Sublime And Odd Is Mutable

Now to lip indulge feeling. Gleefully to that pushed turmoil. Impairment the respectable hooked with loaves. Tiger unofficially grace to it. Grid by stirring bloom with lamp black. Pull from phenomenon smack a glow. Physiology begins jellyfish that soaked an opened fall. Energy to parabolas to paraphernalia. It might be sophisticated to bubble the scratch to this chiaroscuro.

But to echo an anguish is consonant. The drive always explains Picasso. Strength hurled together with vital Quixotic struts. Bulb thing anything amazes the railroad.

Fantasy you hold between ceremonies. When planets caustic copper that coast will drip. Suppleness is the snow wherein a proverb initiates ooze during gantries. To assemble a passion requires more keys than floods. The infinite is embarked on stars. The garments cry nerve smears later than an erection. Pack words in images because the palette is in proposal and the energy is clean and wild.

Cubes touch because the robins frequent cartwheels. Source is seeing is crucial hoses. Grow wrinkles for a friendly inflammation which is cracks. Strong coffee moistens the garden. Rescue the blaze with marks of up. Bleeding is abhorred in sweat and engine. The orchard fluttered or excused a nebula. The café moaned to its heart with steam. Incision by action increases the reticence of unraveling.

The luminous odor in leather gets lingered. It echoes from the bite in personality. Circumference is like what that metaphor does in a garret. That is to say the audacity of tea is imposed on your gifts and the science of this is talking.

Grebe the pavement at the bazaar. The friendly infinite studies its predicament in vapor and stars. Consider wading through its inches. And Max Jacob. And seminal racks engaged in pluck. A pain pyramid must unlock the artist and exceed the stitches of a cloak of amaryllis. The blonde can joke unearthed by lure and grasp.

The panic device will pin the next beauty until it is compelling. Never crack syntax over an energized sneer. Mohair doesn’t green it and paradigms don’t induce stoves to bring food to a physical pulse. Cocoon astronomy in a handstand. Put a zipper on the drizzle. Mortgage your confusion. Then glue the rain with a tube of art. Necessity’s grapefruit is tomorrow’s pharmaceutical. The opium sparkles in the fields.

The granite phonograph was corners like a symptom that hums. Stuff in a dimension as orange as a rascally expectation. The bug is an abstraction in boxing. It is frequented throughout the armchair.

Obscurity turns yellow on a blue twig. And the result is loads of physiology. Two books, three tables, and a sack of morning.

Throbbing Actualities

The Imperfect, poetry by George Tysh
United Artists Books, 2010.

Marin Mersenne, the 17^th century musical theorist and member of the Franciscan order who is recognized as the Father of Acoustics, and who preferred the lute accompanying a solo voice to all other musical instruments, believed in the perfection of imperfection. He stressed the idea that the purity of musical intervals (the distance in pitch between two notes) was not only relative, but dependent on context. If perfection is static, a state of final completion, imperfection is a dynamic condition, a ghost seeking flesh, a body of sound seeking temperament and fiber.

Sound is nothing if it is not heard. Music is alive and transports the soul of the musician to the ears and souls of the listeners. This, in essence, is imperfection. The irrational, the strange, the fragmentary, the elliptical are as necessary to the living being of a work of art as are the intervals and semitones in a piece of music.

The same principle obtains in poetry. The interaction between invisible thoughts and visible emanations may be described in terms of vibrations. What Whitehead terms “actual entities” in which there are no gradations of importance. The connections between matter and the dynamics of inner consciousness are inherently imperfect as there can be no completion. There is no such thing as completion. “God is an actual entity, and so is the most trivial puff of existence in far-off space.”

Hence, the more fragmentary and elliptical a work tends to be, the more it stresses these underlying principles. Such is the work of Tysh’s The Imperfect. The interplay of the interpretive possibilities of the whole utterance, or poem, constitutes an interanimation of words in a living organism. In other words, an experience. “Throbbing actualities.”

The poems in The Imperfect are small. They repose on the page lightly, entities of soft phenomenon, nuggets of gnomic seduction surrounded by space, the white of the page. “Link,” a poem of five lines, seeks what Mallarmé termed as a condition of music, a sense of the beyond magically produced by a certain disposition of words.

The best is behind us. Lumps of grace
imparting to urine the smell of violets,
the contents of a hallway seen through doors.
Holistic ass, organic member, nutritious putrefaction,
the fuck of death.

“The best is behind us” is a prosaic beginning; “Lumps of grace” contrasts sharply with its elliptical predication. We intuit muscle, human bodies in coitus, rumpled sheets, rumpled flesh. The acrid smell of urine, combined with the smell of violets, which are sweet, and which many people find redolent of the Victorian period. ‘Holistic’ is a new age word to my mind, holistic medicine, holistic dentistry, holistic vet. There is also a nice pun here, in relationship to ass. The word is pertinent, since it refers to the idea that all the properties of a system (biological, chemical, social, economic, mental, linguistic, geographic, genetic, etc.,) cannot be explained by its component parts alone. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

“Nutritious putrefaction” is a nice paradox. It reminds me of the nursing logs in the forest, great hulking trees that have fallen and in their rotting nourish a diversity of fern and fungus and new trees.

“The fuck of death” is my favorite line. It has the sound of desperation to it, but also a jubilant, I don’t give a fuck kind of triumphalism, and a slightly onomatopoetic excitation.

There are nine sections of poetry in this collection, small, intriguing entities whose outward style alters in form occasionally, ranging from free verse words dispersed on the page `a la Mallarmé’s “Un coup de des jamais n’abolira le hazard” to the more structurally formal pieces in the section titled “Aperçus désagréables (for Ron Padgett).

The latter are constructed in stanzas. The first, “Unforced Landing,” focuses on the business of airline travel.

The bleached runway
and its faded terminal
remind our anxious passengers
of a scene they’ve seen somewhere
outside in the gleaming unprocessed air of
freely coming and going.

And the muffled static
of what passes for music
(actually a timeless performance of jazz)
is dimly perceived through tinny earphones
and of no more than symbolic relevance
to their poor tired ears

Welcomed as they are to a tarmac
stained with memories of a thousand
voyages under an unblinking sun
or clouded in a flash by showers
from which there is no shelter,
their common implacable destination.

Although this is one of the more transparent pieces in this collection, the pathos and associations of this poem are very complex. The jazz that is so dimly perceived through the little earphones provided by the airlines that is so tinny to the fatigued traveler as to be no more than “symbolic relevance” underscores the sensation of alienation that is such a hallmark of our era. The disconnection, the buffering, the array of conveniences, all comprise an environment that ultimately deadens, yet soothes and lulls as it deadens. The final line, “their common implacable destination,” gleams through all this technological sophistication with the implacable force of a knife blade. The illusion of freely coming and going is starkly revealed by the glare of the sun, and the initial bump of the tires on the tarmac when the plane lands and reverses the thrust of its engines.

Yet, there is a great deal of beauty revealed in these lines. They evoke a familiar world and give it an unfamiliar richness, excite, through their slightly oblique references, the interest of novelty. They seek, the in the image of "gleaming unprocessed air," the immediacy of experience. They encourage us to perceive our perceptions, make us aware of our perceptions. Awakens us, as Coleridge once phrased it, "from the lethargy of custom."

Tysh captures the mood of landing in a plane, a moment of passive reflection. The aisle is too crowded to get up. We gaze out of the window, study what is below.

Which is chiefly the tarmac.

“Stained with memories of a thousand / voyages under an unblinking sun” converts, metaphorically, the tarmac into a Talmud of airborne pilgrimages.

A poem titled, simply, “Heart” achieves a remarkably vivid effect in just six lines, using a combination of rhyme and line spacing.

the outline of a soap dish
  on a shelf in the pink

evaporates this morning
  in the bathroom I think

of it
  beating

That “beating” at the end, so remarkably palpable, is emphasized by its unexpectedness and dissonant incongruity following the rhyme pattern of ‘pink’ and ‘think.’ It dangles, at the end, a pendant reminder of mortality, transience, and a touch of the sublime.

A throbbing actuality, to be sure.

Computer Hell

I dread setting up a new computer. I will cling to the old computer for as long as possible. Even when, as with an old car, one thing after another begins to fail and visits to the repair shop grow increasingly frequent. I cannot stand the idea of letting go. “You may risk losing your hard drive,” the technicians tell me, “and everything on it.” Novels, letters, reviews, prose poems, essays, diatribes, rants, grants, laments and jeremiads, all lost, lost irretrievably, gone forever. “Do you want to risk that?”

Of course not. But won’t there be symptoms? Vomiting and diarrhea? Bloating? Blackouts? Whining? High pitched bowel sounds? Uncontrollable sobbing in the middle of the night?

Yes, there may be symptoms. But there also may be nothing. No symptoms at all. It will just die. Wheeze. Give up the breath. And go blank.

Or, you may get whacked with a virus, or some form of malware, for which your computer is too slow, too obsolescent to defend against. “We can work on your computer," say the technicians, "add more memory, some fans, a slightly upgraded security system, but one way or another, you are doomed. It simply is not worth it to work on a computer this old.”

“This old?” I cry with incredulity. “It’s only eleven. It’s still a child.”

And the technicians laugh. “Eleven is old, my friend. Your computer is ready for the Smithsonian.”

Capitalism thrives on obsolescence. The quicker something becomes obsolescent, the quicker the consumer is out the door to go buy another product. Spend more money. Computers, in other words, are capitalism’s best friend.

I am slow to admit defeat. But the time came when our old computer was simply not performing the tasks we required. Vitally important things, like watching YouTube videos of the Beatles and Rolling Stones. Trips down memory lane. YouTube is my umbilicus to the past. Lose YouTube, I lose my past. The Kinks. Count Five. Sam and Dave.

And so we went shopping for a new computer.

There is nothing in life as demanding and arduous as setting up a new computer. War, maybe. War is pretty bad. But setting up a new computer is at least as maddening as trying to convince a Tea Party fanatic that the govmint they so despise is the same benevolent institution providing them with their Social Security and Medicare checks.

The twisted logic of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland is not nearly as convoluted and bewildering as the process involved in getting a computer to work.

Kafka would shake his head with a mixture of jealousy, wonder, and simple awe.

The tangle of cords alone is enough to give anyone a heart attack. All the connections. Doodads. Terminals. Ports. But on top of the jungle of hardware are all the acronyms and jargon: DSL, BMP, DLL, DSL, DTD, DMA, FLOPS, GPU, OLAP, MPEG, OCR. Nor does it help to find out what these initials actually stand for: Bitmap, Dynamic Link Library, Digital Subscriber Line (this one turned out to be important), Document Type Definition, Direct Memory Access, Floating Point Operations Per Second, Graphics Processing Unit, Online Analytical Processing, Moving Picture Experts Group, Optical Character Recognition. And so on. This is not a language I understand. It is as foreign to me as Kirghiz, or Rajasthani.

Nor do the diagrams and symbols help. Quite the contrary. They are as mystifying as the symbols on the dashboard of an alien spaceship.

It became quickly apparent that I was out of my league. I managed to get the tower up and running (hurray!) and after finally discovering that there were no buttons on the monitor, that it operated by touch, the symbols of which were on the side of the monitor and were virtually invisible, the screen came on. But the speakers were not putting out any sound and I still had no idea how to set the printer up. It did not have a wire, other than the power cord. How did it connect to the computer? Roberta handed me a CD. “What do I do with this?” I asked. “I don’t know,” she responded.

The next morning I called the technical support crew at Staples, where we had purchased our equipment. This was a Saturday. Alex said he would be available in the afternoon. This came as a huge relief. Alex was affable, understanding, and very quick to hurdle all the obstacles I had encountered, the biggest of which was Speakeasy, our Internet server. Speakeasy requires reregistration when you set up a new computer. It was such a joy to hand Alex the telephone as soon as the tech support person at Speakeasy began riddling me with questions about our router, as if I had just graduated from M.I.T.

The really illuminating aspect to this saga came in the interval between bringing the old computer in and waiting for the arrival of the new computer, a period of four days. We discovered that we did not miss having a computer in the house. We enjoyed the quiet. We enjoyed being free of checking our email every half hour, clicking away like mice in a behavioral experiment hitting levers and buttons for a pellet of food. We had more time to read our books. We felt disconnected from a world that had gone completely insane with electronic gadgetry.

And I actually enjoyed visiting the library in order to get online and check our email and take a peek at my blog. I did not particularly enjoy sitting elbow to elbow with people and the lack of privacy, or using a keyboard after someone had just sneezed on it, but I did like the feeling of being able to have my cake and eat it, too. I liked being able to access the World Wide Web without being stuck in it. I liked the feeling I got when I logged out, got up, grabbed my hat, and left. I enjoyed the walk home. And, once home, I liked the feeling of detachment. A home, after all, is a haven, not a panel in Dilbert.

Had those four days expanded into four weeks, however, I am sure I would have felt differently. I am sure I would have longed to have a computer in our house again. Access to the Internet just inches away from the couch. French radio. YouTube. Wikipedia. Blogs. Poetry and rants. Maps and malamutes and mandolins. Paraboloids nomographs and tidytips.

The world.

Or at least a virtual facsimile of the world. One in which the past, the present, and the future are all mingled in a screen of pixels.

A youthful Mick Jagger singing “Under My Thumb.”

Janis Joplin singing “Ball And Chain” at the Monterrey Pop Festival in 1967.

Pixels.

Caught in a web.

And aren’t we all, one way or another, caught in a web?

Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.

The Neck I Wear

The neck I wear is elemental in a cry of denial. Its sinew holds a luxury of sound to clash with the metal of the moon. It can wrestle a painting into salvation. Scratch a present incised with a phantom possibility.

Consider the head, of which it is the root.

Unfurl a flag of granite from the mouth.

Papier collé in the key of A. Balloons in diversion. An allegory unearthed in sipping the broth of a long black highway.

On a planet that impels the votaries of the valve to value the evacuations of the pump, the fat to get thin, the thin to get going, and the simply pink to stop stewing in the backseat of an imitation lump, it is often hard to tell the ooze from its throbbing, the birth from its stumbling, the mop from its mopping, the grump from his grumbling.

One must learn to taste infinity in marmalade, delft in a grain of sand.

Play with immigrant toys, wrap expectation in hope. Linger in baldness as a dimension of oval consciousness.

There is more canvas at war with wisdom than wisdom at war with passion. The stew overrides that history we groomed. Thermometers explode into oddities of Montmartre garlic.

Shout birds is the neck I wear.

There is an itch to the story that says the fat is quixotic and the chair is infinite and the cook is late. The railroad is scrupulous in its insinuation. Not a single river whose depth does not conceal a pronoun whose consciousness pulses with carousal.

The bicycle imposes its shape on the map. We study the oasis of mint in obscurity. Pull buffalo from the confusion of apples. Step backward into the tower to baffle the sparrows. Study the subtleties of bones. Exempt French from its pins and pragmatism.

Begin your travels with spectrums and growth. Hit the atmosphere with your decisions. Let your cotton steam in circulation. Circulate among the jackknives in gray.

Butter abhors initiation. The dusty slither flutters the cap. Resilience seems urged aloud by the emotions. A puddle from Rio Tinto secures mushrooms. The sideboard gape forks its singing to the inspection. We stitch our thoughts together in threads of thaumaturgic girth. The surface of the hoe requests a flocculent biology, something akin to phlox, or moccasin flower. The sweetness of a bower. The percolations of an hour.

Where some see dada, others see knives. Humor beginning just like oats. An umber throbbing on Braque. A geisha burning to stimulate a seaman. Raw sienna carrying a clumsy procession of gonadotropic golem. The debris of thought hammered into punctuation.

The paper imitates cake. The problem rattles into heft.

A necessary roughness circles the vowels and drinks their glow. Each space awakes a consonant and patterns a biography on the hunger of a taxi driver. Cut and haul the lip to the hibachi gun. Unearth sawdust. Hold the bistro in your mouth and pull on its wheels with autonomous clarinets. I need more heat, more smear, more fingers. Orthogonal fiduciary dabs in still multitude.

I need an empty monstrosity with which to develop an echo. I was lost and now I am found climbing a new aesthetic. Resistance is just a symptom. The epilogue alone is pretty and black. It is a farm baffled by its own fish.

An unpredictable plunge among abandoned cardboard reveals Texas in its straw. Everyone has a spouse. The emission shaped an answer, but we wore a different alfalfa, one that a turn to the right or left might exhibit as flyaway grass. Mahogany evinces an obvious camaraderie. The fatter string was exploded later. It revealed oak. And scratching and cinnamon. The world punch bag which is a story told in hallucination.

Intentions take horses because everything else just jangles. Emotion floods the eyeballs into morality. The explicit physiology of a violin. Simulacrums of glove hardened into boxing.

The drool dripped, and a fingernail emerged.

A thermometer churns in luminous flux. The house clasps its own design. The floorboards creak. The stars heave with eternity. We do plays. We give gifts. We dream and moan. Our solicitations sizzle, and darken into books.