/////////////////////////////////////////////////////// / / / / / / / / / for rif/t / / / / / / / / C U T S / / / / / / / / / / / / / ///////////////// //////////////////////// //////// / matthew / huddleston / / / / ////// //////////////////////////////////////////////
for rif/t cuts glac-split
to water ponder-ous(ly)
smash me mass slow-side
head or bask plain
a regal chance thumberly.
rift (Scandanavian): a cleft, fissure, or v. to cleave, rive, or split
and
towards an etymology, etymon=3D a primitive, or root word
how we skelp w/ language.
a.
Authorities "one who does anything w/ his own hand." as genuine / real /
trustworthy
and what is worthy of trust, Ken?
But not "augere" -- to increase, produce?
Distant or near presence? -- but we are replication, no matter how
masked by fad, by mind trips and the scrambling words of intellect and ego.
How is this freeing the word? Our mandate of breath may escape like a
bird of paradise, fowl or flower, shining briefly in the sunlight. Or
expression may freeze, Bunyan's winter -- but spirit.
On the other inextricable hand we are original and all that stems
from or through us is authentic, genuine. What is, for instance, natural?
The voice forms, or the mind prancing gestures behind the voice. Language
becomes, an ember awakened by the breath of the individual, judged by the
accumulated grunge of a speaking population.
Forgery? to forge and reforge -- heated and hammered on the
tongues of another cropped generation. Or is this feigning fiction? The
phrase is no longer my own, maybe never was, but that's the riff -- a horn
in my mouth I blow w/ varying degrees of consciousness and modesty. Rif/t,
fabricate, revolve within the dance ever so authentically authoring, humble
before expression and misexpression laced, however cliched, by spirit and
an earnest participation in the grand pageant of being.
b.
When is a poem done? Mayhap the poem is done as a person is done
leading to conceptions of death -- forgotten, swallowed by the linguistic
currents -- transformed in revelation? Do flawed poems painfully wander
the bardo states seeking rebirth as newspaper articles? Are they, like us,
revolving through verbal samsara seeking perfection? Not Welch's
"accuracy" -- that's the expression of a gunman to the end -- but exceeding
praise. Exceeding praise and celebration.
c.
(Ken, do you consider your body a machine as well? archaic, spec.:
"the bodily frame": machine)
I aspire to this, to "transmit and modify force" -- a goal of the poem as
Olson alludes, effect another with no gap, or "no resistance in the
material." Maybe that's the art -- using a form of resistance but
minimizing, through skill -- through electric energy, that same chosen
"resistance." Is this a form of duty? The potter simultaneously works w/
and against the clay -- the clay actively inert as we see it, but the art
consisting in a mesh with the clay, coaxing undifferentiated mass into
chosen / inspired form. Blowing the trumpet isn't easy, but hear Miles
(resistance overcome -- no, reconciled ("to cause to be friendly again") --
isn't that enlightenment?
"Comfort's in heaven and we are on earth
Where nothing lives but crosses, cares and grief"
to take this maelstrom of desire
and "make it friendly again," to find freedom through accepted resistance:
to thus approach an art of living?
d.
how do you deal with obscenity on internet?
e.
doesn't every space have a multitude of contents? Freud seems to
me too hung on concrete correlation -- maybe this only a pop viewpoint --
and I argue not so much audience mandated relativism, but rather endless
possibility in every direction, in even the most confined and restricted
space.
(understand, Ken, I am very serious about this. We deal here not
with words without substance, or entertaining ideas, but w/ belief, faith,
understandings of the universe, directions of thought by which I seek to
guide myself. Faith, w/ dis-asters and our own pending mortality as we
know it, with love, how should we not pursue this serious joy?)
f.
"By its even tone which can be maintained as long as desired the
organ has in it an element, so to speak, of eternity. Even in the secular
room it cannot become a secular instrument."
-Albert Schweitzer
g.
I hope this doesn't bore you, Ken? Maybe you are very busy, and
writing is, as X confessed... another form of ego driven
presumption: presuming the interest of another. As paths are, I fill
myself w/ experiments on plutonium and mt. bike riding and not so much
in the "required texts," or the theoretical doors. If something,
then, communication. If nothing, empty penance? blessed practice?
(music: practice to performance to play)
h.
Can we consider God the ultimate sculptor of resistance?
i.
Where do I find any entrance other than my own? Is it enough to
string vocabulary? Or, the gallery opening tonight, potter friends of X,
and all these people straining to appear artistic: the dress, the dangling
cigarettes. Can we damn seeming affection? the greased woman in a high
neck silk chinese dress? We all want to seem admirable in our own eyes,
and this enters into the matrix =3D finding a society and conforming to
acceptance. Do I want my poetry to conform? Is this scenario empty? some
saxophone serenade with a too thin reed.
j.
So this editor writes "cyber-shit" and my response conflicts. Much
poetry just doesn't move me, spark thoughts, strike as vital to my
conception of existence -- and I judge, brutally, succumbing to the western
criticality "not this, these reasons, why this" etc., slicing and nicking,
turning over each moldy stone with a barren heart. I buy into this. And
yet, in typical paradox, I refuse to be judged by others: my work, this
voyage, these explorations into the language of my universe. This is ego
talking. Where lies the resolution?
"cyber-shit" and I agree to the possibility. I merely mistrust all
who claim the ability to distinguish, even myself: these aspiring mandators
of canon and class, style and beauty -- trained tastes. Why should I bow
down before the judgments of others unless they first win my respect? Is
it enough to proclaim yourself?
k.
so much depends on cleaning, to clear the mind's surface, a space
for work -- for being, essentially.
shove aside the words
then reclaim them as your own
individual
heritage.
l.
Ken, careful with me, I don't want to drag your marvelous endeavor
toward "cyber-shit."
m.
who is spinning this? do they realize and do battle w/ the
realization of death? of life? are we but games playing sexless solitaire
in the eddies of dust?
(slash and burn)
n.
two lovers, three, four
they eye the moon
and must, matching desire
to bodily been determine
as catch can can
love's syllabic anatomy,
love's bryne-scape
which may be may have
must break tangling glass.
o.
snag me the moon, my love, on a plate
and slice me its light
until I glow like pearls awakened
like dreams unfurled like silk drawn
from the gilded ears of saints.
snag me the moon for a mirror
and snag me the stars
for no reason but my pleasure
to cast them like fireflies
to the mounding waves, my love, the waves
you fetch me as bands
for my arms, the land wrapped deep
and spun to a pillow and fires
inset in rings for my hand.
snag me the moon, my love, on a plate
it is late and we should rejoice.
p.
ambiguity at the beginning and sometimes there is wisdom, a wisdom
in death. for each seeking the sign, the smoking bush if not burning so
poetic the revelation of mourning or an error in the sense of a sigh. yes,
wisdom, wisdom as can be straight, a home, for perception, each nub beyond
sight, a home where flesh will discount the finale, clapping baleful, drawn
to the guts of time's eternity the limits which are never enough, never the
perception. but more, but less, perfume and dim vagaries of sin like so
much paraphernalia and moribund chaos, like hysteria at the mention of
reason -- unsputtering -- and helplessness as an abstraction: each ideal
praised to smithereens. and honesty is okay, a bearable kind of sickness.
and sleep is the illusion howling each mote of us alone with dishonesty.
this is not an oxymoron, this corpulence which rides wave line privilege on
the razor-back of convergence. be gay, be docile. harmony does smack of
escapism, fun as defunct and untitled presumption, and patience a peculiar
form of libido like "logocentrism" without style, without congruency, a
bland dehortation of detritus and jazz. but with this, always remember,
fright misses the bullseye with a clinging radiance, a schwarmerei that
smells of uncanny innuendo blessing the blank spaces that spill from the
faceless crowd, cheers, high on epoxy and the euphoria of false intuition,
their compassion built -- a skyscraper, yellow prestige, optimism all
perpendicular to blindness and obscurity, all belonging in the cosmic
compost of human kind, caught inertia, drunk delusion declining, alienation
and avarice the hand born telescope on philosophy, drained confidence and
pecking rich realism lacking majesty in the worm tunnel labyrinth and
remnant catacombs of assumed celibacy. this is the fog, the realm of
aphrodisia and insouciance, a deficit clanging as the gongs of nirvana yet
retrograde with a filial twist. how inspire and measure the romantic
panache of heaven when the vessel remains, refrains, underdeveloped under
orthodoxy, but by tenacity and the gifted lens of ghostliness passing
vaguely cliche through the land: land populated by epitaph predisposition,
stuffy in the concupiscent conversions of doubt?
q.
cut and paste
____________________
too much for now, Ken: at least you know that my mind is engaged and I am
very excited about this project, this projection of yours, Ken. the lilacs
fade, wet, in the twilight, and we should cook dinner. take care, Matthew
___________________________________
om ah hum vajra guru padma siddhi hum
5
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