Read Emporium Online

Authors: Ian Pindar

Emporium (5 page)

On our last day

when I kissed you so

passionately, you had every right

to bite off my tongue and spit it out.

Instead you cried. I cried two

days later, listening to a Jew

on the radio describe

how he survived Auschwitz

by the skin of his teeth.

                               The skin.

                               The teeth.

DUST

For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

G
ENESIS 3:19

 

Tout cela se résume finalement, pour reprendre Duchamp, à un «élevage de poussière».

J
EAN
B
AUDRILLARD

Dust over

everything. Nothing

but incomplete

exposures and

obscured views.

The ambiguity

of moving parts

never seen

in toto

and never explained.

Motionless pennants

and the heart

of a machine

beating, crystalline,

housed in an underwater

cavern, visited by

defeated characters

after dark

half-dressed and

curious, half-alive,

who die

if awoken,

before they can

touch

the beating heart that isn’t a heart

but a natural formation in the rock

and there is no machine.

LOON

A STUDY IN HYGIENE

I

Lo!

Loon is

Loon was

alone and never alone

being in the world.

II

No!

Loon has

no past

no future

being in the present.

III

Loon forgets

everything. Also:

Loon forgets

everything.

(Memory is

unhygienic.)

IV

Loon has no

interior.

(This poem, too, is all

exterior.)

V

Loon was

Loon is

at the mercy of

encounters

events

sympathies

antipathies.

He flees

the sad

the anxious

neurotic

paranoid.

Sadness is

contagious.

A slave logic.

VI

Loon has experienced more than once a revelation, though seldom any sense of levitation, being bound by the laws of gravitation,
occasioned
by his inclination to inebriation, to which must also be attributed his tendency to profanation and the occasional eructation, through the incautious potation of liquids created by an ancient process of fermentation and whose stimulation is generally held to be the ruination of many a fine soul whose life ends in dissipation. But far from making this a cause for lamentation, as would many who find Loon a source of extreme irritation and look upon his
irregular
ambulation as a cause for disapprobation or even condemnation or at the very least grounds for the confiscation, in accordance with the relevant legislation, of what he fondly and without hesitation calls his medication and only consolation, resulting in a
confrontation
with those who would subject him to interrogation, using insult and intimidation, with a view to his immediate transportation or deportation, or who would at the very least, adopting a sombre
and serious intonation, call for his reformation, regarding him as a blight upon the nation, we offer no explanation, other than to point out the obvious correlation between Loon’s desolation and his exaltation.

VII

Illness narrows Loon’s

possibilities.

(Skip this part

if it tires you.)

VIII

Loon is

USELESS,

rejecting the capitalist values of production and exchange.

IX

In death did Loon transcend

in some inscrutable way

the matter of which he was composed?

X

He did not.

SILENT SPECTRES

Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour … It is not life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre.

M
AXIM
G
ORKY ON FIRST SEEING A MOVING PICTURE

Sound is superfluous in

death’s realm, in

faded prints.

Narrative lost, morbid

radiance,

shimmering

liquid tremor. They shudder

and blur, shift and

bulge as in

a funhouse mirror. Scuffed

snapshots of

reality passing,

most beautiful when

their strength is least

assured.

These shadows posturing

resemble dimly,

dimly recall

the duration of

bodies,

the ancient forms

empirical, action

reaction.

Is it still life

at 18 frames a second?

Is life only a question

of speed?

Bring the girl into the basement,

The sophomore, and cast her down

On the bloodstained and mouldy mattress.

Let the Doberman Pinschers above bark

As you tie her to the wall, and let the wind

Through the broken window

Move the hooks descending,

Then everything goes into reverse and a happy ending.

Listen to her breathing,

Missing the people she trusts, the camper van

On the beach where she spent her last night,

The rain erasing all sign of a struggle.

If she has stopped hoping it is because

Your mouth is at her ear, so close

There can be no more pretending,

Then everything goes into reverse and a happy ending.

Your third marriage collapsed like an old barn.

The crash of it silenced the saloon-bar chatter

like the cry of a newborn.

You never expected to stumble and shatter

like a fumbled glass, or drown

among strangers in a bar.

On sunny days, the curtains drawn,

Pernod on tap but no beer, 

the décor emerald green and gold,

your early promise unfulfilled, 

you hid away from the world,

certain you had failed.

Your looks dropped away with the years

and the people you knew.

The son you stopped talking to cried real tears

at your funeral, but not for you. 

lost in living

making love

and a little money

the heart

grieving 

lost

attention

inattention

forgetting 

the living connection

a habit

unromantic

unforgiving 

She lies awake

if only to evoke

her body

in the dark

stretching

unveiling

her shoulders

like mountains

her pulsing heart

in the dark

an illustration

in a medieval

bestiary

ridiculous, too,

married to

a death to

come.

I

I mature

like a rich quarter of town

with its own sense of

belonging –

not through propriety but

the passage of time –

enough days to make

a life, a clearing in

the forest.

II

Fields of grain

and a good life among

companions –

their grief a gathered

worship, the track of

a difficult birth –

open bones

troubled dust.

Some are carried

through a thousand

victories

others must lay down their lives

for a sigh.

Each has his goodness stolen.

III

My sight is

a standing flower

my sound

a rejoicing people

moderate in their convictions

and secure

in the growth

of their own minds

each restless but

awakened

and no one

taking offence.

IV

I like simplicity with

fortifications.

I am without

a language

lost in the fog of being

alive

of being a singular

thing.

V

I have been

robbed.

No doubt.

The law is

a mystery but

the ultimate paradox

must be a love without

bondage. 

VI

It cannot be proved

but I discern a

sensation following

a sensation

like water in its

passing away

like waves towards

a better future

without prejudice without

collective hysterical

Humanity.

VII

Can you conceive

of a life where

everything is

a fragment and never

develops

exhausting

itself through

the distance it must travel

simply to be

a fragment?

VIII

All founded on

nothing, like you

said. Only your words

found it.

CHAIN LETTER
: 1 William Langland,
The Vision of Piers Plowman
; 2 John Gower,
Confessio Amantis
; 3 Geoffrey Chaucer,
The Canterbury Tales
; 4 Sir Thomas Wyatt, ‘They fle from me that sometyme did me seke’; 5 Edmund Spenser,
The Faerie Queene
; 6 Sir Philip Sidney,
Astrophil and Stella
; 7 William Shakespeare,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
; 8 John Donne, ‘The Broken Heart’; 9 John Milton,
Paradise Lost;
10 Andrew Marvell, ‘An Horation Ode upon Cromwel’s Return from Ireland’; 11 John Dryden, ‘The Hind and the Panther’; 12 Jonathan Swift, ‘A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed’; 13 Alexander Pope, ‘An Epistle to Bathurst’; 14 Thomas Gray, ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard’; 15 Christopher Smart, ‘Hymn II: Circumcision’; 16 William Blake,
Milton
; 17 Robert Burns, ‘Tam o’Shanter’; 18 William Wordsworth, ‘Old Man Travelling’; 19 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Dejection. An Ode’; 20 George Gordon, Lord Byron, ‘The Vision of Judgment’; 21 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘The Sensitive-Plant’; 22 John Clare, ‘I Am’; 23 John Keats, ‘The Eve of St Agnes’; 24 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ‘Lord Walter’s Wife’; 25 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘Ulysses’; 26 Robert Browning, ‘My Last Duchess’; 27 Edward Lear, ‘The Owl and the Pussy-Cat’; 28 Walt Whitman,
Leaves of Grass
; 29 Matthew Arnold, ‘Dover Beach’; 30 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘Sudden Light’; 31 Christina Rossetti, ‘The Thread of Life’; 32 Emily Dickinson, ‘Safe in their alabaster chambers’; 33 Lewis Carroll, ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’; 34 Algernon Charles Swinburne, ‘A Leavetaking’; 35 Thomas Hardy, ‘After a Journey’; 36 Gerald Manley Hopkins, ‘I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day’; 37 Oscar Wilde,
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
; 38 A.E. Housman, ‘The laws of God, the laws of man’; 39 Rudyard Kipling, ‘Mandalay’; 40 W. B. Yeats, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’; 41 Gertrude Stein,
Stanzas in Meditation
; 42 Wallace Stevens ‘Credences of Summer’; 43 James Joyce, ‘The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly’; 44 William Carlos Williams,
Paterson
III; 45 Ezra Pound, Canto XXXIX; 46 D. H. Lawrence, ‘The Mosquito’; 47 Siegfried Sassoon, ‘Everyone Sang’; 48 Marianne Moore, ‘The Mind is an Enchanting Thing’; 49 Rupert Brooke, ‘The Soldier’; 50 T. S. Eliot, ‘Lines to a Persian Cat’; 51 Wilfred Owen, ‘Strange Meeting’; 52 e. e. cummings, ‘Humanity i love you’; 53 Charles Reznikoff,
Jerusalem the Golden
(55); 54 Hart Crane, ‘Powhatan’s Daughter: The River’; 55 Laura Riding ‘A City Seems’; 56 Langston Hughes, ‘Cross’; 57 Stevie Smith, ‘The Jungle Husband’; 58 Lorine Neidecker, ‘Thomas Jefferson’; 59 Louis Zukofsky,
29 Poems
(‘18’); 60 Kenneth Rexroth, ‘Un Bel di Vedremo’; 61 Samuel Beckett, ‘Ooftish’; 62 John Betjeman, ‘In Westminster Abbey’; 63 W. H. Auden ‘Taller to-day, we remember similar evenings’; 64 George Oppen, ‘Party on Shipboard’; 65
Charles Olson, ‘The Kingfishers’; 66 Elizabeth Bishop, ‘The Fish’; 67 John Cage ‘’25 Mesostics Re and Not Re Mark Tobey’; 68 R. S. Thomas, ‘On the Farm’; 69 Dylan Thomas, ‘Among Those Killed in the Dawn Raid was a Man Aged a Hundred’; 70 John Berryman,
Dream Songs
(47); 71 Robert Lowell, ‘Skunk Hour’; 72 Lawrence Ferlinghetti, ‘Autobiography’; 73 Robert Duncan, ‘A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar’; 74 Barbara Guest, ‘Twilight Polka Dots’; 75 Philip Larkin, ‘Church Going’; 76 Jackson Mac Low, ‘Trope Market’; 77 Philip Whalen, ‘Sourdough Mountain Lookout’; 78 James Schuyler, ‘The Crystal Lithium’; 79 Denise Levertov, ‘Stepping Westward’; 80 Kenneth Koch, ‘With Janice’; 81 Jack Spicer, ‘Phonemics’; 82 Allen Ginsberg, ‘This Form of Life Needs Sex’; 83 Frank O’Hara, ‘The Day Lady Died’; 84 Paul Blackburn, ‘The Onceover’; 85 Robert Creeley, ‘The Door’; 86 John Ashbery, ‘A Wave’; 87 Ed Dorn,
Gunslinger
II; 88 Thom Gunn, ‘In Santa Maria del Popolo’; 89 Gregory Corso, ‘Marriage’; 90 Gary Snyder,
Myths & Texts: Burning
; 91 Ted Hughes, ‘A Childish Prank’; 92 Geoffrey Hill, ‘An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England’ (‘The Laurel Axe’); 93 Sylvia Plath, ‘Nick and the Candlestick’; 94 Diane di Prima, ‘On Sitting Down to Write, I Decide Instead to Go to Fred Herko’s Concert’; 95 Ted Berrigan, ‘I Remember’; 96 Amiri Baraka,
AM/TRAK
; 97 Susan Howe, ‘Speeches at the Barrier’; 98 Clark Coolidge, ‘On Induction of the Hand’; 99 Seamus Heaney, ‘Station Island’; 100 Lyn Hejinian,
My Life
; 101 Ron Padgett, ‘Big Bluejay Composition’; 102 James Tate, ‘Nausea,
Coincidence
’; 103 Alice Notley, ‘Beginning with a Stain’; 104 Anne Waldman, ‘skin Meat BONES (chant)’; 105 Bernadette Mayer, ‘First turn to me … ’; 106 Ron Silliman,
Paradise
; 107 David Shapiro, ‘Dido to Aeneas’; 108 August Kleinzahler, ‘A Case in Point’; 109 Charles Bernstein, ‘The Klupzy Girl’; 110 Paul Muldoon, ‘The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants’; 111 Maxine Chernoff, ‘Breasts’.

 

CᾹRVᾹKA/LOKᾹYATA
: Lokayata was a materialistic system of Hindu philosophy that flourished around the first century CE. Its founder is said to have been Carvaka, whose dates are unknown. The writings of this school are no longer extant and all we know of it comes from the criticisms of its detractors. Cf.
Cārvāka/Lokāyata: An Anthology of Source Materials and Some Recent Studies
, ed. Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya (New Delhi: Indian Council of Philosophical Research, 1994).

 

BIG BUMPERTON ON THE SABBATH
: The Outsider artist Johann Knopf was a locksmith who went insane and was diagnosed ‘paranoid form of dementia praecox’ (schizophrenia). One of his drawings is entitled
Big Bumperton on the Sabbath
. Knopf’s illness emerged after the death of his mother, with whom he had lived, then a subsequent unhappy marriage. He suffered
from religious delusions in which he believed he was a Christian martyr and could understand the language of birds, which he considered tragic creatures.

 

IT TAKES A MAN
:
The great Emathian conqueror

Pindarus
: Cf. Milton’s Sonnet VIII: ‘When the assault was intended to the City’. Alexander’s army sacked Thebes in 335 BCE, but he spared Pindar’s house and showed mercy towards the late poet’s descendents.
Rodez
: In 1937 the French poet and actor Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) was arrested in Dublin, repatriated and interned for nine years in a succession of psychiatric hospitals, including the asylum at Rodez in southern France. Here he created in his imagination the ‘daughters of the heart to be born’: feisty warrior-women bodyguards, based on ex-lovers (and two beloved grandmothers), who would protect him from the black magic of psychiatry. 

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