It is clear that the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form.

Ever since sentences started to circulate in brains devoted to reflection, an effort at total identification has been made, because with the aid of a copula each sentence ties one thing to another; all things would be visibly connected if one could discover at a single glance and in its totality the tracings of Ariadne’s thread leading thought into its own labyrinth.

But the copula of terms is no less irritating than the copulation of bodies. And when I scream I AM THE SUN an integral erection results, because the verb to be is the vehicle of amorous frenzy.

Everyone is aware that life is parodic and that it lacks an interpretation. Thus lead is the parody of gold. Air is the parody of water. The brain is the parody of the equator. Coitus is the parody of crime.

Gold, water, the equator, or crime can each be put forward as the principle of things.

And if the origin of things is not like the ground of the planet that seems to be the base, but like the circular movement that the planet describes around a mobile center, then a car a clock, or a sewing machine could equally be accepted as the generative principle.

The two primary motions are rotation and sexual movement, whose combination is expressed by the locomotive’s wheels and pistons.

These two motions are reciprocally transformed, the one into the other.

Thus one notes that the earth, by turning, makes animals and men have coitus, and (because the result is as much the cause as that which provokes it) that animals and men make the earth turn by having coitus.

It is the mechanical combination or transformation of these movements that the alchemists sought as the philosopher’s stone. It is through the use of this magically valued combination that one can determine the present position of men in the midst of the elements.

An abandoned shoe, a rotten tooth, a snub nose, the cook spitting in the soup of his masters are to love what a battle flag is to nationality.

An umbrella, a sexagenarian, a seminarian, the smell of rotten eggs, the hollow eyes of judges are the roots that nourish love.

A dog devouring the stomach of a goose, a drunken vomiting woman, a slobbering accountant, a jar of mustard represent the confusion that serves as the vehicle of love.

A man who finds himself among others is irritated because he does not know why he is not one of the others. In bed next to a girl he loves, he forgets that he does not know why he is himself instead of the body he touches.

Without knowing it, he suffers from the mental darkness that keeps him from screaming that he himself is the girl who forgets his presence while shuddering in his arms.

Love or infantile rage, or a provincial dowager’s vanity, or clerical pornography, or the diamond of a soprano bewilder individuals forgotten in dusty apartments.

They can very well try to find each other; they will never find anything but parodic images, and they will fall asleep as empty as mirrors.

The absent and inert girl hanging dreamless from my arms is no more foreign to me than the door or window through which I can look or pass.

I rediscover indifference (allowing her to leave me) when I fall asleep, through an inability to love what happens.

It is impossible for her to know whom she will discover when I hold her, because she obstinately attains a complete forgetting.

The planetary systems that turn in space like rapid disks, and whose centers also move, describing an infinitely larger circle, only move away continuously from their own position in order to return it, completing their rotation.

Movement is a figure of love, incapable of stopping at a particular being, and rapidly passing from one to another.

But the forgetting that determines it in this way is only a subterfuge of memory.

A man gets up as brusquely as a specter in a coffin and falls in the same way.

He gets up a few hours later and then he falls again, and the same thing happens every day; this great coitus with the celestial atmosphere is regulated by the terrestrial rotation around the sun.

Thus even though terrestrial life moves to the rhythm of this rotation, the image of this movement is not turning earth, but the male shaft penetrating the female and almost entirely emerging, in order to reenter.

Love and life appear to be separate only because everything on earth is broken apart by vibrations of various amplitudes and durations.

However, there are no vibrations that are not conjugated with a continuous circular movement; in the same way, a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis.

Beings only die to be born, in the manner of phalluses that leave bodies in order to enter them. Plants rise in the direction of the sun and then collapse in the direction of the ground.

Trees bristle the ground with a vast quantity of flowered shafts raised up to the sun. The trees that forcefully soar end up burned by lightning, chopped down, or uprooted.

Returned to the ground, they come back up in another form.

But their polymorphous coitus is a function of uniform terrestrial rotation.

The simplest image of organic life united with rotation is the tide.

From the movement of the sea, uniform coitus of the earth with the moon, comes the polymorphous and organic coitus of the earth with the sun.

But the first form of solar love is a cloud raised up over the liquid element.

The erotic cloud sometimes becomes a storm and falls back to earth in the form of rain, while lightning staves in the layers of the atmosphere.

The rain is soon raised up again in the form of an immobile plant.

Animal life comes entirely from the movement of the seas and, inside bodies, life continues to come from salt water.

The sea, then, has played the role of the female organ that liquefies under the excitation of the penis.

The sea continuously jerks off.

Solid elements, contained and brewed in water animated by erotic movement, shoot out in the form of flying fish.

The erection and the sun scandalize, in the same way as the cadaver and the darkness of cellars.

Vegetation is uniformly directed towards the sun; human beings, on the other hand, even though phalloid like trees, in opposition to other animals, necessarily avert their eyes.

Human eyes tolerate neither sun, coitus, cadavers, nor obscurity, but with different reactions.

When my face is flushed with blood, it becomes red and obscene.

It betrays at the same time, through morbid reflexes, a bloody erection and a demanding thirst for indecency and criminal debauchery.

For that reason I am not afraid to affirm that my face is a scandal and that my passions are expressed only by the JESUVE.

The terrestrial globe is covered with volcanoes, which serve as its anus.

Although this globe eats nothing, it often violently ejects the contents of its entrails.

Those contents shoot out with a racket and fall back, streaming down the sides of the Jesuve, spreading death and terror everywhere.

In fact, the erotic movements of the ground are not fertile like those of the water, but they are far more rapid.

The earth sometimes jerks off in a frenzy, and everything collapses on its surface.

The Jesuve is thus the image of an erotic movement that burglarizes the ideas contained in the mind, giving them the force a scandalous eruption.

This eruptive force accumulates in those who are necessarily situated below.

Communist workers appear to the bourgeois to be as ugly and dirty as hairy sexual organs, or lower parts; sooner or later there will be a scandalous eruption in the course of which the asexual noble heads of the bourgeois will be chopped off.

The erotic revolutionary and volcanic deflagrations antagonize the heavens. As in the case of violent love, they take place beyond the constraints of fecundity.

In opposition to celestial fertility there are terrestrial disasters, the image of terrestrial love without condition, erection without escape and without rule, scandal, and terror.

Love then screams in my own throat; I am the Jesuve, the filthy parody of the torrid and blinding sun.

I want to have my throat slashed while violating the girl to whom I will have been able to say: you are the night.

The Sun exclusively loves the Night and directs its luminous violence, its ignoble shaft, toward the earth, but finds itself incapable of reaching the gaze or the night, even though the nocturnal terrestrial expanses head continuously toward the indecency of the solar ray.

The solar annulus is the intact anus of her body at eighteen years to which nothing sufficiently blinding can be compared except the sun, even though the anus is night.

Carlos Quijon, Jr.
Art by Alexandra Paredes

Queer Cinema class under Yason Banal.

Exhibit runs til the 15th. @ The Ishmael Bernal Gallery, UP Film Institute.

2.     Despite the wind blowing and memories lodged in your throat, speak of the first boat ride, the necessity of the finitude of experience, of time.

3.    Ask why the sea is always a metaphor, what do you see? – the discovery of landscape, the perfect time to remember. The sea always trying to lose what is in it: a vehicle, a thought, what you ate the hour before, the hour which you will also forget, the lessons how to float.

4.     Let the word dirt be a metaphor for someone the sea took, mistaken as salt. Someone you remember saying the sea is beautiful. Say, would it make any difference?

5.      Despite the wind and the loss and the metaphor.

6.      When people discovered salt, like what they did when they saw the landscape and the sea, they wanted to know who left it. They wanted someone to thank, someone to blame when they discovered its taste and how it felt in an open wound.

7.      After the metaphor is the fact, the experience. The sea losing even itself and time. You left home and wanted to be lost.

8.     The sea is calm because it forgets. The dirt is calm because it is forgotten.

9.      Ask your mother, who married again after a year, After the discovery of salt, how much has the sea changed?

10.    The sea and its infinite erasures, the sea and the infinity and depth of loss.

Bad poetry, I would submit, asks questions, raises issues, makes complaints, marks territories. Bad poetry does not take on the more difficult task, where the question and its answer are as one. Good poems absorb into their formal and imaginative resources new questions which are as “difficult” to answer as they are to raise. Or put it this way: the poem is an answer to a question or questions no one, including the poet, had thought to ask. These questions are always in temporal, historical flux, responding to myriad collisions of information from every possible-and they seem to multiply by the day-domain. The poem as answer to an unasked question puts pressure on the poet to be alert, vigilant, receptive, not just to the past, but to the weathers, internal and external, which characterize the day- poems of our climate, indeed. The burden of knowledge is immense, but it is also messy and malleable; each time you reread “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” a new fiction will arise and the nature of it supremacy (its bestness) will alter. It is the critic’s job to ask the question or questions which the poem elicits in its answering. As long as editors and critics are blind-sided by the myopia of their pre-existing conditions for good, better and best (the latter a test only time can take), as long as they mistake subject for content, content for meaning, and form for that which is what was, much of the best of the best will remain invisible, and the real questions to their answers will go, as Shelley foretold, unacknowledged.

A rose, after all, is still only a rose, but it smells sweeter when there are three of them.

from “Slaves of Fashion”

by Robert Fitterman

This window makes me feel like they’re really listening to me, even when they do most of the talking, and it’s a real turn-on. This window makes me feel like I’m handling items in microgravity without changing my orientation. This window makes me feel like I’m not free to say what I want to say. This window makes me feel like I live in the woods. This window makes me feel a bit shaken up—I sleep with the window open, even in winter, with a loaded rifle and a flashlight handy. This window makes me feel like saying, “please, girl, stick it out with me… I feel a change coming over me.” This window makes me feel more cocky and powerful when I have a good breakfast—don’t eat anything you can buy from a place with a drive-thru window. This window makes me feel like, I don’t know, it just makes sense to me—it’s just my perspective. This window makes me feel unhip, out-of-touch, old, and I don’t care if they are the latest fashion or on whose runway they were first spotted. This window makes me feel like I wish I could get up on the roof of my apartment building, but there’s a revolving restaurant up there so no way. This window makes me feel like something of a “pure scientist” and, therefore, one of the very people that I often criticize. This window makes me feel like he is explicating her position as a post-linguistic turned Kantian position. This window makes me feel like what happened to me—only a few years ago I was against the old eye for an eye thing. This window makes me feel like you could almost smell the sea. This window makes me feel like this will be the last time you’ll ever hear from me. This window makes me feel like I could climb a castle wall and you could be Repunzel letting your hair down for me. This window makes me feel like no one else thinks about these things. This window makes me feel like there must be a big neon sign on my neck that says come on over here and hit me. This window makes me feel like we could forget about our own agendas and get ready to get sold. This window makes me feel like I don’t know you people, why are you here? This window makes me feel like when I talk badly about their father it’s terrible and it makes me torn apart. This window makes me feel inferior because I don’t have the flashy clothes that the people in this ad have. This window makes me feel joyful because the sky turns from a beautiful light blue to dark blue. This window makes me feel better about losing stuff at home. This window makes me feel worse about myself because I want so much for people to like me for me, yet I am told by my own husband that I act immature and inappropriate at times. This window makes me feel guilty because we’ve had far too much rain this year, and farmers like my mother’s brother are really suffering. This window makes me feel like all of my education is for nothing and I don’t know when I will ever get the right job. This window makes me feel like I am special and loved—when we do nice things for each other we feel happier and want to be together more. This window makes me feel less like a customer and more like a part of the team without talking computereze and without being talked down to. This window makes me feel like I’m a believer in total experience so how do I make peace here? This window makes me feel like the best part of the whole deal is that I don’t have any accidents in my pants like I used to. This window makes me feel like the inside is already a man, and I need to make the outside so. This window makes me feel neglected because he says he doesn’t believe he needs to participate in these manufactured holidays. This window makes me feel even more alone than before with so many people checking up on me lately. This window makes me feel like he is just completely bitter without having any real human feeling behind it. This window makes me feel an admittedly bizarre and psychologically twisted but loving kinship, like we’ve been joined unknowingly for the past decade. This window makes me feel like sometimes I see a guy on TV and compare myself to him. This window makes me feel conspicuous in a way that I hadn’t expected. This window makes me feel like I’m in Disneyland—my checkbook is balanced, the porch is swept, the plants have been watered, and almost all of my clothes have been put away. This window makes me feel better because I know I covered my ass. This window makes me feel sad because it reveals how melancholically beautiful England is, suburbs and all. This window makes me feel like I need to get a larger gold fish bowl or they’re going to keep dying on me. This window makes me feel like I will reach total freedom. This window makes me feel like a heel because I know I am an insecure attention-seeker who has a deep need for total strangers to notice my existence for a very short while. This window makes me feel somewhat better as I can sense that it isn’t just me that seems to be getting less than decent service. This window makes me feel sick, but I have to smile and tell you how happy I am for you. This window makes me feel more successful and more prepared to face my future—something which used to scare me when I thought about it. This window makes me feel slightly depressed because there’s no food in the house. This window makes me feel like we belong some place and it makes me feel like we’ve achieved something. This window makes me feel like I perform better when I frequent the gym and feel that I’m working towards a goal. This window makes me feel engulfed in pride and nostalgia. This window makes me feel like if everyone has an American flag it helps spread the pride. This window makes me feel like I’m having a panic attack where my thoughts are racing and I can’t breathe very well. This window makes me feel a little better about the fact that I don’t have a clue where I’ll be next year. This window makes me feel like I’m looking at mountains even though there aren’t any mountains for miles and miles. This window makes me feel like so normal, like I’m glad I’m not jumping into anything. This window makes me feel better because I didn’t get an upset collections manager in response to the situation. This window makes me feel at peace because I know that love, through me, has helped show a path that makes things easier. This window makes me feel like I just went over the moon, on a rampage, knocking over around ten other clubbers, causing three to lose consciousness. This window makes me feel a little uneasy like he’s capitalizing on the tragedy. This window makes me feel alive as I look up at the skies, take a deep breath, and look at the stars shining bright up there. This window makes me feel like no matter who I am and what I’ve done, I do have a chance. This window makes me feel like everyone around me is giving the two thumbs up sign. This window makes me feel guilty of course, so I don’t indulge in the fantasy for too long. This window makes me feel more in control of what needs to be done, and it makes it easier for me to structure my day. This window makes me feel like the anger’s building because I don’t care what you do anymore, and you obviously don’t care how I feel. This window makes me feel like I’m testing shampoo on a bald man. This window makes me feel like telling someone how much I love his or her product, which is very soothing and effective. This window makes me feel a little bit like each Spring when I find myself coupled with some newfound mate. This window makes me feel like I must be so unimportant to him if he tells me he was busy all day and that he didn’t even have the chance to call me until late at night. This window makes me feel very insecure about my manhood, what with the pink artwork and the fucking unicorn on the front. This window makes me feel like I am in someone’s fantasy. This window makes me feel like I don’t have his full attention and that he’d rather not be talking to me, which is plenty annoying. This window makes me feel more comfortable and relaxed with my surroundings because we treat each other casually by calling everyone by their first names. This window makes me feel like trash and like everyone thinks I’m trashy being big on top and having to look like this. This window makes me feel a lot better because (A) it gives me hope that maybe he will quit soon, and (B) I figure that if they haven’t fired him after all that shit then I don’t know what. This window makes me feel like skipping lunch for the gym.

So what exactly is conceptual writing?

–

—

—-

P.S.
Asteg asteg asteg

Robert Hass

1.

September sun, a little fog in the mornings. No sanctified terror. At night Luke says, “How do you connect a b to an a in cursive?” He is bent to the task with such absorption that he doesn’t notice the Scarlatti on the radio, which he would in other circumstances turn off. He has said that chamber music to him sounds worried. I go out and look at the early stars. They glow faintly; faintly the mountain is washed in the color of sunset, at that season a faded scarlet like the petals of the bougainvillea which is also fading. A power saw, somewhere in the neighborhood, is enacting someone’s idea of more pleasure, an extra room or a redwood tub. It hums and stops, hums and stops.

2.

In the dream there was a face saying no. Not with words. Brow furrow, crow’s feet, lip curl: no, it is forbidden to you, no. But it was featureless, you could put your hand through it and feel the cold on the other side. It was not the father-face saying no among the torsos and the pillars of aluminum nor the mother-face weeping no, no, no at the gate that guards rage; it was not even the idiot face of the obedient brother tacking his list of  a hundred and seventy-five reasons why not on the greenhouse door. This face spits on archetypes, spits on caves, rainbows, the little human luxury of historical explanation. The meadow, you remember the meadow? And the air in June which held the scent of it as the woman in religious iconography holds the broken son? You can go into that carved by a muskrat in the blue-gray distance of the pond, black eyed Susans everywhere. You can go there.

from Human Wishes (The Ecco Press, 1989)

The felt need to write. Hence the need to read. The idea of creatively waiting.

I’m reading and re-reading:

Robert Hass, Human Wishes (The Ecco Press, 1989)

Jenny Boully, Moveable Types (Noemi Press, 2007)

from John D’agatha’s The Next American Essay (Gray Wolf Press, 2003):

Wayne Koestenbaum, “Darling’s Prick”

Joe Wenderoth, “Things To Do Today”

Susan Sontag, “Unguided Tour”

Susan Mitchell, “Notes Toward a History of Scaffolding”

Thalia Field, “A:I”

I’m also thinking of, but still processing:

Lyn Hejinian, Clark Coolidge, Charles Bernstein (Read them here.)

And this is discovery.

What’s more interesting: I have never written anything new since that day the awesome-est person both in the world of forms and the world of ideas told me I wrote well (footnote).

Completely overshadowing the first two interesting things: It took me an hour to write and revise the first sentence of this post. Thinking to myself is this sentence even decent enough to be published under the name of someone who fetishizes, who, if he could, would record the moment,  who even spread to his favorite student writers (footnote) the news of the moment the awesome-est person both in the world of forms and the world of ideas told him he wrote well? and thinking to myself does he really write well as the awesome-est person both in the world of forms and the world of ideas said?

Hopefully interesting: I have ideas on what to write thanks to the awesome-est person both in the world of forms and the world of ideas allowing me to sit-in in one of her classes (footnote).

Must be kept interesting: I have my models and have thought really hard on the execution of a poem series composed of three poems having the same title inspired by a quote by Jenny Boully. The three poems are entitled Errata: one assumes the form of an erratum and is a response to (as what the most intelligent poet in the Philippine literary scene taught me) (footnote)  Jenny Boully’s “22″: raw, confessional; another to assume the form still undecided but is inspired by Vince Serrano’s “Short Walks” and is subtitled notes on recurring words;  another which does not assume the form but is fragmentary a la Wayne Koestenbaum’s “Darling’s Prick”, and Joy Wenderoth’s list “Things to do today.” The poems I’ll pass to the-awesome-est-person-both-in-the-world-of-forms-and-the-world-of-ideas’s poetry class as proof that I did my part as a permament sit-in.

In light of what is interesting to me: Give me your ideas about my interesting project (footnote).

A note on the footnotes: I’m still figuring out how to use footnotes in this site. See them footnotes later.

This post is after a new found friend’s (footnote) post where my new found friend writes about an idea of what to write, basically writing about his own writing.

At the time of this writing, I am thinking of poetry and art as acquisitive, selective modes of communication, in which poets and artists eventually effect transfers. We recognize all sorts of values, take them and process them (at times keeping process alive—a sign of personhood) that they might become part of memory—I guess that no matter the style, I’m still with Keats and Shelley with respect to public realities: I think poets and artists are soul-making legislators, though our airwaves be light. Poetry and art that have value to the event would not misconstrue it, would not simplify violence, and poets and artists responding to it would not sacrifice the real for the true, nor adjudicate between them. We can do little more than to face up to these things without apologies. Else we could challenge the forms in which we work.

from High Chair 12