These are interesting times indeed. When something we collectively call time is interrupted by a situation, when by situation we mean something that has moved although we know not yet in what direction, we have something very interesting developing. Lauren Berlant says a situation is a kind of time “in which a relation of persons is sensed to be changing but the rules for habitation and the genres of storytelling about it are unstable, in chaos.” Situation is interruption, a fiery bowl poured onto the sea.

A canister of pepper spray on a line of seated students: I see the video from UC Davis showing the officer whose name has not been released lowering a smooth and righteous handle of pepper spray from the sky to the students’ heads and faces. The nameless judge throws down upon them a sword of fire. It is evidently well practiced. I wonder how many others have swallowed his burning fist. An incident videotaped and an officer suspended doesn’t change certain facts.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AdDLhPwpp4

What brought Los Angeles to a breaking point in 1992 wasn’t just that famously grainy video but that that video finally revealed what had been experienced as the status quo for years. And the police seem to understand the terms of their relationship to an increasingly agitated group of disaffected people; so the status quo hasn’t changed, their defense of it has just learned to allow itself such excesses across a broader base. The end product, so to speak, is an antagonistic police force with an increasingly diminished compulsion to hide its use of excessive force. Notice how he raises the canister to the sky before lowering it with an air of grace over their lowered heads. So high that the four corners of the earth should see.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yE0Uua7jnSA

And they would be gathered for battle, their number like the sand of the sea. And they would march up over the broad earth and surround the camp of the saints and the beloved city.

In college I took a translation course with Robert Hass. He was working on the Japanese Haiku of Basho and I was into doing some variety of Latin and Romance lyrics. Given as he was at that time to environmental concerns, his selections were pretty idiosyncratic and, likewise, my own probably reflected a range of interests limited to matters erotic if not blithely inebriated and esoteric. Something like a decade later, I read his opinion piece in the New York Times describing his assault by the Alameda County deputy sheriffs. The story of his wife thrown to the ground while he is bludgeoned in the ribs follows a string of similar stories and incidents: Women and the elderly pepper sprayed and beaten, military veterans killed, all kinds of people submitted to egregious uses of oppressive force. The videos I see show me an army who would kill but are at the moment content to maim. If I were taking Hass’ class today, my selections would be different. Ernesto Cardenal, Roque Dalton, and Pablo Neruda would be more pertinent voices.

I am surprised by the difference ten years can make to the social tick of the earth’s clock.

We have a situation here: And they marched up over the broad earth and surrounded the camp; but fire came down from heaven and consumed them and they will be tormented day and night for ever and ever.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGf9wEIXMns

The weeds seem to laugh as they hit and slide on each other in the wind until the wind brings a fire upon their hissing bodies, a situation.

Hass’ editorial ends with the strange image of a tent lifted by helium balloons into the air, hovering over the plaza, “large and awkward,” he says, “occupying the air.” “Today and everyday,” echoes Geoffrey G. O’Brien, “we occupy the air.” And from one Abiezer Coppe again the injunction to “occupie the ayre.” After a recent post, I was criticized for comparing the voices of the occupy movement’s human megaphone to a hymn of ghosts, enchanting alien bodies to be re-chanted by alien windpipes. When air traverses the windpipe it is breath or spirit, the vital principal within living beings. In German “spirit” is geist, our etymological ancestor for “ghost,” of which Hegel says that communal forms of life are built. Geist, as he uses it, could also be translated as “mind,” if mind is understood to be operating at a higher level of existence than just self-awareness. “Spirit, so far as it is the immediate truth, is the ethical life of a nation: — the individual, which is a world.” This worlding of the individual occurs by a process of acculturation and, in moving his discussion to effective cultural objects, he defines culture as the “world of self-alienated spirit.” Although we might feel ourselves to be reflected in another person’s poetry, for example, we are not committed to it except insofar as we are bound to its alienations. Culture allows us, more generally, to reflect and, in doing so, enter a concrete actuality, a grounding effect. Spiritual substance brings us into actual reality. Geist is breath and is also mind, much like Donne’s spiritus or pneuma, (“Since thou and I sigh one another’s breath”), the motile air bringing body and mind together in the speaking voice. When air traverses the windpipe, it, also voice, likewise can be poetry. So I likewise repeat the injunction that we occupy the air.

And though they might stand at the four corners of the earth, holding the four winds of the earth, that the wind should not blow on the earth, nor on the sea, nor on any tree, a vial of air will be released with a great voice out of the temple of heaven. And the voice will be as of many waters.

When a certain illusion is eroded, gnawed like a cliff-base by the sea’s persistent tooth, it will not be again stabilized. Who still believes (viz., gives spirit to) the fantasy that they are today there to serve and protect anything other than a system designed to serve and protect a privileged few? The number of violent police might be like the sand but the sand is not the sea, churning in its spirited contradictions, even swallowing the sand, if it will. These waters rush from the voice of the occupations. They are the churn of history, even as that churn might sicken the sick. They have become the intractable situation.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGKuX8akRzw

In the final sequence of Michael Wadleigh’s 1981 film, Wolfen, three detectives are caught crossing the stock exchange steps at Wall Street by a pack of wolves. The wolves are predatory shapeshifters whose point of view is depicted with an in-camera thermographic effect similar to that used in Predator (McTiernan, 1985) to show the point of view of the extraterrestrial creature hunting the US special forces team sent to destroy rebel encampments in the Guatemalan jungle. The thermovisionary wolves have been descending from a wasteland South Bronx to kill the tycoons intent on transforming their decayed haunt to a high-rise luxury development. When they aren’t in their wolf form, these shapeshifters appear in human form as a group of Indians, presumably Mohawk or Iroquois, as they are at other times shown working on the high cables of the Brooklyn Bridge—special steel-working labor contracts were offered to the Mohawk and Iroquois when it was learned that they did not fear heights or dangerous conditions (Don Owen’s High Steel, 1965). They encircle the police on the steps, growling and baring their fangs amid filmic night mists.

The cop that reaches for his gun loses his hand to the leaping maw of one of the wolves. With his other hand he tries to radio backup to the stock exchange, when another wolf implausibly decapitates him with a split-second pounce. I suspect this is meant to suggest that wolves’ teeth are razor sharp as, earlier in the film, a wolf’s bite had been compared to a guillotine blade. The head rolls on the pavement, its mouth struggling to voice a last word.

The other two escape by sparking a massive explosion (again, implausibly) by firing two shots at the bumper end of a parked car; afterward making their way back to one of the dead tycoon’s luxurious if not gaudy penthouse homes. For a moment, the car and body are shown burning on Wall Street before we see the wolves arrive at the gaudy penthouse where the two detectives are hiding out. Dewey, the lead investigator, faces off with the lead wolf. A voice-over indicates that Dewey is now remembering what he had earlier been told at a dive frequented by the film’s Indians. “They can hear a cloud pass overhead, the rhythm of your blood,” said Eddie, the Indian leader, with a picture of Geronimo behind him, “they can track you by yesterday’s shadow; they can tear the scream from your throat.” Dewey drops his gun, raising his palms in a show of surrender to the shapeshifters. After he smashes a scale model of the high-rise luxury development planned for the Bronx, the wolves howl and leave. The final scene shows them running through their South Bronx haunt, still howling as the film fades out to the Indians atop the Brooklyn Bridge. Dewey is heard musing in a final voice-over: “In arrogance man knows nothing of what exists. There exists on earth such as we dare not imagine—life as certain as death, life that will prey on us as we prey on this earth.”

The wolves protest nothing; ultimately implacable, they return to rampage over what, in their minds, must already be occupied land. Furthermore, the ancient, thermovisionary perspective of the wolves is not the ideology lens-shift of They Live!. There is no symbol beneath the symbol. There isn’t even a simulation to be pierced, no master signifier to burn away at the edges. There is only heat and movement. Whatever dialectical polarity might be abstracted on them, it is already a foreign design. And you can’t occupy what is already under occupation. The wolves protest nothing. Of Geronimo, Edward Dorn wrote in his 1974 Recollections of Grand Apacheria: “Notorious through his opposition/To Alien authority/And by Systematic/And Sensational advertising/His Pleasures were widely known/As Depredations among the Invader//Eyes like two bits of obsidian/With a light behind them.” “In their eyes,” Dewey is told, “you are the savage.”

¤

Personally I am susceptible to a questionable line of thinking when it comes to what to read to rally yourself to revolution. In part it is because I am suspicious of rallies. But also because, when out in a mob, one can still reserve a right to ask what would Ezra Pound think? Confessing this odd impulse to James, as we recently attended the inaugurating protests at Occupy New Haven, he admitted that he did the same but instead replaced Ezra Pound with Robert Anton Wilson. We thought about it a few seconds and realized that essentially they would probably say the same thing—or at least what we are looking for is the thing that they would say that would be the same; something to do with blanket antagonism and a necessary fostering of chaos.

¤

It is a strange accident that the code name for the operation to capture Osama bin Laden was “Geronimo.” Several Native American tribes protested to this.

¤

I went down to Occupy Wall Street with Josh. The next day I received the below email from him:

Dear All,

Last night, I went down to NYC to check out Occupy Wall Street and attend a poetry reading being held there. I arrived at Liberty Plaza at 7:45 and the poetry reading was at 9. At 8:30, after having walked around the occupation, Edgar and I went for a drink and wrote poems to read. We stayed at the reading until 10:30.

The reading took place at the northwest corner of Liberty Plaza, close to Occupy Wall Street’s library boxes (plastic tubs filled with books). No microphone no megaphone and a loud organizational meeting about twenty yards away (and music twenty yards south of that). So a human megaphone was utilized: the speaker said a phrase, line or sentence and everyone close to the speaker chanted it back so those at a greater distance could hear. This was how the organizational meeting behind us was being conducted too. Most of what I have to say about the reading is determined by this fact. People read for 3-5 minutes, but everything took a while because of the crowd repeating back the phrases, lines or sentences. First names and some second names were written on pieces of paper, which were then collected in a cardboard box. The organizers pulled out a name and then you went up onto the steps.

Only two poets whom I saw read chose to go without this chanting (and neither actually *read*; they recited from memory). The first of these was a guy who read a poem about Neda Agha-Soltan called, I think, “What can be said;” the second was a woman who performed a poem about hooker school, dressed only in lingerie. Both were interesting performances, the second less inclined to bombastic language, but turned from satirically performed spoken language (conversations with cops and GRD instructors) to a somewhat earnestly delivered refrain of “your pussy is a sword, even if you don’t know it,” a phrase which seems to me to be making a few distinct arguments at the same time and invoking an archaic supposed poetic habitus of swords and sorcery, and my not buying all this makes me feel uncomfortable. But neither of these are what I want to talk about.

What I learnt at this event I am not sure I want to develop into any type of principal, but it does produce a truth I need to know. When you say a phrase and hear it said back, what falls away is the internal logic or complexity of the poem. One version of the poem only could be locked in, and this was very clear and conscious for me. To refuse the human megaphone, as I almost did, meant to invest the power of language to express suffering and argument only in the windpipe and bones of a single speaker, and not in the shared momentary voice of a crowd of people collected in Liberty Plaza, New York, on the 7^th October to peacefully protest against the current conditions of capitalism (I put this as vaguely as I can because I do not think even the vagueness of calling the occupation *anticapitalist* is vague enough). The logic of the poem belonged to the crowd. Every phrase was chanted back. Critical judgment was for me a secondary faculty. Primarily, I wanted to involve myself with how every phrase was an attempt to give voice to suffering, a condition of truth which could not be avoided for the reason that I simply was there, in attendance, and listening in the act of chanting. The unity of a poem was secondary to the unity of the line first read and the line chanted back; that a poem was a whole unit was knowable because the person standing on the steps a few yards away from you was the same person. This is to say, the reading became a joint project. The passion of an individual was unsustainable because the lines could not be held together, and no prosodic or tonal intensity could be worked up into music because the chants were near-monotone, the prosody necessarily slow and simple. The passion of the collective of reader-chanters-auditors was predicated on a (vague) political commitment. I don’t think it was a poet’s job, here, to provide passion in language to a political organization, with an individual’s language chanted out as emblematic of the spirit of an occasion. Instead, the reading became implicitly a religious-service-esque expression of conviction with respect to two things. First, that a repeated phrase belonged to the whole group (or language community) and must be known, without hesitation, as a voice for suffering. Second, that this language community was in fact speaking and thinking in a very precise language, so that words and phrases from various poems were immediately processed from English into smaller signifiers, with reference only to the geographical and historical context (even the Arab Spring was being reprocessed in my brain).

A man called Joseph went up second and read Prynne’s “The Corn Burned by Syrius,” the last poem of The White Stones. The first sentence of this poem reads:

……….Leave it with the slender distraction, again this
……….is the city shaken down to its weakness.

Potentially, these are two parallel statements either side of a comma and consciously either side of the verse turn, with the second line conditioned as a reiteration of the first: say “this,” what has just been said, “again.” At OWS, though, this sentence progressed logically. You leave the city into the minute exile of the occupation, away from the slender distraction which I heard as dollar bills, and the result is the city being shaken down to its weakness. The mutilation of life which distraction is suggested to be meets its counter force in the occupation, which shakes down the city, replacing the con-artist with the activist collective, bringing power down to its knees. Untrue. But longed for. The corrupt version of an ideal city does not imply backwards a moral imperative to “Leave”; the city is an actual city, New York, which has been left behind in the act of resisting business as usual. Contemporary praxis is no problem, but is instead a solution to real humans owning all the money. That is to say, no city nostalgia was even thinkable for me when these phrases were being chanted. The later lines “O how farre | art thou gone from thy Country, not being | driven away, but wandering of thine owne accord” (see Reitha Pattison’s commentary on this poem in Glossator on this quotation from Boethius’ Consolation) were interpreted (by me) in the context of the nationalism of the occupation (with people shouting things like “This country was built on liberty! Where’s the liberty? You’ve replaced it with slavery!” – when this great country was of course built on slavery). You (our political society and especially you, the bankers) have strayed far from the ideals of the grand USA, not because you have been forced to, but because proper regulations were never put in place. The city of New York becomes in transfigured in turn into an exile from the America of yore. I heard the lines as moving, delicate stuff, but the consciousness with which I received them wasn’t mine. The poem was a fracture of its form on the page. But the reading, for all its poverty, denounced the abyss, at the entrance to which is an instruction to words to abandon all feeling and experience of physical sounds. The liquid matter discovered is being worked into pebbles, not the hard rock of meanings which would compel us to make capitalism yield. If that should ever come, when that comes, it will be a very different event from OWS, but the discovery of these fractured rocks within the array of available political responses (Banks are bad! Stop the bailouts! Money shouldn’t rule, so just separate money from the state! The banks are the new John Bull!) is a prologue toward possibilities.

I feel compelled to stand with the badness of the poetry as much as I feel I ought to be disgusted by the bad interpretations of poems forced on me by the context. Attending to the feeling and sound of every utterance was the virtue of the occasion. The wrong way I heard poems, in the fragmented whole of the evening, is something that perhaps may be correctable by a poetry that learns from this (I certainly didn’t know what the chanting would do to the event). If the poetry readings continue and continue to be amplified by chanting, this may happen; if so, the interpretive consciousness produced in that corner of Liberty Plaza may do some good for the whole occupation. As it is, I think the fragmented-feel-good thinking of OWS at the moment constitutes how poetry exists there too. This is not to say I do not admire what is being done.

Best, Josh

¤

I thought about Josh’s letter for a few days, turning it over in my head, trying to tease out the specific anxieties underpinning it. I remembered the poems he mentioned, the one about Neda Agha-Soltan, a stirring recitation by a man who filmed all the poets who read. And also the one by a woman who recited her poem in her underwear, a poem about a well educated prostitute and the problematic situation when the court mandates she go to “hooker school;” that is, get the GED the prosecution presumes she doesn’t have. There were, in retrospect, two women on display in these recitations—the woman’s body for sale for all to see and the woman we all saw, dying on the streets of Tehran. One uncovered and one covered, one pressured and one released. And still they were both there, together under a totem of poetry or performance, standing for the fundamental contradiction that some must live while others die, even as death seems so far away. I thought about why Josh took issue with the refrain, “your pussy is a sword,” not so much because it was hard for me to imagine how a pussy could be a sword, but because there are much more violent weapons of destruction hanging over our heads and shooting into people’s bodies. Even if Neda had had a sword, would it have done any good against the bullet that blasted inside her chest? Around this time, I came across a passage from Mike Davis that told of one financier’s peculiar obsession: “When the Federal Resolution Trust Corporation seized the assets of Columbia Savings and Loan Association they discovered that the CEO, Thomas Spiegel, had converted its Beverly Hills headquarters into a secret, ‘terrorist-proof’ fortress. In addition to elaborate electronic security sensors, a sophisticated computer system that tracked terrorist incidents over the globe, and an arms cache in its parking structure, the 8900 Wilshire building also has Los Angeles’ most unusual executive washroom: Tom Spiegel’s office, in addition to the bullet-proof glass, was designed to have an adjoining bathroom with a bullet-proof shower. In the event an alarm was sounded, secret panels in the shower walls would open, behind which high-powered assault rifles would be stored.” When facing the banks, one suspects a poem would make more sense if it said a woman’s pussy should be a high-powered assault rifle.

¤

Rereading Blake’s “America, a Prophesy” could be interesting in light of recent events.

¤

I thought about the letter again when walking alongside the Occupy New Haven encampment a few nights ago. It was late night and the denizens of the tents set up on the city’s green were mic checking, or calling out for each others’ voices with a radiating human megaphone. From the far side of the green, I could hear a fainter “mic check” than the one that followed it and than the one that followed that one, “mic check!” There was no speech or assembly being prepared for. They were voices checking for each other through the dark, misty park. Like the bodies of the dead buried beneath them in the green, they sent out wandering specters to ensure each other that they were still around. Chanting their voices toward alien bodies, they enchanted those bodies to be re-chanted by alien windpipes. I disagree that this is the voice of a crowd. It is a hymn of ghosts.

¤

“You don’t have the eyes of the hunter,” Dewey is told, “you have the eyes of the dead.”

¤

It’s true—a man did read J.H. Prynne’s “The Corn Burned by Syrius” at the Occupy Wall Street poetry assembly. On his feet at the citadel’s threshold, the reader ghost-hymned a dream of departure. It is necessary first of all to disentangle the citadel from the nation, as it has already done so, in order explain why the reader was even holding his vigil on the steps of a financial stronghold and not, as the Bonus Army did in 1932, on the lawn of the U.S. Capitol. In dreaming of self-possessed exile, he paradoxically came to the heart of the citadel, its market and tables of exchange. In a strange way, however, it seems that one can feel most far away when most near an intolerable thing. We can imagine that he had money in his pocket, if not a debit card. And nonetheless there he was making outward motions with his arms. But could his hands be unmarked anyway, as far down the sloping grasses as he might take them, so long as he went with the citadel on his horizon?

And if he discovered in his exile the “fractured rocks” which Josh identifies as “a prologue toward possibilities” does he hurl them with a poem or not? And, if so, is he throwing them at the same abyss at which they were thrown in Cairo or Rome? “The so-called revolutions of 1848 were but poor incidents—small fractures and fissures in the dry crust of European society. However, they denounced the abyss. Beneath the apparently solid surface they betrayed oceans of liquid matter, only needing expansion to rend into fragments continents of hard rock.” I recently heard Slavoj Zizek echo Marx’s point: “The system has lost its self-evidence, its automatic legitimacy. And now the field is open.”

¤

I am peeved by the supposition that circular-time as we understand it is somehow autochthonic to the Americas. That idea of time comes from the industrial circuit of endlessly repetitious monotony or monochronicity (emblematized by the wrist watch). Indigenous time is more like a loom-piece. “Their world is older,” Dewey is told, “more finished; more complete.”

Indeed the indigenous dialectics that I am familiar with are often based on crisscrossing and colliding lines of history. Americans could do with a better sense of line.

¤

In an exchange of emails on chaos and circular movements, I sent the below passage (the last paragraph from Heriberto Yépez’ El Imperio de la Neomemoria, 2007) to Jose-Luis and Oscar:

Desordenándose unos a otros, resistiendo influjos de la otredad, desigualándose, el alterverso mantiene su libertad, su descarga. Lo irreversible es la verdad. Nuestras prácticas, ideas y fantasías sociales acerca del funcionamento del cosmos bajo un mismo juego de leyes es otro más de los espectros de nuestro pensamiento totalitario. Hemos pensado al caosmos como si fuera un Estado total. La noción de un “Universo” es la de una detestable omnisistema absolutista, cuyas leyes todo lo encadenarían a través de la eternidad. Autoengaño y engullimiento, abondonar la idea de la existencia de una Totalidad, puesto que la caótica es la prueba definitiva de la existencia de la libertad. Para que yo sea Soberano deben dejar de existir todas las Leyes Generales. Sé que negar la existencia del Universo es un absurdo; por ser absurdo, lo asevero. El Universo jamás ocurrirá.

I translate the passage thus:

Throwing itself here and there into disorder, resisting the influences of otherness, unbalancing itself, the alterverse maintains its liberty, its charge. What is irreversible is true. Our practices, ideas and fantasies with respect to the workings of the cosmos under one set of laws is another specter of our totalitarian thinking. We have imagined the cosmos a total State. The notion of a “Universe” is a detestably absolutist omnisystem, whose laws would shackle everything by means of an eternal. Self-deception and gullibility need abandon the idea of the existence of a totality, as chaos is the ultimate proof of the existence of liberty. For me to reign sovereign in this, all General Laws must cease to exist. I know that denying the existence of the Universe is an absurdity; so, as to be absurd, I declare it. The Universe will never come to be.

¤

A fractional-reserve banking system increases the money pool by lending a multiple of what it actually has. For all the deposits a bank receives, it keeps only a fraction of those deposits as reserves. Deposits are widely understood to be in the form of money or currency. But a parallel banking system exists, known as the “shadow banking system,” which is a misnomer because it operates openly and liberally. Trading in debt via packages such as hedge funds, money market funds and structured investment vehicles, this banking system is harder to control because it trades in forms of credit doing the service of money. The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 made it easier for these banking systems to collude. In the years leading up to the banking crisis of 2008, banks borrowed from short-term liquid markets, subsequently multiplying the money pool to invest in long-term, risky illiquid assets (such as mortgage-backed securities); the same person that dips a hand to pull money from one purse uses their other hand to drop the funds into an unregulated, risky investment. This is also known as a diversion of funds for speculative operations, in so far as the parallel investment is secured by nothing and, on the other hand, the bank accepting deposits continues to require cash to go about its daily business. Either it has to continue taking risks to increase an available pool of cash (for its depositors and, of course, its operators) or it teeters on the brink of bankruptcy with the hopes of being rescued by some larger entity.

Any corruption stemming from such an enterprise isn’t as much a matter of greed as it is of a flawed system. Although, nevertheless, the system was designed.

Furthermore, when a money pool is multiplied from its multiples (the funds lent at a multiple of what a bank actually holds can be re-received as deposit to count in the fraction that it needs to be considered as holding reserves; so can likewise be re-multiplied), it makes money a linguistic exponent, only ever realizing itself as a greater abstraction. Braving absurdity, I say that the money you hold has never actually been.

¤

In any event, here’s a poem:
What we forget we remember
in more whole form
……….this is how
came about the universe
the sky dropping
like a honeysuckle rose
into the hand
from which it stemmed, a hand
stopping over a keyboard
to tap one key just once
but then to walk away
and what of apocrypha have we
……….to say or speak to
the story of the fish who ate
the sea or the rabbit
who swallowed the limbless fish
……….the tide is itself
its opposite and forcible bend
the people pushing toward refutation
………………..meagre push
while the eel dreams of limbs
and a desk is washed out
……….by its time, out
………………..to inscription
that in memory it remain
hopeful of these things
though hidden they delay, evacuate
…………………………or protest

¤

“They can see two looks away.”

.

An excerpt from Hydra writer Jose-Luis Moctezuma’s review of Charles Drazin’s French Cinema (2011) on the Summer 2011 issue of Cerise Press (Volume 3, Issue 7):

When one thinks of “French cinema” a certain tendency is evoked by the residue of classic francophone films that were, from the perspective of those who loved cinema but who did not grow up speaking french, considerably quieter and, perhaps, subtler than the mainstream films of Hollywood. This presumed tendency in French cinema to come across as intellectual and “mature” in comparison with its American twin brother is one bound up with a kind of traveler’s nostalgia for crisp black-and-white images that crackled like old newspaper and lovesick, chatty movies that brought attention to themselves as extraordinary metafictions, “a cinema in love with cinema.” For me, at least, my first meaningful encounter with French cinema was Jules et Jim, and its indexical image was that of Jeanne Moreau blithely singing “Le Tourbillon de la vie”, an iconic scene which always struck me as unavoidably, even obstinately, French, as if Francois Truffaut — its réalisateur — had secretly attempted to integrate the elliptical, New Wave-soaked rhythm of Jules et Jim within the illustrious continuity of France’s tradition de la qualité. Truffaut’s insertion of a chanson whose charm and cadence seemed to evoke a nostalgia for the Golden Age romanticism of directors like Julien Duvivier and Marcel Carné is an irony Charles Drazin picks up on in his book French Cinema (Faber & Faber, 2011). That Truffaut and other members of the French New Wave are now as canonical as the old school predecessors they theorized and rallied against punctuates the strange capacity of French cinema to remain a unified genealogy of film even after a century of cultural ruptures and technologic revolutions.

To read the rest of the review, please visit Cerise Press‘ website.

Darién Gap

Monday

May 16, 2011

Dear Nate,

It was good to get a nice long stretch of the Andoumboulou songs from you, but because it looks as if they have incorporated the parts treating the continent of “Mu,” at first I didn’t know where to address this letter. Perhaps, when I have a chance to visit, you might explain why you chose to destine the land of Mu to the same fate as its hapless cousin, Atlantis. Queen Moo, Le Plongeon’s lone refugee from the Maya island of Mu, has been dispatched from Egypt back to the jungle. And by jungle I mean sea. But you know what I mean.

You are starting off from history. But, where you think you mean history, you mean song. And, where you think you mean song, you mean history. Lorca is a good place to start, but before I get into that, I will remind you you wrote this: The thin bread of duress sounds to me like the duende of deep song which elsewhere you described as “a sound of trouble in the voice,” or when the voice stretches so thin that it feels as if it might snap. Because the duende of deep song originated with the gypsies, whom legend tells were the exiled Egyptians of old, the song is inherently one of migrants. Your Haitians here are the reminder of the tradition of poetry that crosses national borders, the sea-weary drift of the refugee’s boatlifted music.

For this reason, I think that where Olson wrote that “SPACE is fundamental fact” for the mind born in America, you started from the premise that he meant Americas and not America. Later, he probably did but only got there with his work in Yucatan, viz. after Call Me Ishmael. Anyway, to my ear your drift is the sound of the borderzone — in form the transportable point of encounter between this world and that. Place and moment of mobility and syncretism. That world and this at once. You might see how I’m winding my way back to Lorca.

Spicer got Lorca. Got duende fully — so that he could confront Lorca only where Lorca was, where the dead are. There’s a moment in the movie Sugar Hill when Sugar is responding to Mama Maitresse: Where does the power come from? From the living among the dead. Who can use the power? The dead among the living. This comes to mind, although I think it was the opposite for Spicer (and Lorca). But that is neither here nor there. Lorca wrote that the deep song singer Torre said to him: “what you must search for, and find, is the black torso of the Pharaoh.”

But you know all this. The real reason I write is because I wonder how deeply deep song has penetrated the Americas. What is the connection to the Pharaoh in the Americas? Lorca was in Harlem and heard duende in the explosion of music and poetry in that place at that time. And you have written on the relationship between the black aesthetic of duende and the motile harmonics of Coltrane and Miles. But what about since that time? Where does your duende today stand? Where do I find the deep song in the latest stretch of the Andoumboulou music?

You open Splay Anthem with Glissant and Olson, respectively: “a place of encounter and resistance” and “and all motion / is a crab.” In my mind what you intend to index here is the borderzone. And I don’t mean just any borderland between two nations (although that may be a part of it), I mean the portable potential of encounter viz. the condition of movement. Sauer was keen on migration as the basis of cultural growth, with the true space of culture being where migrants meet and their paradigms can cross-fertilize (in a spiritual understanding this is where they can cross over): outside enclosures, beyond borders. Movement thus = culture growth. But more specifically I think that movement across a bordered area (i.e. through a borderzone) makes for a particular kind of culture; migrants make their own kind of music.

In the “Song of the Andoumboulou: 50,” you write: Fray is effect of strain as it is shown on a fabric but if the fabric is unwound I think of Cecilia Vicuña who relates that “in the Andes, unspun wool is cosmic energy, pure potential.” Stray is what the migrant is. Spar is a wooden boom that supports a sail, therefore a instrument in movement but also a type of pugnacious activity. Rasp reminds me of your “rasp / our lone resort.” And Bray is a loud, harsh cry. They may or may not be a place but they are surely a zone of arrival, “came to… come to… came to… come before,” a culmination of departure that is still only transit point to next departure. You arrive before you arrived because upon arriving you will have had to leave. But where are you arriving from and leaving?

I think that, without a specific national context, you are moving the area as a cultural zone, one to which access is immediately available. This is migration, pure potential but also mix-up. And across the confusion there is a thin line, a harsh chorus, a fray strung into a bray.

I hear Bray and think of Brer and hear a Brer in his Bray:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEwqHCKiyCA

“As long as you’re to the point, son… but when you walk, remember what you see.” In the song Brer is shouting into a mirror, “you ever seen a bigger fool than me?” And I think of your writings on Coltrane: “who uses the upper and lower registers of the instrument as though they were two different voices in dialogue with one another, in a sometimes quarrelsome conversation with one another, in competition with one another… It makes for an unruly agonistic sound in which it seems that the two lines of articulation are wrestling, that they are somehow each other’s contagion or contamination.” This you call “a crippling of the voice that paradoxically is also an enabling.” The migrant, in this case Sweetback, whether moving southward or northward or inward through an outward stare in the mirror of history and social fact, rasps a frayed bray.

I hear it elsewhere:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=hs1awMgySgU

Where before strength was disability, here disability is strength. Brittle bones in pursuit of a mirage of capital. But in either it is a quality of the off-key. It is audible in your lines. In the same essay that I was referring to before, where you relate limping to strength, you talk about the African Loa, Papa Legba, “one of the gods of vodoun, candomblé, and lucumí… god of doorways, gateways, entrances, thresholds, crossroads, intersections.” Here is where I would add borderzones. Borderzone, on a large scale, is the national crossroads. Or, better put, it is the crossroads putting you past the nation. What makes us limp paradoxically provides us with a secret power. And, here, I am thinking of a context specific to the geography of the Americas.

While our near borders get increasingly policed and transit + transfer across them criminalized, the main facilitators of transfer get either (1) made into criminals when before they were not or (2) radicalized in crime or (3) which is (1) then (2). The culture that must necessarily form the conditions of this kind of zone of encounter will have as its basis criminal underworld. Or, I will suggest, just underworld: Whose patron saint is Malverde, whose psychopomps deliver death and deliver unto death. And their music is, you surely know, stranger to sense of key.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7G3mp4GBew

In the last song, an explicitly borderzone corrido, Mario Quintero Lara bemoans the “frontera roja,” or the red frontier, so-called due to the endless bloodshed ensuing from the traffic of narcotics from Colombia to the United States. The corrido, originating as a news outlet for the illiterate, was transformed under the mainstream hegemony of radio into an outlet for communications from outsiders (i.e. the oppressed, drug traffickers, etc.). In the 1980s, the narcocorrido exploded as a genre of murder, racketing, immigration, and smuggling, sometimes with a critique of political corruption underpinning these things. Confronted with the immediate menace of death and devastation, the singer of the narcocorrido can never turn back; his passage has already been purchased. His voice is consigned to a red frontier, a straying and a spar in which he is surely to die.

Like the gangster rap which arose alongside the narcocorrido (sold early-on in the bootleg cassette stands of the swap meets and in vehicle trunks across Los Angeles), the musical form has claimed its victims. Chalino Sánchez, which Hydra writer Jose-Luis Moctezuma has dubbed the Tupac of the corrido, was much like the rapper slain in his 20s; who, before he was killed, wrote a song where, as with Tupac in his Niggaz Done Changed, he is speaking after being killed. A communique from the afterlife:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1R1ILsAxI_0

In one of Sun Ra’s interviews, he speaks of the grim mirror relationship between the negro and the necro, with attention to the sonic emblem of the ‘crow’ contained in both words, animal guarding the entrance to the necropolis. The narco, I would add, is today also a narcro. And this is due to the historical upshot of economic circumstances. And you start off from history. But history is song. What song did you hear when you stood on that overpass looking west?

What desert music? A narcrocorrido rising from the fiery asphalt of the 101? A song of Santa Monica and Western? Where did you stand? I think the point is that it was borderzone. It doesn’t matter where you stood or who sang. Nonetheless I think you are saying that a new imagining is necessary and at hand. Mu must return to the waters because Queen Moo must return to the jungles from where she came. Not because she must leave but because her presence must be a constant arriving. To have this be, we must reimagine the migrant in our world. The Nazis killed the gypsies and in the United States they hunt the migrant. This cannot be allowed. Queen Mu, of muthos and music, must move. “She closed her eyes but went on looking at us, an opaque stare which confirmed her voice’s stridency and strain as of a time and place we hadn’t gotten to yet.”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jFTDPwluF0

In short, I follow you in your call to reimagine our borderzones and what it means to cross over.

Sincerely,

Edgar

"All this is... White Man's Fantasy," remarks Fernando Hernandez, a Mayan priest who played the Lord of Xibalba in Darren Aronofsky's 2006 film, The Fountain.

In February 2010, after a series of snowstorms had carpeted every strip of pavement and stretch of land, but before the packed carpets had begun to melt, I settled in with some movies, in the hope of relieving the nervous torpor that takes hold of me whenever I have been confined to watching the world through apartment windows for too long. The snow that had fallen had been followed by more snow, at least three times, each time landing more gently on the bed of its forebears. And in fact they seemed so carefree that a person watching them through a window would believe that these softly increasing beds were indicators of a tranquil and agreeable time arrived. The atmosphere felt alive if just a little sleepy. Leaning out the window, I could see the subtle northeast haunch of the mounds on the sides of the birches and jack-pines, divulging the vicinity of the celestial fountainhead from which the carefree visitors had jumped. Unless they had a winter cave somewhere, the Indians of this area would have had to turn their tents to the southwest to keep the snow from collecting at their entrances. All along the Connecticut River Valley, tanners, hunters, quahog- and whelk-grinders, arbiters, weavers, loomers, emissaries, doctors and farmers would be settled in, facing the southwest with their imaginations dancing on winter’s end.

It was in a winter like this that Metacom’s war, one of the bloodiest in the history of North America, was fought here, waged amid the forebears of these same trees and atop an earlier concretion of the soil beneath.

Not too long before, I had walked the icy canyon paths formed between the mounds with Moshe Feldstein, icon of self-realization. We talked about the snowfall that would never melt away.  Or that had melted but in doing so had infected the soil with its cold blood soaked as a nutrient by the roots of the bushes and the trees of this valley. We listened closely to the wind moving through the trees for the whispering legacy of Metacom’s war. Moshe told me that we could make peace with the Indian, even today. I disagreed. I told him that Metacom, also known as King Philip, the young Sachem of the Wampanoag Indians, had lived in Boston and clothed himself in the fashion of the colonialists. In his adolescence he was seen as an apogee of integration and cultural hybridity. Years later, when Mary Rowlandson was captured and held as Philip’s slave, she betrayed a solace felt in the company of the urbane, tobacco-smoking King, who had her make for his son shirts and caps after the Boston fashion. Metacom had welcomed the garish lifestyle of his enemy, had met his enemy in their world, a world of coins, buttons, and windows. What could we, in this world, offer Metacom that he hadn’t already relished, rejected and continued to secretly relish?

After Metacom was driven from the valley, it was a short while before he returned, knowing he would certainly be killed, to his ancestral lands. John Alderman, the praying Indian who shot Metacom dead, received as a reward for his work the prize of the famous King’s head plus one hand. He traded the head to authorities of the Plymouth Bay Colony for the standard price for an Indian head of 30 shillings. It is said that he purchased silk net purse for keeping the 5 shilling fee that he would collect in exhibiting Philip’s cut-off hand. The head was displayed free of charge by the authorities of the Colony on a stake on Burial Hill for 20 years.

But why did Philip return? Linguist Jesse Little Doe, of the Mashpee Wampanoag suggests a relationship to language brought Philip back. When we say just land in the Wampanoag language it’s ahh-key. But if we want to say my land we must say na-tahh-keem. This means, Little Doe explains, that we are physically the land and the land is physically us. After the Europeans were here for about 70 years, people started to write na-tahh-key, which is so sad because it means that I am not necessarily part of the land anymore. The land can be separated from my person. Philip, who fought his war 55 years after the arrival of the English, would have been in the vanguard of this shift of language. He would not have said na-tahh-key, not knowing that it was even a possible linguistic construction. Without the silent brown soil he would have been nothing. Just as the silent brown soil would have been nothing without him. In all their coming and going, the residents of this snowy valley, grumbling in their apartments, have added nothing to it to offer as reparation. Metacom needs his land, desolate and frozen as it might appear. We hear him and others like him imploring in the inner whispers of the wind in the trees.

Sitting down into the striped sofa with my dog to watch one of the movies, the one that caught my eye did so because of the Indian glyphs along the right side of the title, adjacent to a tagline that asked: “What if you could live forever?” The opening sequence consisted of a passage from Genesis (3:24), a woman who one later learns is Queen Isabella of Castile bathed in white light bestowing a fictional conquistador with a ring a license to conquer at all costs, and a battle pitting the conquistador with two compatriots on one side and a mob of spear-wielding filthy Maya warriors on the other. The compatriots who retreat are killed while the conquistador who charges ahead is captured and taken to the temple’s inner sanctum where, so this story goes, the fountain of eternal youth lies protected. There, he finds another filthy Maya, although this one is dressed in fanciful garb being that he is a priest, who shows his teeth, blood-stained and filed down to fangs, before striking the white warrior with his obsidian blade.

a still from The Fountain

The images in this film, many of which follow the historical standard for justifying the conquest and correctional religious conversion of the Indians of the Americas, astounded me because, on top of their overt racism, they were not especially captivating. In fact, they were so boring that the director of this film had to compensate by injecting the production with a speedball of Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) mixed with frequent upside-down tracking shots that made me reach for my chest in severe agony. It was then that I thought again of Metacom. In 1772 Paul Revere etched an image of “Philip King” on Mount Hope, flattening him into a repulsive pygmy-like man dressed like a puss-in-boots in the gaudy gaiters and faux-mozetta cape popular among the social climbers of New England at the time. We could call this beastly social upstart uppity. And we could say the same of the obstinate, ogrish, blood-cocktail drinking Maya of Darren Aronofsky’s 2006 film, The Fountain.

Likely one of the most boring and simultaneously most offensive movies that I have ever seen in my life. I had to contact others to see if the world had indeed gone blind to the historical Indian. Was this horrid amalgamation of CGI and the degrading deformation of an ethnically cleansed race what counted today for historical fact? Did the sound of munching popcorn fill the silence left by the genocide of the people of these lands? I sent an email out to the writers of this magazine warning them of the film, admonishing that it would hurt their soul to watch it. The following thread ensued:

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I really like the film — but i think you need to take his historical references and genre-bending with a grain of salt. What Aronofsky is doing is really a sort of trash aesthetic, where he collages all sorts of kitschy, sometimes silly ideas, on top of one great, serious story line.

This movie is about our scientific way of viewing the world and the desire to live forever — in essence, the culmination of the western world’s imperialist mindset, which led Europe to the Americas, Ponce de Leon to search out the fountain of life, and today’s scientists to try to cure the disease of death (the singularity theory, etc.). Really good and fun to watch (in a sci-fi sort of way, which is all i ever expect from Aronofsky).

*     *     *     *     *

I don’t think Aronofksy is a very good filmmaker. The Fountain was terrible. His ideas are so simplistic and he keeps whacking you over the head with them. (I wanted to think of a clever pun to put here but could not.)

*     *     *     *     *

What I saw when I watched the film was Mayans = Death, Europeans = Life. Mayans had to die for Europeans to figure out secret of everlasting life. That sounds pathetically familiar.

Aronofsky is just reformulating same imperialist notions into sci-fi dreamscape. Along the way making indigenous people look like bloodsuckers. Why do Mayans always have blood in their teeth in these movies? Like all they did was sit around and drink blood cocktails. and notice there are none of them in celestial Xibalba. It’s like the Lord of The Rings-looking guy is the only person in their heaven.

I can’t take it with a grain of salt when it’s the one thing that keeps hitting you over your head. Also – when the character for the dying wife is played by the same actor who plays Isabela of Spain of course I’m going to want her to die. Isabela was terrible, and no amount of bathing her in light (which this movie does a lot of by the way) is going to convince me otherwise.

And those shots where he follows the car upside down and then follows the horse upside down and then follows the sphere upside down don’t really have a point. Those were the ones that made me most sick.

*     *     *     *     *

“And those shots where he follows the car upside down and then follows the horse upside down and then follows the sphere upside down don’t really have a point. Those were the ones that made me most sick.”

hahahahaha

*     *     *     *     *

I am not a fan of The Fountain; it’s very bad in my opinion. There are some moments here and there that are ok, but not worth sitting through when you have to wade through so much garbage. It’s the film where it became obvious that Aronofsky doesn’t have the mental chops to tackle such weighty subjects.

This doesn’t even get into the visual aspects which are even worse.

That said, i saw it when it came out and I had been waiting for it for many years, so it’s possible my anticipation made me more biased. I would be willing to re-watch just to see if my criticisms still hold.

*     *     *     *     *

Couldn’t help but chime in on Aronofsky. I absolutely must concur  that The Fountain is horrible dreck and thoroughly worthy of all forms of neglect. On the other hand I do not think Aronofsky is, by reason of this, a horrible filmmaker; I rather think he’s a formidably muscular director in the way a boxer is considered athletic: capable of certain camera rhythms which, however empty they may be of content, are worthy of being studied in the way a right hook is emulated. The Fountain is Aronofsky attempting to think for himself (for once in his career) and we find he is a poor metaphysician, and an even worse historicist: let’s hope he doesn’t attempt these Kubrickian statements again. If you can imagine a late 90s Tool video (you remember the band Tool right?), then you have The Fountain in a nutshell (the Tool analogy came through loud and clear during the ludicrous CGI blowout at the end).

But if anything good ever came out of this grotesque failure, it had to have been the evident humbling of Aronofsky, who’s since scaled down to subjects worthy of his talents. A fatuous film like The Fountain made the relative asceticism of The Wrestler possible (not to mention his imbibement of the Dardennes style), and these two were something like training experience for the production of Black Swan, which I think is rhythmically quite excellent.

*     *     *     *     *

I’m inclined to publish this conversation in some form, because it has made me laugh.

*     *     *     *     *

I thought you all might be curious — Aronofsky’s Fountain movie & screenplay are banned in Texas jails.

“Our Earth is degenerate in these latter days,” reads an Assyrian cuneiform tablet dated to approximately 2800 BC, “there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end. Bribery and corruption are common.” Ubiquitous on the internet as the earliest recorded instance of the human obsession with the end times, the quote was first widely disseminated by Isaac Asimov’s 1979 Book of Facts. Before that, the only other recorded appearance of the quote seems to be in a 1953 character-building book, Personality and Adjustment, by a certain William L. Patty and Louise S. Johnson. It appears, in other words, to be as spurious an invention as a number of the marvelous, if not ingenious and inspired, predictions that I will present as my top 11 for 2011.

11. Immediately preceding the paragraph on the cuneiform tablet in Asimov’s book is another outlandish ‘fact,’ which claims that “the lone surviving record of Mayan history is three codices written in hieroglyphs on bark paper.” We know that this is untrue because Mayan history was also carved on the stone stelae found at their cities, the most famous of which has become the tabulation of the baktun shift at Cobá. Otherwise known as the 2012 prophecy, the stele reads:

13…,

13… stones, 13… bundles,

13…, 13…,

13… bundles, 13… bundles,

13…, 13…,

13… stones, 13… stones,

13… stones, 13… stones,

13… stones, 13… stones,

13… stones, … 13 lord stones,

13 ended bundles, 13 higher bundles,

13 bundles, no scores of stones,

no single stones, no scores of days,

no single days, on 4 Lord;

the ninth lord of the night wore the headband,

and 3 days ago the moon had arrived,

… is the name of the new

month of a score and 9 days; it was on 8 Kiln

Translated by Dennis Tedlock in his anthology, 2,000 Years of Mayan Literature (another work whose very existence refutes Asimov’s outlandish claim), he additionally calculates the long count by taking every 13 to be the completion of a bundle (much as the number zero works in decimal systems), producing a date for the beginning of time that is “so enormous that it exceeds the powers of the imagination. . . the resultant time span would be more than billion times longer than the age astrophysicists currently assign to the universe, which is 13.7 billion years.” This massive long count, the prophecy tells us, will switch over (exhausting the maximum possible ‘zeros’ in the Mayan system) on December 22, 2012, when the Mayan calender will dawn again at 1.0.0.0.0.1. Supplementing his reading of the baktun shift with the prophecies of the Chilam Bilam, Tedlock concludes that “the new era will have a feminine character… [and] should be a good time for planting, and for making new starts of all kinds.”

In contrast to the more apocalyptic 2012ers, Tedlock’s reading is nearer in spirit to J.L. Navarro’s theories of an Ascension period. Navarro, whose early poetry and fiction appeared in the 1960s East L.A. magazine Con Safos, follows Carl Calleman’s calculation that the baktun shift will not occur in 2012, but on October 28, 2011. With the cosmic forces already pressuring the great shift, Navarro’s period of Ascension, already underway in the year 2011, requires that the heart’s eye be open to the highly unusual transformations happening around us and, if we are sensitive to the cosmic forces, within us as well. What those transformations might be exactly, will be the substance of the rest of this list.

10. One possibility that is particularly engrossing for Navarro is that UFO disclosure will begin this year. According to retired NORAD officer, Stanley Fulham, who claims to be in continuous communication with extraterrestrial life, a few large-scale sightings over Russia and London in January will force governments to reveal what they know about life from other galaxies. Much more on UFO disclosure here.

9. And, if it isn’t persons from other planets that arrive in 2011, it might be the arrival of another planet into our solar system, as is believed by proponents of the planet Nibiru = Planet X hypothesis, and the Edgar Cayce Association for Research and Enlightenment.

8. Furthermore, if not another planet, unusual contact might come from our own sun, which some believe will be entering a period of high turbulence, an especially violent solar max period that could last from 2011-2013, disrupting relatively stable conditions in our solar system with a season of chaos.

7. Others, on the other hand, affirm that it will be ‘not by fire, but by ice,’ calculating ice age cycles to last approximately 11,500 years, with the last ice age ending (you guessed it) about 11,500 years ago. The calculation seems somewhat arbitrary, but many who suffered through the blizzard that carried the North American East Coast into the new year would be sympathetic to the possibility of a world getting colder.

6. A world getting colder would, however, fail to account for the increase in dry seasons and droughts throughout the world. With many ex-oil tycoons (such as the Bushes and T. Boone Pickens) now buying up water springs and deposits, some theorize that 2011 will be a year in which the Water Barons calcify their hold on Worldwide Water. The research on the rise of ‘Blue Gold,’ despite the conspiracy theory-buzz, is in reality extremely disturbing.

5. But how about some synthesis? A combination of possibility number 4, 5 and 6 comes from the Pentagon, who, in addition to affirming that “future wars will be fought over the issue of survival rather than religion, ideology or national honor,” also predicts that “between 2010 and 2020 Europe [will be] hardest hit by climatic change with an average annual temperature drop of 6F. Climate in Britain becomes colder and drier as weather patterns begin to resemble Siberia.” And that “by 2010 the US and Europe will experience a third more days with peak temperatures above 90F. Climate becomes an ‘economic nuisance’ as storms, droughts and hot spells create havoc for farmers.” The Department of Defense’s prognosis sounds similar to what John Hogue is calling Nature’s current, 2-year World War on Humanity, which he expects to last one more year.

4. The heavy and horrible idling of the ram.

3. The potential to take the ram, so to speak, by the horns. Some view the ultra-rare total lunar eclipse coinciding last month with the winter solstice, compounded with Mercury in retrograde sling-shooting the Earth into its New Year, as an opportunity to enact extreme transformations in outlook and motility. Resulting from a sensitivity to these cosmic turns, a person’s body could begin to feel more nervous than usual, desiring to take up the opportunity for radical transformation that the cosmos is offering it.

2. That Hopi visionary White Feather’s predicted emergence of a Fifth World, in its defining characteristics similar to Vasconcelos’ Universópolis, a city to be founded by the fifth race, la Raza Cósmica, will finally begin to be realized in the Americas. Developing a truly robust notion of absolute humanity, this world will be profoundly transformed by a notion of humanity that extends that category across borders and into the cosmos. To some Hopi, the prophecy suggests an opening of the Earth’s tunnels. The word alien will be as reprehensible, if not as comical, as the world wetback or redskin or chink.

1. That Hydra Magazine and its heads will continue to dig up tunnels to reveal what is outside them, and inside them, so that the total reality tunnel of its writers and readers will expand unto the coming era. Or, as J.L. Navarro put it in an early poem: “REALITY’S GETTING ME SICK/I THINK I’LL BLAST THIS STICK/AND GO GET EDUCATED.”

C|S

A dory is a small fishing boat, not built to rough high seas, but designed to bring catch in from waters along the coastline. When I received a preliminary copy of Small Anchor Press’ Dory Reader in the mail, the first in what will be a serialized run of “disparate authors” throughout 2011, one author every month in your mailbox, I had the impression that the nautical motif was fitting in that the editions were compact, bringing poetry to my door, in effect using handmade craft to bring catch in from the whipping waters. But as I sat down with the first issue, poems by Jen Bervin, it became apparent to me that a dory, although modest in size, still conveys something from a larger body. The point, in other words, is to fish.

The analogy of the production of poetry to local fishing, as it might be understood by somebody like Olson in Gloucester, or Ferrini for that matter, or even Merrill in Stonington, presupposes a field of imagination in which culture is sustenance, and the poet the fisher just in with a net full of wriggling vittles. It should come as no surprise then, that Bervin (the first poet published in the series), has (through Ugly Duckling) published “NETS,” in which she strips “Shakespeare’s sonnets bare to the “nets” to make the space of the poems open, porous, possible—a divergent elsewhere.” Showing her erasures of Shakespeare in light gray print, her fish are given in black. The famous 18th becomes:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate;
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Letting the catch show through the erasures, her work in the Dory Reader is more evidently reticulated, or woven in such a manner that net shows. Lines of poetry, which appear embossed on the page, are painted over so that you see the bumps or shape of words pushing up against the shrouding brushstroke. Thicker strokes make some text unreadable. Varying thicknesses of paint therefore produce a range of readability or unreadability. Not every fish slithering in the catch, it seems, is meant to be ate: “the best part of the weaving/was the drawing pressed/up against threads so/carefully arranged/to look simple/ … /the best part of the drawing/was how the whiskers emerged/like comets on the face of/a leopard.”

Like a catfish trawled from the lower waters, Bervin’s poem captures a fitting emblem for the Small Anchor project. Not only do they publish original work by new poets, they are also bringing to the surface older albeit rarely seen works, such as Joe McElroy’s “Preparations for Search,” a much-speculated-upon section withheld from his 1987 work, Women and Men. Although I am told that the cover of the book is meant to convey “a coastline at the same time as representing a graph of randomness,” I cannot help but be reminded of Mandelbrot’s graphs for the fractalization of the English coastline in his famous essay, “How Long is the Coast of Britain?” The idea of auto-perpetuating self-similarity upon which Mandelbrot bases his theory of fractals is a good way to think about the publication of a piece of an author’s work, an unseen or unnoticed leaf-tip leading back in similar patterns through branches to the beastly tree.

Other hand-bound, limited edition works published by Small Anchor include Kimiko Hahn’s A Field Guide to the Intractable, Bridget Talone’s In the Valley Made Personal, and, forthcoming, Professional Human Beings, by Pauline Cavillot, a book of writings and interviews from New Orleans, with poems by Brett Evans, Michael Ford, Bill Lavender and Frank Sherlock. But subscriptions to the Dory Reader 2011 close in two days (December 15th). The series, which will feature one poet each month and will include printed and audio material delivered to your mailbox, features Jen Bervin, Sarah Dimick, Autumn Giles, Christian Hawkey, John Jodzio, Hoa Nguyen, D.A. Powell, Matthew Rohrer, Sarah Sala, Chris Sawyer, Betsy Wheeler, and Matvei Yankelevich. With the series beginning next month, the chance to get ‘on-board’ rapidly departs.

Raul Llerena, born in Belén, Iquitos, in the heart of the Amazonian rainforest, is something of a luminary in that watery town and a legend in the world of cumbia music. Musician, producer, journalist, television and radio station broadcaster, he was ever only any of those things when he could take charge of his self-presentation. To disseminate his music, he pressed his own records. To get on T.V., he broadcast his own signal. He is currently running for mayor of his town. And, if you’ve never heard of him, another independent vinyl-press project, Masstropicas, is looking to change that.

I had a chance to meet Masstropicas’ head honcho, Michael Pigott, at a curated speaker and performance series in New Haven, “SOUND HALL,” presented by DETRITUS bookstore and CHAMPIONSOUND, and co-sponsored by the Public Humanities Initiative and the Program in Ethnicity, Race and Migration at Yale. Upon discovering that Pigott and I shared a number of cumbia crate-fiend friends and acquaintances, diggers like Supersonido and the tripartite team of Ganas, Enorbito and Lengua at Mas Exitos, I realized how tight the community of presenters and preservers of cumbia music is in the United States. Although Pigott travels regularly into the Amazonian jungle to find records so rare that he may own the only existing copy, his curating project takes place in the North: sometimes requiring that he mend broken 45s lest the recording be lost forever.

His current project takes on a similar mission of communal preservation. Along with Lima Foto Libre, Masstropicas, in conjunction with La Cumbia de Mis Viejos, Chapillacs, and Fokus Limonta, is kickstarting a project to travel up the Ucayali river, through the Peruvian rainforest, to record and document a new cumbia movement, expecting to emerge from the adventure with a 7″ and LP from the recordings. In donating to the project, you reserve your own artifactual vinyl from the jungle.

There is, of course, a more complicated implication for the exportation of jungle sounds to the world stage. In many cases, the cumbia musicians of Peru include a shaman in their band, as if to ward of the devil of wherewithal. Nonetheless, under the spiritual guidance of the genii of jungle rhythms, the spirit of ayahuasca and the funky techniques of modern production, cumbia has transformed to and from chicha, entered the 1980s and transpired to take its place on the world’s stage while remaining resiliently local. The brew having settled, it seems, in their favor.

But, you might be asking, where the sounds? Upon Masstropicas‘ digs, I present the following selection:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLX6saKTTig

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ocym9HVyMP0

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PKRJWKJgKM

www.youtube.com/watch?v=LElcPIokLuI

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lpFk75GO9I

For more, you know where to go.

Darién Gap

Tuesday

November 23, 2010

The soul of the spy is somehow the model of us all.
- Jacques Barzun

Dear Lee,

Thirty-seven years ago this week, you were arrested at the Texas Theater in Dallas as a suspect in the fatal shooting of police officer J.D. Tippit. Patrolman 78, whose initials “J.D.” stood for nothing in particular, had pulled his squad car alongside a white male about thirty, of slender build, who matched the description of a man linked to “a shooting in the downtown area involving the President.” Confirming that he was in the Oak Cliff area, Tippit’s last words to the dispatcher had been a heedless “10-4.”

At 1:08 PM, patrolman 261, C.M. Barnhart, approached a man “drunk down at the end of the north end of Laws Street” who fit the shooter’s description. Joined by patrolman 243, B.L. Apple, the two 3-W motorcycle cops approached what turned out to be local rake and “3 time loser” Lonnie Ray Wright. They were arresting this suspect – who had “a loud color jacket on” – at the end of Laws near the railroad tracks, when at 1:16 they overheard a citizen using squad car 10′s police radio to report the shooting of an officer. Three minutes later, the citizen reported that the officer was dead.

The suspect fleeing the area where the officer had been shot was described as “a white male, about thirty, five eight, black hair, slender, wearing white jacket, a white shirt and dark slacks.” Known at this time as the “Oak Cliff suspect,” it was becoming clear that this suspect might be connected to the “downtown shooting.” But as it was still unknown what the connection might be, the police pursued the suspect in the slaying of a fellow officer while remaining alert for another man connected to the “downtown shooting,” who was potentially armed with a 30 caliber rifle. (As you were arrested, several officers continued to pursue a Pontiac station wagon that was spotted in a gas station with a rifle or shotgun in its back seat.)

So when you were taken in the police had two suspects in one person. One suspect was the man wanted in the shooting of officer J.D. Tippit. The other was the man into whom the world’s response to the events of that day in Dallas had begun to recede. Led astray from the possibility of a larger conspiracy in the assassination of the president, the television cameras zeroed-in on the presentation of a suspect as if it were the identification of the lone gunman. He was, in fact, informed that he was a suspect in the assassination of the president not by investigators but by reporters. And here begins the Gemini effect for those who enter the worlds of the men who killed Jack Kennedy.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaS-UV-BsdY

When the “Oak Cliff suspect” was arrested he had two names for investigators: a Selective Service card identified him as ALEK JAMES HIDELL and a Uniformed Services Identification and Privilege Card as OSWALD, Lee H. When questioned about the names, and what his real name was, you replied, “you have the card yourself and know as much about it as I do.” When police investigated the matter further, going to your rooming house in Dallas to better determine who the man in their custody was, he acquired another name; they found that he had been living there as O. H. Lee.

This Lee or Oswald or Hidell, initially charged with the murder of a police officer and not charged with the assassination of the president until the following day, would further disappear into this world of mirrors when theorists later speculated that the man who shot Kennedy was a Soviet agent who had swapped bodies with the original “Oswald” during “Oswald’s” defection to Soviet Russia, 1959-61, when he was known to the C.I.A. as Lee Henry.

Lee Henry had tried to kill himself with a piece of broken glass after he was denied Soviet citizenship. Having been asked to leave the U.S.S.R. by 8 PM, October 21, 1959, he wrote in his “Historic Diary” at “7.00 P.M.” that day:

I decide to end it. Soak wrist in cold water to numb the pain. Then slash my left wrist. Then plunge wrist into bathtub of hot water. I think “when Rima comes at 8 to find me dead it will be a great shock. Somewhere a violin plays as I watch my life whirl away. I think to myself, “how easy to die” and “a sweet death,” (to violins)

But not only do the medical records at the Ministry of Health, Moscow show that Oswald was admitted at 4 PM (three hours before he claims to have cut himself), the tone of the passage is itself colorful staging, dramatizing a resolution to a visa problem that he successfully translated to a real resolution: “Somewhere a violin plays… I think to myself… ‘a sweet death,’ (to violins).” Oswald’s purple suicide kept him in Russia past 8 PM when, as he wrote in his “Historic Diary,” he was found unconscious, “bathtub water a rich red color.” His blood, in a staged sacrifice to Russia, made the clear water a rich red — while, analogously, his performance guaranteed him an extended stay in that place. Oswald performed transformed the horizon of possibility for Oswald the real. And the blood in the water made it harder for us to see which was which, where one ended and the other began. Oswald looked in the bathroom mirror of his Moscow hotel room, sometime around 3 PM, October 21, 1951, and split himself in two.

Your self-splitting became a quality of reality that would calcify around you in the following years. Rather than solidify you as a person, the increasing amount of research on JFK’s killer has produced many Oswalds — that is, a matrix of multiplication for any person associated with this mirroring human, a seductive world to become lost in. Zygmunt Bauman has written that social control in the mid-20th century shifted from a model of repression to seduction. Rather than present, produce, or put forth arguments to logically dominate a discourse, the discourse of seduction, naturalized in an ideology of consumption, works by deflecting our desires to increasing invisibility. We reach out, in other words, by drawing in. And, as was the case with Oswald, we frequently draw in by harnessing the doubling power of the mirror.

The greater the multiplicity in which you are seen, the more invisible that you become.

And, in this the age of Gemini, we have a world full of corners. The southeast window of the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas, Texas, was such a corner. But Oswald’s duplications did not end there. As he shot down to a target receding to the southwest, the entire space relative to the events, time, and circumstance suddenly exploded in a self-proliferating population of strangers, plotters, theorists, hidden types and others reaching for the manufacturing power of the camera shot.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMtdotTD8lY

An example of this populating effect is Gary Mack‘s identification of a badged man hiding in the bushes photographed in Mary Moorman‘s Polaroid. The Badge Man theory was made public in Nigel Turner’s 1988 documentary, The Men Who Killed Kennedy. This is Mary Moorman’s Polaroid:

If you don’t see a badged man in the bushes behind the grassy knoll, perhaps you aren’t looking hard enough. Here is an enlargement by Jack White, followed by a diagram by Greg Jaynes:

Yes, of course he is there. And, just as certainly, of course he is not. In allowing myself to be seduced without any commitment to the logic of responsibility or even culpability, I can assume that you are guilty while presuming that there must be other men who participated in the assassination of Jack Kennedy. Oswald can and can not act alone–and we enjoy having it both ways. As my eyes follow the traced outline of the Badge Man, I have allowed the liquid world in which he lives to pour forth. I am seduced, declarified, invisible–and there are many others for me to see: the Babushka Lady, the Umbrella Man, Black Dog Man, the Oswald Double in the Doorway of the Depository During the Shooting, the Three Tramps, etc. The water, as it were, appears to us a rich, red color.

And the more that we look, the more that we’d like to see. An investigator goes rogue upon discovering that the factor of culpability is eliminated in the wake of their leads. Without consideration for where they might end up, they end up going everywhere. Researching the Kennedy assassination, one comes across strange outliers like Christian David, who in the mid 80s claimed to have been offered the job of eliminating the president by Corsican mob boss Antoine Guèrini. Serving a prison sentence for smuggling drugs into France from Brazil, he insisted on total silence until he was released from prison, hoping that he could use his information regarding the assassination to reduce prison time. Michel Nicoli, a former drug trafficker now under the American witness protection program, corroborated David’s story. But, although David was released in the 90s, upon release he said no more about the Corsican conspiracy. Stories like David’s (specifically by felons seeking to lessen prison sentences by offering groundbreaking information on the Kennedy assassination) abound; there have been at least two dozen similar claims. Actor Woody Harrelson’s father, Charles Harrelson, who was serving two life terms before he died at the Florence Supermax in 2007, claimed to have shot Kennedy–suggesting that he was one of the Three Tramps found in a boxcar behind Dealey Plaza minutes after the assassination. In 1982, he said to a Dallas radio station:

Do you believe that Lee Harvey Oswald killed president Kennedy, alone, without any aide from a rogue agency of the US govt. or at least a portion of that agency? I believe you are very naive if you do.

Do you believe? I believe that production of Other Oswalds is not only a permanent effect of the seductive conditions of the world of the Kennedy assassination, but such an inevitability that, just as Harrelson implicated himself by approaching the Plaza, every approach to the Plaza (the locus of the events) is necessarily productive of more Oswalds and implicated in production of more mirrors, evermore elaborate. And I, too, am now guilty. Because I have been seduced, I must seduce. And, in researching the events in Dallas on November 22, 1963, I can function by no principle except the observation of total proliferation and deflection. There will always be more gunmen. And, of course, you acted alone.

Sincerely,

Edgar

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MOJ1WvAN2Y

The ‘conquest of space’ was the benign concept by which the United States finally came to terms with itself as empire, with a fully operational imperium in imperio to boot. During the Cold War, Arthur C. Clark writes: “Interplanetary travel is now the only form of ‘conquest and empire’ compatible with civilization” (“Space Flight and the Spirit of Man,” 1965). Project Paperclip brought Nazi rocket scientists to the deserts of the southwest. Working with the OSS (the then CIA), ex-Nazi Werner von Brauen spearheads a multi-platform popularization of the idea of space exploration. And Walt Disney is there to help.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILjXGfTkKvk

Prez Ike uttered the phrase ‘Military-Industrial Complex,’ to warn against the increasingly intertwined policy relationships between the industrial sector and the national armed forces. While Americans were urged to defend liberty in the face of a global red scare, the same urge was depicted as the force of circumstance by which the massive centralization of resources that only big government could organize became total necessity. NASA and the CIA came from this single gargantuan womb. And we began to send people into outer space.

But the 1960 U-2 Incident, in which an ultra high altitude surveillance aircraft was shot down over Soviet airspace, forced Eisenhower and Kruschev to the issue: What, they were forced to answer, is inner space? And what is outer space? Flying 20 miles above Earth, the scandalously downed U-2 had skated upon the stratosphere. While 100 miles past that, Sputnik was whirring unchallenged through Earth’s low orbit. At what altitude did the liberty of space begin? Apollo, drafted by the United States to settle the question for all earth-kind, shuddered in his full-pressure astro-suit.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeZr2mQ1ivg

American astronauts eventually made it to the moon (or so it is said). While the Soviets, having suffered the embarrassment of their failed N-1, settled on the Salyut program of human-manned space stations orbiting our planet. This project culminated in the long-term research outpost, Mir (their realization of the fictional Solaris), which like its fictional counterpart came down in a series of blazing fragments.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxZTG6iX–g

But, if the original campaign to promote the conquest of space defined the project as intended to protect freedom here, and if freedom here was defined as liberty to enter outer space, doesn’t it follow that the liberty of going there should be the principle by which we continue to understand our freedom here? Why, in other words, aren’t we allowed to visit outer space? An international research facility is currently being completed in Earth’s low orbit – but space is limited and only a few will be able to visit.

But what about you? Where is your place, if any, in outer space? With the recent upsurge of people sending their own craft into outer space – last month a father and son in Brooklyn sent an I-phone/digital camera package into the upper atmosphere to photograph the Earth’s curvature, two years previous another man having sent a similar craft out from England – the question today is not so much at what altitude the liberty of space begins, as it is to what altitude is the control of space defined. Title 14 of the Federal Code of Regulations (the section treating Aeronautics and Space Regulations) tells you that:

(a) You must operate an amateur rocket in such a manner that it:

(1) Is launched on a suborbital trajectory;

(2) When launched, must not cross into the territory of a foreign country unless an agreement is in place between the United States and the country of concern;

(3) Is unmanned; and

(4) Does not create a hazard to persons, property, or other aircraft.

(b) The FAA may specify additional operating limitations necessary to ensure that air traffic is not adversely affected, and public safety is not jeopardized.

[Doc. No. FAA–2007–27390, 73 FR 73781, Dec. 4, 2008]

You must, if you are going to launch something into space, ensure that it remains suborbital. Furthermore, if you would like to legally operate a manned rocket you must comply with regulation for Class-2/3 (High-Powered/Advanced High-Powered) Rockets, which basically commits you to sanction by the FAA:

(a) Class 2—High-Power Rockets . When a Class 2—High-Power Rocket requires a certificate of waiver or authorization, the person planning the operation must provide the information below on each type of rocket to the FAA at least 45 days before the proposed operation. The FAA may request additional information if necessary to ensure the proposed operations can be safely conducted. The information shall include for each type of Class 2 rocket expected to be flown:

(1) Estimated number of rockets,

(2) Type of propulsion (liquid or solid), fuel(s) and oxidizer(s),

(3) Description of the launcher(s) planned to be used, including any airborne platform(s),

(4) Description of recovery system,

(5) Highest altitude, above ground level, expected to be reached,

(6) Launch site latitude, longitude, and elevation, and

(7) Any additional safety procedures that will be followed.

(b) Class 3—Advanced High-Power Rockets . When a Class 3—Advanced High-Power Rocket requires a certificate of waiver or authorization the person planning the operation must provide the information below for each type of rocket to the FAA at least 45 days before the proposed operation. The FAA may request additional information if necessary to ensure the proposed operations can be safely conducted. The information shall include for each type of Class 3 rocket expected to be flown:

(1) The information requirements of paragraph (a) of this section,

(2) Maximum possible range,

(3) The dynamic stability characteristics for the entire flight profile,

(4) A description of all major rocket systems, including structural, pneumatic, propellant, propulsion, ignition, electrical, avionics, recovery, wind-weighting, flight control, and tracking,

(5) A description of other support equipment necessary for a safe operation,

(6) The planned flight profile and sequence of events,

(7) All nominal impact areas, including those for any spent motors and other discarded hardware, within three standard deviations of the mean impact point,

(8) Launch commit criteria,

(9) Countdown procedures, and

(10) Mishap procedures.

[Doc. No. FAA–2007–27390, 73 FR 73781, Dec. 4, 2008, as amended at Doc. No. FAA–2007–27390, 74 FR 31843, July 6, 2009]

But what does all this matter – when you have already been informed that you are not allowed to send anything (including yourself) beyond Earth’s orbit? In the history of fantasies of space travel, it had typically been a lone galactic soul who builds their craft and sets out to explore the extraterrestrial hinterlands for themselves: Lucian of Samosata tells of a trip to the moon in 160 A.D. Parodying Homer’s Odyssey, his heroes sail past the pillars of Hercules to the realm of the moon-King, where they get embroiled in the galactic war between the moon-people and the sun-people. Crash landing on their return, they are swallowed by a whale. In 1611, Johannes Kepler writes Somnium, the autobiographical account relates how, during an eclipse, he falls asleep and is kidnapped by moon-demons who use the moon’s shadow for a bridge. Around the same time, Francis Godwin writes a pseudonymous memoir of a trip to the moon powered by a flock of large swans who migrate regularly to the moon. Here he discovers that the moon-race speaks in music. Another method from this time imagined at this time, by the hyperactive Cyrano de Bergerac, harnesses the power of the rising morning dew. Shuttling into space with a system of perfume bottles filled with morning dew, de Bergerac falls short of his mark, landing in Canada where the hostile natives force him to invent an escape rocket with which he finally makes it to the moon and back. Edgar Allan Poe describes the adventures of Hans Pfall, who must leave Earth to escape hostile creditors, and does so with a home-made balloon that takes him all the way to the financier-free, tranquil moon.

But, when the technology to take people into outer space was finally developed, the narrative of travel and means utterly changed. Although Walt Disney was instrumental in the popularization of the American space program, with shows like Man in Space and Eyes in Outer Space, it is interesting to note that Mickey himself, Disney’s Odysseus, never makes it to outer space. The limits have been set and outer space is not open to the lone galactic soul. Even Mickey Mouse is kept on suborbital trajectories. What foolish faith in Disney.

WE, who continue to want to go there, must now recognize that the dominant narrative of space travel in the 20c has confined humans to Earth. Here at Hydra, we provide as frequently as we can alternative narratives geared toward producing the galactic consciousness which understands that outer space is ours. And that, only by defining our liberties on Earth by our liberty to leave it, could we possibly walk freely here. A hard shift to affect, but a necessary condition for living a life unrestriced. Perhaps we would have been better off, if we had been watching Fleischer cartoons instead:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsJxoBKi1is