A Prophetic Chicken Madrigal

As with prophetic chickens who will read to you the news,
a systematization of beliefs ain't always true –
that confuses what it is, with what the calculus can do.
Neither madness nor from wine, this thought it comes from Wittgenstein.

But that may be irrelevant Ludwig he so advised:
the cause one finds is the solution even when it's mythic,
illustrating the successful one who's psychoanalytic
still relies on self-fullfillings underlying olden magic.

chorus

And not even mystically prophetic,
when put in words like autopoietic,

but if it works, where is the fowl
affronting any set of civil ethics?

Have you observed when those you love have died?
no one but you remembers they existed
no obit to them ever will acknowledge
unless of course they've graduated college.

We're trained the past is ever out of reach,
"it never really was", they even preach,
or did but "that's beside this point of mine,
and 'mad' be called to entertain myth-time".

Introduction to Black Polish, "a sometimes decipherable memory" of '68

"In order to analyse the rules for the formation of objects, one must neither, as we have seen, embody them in things, nor relate them to the domain of words; in order to analyse the formation of enunciative types, one must relate them neither to the knowing subject nor to a psychological individuality. Similarly, to analyse the formation of concepts, one must relate them neither to the horizon of ideality, nor to the empirical progress of ideas."

– Foucalt

So what if an invertibrated cockroach has juicy innards and an epidermis like fingernails? Your soft and supple skin is no sign of freedom from malignancy no matter the polish or hardner applied – it's just formaldehyde, not reverse english – whether scratching an itch or gouging out my eye 'cause that mosquito was no biting seductress, a glance in the wrong direction's always like a growing mutation, but only on the face of things reminiscent, and not there-by necessity, unpleasant. Only when you turn around at night has what was left behind become in front all right.

So what if the praying mantis had no free pass through pearly gates until decapitating the old man for saying rice shines no brighter and rocks no harder after any rumble in a tumbler? He lost his head for a hard roll in the bread bag, you spineless spider of revenge some would call my mother. Never mind to confuse a flour sack for silk and I'm supposed to say "it's pretty"? A sacrificial lie's not always over guilt – sometimes there are feelings underneath your tramping foot.

So speechless, dead posies grow in The Tumultuous Sea between audition and reception – I call them "poetry" – as a swell, wave or undulating resonance between noisy mounds wiggling "kathump, kathump" like the bottom of a boat. Should you fall off, it may not be a pretty pose except to slithering sharks whose spines are soft but well constructed like a high school yearbook with her glossless image on page 71, observed by Billy Bibbit.

So the black-death dots up close they spread out and at a distance, go gray, a shade we knew was blond instead, like daffodils all 'round a grave. The lips concealed the teeth so one could not discover what's inside her – to smile or no was a question to consider. There was always a supple depression about it one could not avoid sinking into forever. Never just distraction – that is, t'was unenhanced – we'd only met without an introduction – that is, it was by chance.

So each sequential miscarriage was a bloodied flush of miscreantic me. Could it be that call-up from my daughter, the one thought not to be was not another "whoops! wrong number", worried that I'd get too cold, my wits too long away at sea, a void of blackened columbines or lillies in the fray? Who has died? 'Twas never thee! If I should find it here and then again or there, why's it wrong to say it's everywhere, when still a memory's in my eyes, in this dismembered corpse which even you could never recognize.

So is it then my own remorse which clouds the daylight skies?

MY OLD SAL

In lieu of any salary, how 'bout this: a salutation with some salt for surging salivation sweat beneath some solar radiation? O'er the shoulder's just a cue to thank the heavens this old earth's still got an ocean and not a cursed expenditure or nuclear explosion.

– Salamander of Thump, 68 a.d. 'Güde Luk'

Theses on the Copula

1 the comma may prevent a coma when in any well written sentence structure the minor difference which makes a major different is often found in placing absense or presence of a general copulation without which words might be seen running together 2 such is rank for the ear on its own there must be a pause which refreshes a tone that changes breath time out from between an utterance and that is the cleavage of syntax from whence emerges meaning or meanderly direction while a coma is a mere stop period 3 it is the same thing for baby making but then not from the mouth or ass which maybe drool with vomitus first and excrement last 4 the difference between poetry and prose is not found in their form or pose but without maleable muscle the rigidity of bone is only alone for ever lying in the tomb or monotone 5 tumors are malignant when the skeletons jelley or muscle cement otherwise why the bother pitting one ever at the other like misapplied gender corrupting our grammar but whose to say what is spelled out must be heard as well hogwash like children seen but not heard and vice versa when its bedtime 6 it should be a song and dance and not a war directing a flick that is not a simple trick of horror when conflict is waiting in reserve for what one does with trading partners or for charging rent for a single space or spot to briefly contemplate 7 foramen magnum a hole in the head like the objective in syntax less the neck and neck attach other bodies to our skulls thinking only of a win and to double space 8 is the copula a thing of necessary purchase or just a matter of provisional periods waxing and waning with in flowing spirits and outgoing err 9 clearly some texts should never be read aloud if one wishes for clarity or demand repitition otherwise we insert our breaks wherever we think to appropriate it is not always a condition of thievery but qualification 10 who says the meanings in the word uninterupted and not a matter of interpretation when we can do it out loud without effort and better without too much thinking that always comes later considering any reason is almost always all of the above

Where "law" is merely the appearance of surface-regularity, there emerges a lexic metaphor and mindful nomadology – on the face...

"Seldom we find," says Solomon Don Dunce,
   "half an idea in the profoundest sonnet.
Through all the flimsy things we see at once
   as easily as through a Naples bonnet –
   trash of all trash! – how can a lady don it?
Yet heavier far than your Petrarchan stuff –
owl-downy nonsense that the faintest puff
   twirls into trunk-paper the while you con it."
And, veritably, Sol is right enough.
The general tuckermanities are arrant
bubbles – ephemeral and so transparent –
   but this is, now – you may depend upon it –
stable, opaque, immortal – all by dint
of the dear names that lie concealed within 't.

– Poe

...probability. Like the synchronicity of falling stars, ports of call and flowers blooming out to sea. Or islands as holes in the solidarity of water (Buckminster-fuller) or a sucking vortex like a pepper-mill grinding life into mince-meat before it can bloom, thrust out of context and then spewed and quasi-renewed (The Kalevala). Like, the name is not the thing – how many comrades are named "Mary"? When Wittgenstein accused Freud of merely constructing a mythic narative, Siggy might have answered, "What other kind of discourse is there?" Regarding the sentiment that the time-lines of things are not the be-all and end-all of language or history, Foulcalt says this:

"Let there be no misunderstanding: it is not the objects that remain constant, nor the domain that they form; it is not even their point of emergence or their mode of characterization; but the relation between the surfaces on which they appear, on which they can be delimited, on which they can be analysed and specified.

[...]

What, in short, we wish to do is to dispense with 'things'. To 'depresentify' them. To conjure up their rich, heavy, immediate plenitude, which we usually regard as the primitive law of a discourse that has become divorced from it through error, oblivion, illusion, ignorance, or the inertia of beliefs and traditions, or even the perhaps unconscious desire not to see and not to speak. To substitute for the enigmatic treasure of 'things' anterior to discourse, the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse. To define these objects without reference to the ground, the foundation of things, but by relating them to the body of rules that enable them to form as objects of a discourse and thus constitute the conditions of their historical appearance. To write a history of discursive objects that does not plunge them into the common depth of a primal soil, but deploys the nexus of regularities that govern their dispersion.

[...]

The analysis of lexical contents defines either the elements of meaning at the disposal of speaking subjects in a given period, or the semantic structure that appears on the surface of a discourse that has already been spoken; it does not concern discursive practice as a place in which a tangled plurality -- at once superposed and incomplete -- of objects is formed and deformed, appears and disappears.

The sagacity of the commentators is not mistaken: from the kind of analysis that I have undertaken, words are as deliberately absent as things themselves; any description of a vocabulary is as lacking as any reference to the living plenitude of experience."

– Foucalt, The Archeology of Knowledge

Homely but Goodly Dwarf Blues

The opposite of pragmatism is not disposal, an active dis-position, giving no respect to space at all. But could it be a will to distributivity, to spread out like waves in the manner of water? In order to catch it, pragmatics stand still: should you miss the boat, then call for the scapegoat.

Just as likely, there's no nominal (stand-offish) "divinity", but in dreaming and art an aesthetic perspective is empirically "divine" (a cut above, not a mere welt) as measured by one's taste or an other's salivation: salvation comes only with a dash of salt. Or is divination drawing a lot? You take what is gotten or dash off to pout.

Goodly for Xeno is oddly godly, obtaining only two-bits of zero. One could even say "something" rather than "nothing", and that may be a useful consideration but not a side by itself – that would be too gaudy. Word-play's no incitation to war, just etymology without respect to time and grammar – not an injustice, it "just is" non-linear.

Like in latin, our "theo" was called "divus", a great divide, an original divot. 'Twas really "diversion", otherwise, nothing to write "h-o-m-e" about. It was, there and then, thought god was a sharpy, a sword slicing sky off away from the ground, hence the "demi-urge" – a prime vivisection and not a bang-job. But then again, when we say "to shear", they'd have said "for sharing".

Nordic dwarves were invited to keep them, like pillars against gravitude (we now think it's "motion", one through the other), from ever coming again together. When they went underground from the Roman erection (or its constitution), there was first heard "the sky is falling", to which an answer came to all there about, "down but not entirely out".

The Square, or Civil Rectification

Never uncovered by tooth-brush or trowel in rectangular pits is the four dimensional object, which is just another square tinked to a cube, an imposing language game playfully fumbled with toothpicks and elmer's glue (or their 'virtual' analogs) instead of the more appropriate lips, teeth and tongue – a labial-dental lingua and not a matter of currency in french or any other "whence?" A seven-sided cube is more misnomer than multidimensional body past three. Four-d is a mathematical possibility but begs the question, not unlike the problem with "energy", "just what is a dimension, anyway?"

In archaeology, the fourth dimension is the excavator. In linguistics, it is air in and out of a chest and not a branch of semantics at all. Pollution is what happens to air when it loses its commodity value. But fallout is always marketable.

Where is the tactile sense in that beyond feeling one's own head set to vibrate at its sides or its gullet? Should the function of any discourse be exorcism – the removal of spells or ephemeral presence – and more appropriately labelled de-curse as a medical practice? Then what of enchantments and anonymous presents? Such is the cornerstone of impossibilist discourse in a materialist philosophy which must exclude any relative artistic impression (whether or not expressed in the past), just to preserve its sacred integrity, still glued to good and bad magic and their rectification, but rarely discussed except between nations with the grammatic accusative.

While the dreamer has no aversion to hands-on experience or the reality of bricks (seen often, in fact, promoting them both), dream and mythic poetry remain, still undistinguished by the realist but only within that great void of intolerable nothingness – "does not exist!". That is the picture of conservatism always and only painted by the most progressive of think-tinkers.

Mental Scales & Truth

"I make out my case thus—

There is an exact balance in the distribution of causes of pleasure and pain: this has been satisfactorily proved in my next paper, upon “Cause and Effect,” therefore I shall take it for granted. What, then, is there but the mind to determine its own state of happiness, or misery: just as the motion of the scales depends upon themselves, when two equal weights are put into them. The balance ought to be truly hung; but if the unpleasant scale is heavier, then the motion is in favor of the pleasant scale, and vice versa. Whether the beam stands horizontally, or otherwise, does not matter (that only determines the key): draw a line at right angles to it, then put in your equal weights; if the angle becomes larger on the unpleasant scale's side of the line, happiness is the result, if on the other, misery.

It requires but a slight acquaintance with mechanics to see that he who would be happy should have the unpleasant side heavier. I hate corollaries or we might have a group of them equally applicable to Art and Models."

– The Germ, June, 1848.

If the preraphaelites armed with moral certitude could have merged symbiotic with the symbolist's sense of mystery and the ineffable, we'd have the perfect re-synthesis of myth-time and dream-time, or for William Blake some bigger space to reincarnate, but then the Angles and Francs never could find a common exchange-rate, not til Baudelaire brought Edgar Allen Poe to the french mêlée for such as S. Mallarmé to emulate. Of course, there is no going back nor even forward, truth to tell, we're stuck with the 'pataphysic world of Jary's Doctor Faustroll.

– see The Symbolist Manifesto by Jean Moréas .

Intellectual truth is a moral sentiment followed by an emotional outburst enforced by a huff and a puff and a blow yer house away.

And then again, from Bierce's devil's dictionary,

TRUTH, n. An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance. Discovery of truth is the sole purpose of philosophy, which is the most ancient occupation of the human mind and has a fair prospect of existing with increasing activity to the end of time.

FIB, n. A lie that has not cut its teeth. An habitual liar's nearest approach to truth: the perigee of his eccentric orbit.

When David said: "All men are liars," Dave,
Himself a liar, fibbed like any thief.
Perhaps he thought to weaken disbelief
By proof that even himself was not a slave
To Truth; though I suspect the aged knave
Had been of all her servitors the chief
Had he but known a fig's reluctant leaf
Is more than e'er she wore on land or wave.
No, David served not Naked Truth when he
Struck that sledge-hammer blow at all his race;
Nor did he hit the nail upon the head:
For reason shows that it could never be,
And the facts contradict him to his face.
Men are not liars all, for some are dead.

– Bartle Quinker

PLATITUDE, n. The fundamental element and special glory of popular literature. A thought that snores in words that smoke. The wisdom of a million fools in the diction of a dullard. A fossil sentiment in artificial rock. A moral without the fable. All that is mortal of a departed truth. A demi-tasse of milk-and-mortality. The Pope's-nose of a featherless peacock. A jelly-fish withering on the shore of the sea of thought. The cackle surviving the egg. A desiccated epigram.