Edge, on edge, edgy, I’m edgy, and a stand-up comic describes his style as edgy because he curses a lot. Is edge some four-letter words, is it life or death? Is edge pushing to extremes? Is edge danger, or a challenge to conventionality? My teeth are on edge, the molars grind, the pulp’s exposed. The paper cut, plain photocopy paper, sharp as a saw blade, though not as strong. The sickle blade, the sharp tongue disclosing truth. Oh no! How corny to upset old ladies at coffee-klatches! Undermine the peace! Yet that’s edgy, son. Your rapier-sharp wit could uncover a gold mine of unchallenged assumptions holding a class of people together like glue. Knock down the jambs, edgy guy! Dress for the role, black leather or tutus. Show yourself.
Things slant a certain way, and other things slant another way. And there’s a point where all lines converge but it’s not easy to find, and the worst thing is the point changes with the movement of the eye. There are an infinite number of these points towards which all lines of perspective converge, and the points lie at an infinite distance. The lines come closer, but they never actually meet. At this point the eye sees the point towards which all converges without the point really being there, so the eye makes up a story to bring the story of the nearly converging lines to a close, and so in the distance the perspective closes: everything is eventually drawn into a vortex.
An infinite number of points in a sphere of an indefinite diameter. Who can say what this diameter is? 20 meters or miles? Does it only extend as far as human sight? How do the short-sighted fit into this picture? How about the farsighted, the ones most likely to see a moose among raspberry bushes and bramble, or the street signs for more than a block away.
But on the other end, do these lines of sight pass or engulf you, extending behind you wherever you’re looking? Do they include you as a wave includes? Or do they simply pass you? You seem to be the tangent they happen to touch before diverging. Everywhere I look objects placed at different angles confuse me, like cinderblocks accidentally dumped in a parking-lot. The little speakers –the tweeters – are pointed in one direction, the woofer in another direction. They each remain in separate, irreconcilable lines of perspective, until I make them point the same way, because for best effect, they have to reach my ears at once.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
9/13/2003 -- 9/14/2003
9/13/2003
You could walk a tightrope over the land corridor that leads to the Free State of Danzig and you wouldn’t please anyone, dodging the border guards while ordering strudel from the local bakeries over your cell phone, and you don’t even own a headset. This had better be good, considering the hits you’ve already taken.
When you pause you deliberate, and when you deliberate you reflect, and when you reflect you have that nasty habit of rearranging events that you can never actually change ad infinitum, because you are at a place that you would not wish upon your worst enemy. Who is your enemy, do you need one as governments and nationalities do to distinguish their integrity from others. The faceless incommunicability of the ones you’ve never touched, were perhaps too afraid to go after, collide with or push through one another, through one another’s bodies in a manner one could not confess to the priest or to the marriage counselor. The house of the dead is the house of the ghosts of the past of the living, the past selves of the living with which you were familiar and to whom you could breath fire and do nothing wrong. The past self of a living person is a ghost invoked by print media. The younger self discontinuous with the present self.
The steps and ladders of the music as it proceeds to some conclusion, a few air-tight spaces in which separate occurrences independent of another occurs, the sum total of the effect being spell-binding in its alleged unity, for which you have not been trained nor accustomed to catch, a rhythmic ladder of strings or wing-beats against a sun that seems to cool and disperse its fire in the sea, an egg yolk in the white of the sky. These various but intact file spaces conceived by equally proportioned notes, a furor of fiddles, terraces of the concert hall to approximate the angelic thrones, molding of blanc mange the herringbone clouds, the equally spaced studs of the ceiling of velveteen the firmament that in retrospect seems paltry when compared to the Superdome roof controlled in the immediate future by a proconsul who wears cowboy boots beneath his pinstripe-suited exterior. A rank smell that wafts into the window from the west.
9/14/2003
A parking garage replaced my early Surrenden St. apartment of over 25 years ago. The cement walls and columns rose through the summer, the din of cranes or giant hammers pulverized the ground. O winter breaks you spun your used vehicle in circles in the parking lot, upon the built up ice. Who cares now if your tires are really skates or the treads of skis the Neolithic man frozen on the side of the Italian Alps might’ve wished he had if he could have seen into the future instead of falling asleep beneath the impending avalanche—crash and boom!—and his fur pelt jacket refuses to keep him from freezing on that mountainside, while the mind in the perishing body thinks identifiable circles before it desiccates over ten millennia, his thatched hut on the lakeside blurry—now the skiers have taken over the polyglot Helvetian village from which he wandered, hunting mastodons or macroceros in the virgin snow nosing to the frozen ground for grass or chestnuts. There’s plenty for everyone, how carry the foison homeward unresolved.
What, might I ask, does that have to do with the price of eggs? A tangent that no one can follow, such as the gloomy mittel-European sloe-eyed philosopher traces with his pointer over an illuminated globe in his darkened classroom, his acolytes planning their career moves on luminous Etch-A-Sketches. How few degrees separate yourself from the social station you desire, commanding armies above a darkening plain while others can hug one another in bouts of indulgent reassurance. As much as they may laugh they know the man with the light pen before the blackboard knows his stuff, knows the hoi polloi cannot know better.
A tightrope walker across the Danzig Corridor
Reflects and falls, rues the day he choose.
Someone always pays for the mistakes
My unrequited crush will shatter into glassy Narcissistic mirrors
When you smell a rat you hear an odd inflection
A paper tiger has a chance of floating on the gulfstream
While those of flesh and blood become extinct.
I walked across the creaking floor to see the time-and-temp clock better.
You could walk a tightrope over the land corridor that leads to the Free State of Danzig and you wouldn’t please anyone, dodging the border guards while ordering strudel from the local bakeries over your cell phone, and you don’t even own a headset. This had better be good, considering the hits you’ve already taken.
When you pause you deliberate, and when you deliberate you reflect, and when you reflect you have that nasty habit of rearranging events that you can never actually change ad infinitum, because you are at a place that you would not wish upon your worst enemy. Who is your enemy, do you need one as governments and nationalities do to distinguish their integrity from others. The faceless incommunicability of the ones you’ve never touched, were perhaps too afraid to go after, collide with or push through one another, through one another’s bodies in a manner one could not confess to the priest or to the marriage counselor. The house of the dead is the house of the ghosts of the past of the living, the past selves of the living with which you were familiar and to whom you could breath fire and do nothing wrong. The past self of a living person is a ghost invoked by print media. The younger self discontinuous with the present self.
The steps and ladders of the music as it proceeds to some conclusion, a few air-tight spaces in which separate occurrences independent of another occurs, the sum total of the effect being spell-binding in its alleged unity, for which you have not been trained nor accustomed to catch, a rhythmic ladder of strings or wing-beats against a sun that seems to cool and disperse its fire in the sea, an egg yolk in the white of the sky. These various but intact file spaces conceived by equally proportioned notes, a furor of fiddles, terraces of the concert hall to approximate the angelic thrones, molding of blanc mange the herringbone clouds, the equally spaced studs of the ceiling of velveteen the firmament that in retrospect seems paltry when compared to the Superdome roof controlled in the immediate future by a proconsul who wears cowboy boots beneath his pinstripe-suited exterior. A rank smell that wafts into the window from the west.
9/14/2003
A parking garage replaced my early Surrenden St. apartment of over 25 years ago. The cement walls and columns rose through the summer, the din of cranes or giant hammers pulverized the ground. O winter breaks you spun your used vehicle in circles in the parking lot, upon the built up ice. Who cares now if your tires are really skates or the treads of skis the Neolithic man frozen on the side of the Italian Alps might’ve wished he had if he could have seen into the future instead of falling asleep beneath the impending avalanche—crash and boom!—and his fur pelt jacket refuses to keep him from freezing on that mountainside, while the mind in the perishing body thinks identifiable circles before it desiccates over ten millennia, his thatched hut on the lakeside blurry—now the skiers have taken over the polyglot Helvetian village from which he wandered, hunting mastodons or macroceros in the virgin snow nosing to the frozen ground for grass or chestnuts. There’s plenty for everyone, how carry the foison homeward unresolved.
What, might I ask, does that have to do with the price of eggs? A tangent that no one can follow, such as the gloomy mittel-European sloe-eyed philosopher traces with his pointer over an illuminated globe in his darkened classroom, his acolytes planning their career moves on luminous Etch-A-Sketches. How few degrees separate yourself from the social station you desire, commanding armies above a darkening plain while others can hug one another in bouts of indulgent reassurance. As much as they may laugh they know the man with the light pen before the blackboard knows his stuff, knows the hoi polloi cannot know better.
A tightrope walker across the Danzig Corridor
Reflects and falls, rues the day he choose.
Someone always pays for the mistakes
My unrequited crush will shatter into glassy Narcissistic mirrors
When you smell a rat you hear an odd inflection
A paper tiger has a chance of floating on the gulfstream
While those of flesh and blood become extinct.
I walked across the creaking floor to see the time-and-temp clock better.
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