“Autumn”

A poem I wrote a number of years ago, as read by Heather Primrose. 

“Mortal Grin” lyrics

 A song I wrote 16 years ago:

Mortal Grin

The night is speaking in strange tongues,

and the heat hangs like a dead lung.

Surreal thoughts leaking out of my brain,

going up in smoke through this tepid rain.

I wander vague, disconcerting streets,

full of apparitions clothed in meat.

Staring into these confident faces,

I'm stupefied for explanations.

What should I think about this suavity

and body language so cavalier,

when I feel like an underground man

with a Dostoevskian fever?

I hear the murmur of latent cadavers,

waltzing just outside the graveyard fence.

No misstep, no pause in their palaver.

Where can I get one of those big, wide mortal grins?

My thoughts are running like a wild dog,

as I contemplate this complacent throng.

Hey you, yes you, with that bowler on your head,

what spell are you working on the mighty dread?

I stand perplexed, my mouth is agape,

mystified by reality's shape,

while all around me are gesturing blithely.

They know something I'm un-divining.

Should I purchase some opium,

join this conspiracy crowd?

They say there's strength in numbers, numbers,

but they're dropping like flies while the night's unbowed.

What should I think about this suavity

and body language so cavalier,

when I feel like an underground man

with a Dostoevskian fever?

I hear laughter coming from a midnight ball,

where the smiling masks are made out of skin.

Jesters tumble happily in absurd thrall

to the yawning god of sleep and mortal grins.

I hear the rumble of distant thunder,

that deep and unsettling symbolic din.

I wish I could put this fear asunder.

I want my very own big, wide mortal grin.

Words & Music by Tim Buck, 2008

Agafia where frost and birches

~ inspired by the life of Agafia Lykova

Gone to God now they are.

Bones will follow someday.
Rattling through moonlight.
Up to the angel stars.

Graves sway grass and crosses.
Blue star flowers wild I put there.
Crosses tell my own dear sleepers.
Blue star flowers strung on crosses.
Mountain makes the wind a hymn.

Fled to this far frost we did,
to hidden nights of birches.
Hard oh God, cold oh God.

Sky changing out the years.
Hungry and the soot of hours.
Once I heard an old saint speak
inside cold fire of soot and hours.
Frost and snow and silent birches.
How long oh God, how long?

Once they came to take us back.
We felt the sin on strange breath.
What more than faith is saving?
Why go when we are here?
They left us to our prayers.

Gone to God now my dear sleepers.
Nights we told our holy dreams.
The Devil circled our dark hut.
We swayed to scripture rhythm.

I sway to scripture rhythm, мама.
Now at night I hear the voices.
Time is harsh for ecstasy.

~ TB

Because we exist…

...certain thinkers try to think into the abstract structures of the situation -- of the ontological everydayness. They apparently think it can be described and explained. Maybe it can. Maybe the French postmodernist philosophers were onto something. Maybe their descriptions and explanations are accurate, more or less.

Of course, those French thoughts might not be accurate, but only fascinating:

"Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates."

-- G.C. Lichtenberg (1742 - 1799)


The "textualness" of books, personality, and circumstance may indeed be amorphous and infinitely deferential. Something called "Event" may be eruptively efficacious in patterning great turns of time within abstract being. Contextualizing arenas of action and change may shed unexpected light. Social psychoanalysis may yield groovy ways for looking at the problem of identity. Critiques of power relations may tell us about general attitudes and systems of value. Semiotics may point to the elusiveness of any conceptual solids in our discourse.

Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Badiou, Lacan, Baudrillard...fine. Go ahead and think your stuff to the max. It's entertaining to read and ponder odd and original views of the world.

But....

at some freaking point, I think it would be a truer thing to replace the word that floats their thinking -- "abstract" -- with a different word -- "mystical."

So what would we gain by a mere word substitution? Probably not much. But just as Heidegger danced around none too nimbly trying to avoid the mystical implications of his own work, I think it would be more honest and more succinct for the French to cut to the chase: consciousness finds itself always and at every ontological location enmeshed not in intertextual patterns or reified ramifications but in the chronic impossible.

That's the rub of it. Being is best describable and explainable as a massive paradox. 

I keep wondering about what those French guys have said. Why in the world do they spend so much time being profound and arcane? What practical (existential) thing results from the dark rooms of thought where they develop their abstract pictures of reality?

The problem of mortality trumps the problem of thinking. Being death-haunted makes the student in the Lycée lecture hall grow impatient, fidgety. "Speak to me of why, not of what," she says to the French professor who thinks reality is contained inside language and abstruse prolixity.

Something is surely going on with all this human existing stuff. I'm just not sure it is accurate or aesthetically satisfying to account for it in terms of postmodernist abstraction.  It seems to me there is something that remains yet hidden (mysterious) behind our best attempts to map phenomena onto a coherent plane of deep thinking.

It's not just the French guys. There's also Slavoj Žižek, the Slovene. Inside his strange reality bubble, we bounce around trying to dodge the anti-matter particles of his contrariety. Those elusive particles eventually agglomerate into political shapes. But politics is a form of sleep, of normalizing trance. The true radical is the one silently screaming toward the mystic abyss. 

What do I mean by "mystic"? Not sure exactly. But maybe something like this: what is not possible has nevertheless found a way within the sentient doldrums of a dreaming Holism.

Does anything practical (existential) result from such an intuition? Not in the normal sense. Rather it offers a perspective in which the organic, the inorganic, and all the laws of process are imbued with traces of an old and weary magic. In such a milieu of the holographic uncanny, it behooves us to have compassion for all other drifting and tragic spells of being. 

The Sensitive Layer -- Yves Tanguy

I looked up…

…the dictionary definition of “Alito”:

a smarmy, condescending, theocratic asshat. 

Beyond Roads’ Withering

 ~ based on the piece Old and Lost Rivers, by composer Tobias Picker

I'd rather not write about those everyday things
of the South down here. There's something else
that has taken hold of me, as if recall or imagining.
It's about old and lost rivers, of antediluvian character.
I might have seen them, or this might be a dim vision.
Other things gather around my thoughts of slow waters.
Maybe old sunlight echoing from a long path of lilies,
begonias, and soft camellias glowing under a vast halo.

It's best to wander down your mind and on into Louisiana.

A weary river is shrunken by years and idles past old Hope Manor.
Loons stand in shallows, and from depths a fish wrinkles the surface.
Warmth in air has come from under slow clouds' summer momentum.
The season has settled here halfway between dogwoods and autumn.

Beyond roads' withering come the faint trails
of vagrant, leaning grasses. Odd shadows delve
under trees toward lost rivers' moss-hued reveries.
Dragonflies weave their complex fabric of ennui
out of silences hung in time. Beyond roads' fading,
lost rivers are hidden, flowing with ambivalence,
odors, and goggling eyes below cypress water roots.

There is no one there to know a lost river.
It moves by itself, lapping the primitive bank.
And who knows if even a ghost can find it?
But I sense the narrow river and its weariness.
I float it in vision and need, as if I'm searching
for someone also lost in a murkiness of liquid.

A last breath comes to all things that breathe.
Yet time continues with a halo of mourning.
Maybe the lost dead can be sought beyond paths,
in the wildest durations of forgotten river moods.

Beyond roads' withering, things become uncanny.
Sometimes I think Southerners hold a few ounces
of slowing light when we die and then disappear.
We ride the air as a quivering above mossy silence,
going down a lost river, gleaming on dragonfly wings.


~ TB

Old Jaffa

Moments come that are not a viewing.

They are a listening into tones of light.

When the sun calls, the noise of seeing

faints behind an aural synesthesia.

Light works into substances, vibrating

into shadows of shadows, sounding angles

until the eyes change to different senses.

Bundles of light-sung shapes rise

as cubes of time holding echoes

touching echoes that interfere

and become complex harmonies.

This light pleads into structures, pulling

sentiments deeper than clayey sediments.

Light trembles into a liminal mood.

Ballads of sun in matter can build

staggered tones of momentous world.

Octaves glow as sung vignettes rising

beneath the Old Tragedian's eye.

Architecture dreams under the sun,

its memories refracting into gold.

While just looking at a photograph,

imagination hears unexpected vision.

I have never been to Old Jaffa.

I will never go to Old Jaffa, but...

I went anyway into a photograph of Old Jaffa,

a boat's view of the harbor becoming hillside

and a hundred buildings of staggered mystery

in the light glaring an ecstasy and absence.

I walk stunned through narrow streets,

an old quarter filled with sibilant tongues

that speak of glimmering fish, of heat

and of things I could never imagine.

Many sun-burnt ghosts brush past,

moving through a dream of Jaffa.

I will not leave until the sun goes.

This maze of houses swallows me in shadows

until I make it back to the harbor, to the railing.

I stare toward the far water changing its colors.

The afternoon brings an epigram on the wind:

being lost is better than ever being found.

Sunset now a gong rippling out its gold abysses.

The long waves curl like her tresses...

and I will never walk in Old Jaffa.

~ TB

Lost in a Chinese Night

Yesterday, I had an actual reverie. An official daydream, approved and stamped by a shadowy bureaucracy in charge of dubious precincts of time.

I keep thinking about that reverie. I think it lasted for only a few moments, yet those moments were stretched into a different form or quality of duration. Those few moments seemed to last an incredibly long while.

I was afoot and moving at night through a town or village somewhere in China. This night was dynamic and clangorous with bodies, faces, trumpets, dogs, chimes, flags, leashed monkeys, and neon signs buzzing unknowable ideograms.

But the faces! Everywhere faces. Peculiar, probing, insinuating, alarming faces.

The streets (some paved) were coming and going at odd angles and refuted any possibility of destination. The houses and other buildings were close to the streets and were all built in the old Chinese manner, with curving, sweeping roof lines. Asian trees spread their perfumed branches. Traditional lanterns glowed here and there, like the pale heads of forlorn ghosts.

The sense of utter and bedazzled alienation took my daydreaming breath away.

Those faces! People swerving up to me, close to my nose, wide-eyed, gesticulating, staring with the expression of vaguely threatening hieroglyphs. Faces that were, in contrast to my own, completely at home in this world.

There was no point to this reverie. It was simply a divergent moment stretched out into forbidden space. If Carl Jung was still alive, perhaps I'd drop in on him, to ask about this dark tumbling into a town or village of my subconscious hysteria. To find out the reason why I tumbled there. To discover what form of psychological ruin this episode was a foreboding or what form of spiritual talent this episode was a possible presentiment. 


~ TB (2013)