The Reflection In The River

Plied Position of Unerring... Seemingly Always Right

2008-07-23T18:27:00.006-04:00

Reflect Upon Her Position In Poetry,
Write A Real Sonnet, pilgrim,

i did not mean to be so loose of tongue,
so bold in all i loosely told in my smut so smug, so overly sold.

i did not mean, pligrim, to traduce. i apologize, i offer no excuse:
but, poet, though you have right to scold

it was highsouled you who made my mouth hold
what it held and tell what it told. a truce,no, let’s call it an honor.

mine is apt, as far as long sentences go:
my vice in your verse will tempt others to try

and sing: readers,
lovers forever rapt and about to sweetly sigh: paradise!

thank you, poet, for keeping me alive.

Some Fell Out Of Favor

2008-05-30T00:30:00.004-04:00

This post is for everyone that has been dying to see state portraits of Maoist Generals who have fallen from grace and thus been "disappeared" from the official museums and history books.
Or for anyone who likes strange painting of Chinese military men on horses with flowers and rainbows.

REFLECTION : Living Without Your "Sorry"

2008-04-14T08:56:00.003-04:00

_Dogs must find a place to shit, but finches don't share that concern._

Dogs have been broken, they sleep at the foot of the bed and depend upon the hand of the Master for food.

The birds live freely and are never told by their neighbors what is appropriate behavior.

The price could be starvation, but it is of their own doing.

This stability being sold by so many today carries too high a price for those who can count the number of liberties surrendered.

FACT: Clint Eastwood Hates Disabled Persons. (And That's A FACT)

2007-11-21T01:00:00.001-05:00

We are accustomed to think of ourselves as an emancipated people; we say that we are democratic, liberty-loving, free of prejudices and hatred.

This is the melting pot, the seat of a great human experiment.

Beautiful words, full of noble, idealistic sentiment.

Actually we are a vulgar, pushing mob

whose passions are easily mobilized

by demagogues, newspaper men, religious quacks, agitators and such like.

To call this a society of free peoples is blasphemous.

What have we to offer the world besides the superabundant delusion that this insane activity represents progress and enlightenment?

Reality Of Being Is Evidenced By Repetition

2007-09-18T04:02:00.001-04:00

Crossing The Alps...Ad Infintium Towards Waterloo

2007-08-20T20:15:00.002-04:00

Napoleon at the Saint-Bernard Pass
painted by Jacques-Louis David, 1801-1805

First Versailles Version

Second Versailles Version (the personal version of Jacques-Louis David)

Château de Malmaison Version

Belvedere Version

Charlottenbourg Version

...and finally one painted by Paul Delaroche because the others were too implausibly theatrical.

...Un Nuevo Mundo

2007-08-10T04:54:00.000-04:00

The Thin Line Between Past and Present

2007-07-13T05:11:00.001-04:00

But you see in dealing with me, the relatives didn't know that they were dealing with a staunch character and I tell you if there's anything worse than dealing with a staunch woman... S-T-A-U-N-C-H. There's nothing worse, I'm telling you. They don't weaken, no matter what.

It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present. You know what I mean? It's awfully difficult.

Extended Excerpt- Jude the Obscure

2007-05-23T03:10:00.002-04:00

The is the extended excerpt from Part Sixth Chapter II, regarding the death of Little Father Time

The failure to find another lodging, and the lack of room in this house for his father, had made a deep impression on the boy--abrooding undemonstrative horror seemed to have seized him. The silence was broken by his saying: "Mother, WHAT shall we do to-morrow!"

"I don't know!" said Sue despondently. "I am afraid this will trouble your father."

"I wish Father was quite well, and there had been room for him! Then it wouldn't matter so much! Poor Father!"

"It wouldn't!"

"Can I do anything?"

"No! All is trouble, adversity, and suffering!"

"Father went away to give us children room, didn't he?"

"Partly."

"It would be better to be out o' the world than in it, wouldn't it?"

"It would almost, dear."

"'Tis because of us children, too, isn't it, that you can't get agood lodging?"

"Well--people do object to children sometimes."

"Then if children make so much trouble, why do people have 'em?"

"Oh--because it is a law of nature."

"But we don't ask to be born?"

"No indeed."

"And what makes it worse with me is that you are not my real mother,and you needn't have had me unless you liked. I oughtn't to have come to 'ee--that's the real truth! I troubled 'em in Australia, and I trouble folk here. I wish I hadn't been born!"

"You couldn't help it, my dear."

"I think that whenever children be born that are not wanted theyshould be killed directly, before their souls come to 'em, and not allowed to grow big and walk about!"

Sue did not reply. She was doubtfully pondering how to treat this too reflective child. She at last concluded that, so far as circumstances permitted, shewould be honest and candid with one who entered into her difficulties like an aged friend.

"There is going to be another in our family soon," she hesitatingly remarked.

"How?"

"There is going to be another baby."

"What!" The boy jumped up wildly. "Oh God, Mother, you've never a-sent for another; and such trouble with what you've got!"

"Yes, I have, I am sorry to say!" murmured Sue, her eyes glistening with suspended tears.

The boy burst out weeping. "Oh you don't care, you don't care!" he cried in bitter reproach. "How EVER could you, Mother, be so wicked and cruel as this, when you needn't have done it till we was better off, and Father well! To bring us all into MORE trouble! No room for us, and Father a-forced to go away, and we turned out to-morrow; and yet you be going to have another of us soon! ... 'Tis done o'purpose!--'tis--'tis!" He walked up and down sobbing.

"Y-you must forgive me, little Jude!" she pleaded, her bosom heaving now as much as the boy's. "I can't explain--I will when you are older. It does seem--as if I had done it on purpose, now we are in these difficulties! I can't explain, dear! But it--is not quite onpurpose--I can't help it!"

"Yes it is--it must be! For nobody would interfere with us, like that, unless you agreed! I won't forgive you, ever, ever! I'll never believe you care for me, or Father, or any of us any more!" He got up, and went away into the closet adjoining her room, in which a bed had been spread on the floor.

There she heard him say: "If we children was gone there'd be no trouble at all!"

"Don't think that, dear," she cried, rather peremptorily. "But go to sleep!"

The following morning she awoke at a little past six, and decided to get up and run across before breakfast to the inn which Jude had informed her to be his quarters, to tell him what had happened before he went out.

She arose softly, to avoid disturbing the children,who, as she knew, must be fatigued by their exertions of yesterday.

She found Jude at breakfast in the obscure tavern he had chosen as a counterpoise to the expense of her lodging: and she explained to him her homelessness. He had been so anxious about her all night, he said.

Somehow, now it was morning, the request to leave the lodgings did not seem such a depressing incident as it had seemed the nightbefore, nor did even her failure to find another place affect her sodeeply as at first. Jude agreed with her that it would not be worthwhile to insist upon her right to stay a week, but to take immediate steps for removal.

"You must all come to this inn for a day or two," he said. "It is a rough place, and it will not be so nice for the children, but we shall have more time to look round. There are plenty of lodgings in the suburbs--in my old quarter of Beersheba. Have breakfast with me now you are here, my bird. You are sure you are well? There will be plenty of time to get back and prepare the children's meal before they wake. In fact, I'll go with you."

She joined Jude in a hasty meal, and in a quarter of an hour they started together, resolving to clear out from Sue's too respectable lodging immediately. On reaching the place and going upstairs she found that all was quiet in the children's room, and called to the landlady in timorous tones to please bring up the tea-kettle and something for their breakfast. This was perfunctorily done, and producing a couple of eggs which she had brought with her she put them into the boiling kettle, and summoned Jude to watch them for the youngsters, while she went to call them, it being now about half-past eight o'clock.

Jude stood bending over the kettle, with his watch in his hand,timing the eggs, so that his back was turned to the little inner chamber where the children lay. A shriek from Sue suddenly caused him to start round. He saw that the door of the room, or rather closet--which had seemed to go heavily upon its hinges as she pushed it back--was open, and that Sue had sunk to the floor just within it. Hastening forward to pick her up he turned his eyes to the littlebed spread on the boards; no children were there. He looked in bewilderment round the room. At the back of the door were fixed two hooks for hanging garments, and from these the forms of the two youngest children were suspended, by a piece of box-cord round each of their necks, while from a nail a few yards off the body of little Jude was hanging in a similar manner. An overturned chair was near the elder boy, and his glazed eyes were slanted into the room; but those of the girl and the baby boy were closed.

Half-paralyzed by the strange and consummate horror of the scene he let Sue lie, cut the cords with his pocket-knife and threw the three children on the bed; but the feel of their bodies in the momentary handling seemed to say that they were dead.

He caught up Sue, who was in fainting fits, and put her on the bed in the other room, after which he breathlessly summoned the landlady and ran out for a doctor.

When he got back Sue had come to herself, and the two helpless women, bending over the children in wild efforts to restore them, and the triplet of little corpses, formed a sight which overthrew his self-command.

The nearest surgeon came in, but, as Jude had inferred, his presence was superfluous. The children were past saving, for though their bodies were still barely cold, it was conjectured that they had been hanging more than an hour. The probability held by the parents later on, when they were able toreason on the case, was that the elder boy, on waking, looked intothe outer room for Sue, and, finding her absent, was thrown into afit of aggravated despondency that the events and information of theevening before had induced in his morbid temperament. More over a piece of paper was found upon the floor, on which was written, in the boy's hand, with the bit of lead pencil that he carried:

_Done because we are too menny._

At sight of this Sue's nerves utterly gave way, an awful conviction that her discourse with the boy had been the main cause of the tragedy, throwing her into a convulsive agony which knew no abatement. They carried her away against her wish to a room on the lower floor; and there she lay, her slight figure shaken with her gasps, and her eyes staring at the ceiling, the woman of the house vainly trying to soothe her.

They could hear from this chamber the people moving about above, and she implored to be allowed to go back, and was only kept from doing so by the assurance that, if there were any hope, her presence might do harm, and the reminder that it was necessary to take care of herself lest she should endanger a coming life. Her inquiries were incessant, and at last Jude came down and told her there was no hope. As soon as she could speak she informed him what she had said to the boy, and how she thought herself the cause of this.

"No," said Jude. "It was in his nature to do it. The doctor says there are such boys springing up amongst us--boys of a sort unknown in the last generation--the outcome of new views of life. They seem to see all its terrors before they are old enough to have staying power to resist them. He says it is the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live. He's an advanced man, the doctor: but he can give no consolation to--"

Jude had kept back his own grief on account of her; but he now broke down; and this stimulated Sue to efforts of sympathy which in some degree distracted her from her poignant self-reproach. When everybody was gone, she was allowed to see the children.

The boy's face expressed the whole tale of their situation. On that little shape had converged all the inauspiciousness and shadow which had darkened the first union of Jude, and all the accidents, mistakes, fears, errors of the last. He was their nodal point, their focus, their expression in a single term. For the rashness of those parents he had groaned, for their ill assortment he had quaked, and for the misfortunes of these he had died.

When the house was silent, and they could do nothing but await the coroner's inquest, a subdued, large, low voice spread into the air of the room from behind the heavy walls at the back.

"What is it?" said Sue, her spasmodic breathing suspended.

"The organ of the college chapel. The organist practising I suppose.It's the anthem from the seventy-third Psalm; 'Truly God is lovingunto Israel.'"

She sobbed again. "Oh, oh my babies! They had done no harm! Whyshould they have been taken away, and not I!"

There was another stillness--broken at last by two persons inconversation somewhere without.

"They are talking about us, no doubt!" moaned Sue.

"'We are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men!'"

Q: Happenstance? A: Design.

2007-05-19T01:29:00.001-04:00

The man of survival is man ground up by the machinery of hierarchical power, caught in a mass of interferences, a tangle of oppressive techniques whose rationalization only awaits the patient programming of programmed minds.

The Death of Things Sacred

2007-01-17T13:56:00.001-05:00

In his malodorous brain what slugs and mire,

Lanthorned in his oblique eyes, guttering burned!
His body lodged a rat where men nursed souls.
The world flashed grape-green eyes of a foiled cat To him.
On fragments of an old shrunk power,
On shy and maimed, on women wrung awry,
He lay, a bullying hulk, to crush them more.
But when one, fearless, turned and clawed like bronze,
Cringing was easy to blunt these stern paws,
And he would weigh the heavier on those after.
Who rests in God's mean flattery now? Your wealth
Is but his cunning to make death more hard.
Your iron sinews take more pain in breaking.
And he has made the market for your beauty
Too poor to buy, although you die to sell.
Only that he has never heard of sleep;
And when the cats come out the rats are sly.
Here we are safe till he slinks in at dawn.
But he has gnawed a fibre from strange roots,
And in the morning some pale wonder ceases.
Things are not strange and strange things are forgetful.
Ah! if the day were arid, somehow lost
Out of us, but it is as hair of us,
And only in the hush no wind stirs it.
And in the light vague trouble lifts and breathes,
And restlessness still shadows the lost ways.
The fingers shut on voices that pass through,
Where blind farewells are taken easily . . .

Ah! this miasma of a rotting God!

The Shadow Fills The Void...

2006-10-23T13:18:00.002-04:00

Stolen from an email from Caput Mortuum:

There are those who want a text (an art, a painting) without a shadow, without the "dominant ideology; but this is to want a text without fecundity, without productivity, a sterile text (see the myth of the Woman without a Shadow). The text needs its shadow; this shadow is a bit of ideology, a bit of representation, a bit of subject: ghosts, pockets, traces, necessary clouds: subversion must produce its own chiaroscuro

Roland Barthes
(32, Le Plaisir du texte).

Confucious and the Madman of Kieh Yu

2006-10-06T16:44:00.007-04:00

When Confucius was visiting the state of Chu,

Along came Kieh Yu

The Madman of Chu

And sang outside the Master's door:

"Oh Phoenix, Phoenix,

Where's you virtue gone?

It cannot reach he future

Or bring the past again!

When the world makes sense

The wise have work to do.

They can only hide

When he World's askew.

Today if you can stay alive

Lucky are you:

Try to survive!

"Joy is feather light

But who can carry it?

Sorrow falls like a landslide

Who can parry it?

"Never, never

Teach virtue more.

You walk in danger,

Beware! Beware!

Even ferns can cut your feet -

When I walk crazy I walk right:

But am I a man to imitate?"

The tree on the mountain heights is its own enemy.

The grease that feeds the light devours itself.

The cinnamon tree is edible: so it is cut down!

The lacquer tree is profitable: they main it.

Everyone knows how useful it is to be useful.

No one seems to know how useful it is to be useless

-Thomas Merton

(as Eddie Lee calls him "squirtin' Merton" or as the Trappist Order at Gethsemani call him "Fr. Louis")

Why Then?

2006-10-06T15:55:00.003-04:00

Icarus-
Do I, then, belong to the heavens?
Why, if not so, should the heavens
Fix me thus with their ceaseless blue stare,
Luring me on, and my mind, higher
Ever higher, up into the sky,
Drawing me ceaselessly up
To heights far, far above the human?
Why, when balance has been strictly studied
And flight calculated with the best of reason
Till no aberrant element should, by rights, remain--
Why, still, should the lust for ascension
Seem, in itself, so close to madness?
Nothing is that can satisfy me;
Earthly novelty is too soon dulled;
I am drawn higher and higher, more unstable,
Closer and closer to the sun's effulgence.
Why do they burn me, these rays of reason,
Why do these rays of reason destroy me?
Villages below and meandering streams
Grow tolerable as our distance grows.
Why do they plead, approve, lure me
With promise that I may love the human
If only it is seen, thus, from afar--
Although the goal could never have been love,
Nor, had it been, could I ever have
Belonged to the heavens?
I have not envied the bird its freedom
Nor have I longed for the ease of Nature,
Driven by naught save this strange yearning
For the higher, and the closer, to plunge myself
Into the deep sky's blue, so contrary
To all organic joys, so far
From pleasures of superiority
But higher, and higher, Dazzled, perhaps, by the dizzy incandescence
Of waxen wings.

Or do I then
Belong, after all, to the earth?
Why, if not so, should the earth
Show such swiftness to encompass my fall?
Granting no space to think or feel,
Why did the soft, indolent earth thus
Greet me with the shock of steel plate?
Did the soft earth thus turn to steel
Only to show me my own softness?
That nature might bring home to me
That to fall, not to fly, is in the order of things,
More natural by far than that imponderable passion?
Is the blue of the sky then a dream?
Was it devised by the earth, to which I belonged,
On account of the fleeting, white-hot intoxication
Achieved for a moment by waxen wings?
And did the heavens abet the plan to punish me?
To punish me for not believing in myself
Or for believing too much;
Too eager to know where lay my allegiance
Or vainly assuming that already I knew all;
For wanting to fly off
To the unknown
Or the known:
Both of them a single, blue speck of an idea?

Scarlet and Black.....

2006-10-05T12:45:00.002-04:00

Stendhal wrote an amazing novel entitled Le Rouge et le Noir (The Scarlet and the Black). In this novel he represents the separate groups in power by the color of their uniforms. The mask of each being suggested by the color. I see the two of these as acting in unison of power, Like the Black Collar and the firm hand of Fate, the Scarlet Glove. Please see the Pasolini movie Salò: le 120 giornate di Sodoma to understand the ruthless and heartless desires of power. When one gains power over another human what they do with that power is how they should be judged. I once printed two photographs of George Bataille; one in scarlet, the other in black. I thought it was fitting for Bataille to be represented by this fate, that he represented the dual grotesqueries of the military (the state) and the church. Two Systems of imposing social order. Bataille loved to point to the discrepancies and falsehoods in each. In the beginning of love I was asked what I thought love was. The answer I was told was "...love comes in the sharing of the mundane things." This was taken from the Kundera book Unbearable Lightness of Being. And how unbearable our being is when it is rotting in isolation. My response to this statement was a subtle agreement, but also recognizing what Bataille said loosely paraphrased..."In love, the most difficult task is to maintain happiness." It is difficult to remain in love when one is happy, people need conflicts to resolve.

Frottage

2006-10-01T20:00:00.001-04:00

Frottage
How goofy and horrible is life. Just
Look into the faces of the lovers
as they near their drastic destinations,
the horses lathered and fagged. Just
look at them handling the vase
priced beyond the rational beneath
the sign stating the store’s breakage
policy, and what is the rational but
a thing that we must always break? I am not
the only one composed of fractious murmurs.
From the point of view of the clouds,
it is all inevitable and dispersed—
they vanish over the lands to reconstitute
over the seas, themselves again
but no longer themselves, what they wanted
they no longer want, daylight fidgets
across the frothy waves. Most days
you can’t even rub a piece of charcoal
across paper laid on some rough wood
without a lion appearing, a fish’s umbrella
skeleton. Once we believed it told us
something of ourselves. Once we believed
in the diagnostic powers of ants. Upon
the eyelids of the touched and suffering,
they’d exchange their secretive packets
like notes folded smaller that chemicals
the dancers pass while dancing with another.
A quadrille. they told us nearly nothing
which may have been enough now that we know
so much more. From the point of view
of the ant, the entire planet is a dream
quivering beneath an eyelid and who’s to say
the planet isn’t. From the point of view
of the sufferer, it seems everything will
be taken from us except the sensation
of being crawled over. I believe everything
will be taken from us. Then given back
when it’s no longer what we want. We
are clouds, and terrible things happen
in the clouds, and terrible things happen
in clouds. The wolf’s mouth is full
of strawberries, the morning’s a phantom
hum of glories.
-Dean Young

The Whole in a Hearth

2006-09-30T19:00:00.002-04:00

In Home- Sea is cotton.
Comfortable and calm
-calcium- warm.
Woolwood woven and wasted monuments
And hooded secret dust
Freemasons gather at the base of
Pillowed-quilted and stack-cushions
Of towering basalt fortresses

Touched steel;
Golden and black foraging intricate corners
Fitted and inviting corners, key-lock corrals
Rounding a hearth of glistening moist velvet.
And strung-yarn sinews cling to
Load bearing chalk-beams and iron books.

There is appearantly damage
Circling above, but it all seems
So recon-trite.
And doors and locked doors and glass doors...
And isn't all glass
Plasma screen. Cutable clear putty
Screens. and the shower curtain
Can never seem to stay clean. I think
It does it on purpose.

There are complete libraries of bowls,
And the stories are Seared
Needlepoint delicately onto polite fruit
Peels that have long since
Over-rippened
And sugarcrusted
And soured.
Nectarines, guava, grapefruit,
Plummed, persimon, and honeydew rinds.

The accordian whale{wale}bone and
Nomad's skeintint transmigrating
From elk to carabou to...
Then lay like British campaign furniture
Where the sun never set. There are hexes
And poxes and scalped monkey curses
Between the lathing and plaster, and

I WILL NOT Put my hand
in that hot emptiness - ever - again.

There are purcusive symphonies hidden
Festive and fleeting underfoot,
But heard. Nervous shin pistons
Pulse-power all on ,
Everything all on...
And a hair dryer that harangues more than hums.
And a furnace which is also
The camera operations manual,
Which the circuitbreaker,
Which is the cookbook,
Which is the feather,
Which is the splinter and saw,
Which is the ability...
And it "expands to encompass every new idea...
And it is unable to shrink back to it's original size"
There may be scars, dings,
And dents on it are facets-
They're called Cut-Clarity-Color
And there are Carrots
And the laws of geometric organization
Do not apply. Physics is merely one "theory"
Among the thousands.

...Reflexive Posts. This Is The First Of The...

2006-09-27T23:59:00.002-04:00

This will be an explanation blog for The Twins Shadow. The Twin's Shaddow will be a disjointed narrative that is being developed in order for me to understand and address the effects of mental illness. This blog, Reflection In The River will be to address the missing gaps in the narrative. This is the structure. Everything will be structured according to .Robert's Rules of Order- at least in theory.