Bait & Switch
"Polonius:
What do you read, my lord?"
the sculpture
of the night—
dream—
erodes
in the morning
words words words left
over the melting
dew (the pickpocket).
Ghost was the sculptor of
the dream,
itself a sculpture.
.
absolute love may not exist
but is everywhere
maybe not kind
maybe not nice
but is everywhere.
therefore,
infinite love precedes its
happening
Is.
Is.
.
Mom says she and I in hatred
are each others' its, objects that love melts into rain.
the stars were on the sidewalk
as if at the prophet's coming
because it had drizzled the night before
dizzy like a cloud, i left the house
skipping, skipping on the stars
pleased as punch in the moonlight
playing hopscotch
as at the prophet's coming
because it had drizzled the night before
.
through your transparent gown,
low light from a table lamp in the back room.
your long legs
were luminous in the door.
i moved fearlessly.
guilt hung back
on the acacia trees
in the rain.
the church bells were calling folks
to prayer.
we spread a picnic blanket
on the bed.
that's how everything happened
first.
.
"Not a mouse's stirring"
the crumbs of the clock
spilled from
tulle
curtains, as the night
ended, light in
smithereens
slowly in the eyelashes of
my cat dispersing
over the rug.
Who’ll pick them up
now, the leftovers
from the shuttle worriless
humming on.
Morning streamed from the
hair
of the widow,
sprinkles of the clock and
light.
I
opened my hands, but as I
opened them
they still kept streaming
streaming streaming.
wall. ghost. mirror. bird. arras.
window. wind. widow. tree.
dew. water. tears. river.
mourning.
painting. panting.
death. hearth,
etc.
.
"Horatio: The morn, in russet
mantle clad, walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hills."
.
"So dawn
goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay. " Robert Frost
the corrupt weaponries of language.
To Be Too Much In the Son
"Though yet of Hamlet our dear
brother’s death
The memory be green, and that it us
befitted
To bear our hearts in grief
(and our whole kingdom
To be contracted in one brow of woe,
...yet... with wisest sorrow... together
with remembrance of ourselves...
yada yada yada!)
Have we—
(as ’twere with a defeated
joy,
With an auspicious/dropping eye
...
Taken to wife")
yada yada yada!
"nor have we
herein barred
Your better wisdom, which have freely
gone
... along."
yada yada yada!
.
An
Image of Death
what we call
the world is merely the illusion of the nearnes of things.
what we call
the world is only the image of the nearnes of things.
The audience's eyes: Claudius,
Gertrude, Polonius, Laertes, Hamlet are on stage, simultaneously. They'll all
be dead in two hours.
Laertes asks the king leave
to leave for France
Time is forgetfulness in Hamlet. Everyone forgets though
protesting otherwise (including the ghost, "Remember! Remember!" he
pleads from under the claptrap truepenny
machinery of Elizabethan stage—representing the underworld—to a joking Hamlet), the most cutting of all Hamlet forgets
Ophelia.
Return to France
Laertes:
My thoughts and wishes bend again
toward France
An unquenchable loss over
something once possessed—not life, but something else, peace of silence, or
love, or the night itself—which to recover one must cross a reverse
threshold—warping into a parallel dimension—looms over the play.
Facts are jailed into
themselves.
Death is jailed into itself.
.
think it
"Hamlet: Seems, Madam, no is. I have
that within me
That passeth
show..."
to be it, does it have to exist?
god is it, whose essence, is non-existing.
sofas, beds, the hysterical
archdukes of MY psyche.
is
what is man?
man is a what
obviously,
a rose is a rose a
rose is.
.
Mayflies
Infinite possibility doesn't
mean freedom, but that it may happen infinitely
but of maybes
Infinite possibility, within
finality
that is the pharosrhythm
perception of freedom
as gestures of maybes
prr
object ivities in a mirror existing
in continuum.
.
Hummingbird
Before we part did
A moment we share
together
you having placed a small
nutrient vial of translucent liquid on your porch
and I, watching birds
dipping into them
you away,
in instantaneous darts.
Does THAT have to exist? I
can't remember. D I D.
An instant on the threshold
of not remembering, the change of time zones— erasure of the table of
memory—the humming bird approaches the moment of stasis—of jump.
.
Memory and Rhythm—a Rhythm of Forgetfulness—Insanity
Shakespeare seems to forget what happened
from one scene to the next in Hamlet,
seems to suffer a kind of dementia, giving the play its purposeless bursts of
focus, meandering—a genius democratically and at random dispersed among the
characters—giving it its seductive, ever alluring air of translucent insanity.
Its irresistible entropy.
Polonius: Marry,
sir, here’s my drift:
(And I believe it is a fetch of wit)
You, laying these slight sullies on my
son
As ’twere a thing a little soiled i'
th' working—
...
And then, sir, does he this, he does—
What was I about to say? By the mass, I was about to say something. Where did I
leave?
...
Videlicet a brothel, or so forth. See you now,
Your bait of falsehood takes this carp
of truth... (Act 2, Scene 1)
*
Memory has a great difficulty crossing the
threshhold of dawn. A self-propelling time has to move forward, as if a
completely forgotten dream is still brooding in the bones.
Hark!
Frost
The
ghost
's
kissed by the morning
&
turns into a frog
in
the soul.
The sun has a different rhythm than stars,
though in the frame of eternity the same. Time moves at different speeds in
each. The walled-in ecstasy of Scene 1, "swift as the meditations of
love," is followed by the objective view of Hamlet as moody, irrational or
insane—his meandering, exploring metaphysics on suicide, instead of revenge,
and his churlish obscenities.
Except while encountering
the ghost, at night, Hamlet lives, his being is, in the wrong space.
The play Hamlet is out of control.
Scenes follow each other in
obstructive rhythms, failing in, inhibiting the play's linearity of purpose. The
Macguffin of revenge. Two temporal cadences are superimposed.
trapped outside time, "[the] Messiah allows time to
be continually deferred." (The Burnt Book)
Delay
is a ray
from
unreal-
ized
space.
Hamlet and Its Hidden Texts: Poems
as Commentary, Film Lumière
Hamlet is
the holy text that is at the heart of a
day book/ things, real or unreal, objects, living or un-living. Almost
every piece in the poem is a commentary—a riff of thought, a speculative
argument, a parallel alternative text, a counter argument or counter
fact—turning around a specific word or phrase, a disjointed twisting of fact or
a suggestive, elusive echo that occurs in the peripheries of the
reader's/listener's mind—out of the focus of the linearity of the main action,
the revenge, in the play.
The paradigm of a text made completely of
commentaries, like moths flying around a holy text with its own distinct
linguistic identity, is The Talmud Here
is what I write about the nature of such a text in "Eleven Septembers
Later: A Reading of Benjamin Hollander's Vigilance":
Precedents of Prophecy (Film Lumière)
The verbal precedent of a poem whose
ideal condition is stasis is The Talmud. In it single words explode into
commentaries. It can not be read but stopped
at every word and riffed from; re-read continuously, super-imposed, blurred commentaries creating the
Jewish consciousness of responsibility and guilt.... The visual
precedent of Vigilance is
photography... The space created by photography/
film lumière has an unconscious, to
its viewer reflecting, revealing the
dreams, aspirations, fears of her teeming population. Superimpositions of different media—film, T.V., the web and words emanating from them—on photography, which film lumière is, creates a unified field/space which is prophetic.
The perennial question on Hamlet is why Hamlet does not go from A
to B in a linear line, "swift as the meditations of love" or, as
Laertes does, "defying hell"; but meanders, mostly travels in a world
of ideas, and arrives at his purposed destination, seemingly by default,
exhausted, feeding on the immediate carnage around him. He does so because he
exists in stasis, in "a ... field/space which is prophetic." The sole
action he can commit is death. It is the space where consciousness (the soul)
is born. It has nothing to do with character or a character defect though
Hamlet himself thinks so.
Hamlet's
is a language of the soul progressing towards dying.
Hamlet's language is not of acting, of
showing; but of an "isness" outside "living" speech:
"Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not seems... nor all the suspirations of
breath... can denote me truly." His focus is on a dissolution of the body
towards the un-human and un-living: in essence the dissolution of a
Wittgensteinian language of exchange and observable, speakable f(acts) towards
silence. This dichotomy in the play is distilled in its concept of time as
speed and slowness, their duality. Hamlet is aware and fatally wounded by what
Claudius defends: speed, the imploding speed between the vigil of death and the
merriment of marriage, warping time. Hamlet "meanders" outside speed
in a state of stasis, though he himself sees it as paralysis. The two are irreconcilable.
Though they point to the same facts, like convex and concave mirrors reflecting
each other, the wall in between is unbreachable. That unbreachableness (the way
the consciousness of the living, the real, the rational can not breach into the
consciousness of the un-living, unreal) is at the heart of Hamlet's mysterious power, what
makes it a holy text.
Ophelia occupies a space between the two.
Her death, a union with water and plants, points to a moment when the focus of
the conscious mind (consciousness itself)
turns from life to another dimension (vigil) of lamentation and song: "...
Her clothes spread wide/ And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up;/ Which
time she chanted snatches of old tunes,/ As
one incapable of her own distress [italics my own]."
*
Laertes' and Polonius's warnings to Ophelia
about the unreliability and lastingness of Hamlet's love for her turn out to be
true. Hamlet's love turns into abuse and mockery, interspersed only with an
unpleasantly perfunctory profession of love at her death. But, though the
predicted result occurs, it has little to do with Polonius's cynical view of
young passion or Laertes's decorous argument relating to the real politic
involved in the marriage of a prince. The cause
lies in another dimension, the space of the ghost.
The a-causal, infinite space of Hamlet.
A Day
Book is not a comparison, a metaphor; it is not like Hamlet. Rather, its
Talmudic commentaries are against Hamlet,
subverting and reconfirming its
autonomic, ever elusive sanctity--its otherness. In a sense, in A Day Book I try to transform Hamlet, at least for a single moment,
into a plant, an animal, a speck of dust, a dew.
Not a moment of understanding, but bee-ing.
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