A Lucky Night

bcpa    2.28.2011

life before cars

prokudin-gorsky 1915

climbing

          upright in trees

      with her hands and feet

                 binoculae facing

a far wide horizon

rains dry         fruits wither

    she descends

                 

         to stand

                      animal and  wolf

talking to myself for decades

maybe im talking to my nephew

who was born today

and will not know me now

eight and a half pounds

nicholson haircut

elfin chin

pissed off nose

whose heart got up

to leave

before scheduled

to catch up

to two blondes

attention sweets and fun

richer than ever

better lookin

than a boy should be

will they push him farther away

smoke the mirrors

or slip a chance

to figure it out

through denial

so back to chrysolas

braving tomorrow

with a suggestion

life can be a boat

steer where you can

enjoy the view

desperately

remember

were all here

as we learn more

perhaps human

is overbroad

hu for soul

man for animal

maybe homo

dewey coded with options

sapiens sapiens

or camel leather

he curled the wheel to the right

and the roadster shuddered most softly

as its bumper hit the rail

the tail lifted peacefully

behind and fell forward

89 miles an hour

grace in a second

vision and arms out

over the teal below

common empiricist

that instant when jack heard a tickle a snap to his right

before the sweet cherry red mind
split from his ears for TV and the future

the america dream didn't perish then

until the term. of lee

london  95

djuna and james

And then one day I came to Paris.

Sitting in the café of the Deux Majots,

that faces the little church of St. Germain des Pres,

I saw approaching out of the fog and damp,

a tall man, with head slightly lifted

and slightly turned, giving to the wind

an orderly distemper of red and black hair,

which descended sharply into

a scant wedge on an outthrust chin.

He wore a blue grey coat,

too young it seemed,

partly because he had thrust

its gathers behind him,

partly because the belt which circled it

lay two full inches above the hips.

He sat down opposite me, ordered

a white wine and began talking at once.

"The pity is the public will demand

and find a moral in my book--

or worse they may take it in some more serious way,

and on the honour of a gentleman,

there is not one single serious line in it."

There was silence. His hands

peculiarly limp in the introductory

shake and peculiarly pulpy,

running into a thickness

that the base gave no hint of,

lay, one on the stem of the glass,

the other, forgotten, palm out,

on the most delightful waistcoat,

purple with alternate doe and  dog heads.

The does, tiny scarlet tongues

hanging out over blond lower lips,

downed in a light wool,

and the dogs no more ferocious

or on the scent than any good master

who adheres to his master through

the seven cycles of change.

He smiled, "Made by the hand

of my grandmother for the first hunt

of the season".  He lit a cigar.

"All great talkers have spoken

in the language of Sterne, Swift,

or the Restoration. Even Oscar Wilde.

He studied the Restoration through

a microscope in the morning and

repeated it through a telescope

in the evening.

In Ulysses, "They are all there,

the great talkers, them and the things

they forgot. In Ulysses I have recorded

simultaneously what a man says sees thinks

and what such seeing thinking saying does

to what you Freudians call the subconscious,--

but as for psychoanalysis its neither more nor less

than blackmail."

People say of him that he looks both sad and tired.

It is the sadness of a man who has procured some

medieval permission to sorrow out of one time

and in no place;

the weariness of one self-subjected to the creation of

an over abundance in the limited.

If I were asked what seemed to be the most

characteristic pose of James Joyce I should

say that of the head; turned farther away

than disgust and not so far as death,

for the turn of displeasure is not so complete,

yet the only thing at all like it, is the look in the throat

of a stricken animal.

Think of him as a heavy man yet thin,

drinking a thin cool wine with lips

almost hidden in his high narrow head,

or smoking the eternal cigar,

held slightly above shoulder level

and never moved until consumed.

We have talked of rivers

and of religion

of the instinctive genius of the church

which chose for the singing of its hymns

the voice without overtones

the voice of the eunuch.

We have talked of women,

he seems a bit disinterested.

Were I vain I should say

he is afraid of them but

I am certain he is only

a little skeptical of their existence.

We have talked of Ibsen, Stringberg,

Shakespeare: "Hamlet is a great play

written from the standpoint of the ghost."

Strindberg: "No drama behind the hysterical raving."

We have talked of death, of rats

of horses, the sea;

languages, climates and offerings,

of artists and Ireland.

"The Irish are people who

will never have leaders

for at the great moment they always

desert them.  They have produced

one skeleton---Parnell--never a man.

Joyce has few friends.

Callers have often found him

writing into the night, or drinking

tea with his wife Nora.  I myself

once came upon him as he lay

full length on his stomach poring

over a valise full of notes

taken in his youth for Ulysses.

Once he was reading out of the  book

of saints(he is never without it)

and muttering to himself that his day's saint,

"A devil of a fellow for bringing on the rain,

and we wanting to go for a stroll."

He described Stephen Daedalus

"Alone, not only separate from all others,

but to have not even one friend," stating

"I will not serve that which I no longer believe,

whether it will call itself my home,

my fatherland, or my church:

and I will try to express myself

in my art as I can, using for defense

the only arms I allow myself to use,

silence, exile and cunning."

130

I hear the train

all my life

night and me

within 2 miles

2 in the morning

but there's no

continuity

unlike bells

on sunday

 

 

Erik Satie was born at Honfleur and  received his first music lessons from a local organist.  In 1879  he entered the Paris Conservatoire, where he was  labeled untalented and lazy and his piano technique critiqued  as "insignificant , laborious and worthless".

In 1887 he left home for Montmartre and  became friends  with the poet Patrice Contamine  and Claude Debussy .

 















Playing piano in cabaret theatres he started publishing his Gymnopédies.  

 By 1891 he was the official composer and chapel-master for a Rosicrucian following.

In1892 he stopped using barlines and  devised a compositional system for music. Scores of his compositions  were covered with written remarks which were often read out during performances.  

In 1893  an  affair  began with model and artist Suzanne Valadon.  

After their first night together he proposed marriage  but Valadon moved to a room next door at the Rue Cortot.  

Satie became obsessed with her, calling her his Biqui,(goatling)and writing impassioned notes about "her whole being, lovely eyes, gentle hands, and tiny feet".

During their relationship Satie composed the Danses gothiques as a kind of prayer for  peace of mind, and Valadon painted a portrait of Satie. After six months she moved away, leaving him broken-hearted and  left with "nothing but an icy loneliness that fills the head with emptiness and the heart with sadness".  This was his only intimate relationship.

He met the young Maurice Ravel  and founded the Metropolitan Church of Art of the Leading Christ. As its only member he composed a Grande messe , and wrote a flood of letters, articles and pamphlets in support of the church.  H e applied for membership to the Académie Française twice, writing that the board (presided  over by Saint-Saëns) owed him membership.
 In 1895 he inherited money, allowing him to print more writings and to change from wearing a priestlike habit to being the "Velvet Gentleman".

But  by 1896 all his money had vanished and he  moved to cheaper and smaller lodgings. He became a member of a radical socialist party and in a filing cabinet  kept a collection of imaginary buildings made out of metal which he drew on little cards.  He would publish announcements in local journals, offering the buildings,  a"castle in lead" for rent.

He wrote for Vanity Fair in the 20's and after years of heavy drinking died in1925 from cirrhosis .   No one had entered his room since he had moved 27 years earlier. His friends discovered compositions  behind the piano and in velvet suits which included the Vexations, Geneviève de Brabant, The Dreamy Fish, and  a set of "canine" piano pieces.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUlZylqILKI&feature=related


http://ml.oxfordjournals.org/content/77/1/64.full.pdf

notions

the wake called for great effort

patient endless revision

without a hint of polish

like burroughs

around the camp fire

half true routines

a speaker like twain

who let you in on it

the next night

unnecessary dramas

infinite reaches for allusion

sneering with grace

or if not for what?

greek soliloquy

trianon arias

allusions ad absurdum

shoulders above fiction

a sitting book

to swim with words

the wake

wont let you speak

recline and the words

move of their own

toward your understanding

without need

to get it all
beginnegan

he slammed the metal door

      you will live for ten to twelve hours

      as your body slowly bakes

      it is far worse than

      burning to death

      becoming a slow

      inevitable chemical reaction

      you will begin to feel

     it in fifteen minutes

     it was your fault

     remember that