City of Interrupted Passage
That which surrounds is called Darkness. That which emerges from Darkness for its moment, bespeaks the Power of Darkness. Would we had strength not to rue it.
For that which rues the Power of the Darkness is of the Darkness truly, and makes of the richness that sources all things, a poverty and a scandal.
Singular identities stand forth from a luminous dream, whose heroic strength wields instruments that score a truculent surface. But the shadows as fallows punch beneath these just barely effulgent singularities, and for all their formidable potentiality, all redolence still strikes dread in the soul.
This city thus is where our infamous trajectories, although oriented most majestically, are thrust toward targets affirmed on intuition and fidelity alone, and finally truncated by the very power that releases them.
Here, fragments are their own substances, images indifferent from their referents, and all frames engaged to sequester perfection from the transitory, are transitory entities eternally.
-----------------------------------------
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 20.06.09
Lizard Music - Bloomsday 09
Endless Reflection
The Crystal Gazer
Bogus Maps to Nowhere, II
Besides the obvious sleight of the title,
[like the Book Of Lies, where the double negative fails to eliminate the suspicion of a proposition, recalling the Stevensian evocation of “The Nothing that isn’t and the Nothing that Is”]
—everything pertaining to this image—and indeed the image itself, if it is an image, if it is AN image—trips out on (or over)—as if in order to exhaust at last—the Negative. Hence the tireless suspicion or supposition, that something has eluded utter inanition.
Something
is awash
in the blood.
As if the powerfully definite ramification of these vessels required a gps device, of whatever prescience and sophistication, to travel the toxins or their antigens, towards their teloi.
The map is but a speck in the territory, they say, but what a speck it is! There are bubbles and then there are bubbles, that is to say, absences exist in a number of species, depending upon the substances they exclude and whose absence they contain. An SUV full of party balloons exhibit behavior not unlike untrained mammalian pets or maniacal infants. They cannot be tethered and do not fail to disrupt the journey and its telos, uproariously. Yet continuous disruption, where disruptions, like bubbles, displace the very substance they are bubbling in—is disruption of what, exactly?
There are bubbles in thought that are quite made out of thought. That is, that which exists, in thought, where thought is not, is thought indeed. Yet there are absences that divert the entire proposition of any path of thinking. For the course down which the intellect somewhat thoughtlessly thinks itself to be coursing, with a little thought, will appear no path at all.
Now every absence, well-circumscribed, shows not a single boundary but a skein of pseudo-linear ribbons, and the interior of such an ambiguous surface, must prosecute its own desire
if desire there be,
to dwell,
relieved from monotonous contrariety, within any bounds at all. Thus not only maps, but constraining or containing forms, might very well, but sadly, suspect themselves of being inalienably bogus. And the direction that they would pursue, were they to succeed in prescribing an order to their coursing, by application of one or another protocol or algorithm,
whose halting procedure, as we know, cannot be specified,
would travel them therefore to that place whose pots of gold
at the end of,
prove (o)utopian.
--------------------------------------
Charles Stein, 01.06.09, Barrytown, NY
Scorpio Rising
Ogun
-small.jpg)
The Garuda Bird & the Nagas (after a text by Charles Stein)
Orchids are from Elsewhere (050509)
I have seen these wheels in another time. Sour, sweet,
bitter
…the bitter wheel
Whirls both ways
And time
Is neither
One of them.
It ramrods orthogonal
From that center
Where the interchange of tinctures
Orders all vortices.
Death walks on apace. The death of one Will
Is the contract
of All.
The sky has divided from the earth.
The Gap between
Precedes the separation.
Tomorrow’s achievement
Sits on the Buddha’s nose.
The frogs are green.
Quiet secrets
Trigger The Queen’s
Derision, but the frogs don’t mind.
Ejaculations
Luminous and vertical
Beyond the cut
Of the Rim.
-------------------------------
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 050509
Whose Laughing Now?
Musical accompaniment with the same title (Guillermo González Phillips, Mexico City, 28.04.09)
Whose laughing now
Death threats from the other ether
The one where the party favors
The well-dressed
Asshole who throws the
Whole shebang
For what? A night
Of mysterious revelries
While deals are wrung
From an insidious sociality.
Death is a maw, a mouth
That covers an insatiable engine for devouring
With an insatiable appetite
For speech. Nor is it certain ever
Who is devouring, who devoured,
Who bespeaking
Whom.
---------------------------------
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 28.04.09
We await thee, VI
The Temptation of Wyatt Gwyon, II
Being has no scale, no multiplicity, hence no orientation. All orientation orients on It. The vagaries of symmetry-breaking are the qualifications of manifest worlds. A long history of establishing symmetries makes history itself the twin of that which cannot appear to be. That which has no scale is twinned in conditions of apparency, where those conditions themselves offer balanced, symmetrical, pairs. When the doubling deviates from itself ever-so-slightly, apparency takes off on its own flight plan, occulting Being, forcing all the delusions of ontology. Where pious mimesis might have been the only candidate for the twinning of what is most real, forgery is born as the Mimetic Shadow. But as Being itself falls under darkest occultation, forgery beyond mimesis grapples with that which history has abandoned or forgotten or perhaps never realized at all as its innermost vitality.
Far beyond the shadows and the objects that are thought to cast them, beyond the light itself and the space that receives its radiations, we would cleave to the most productive of all simplicities, the most egregious affront to apparently productive life. Being itself does nothing at all, and all things are taken care of. Draco interfecit se ipsum.
-------------------------------------
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 22.04.09
Your Place or Mine?
Easter 2009
"After the Ball Was Over"
Recogimiento (Guillermo González Phillips, Mexico City, 11.04.09)
The Universe in an Oscillating Wave Packet
Is Athena’s idea
The head of an owl
Holds
The thing together
A predator
On her branch
In the June Zone
In an ontological year
Whose attitudes
Perk up
From slumber
Flash from the matrix
Get tired of themselves
Pounce
Gobble
And are gone
(An old owl actually
attached to her famous baubles
in every weather
--------------------------------
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 29.03.09
An expanding wave packet experiences a phase transition - or collapse of the 'object function'
-small.jpg)
"What is a nail? A nail is unity." (Vernal Equinox, 2009)
On the morning of the equinox I underwent a surgical procedure to repair a fracture in the finger of Jupiter on my left hand, and I arranged to have the operation photographed. The image above is a derivative of a somewhat gory (and happily, transitory)
object function that can be viewed
here. [bialy, Cuernavaca, 23.03.09]
Farewell, Lionel
Rubies, My Dear (to the memory of Monk)
"The Black Saint & the Sinner Lady" (to the memory of Mingus)
The Mountains Where Dreams Are Born
…and where they lurk
in special potentia
as if an eye
emitted them
as if there were a chest
or breast
where they are hoarded
as if they were entities
of themselves
alive without the minds that dream in them
of local earth
inbred
of other dreams—their histories—the consequents…
but the hyperfolds and hyperrealms
inscribed in unimaginably ample
species of spaces
of which we are inscribed
as well as they
------------------------------------------
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 04.03.09
The Temptation of Wyatt Gwyon
For only in the excessive success of its intimate betrayal, does the truth abound.
--------------------------------------
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 25.02.09
We Await Thee, IV
Metastasis
Altruistic Genies - There Aren't Any
Malinalco
Una fantasía que contraface el arpa a la manera de Ludovico de Alonso de Mudarra (1640) con chicharras continuo ::
Sonata p chicharras y contínuo - More music with the "prima donna" chicharras of Malinalco (Guillermo González Phillips, Mexico City, 16-19.04.09)
"Say me something, Fernández"
The Mirror of Hephaestus
The enemy Shekinah
in the dust.
All Use—
Abuse. [GL]
Sundered from her own existence she becomes
enemy
of the scattered parts and portions—
the events
that spring
from the maddened fountain.
The promise that the magus doesn’t have to offer to procure her
turns her beautiful locks
to the broken microtubules of her rapture—
a sullen tower
with a clock
in a bruised metropolis.
She has a spectral self
that doesn’t even wear a face.
Meanwhile ,the verticality of thought’s exaggeration
exacts its mean tariff
while sporting a tiara with too many stages.
--------------------------------------------
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 03.02.09
The Scorpion's Lair
/The concept of a temple determines it
as an enclosure that defines a god.
Likewise, a lair encloses.
The one protects the numenon from alien significance.
The other protects the living thing
from alien life.
Outside the lair, the living thing within it seems an ominous embodiment.
Ogres have lairs,
and, apparently, the spirits of certain stinging things
that take form as scorpions.
For a thing to have a sting,
its form of life must provide the weaponry:
tooth or fang or tail or venomous pincer.
But to enter the lair of a pointed thing
or strenuously to envision one
is to cavort with The Menace at the bottom of one’s being.
There surely must be some attraction to motivate one’s doing so—
the presence, perhaps, (at the bottom of one’s being)
of Sacred Water. This
and a massive statement of architectural symmetry,
experienced from within the sacred edifice, not externally. These
and the manifest presence of the deity, numinously ominous—
the famous Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinosum,
which faces one frontally
upon one’s appearance
as the third face of the cubical arrangement
comprising the holy scene.
No longer a miasma of granules or random pixelations,
within which the swarm of deities,
however organized around a central axis,
needs must take on form—
the matrix of mystery manifests as that back wall—
The column of deities is localized clean within the Templum.
From beneath the throne where the deity—or his Hiereus—stands seated—
a model of himself sallies forth upon a bark, upon the water—
is this water a harbor, a canal? No matter.
But that it opens upon some more expansive water.
The fourth internal wall of the temple edifice
is missing if this is so: the Temple is frontally Open, and it is ourselves,
as witness to these proceedings,
that are most wonderfully
constituted thereby
as The Great Sea.
--------------------------------------
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 01.02.09
"So, What You Get?"
In the Bush of Ghosts - to the memory of Amos Tutuola
The Seals of Suleiman
In the annals of devastation, it is infrequent that the
instruments of same come to replace the civil edifices, not to mention the animate population, subject to the
work of same. It is not impossible that that which comes to view
down there, are just some such thing.
In the aereal view, which survives this singular catastrophe, however, it is impossible to deduce precisely how, in the sudden destruction of xxxx-opolis, among the curiously distributed debris, can be discerned craters, chinaware, cyclotrons and finger rings—circuloid objects and impressions, strewn inchoate about the surface of the devastated terrain. They render the scale of the site impossible to determine. A tripod of sorts, a bench, the ripped out material shadows of once incised gems, suggest, a single chamber, inhabitable or inhabited. But there we behold the fragment of the interior of an engine so thoroughly exploded, that one cannot form a surmise regarding its function, and therefore must remain in doubt regarding scale. Or what if
that is A Tower toppled; and the terrain blown clean where the top of it struck the ground, while the region where the tall thing stood, is scarified, scored, rutted, coagulated, bruised by a ruinous incursion of instantaneous force the Tower, perhaps, is the source of.
*
Suleiman or Soloman’s, seal, incised at the bezel of a ring, compelled an entire cosmos of demonic entities, whose uncompelled habitation was not particularly that of a latter-day Christian’s Inferno. Before the Israelite king, the world had been spared the rigors of a certain species of order. There were three zones, no doubt—earth, heaven, and that which lay below—but the entire of existence had not yet been violated by an ontology sifted through the criminologist’s imagination. All sorts of circumstantial possibilities were actualized across a flat but distantly distended horizon, that did not specifically fall beneath the purview of a uniquely ethical umbrella.
The demons, daemonai, Ifrits, spirits, powers, though circumscribed entirely under Suleiman’s survey, comprised abilities and performative interests of great variety. But the completion of the very Temple they were summoned to erect, concentrated existence around it with such fury, that they could no longer be suffered their former license at large in a world now delivered up to a very different moral geometry. For the sullen Ifrit that had in fact commissioned and now inhabited said Temple, would neither acknowledge the spiritual species to which he certainly also belonged, nor countenance the free activities of his less potent though more liberally endowed kinsmen. They were thus assembled and cooped in the famous bottles by the magic of the Solomon’s famous Ring. The bottles, stashed in the basement, or buried in the grounds below the temple, were discovered by the royal Babylonian thugs who ravaged it, and were opened by them, inspired by an acquisitive curiosity that released the Ifrits within them—the Babylonians thought the bottles were stuffed with who knows what riches, much as Odysseus’ men thought the wallet that bound the winds was stuffed with gold. It was not until Dr. Jung’s senility that such a project — the deposition of material currency within earthen vessels, to be secreted as treasure indeed in whatever depositories suggested themselves — in fact was enjoined. The famous analyst, being compelled to manage his holdings after the death of his heiress wife, set out to safeguard his considerable fortune by stuffing urns and jars with Swiss Franks and Deutschmarks, and planting them about the messuages — the jars are being disinterred till this day. Of course it is no accident that the person to fulfill the mundane fantasies of ancient miscreants — Mycenaean sailors, Babylonians mercenaries — should have been the one person in the twentieth century to have secured a psychic, if not a material, abode for the demons indeed — the famous collective unconscious of his own imagination. It is for the reader of these missives to disinter the principle by which such an inversion might have performed itself.
Suffice it to say that in the Bronze Age and its aftermath, the Ifrits existed on what we consider the material plain…and as such were subject to the vicissitudes of cosmogonic evolution—i.e., historical changes in what humans conceive the cosmos to comprise. Their cosmological position has devolved, that is to say devoluted, in recent times, until a crisis point, apparently, recently was reached, regarding the energetics at the Ifrit’s command, and the devastation witnessed herein became quite inevitable.
--------------------------------------
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 26.01.09
Cuff-links of the Counterfeit Countess
A Dream of Deliquescent Love
The Table at the Lake of the Beta Gods
Two servile Ifrits proffer the Lore Boss to his Beta God,
ignoring the pragmatic seizure of the middle ground
by a complex of geometrically improbable bublets,
whose motion is froward while the Ifrits head aft,
and the future of whose commity is as indefinite
as whose content portends the absolute.
We do not know for instance
if the geometry of the countenance of the Beta God
bending down upon the geography he
perhaps
conjures
perhaps merely compels
is source or substance of the magic
over which he officiates;
or if in fact he is [the] or rather [a] Betagod anyhow.
"Beta be a Beta God than a Lessa one,"
quips the Lore Boss, "ha ha,"
though singularly lacking in levity is his Betaship,
as his mood spreads beyond even the object of his grim survey.
It is late in the day, two weeks after solstice,
a chill colors space with an irresolute blueness,
but The Lore Boss ponders:
"We summon ourselves to the Lake that wells beneath us
flattering gravity with the principle of Recipiency.
We break with the tendentious attitude of stasis
that the prejudice of mere vitality tediously slanders.
We would be still, not to approximate that ground state
where vitality passes under, but to attract
in the turmoil of the manifest,
the attitude at last
that has no attitude."
---------------------------------------
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 08.01.09
Philophily
it is the Ifrits who do this
to us, not alefbet not elefant
not peel not feel
it is the if of them the Ifrits
the zionists of hamas
the stern gang of the crescent moon
the Ifs, the Ifs who look
across every river and say
if that were mine and it is
save us from thugs Thuggee and all the thusses of filosofy
instead: philophily
----------------------------------------------
Robert Kelly, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, 23.01.09
Ascent of the Virgin
The ascent of the mother.
The bodily assumption of Mary.
The elevation of Malkuth to Binah.
Mary the Mother is the matrix, the potentiality for that which is differentiated before anything can be differentiated.
The assumption of the bodily: the bodily is the embodied, the grounded, the determinate, the particular, the realized.
But in a timeless prospect the ascent and the descent are the same event.
The materially articulated is precisely the potentiality to be materially actualized.
The undifferentiated is nowhere distinct from the manifestation of the potentialities for differentiation impossibly but necessarily internal thereunto.
"The earth with its many cows"
The sky cow
Wandering
Among the boulevards.
The hebephrenic cowboy invisible (inaudible) among the Royals.
The Royals on the Road of Excess that opens in the prairie.
The fabulous dinner unappeased.
The shoulder blade of Pelops.
The broken herms
--------------------------------------
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 08.12.08
Adam's Rib
Parsifal
Coffin of a Nameless King
Few enter. Fewer return
What is the entity I see alive in my intimate interior, coiling, pullulating, being being, where I thought my being should be, which one is me, is me—the day I heard that betty died, I was on mescalin, one of those trips wherein the merely mortal fragility of the viscera, were speaking, through themselves, impossibly , through, to me. She was
too young
to die. But she hasn’t returned, as limbs and viscera, all
these many years
since.
This is the heart
Of the heart
Of
Of
--------------------------------------
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 29.12.08
Star-crossed Lovers
Welcome to the Hell Realms
The Blue in the Center of the Heart
Oh my lord, this swirls about me I swirl about me
in singular mutual embrace—
The rubies flash across the emeralds the sapphires
wreak of the Zones—
Shall we enter the cave
with our device?
If I were Mercury
I’d trade my caduceus for emptiness.
If I were Mars
I’d silence all wars.
If Venus—
But I AM Venus:
I can feel her flesh
Accumulate along my flesh.
Do I have flesh?
Such flesh as I have
Is hers.
To have a body
Is to be
a woman.
If I were night
I’d trade my stars
For the singular edges of ice
That form beneath my prayers…
-----------------------------
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 20.12.08
A Picture Book of Everything You Think You See You Do
A picture book of everything you see
indeed
As when the inner and outer surfaces of the containing object, the volume of its interior, and the recession of the space that it prescribes, contains, articulates, and, most universally and concretely, seems to be
are equally drawn
by the same device—
O person of many devices—
Then what can we expect will fail to appear therein?
Happy reading for a kindergarden
peopled solely by Babes of the Abyss
who, having crossed the sea of (un)reason,
possess the means
of proper dispossession
such that whatever needs must be
shall not lack the occasion.
--------------------------------------
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 19.12.08
Nolo Contendere
The Forest of Oshun
Death of the Virgin con Caravaggio
The event is not recorded in Scripture. It occurs in the false memories of later men, who must contemplate biographies at all cost, and for whom a life has no focus at all until the final chapter has been scripted. The Christians certainly were Greeks in this: that they addicted themselves to a blind ontology of narrations. Nothing is so but that it inspire the tale of the tale of the tale of it. “Historical” paintings project this obsession with storied closure as far as their artists do manage, convening an episode in an image, focusing the ephemeral character of happenstance into the illusory stasis of a supremely contrived illustration.
But if we are alive to the life of the moment, we find no static image anywhere. Every point of surface flows, or rushes rather, jet stream along its own accumulating oblivion, each detail but a line in the long-body of a ferocious and impossibly strained desideratum: that the eye might have a pathetic corpse or dismal tomb to come to rest on, even while enjoying the largesse of spontaneous free survey.
Caravaggio’s image is both slice of life—the grieving apostles and the Magdalene are living enough—and figure of death, for the tale is finished in its image, though the image convenes itself beyond both death and life, the duplicitous surrogate of both, the faithful proxy of neither. In the picture, the Virgin’s body has clearly not been assumed living into heaven, as later dogma will hold it must have been; but neither does it wait in state to elevate at last in sweet post-mortuary rapture. Furthermore, there is not a hint of imaginally mediated spirituality, no allusion to or embodiment of that ancient goddess, whose many names from Erishkigal to Ouranian Aphrodite we might rehearse; names the tedious major years of Christendom violently repress, and which, however anemically, the modern Church has sought to resurrect in the Virgin’s name and image. Here, the pathos of her mortality releases no blue lunar luminosity, no contemplative harmony or solicitude, no transfinite ocean of comfort, compassion, pity, or transfigured human will. The thing is leaden. Story over. The story of the story. The story of the story of the story, as it must be. Over.
*
In a famous sermon of Meister Ekhart, the figure of the Virgin is contemplated as both Virgin and Wife; the paradox resolved by the Eternal Birth of Christ in the Heart in every moment; the radically transitory itself—the condition for timeless epiphany.
In the Chaldean Oracles, Hekate has two wombs: one with hymen unbroken, the matrix of all planetary worlding; the other broken indeed, eternally giving birth to all phenomena.
We read herein the effacement of Caravaggio’s sullen image: an effacement at last of all that the image of the virgin (propagated for two millennia of obtuseness in the name of sexual abstemiousness and drystick purity) has betrayed. Yet it is not so much that the refusal of the sexual body (the cover story of Virginity) sidesteps (as it does) that Death whose sexually orchestrated inversion is life’s possibility—which must be rued here. Such effacement alone shall give us The Virgin once again, who stands on the ledge like a pitcher in an ancient cave. Her secret name indeed is Hekate, the Double Wombed, the Moonlight Holy Doghag.
--------------------------------------------------------
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 18.11.08
Magnetic Lines of a Mirrored Cross
Washed in the Blood of the Invisible
There is he says a substance in which magical information transmits other than through the propagation of wave forms. The experiment, he says, thus yields the unexpected result…
that the image in question, itself, is, in spite of everything, a re-presentation of an otherwise unrepresentable ontology. It is only here because it cannot possibly be here. Watch and listen.
Not yet delivered to its measures or to the terms to which any measure whatsoever ever might apply, one enters the region of such a substance in accordance with happenstance, surely, but not without preparation and commitment, at least a general commitment to the form of magical will.
Manifestation, willful; the declension from the inapparent, magical.
But the substance appears in the quality of its ambient atmosphere, the nose for which requires an exaggerated relaxation of the musculature deep about the thoracic vertebrae. Way down there, very still. Very open. Very susceptible. The fascia all unglued and preternaturally resonant.
The passivity of The CruXified requires this. The rippling wave-form of agony passes right on through.
Various symbolic articles have been cast abruptly into that atmospheric quality, their materiality—ominous, miraculous, extravagant, improbable. The probability of the materielle canceled in the self-confirmation implicit in its epiphany. One has simply entered the corporeal regions where only magical configurations apply. The thought of the inexistence of this atmosphere—an inexistence that is the provenance of Reason itself—an extravagant dream. The Dream of Reason extruded from the ambient. The mirrors, he says, the mirrors.
(Write something, he says he says, for chrissake...write….some…thing…)
Are the crumpled heads mementos of some inescapable biography of violence—some accumulation of minute acts of grim volition, each skull one vile intent, and shall they waken and bespeak us? Only the verbal occupation of The Crucified requires this. To wash the ambient in the blood of the invisible.
What do these sorcerers imagine we will make of their stark yet lurid, hyper-material, technically Decadent histories? Whatever it is we will not make of them “histories.”
The magical is thus revealed to have several boundaries, only one of which degrades the rational.
-----------------------------------------
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 03.11.08
The Crystal Mountain that Goes Through the Sky
The Mountain of Matter
compact of colored
head-clods—
their words
suppressed.
What geometry affords such compression
of irregular part(itive) entities?
What excavation must we attempt
to recover their speech?
The verticality that makes them mountain
actually passes inward to a sky
that naturally permeates
rather than soars above.
The heads are silent
if they show as crystal.
A moment before the Ifrit forms from his vessel
rising like mist smoke cloud—
a thousand bodiless entities
seek to coalesce inside him.
“Put your money away.
Can you pacify the angry owl heads?
The sullen masks
of simian green?”
The archipelago of yearning—
bodiless tidal thump smoke.
“I have never seen more bodiless a body.”
The edges match up
so that the swarm
swamp swell swill
sweet-water wallow of
edgeless happenstance
anneals with a positive rhythmos…
“We are almost inexisistent—
so close it is in here.”
Convection patterns
on the edge of turbulence
awaiting
the whiteness
to come…
Every cell
an incised
head—
every head the enthralledness
of the thought
of its own form—
every whiteness the timeless vitality
that passes beyond its own incisiveness—as if
the idea of crystal
were to wash all enthralledness
away.
----------------------------------
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 30.10.08
Mu-Ah
Taoist minister in Chinese livery with some exuberance carries—and I cannot say whether he carries this inside or out him –a dark and smokey Buddhist master—as his source or proxy—some temporizing accommodation has been reached with the local Buddhist constabulary—i.e. temple apparatus—or possibly the converse of this—the Buddhist metaphysicians regulate the polity and the Taoist bureaucrat were his factotum. The interchange twixt Taoist and Buddhist in whatever era pretended here, betokens nothing quite historical—that is, not temporizing at all—but an interchange of subtly related archetypal dominants. The local details of the arrangement; sums exchanged; moralities
exerted or compromised, are with due deliberation and in support of the transcendent aim, suppressed withal.
In any case, if I just stood around and waited, eventually, through the fog of the ambient, all things would come into view—not as a vast and all-ingratiating panoply, but one by one, disclosing the chain of intimate time as a clearing IN the fog: a tortuous compound or composite, rivers through improbable localities crossing on the moor, autumnal paths incised with blackened Cenozoic leafage, the hoofprints of variant pachyderms, petri-dish detritus of laboratories (haply) long-unfunded… for the matter itself is tortuous, diffident, almost impossible.
Still, the mind is almost like that –snap-shots and fragments, yet each one internally undulant with effluvial riches if one finds support in oneself for the leisure to explore.
To say that reality itself is a circle sans circumference revealed at the focus of some optical apparatus, perhaps is to confine one’s inquiry too exclusively to eye-born informations; though, for some millennia now, the Eye has been the favored surface of the human sensorium. The other senses hide beyond the “outline,” and to leave the outline unlimned—well that’s the argument.
Concentration, whether of Taoist or Buddhist variety, nevertheless shall be called upons to elicit even optical information; con-centration itself being an optical principal for ordering the sense: to hold one’s bearing among haptic, olfactory, or auditory data requires some other regimen. And it does take concentration to extract from the gray puppy-dog figure with extravagant ears at the top of the unlimned circle, something other than a cuddly glow, for the “function” applied succeeds in disarming such distraction: those are not ears, but a smokey zodiac that swirls round him as a crown.
In sum: Outline and liminal ambiguation alternate throughout, inducing intellect to disclose, as if in recovery of unwonted frankness, the internal disparity of its most puissant algorithms.
-------------------------------------
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 27.10.08
Ha-Um
When opals (ovals) double,
but overlap to leave a median locus
ovaloid, eliptoid—
but an opening, as if an opening in nowhere,
or a nowhere opened by the doubling—
Well then, it may happen, as it does, that a certain absent person, manifests full-blown, without preamble, without a “take off roll” of any kind. The conditions of manifestation, are simply manifest. And the full-blown, full-tilt, silly-handsome, bon-ton, dapper, fishlike, mustachioed, master of chromatic, possibly vapid, happenstance—but no, no, not vapid—replete—behind all mustaches ever—and happy to be occurring so, without extraneous accoutrements, subaquatic, no shit, as if the real person seriously responsible for his manifestation, were happy too—happy to have manifested too—
And he took an antique mirror, no matter from what epoch,
and doubled it in his intent,
and placed it in a basin
of ceremonially treated water
variously bedight with lichen
and other animate if fossilized or recently grown moribund
vital encrustations
on the cement surface of the old pool
behind barbed wire
in woodland shadow
dappled
itself long abandoned for largely budgetary reasons,
and a certain institutional oblivion to communal being,
or an aggressive attitude to spontaneous social harmony or focus—
the residue of the old pool gazed into and bespoken,
so that instanter the Lord of the Episode,
should appear
his lilac colored internal ambience all he needs
for us to justify without qualification,
the resonant qualities of his being there.
And it is thus amply justified.
The New Age arrives in generationally separated installments,
with whatever subsequent corrections
wave after wave. Wave over mastering wave.
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Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 04.11.08
Epiphany of the Birds
A few words are needed to avoid certain incorrect conclusions a person might reach when viewing the above. The work originates with a photograph of bird dung on a piece of scratched acrylic, and contains no images of anything that once breathed (bialy, Cuernavaca, 4.11.08).
The Rapture of Thales
God is water
or there is a god OF water
or as for water, “water’s best”
or only a drop in the bucket swills the whoruld.
I mean, like, dig the SOUND down here,
the resounding surrounding
Everything looks SWELL (from) down here
all that obstruction of daylight obscuring the stars just walks right on by and there she is
in Hathor and Nuit in all their starry splendor
Up yonder at the rim,
well shucks,
and the whole world beyond
nobody REmarks or even suspects a thing.
Things are so quiet except for an occasional frog and so forth,
so that I am able to hear my intelligence inventing calculation
and what a calculation it is!
I can SEE with projective foresight exactly when that Dragon Mouth is going to swallow the Sun but I’m not telling.
Let the bloody gods do their own calculatin’.
It’s quite enough
to KNOW.
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Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 06.1108
Epiphany of the Birds II
We have lived long enough on the turbulent periphery.
On the stormy periphery, long enough
Have we dwelled.
Have dwelled in the storm of peripheries.
.
The smokey glass of the module’s forward declination
Coming in for reconnaissance
Or to gather technical data from terrain
The map will form itself and require merely supervisory attendance.
All significant judgments performed aforethought.
.
There are no birds here
Not even caged canaries.
The planet will not sustain
The Flight of the Zo-on.
Pine voles possibly.
Poosibly grubs.
Not even grounded avians from another time.
Not even the flight
Of stones.
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Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY 06.11.08
The Commutative Universe of Desire
Once you have seen The Lake,
you will never have not seen The Lake
again…and
once you no longer have seen it,
never again will you have seen it
then…
seen the lake
of the Middle
at midnight,
a thousand strange eyes
shining from the loge…
Once you have ridden the hidden
tubules to the esplanade
escape is inescapable;
And if you have never hidden
from the laughter ridden damask-shadowed plantways—
And if you have never hidden
in the laughter ridden damask-shadowed plantways—
the strange plants,
erect by the weirdness of the paddock where the barges
hearken, “for chrissake see something,”
back where the barges
hearken taken
aback but to the
weirdness where the strange plants
hearken,,,,
At the east end of the Lake
An alter to the kingdom of the sleepers
marching in straggly clattering circuloid tubules stocked with oxygen--
“What you need is oxygen
deposited on several orthographic strata, while
discriminating missives from the overhangs—“
(Reading upward through the artificial overhangs
that grow but sustain without horticulture
parity and verdure:
The flight of dragon semen
upward through the channel in the middle
until all medicines
in halogen bursts
rip open the fontinelle
zooming upward through the banked Egyptians…
“That part’s natural enough, I tell you, but as to what they do there—
identical exigencies describe to me
the very movement
stammering
moderately that enjoys me…
*
Across the fleshed embankment
equal but opposite fanfares
regale the dark
in such wise
that nobody ever present
reads us green.
-----------------------------------
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 11.11.08
Queen of the Waning Moon
They have been quarreling for some time, as far as I can tell—the antagonists of a certain disputation twixt Surface and Depth. Profundity apparently overstayed its welcome; whereas superficiality had never quite optimally played its hand. And, as if in quasi-resolution of such ontologically fraught an enmity, there have always been, in its history, available to imagery such phenomena as skates (waterbugs) silently leaping on the surface of limpid pools; or transient thought-lets skidding across the surface of the minds of water nymphets miasmatically langoring.
The image here seems to be an image of this kind. Yet the viewer is suddenly startled into her own place—as if in front of a somewhat dusty window—but there—that is to say here, outside the image, in front of the space just above the viewing screen, in front not only of the image, but of the apparatus up onto which, as if from deep inside said apparatus, the image is projected.
Now certainly, the tehnological device that delivers this imagery is surface only. That is to say, surface all the way down. But it is a puzzle of some perplexity that I am here, outside all surfacing. And the image, by having what is lucidly its own surface, but projected all the way up out and onto the technological surface that confronts me, when I peer at said technological surface, I am by virtue of an unexpected inversion peering all the way into precisely the image’s (for it certainly is not the guts of the machinery or its pixilated digital labyrinth into which I am peering) peering all the way into the image’s depths.
So there they are—or here we are—ourselves the agonists against mere superfices—the witnesses of the depths—mystery palpably traversing and establishing, if only for the moment, materially intransigent inner zones, a shadow horse looking backwards, I say I say, embracing the ghost of a rose.
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Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 24.11.08
Snow-Lion
"Laws of Form"
What precedes the advent of Distinction itself in the indenominable actuality of Being? It is thought, I say, that before (logically) there was Distinction, there was No Distinction. But then what side of that distinction falls this one: That which is, before Distinction happened upon ontology, and that which Being was and ever is, once Distinction cut to cull the scene?
As “fresh distortions” freak upon the surface of inscription one must think again. For the movement of the internally forcèd agitation of the eye (internal to the image that is) forces distinctions drawn to seem withdrawn and yet to agitate and hyper-hesitate and, with ever greater definiteness, to articulate, ever fresh distortions of the distinguished state.
To de-clare Laws of Form re-clares its own event, for such Declaration were, even in the beginning, a distinction that cannot have come under its own laws; and yet without the essential yoking between Law and Provenance, or again between Law and its Principle of Legitimation, neither the laws declared nor the law withdrawing the very possibility of such declaration, ever might have happened even so to seem. Drawn.
Now to task. Garish color and complexity of image, without hesitation declares itself to be on the hither side of the possibility of Distinction. So MANY differences powder, chatter, scramble, and sublime the image surface, that one is not tempted to concede that such a melee might precede the advent of Distinction itself. The thought does not arise.
But do seek even one such distinction, one boundary articulating entity from entity with which the specular surface appears to be charged, and another distinction worries the first, instantly transfering definition to another site.
In Kabbalistic theosophy, the highest figure, named simply the Infinite (eyn sof) exceeds all figures; and yet the mutiple regions of the sephiroth, nowhere discontinuous with this Infinite, appear ambiguously within it and without it. So that in one’s scramble for coherence it seems that one must see the infinite potentiality for manifesting multiplicities as itself already differentiated into all the articulations the eyn sof was supposed to merely be the potentialities for. One can be no more confused than in the mind that wishes to establish for itself that there is no distinction between that which precedes Distinction and there where that Distinction lies fully drawn. Yet there She is, in all her splendor. The worst case scenario writes itself as the simplest script for the mind. And we are none the wiser. Except that Laws of Form (the image and the classical text by G. Spencer Brown) provide provisories and admirable admonitions as a site from which the “worst case scenario” and only that extremity—might proffer All Good to Come. (Kunto Zangpo).
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Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 06.12.08
A Lavalou Delivery Device from Jupiter
Invocation of the Heavenly Host
Any emblematic structure that might manifest
is by the fact of its manifestation
capable of iterations on other scales and on other plains—
So that when such other versions of such structures do appear, one can instantly apply a sort of zoom device of pure cognition to extrapolate or rescind
to the ideal or abstract homeland of said emblem…
And here we are
On a journey without a vehicle
In a space without parameters (without metric or distance function—whose points are intitial points of vector-spiraling-elsewheres--
in a form of kinesis that involves no change of place
because the species of motion this kinesis involves is precisely the erasure of the parameters the space is drawn from--
And here, all place inhabits its own ascesis, its own elaboration, its own wild profligacy and happiness.
To erupt to the Summit of the Real is the summit of happiness, she shouted,
ejecting from her consort’s fontinelle in a most material though momentary panic—into the local flashing fan of the aither itself—that is, the zone of purest fire
far far Beyond
all planetary conflagration
(and only to return—she does return—her panic was in fact, inspirational—a matter of accumulating charge
as a secret motivation
within the most intimate and sweetly secreted recesses
of the eternal rabbi at the Bottom of the Spine
who, for this operation, is Resident Conjurer. He stands before all Substances
that might be invisible birds
whose wings are transitional modalities,
whose calls erase device—
And is this then anything at all but His Question? A question
between the localization of Himself and this favorite nymphling of his—
A call
From the specific torment of her absence—
To the exasperating happiness
And abstraction
of her approach?
Go in fear of abstraction? Do you enunciate?
I fear
that the music he most clearly is
the orchestration of,
will have no idea at all
of why you say this.
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Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 12.12.08
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