the drugs

Kirsty

I mean, Colin: Yeah, me too!!! I have never taken, but it looks promising, my kids may never have to deal with anxiety, alcoholism, schizophrenia, etc

Serge

Hahahah I feel like calling you "insane" gets into ableist language

Colin

The people I feel most immediate mental kinship with are raving schizophrenes in subway tunnels. We talk for hours, and completely understand each other This worries me Oh probably, sorry about that

Peter

Kristy, I feel you that people should be responsible with drugs, and have certainly set my own self back thru my drug use, certain drugs are definitely Good

Colin

peter you are so fortunate to have your natural high inbuilt

Kirsty

i'm just. not all that interested. risks seem to outweigh rewards and i'm aware i'm quite susceptible to addiction as it is

Jack

U can't get addicted to acid

Werner hotzdog

I am a Yeatsian gyre let's say. I kind of need my falconer sober so he can hear me maybe

Peter

Peter you seem perfectly cogent to me

Colin

Kirsty, I think it's nice that you give insight. It's good to get informed of where you're going in life. To acknowledge past experiences ensures not committing past errors, etc.

Serge

Half my family are alcoholics it worries me yeah but I agree in principle Colin

Peter

yah but you can apparently lose your mind to acid haha

Jack

Addiction isn't much to worry about with weed and LSD but as someone whose been in treatment and had to actually get sober off some shit that was ruining my life, I understand your discretion

Colin

Oh you can But yeah like Colin said only if you're teetering

Peter

yeah i mean weed seems fine and i wouldn't mind trying it again but at the same time i'm not really that bothered

Jack

I get concerned inquiries about my mental health several times a week and it isn't just the depression it's mainly the opposite end of the spectrum. It gives me pause

Peter

There's no evidence to show LSD actually causes brain damage, if I'm properly informed

Colin

Oh wow Colin I didn't realize I hope you're well and the recovery is going well for you!

Peter

thanks Serge. it gives the experiences an extant value if i can share them and have any hope of making someone elses life easier with the sharing thereof

Kirsty

I'm 3 years clean of amphetamines with only one 2 month long relapse

Colin

I already eat too much and listen to Floyd and say weird shit about it in the dark for hours lol

Peter

I'm proud of that

Colin

hahaha peter

Jack

big time, well done colin

Kirsty

Stories I've heard are just anecdotes not science about LSD for sure

Peter

i get high off #Art mostly music

Jack

You should be congratulations!

Peter

Haha I definitely get high off art

Colin

can you help me give up smoking

Kirsty

Same my dudes

Peter

But have you ever gotten high off art (in John Stewart from half baked voice) on weeeeed????

Colin

Colin, there are concerns Re: LSD and how the mind deals with the trip - no actual brain damage, lesions, etc AFAIK.

Serge

Bahahahaha So what's the concern Serge?

Peter

haha no the one time i had weed i was just sat in a park with my friends looking at dogs

Jack

au revoir gentlemen

Kirsty

tot ziens kirsty!

Jack

Kirsty bye it's always nice to read from you.

Serge

http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/03/truth-about-psychedelics-and-mental-illness.html … there's no correlation between psychedelics and mental illness

Werner hotzdog

Aww don't leave Kirsty! I am following your actually informed life advice!

Peter

Serge, that's kinda what I'm saying. A healthy mind can deal with a trip, an unhealthy one could fall into psychosis. I'm not gonna say the unreality you experience isn't hard on the brain haha Bonnie nuit, kristy!

Colin

My mom had a 4 pack a day cig habit that's one I'm never touching I don't have a healthy mind lol By any definition

Peter

Well me neither But imm merely neurotic and want to kill my self on my worst days

Colin

everyone pops up in here when you bring up drugs eh

Jack

Colin, totally in agreement. Please note: I'm not remotely knowledgeable Re: drugs and I am way out of my element here, but I have done some research BC of my own issues, and I think I would do LSD if it were in a controlled environment with health professionals.

Serge

I want to sleep until I can wake up in a world in which I would not be a shameful display, but never really to self harm thank god. I'm so lucky in this way Hahaha Drug Chaw

Peter

yea i only ever like - emotionally self-harm i guess lucky in that too

Jack

I'm sorry to hear that Colin, Re: self harm. My 9 year old talks about self harm. I see it happening in him. It is difficult.

Serge

I never want to self harm--death is an answer to anxiety for me when life feels too crazy, out of my control, I can always choose to end it.

Colin

I hope you guys feel better depression is not fun

Werner hotzdog

yah i feel you colin

Jack

I'm fairly well now--honestly in part to my LSD use--and don't thinking about Erasing My Own Map, as DFW puts it, on a daily basis anymore

Colin

Colin, same, but I never have nor have had self harm scenarios as a solution for my anxiety during an attack.

Serge

speaking of acid and being high on music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoS9rEfHKwo …

Jack

Ha ha ha speaking of music!!' Have y'all listened to the new animal collective album

Colin

I'm glad everyone is doing well in this way now Yeah I just browbeat myself fiercely

Peter

Love too self hate

Werner hotzdog

i have never got around to animal collective

Jack

oh man! they're the best this year has been so good for music so far, their new album just a fraction of why

Colin

Major, please remind me your name, I forgot it but I gathered through these chats just now that it's Peter right?

Serge

It's actually Pee-odor We call him Peter to be polite bc his parents were dicks

Colin

haha what else have you loved this year? i loved that bowie album, savages' new album, and like two or three tracks off that new kanye "album"

Jack

I need to listen to the new Kanye

Colin

you ah, probably don't

Jack

But the future and young thug releases in 2016 have been so far

Colin

it's viscerally disappointing for the most part lol

Jack

Peter, I will try hard to remember.

Serge

Nah I need to hear it bc I love him so much haha

Colin

Hahahaha true My display name was "Pee-odor Dostoevsky" for a while lol

Peter

the first track is really great, with chance the rapper on it

Jack

Yeah! That's why I made my joke

Colin

I like the new Kanye but I'm worried about his mental health

Werner hotzdog

The one with young thug is dope

Colin

Serge any name will do no worries Hahahaha

Peter

"I wish my dick had...go pro!!" lol

Colin

This music stuff is edifying for me because I'm not hip

Peter

i'm just sick of his shit i think lmao

Jack

Can you guys give me a quick impression of a dream I had? Rebecca already saw it but don't think anyone else did

Peter

he fuckin just didn't try at all with the lyrics on most songs i think

Jack

Please be more hip Peter

Colin

I am in a musical slump. I've been listening to the same music for decades. The new additions to my collection are DumDum Girls, Explosions in the Sky. That's it. :/

Serge

go ahead peter?

Jack

I woke up writing this like a week ago The vision was weird because it felt like dying but in a good way The voice doesn't sound like me and I don't know if I can edit this into usefulness

Does it flow ok? Is it nonsense? Do I see the vision only because I saw it in the dream? Just quick yea or nea is enough here

Peter

violent

Jack

Peter, it's colourful. :)

Serge

i dunno it does feel like you in several ways 'dreory' for one haha

Jack

It is a nice read, it'd take some time for me to parse.

Serge

(Side note: did you notice me using "amidships" in my story? word's been in my head since i read pound haha)

Jack

Hahaha yes the vocab for sure is typical haunts

Peter

i like a sudden lack

Jack

It feels alien somehow idk why Hahaha yes!! Canto I indeed sat we amidships wind jamming the tiller!

Peter

probably because of the dream origin

Jack

That found its way into a poem of mine too Jack lol I'll find it sometime Oh good point yes To me each stanza successively becomes less questionable, oddly

Peter

the sudden lack line is reminding me of a line from something i wrote which went iirc something like: needs filling up with some substance to relieve the lack.

Jack

Maybe because I was waking up So the end starts to seem more like an actual poem that works like a poem I like that very much!

Peter

yeah like it was less just jotting down impressions as it went on maybe i'll have to dig up that poem, it was ok i think

Jack

Sounds good imo Makes sense yeah Hahaha yeah at least it isn't Pound pastiche or whatever it kind of is me basically just it feels weird and I can't say why

Peter

Jack

I mean "lachrymony" is some grade A peter bullshit

Peter

yeah i dunno it is more impressionistic, less structured maybe your kubla khan which is coleridge's best poem so, take it as a compliment

Jack

"Testament of Tears" would maybe be an equivalent line and somewhat savorier Better than Mariner even Jack? I'll buy it. And what about Depression? I probably agree tho That's absurdly high praise lol

Peter

i say this in broad ignorance of coleridge's output really, it's just the one i've liked best haha i like it better than mariner for sure tho

Jack

There's a lot in there I like Jack Most especially your rhythms as usual for me Which you'll note is what I value most in a poet probably I'm not a Bloomian, the vision alone isn't sufficient

Peter

me too probably

Jack

You negotiate real speech well too I have the sense that could be tightened but there is nothing bad in it

Peter

what do you mean about speech?

Jack

No touch of maudlin sentimentality in a topos that's gotta be the hardest not to do that in

Peter

yeah i get that sense too. it's quite an old one i haven't looked at it in a long time

Jack

Oh like "the vulgar tongue" It's not haughty poemy language or a fake cummings register etc

ah right yeah

Jack

It's good work I might tinker with it at some point if that's suitable and try and do a Pound

Peter

cheers

Jack

I admire that a lot I can't do that for shit

Peter

that would be lovely! even though i have no idea what i'm doing with any of this poetry at this point

Jack

It feels like dying when I try Too scary

Peter

i think what you do is equally valid though

Jack

What would anyone do with a poem mate?

Peter

that kind of poetic whirlwind of reference and unusual language

Jack

Let me know if you find out!

Peter

haha let them rot in a word file apparently

Jack

I appreciate that and in my happiest moments I probably agree But, you might actually get read by like more than a dozen people. Dozens of thousands even Millions even!

Peter

haha very doubtful

Jack

I don't doubt it tbh

Peter

well you're very optimistic for me

Jack

All I request of this world is a reader more literate than me who can set my lands in order and has a vexing passion for my work that drives her to bathe in my rivers and streams and produce some lucid critical work I can read and discover what the hell my life was all about One reader such

Peter

hahaha it must be difficult being the most literate man on earth

Jack

It will be like coming back from the Sarbonne here as Stevens describes it

I'm very optimistic in re Jack. You're very good, you're young, you'll get much better, and there's no impediment whatsoever to your being read Lol I'm far from that. But the many who are far wiser and sager - etymologically the people who see clearly and taste with refinement - mostly will never read anything I write and for good reason. And as for the few mermaids that do I do not think they'll sing to me

Peter

except my crippling lack of ability to motivate myself to write or navigate the world in even the most basic ways let alone go through the complicated channels of getting published

Jack

I want to be a Pound in many ways but one of the most pressing is the impressario role

Peter

if blake can be a mainstream object of study now you can be imo

Jack

I might could do it for some of youse, I could get the enthusiasm going Man if I could see like that guy could see! Some day Jack. We grow and grow, nothing collapses

Peter

i am happy to be impresarioed but afraid my oeuvre is a bit thin on the ground

Jack

Yeah we gotta make up a movement that captures the zeitgeist

Peter

the pommes chyort movement

Jack

One thing that has occurred to me is an epic that works even tho it modarn because it is sewn together from different poets Double down on the incoherence - death trampled down by death - incoherence of epic redeemed by this other dimension of incoherence that's so frankensteined it perfectly traces the sutures of our walking dead world lumbering under its electric sponsorship

Peter

haha that sounds....... ambitious

Jack

Multimedia too - performance art surely, opera even in a modern idiom idk Idk! Yah that's all that can get me hard anymore, the absurd scenarios

Peter

i try to avoid ambition because i'm aware of my own inability

Jack

I can actually work toward something I can't fail at because failure is inevitable Makes sense right? ;-)

Peter

i guess on some level haha i'm just happy when i can finish a story

Jack

Honestly the more impossible the more likely I am to work steadily. It's odd And you get *somewhere* "A story isn't cool. You know what's cool? A BILLION stories"

Peter

hahaha

Jack

I did really well with my business when I was aiming at transforming the modern workplace. I employed 4 of my best friends and we all lived comfortably. When I started just wanting to maintain lifestyle I stopped putting in any effort I work like 3 days a month now It's such a problem for me not to feel heaped and tasked as Ahab put it

Peter

i'm just perennially incapable of doing anything lol

Jack

Whatever I am as a poet was me trying to carve out a harmony between the moderns and the romantics and blaze a path forward. To do a sort of epic of lyrics. When I started trying to just write poems I now don't attend to them at all I advise hypomania Jack. Only thing that's ever had me do a single productive task :/

Peter

let us call our new movement, Perpetual Lethargy

Jack

Has a ring

Peter

[Peter changed the group name to Perpetual Lethargy]

good name for like a black metal band

Jack

Maybe that's what we are

Peter

i've got my red pen out to annotate these pieces i'm supposed to be looking at for writing group tomorrow

Jack

"the thorough-sought pains of lethe"

Peter

#progress

Jack

Less ringly #keepworking Fare forward says Krishna to Arjuna

Peter

it is slightly depressing how many people on my course's sole interest in writing is doing "dark" versions of fairy tales or just plain children's fiction sorry i'm getting frustrated reading this stuff for the writing group because i have nothing productive to say about it beyond "i would not read this" lol

Jack

Lmao that's the worst I mean, feeling just like "I can't comment on this"

Peter

yeah "we are not doing the same thing. somebody might like this but it is beyond my purview"

Jack

I took one poems class in university and it was like that only maybe 15% of the time which was good Because I shared nothing with any of those people Most notably - I was the only dude among 10 women

Peter

yeah i'm the only guy in most of my classes i kind of don't mind, the one guy in my creative writing study group is writing terrible shit in a completely different way lol like fuckin, screeds against political correctness and the evils of women

Jack

Jesus Yeah I didn't miss dudes it was actually refreshing I just felt like an elephant

Peter

yeah lol thankfully he's even lazier than me and just never turns up which is a relief

Jack

Like I didn't want to stomp around loudly and I wanted to appear to not be just this out of place imposition on them

Peter

hmm yeah i don't really make male friends irl?

Jack

Lucky

Peter

like i used to have a bunch but then none of them went to university just stayed at home playing video games and we fell out of touch

Jack

Oh Wooow

Peter

Worlds apart and then all of the few guys on my course are like the opposite, frighteningly attractive social butterflies who i would only ever feel inferior to

Jack

I'm too focused on being the weird thing I wanna be to feel inferior irl It's awesome

Peter

haha i would love to feel that way

Jack

I only feel inferior on line and in books and like when I consider someone while in my solitude It's grand

Peter

i think i would mostly just like to be Normal™

Jack

Oh god please I would die I worry I am sometimes and I almost puke from anxiety

Peter

i think we have the opposite reactions to our respective weirdnesses haha

Jack

For sure I like the Jack deal tho Savory

Peter

haha the Jack deal?

Jack

Yah the weirdness thereof

Peter

im glad someone appreciates it haha

Jack

I revel in it most lustily

Peter

excellent kind

Jack

this person has chosen the rhyme scheme "every line in each stanza has the same rhyme" it's the most awkward thing and it makes me sad because i don't want to be mean about it

Jack

Whoa How many lines per stanza?

Peter

alternately four and five its so bad

Jack

Wow that's...a whole thing

Peter

:(

Jack

it's also straining after some kind of metre but consistently missing it i don't really know what to do with this that isn't just demolishing it

Jack

Oh jeez

Peter

wahhhh help lol

Jack

Sometimes you gotta be harsh with your criticism? I'm bad at helping people w poetry but I know I’ve read thematic analysis from people and had to look at them and just straight up say "dude you're totally missing the point here"

Colin

I can't unless the person is real good and they need to cut the shit and they basically know it. It's too hard otherwise

Peter

Hahaha that's a triply problem to encounter Colin yeah that's the thing peter otherwise it feels like you're just condemning them

Jack

Lmao Idk sometimes they just don't know and they need to be told otherwise!! Like they've literally just been told "oh this is good...." About they're work forever

Colin

true but there's alevel of not-knowing that is not easily fixable by me haha i think it's cuz the guy who is supposed to be running the poetry part of our creative writing module is totally unresponsive to emails and stuff, so all the poets have no-one to show their work to

Jack

I agree with all of this but lack the stones

Peter

(Turning to Peter) did you just use a gendered metaphor for courage

Colin

like if you tell them "this is shit" you're taking on the responsibility to help them make it not shit lol

Jack

Man a delegating asshole

Peter

my comments look even harsher bc im using my red pen

Jack

Hmmmm...how to save...um, my personal courage is lacking because of my biological problem which is my lack of testicles Or also um stones ain't got genders at all they are geologies Yeah I shouldn't do that though obviously didn't even notice is the crazy part

Peter

Hahaha I'm just giving you a hard time. I often slip the word "retarded" when I know full well I shouldn't

Colin

[clamatoes]

Poems Chat Transcript Sunday, 2/14/16

Togbreeny and my stomach tight phrases are SO COOL I love language so much so it really was a treat to see some info on farsi & arabic straight from the source Abeer you are so knowledgable on so many things, you are a super fascinating person with all the info you've imparted onto me by just lying low in the background but I'm saving togbreeny and keeping it in my back pocket

Rebecca

Omg i didnt see this peter i'll listen to this now!! HOLY SHIT THANK YOU im not at all but youre so kind you made my day!!

Abeer 

Gotta second the endorsement of Abeer as knowledge fountain, but also such a good witness and conveyor of those beauties that slumber in the gaps between our knowledge. A rare combo and extremely excellent OK if anyone has a minute - does this cadence/intonation make sense for this sonnet? I gotta record it as a video soon and idk. LOL when I wake up my voice is like an octave deeper for an hour https://soundcloud.com/user-840824539-233389862/shakespeares-sonnet-77 …

Peter 

I like your giggle at 0:27

Rebecca

hahaha ty i feel like there's supposed to be levity in that line and with video I could get it across with like a wry smile - but i guess i should keep the giggle then!

Peter

sounds right to me but I don't catch levity? Perhaps it's me

Rebecca

I could be dead wrong tbh But like "that mirror is going to tell the absolute unfiltered truth about the lines on your face that you like to forget are there, multiplying" And then having that juxtaposed with the "mouthed graves" image. Maybe it's all supposed to be somber tho, those two lines. Not sure

Peter 

I mean in that line, yes, but as a whole it escapes me

Rebecca

Maybe not levity but like a wry type humor. Maybe not, now that you've got me thinking I think it's incredibly complex as a poem and most lines have several meanings One thing Nathan helped me with immensely was pointing out its about the narrator giving a diary to a protege The vacant leaves and the book are of the empty diary So like the mirror/glass shows beauties wearing away, the clock/dial shows time wearing away in a similar way, the diary will bear "thy mind's imprint" in the way that the mirror and the sundial take impressions from your face as it changes and shadows as they fleet to mark time The "waste blanks" are basically the empty spaces in the journal. "Discover what thy memory can't hold, and then hand those things over to the spaces in the diary" And suddenly those thoughts or memories or ideas will be nursed like children, "delivered" (like a obgyn does, or like a salvific hero does) from thy brain to take a new acquaintance of thy mind - you can sort of see your thoughts and memories in a new light, then having metaphorically been reversed in age into children and given newness and freshness again by the transformational process of writing "So oft as thou wilt look" seems to me a huge crux at the end there - looking *is* the "office" of the writer-down-of-things, keen observation the externalization into writing of which somehow saves the mind from the decay that afflicts the body in wrinkles etc But there's other stuff going on I haven't yet unpacked. Like little wrinkles betokening open graves and shady stealth of little slightly moving shadows betokening the infinite progress of universal time. It's like what you can see with your eye in simplicity is actually the same as the biggest universal mysteries. Man is the measure of all things etc So your diary, this little book of "reflections" (like the mirror ) can actually encapsulate everything there is in this hyperbolic sweep

Peter 

Ahaha awesome Listening a couple more times I can hear a certain lightness

rebecca 

But also a line like "of mouthed graves will give the memory" can be read not just as "will call to mind for you the image of open graves" but also "will bring you memory out of opened graves, 'mouthed' graves which don't just eat but also speak" - a sort of image of resurrection here which I guess is always a preoccupation of the poet since Orpheus, and obviously a fixation on this poem - time slips away, what can we bring back from the grave etc. So there's a ton going on here and I haven't figured it all out yet. Nathan and I chatted about it and I'll post a link to that transcript ASAP but I think I remembered like 90% of here anyway I think Shakespeare especially in the sonnets has this joy in his jaunty voice and its easy power, and it makes even really heavy topics swift and delightful. And maybe to some extent that's even what this topic is about. If you trope on even death and decay, and do it beautifully enough, cleverly enough, they become in this telling things of great enjoyment. That's a transfiguration of sorts surely, maybe even a resurrection out of mouthed graves who *speak* the dead, but maybe don't *quite* "vomit" them! Hahaha Rebecca thanks for the reflection on "lightness" I hadn't thought of that and you full on gave me this last comment the end of which especially makes me feel clearer about this sonnet. Great ear!!

Peter 

I don't know who else has that kind of chattering voice that sometimes says poetry at them - I know Jack mentioned having this experience - but I was just walking the dog and I "heard" this and I'm not sure what to think of it (much less what to DO with it) but it made me viscerally feel like the bronze spears of the falling afternoon sun were the the galloping waves of a nuclear annihilation: "a bone scrawn, one of the starved, a speck of this weary century in the strew of its diffusion, confused by fusion like fuming shadows in Nagasaki" The idea that one or both of the Brits in here say "pommes chore" is cracking me up atm 

~~~~~Jack changed the group name to Pommes, Chyort!~~~~~

peter for me it's not so much a chattering voice as an occasional thing that solemnly pops up and tells me something poetic or mock-profound, which maybe accounts for our different levels of effusiveness haha that's some good Porm there though def use it for something it's got teeth

Jack 

Your description sounds like what mine should've been Jack, as usual For me it's always exact words to write down tho, the voice

Peter 

yea same

Jack

stories come out of the gradual piling-up of the things, when i come to recognise a theme or common use for all the fragmentary phrases

Jack

Awesome thanks, I hope I can. For the last year or so I haven't tried at poems at all with any craft or patience. Some shit bubbles up in dreams or unattended moments and I don't do anything about it other than write it down. Ironically it makes the voice more active but also less useful lol. It's like monks and nocturnal emissions I guess That's exactly how my poems tend to happen Jack. I've not written a narrative since grammar school apart from the very loosely narrative expanse of this worthless novel I occasionally peck at

Peter

yeah i have great difficulty getting anything down on paper even when it's constantly bubbling up in my head apart from your 40k words in a night or whatever it was, you mean

Jack 

That was crit tho

Peter 

ah right, thought you mentioned it having something to do with a novel

Jack

Oh yeah I hope to include it or some piece of it in there as one of these dichotomies - crane vs stevens Also Socrates vs Nietzsche and some others. Truly boring bullshit To sort of adumbrate the philosophy of this schizophrenic hobo lmao

Peter 

hahaha

Jack

Yah. Heraclitus vs Parmenides too. Just fun reading for the whole family I think it's not a novel so much as a heretical religious text ahahaha but I might be able to make it have a plot

Peter 

hey man blake wrote plenty of heretical religious texts that were mistaken for poetry collections so

Jack

very blakean tbh, deals a lot with urizen and los and all them zoas too hahaha. i cannot make it cohere i'm sure

Peter

who can, in this day and age

Jack

the fevered aspiration i can acknowledge with anything other than laughter only in actual dreams or in the thrill of some fleeting hypomania, is to make the world cohere with this somehow it's too much for my shallow learning and even shallower attention span and work ethic tho and i don't know how to break it down into pieces that might in themselves be worth reading and also actually doable

Peter 

i'm lacking a Big Thing that i want to write really. just a diffusion of small things i couldn't keep going long enough to write a coherent novel and i don't understand pacing at all

Jack 

Pacing in what sense like how many hours a day to write or like the speed of the prose?

I have one big thing I would gladly exchange for good small ones lol

Peter 

haha i meant the latter but definitely the former too

Jack

I have 2,500 pages of notes toward this, and 14 hours of voice memos so far. I'm in the exposition, with some notes on how it ends. No clue of arc or more than the 2 main characters and their conversations Yeah that's hard as hell - both things are lol

Peter 

i was showing the thing i'm currently working on to my irl writing group and they were like 'is this part of a novel? i'd read it!' which made me shrink away in terror lol 2500 pages is insane

Jack 

Also, I haven't ever re-read any of the notes. I'm terrified of looking at them I might as well be throwing them away instead of saving them I suspect Dude don't be afraid you can do this

Peer 

even if it's crap i'm envious of just the ability to write that much at all

Jack

I'm happy to be a sounding board if it removes some fear also in some way so just let me know whenever I can be useful

Peter

haha it wasn't part of a novel though. for now at least it's just a short story

Jack

It's not exactly crap but it doesn't much matter that it isn't you know? It's dense and allusive and obdurate and rococo and insane Short stories are actually harder according to most famous novelists ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Peter 

In 14th Century England, flower production skyrocketed as agricultural practices advanced, and florist’s apprentice Geoffrey Chaucer scrambled to increase market demand, claiming that giving flowers to your lovers on Valentine’s Day was the highest form of courtly love and also warded off Saint Valentine’s Malady, epilepsy. In the Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath actually tells her boyfriend that a “magyk natureel” can undo a “mayde abood fornicacioun” with a gift of “fleurs.” Clever product placement indeed. Chaucer was a genius businessman and his plan worked, sparking a worldwide cultural and commercial phenomenon. Flower sales took off, epilepsy rates were unchanged, and Valentine’s Day became a holiday for sexing instead of ex-ing.

Kirsty

It's literally insane. It is a madman's hollered jeremiad against the wind. But it knows that's what it is and its whole project is to claim that madness is wisdom despite being madness etc

Peter 

just dropped by to fyi

Kirsty

What a great story Kirsty!!

Peter 

haha yeah but i don't know if i'm writing short stories out of inability to write anything longer rather than actual ability in that area lol hahaha dropping the #chaucerfact curse you chaucer for inventing this day of loneliness

Jack 

silly geoffrye he knew not what he dun what you guys talking about? football?

Kirsty 

yes

Jack

:) so glad you liked the gogol stuffs, j

Kirsty

it's great! thanks for giving me the push in that direction, i never get round to things otherwise

i dunno what it is about russian literature. it seems especially in the 19th century just so much better than any of its contemporaries in western europe? like i love tolstoy but am completely cold on dickens

Jack

Dickens is a genius but I can't care The Russians are bae, as the kids say

Peter 

the russians are hardcore

Kirsty

and yet dickens is like, a huge influence on tolstoy, so my position really makes no sense

Jack

that's not true

Kirsty

which part

Jack

i have very little idea why i was so ready to say that lol

Kirsty 

hahaha

Jack

it's been a torrid time lately. i'm going to shut up and sleep. much love to all in pommes, chyort on this chaucerian horror confection anniversary!

Kirsty

goedenacht Kirsty, zoete dromen

Jack

Good night Kirsty!!

Peter

[clamatoes]

Poems Chat Transcript Saturday, 2/13/16

Abeer lets get to this poem you sent today and also maybe some Lowell if you want? I'm sleep tho so tomorrow adieu adieu hugs and kisses to the chaw entire round to each and each snug around The Paris Review @parisreview “Poets love the world and fiction writers want to create an alternate universe.” —Mary Karr http://bit.ly/1yNNkLs  https://twitter.com/parisreview/status/698402549133635584 … interesting quote I've been delinquent on archiving but will catch up a bit today. For everyone new: we have the chat archived by date and also by poem discussed at: http://clamatoes.tumblr.com/archive  Some of the poems are even originals by people in the chat! What are the pormes that chawe? What tweeters grow out of this horney rubbish? Thirsty man, you cannot say or guess, for you groan lonely o'er puns with suggestive messages...

Peter 

peter

Jack

Bahaha sorry Jack, when I take showers, tragedies occur Such as my Keats catastrophe that was actually about how taking showers is the devil

Peter

lol

Jack

Anyone else doing these Shakespeare sonnet videos

Peter 

not me, the coward of whom his animated face will not show on the web

Jack

lol

Peter

welcome reg gen

Shayan

You should dude your mug is good imo. But I understand. I'm apprehensive about it myself, as with the voice. Adding to what people can perceive of you is scary because they may have liked the other modalities better

Peter 

i spend a lot of time trying to figure out what "modality" of my being it is exactly that puts people off me but who the fuck knows i guess

Jack

I have been struggling with that question my entire life. I blame it all on growing up with two cultures but deep down I know that explanation is futile

Shayan

Existential despair solidarity fistbump

Jack

[fist bump emoji]

check it out yall according to Whorfian hypothesis, the people in this chat have more sophisticated processing of their sensorium than common plebs, given their overwhelming vocabulary and language skill

Shayan 

Lol nice. Whorf was discredited but then became influential again. It's real interesting. It looks now like language and cognition are a reflective equilibrium, according to what I've read. The analogy I have in mind is a system of roads that were dug gradually by years of mule carts using the same paths and slowly carving grooves. It's easier to move heavy shit by mule cart and it's easier to use the grooves than to off road. So the language you've got determines your cognition in aggregate as a practical matter, but it isn't purely deterministic. But learning a new language is of course the very process of carving new mule ruts. So it's no surprise it expands your cognitive ability and also further determines your cognitive tendencies by means of its acquisition What I wonder about is whether poets establish new mule ruts not according to cognitive efficiency (which would almost always favor using the old roads: cliches, tropes etc, except when a new concept is so exotic as to require new roads to connect it to our pre-existing network of ideas) but according to sort of the opposite principle: making surprising or difficult syntax for musical effect or even just to make us pause and think and focus on words as sounds and have difficulty construing semantics so that we find ideas and concepts fresh and new and beautiful again

Peter

The analogy you made is an image of positive reinforcement, which I am also learning about. If im correct, it has to do with behaviorist theory I think I'm following along

Is this sort of what you're getting at? The interplay between these theories and how they might apply to poets?

Shayan

Good point Shayan. I think that's maybe a bit reductionist (which behavorism always seems to me to be) but basically right as an abbreviation. Positive reinforcement here is being understood adequately by another, say In re Whorf: eg, Russian speakers have to tense their verbs in bizarre ways that involve thinking about aspects of actions we normally ignore as English speakers - eg, one of their dozens of tenses is for if an action is interrupted by something and then continues. You can't just say "I drove to Ohio and stopped for gas along the way" you need a different tense for "drive." It stands to reason that having to build all this information into utterances to make them coherent to other speakers of your language would make you pay attention to it instinctively and better than speakers of other languages

Peter 

totally agree about "surprising or difficult syntax" - if we go back to this berryman piece https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGIr7fGdo6o … i think what it's doing is not carving new ruts but i guess going offroad

Jack

Some tribes in the outback don't have relative directions. They say like "your fork is north north-east of your knife" not "to the left of it" Even in a like labyrinth they know which way is north or south etc. I could never keep track, as an English speaker

Peter 

yes! Just learned about that- the acquisition is influenced by a desire to communicate with those around you

Shayan

Now evolutionarily the reason a language would develop that way is that it was adaptive to do so. Language evolves like everything else and I think positive reinforcement as you said is the essential mechanism. Equatorial tribes tend to have fewer words for colors. They have like "black white and red" only a lot of times. Northern latitude peoples have tons of words for colors, not because there was more color but probably because it was more surprising when it happened and thus important. Crazy and counterintuitive stuff Makes sense Jack. Evading sense to build a new encounter with sense, as it were "And there I found myself more truly and more strange" Stevens says. He may have said "and there I found my sense more truly and more strange"

Peter 

More surprising when what happened exactly?

Shayan

I think we try to get rid of the second-order nature of language and meaning and life and make first-order encounters of it again, we poets

Peter

I believe what you call "adaptive" evolutionary biologists call "advantageous"

Shayan

They apprehended colors Rainforests are full of strange and exotic colors Ah ok good to know Shayan I'm just thinking out loud so I'm sure my nomenclature will be quite wrong very often lol Rainforests are full of color but like Lapland isn't, for instance The Innuit snow example makes sense to us because they live in snow The lack of color words in tropical climes seems to be an opposite phenomenon I had like a week of linguistics in a psych course and listened to a podcast once but I stayed at a holiday inn express last night Ah I bet no one knows those commercials but me

Peter 

Thank you Shayan

The Halitosis Sharer

That's a lovely example Jack Abeer knows a ton about linguistics. My sister has a degree in it and is smart as hell but has no interest in twitter or in poetry

Peter 

Hey guys i love this dm group so much its my favourite! I dont really know a lot about linguistics im studying it as an undergad so i have very basic knowledge We studied a lot of the theories shayan is talking about in acquisition class but they are applied to the acquisition of language i.e: how do children learn how to speak? And then how do adults learn a second language? Skinners behaviorist theory has been disproved, it assumes that children learn by conditioning, they copy adults exactly and see that they get rewarded for it What behaviorism doesnt account for is how children come up with new forms theyve never heard (i.e: mistakes that contain grammar structures that dont exist in the language) Chomskys theory on the otherhand assumes that language is innate, with a particular (not yet found?) place in the brain responsible for language acquisition. A Universal Grammar sort of thing that explains how theres only a specific set of possibilities that a language forms its self and usually most languages in the world follow no more than 25 patterns i think? Linguistics is an extremely complicated relatively new field that has multiple competing theories Plus its often times a social science which makes it extra complicated and hard to prove/disprove My personal opinion is that language is a reflection of culture. And that it does not effect the way you think, but it could change they way you behave as it carries with it the pragmatics and social customs of the speakers of this culture Some languages have more rules of politeness, some languages allow for more direct speech Those are only my opinions!

Abeer 

Abeer it makes sense. You are all so learned

The Halitosis Sharer 

That's real interesting Abeer I think it doesn't restrict how you think in a way you can't overcome, but I think it definitely influences it especially when you're not trying to resist it. There was a great podcast I heard about this I'll find a link

Peter 

Thank you!! Im really not I've been studying this for three years and i still don't know shit! Peter id love that link so much I saw an interview with the you gest polyglot who speaks 20 languages and he said something about this I'll find it!

Abeer 

I'm sure it's way beneath your learning rn but it had a good idea or two in it

Peter 

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cKlWBKhe2rs …

Abeer

I REALLY DONT KNOW A LOT AT ALL I PROMISE YOU hehe

Abeer 

Wow wow thanks Abeer I'll check this out soon it's gonna take me a bit I'm driving

Peter

It's cool, I actually understood what he was talking about. I didn't watch him talk all of the different languages, only some. Smart!!

The Halitosis Sharer

Enjoy bb!

Abeer

Abeer everything you said aligns with what I've learned! Are Arabic and farsi as similar as German and english?

Shayan

What book are you reading shayan? It looks cool!!

Abeer

I want to start picking up Arabic. Are letters pronounced the same in farsi and Arabic?

Shayan

Sadly no, arabic is a semetic language and farsi is an indo european language Farsi has lots of arabic loan words and the same alphabets but in truth its closer to Portuguese than it is to arabic i think. But speaking farsi will definitely make learning arabic easier for you! Bc of your knowledge of so many words already But english and german are both germanic languages, they don't only have common words but common syntax and grammar structures! You should!! I really wanna learn farsi we could help each other shayan!!! Most letters are similar but a couple are pronounced differently! I think as a farsi speaker the easiest languages for u to learn are probably urdu and hindi!

Abeer 

The book is called MCAT behavioral sciences review lol

Shayan

Ohhh yeah youre gunna take the MCAT test thing! Good luck!!! If you ever wanna discuss linguistics with me id love to! I have a bunch of books too

Abeer

Very very interesting. I would love to help you learn farsi! My comprehension and reading are way better than my speaking and writing though, be warned Absolutely!! Thank you btw

Shayan 

My main goal of learning farsi is to read poetry so reading is what matters most to me! You're totally welcome!

Abeer

شوكران آبير

Shayan

ممنون شايان

Abeer

reading Farsi is half a guessing game based on context. Lots of sounds get skipped in writing depending on where the sound is in the word. I also have a terrible grasp of how capitalization works just a heads up is that how it works in written Arabic too?

Shayan 

My friend ehsan is helping me and he says the same thing about the guessing part :( its soer of the same in arabic because most of our voweld system depends on accents that no one uses anymore. So i think its the same here yes! But we dont really have capitalization (just another way farsi is more of an indo european language than one influenced by Semitic arabic hehe) The informal farsi word for you is تو yes? Its the same in Spanish and french and and urdu i think! 'Tu' All connected! Its so cool to me

Abeer

OMG I never made that connection!!!! AHHHHH MIND IS EXPLODING

Shayan 

ISNT IT AMAZING?? Language is soooo cool and weird

Abeer

Farsi is so facetious in general, like when people are arguing they refer to each other with terms of endearment

Shayan

SAME OMF THATS HOW IT IS IN ARABIC!

Abeer

haha english too guys “hey BUDDY what the fuck?" "OK pal, move your fucking truck"

Peter 

In general farsi speakers or perhaps iranians saturate their everyday language with terms of adoration and adulation and exaggerated emotions of thankfulness etc

Shayan

I was just thinking of sweetheart lol

Abeer

Haha that's very true

Shayan

Listen, sweetheart

Abeer

lol exactly abeer

Peter

Oi mate

Jack

Yess! I saw a video about that! I think its a middle eastern thing because arabs do it too, so do turkish people (?) and north africans as well haha

Abeer

in English, you just say "I miss you." But in farsi, the common way to say I miss you is to say "my stomach has grown very tight for you" Hahaha interesting

Shayan

Hahaha that's great

Jack

Oh my god Thats beautiful In arabic 'togbreeny' is a term of and endearment which means may you burry me (as in i hope i die before you)

Abeer 

Calling someone your own liver is also a term of endearment Haha wow

Shayan 

that's awesome shayan ahahah what delightful languages

Peter 

Oh my god shayan LITERALLY SAME IN ARABIC

Abeer

Hahahaha good

Good that means there is lots of similarity than I didn't recognize before

Shayan

This is amazing!! Love it.

The Halitosis Sharer

i do too!

Abeer

here's some info about emotions you guys might think is interesting as poets

Shayan 

That is interesting Shayan! Abeer I was telling you about your voice and the cello The first minute of this or so is a good example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1U0hSsHhVZ4 …

Peter

[clamatoes]

Poems Chat Transcript Friday, 2/12/16

Btw this was the comments on my essay if you're interested Peter

Also. What happened last night

Jackhttps://soundcloud.com/user-840824539-233389862/shakespeares-sonnet-77

i smoked indoors. yuk. incredible essay comment Jack.

Kirsty 

Love getting comments like that on my work!

Colin 

i once got one that was like 'once you receive this mark, come to my office and shake my hand' kirsty ye ben yrdronke also thoroughly seconding the kool ad endorsement

Jack 

kool ad is owns haha

Colin 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtmG1srEPgY … this one is the funniest song i've ever heard probably

Jack

What's the word before "in the futurel??

Peter

sensitively, i think! i struggled for a bit too haha

Jack

Glowing reviews that almost convey how good your work was Jack

Peter

my other essay the marker said my style was too informal which i am Skeptical of

Jack

I got a less formal review last night myself, which is a critiment, a criticism wrapped in a compliment or vice versa

Peter

haha what was that ahh haha

Jack 

that's more like a compliment wrapped in a criticsm ya complimism

Jack

You're pretty formal. maybe fluid discursivity is frowned on by some asshole ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Lol my speciality as a recipient lmao

Peter

i like the guy in general he just gives me weird comments out of nowhere on my essays that i've never got from anyone else

Jack

The fuck is a genius anyway

Peter 

i think i took to much DXM and now im both stoned and disassociated in class. help.

Colin

type of mental illness

Jack

Loool

Peter

lmfaob

Shayan

[žižek voice] D-emocracy X-enophobia, M-ilitarization have disassociated all of us *in class* and its struggle!

hahahahah

Colin

lol

Jack

jesus christ

Colin

zing

Shayan

but for real im like next level fucked up in class rn and it's an issue i think lmao

Colin

Be sure to write down notes for a story Ride it out imo

Peter 

accuse the lecturer of some kind of conspiracy or whatever

Jack

hahaha

Colin

That honestly doesn't sound too bad. I like riding the vibes and coasting when I'm lifted in class, just doing my best to pay attention when I can

Shayan

I basically was only ever completely bemused and glowingly half engaged in a class or asleep in it lol so I feel

Peter

Lmao i just want to say i love you all

Abeer

abeer you should and/or definitely shouldn't read through the chat from last night

Jack

Abeer I love you as well but also you missed a night to remember. Imma post all these up soon on the tumblr but I will send you a link to last night Jack has it right. Genau my friend

Peter 

I will!!! IM SO SORRY IT WAS LATE AND I WAS ASLEEP

Abeer

that's a pretty weak excuse abeer

Colin

wow abeer you decided to sleep instead of keeping up with pormes chaw? for shame without abeer this chat would never have come into existence

Shayan 

Abeer doesn't understand why the chat name is now in pseudo-Chaucerian English!

Peter

i'm not sure it's in any language any more

Jack

Bahahaha we are post linguistic her win the ccchr

Peter 

lmao post linguistic is an interesting idea

Shayan 

postlinguistic more like the MOSTlinguistic

Jack

It's really interesting Shayan I'm still wondering about it and what it could mean in practice More like ROASTlingusitic what an absurd set of descriptors fam Canst 'ou my son any chaw maketh, chaw which porme thee? That's what I found myself whispering into the mirror as I washed my face this morning. I think I'm ruined mentally by this dm 

Peter

twitter destroys minds

Shayan

how do you think i feel i became a chaucer parody for a while

Jack

It's definitely done a number on mine. I am quite certain my brain scans would look very different Yours was on script at least and verisimilar and cogent Mine is a nonsense sentence muttered unprompted to myself out of an Ezra Pound fever dream Hahaha I've had like 4 Ezra pound fever dreams irl actually lol He's so angry and I'm so scared

Peter 

are you being haunted

Jack

Did I show you the poem I stole off his desk in a dream???

Peter 

i had a horrible dream the other night apropos the gory bits in ovid lol no?

Jack 

I only made it out with the first stanza until it all faded away into my hypnagogy

Peter

kubla khanite

Jack

This thread explains the context https://twitter.com/clamatoes/status/544725643028865024

And here’s a screenshot of the poem itself:

Peter 

thats certainly very pound yr dreaming mind is capable of impressive pastiche

Jack

The oars gratia artis instead of ars as Odysseus taking his oar far enough from sea to be confused as a winnowing fan etc is still a weird image to me. And Rome being described as stinking like manure but in old English, the anglo forces defeating the Italians in the war, and this extension of britishness in the iambic pentameter of the final line. I just got visited by Pound lol no way that's my idea Your conscious mind is Chaucer tho dude! Much more worthwhile skill. Mine's not even a skill it's an accident

Peter 

i would prefer to be like, kafka or beckett but we can't all get our wishes

Jack

You probably could tbh

Peter 

i've tried with mixed success

Jack

Although you probably aspire to be more than a pastichetician

Peter

i wrote a short story years ago that was basically just a ripoff of Endgame lol

Jack

Is it like Carroll passing off Jabberwocky to scholars as actual Anglo Saxon verse?

Peter

and my second story for this portfolio i intend to be just a huuuge kafka ripoff

Jack

Is it like a lost Beckett?

Peter 

no it's a bit piss tbh

Jack

Doubt that

Peter

i did do a dostoevsky thing that i think genuinely worked and i'm pretty proud of, more recently

Jack

I try to avoid these problems by not reading much

Peter 

me too

Jack

Oh man that's awesome

Peter 

if only this were prose chaw

Jack

you guys see poems in your dreams?????????? whoa

Shayan 

i do not peter sees poems in every inch of reality i think

Jack 

lol tru

Shayan

Bahahahaha hardly just I get fevers the first week of June every year for god knows what reason and they're always interesting We can accommodate proses Jack. At least I can in separate dm. But I'm sure everyone would be thrilled to read anything anyone wants to put out there

Peter 

well i can send over this dostoevsky lite if you want? and then i'd love to share the thing i'm currently working on once it's finished

Jack 

Absolutely to all of the above

Peter 

what's a good way to send it in here then? can't attach files as far as i know

Jack

Well, hmm You can do google drive and post a link

Peter 

hmm ok i'll see if i can figure out how to do that lol

Jack

We should make a Google drive folder for this DM Or maybe a facebook group or something

Shayan 

Good idea

Peter 

does this work? https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B26q7jjd2efGUVNNLWZLa21nelk/view?usp=sharing …

Jack

Indeed!

Peter

[party hat emojis]

Jack 

Well done! Felt some underground and idiot in there

Peter 

hah, i haven't read the idiot yet was mainly channeling underground and crime

Jack 

Makes sense I would say spiritually underground but the technique had that and also something else Crime and punishment makes sense

Peter 

yeah i felt like i was not quite dostoevsky enough to write an entire piece where the protagonist never does anything decisive at all so gave it more of a C&P style plot

Jack

Hahahaha I could've seen it going either way I thought it was tight I often find Whitman or Eliot or Stevens or Pound or Crane or obviously Shakespeare (I mean we all are writing in essentially his English) in my poems but my prose only admits of the conspicuous influence of Kant and occasionally Nietzsche lmao. I pray for the Nietzsche passages Melville maybe if I'm extremely lucky for a page long sentence or two Why is my prose German is the question I ask myself. I haven't really read those dudes in years anyway Not to their stature of course. Just stylistically. It's mostly an awful thing tbh

Peter 

that is pretty weird you're german at heart

Jack 

Or I guess the most I can beautify my prose is into continental philosophy not literature per se

Peter

I feel like post linguistic communication is basically sex lol Or a fist fight

Abeer 

Maybe it's pre linguistic tho. Or both lol Man we're reaching critical horny levels in here we've had to compare something to sex or talk about nipples every 10 posts for the last 24 hours May Day!

Peter 

cunnilinguistic thank you, im here all week

Jack

"Polytropos" Odysseos takes on a whole new meaning

With the twirl of my tongue I encompass girls and vulvas of girls 

Peter 

unacceptable. this is now celibacy chat

Jack

I'm still laughing at my inveterate punnerancy Bahahahahaha I'm bad at puns irl just not in dem chaw

Peter 

Oh my god you guys lol

Abeer

this is a family dm

Jack

We might produce a family if we're not careful Some people find it odd for you to belt the blues tune stuck in your head when you're stuck in line at the coffee shoppe. But I've stuck it to them haven't I then. Chawfessions. I forget I'm visible and in public sometimes lmao

Peter 

lmao i don't it sounds freeing

Jack 

Hahaha "I am the world in which I walk!!!" It's actually a prison of solipsism Jack Uh more like celibracy chat

Peter 

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173954  the ultimate horny poem

Jack

I just always marvel at Whitman making the stars be strung together by jizz Hahaha marvell par excellence The horneyest man in lettres Whitman is unhorny in the way Nin is Too far spent and besprent

Peter

an hundred to adore each breast i know nothing about these writers

Jack

Same [sunglasses emoji] #justpeterthings

Peter 

[party hat emoji]

Jack

People park around this lake and leer into phonographic cellphones. I've espied this lacustrine lewdness twice just today! Ich weiss Whitman nicht, aber ich kenne ihn sehr gut

Peter

what are you multilinguing about now

Jack

I am wise not to Whitman but I ***know**** him

Peter

Is aber me!!!! بيتر

Abeer

hehe aber means but abeer butt

Jack

Looool aber means but in German; Abeer means Butt in every language lmao There's 2 different knowledge verbs in German one is like facts and one is like interpersonal or sexual intimacy I get Whitman's spirit tho I know few of the critical and interpretive "facts" about him. Or so I flatter myself to believe

Peter 

ik ken of ik weet

Jack

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/walt-whitman-rides-the-steamin-demon-rollercoaster-at-six-flags …

Kirsty 

You got it mate

Peter

Lol!!! Kirsty

Peter

hahaha

Jack

Nice im butt

Abeer

kirsty i posted an Prose earlier, if you wanted to catch up y'art but a butt

Jack

What is there butter to be, Abeer?

Peter 

Keep it PG-13 please.

[crymojis] 

Shayan

Im the buttest

Abeer

Burst things burst in the buttest

Peter

two hundred to each breast and thirty thousand to the rest.... oh my

Shayan

Ahahahahaha

Peter

To adore**

Shayan

I was riffing on Abeer's *former* @ tho, the joke is obsolete

Peter 

he doesnt say how many years to adore the butt its a disappointing absence

Jack

the butt deserves 1000000000000000 years

Shayan

maybe thats why he didnt say it, that would take up a lot of syllables to say in words

Jack

Worlds and volumes of worlds

Peter 

http://youtube.com/watch?v=0DdGvvpfMzQ …

Shayan

that has nothing to do with poetry but it has to do with butts

Shayan

peter will find a way to make it relate to poetry

Jack

Butts and poems are One Lol shayan

Peter 

see

Jack

Butts are twain and yet they are one unity. Contemplate this mystery They are cleaved and yet do they not indeed cleave one to the other, being even one?? So are Words with Things, and Things with Us *through* Words

Peter 

The Uncanny Butt(ock): A Thesis

Jack

Except in that it is of course a can: a palinode against Jack of the Crack Jack your new avi - who is the secksy man??

Peter 

i dont know maybe you are looking at a different picture from me

Jack

Ah that old freshman tidbit. Yes maybe green to me to you is rusty\ Look chaw can we mention some haunts, which to me form the atomic matter of Poetry? Those cadences that curl their wires around your synaptic spans and grip like a python their ympreciouns rude into the echoing chasms of your voice-vexed cranial voids!

"Voices of the interminable generation of prisoners and slaves" !!!!!!!!! What fresh hell slaps its surf froth against our unsuspecting shores?!?! "And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the father-stuff" !!! Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil'd...AND I REMOVE THE VEIL I mean you gotta give Walt his props on some savage verses That shit is *raw* And all in a little section It's an ecstasy of slow drawn out pastures mown of its chthonic effluvia casually stacked into mountains. A gentle torture of droplets carving canyons in prehistoric rock. I meaaaaan It's the bible with a boner, and it removes the veil

Peter 

BWAHAHAHAHAHHAHAH.... yeah, I'd say that's an accurate description of Whitman

Nathan

Ahahahaha I'm glad it's been sanctioned by a sober scholar it counts now, done deal Btw do you guys know who Walt Clyde Frazier is? He's a former NBA basketball player for the New York Knicks who was their best player when they won 2 championships in the 70s and has been their announcer of their games since the 80s and still is Anyway, he's very poetical in his announcing, every time he speaks actually Well, one night in NYC I met him at 1am in a McDonald's and ended up letting him sit with me when asked because there were no seats  This thread ensued...

https://twitter.com/clamatoes/status/698255205574537217

hahahaha

Jack 

That's just how he talks in life. He announces basketball action like that "Carmelo Anthony hits a shot heard round the blue and spinning globe, slipping through the basket's cotton casket this orange and spinning globe" or whatnot

Peter 

that's amazing haha

Jack

He has this smooth Lando Calrissian voice too. You gotta google a call of his I'm sure there's some clips on YouTube

Oh my god That's so great lmao

Colin 

his name is a great poet name too

Jack

I would do it but ye bryttons can't access it I agree! Clyde is a nickname he gave himself lmao!!! "His nickname is just another guy's name, he is: the most interesting man in the world™"

Peter 

hahah

Jack

i'm looking thru my 3000 word file of little fragments i haven't found a proper use for yet and trying to separate out the ones that could be used in the stories i've currently got planned into the relevant files and i've already got 1000 words of random bullshit for one just by doing that

Jack 

Composting

Peter

thats what i call my tweeting!!!1

Jack

Lol. I call my public suppuration

Peter 

https://twitter.com/sadness_tweets/status/698271294069014529 poll

Jack 

this is a really long poem but its beautiful http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/239988  i really love etel adnan its nto that long lol but its too long for screenshots shes an arab american poet who writes in english

Abeer

Awesome Abeer thanks for introducing us to ME literature btw

Peter

i always feel like i have an agenda im pushing or whatever lol but thats the literature i was always exposed to so its hard not to talk about it and share it

Abeer

Same I feel the same way about myself tbh but I think we all have different ones so we get so much out of that. I definitely do from what you bring Abbu! Abeer I have no useful words for this poem yet other than to say it is extremely beautiful

Peter 

It is really beautiful do u guys like robert lowell?

Abeer 

I do

Peter

Hes so wonderful but his poetry is so hard to understand Every line is a beautiful enigma

Abeer

~~~~~~~~~~~Abeer added The Halitosis Sharer~~~~~~~~~~

Hello i have added Twitter user @Reg_Gen who enjoys poetry

Abeer

Hello hello, thank you for the greeting!

The Halitosis Sharer

Howdy

Peter

[clamatoes]

Poems Chat Transcript Thursday, 2/11/16 - Part II

~~~~~~~~~~Shayan added Colin~~~~~~~~~~

pataphysics pere ubu

Kirsty

i shall impose a sin tax on ye that we levy funds for the expensive antics of semy this is my verbal programme, as you know

Peter

hello new person. you've entered at a very confusing time peter please refrain from punning we have a guest

Jack

Theres a 70 year old woman in phenomenal physical condition in this starbucks, with candid white hair down to her ass perfectly sleek-coifed and radiant, and she isn't wearing a bra in an extremely tight leotard-like top and her nipples are promiscuously jutting out against the february chill. It's very loud and it's hard to be in the same room as hahaha nah man he knows my deal already

Peter

that's poem food

Jack

lmfao

Colin

colin is bae welcome my dude hahaha it is Jack i can't encounter it steadily, i shall leave my subconscious to work on it and issue something in about 18 months, as is my wont

Peter

(Curled up in my sheets, sick as a dog, peering above my copy of Native Speaker) hi friends

Colin

this is irc 1995

Kirsty

cold? laaaaame i'm so sorry man

Peter

Shayan added me so I could see what y'all do In here

Colin

i'm going to smoke indoors we party with words

Kirsty

Lmfao peter

Shayan

Yeesh yeah a bad cold haha missed the past two days of class!! I feel so behind

Colin

we have a good time. no poems on the docket yet today, because it's kirsty's birthday and we're just all existential crisising together like a bunch of coed roomates influencing each other's soul-uteruses

Peter

lolol

Kirsty

I loled at your description of that woman's nipples

Shayan

ah man feel better!

Peter

peter strop trying to be cool

Kirsty

kirsty smoking indoors is poet behaviour

Jack

hahahaha i'm glad shayan

Peter

Peter is cool, imo and buff, and hot

Colin

i'll never stop trying to be cool. you're the one smoking like a Cool Kid awwwwwww colin !!!

Peter

i will never be cool. this is my pledge to you

Jack

colin is a brilliant dude and knows a bunch of lit crit shit i have no education in whatsoever. he's a humane man of compendious reading but also an open and resonant soul, and he has bad ass trips on psychadelics that tend to reveal much about art

Peter

rad

Kirsty

Thank you for introducing me

Colin

share the contents of your mind, colyn

Kirsty

that made me feel pretty good about myself tbh, allowing me to psychically fight this cold

Colin

that was a good introduction

Shayan

excellent! it's so good to have you on board

Peter

sorry for not doing that. peter of course did a much better job than i would have

Shayan

My main academic interests are Marxism and deconstruction but I love critical theory in general

Colin

colin I can't wait for you to watch what happens when they get going on a subject

Shayan

I find myself writing about class a lot, and then binary oppositions and anxieties about language

Colin

nonsense just a much more florid job. shayan is an entomologist and understands the complicate beauty of the insect and substantiates it in his subtle and coiling insights that are just straightforwardnesses piled atop each other out of which a structural color comes astonishingly

Peter

my main thing is Suffering

Jack

lmaooo

Peter

ostensibly writing about it but mostly not-writing

Jack

good god... we are all in this for the long haul then eh if there's a potential to be reached i wonder what it is

Kirsty

guys i am meeting with my irl creative writing group next wednesday i'm excited

Jack

given our combined skills

Kirsty

my main thing is hollering real loud and haranguing people with rococo syntax that spurns punctuation and outsprints comprehension to avoid analysis into its constitutent stupidities :)

Peter

socks all round

Kirsty

we are going to publish a novel contained in a sock

Jack

Jack this is an idea i can get behind

Peter

while peter sings about walt whitman or whatever

Jack

same

Kirsty

it will be written in arabic by abeer

Jack

peter you are getting whitman socks. yes, in arabic. Jack -heir to futile moons, i don't think a better slogan can be seen on any pair of socks to date

Kirsty

excellent

Jack

kirsty is a sublime musician and singer, and is also now a professional knitwear artist. she is an incandescence the twitter machine can't manage to blunt, her reading is wide but somehow even deeper than its breadth. she's also real af

Peter

i only have boring socks and christmas socks the rillest

Jack

lol thank you peter for giving me the bombast so necessary but actually, colin, i am a peasant.

Kirsty

kirsty is extremely fancy and Brittttish

Peter

you all seem cool. Glad I got added to here.

Colin

Peter :3 U r making me feel warm

Shayan

it would be more academic, i imagine, but the peasant always interrupts with her real-time feelings, colin

Peter

plus ca change

Kirsty

Jack is twitter's Good Boy, but behind his urbane veneer is a storehouse of cleanly taxonomied arts of every age and language. he has an ear for rhythm whose lodestones i trust my fate to implicitly. he has a sobriety kirsty and i lack, and it keeps us from diffusion into the void. kirsty lacking literal sobriety atm, which is A+ shit imo lmaooo I'm stoked you're here Colin

Peter

I'm a mix of stoned off my gourd and fucked up from cold medicine

Colin

[surveying the chat my kingdom Soberly] ja. goed.

Jack

Trying to read rn is a task lmao

Colin

the first thing I saw Kirsty say in this chat was that she hated the poem that everyone else seemed to like. it was so blunt and awesome

Shayan

reading peter's prose makes you feel stoned regardless

Jack

that's how you want to do porm's chaw colin, for real hahahaha kirsty FUCKED UP edna st. vincent millay edna left in a body bag

Peter

poor edna. the innocent in all this

Jack

lol Jack

Shayan

i literally get asked what drug i'm on daily

Peter

you are the drug

Jack

shayan, you should see me in an art gallery.

Kirsty

"oh dude how much adderall have you snorted today?" "this sounds like an acid thought peter, are you tripping" etc. Daily. LMAO

Peter

i have the great joy of not being formally educated.

Kirsty

I would pay money to see that

Shayan

but being well-read nonetheless.

Kirsty

is it freeing kirst

Jack

My ex-gf told me frankly once "you're a drug. it's a lot of fun, but if you take too much you wind up in a padded room and then visiting everyone in your life to make 12-step program amends" kirsty dropped out of school at 15 like good will hunting or some shit

Peter

hahaha sorry that was possibly really tragic at the time peter but it's pretty funny in this context

Jack

my formal education is the only reason I realized I liked to read lmao

Colin

i want to spend irl time with kirsty so much. take her everywhere. concerts, galleries, restaurants, national parks, monuments, etc.

Peter

it's just more instinctive. but telling that i've bothered to set tasks for myself anyway.

Kirsty

porm's chaw field trip

Jack

same colin. i don't like to read actually. it's excruciating for me because my brain is wrong and too loud. but it's sublime also, like many tortures of this world. thank god for teachers

Peter

newcastle meetup

Jack

omg Jack i want to do this we should all meat in the sargasso sea, in the middle basically

Peter

meat?! lol

Kirsty

freudian slip i'm sure i'm kinda hungry...

hahaha meat party

Kirsty

i know what you mean sometimes peter if i really love a book it becomes a chore to read because i'm finding a new wonder of wonders on every page

Jack

....for Cock

Peter

lolol

Kirsty

yeah and i get anxious and feel ~Small~. fuck all the good artists to hell

Peter

[soberly] i will not abide this level of Horny in porm's chaw

Jack

someone gave me a good present today

Kirsty

yeah same, i got that when reading Cosmopolis bc i envied the polished prose so much

Jack

a framed print of the final annotated page of in search of lost time

Kirsty

I'm so boringly straight it's merely a simulacrum of hornt :(

Peter

oh niiiiiiice

Jack

now i have to fucking finish it as it's hanging next to my front door and taunting me further

Kirsty

Omg that's beautiful Kirsty hahaha owned

Peter

you're way ahead of me kirsty

Jack

yeah. it is. really. very lucky.

Kirsty

i will post a picture of it

Kirsty

If you do finish it I predict you will find yourself...in search of lost time At least I've become left handed suddenly for many tasks

Peter

ahaha look what just got retweeted

Jack

I was worried I had a brain tumor but scans are negative Do so! "You are the brain tumor Peter" --Jack

you've got a poetry tumor

Jack

Bahahaha I would pay to have that installed actually. Know any surgeons?

Peter

Kirsty

That's handsome af nice

Peter

that is some extremely scribbly bullshit i would expect no less

Jack

the manuscript was insane, all taped together and hundreds of margin notes. yes

Kirsty

A guy I've followed on here forever and who's a good online friend turns out to be a really good poet I found out today. Ima see if he'll join at some point

Peter

I've only ever produced one piece or creative writing that I really feel confident about haha

Colin

We'd love to see it!

Peter

aye

Kirsty

We've discussed like classic poems in here some but also each other's stuff

Peter

i'm pretty confident in my work sometimes for about ten minutes before the image falls apart again

Jack

I'd have to dig it up, it's about when I stole Percocet from my best friend lol

Colin

I archived it by topic so you can find past stuff we've discussed quite easily as well ill DM you links when I can in case anything is interesting

Peter

colin, nabokov was wrong. showing somebody your unfinished work is not "like showing them your sputum". it's showing them your soul. i love outsider shit far more than i ever will anything else. naive is real.

Kirsty

I am unmoved positively or negatively by my own work. It's adequate and itself. I've lost the shyness and the enthusiasm lol I agree Kirsty in principle but I'm a Canon Whore as it shakes out I find this unacceptable but haven't been able to fix it yet

Peter

but all canons strive for naivetee

Kirsty

Also show people your sputum Tbh

Peter

everything is striving for childlike in essence so why not

Kirsty

colin would have a field day with the class implications of my canon thralldom but your'e right for sure

Peter

billy childish is unequivocally mazing for this reason

Kirsty

bunting on showing people your shit

Jack

chatham lad

Kirsty

that's a sweet gift Kirsty

Shayan

love that bunting Jack i remember you showing it to me a few months back who is this chatham gent kirsty

Peter

I feel like I end up reading lots of canonical stuff.

Colin

im always perversely proud of myself when i find something off the beaten path that i sincerely love more than the canon

Jack

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Childish#Poetry …

Kirsty

not sure i've ever really veered that far Jack maybe in music his paintings are bad ass kirsty i want to tie up a loose end here - kirsty, what did you mean by my being distracted by women? you didn't know about the sexy nipple crone until an hour later. which ladies?

Peter

they are. sexton ming is very cool too.

Kirsty

v proud of my endless perverse love for The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner: Written by Himself: With a detail of curious traditionary facts and other evidence by the editor i was wondering that too

Jack

I've never heard of those Jack!

Peter

kirsty may, in fact, be dronke

Jack

"nipple crone" !!

Kirsty

that is all one book its a very Good title

Jack

oh wow! bahaha Sexy Nipple Crone ahahahaha love too laugh at my own jokes

Peter

don't ask me what it's about though i have great difficulty summarising it neatly its all very postmodern several hundred years in advance

Jack

kirsty came in here guns blazing about my distaff distractions and i need to know why

Peter

yes, i am dronke....ugler i mosen apparently sorry, danish at the dutch party faux pas

Kirsty

was it prophecy?

Peter

no, you said you had a serious thing to attend

Kirsty

ich was doynge middel engels

Jack

did you see me interacting with Ladeys or are you reading my future or my soul ?!?!

Peter

and then there was lots of language surrounding wily women

Kirsty

Rebecca

huh rebecca...i'm so sorry

Peter

hahahahah

Colin

why sorry?! I've been MIA! I'm glad you guys have been happy n involved!

Rebecca

quite involved, spiraling inward into oblivion lmao colin got caught in the maelstrom

Peter

Whan that Peterus, hys starre shynen bryght Becamen Hornye, Kirstye t'ward thise wight Broghte forthe an prophecye of ladyes fyne That to hym eighen did forthe brynge an shyne

Jack

Oh my god gahah

Colin

Jack, you're simply the best

Peter

i believe the term is "i can't even" lolol

Kirsty

Jack..... you can.... write.... medieval.... poetry

Kirsty

Dystractede henceforth from his werk he was That to an bisynesse was to make presente And fonden he hymselfe unable forth To gan from Pormes Chawe that was his wone

Jack

fucking hell lol

Kirsty

I would correct our own Chaw'cer here, however, in that this fair lady didst never once tempt me with other ladies fair: she merely accused me of such an entanglement

Peter

out you go, peter, on to the business with ye

Kirsty

laughing my damned ass of Jack you're rolling

Peter

Rebecca changed the group name to Pormes Chawe

Upsterte he, and wythe an myghty rore Upon the walles begyn to wryte an screde Wherewyth he thoghte to make descrypcioun Of hire he hadde yclepen "Nipple Crone" right im done

Jack

hard lols and applause

Kirsty

Jesus Christ you're triggering my cough hahaha

Colin

Oh drat I want to hear your chaucerization of the sexy nipple crone so bad Jack

Peter

omg

Kirsty

raucous claps and hollers jfc

Peter

it cannat be gedaan

Jack

Tell us the tale of the four-score yeared nipple crone and the 24 year old sleeve-betatted baristo who would woo her

Peter

and with a mighty roar, did write "nipple crone" upon the wall

Kirsty

is this the peter equiv. of "Encore! Encore!"

Jack

ffs

Kirsty

ahahahahahahahahahah

Rebecca

hahaha

Colin

BRAVO! ENCORE! NOCH EINMAL, MORE, MORE!

Peter

creased

Kirsty

fine....... fine

Jack

right. i've got your description of nipple crone onscreen. gonna set to work. talk amongst yourselves

Jack

"Theres a 70 year old woman in phenomenal physical condition in this starbucks, with candid white hair down to her ass perfectly sleek-coifed and radiant, and she isn't wearing a bra in an extremely tight leotard-like top and her nipples are promiscuously jutting out against the february chill. It's very loud and it's hard to be in the same room as" "i want to tie up a loose end here - kirsty, what did you mean by my being distracted by women? you didn't know about the sexy nipple crone until an hour later. which ladies?" - just to catch everyone up on Jack's topos here

Peter

oh there it is haha

Jack

back to the millstone, scald!

Peter

the millstone is Jack's bitch tbh

Kirsty

kirsty still won't give me satisfaction in the matter of her accusation against my libido

Peter

I am howling I love this chat.

Shayan

hahaha yeah Jack is up to this task jesus christ it's so perfect same shayan, oh man, same ok so phrasing that as "give me satisfaction" maybe isn't helping my case. moving on.

Peter

do you guys know other people who know Medieval English? Jack is officially the only person I know who can do what he was just doing

Shayan

boy, i don't think so. i mean, not with the cadences as spot on as they are as well. it's eerie man, you people are such a joy

Peter

seconded

Shayan

I'm v glad to be added to here chat

Colin

Thise Nipple Crone, that Petere termeth so She hadde in lyve yet thrie score yeren ten And yet, shee for hire age ben unmodeste: Hire haire ben longe and silvere as a clowde, And gan forth tumblynge downe hire bakke towarde Hire rump whyche that was cladde in lethir pantis But yet thise tale ye not put down just nowe For have ich yet to tellen yow the beste! Thise singele feature whyche the lowdeste was I shalle now forth yow tellen for the nons! Hire Nippeles, which that myghtyly protrude Did maken pon hys yën ymprecioun rude! They poketh forth, and wythe vulgare entente Maketh hym from hire sokketes hys yën rente! Heere endeth thys, the tale of Peterus, Whom that a vulgar ende did mete, and ceysed.

Jack

About to rip some dabs and put on some tunes my head is too stuffy to be bothered with reading atm

Colin

oh my god Jack

Shayan

i am ceysed indeed

Peter

"Hire Nippeles, which that myghtyly protrude"

Shayan

Jack... the fuck

Kirsty

slay queen too much chaucer does this to a brain

Jack

Jack you have to archive news events and shit

Peter

"they poketh forth" though

Kirsty

this would be a very popular twitter account

Peter

there's already too many shite chaucer accounts

Jack

they maketh ymprecioun rude! yours wouldn't be shit, is the thing

Peter

fuck twitter. whys good talent always wasted on this medium

Kirsty

who wants to do a dramatic reading of the nipple crone

Jack

true that

Peter

you should NOT consider giving this shit away for free

Kirsty

bahahaha someone gotta soundcloud that shit i vote Jack good point kirsty

Peter

kirsty, whom would pay for this, in the world

Jack

if i had discretionary funds Jack, i would be your sponsor

Peter

ok ok... not for free, for the undiscerning at risk of snobbishness lemme tell you a dronke story when i was 18 and thought nought of all

Kirsty

kirsty tale time, settle in by the fire

Jack

i dids't cometh across a certain welcoming called "POKEY THE PENGUIN" (yes, thy don't call me old fireside for nowt) web comic, thank you autospell.

Kirsty

Jack you have to read that out loud

Shayan

i'm only moderately distracted by the gondola-gliding exit of the ageless witch of piercing tits so continue, by all means, kirst kirst

Peter

anyway, long story short, it was a niche discovery that has followed me through time and ages and led to a very pleasant communication with pokey creator it was, has been: meaningful

Kirsty

i do not know of this wab comicke but it is nice, that you have had this experience

Jack

i am happy for these signs, though i know not what they mean

Peter

http://yellow5.com/pokey/

Kirsty

@pokthepenguin

Colin

i've seen pokthepenguin and considered reporting him to my friend pokey!

Kirsty

i am confused between these accounts whom is the real pok

Jack

Controversye

Peter

the real pork, i can assure you, is steve havelka from portland oregon

Kirsty

actually its me

Jack

if you locate his twitter account, he is hugging a cushion in his profile pic

Kirsty

i am chaucer, and the penguin boy

Jack

that i made for him

Kirsty

that's wonderful!!!

Peter

because i truly do love that curmudgeononly penguin

Kirsty

wait, that is not me at all!

Jack

my spirit animal HOORAY

Kirsty

v cute cushion

Jack

btw Jack, the nipples popping becoming the popping eyes, it's so chaucer mate

Peter

ymprecioun rude

Jack

rofl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i35mAvFY7pw … apropos of nowt

Kirsty

I have no idea how to read English like that

Colin

i can't believe i haven't posted the chaucer line where he describes someone's poetry as "nat woorth a toord" in here yet

Jack

my library of books is mostly contemporary and early 20th century haha

Colin

AHAHAHAHAHA Very carefully Colin

Peter

believe it or not middle english is thoroughly Not My Area

Jack

that's hilarious lol

Colin

i'm mostly modernism too

Jack

This is true, and all the more impressive. Rudely impressive even

Peter

what if i had useful skills instead awful

Jack

Useful to me fwiw (not much)

Peter

recently I've been enjoying taking critical theory to older works tho. like im excited to break down the rape of Lucrece by shakespeare from a feminist perspective.

Colin

we've been reading chaucer psychoanalytically

Jack

Oh how funnhaha

Colin

Nice

Peter

ich moste abed to gan yf resonabliche I acte whyche that ich oftene don't even my middle english is slipping, disastrous

Jack

oh i have something relevant to abeer that discovered today but i forget in my dronkeness night Jack genius Jack

Kirsty

Abeer appears to be elsewheres about and not here, I fear my dear Good night Kirsty!

Pete r

i know that, but let the record state...

Kirsty

Jack my dude, Jesus Christ I don't know what to say

Peter

what now im still here, for the moment

Jack

I too am here

Colin

yes abeer is unlikely to read through all this bullshit

Jack

SURELY "ich moste abed to gan".... come on

Kirsty

what

Jack

what does that mean lmao

Colin

i must go to bed

Jack

Abeer will be missing out

Peter

i've known hwedishes and their "wi komma gan hem nu"

Kirsty

but then i did not, yet

Jack

"jag hungrigs"

Kirsty

am now completely lost

Jack

Kirsty's speaking Swedish now innit I can muddle by in it by means of the like 200 entries in an Anglo Saxon dictionary I had to look at a couple years ago

Peter

it sounds exactly as it means

Kirsty

somehow, not surprising

Jack

Hell of a cheat code

Peter

you might have to explain for us plebs kirst

Jack

She's going to go home now because she's hungrig imo

Peter

lol

Kirsty

(She used the royal we tho)

Peter

not i, the swedishes.they do that. the dutch contingent... they ich moste abed to gan" et moi aussi

Kirsty

"Peasant" my asse

Peter

I'm extremely lost

Colin

That was an attempt at Middle English again Kirsty, not Dutch!

Jack

That's englis imo

Peter

Ik moet ga naar bed

Jack

well Jack, yet more testament to your genius, were it needed

Kirsty

smh

Colin

Ik moet naar bed gaan, rather

Jack

There's some Dutch double voweling it up

Peter

(In extremely Philly dialect) them jawns, youse, wooder ice the shore

Colin

Jack is a scholar, Holmes

Peter

I'm only pretending

Jack

Which ironically means "lay-about" etymologically

Peter

I can't read

Jack

Wooder ice indeed lmao

Peter

lol

Colin

That's v appropriate

Jack

alors, j'ai bu tout du vin et fume tout des .. uh... fumées. et j'ai parle tout les mots. un plaisir. merci je t'aime.

Kirsty

I saw "water" but definitely fall into the Philly dialect if we are talking about the delectable ice desert we all know an love as wooder ice

Colin

Going to assume that means something nice and good

Jack

au revoir

Kirsty

Gnite

Jack

Tot ziens

Jack

You're gonna fumigate your vineyard?

Peter

ahhh Tu parles francais! moi aussi Bon nuit! Dors bien

Colin

Maar ze is gegaan A veritable linguistic mess this is

Jack

She drank all The wine and smoked all her "smokes"

Colin

A plastic. I'm tame. Kirsty's avin a stroke! Ah she must be a Parisian I was interpreting it as langue d'oc

Peter

Ich have abed gannen Not sure what language I'm doing now. Maybe Geordie

Jack

I only learned French in the Parisian way

Colin

Hahahaha

Peter

that's what they teach in American schools

Colin

lol! j'usqua la prochaine fois monsieurs. a bientôt (probably demain) bonne nuit.

Kirsty

Goedenacht

Jack

I am also actually going now, denk ik

Jack

Goodnight!

Colin

شب بخير

Shayan

hahaha

Colin

Lol

Peter

Peter do you listen to hip hop at all?

Colin

I really haven't entered that world Colin I could use guidance

Peter

Haha it's such an interesting thing

Colin

I believe it I just haven't found my way in Like I hear stuff on the radio that's good but I haven't encountered it as Art yet, let's say

Peter

I love it a lot. You'd probably like KOOL AD quite a bit, he's very pun oriented, but also was an English major so his music is very much ideologically conscious not conscious in the way a rapper like Kendrick Lamar is (not to deride him), he's just very aware of the system of language

Colin

That's interesting imma write your recommendations down

Peter

http://genius.com/Kool-ad-al-green-lyrics …

That's one of my favorite verses by him

Colin

Whoa yeah the associative flow is something else

Peter

Yeah!! Dude is just pulling words out of a cloud and flowing on it haha Check out his album 51, lots of stuff like this.

Colin

Will do man it's going to be cool to discover this stuff

Peter

it was definitely cool when i started to see hip hop as art. like I've cried listening to future haha (Hope this is on topic enough)

Colin

Oh man anything is on topic tbh but also this stuff is literal poetry so it's extremely on topic

Peter

Do you have some lyrics you'd like to post and have everyone talk about? After about 12pm tomorrow I can engage fully and usually everyone is more on here earlier in the day because many live east of the Atlantic

Peter

Hmm That'd require some clarity of thought which I lack atm

Colin

People tend to post poems and then we just riff about them and post shit it reminds us of and links to critical literature we think is relevant etc - very free form and free flowing almost like a group freestyle lol

Peter

word I'll definitely share lyrics and stuff I find interesting haha Man I might fall asleep to r plus seven tn

Colin

Nice! No take your time the chat is gonna be dead for the next like 10 hours anyway is my suspicion given the time zones

Peter

lmao You faved my tweet about the end of chrome country the other day haha I have a huge boner for that organ sequence

Colin

I learned about it from your tweet!

Peter

oh damn! haha yeah that album is so fuckin gorgeous. a real sonic play. each sound is like it's own character, moving and interacting with the aural Landscape around it

Colin

Yes exactly. Real polyphony This is why I love Bach tbh I need to go and listen to that whole era of music

Peter

I'd probably appreciate it now

Colin

Independent voices Oh man yeah Bach is so incredible. I mean it's sort of tough to get into at least it was for me I took a music composition course called "tonal counterpoint" in college and we just studied basically Bach fugues and inventions And had to write some ourselves. I came to just love that guy from how much we had to listen to his music eventually it just annihilates you

Peter

that sounds like a great course!!

Colin

The professor was this incredible composer dude who wrote for like jazz ensembles and rock groups including I think the Beatles when he was young

Peter

Oh shit

Colin

But his like visceral passion that was entirely modern and not like stuffy was so cool Totally changed my ability to interact w classical type music Bach as a Kabbalist or Chopin as an earlier Coltrane etc. Rachmaninov as precursor to rage against the machine. It was wild

Peter

Lmao that's so interesting OPN definitely opened me up to slower music and that's probably necessary to going back in musical history

Colin

Oh true that's a good point yeah

Peter

most people don't care to listen to a song that takes several minutes to make an interesting musical "point" However you can definitely train yourself to be more sensitive to subtle shifts and changes in a song that create what is very similar to sexual tension, ime

Colin

It's very true but that's most of the absolute best shit Exactly but think about how most people treat sex lol Very similar to how they treat music

Peter

True true I probably treat sex less delicately than I treat music hahaha

Colin

That's exactly the connection Colin that's the whole thing lol You nailed it

Peter

lazy libido [snooze emojis]

Colin

Hahaha same for sure but idk not with less...patience or aesthetic interest say. Idk. Seems like there's probs an overlap

Peter

I just would rather skirt away my sexual desire by masturbating most of the time and take a nap than get caught up in the rather lengthy act of sex haha

Colin

It's kind of a laziness you need to listen to slow to develop music

Peter

Hahaha

Colin

Hahahaha fair enough

Peter

man I hope this medicine knocks me out well

Colin

Good luck with it

Peter

lmao

Shayan

Shayan where do you live? Are you east coast USA?

Peter

Minnesota!!

Shayan

Nice! Are you in school? Is it insanely cold rn?

Peter

Yes and yes Hbu? Not too bad recently actually

Shayan

Yikes imo brrrrrr

Peter

[clamatoes]

Poems Chat Transcript Thursday, 2/11/16 - Part I

summary: kirsty's birthday!; kirsty recites some shakespeare ON VIDEO and what a joy!; peter croons some butchered Hart Crane to her in celebration; jack got the good mark what for his essay; kirsty reads a bad ass poem in a gorgeous Geordie accent; we lament our cognitive deficiencies and much maladied spirits; the anecdote of nipple crone and jack's hilarious chaucerization of it, and thence Rebecca's renaming of the chat; introduction of colin to the group and the group to colin; discussion of music as sex; kirsty accuses peter of being distracted by women, but refuses to clarify what she means by this egregious slander; kirsty introduces billy childish whom cool; the horniest day of pormes chawe yet, and probably the most fun; had to split into multiple parts because too long for tumblr to handle ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I find myself saying "heir to futile moons" to myself all the time Jack

Peter 

yours is sooo much more interesting. mine was a trial.

Kirsty

Oh no! Mine's awesome yeah Nathan unpacked it for me If you get a minute tell me if you think that's how to enunciate it https://soundcloud.com/user-840824539-233389862/shakespeares-sonnet-77

Peter 

perfect!

mine is awwwwful! but i just really enjoyed memorising it. it's been a while and am auditioning for aplay on 21st so very useful.

Kirsty

that's so cool what's aplay tho??

Peter 

the result of a mis-struck space bar...

Kirsty

Oooooh I thought it was like a Web 2.0 drama app or something lmaooo

Peter 

hahaha you're so future

Kirsty 

That's rad what play?!

Peter

it's called the regina monologues

Kirsty

Neato is it newish?

Peter 

henry viii's wives hanging out, updated to the present

Kirsty

I would love to hear your Shakespeare tho! (Do let me know if this version needs vast improvement before I video myself up)

Peter 

looks like mid-00s, maybe earlier

Kirsty

That sounds awesome

Peter 

oh i posted the link to the vid up there ^^^ warning. it is BAD, but nm it is not porm's chaw standard-meeting, that's for sure! but i forgive myself :) i might just designate myself Head of Foot Couture in lieu of actual crit Porm's Chaw socks all round.

Kirsty

I never got a link :( Omg yes sock it to me

Peter 

in serious, i would like some help with lit-based slogans for socks and other garments to lavish some designs with.

Kirsty

But also your crit is critical my dear Oooh that's fun

Shakespeare's Sonnet #26 https://youtu.be/l1_EWZ1wPrY

Kirsty

You could have a moby dick themed pair of ghastly white socks that shadow forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe!!

Peter 

hmmm

Kirsty

It's so good!!!! Your voice and accent are phenomenal

Peter 

haha oh shut up thank you it's awful.

Kirsty

I love this video I'm gonna watch it a bunch of times It makes me exceedingly happy It's so grand!

Peter 

lol well i'm happy you're pleased.

Kirsty

I'm v pleased

Peter 

de trop, pas de grand

Kirsty

Tres belle! De trop is the main criticism my old professor gives all my bad writing He'll just write that in angry red pen You're so measured and poised you have nothing of the 3,000 mile wide wildernesses of the new world in your lovely lectery Unlike, say, yours truly

Peter 

:) so lucky. i dream of being harshly criticsised with red pen but mostly people just offer it via silence.

Kirsty

He's so honest it makes his praise inestimable YES! amen

Peter 

more behaviour than writing. uggggggh peter it's my BIRTHDAY

Kirsty 

No way??? Happy Birthday!!!!

Peter 

what shall i do? i haven't got up yet. coffee first. thanks! i was born on a thursday.

Kirsty 

I thought it was in March for some reason You're good until 40 so don't fret!

Peter 

i'm going to make a BIRTHDAY coffee.

Kirsty

I was Monday, at 8:12am

Peter 

45 is my dream age. i like aging. just to be contrary, no doubt.

Kirsty 

Whitman didn't make poems of any significance until 36. Same with Stevens

Peter

and i didn't start making socks until late 33.coincidence? lol

Kirsty 

Unlikely to be imo !!!

Peter 

i'm obsessed though. i resent having to break to eat / sleep. and i power dress to walk from one side of the room to the other.

Kirsty

I keep hearing this Hart Crane poem as a country western song and cackling. I can't sleep This will redound to great things Kirsty. Of this I am certai Should I croon it sans accompaniment into sound cloud??

Peter 

yes! of course!

Kirsty

Bahaha I will https://soundcloud.com/user-840824539-233389862/repose-of-rivers … ahahahahahaha

Peter 

rofl Kirsty same

Peter 

BRAVO! MORE!

Kirsty

I need a slide guitar ahahahaha

Peter 

amazing peter. ugh you're so free it's disgusting. :)) just very much kidding there.

Kirsty 

wait where lol the "more"? ;-)

Peter

"you're so free...."

Kirsty

ahhhhhh yeah i'm p uptight tbh this wonderful group of people and you so prominent among them makes me loosen up immeasurably

Peter 

no, i meant it's a joke that it's disgusting. it's completely delightful.

Kirsty

well no it's not immeasurable it's measured in my one-take absurd warbling butchering of immortal verse into the haggard idiom of merle haggard hahahaha i'm glad ! :)

Peter 

which is the Most Amazing Thing I Will Hear Today

Kirsty

lmao i should hope your day gets even stranger from here!!

Peter

it's highly unlikely unfortunately.

Kirsty feels distinctly unmarked for anything especial. except your singing. which is an insurpassable way to start! i haven't even had coffee yet and yet here peter in florida is joyfully transposing sombre language into a sort of Disney song i love life. very very seriously that is the case.

Kirsty 

Hahahaha What a joy to hear!

Peter 

well it is the day for reflecting on it

Kirsty

your prescribed day of apprehension (in every sense of the word) of ~The Important Things~

Peter 

yes and the day for feeling very acutely like a motherless child.

Kirsty 

noooooooo :( maybe your mom is meant to be the wide universe, and any mother before her would be a terrible sacrilege

Peter 

just a matter of fact, peter, not wailing-fodder!

Kirsty

there is nothing one must so bewail as a ~Matter of Fact~

Peter

ok, fair :) ha! anyway! i have to be at work in 45 minutes and even though it's only on the other side of the room in my bedsit, i take sitting at the machine at 10am very very seriously! the socks i'm making are too beautiful today. a pleasure to start the day with this conversation, thank you :) *curtsey*

Kirsty

Have at it!!

Peter 

ttfn.

Kirsty

OK the final Shakespeare edition for anyone to help me improve with stress tips etc... https://soundcloud.com/user-840824539-233389862/shakespeares-sonnet-77

Peter 

I'm listening to Nick Drake on the train ~vibes~ and I have 15 mins of wifi to communicate with you fine people 'Heir to futile moons' is a lovely phrase from the book of Job if you didn't know Peter! Kirsty, fijne verjaardag! Will listen to various lovely readings later Last night my dad got my poetry soundcloud up on his phone then couldn't get it to stop autoplaying endlessly which is a good #dadstory I think Adoring~ life presently

Jack 

My stars and I've read Job on at least two occasions and somehow didn't take that away. What a gaffe that's the perfect #dadstory Jack lol

Peter 

Haha it's probably not a very commonly used translation I think

Jack

I'm so glad to hear life is good! I'm weirdly jovial today and I can't do the work I have to do for tomorrow because of it. It's Kirsty's Birthday! Of course it must be a fine day!

Peter 

Endless poetry readings blaring from iPhone speakers forever

Jack

A giant reading stamping on a human ear drum...forever!

Peter 

Kirsty I missed your curtsy never intending to treat you curtly! I bow back now with vows of my sorrow for this oversight. How trite!

Peter 

Kirsty's kirsty. Should have done the reading in Geordie ffs! it is a BEAUTIFUL day here, sunny and bright. Think I might finally pay my library fines. Love the dadstory Jack. Kirsty's kirtsy.

Kirsty 

I swear to God I was a gloomy gus 3 hours ago and I caught myself in the mirror as I washed my hands and my eddying unkempt beard-cloud along with my hair's capricious curls astonished me with a glimpse of hale old Whitman trundling down some forest path and I was just taken with joy! The man is immense and all is his demesne even my petty evenings of frets and furies. What a boundless outward and outward we inhabit! How we expand and do not come apart!

Peter

a triksy little kirtsy from kirsty. lol your love for whitman is electric.

Kirsty 

If you act like you can't read they'll never suspect the fines are your responsibility Kirsty

Peter

Geordie would've been perfect please do another soon pleeeeeeeease I'll do a soundcloud, but it'll all be in geordie.

Kirsty 

YASS!

Peter 

i'll do one now, i've got a book of knitting poetry here and 10 mins before work.

Kirsty

ahahaha let's

Peter 

Jack so good to hear you adore life! christ it's sloooooow to upload alors.... https://soundcloud.com/user-689342458/the-knitter-Jackie-kay …

Kirsty

HOLY SHIT Like maybe you're pretending to take the piss but this is MAGICAL Holy shit holy shit I got literal figurative goose bumps (goose pimples for ye britons)

Peter 

:)))))

Kirsty

That's a neat as hell poem too

Peter 

yeah, right? feel it.

Kirsty

I do

Peter

speaking of knitting..... the socks won't knit themselves. ! later skaters oh yes... in the grand tradition ugh ok twitter won't let me post photos today.

Kirsty 

:(

Peter 

was just going to be the poem transcript

Kirsty

Fucking twitter

Peter

Collecting marked essays

ayyyy

Jack 

Kirsty your voice is [emojis indicating approbation] Especially in Geordie mode

Jack 

thank you very march :) congratulations on this most praiseful remark here! excellent stuff think i'm going to do harold bloom's the best poems of the english language entirely in geordie on soundcloud.

Kirsty

[emoji indicating savory satisfaction with what’s been offered]

Peter

incredible

Jack 

Is that your essay I read Jack?

Peter

yes indeed! it got 78 which ah if it doesn't translate across to the american university system, is Very Good

Jack 

That's awesome! Hardly surprising tho

Peter 

mijn one talent

Jack

All the talents I happen to know of yours are poem related but they are many, imo

Peter 

happy birthday Kirsty~~~

Shayan

omg its kristy's birthday? happy birthday!!

Abeer

How goes life for each pormer what makes chaw??

Peter 

[glee-moji] th'imogie speketh het is goed

Jack 

Capital!

Peter

Mine's ~Bad~ because of my accretive irresponsibilities

Peter 

hey. hey [opening overcoat and shiftily glancing both ways] you want a poem oh no, wat is het

Jack 

lmaooo

Peter 

I do but I probably can't engage rn because I'm anxiety Oh just work stuff. I've delayed putting together a presentation I have to give tomorrow, on which hinges among other things my ability to eat

Peter

what's gaan on oh dear! i shall not distract you with poetry presently then

Jack 

Here's the problem - my value in this context is predicated on my immediate enthusiasm in these presentations (without it I can do nothing of value), which is predicated on my faith that I've just discovered some essential truth or way of limning other essential truths formerly opaque to my libidinous prongs And I have not been visited by anything other than thick distaste for myself and what I do, and I am museless and abandoned and, in a word, fucked

Peter

what is it you do? what do you have to present on?

Jack

i do a lot of worthless dicking around and then once in a while i get paid to do business consultancy, much of which lately focuses on customer experience marketing type stuff and helping people in sales not be shitty predators but instead focus on helping clients and thus getting rid of their reluctance to influence purchasing decisions, I guess

Peter 

you should do the presentation, in song

Jack

Lol I could actually manage to focus on that tbh but this...I can't seem to

Peter 

yea i got no advice, i'm thoroughly unable to make myself focus on anything

Jack

Such is life I rely on anxiety And I hate anxiety I wish I could just be a real boy

Peter 

me too, me too i have to write 8000 words of creative writing by april so i'll probably be in panic-state too soon enough

Jack 

The bigger problem is, as a nominal adult, nobody cares to impose inexorable deadlines and such on me so I can just languish quite easily Omg I feel you I wrote I think 40k words on a Crane poem in 2 nights tho at no one's behest ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Peter 

haha yeah i need a deadline and a library

Jack

What is wrong with my brain and how does it get fixed?

Peter

that is too many words. that is most of a novel. how did you do this thing

Jack

Hypomania™ It's supposed to be adapted into a section of my Very Boring Novel

Peter   

i can usually manage 1500 words a day tops even in Crunch Mode

Jack

Do you know I think I only examined about 1/3 of "voyages" in spilling that much ink? It's endless

Peter 

and then with creative writing it just varies wildly

Jack

I have about as many words in "notes" left to polish for it that haven't made it in yet Creative writing is totally different yeah

Peter 

wat is goingon

Kirsty

i know little about hart crane other than that i attended a lecture on him that i didn't much understand at a conference a few months back hallo

Jack 

it looks like peter is distorted by womenfolk when should be concentrating on Big Work Deal

Kirsty

Jack the thing about Crane is he's a top 5 poet of the 20th century and he died at 33 and was better than the other 4 at 33

Peter 

peter is telling us about his ridiculous writing ability

Jack

hallo

Kirsty

Voyages is maybe the best poem since Whitman

Peter

thank you, btw, shayan & abeer re: bofday

Kirsty

Quite the meet subject for ridicule Jack yes Hi Kirsty! What womenfolk??? Maybe since Milton

Peter 

i said distracted, not distorted! how could i type distorted, when i want to type distracted!

Kirsty

Certainly since Prufrock

Peter 

(i am mainly drunk) prufrock again

Kirsty

What a distortion Kirsty! You must've been distracted

Peter

you were distracted while typing 'distracted' and the word therefore became distorted ('distorted')

Jack

is this all poems lead to prufrock?

Kirsty

damn beaten to punning

Jack

Which womenfolk distract me? I thirst not. The sirens beat powerless against my deaf ears

Peter

my mother used to say "let us go then i, you and i..." every time we left the flat when i was a kid

Kirsty

Jack likes Prufrock so I use it as a touchstone

Peter

it's very pertinent today for me

Kirsty

Ah Jack you can be Leibniz and I'll be Newton we're both winners in pun innovation Lol that's fantastic

Peter 

because now my mother and my have a relationship that barely resembles a patient etherised upon a table

Kirsty

Ahhh I can imagine

Peter

but i do thank her for the interest in literature

Kirsty

kirsty wherefore ben ye dronke?

Jack

I'm so sorry about this Kirsty My parents are very well read and don't give a shit about literature

Peter 

no no its ok. i have a poets temperament but no skill as a result merely borrowed

Kirsty 

I'm the opposite

Peter

whereas she is a sublime poet

Kirsty

my dad has read two books in his whole life no word of a lie

Jack

who only cares about birds and they speak to her

Kirsty

You actually have a flair and a personality in it Kirsty. "Skill" I'm told is a product of great labor which is why I possess little of it

Peter 

my mum exclusively reads self-published romances she finds on amazon

Jack

That's mental Jack Is she really?? That's phenomenal imo Jack

Peter 

my granddad wanted to be a writer but is extremely dyslexic and quite stupid also i've some distant relatives who are 'literary' but see them very rarely

Jack 

That's so strange tbh

Peter 

"Being a mother is discovering strengths you didn't know you had and dealing with fears you never knew existed. - Sherene Simon" that is my mother, tweeting, knowing that i consider her an arbiter of abuse just to highlight social media's import

Kirsty

My dad has the most impressive gift for coinage I've ever witnessed; my mom is a great orator. My dad truly appreciates music in a way few do. Not intellectually or learning wise but spiritually. My mom does not. That's the extent of my entire family line's engagement in art No one else anywhere has any commerce with it even as a spectator. We've done the lineage thing. It's crazy Jesus...

Peter 

https://twitter.com/chirrrup  - my mother. anyone would think she were the fucking last word in sound.

Kirsty

i've generated myself out of thin air apparently

Jack

Self-begot!

Peter

hope you are doing ok kirsty we in porm's chaw are rooting for you

Jack

I'm an exact blend of my parents except also I'm haunted by the voices of dead men

Peter

beautiful, no?

Kirsty

Any guess as to why. Or to what purpose Exquisite, in fact

Peter 

i've read her diaries and her notebooks and i confirm that sara inglis is the poet i'll never be

Kirsty

Birthdays are difficult You're too self conscious I'm sure she's got none of that afflicting her

Peter 

she is! it's hard t know what to do when your own parent is a master of the subversive except fight

Kirsty

do a kafka and write a long angry letter about it

Jack

She has deep conniving self doubt? Damn yeah

Peter 

i've done everything you can imagine

Kirsty

Just don't do the Kafka thing where you starve yourself All the other Kafka things are [100 emoji]

Peter

she's the most convoluted person on the planet

Kirsty

Like the ammonite sink basin she tweeted

Peter

kafka didn't know he was born tbh a loving mother, sister

Kirsty 

Whoa

Peter

just daddy issues

Kirsty

My parental issues are entirely obscure to my conscious mind

Peter

my parental issues aren't normally so pronounced and you will forgive me them now :D

Kirsty 

kirsty we will forgive you anything for your glorious buoyant presence

Jack

Oh there's nothing to forgive

Peter 

that too

Jack

Again, like I said before, for my part anything is welcome in the chaw

 Peter

and me too, i think that is the crux of any port's chaw porm

Kirsty 

Especially if venting is required Assuredly

Peter 

i'm making wild decisons today

Kirsty

Nice Let's hear em

Peter 

all based on negative capability

Kirsty

do they relate to socks

Jack

no, but they probably relate to wine and social media

Kirsty 

the decision to drink wine and do excellent tweets cannot be faulted

Jack

yes you're right it's that that galvanises me and allows me such parenticidal waffling I don't drink because it makes me too happy :)

Kirsty

And I worry for my liver and Wernicke's Area

Peter

peter is perpetually dronke on poesy

Jack 

i know! fucking hell peter

Kirsty

 i just need attention

 Peter

ok maybe i do a very drunk "harold bloom chooses" in geordie yes me too peter, that's why we clash sometime i thinkg

Kirsty 

that would be tops kirst do we clash? i feel like you tolerate me incredibly well especially for someone who has that peacock disposition! usually it takes a self-contained sort like Jack to abide me in any duration

Peter 

oh no i feel or interpret silent punitive stuffs Online as much as in the real

Kirsty

Jack's like my sister that way, steadily brilliant, secretive but also secreting steadily their genius. i am a volcano that lies dormant and then ruins towns im more lowkey attention-requiring

Jack

I'm so sorry if I've ever appeared to punish you with silence. I can absolutely promise you it's never crossed my mind. You're always a delight to me. I can miss stuff in here and especially on the TL tho

Peter

Jack actually demolishes me intellectually, v annoying

Kirsty

you what m8

Jack

Intellectually, it goes 1. Jack 1. Kirsty 3. Peter that's one of my favorite parts of this DM, is the brain access I have I'm likely the stupidest person in here, and I basically never meet someone who isn't a lot stupider than me irl. This is so luxurious

Peter 

i mean you all do, but Jack you're v good at a certain sniffiness :) i had to overcome you with a True Life Story before you Online Trusted Me

Kirsty 

not in a bad way i hope!

Jack

Who me Kirsty?

Peter 

i always Online Trust You kirsty it's just v difficult for my brain to get out of its rut whether i want it to or not

Jack

no, not at all. respect to your discerning ability.

Kirsty

im only pretending to smarts trewely ich ben an jolie foole

Jack

the whole thing about smarts is they aren't ever pretend

Peter 

have i mentioned that i'm drunk and relinquish all responsibility for my typings

yes, peter

Kirsty

ye have kirsty

Jack

there's no joke smoke without joke fire

Kirsty

i'm mostly pretend

Jack

did i really not online trust you? your impression is what matters here not any sort of ~~Reality~~ I'm just someone surprised I would've seen untrusting per se

Peter 

no, you are all real but yet to accept that your pretence is real

Kirsty

i think she was talking about me peter!

Jack

ah ok idk I'm turned around lol these threadings are shite

Peter 

a veritably peter-esque feat of syntactic trickery there kirsty

Jack

pretence is artifice is art which is the highest truth Jack

Peter