July 20th -- eyes of cows

I'd recently written in a letter to my mother that I was pretty sure I was smart. I'm not too sure "smart" is accurate now. Thinking about it, "enthusiastic" & "passionate" came up. Something bred out of the majority of society.

You can see its lack in the eyes of cows.

Not that I'm not a cow, I may just be one of the ones that wanders off a bit to stare at the trees outside the barbed wire -- or one of those rangy-horned, sagebrush cows that scamper indelicately off when you're hiking in the Puebelo Mountains. Ones who've gone to seed a bit, whose meat is used for jerky & their hide for boot leather -- still dim, but Remembering, nonetheless.

The eyes of a deer, or an elk -- that's an entirely different story; one I hesitate to even start in on. The depth of a deer's gaze, the sex in the elk's (of course I'm thinking here of a full-antlered stag in the rut -- pounding the ground with his powerful, impatient steps, ripping up bushes for practice and release). I'm not ever going to go into it, I don't have the time to write such a volume -- or the maturity. My feet are still unhaired, and my hands soft. I'll wait until the bottoms of my feet are shod in thick leather, and my hands tawny & strong & brown like a rancher's tanned grip.

July 20th -- Federico Garcia Lorca poem

Fuck Yeah! (Lorca trans. Bly)

New York


(office and attack)
to Fernando Vela

Beneath all the statistics
there is a drop of duck's blood.
Beneath all the columns
there is a drop of sailor's blood.
Beneath all the totals, a river of warm blood;
a river that goes singing
past the bedrooms of the suburbs,
and the river is silver, cement, or wind
in the lying daybreak of New York.
The mountains exist, I know that.
And the lenses ground for wisdom,
I know that. But I have not come to see the sky.
I have come to see the stormy blood,
the blood that sweeps the machines to the waterfalls,
and the spirit on to the cobra's tongue.
Every day they kill in New York
ducks, four million,
pigs, five million,
cows, one million,
lambs, one million,
roosters, two million,
who turn the sky to small splinters.
You may as well sob filing a razor blade
or assassinate dogs in the hallucinated foxhunts,
as try to stop in the sawnlight
the endless trains carrying milk,
the endless trains carrying blood,
and the trains carrying roses in chains for those in the field of perfume.
The ducks and the pigeons
and the hogs and the lambs
lay their drops of blood down,
underneath all the statistics;
and the terrible bawling of the packed-in cattle
fills the valley with suffering
were the Hudson is getting drunk on its oil.
I attack all those persons who know nothing of the other half,
the half who cannot be saved,
who raise their cement mountains
in which the hearts of hte small
animals no one thinks of are beating,
and from which we will all fall
during the final holiday of the drills.
I spit in your face.
The other half hears me,
as they go on eating, urinating, flying in their purity
like the children of the janitors
who carry delicate sticks
to the holes where the antennas
of the insects are rusting.
This is not hell, it is a street.
This is not death, it is a fruit-stand.
There is a whole world of crushed rivers and unachievable
distances
in the paw of a cat crushed by a car,
and I hear the song of the worm
in the heart of so many girls.
Rust, rotting, trembling earth.
And you are earth, swimming through the figures of the office.
What shall I do, set my landscape in order?
Set in place the lovers who will afterwards be photographs,
who will be bits of wood and mouthfuls of blood?
No, I won't; I attack,
I attack the conspiring
of these empty offices
that will not broadcast the sufferings,
that rub out the plans of the forest,
and I offer myself to be eaten by the packed-up cattle
when their mooing fills the valley
where the Hudson is getting drunk on its oil.


--Federico Garcia Lorca
trans. Bly
News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness pps. 110-112

May my invective poetry/writing be as fantastic, may it be so.

July 20, Notes over Breakfast -- poetry musings

Notes over breakfast -- Gerard De Nerval, "ancient energies" poet. Late 1800's.

[all from News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness Bly]

German tradition of "animal thinkers" Boehme & alchemists, Goethe and Novalis, Rilke.

Spanish: Jimenez, Machado, Lorca.

North America: Jeffers, Wallace Stevens.

Wow -- Wallace Stevens "Anecdote of Men by the Thousand."
"Whales weep Not" D.H. Lawrence

               Oceans

    I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths, 
against a great thing. 
                    And nothing
happens!  Nothing... Silence... Waves... 

--Nothing happens?  Or has everything happened, 
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?

                     Juan Ramon Jimenez

God! I love those spaniards: Reminder: look for good translations, Jimenez, Lorca, Machado, Vallejo.

July 18th, Garden of Forking Paths, Quantum Physics, notes on Book ideas

I'm reading The Garden of Forking Paths -- and realized that it was published 5 years after the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics -- 1957 -- published '62 -- It's Borges's musings on this, I'm sure of it.

****

Ideas for Lookout Notes book:

Zeroxed -- linen paper outside -- stapled. Cover, a photo of Hickman zeroxed onto cover -- tape showing that held it on. Maybe a photo of me on back cover.

Intro: this book is created from excerpts of correspondence, journal entries, & "legitimate" writings put down while I stayed in a Fire Lookout Tower in the Mt. Hood National Forest. I've limited myself to very little editing after-the-fact, I.E. after I left the tower. Thus, the flavor of the pieces were maintained -- and the roughness. Enjoy.

Sign & number them.

Introduction --
Place --
Miasma --
(fantasia, catharsis, revelation)

Excerpts from radio messages -- definitions out of books (watch copyrights), incoming correspondence.

Send one to Snyder & Whalen.

"Dedicated to Gary Snyder -- whose work has never failed to give me hope -- both in the human race, and the artistic process.

And to my friend Ross Christian, without whose example I would not be writing today.

Blessing: May this book give permission to a flood of publications waiting to happen within the talent group of friends, so far unpublished, who are like a crowd at a banquet, plates at the ready -- waiting for someone to scoop the first serving."

Things to work on: format develop & allow for an intense amount of flexibility -- maybe prose - verse, adjunct prose; maybe chapter intros & maybe no explanation whatsoever -- maybe chronological order -- maybe titled chapters -- maybe not.

"The format developed organically, it isn't chronological -- or sequential -- it follows flows that occurred over the 4 months there. It's natural."

July 18th, insect teaching

(after finishing a small writing)

"It's so simple you see" -- the fly hovers between transparent wing clouds, swings back and forth in front of the mountains,
"It's just life, that's all. It's not a hard thing to do at all."

He flies away, and leaves me at the desk to write this down.

July 18th, The Sun, A Butterfly, and Chinese Poetry

Let it be said that the day was warm -- that the man laid nude on the catwalk and his flesh drank deep the nourishing rays of the Sun.

A shadow passed, and I looked up into a grey stormcloud, hinged bright penumbra halo.

I got dressed, and went back out to the walk, noting the flight of a Zebra Swallowtail below. So angular -- in my youth, the swallowtails in general were diamond & ruby to this butterfly collector -- but Zebra were nearly unheard of in the lowlands where I lived, and were especially prized. Never in all my childhood did I kill either species to impale them with a pin. Not that I wouldn't have at the time -- it just never happened.

Now, watching the jagged geometry of it's flight from above -- I wonder at the design it's tracing. A fractal perhaps, like the view from the top of the juvenile Doug Fir tree beside it -- perfect geometry. Or something more delicate, more subtle. "nonsense" to the uninitiated -- but a fluid, consistent 'chaos' to the new Scientists.

As a child, the erratic flight always seemed a programmed evasion technique; but I had a particular relation at that point. Now, I wonder if its sketching something more important to my understanding.

Maybe it will be one of those visions that lets gates fly open in your synaptic mass, like your first orgasm, or psychadelic experience.

I notice another butterfly off in the Rhododendron field, sketching its own, similar, chaotic pattern. I am reminded of a poem, "Visit to the Hermit Ts'Ui, by Chiien Ch'I -- written in the 8th century, in China (translated in the 1960's by Kenneth Rexroth).


Visit to the Hermit Ts'Ui


Moss covered paths between scarlet peonies,
Pale jade mountains fill your rustic windows.
I envy you, drunk with flowers,
Butterflies swirling in your dreams.



Ch'ien Ch'I
(Love and the Turning Year;
One Hundred More Poems from the Chinese
Kenneth Rexroth, P. 67)



I look out over the butte and realize I'm in a garden of pink Rhododendron flowers & small, precise conifers. I realize I'm alone, and will be for months. I realize I'm watching butterflies -- and have been for nearly an hour.

July 17th, Writing a good letter

"You know you're writing a good letter when you jump up from your desk & pull down 1 or 2 books, and when you hunch over your notebook like a kid with a magnifying glass over an anthill."

-- Me


"God must not engage in Theology; the writer must not destroy by human reasonings the faith that art requires of us." -Jose Luis Borges