Kitty-Boy

He's 14 years old. He's a sweetheart. He's my cat, and I'm his human.

sorry for being silent

A blog is for saying stuff. Silence is weird.

I thank those who still stop by here to flip through the archives.

I'm in week three of recovery from open heart bypass surgery.

I ain't got much to say. I'll post some music instead.

my boring hypothesis

Before the internet and social networking, there was, in individuals, a concentration, an intensification of consciousness and being. Since the internet and social networking, there has been, in individuals, a dispersal, a dilution of consciousness and being. 

A possible equivocation: my poems and mini-essays -- this very blog, in fact -- would not exist if not for the internet and social networking. If not for the decanting of worlds and souls previously unsuspected into my world and soul. My stuff took on life and being inside this half-ghostly milieu, this floating reservoir of exotic presences. 

I guess what I'm trying to say is that, prior to the internet and social networking, individual consciousness was, perhaps, more of a solid than a liquid or atmospheric substance. 

I suppose I'm having a sort of Walter Benjaminian moment. 

Blue Rigi: Lake of Lucerne
J.M.W. Turner (1842)

bird feeder

Yesterday would have been my mother's 88th birthday. She loved birds, always kept her bird feeders filled and water in the bird bath.

Yesterday in her honor, I built a bird feeder.

On the back of my property is a dilapidated old shed made out of cypress boards. I got one of those 1 x 6 cypress boards and sawed it into two pieces (for the top and bottom feeder platforms). I cut up a pine 1 x 2 for the upright supports ("weathered" them with some maple stain, some walnut stain, and some smears of gray oil house paint, so they would sort of match the old cypress boards). 

Then I said to myself, "Hey, I have an idea!" 

For the other feeders I've built, I used 1 x 2s for the perimeters, to keep bird seed from blowing off. This time, I cut some 1/2" diameter tree branches to length and nailed them around the top and bottom feeder platforms. 

The birds like it. They enjoy alighting on actual branches instead of on 1 x 2 strips.  In fact, I heard a chorus of them singing in mixed keys:

"Birdbrain went to extra fuss. We accept him, one of us!"

Some people stroll...

...through cemeteries rationally and socially on late Sunday or Sabbath afternoons in midsummer. They are not of my eccentric tribe.

I remember when I was a boy, walking through a particular cemetery on late Sunday afternoons in midsummer. That space of the dead generated in me a kind of muted ecstasy. The strangeness of it had a texture of the infinite (a poetic, not religious infinity). It opened up a region or vortex of delectable, macabre melancholy.

That haze of atmosphere mixed with a smell of moody grass.

The experience was distinct from any mournful connection to dead relatives there, though maybe that played a role subconsciously. It was more about time suddenly felt as an alien substance, as an exception to an unknown rule, as a something freakish and woven of the sublime -- sublime in the sense of beautiful or wondrous terror.

Perhaps those early-in-life, late Sunday afternoons of strolling through a cemetery contributed to my becoming an outsider being.

It's just a thought. I'm just having a moment of questionable nostalgia.

I have a friend...

...who was born in the coal-dark and liquor-weird geography of West Virginia.

My friend is admirably self-sufficient. She's flown over the ocean to live in a land where they speak an incomprehensible northern tongue. My friend is remarkably independent. She's bootstrapped herself into dimensions of old and new culture, appreciating extraordinary literature and cool music.  

One thing in particular must be emphasized. It has to do with the music of Johannes Brahms.

It's not every day you run into a person who is drawn to Brahms's music, to his spiritual sound world. There's a distinctive emotional tonality that runs through his music, a diffuse yet cathartic atmosphere that haunts his wordless speaking. It's hard to describe. 

Most people can't be bothered to be amazed by the quality of Brahms's music. Different strokes. But I'm pleased to report that my friend is a friend of Brahms's music. I'm pleased both by the strangeness and the depthness of this phenomenon reflecting my friend's discrete, sovereign soul.   

a quiet sophistication

Some people -- through an unknown law of nature or magic -- stick in your consciousness. It's really an unusual phenomenon. I say "stick," but it's more like an elastic echo returning at random moments across various segments of duration. Even weirder is that those who are the quietest conjure the profoundest echo.

I have a friend who lives in Norway. What a country! Ridiculously sublime mountains and waters. From my perspective here at a secret outpost in Arkansas, Norway is as exotic as Old Japan.  

My friend is Russian. How in the world did my friend end up in Norway? It's one of life's great mysteries.

My friend impresses with a quiet sophistication and a tendency to subtle mirth. Seeing into things with unusual vision and smiling at the occasional absurd are cool ways of being.

My friend is more sophisticated than I am. Whether a text, a painting, or a vocalise, my friend extracts from them a nuanced essence that is beyond my Arkansas detection equipment. 

Well...it's really a fool's errand, trying to describe aspects of a being who is sensitive to seasons in Norway, who pays attention to eccentric moods of Nordic flowers, who is elusively Russian, and who is preternaturally not a nihilist. 

My hair always grows...

...like a monkey-shrieking jungle.

I got a haircut in October. My hair stopped growing.

November, December, January -- my hair refused to grow a smidgen. I thought it meant I had some terrible physical or symbolical illness. Why did my hair stop growing?

A few weeks ago, my hair started growing again, like a mystical occurrence. Almost overnight -- Poof -- there it was, with no explanation.

Charlie Kelly versus World Order

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Charlie Day as Charlie Kelly 

First, let's stipulate that everyone is unusual. The spectrum runs from highly functional people with a few quirks to stark raving madmen and madwomen. Then, there's Charlie Kelly. He has completely sidestepped the spectrum.

Objects have meanings bestowed on them owing to consensus of experience. A hammer is for affixing a nail. A window is for staring out of. A pizza is for being round. So on and so forth. But in Charlie's head, all objects are free-floating, a-historical phenomena.

As with objects also with behavioral conventions. Every social construct is, for Charlie, a region of stupefaction and always already beside the point. His impatience with the usual, the agreed-upon-by-society expresses itself as an almost physical spazzification.

Try to imagine Charlie Kelly running for elected office, becoming an entrepreneur, writing depressive poetry. It's not possible. Outsider artists interred in insane asylums would consider Charlie one step beyond. This fracture of normality precludes his participation in ordinary non-verbal codes. Inflections, nuances, winks, and nods don't mean for Charlie what they mean for the rest of us. This is not solipsism on his part. This is about him moving around as best he can inside our collective solipsism.

Charlie is preternaturally tuned in to a frequency of "I wasn't consulted beforehand about being born, therefore...rabbit." This is non sequitur as the manic law frothing beneath all philosophies of Being and Time.

Charlie Kelly is the embodiment of something on the tip of the tongue. He's the living reverse of the Freudian Uncanny -- with Charlie, things have no chance of ever coalescing into the familiar. Charlie is permanently un-housed.

Watching Charlie Kelly on the TV series It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is to encounter primal spirit set loose in the world. He's a stray mercurial juggler of semantics performing unlawfully inside our thick categories.

the splendor of false memory

I have a recurring image of a house set back from a certain strange street in El Dorado, Arkansas. A recurring image from my adolescence. The front yard was vast, with a curving driveway. I have a recollection of the interior of that house. I've never been inside that house. 

This recurring image is a false memory.

In my false memory, my cousins Judy, Janet, and Terry lived in that house. In reality, they lived two or three miles away. They never lived on that street of overhanging elms and moody time.  

There's a unique texture to this false memory. It's not like a stray piece of dream. It's even cooler than that. Wherever it came from and however it is that it keeps appearing behind my third eye are questions having to do with a dimension tilted away from reality. 

This isn't past-lives stuff, isn't supernatural or Jungian. It's way more interesting than all that stuff. Somewhere deep in my head, a wrong house has decided to exist containing three wrong cousins. I really don't want to know how or why. I'm just glad it's there.

Leonard's a deep guy

There's a blaze of light 
In every word 
It doesn't matter which you heard 
The holy or the broken Hallelujah

an intellectual on the road

In Dostoevsky's novel The Possessed (variously Demons), you will find the character Stepan Trofimovitch Verkhovensky. He's an older fellow, an intellectual. He lives mostly inside his head, where the ideal, the abstractive, and the theoretical quiver in consciousness. He lives, therefore, just beyond the actual, in a more liquid or gaseous state than the solid. 

In that respect, I see his intellectualism as a kind of artistry. On the impetus of allusive and expansive thinking, he floats toward possible spheres of interpretation. The life of mind has, over time, opened up a tangential space for this critic at large, for this spirit known as Stepan Trofimovitch. A peripheral "geography" is where the artistic abides. But let's not get carried away. He's an intellectual, not an artist per se, even if his musings and one famous work change time into different substance.  

We find Stepan Trofimovitch in the novel during his later years, when he's a chronic free boarder with the aristocratic Vavara Petrovna. In her manor and with dramatic flair, he soliloquizes perceived slights and gesticulates intrinsic egoism. But he's more eccentrically charming than insufferable. Just a fading candle flame from an older era. 

In Part Three of this novel, there is a Chapter 7: "Stepan Trofimovitch's Last Wandering." After a falling out with Vavara Petrovna, he sets out on the road. Dazed, feverish, and crestfallen, he yet proceeds with a misty hopefulness -- a Don Quixote on a not quite firm mission. Here's an excerpt:

The cart reached him; it was a fairly solid peasant cart. The woman was sitting on a tightly stuffed sack and the man on the front of the cart with his legs hanging over towards Stepan Trofimovitch. A red cow was, in fact, shambling behind, tied by the horns to the cart. The man and the woman gazed open-eyed at Stepan Trofimovitch, and Stepan Trofimovitch gazed back at them with equal wonder, but after he had let them pass twenty paces, he got up hurriedly all of a sudden and walked after them. In the proximity of the cart it was natural that he should feel safer, but when he had overtaken it he became oblivious of everything again and sank back into his disconnected thoughts and fancies. He stepped along with no suspicion, of course, that for the two peasants he was at that instant the most mysterious and interesting object that one could meet on the high road.

“What sort may you be, pray, if it's not uncivil to ask?” the woman could not resist asking at last when Stepan Trofimovitch glanced absent-mindedly at her. She was a woman of about seven and twenty, sturdily built, with black eyebrows, rosy cheeks, and a friendly smile on her red lips, between which gleamed white even teeth.

“You . . . you are addressing me?” muttered Stepan Trofimovitch with mournful wonder.

“A merchant, for sure,” the peasant observed confidently. He was a well-grown man of forty with a broad and intelligent face, framed in a reddish beard.

“No, I am not exactly a merchant, I ... I ... moi c'est autre chose.” Stepan Trofimovitch parried the question somehow, and to be on the safe side he dropped back a little from the cart, so that he was walking on a level with the cow.

“Must be a gentleman,” the man decided, hearing words not Russian, and he gave a tug at the horse.

“That's what set us wondering. You are out for a walk seemingly?” the woman asked inquisitively again.

“You . . . you ask me?”

“Foreigners come from other parts sometimes by the train; your boots don't seem to be from hereabouts. . . .”

“They are army boots,” the man put in complacently and significantly.

“No, I am not precisely in the army, I ...”

“What an inquisitive woman!” Stepan Trofimovitch mused with vexation. “And how they stare at me . . . mais enfin. In fact, it's strange that I feel, as it were, conscience-stricken before them, and yet I've done them no harm.”

The woman was whispering to the man.

“If it's no offence, we'd give you a lift if so be it's agreeable.”

Stepan Trofimovitch suddenly roused himself.

“Yes, yes, my friends, I accept it with pleasure, for I'm very tired; but how am I to get in?”

“How wonderful it is,” he thought to himself, “that I've been walking so long beside that cow and it never entered my head to ask them for a lift. This 'real life' has something very original about it.

So much other stuff goes on in this whole novel that someone might ask, "Why are you focusing on this little scene with the two peasants?" It's because I find myself on occasion wondering about the further and farther lives of minor characters.

The two cart peasants are confronted with the riddling presence of an...intellectual! They are also being unconsciously influenced by the intellectual narrator. And behind him, the artistic intellectual author, who has placed those two peasants in an unusual circumstance. They must be feeling ghosts! 

Will they later laugh or whisper about that preposterous stranger on the road? The appearance of Stepan Trofimovitch will surely alter, in the weeks ahead (especially for the woman),  an opinion that things are firmly quotidian. 

The world is odder than it appears. How thoughtful of Dostoevsky to bestow on non-intellectuals an extraordinary encounter with someone from the life of reading and thought. The shock will surely vibrate into their own later years.

And how will brute nature -- rain, snow, wind, stone, stream, wheat -- extruded into the human shapes of two cart peasants affect Stepan Trofimovitch? Will his last dream as he soon lies dying spiral around the weirdness of a contrary mode? Will he sigh out his last toward the enigma of peasants, those who eyed him with suspicion?

on sincerity

The spectrum of human feelings covers a complex range, from the writhing shriek of a sick or injured child to the discombobulation of the amorous to the autumnal melancholy of some old geezer. Many other perturbations, excitations are found along the array of stimulated homo sapiens.

But the transference of emotion to forms of art should involve a movement not simply linear (compulsion, saturation, confession) but also vertical (metaphysics, symbolism, dubiety). 

Big context. Actual peculiar. Deep sincerity.



Bob Dylan - Highlands by perostoppogno


Highlands
Bob Dylan

Well my heart's in the Highlands gentle and fair
Honeysuckle blooming in the wildwood air
Bluebelles blazing, where the Aberdeen waters flow
Well my heart's in the Highland,
I'm gonna go there when I feel good enough to go

Windows were shakin' all night in my dreams
Everything was exactly the way that it seems
Woke up this morning and I looked at the same old page
Same ol' rat race
Life in the same ol' cage.

I don't want nothing from anyone, ain't that much to take
Wouldn't know the difference between a real blonde and a fake
Feel like a prisoner in a world of mystery
I wish someone would come
And push back the clock for me

Well my heart's in the Highlands wherever I roam
That's where I'll be when I get called home
The wind, it whispers to the buckeyed trees in rhyme
Well my heart's in the Highland,
I can only get there one step at a time.

I'm listening to Neil Young, I gotta turn up the sound
Someone's always yelling turn it down
Feel like I'm drifting
Drifting from scene to scene
I'm wondering what in the devil could it all possibly mean?

Insanity is smashing up against my soul
You can say I was on anything but a roll
If I had a conscience, well I just might blow my top
What would I do with it anyway
Maybe take it to the pawn shop

My heart's in the Highlands at the break of dawn
By the beautiful lake of the Black Swan
Big white clouds, like chariots that swing down low
Well my heart's in the Highlands
Only place left to go

I'm in Boston town, in some restaurant
I got no idea what I want
Well, maybe I do but I'm just really not sure
Waitress comes over
Nobody in the place but me and her

It must be a holiday, there's nobody around
She studies me closely as I sit down
She got a pretty face and long white shiny legs
She says, "What'll it be?"
I say, "I don't know, you got any soft boiled eggs?"

She looks at me, Says "I'd bring you some
but we're out of 'm, you picked the wrong time to come"
Then she says, "I know you're an artist, draw a picture of me!"
I say, "I would if I could, but,
I don't do sketches from memory."

"Well", she says, "I'm right here in front of you, or haven't you looked?"
I say,"All right, I know, but I don't have my drawing book!"
She gives me a napkin, she says, "you can do it on that"
I say, "Yes I could but,
I don't know where my pencil is at!"

She pulls one out from behind her ear
She says "All right now, go ahead, draw me, I'm standing right here"
I make a few lines, and I show it for her to see
Well she takes a napkin and throws it back
And says "That don't look a thing like me!"

I said, "Oh, kind miss, it most certainly does"
She says, "You must be jokin.'" I say, "I wish I was!"
Then she says, "You don't read women authors, do you?"
Least that's what I think I hear her say,
"Well", I say, "how would you know and what would it matter anyway?"

"Well", she says, "you just don't seem like you do!"
I said, "You're way wrong."
She says, "Which ones have you read then?" I say, "I read Erica Jong!"
She goes away for a minute and I slide up out of my chair
I step outside back to the busy street, but nobody's going anywhere

Well my heart's in the Highlands, with the horses and hounds
Way up in the border country, far from the towns
With the twang of the arrow and a snap of the bow
My heart's in the Highlands
Can't see any other way to go

Every day is the same thing out the door
Feel further away then ever before
Some things in life, it gets too late to learn
Well, I'm lost somewhere
I must have made a few bad turns

I see people in the park forgetting their troubles and woes
They're drinking and dancing, wearing bright colored clothes
All the young men with their young women looking so good
Well, I'd trade places with any of them
In a minute, if I could

I'm crossing the street to get away from a mangy dog
Talking to myself in a monologue
I think what I need might be a full length leather coat
Somebody just asked me
If I registered to vote

The sun is beginning to shine on me
But it's not like the sun that used to be
The party's over, and there's less and less to say
I got new eyes
Everything looks far away

Well, my heart's in the Highlands at the break of day
Over the hills and far away
There's a way to get there, and I'll figure it out somehow
But I'm already there in my mind
And that's good enough for now

Time has a way...

...of moving certain souls toward a condition of silence. That movement involves a gradual shedding of vanity, pathology, and delusion. What's beneath the world, beneath language is more genuine than masks of form, substance, and saying. People are amorphous, pronouncements transient and hollow. Silence is solid.

an unusual blog

This blog -- Flame in the Snow -- isn't ordinary and boring. It's actually interesting. It's written and compiled by a sensitive soul. From certain depths, a resonance might issue with rich and peculiar coloring. 


Here's a post from there:  

Vertinsky and Pierrot (Blok and Balaganchik)


And I'm honored to be mentioned at flameinthesnow:

Someone is Required

an eavesdropping

Sometimes, I get myself all abstractified and extrusionated. I ramble and blather about this and that. Occasionally though, a certain unusual piece of music will bring me up short. My babbling fades. I then simply listen to eccentric aural moods of life as such. 

Whatever life is in itself becomes impervious to reason, presents itself as spirit within sound.

Four exemplary Chekhov aphorisms...

...brought to my attention by Will Crawford:


Life does not agree with philosophy: there is no happiness which is not idleness and only the useless is pleasurable.

The grandfather is given fish to eat, and if it does not poison him and he remains alive, then all the family eat it.

A writer of no talent, who has been writing for a long time, with his air of importance reminds one of a high priest.

Women deprived of the company of men pine, men deprived of the company of women become stupid.

Hannah Arendt said:

"Ideologies are never interested in the miracle of being."

to be but not to be pretentious

Whether in one's poems, stories, daily lived attitude, or chronic consciousness, I suggest it might be a good thing to not mythologize oneself.

Even worse is when self-mythologizing takes the form of an artificial role lifted from another's persona. One Hemingway and one Kerouac are adequate as single-occurrence beings. They were already rather shallow and boring. There's no need for any literary and attitudinal redundancy of those types.

Clipped expression and beatnik style go stale very fast. The elemental and the experimental -- masculinity and radicalism per se -- are metaphysically anemic constructions, therefore more cardboard texture than living gesture.

One should aspire to be oneself. And that means scraping off encrustations of pseudo-selves, means not glorifying the banality of your situation, means acquiring a pair of mystical binoculars to spy the question behind formal, fabricated personality.

The Real is vaster and stranger than what goes on in the blinkered coordinates of modern mythy guys.

other forms of exile

I've never been forced to emigrate, so I don't know what it feels like to be an exile. Nonetheless, I'm drawn to poems made from that dynamic. There must be something deep about the condition of exile as such, something that mesmerizes me into that special complex of melancholy/dislocation. It must signify a certain tonality within myself. And maybe why I'm attracted to poetry in general.

Poems of exile seem to express or reveal an important latency inherent in language. Poems of exile have a distinctive quality, and I think they might contain a semantics of soul beyond the particular and the literal. Those poems might be rumors of answers to questions having to with the subtlest elements of aesthetics (the spectrum and texture of qualities).  

I wonder if there are forms of exile other than the geographical?

Maybe dreams are situations of quasi-exile. They place one within the coordinates of novel and problematic experience, requiring improvisation and elasticity from the sleeping spirit. We are wanderers from a somewhere, moving through an elsewhere and toward a neverwhere. We improvise from a vague store of memories and moods as we attempt to navigate among beings and within circumstances that are as foreign as an unknown language.

Time might be another form of exile. We are distanced from older happenings and impressions by spaces of duration. Perhaps we continually grieve in our unconscious precincts for the lost things that time has taken and hidden or half-hidden from us. The inexorable flow of moments eventually leads to a parting of ways with loved ones -- age takes them away to a land of fog and fading. Death exiles us from those who were the landscapes and cornerstones of our souls.

Old horizon, 1928
Yves Tanguy