bialy/s

[Harvey Bialy, 22 July 2008]
Thank you for visiting

Theme music courtesy Dispersions of the Spirit of Ra :: Alternate theme music courtesy Harry Smith

There are 4 kinds of things to be found in the White Cyber-City :: visual, musical, poetic and discursive.

i parse the visual obras displayed in the main gallery as:

configurations, constructions, contemplations, conformations, considerations, conjunctions or conjurations

depending on the day of the week on Jupiter.

They were all created using Photoshop 7.0, and the procedures used to transform the original digital record of some objective event were derived by application of the fundamental principles of the Alphabetic Calculus for Cosmic Idiots, so delightfully elaborated by my dear friend Eccles in a surprising forum.

Free and unrestricted noncommercial use of these pieces is permitted, and even encouraged. They are suitable for excellent quality reproduction up to 10 x 12 inches. Any and all commercial uses are prohibited without prior written permission. Copyrights to all images and texts remain with the contributing artists.

Personalized, signed CD's containing a bitmap file that is suitable for large format (up to 36 inches wide), high quality printing of any piece are available for $100.00 (including postage) and may be requested via email to: harveybialy@gmail.com.

Musical (except for the dual themes above) and other items are located in the Comments links at the right of each entry. Clicking on any image enlarges it. Placing the cursor over the enlarged image sometimes allows a further magnification.

A DVD of selected, collaborative works of bialy/Stein, designed by Michael Harold, will be available in the summer of 2008.

[Harvey Bialy, 22 July 2008]
Nested Light


Looking down the tunnel of a hypersphere, each ring a sphere entire. Remember. There Dante stood with Beatrice,
On the verge of Paradise.
They saw
Such.

----------------------------

Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 23.07.08

[Harvey Bialy, 20 July 2008]
The Veil of Isis


Hound and Fox

Before being plagued by the Sphinx, Thebes was plagued by a fox. It was the swiftest little animal there was. It ran like a streak through the city seizing whatever it wished, utterly unstoppable. To protect the city, whose seven musical walls were in sufficient apparently, each year the citizens were forced to offer as a forfeit to the fox a human child.


But the Thebans had an ally in a certain hero from Attica, who was in possession of a hound, who in turn possessed this attribute: that whatever he set upon could not possibly escape. Unstoppable fox, inescapable hound. Thebes.

In the end, as if in expression or abhorrence of the paradox, Zeus turned both beasts to stone.

------------------------------

Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 21.07.08

[Harvey Bialy, 18 July 2008]
Tourmaline II (.37, 90 ° CCW)


The hidden images do not bite from texture but are inlaid like floaters

on the humours of the aging eye, O gracious new opthamologies…

Floating in “from” what no longer reads as cosmos no longer inhabits an elsewhere,

the preposition “from” now sur rature, no elsewhere any WHERE only non-exigent contingency of infinite parametrical supply can deploy us now—

The indefatigable goddess standing by

To remove the mist that so recently clouded

That discernment twixt deity and mortal were possible

Like a lion

Stung

By runaway shepherd incompetent

To save his wooly

Flock from said lion

Aroused

Leaps over the fence and into the sheepfold

So Diomedes, etcetera

And so ourselves

Aroused by non-exigent

Contingent mortality

Leaps over fences to whatever…

Impregnable Design inevident anywhere…

Its own fence about it

Commends that which it is NOT

And for which it ardently hungers

In cultural secrecy

And on which, mired in deep wandering ignominy,

It FEEDS…

-------------------------

Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 18.07.08


[Harvey Bialy, 15 July 2008]
Anticipation of the Night
[Harvey Bialy, 13 July 2008]
Asiatica erotica, or: A Sunday in the 'Solvent Garden'
[Harvey Bialy, 13 July 2008]
Tourmaline (.25, 2x)


We are here that we are here. The royal dawn,

trumpets,

over the pageantry and complexity—damned complexity—

of a ceremonial so stuffed with artifice

that sweet sweet dawn is an oblivious triviality, an accident, an expendable contingency. why bother with mosquitos gnats and deer ticks when the parlor of the magus

provides, as it should, Etc.

Fantastic ceremonial rides

its loud and triumphant finality,

An imposition OF RED ROBES UPON

the transitory rouges, russets, and vermilions of …

An epiphany offered with such verbosity

and yet languor, such insistent presence

That the Mind Work once agitant to ward off all sensual thralldom falls thrall to sensual thralldom

“The Mind Very Bloody Damned Red” (and did I say LOUD?

It says

And green too

With an altar

Set up up above the prairies

The steppes, the taiga the tundra

The savanah, no matter

Set UP

And Above

And forever.


And monstrous birds FACE OFF


Who set on this Agony? The temple games

In celebration

Of the victory

Of temple games

On a mountain slope so organized

By a jar in Tennessee

That the god were seen

To inhabit

The roost thereof

To rule the roost

The rooster god Kadoodles

The dawn


But the dawn was the first impulse from night

First inkling that all that blackness

Was pregnant with the articles of day

It was she that came out of the bedroom

And with a towel around her

Stretched and yawned

And o so subtle were the colors

That wafted on her scent

Across the first gestures

Of Worldhood


The hell with that.

Let there be trumpets

And the degeneration of kings

Into warlords

And gang boss hoodlums

With residual intelligence

At their black disposal

No longer held by anything

At bay

----------------------------

Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 13.07.08
[Harvey Bialy, 8 July 2008]
"There is but the one Sordello"


Firey realms that are not hell realms
Burn with the evanescence of all things
As told for all time in The Fire Sermon of Buddha Gautama

“All things, Oh Monks, are on fire,
they vanish like straw in a flame.

The eye is on fire
the ear is on fire
the nostrils, the tongue, the body entire
is fire, on fire

The forms that the eye sees
and the mind that informs them,
the noises the ear knows
—fire, on fire

Flavors and fragrances
sensations and contact,
the intellect and what’s in it
—fire, on fire

Wanting what you have not,

Hating what has you—

Rage and desire:

—fire, on fire


So burn, Oh Monks, until you comprehend this!

Then do be done with it.
(Put out the fire.)”

........................

Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 09.07.08

[Harvey Bialy, 6 July 2008]
Wedding of the Red Lions - for Tara & Nathan


It was the prototype of all cosmic marriage festivals, and no one was certain precisely how to behave, it being in fact the prototype of behavior itself. All the Forms and Forces attended, before all other reasons, in search of their own defining boundaries. No wonder that the principle celebrants, man and wife, god and godlet, manifested first in the shapeless shape of shining water, then that of a tree, a mist, a ghoul, a fish, a mountain, and finally grew reasonable and took on the forms of two red lions, with blonde flaxen mains, their marriage vows echoing forth from the vast organic cavities within them, more rumble than roar, as if matter itself were hollow and covered great echoing regions, as if red fire were no more than an instrument to render matter malleable, as if gods were storms or spaces, tendencies, energies adrift or at play in emptiness, as if form were soft swatches of color seeking space or entity to qualify the surface of.

The legend in fact does not quite indicate whether the male member of the favored dyad were god or mortal, whether he sprang from the earth or from a river, or whether some previously constituted deities were his progenitors. While the bride, in contradistinction, were the only child of Aphrodite and her famous bedmate, the god of war, and took the unlikely appellation, never thought to be nom de guerre—fair Harmonia.

History, like behavior, before formation, were poised on the brink of its innumerably apportioned disasters, the stars a-swarm in primordial nebulous vortices of dust and gas, and the words that solemnized the union were the original fiat lux, uttered not so much to separate the waters, but to articulate the forms of inversion and establish the conditions of attention under which they might interpenetrate, annihilate, and swirl. Hostilities and ambiguities among the guests were in suspension. A happy time it was, enjoyed by all.

.................................

Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 10.07.08
[Harvey Bialy, 2 July 2008]
The Patient Dead


It hangs on a surface that once was a wall. Though neither penetration nor removal has reconfigured said wall’s defining and/or obstructive, mural function. But inordinate action has fused with structural fact; and multiple encrustations have covered the matter so thoroughly that “wall,” no longer seem the cypher of any locus.

The patient wall, a patient no more. The dead lie in infinite stasis. Remains, waits. A single medical object, and permanently so. But here is the calling of an ever-enlarging class—insects, large white birds, a magic spoon, persons resolved to circumstance—patient(s) all. The dead drawn in and gathered to the purity of a timeless expectation.

Something nevertheless unclean surmounted by an exactitude that renders the oily, old garage smells, hammered things and burned ones, things spotted, stained, annealed, illumined, gold drops incised on a mangled black tooth; button eyes glazed with a wrinkled bauble; over the upper edge, a thought that brooks no articulation, no consequence, no resonance. No denial. Renders them beautiful.

I am here that I am here. A metal slab. Bolted to the general surface, with an eye, that resists the devastation of its separation from…lug nuts with ocular capacity; and how is the eye annealed to the small slab, flesh merging with flesh where no flesh can be. And in the eye, crumpled paper holding form issuing image faces of agony.

Or is it a form of reason that has died; but lift your head: the eagle having vanished up through the sky light, its trace but a screech in an aura; the sense that a “portion of genius” has just flown by.

The halls of the dead wait for no one, that is, they wait for all. And underwrite the floor of all anticipation, all crisp release. Echo a primary hollow, a false rejoinder to an old proposition, one that has lost its primacy and wanders just outside the brackets that restrain it. I am going to go to sleep now. I am going to take a walk, in the region where firstness forbids its own iteration. I will find the broken dolls and green propinquities from which to recover these mysteries. I do not say this.

--------------------------------

Charles Stein, Cambridge, MA, 03.07.08
[Harvey Bialy, 15 June 2008]
A Final Fling (Father's Day, 2008)
[Harvey Bialy, 13 June 2008]
Nausicäa -- with one eye closed
[Harvey Bialy, 11 June 2008]
"And thus, the Room is Bigger than the House"


I must not stare in the woman’s eye. Why?

If I knew the answer to that, I’d be the woman herself,

in some other sense than that of course I am.

I am the woman into whose eye

I must not stare, (for too long anyway

Until, that is…lest I swear

some eternity has opened on the far side of selfhood, either hers or mine,

wherein we together dwell, to hell with “relationship’…

That there is a time or heaven or realm beyond the betrayal of the actual,

or of an actuality so rich and rare that it beggars all betrayal,

all exigency of departure or loss, all unforeseen “developments” …

I must not gaze in that woman’s eye,

but of course I do.


And if I do, the topology wherein the final iteration of an operation, that is to say the tenth one, displaces the darkness to which I have submitted,

I have invited my own absorption, by repeating in structure that which fascination claims in the manner of affect….

For the principles of measure shift with each iteration, each twist of event, and the series of self-containing chambers terminates in a cabinet –

various of ornament—poikila—elaborate—

iterates an intransitive topology

wherein a central cavern

encloses an original sky. Still…


And when the doors are opened

And I return to the image, darkly absorbing, without elaboration—

a simple overlay of occultations—a string of pearls with epigenetic foldings,

casual accessories decorate

an empty cyclopean chasm without an eye

A mask behind a mask

Chasm and cosm alternate

As I I must not allow

the darkness of an eye

to gaze at me

Of course every circle is intransitive. It is the strange application of periodicities that suborns reason and enhances to the degree of the marvelous our topologies:

But applied to time or “relationship” periodicity itself is peculiarly obscure, and the arhument from dimension fascinates but fails reveal. At all events, the image stared at or sworn to effects a condition wherein we are consumed where we would consume. The wretched belly, that introjects the world—Odysseus opines, ruins discourse

And Hesiod identifies appetite as Eros

The textures of this image do not initially invite iterations of the zoom device, but when applied, there does appear, an eye where at normative scale a black chasm is, and within the eye another eye, until the gaze regresses, and regress inverts, and the mutual penetration of optical intensities accessorize the matrix.

--------------------------

Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 16.06.08
[Harvey Bialy, 31 May 2008]
"Can You Tell the Difference Between the Dreams of Day & the Dreams of Night?"
[Harvey Bialy, 26 May 2008]
"It's My Party & ..."
[Harvey Bialy, 25 May 2008]
"Baby, Save the Last Dance for Me"


it is a woman you found in the Hoggar
her body made of rain

and now that you have found the colors of her difference
at a word from you she'll

drench that desert and New Aphrica
will happen to our heads,

our silly Tassili bone-dry brains

------------
Robert Kelly, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, 25.05.08

****


I was dancing with my loved one at … the Memphis Ptah Hop…I mean I THOUGHT it was my loved one. Prob’ly not. After all, no one other than I EXISTED in that epoch. I wondered: Could it be that the origin of jealous panic lies in the inexistence not only of the Other Lover but of the Beloved Herself? Is she not a creature of the Rules of the Dance, and the literal efficacy of the crooner’s mood and modality?

Well, on THIS dance floor, between red-headed I and indistinctly tinctured red-headed me, (deploy that agèd dichotomy?—deploy or deplore—your choice), the towering ghostly priest-thing holds his crossed flutes, flails, and hammers, having stretched himself, mage-wise, into a transparent garment-being, one half stellar-luminated, one half all dark, out among a space of intergalactic fogs and attenuated gasses, as well as among the stars.

Nebulae of insubstantial matter guash the ambient.

The Dance—now there were three of us—measured out the ecliptic—a luminous upward arcing streak across the image’s two lower quadrants.

The ecliptic and the changes that mark the ages prove that whatever we mark as time (time), is surely not. The very fact that we mark time marks time. Whether it is ours or some other collective makes the marking. We stipulate just this much regarding a certain canon of objectivity. It is not my horoscope that invented the wheel.

The world is parceled out between cows and horses: cows the Zeus-lot, horses Demeter and Poseidon. Our researches take us through the Mycenaean, so that we want to know just what has come to birth in the perpetual arrival of “the god who comes.” A consequence of having two many mothers, of both genders.

In the upper reaches of the image field a silly moose or petulant Flubadub-like animal, whose very existence struts disturbance to the ontic stability early television toyed with. There were philosophical discussions, as I remember, in the early fifties, the peanut gallery be my witness, whenever new kritters were introduced among the arrant characters.

Unlike the chatter in those precincts, the current telescreens purport the very happiness that beauty is—as a play of watery color and tentative outline, the comfort zone of outer space, a will to settle down wherever the horses run and all contented cows really do come home.
-------------
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 25.05.08


****


The Last Dance

is a Coptic fox-trot, a Nubian two-step

It is performed sans feet in the sky that is sand that is sea

Save it for the me who is not "me" but a memory of aspirant ghosts

Save it for the moment the wrecking ball levels the ballroom

Save it for the hand that wrought these hosts

--------------
Mikhail Horowitz, Saugerties, NY, 27.05.08
[Harvey Bialy, 23 May 2008]
63
[Harvey Bialy, 21 May 2008]
Scorpio Burning [ for Kenneth Anger ]

Return to the composition of Images.

Outside the object, red ash that need not cease to glow.

Inside, a goat in a goblet, conjured as it is conjuring.

The goat within the goat makes pious offering

of a pious offering: a red dot

situates the scorpionic version of Everything.

Yet the body of the pious incineration has so efficiently exhausted temperature that a linear series of light points radiates the eyes of the dead and completes itself at its own bottom, just beneath the site where x marks the spot. It is the seed of a resurrection at the crux of crossed light swords: chalices inside chalices, sporting a crunchy froth of tasty gemstones, though few, I’d hazard, dare sample this elixir.

It is a good thing that history has no outcome, for each image phrase is a phase of an experiment in beauty whose dimensionality portends the unproducible.

-------------------------

Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 21.05.08

[Harvey Bialy, 20 May 2008]
A Nest of Bodhisattvas
[Harvey Bialy, 19 May 2008]
"Mysterium Coniunctionis" [ for Jordan Belson & William Breeze ]


The circle ought not appear in the square, methought, thinking of the Tibetan refinement of non-duality as “dyer-med” meaning “never-having-been-divided”—

not at all a matter of the marriage of two true minds diverse in substance but complementary in affect, the consequence of everting the invert. But that, in what we may call “our practice,” the distinction need not be so severe, since the everted inverse requires that the diversion recovered in act had never occurred.

Furthermore, here the sphere (that floats with such unaccountably harmonic alacrity in its proper atmosphere) out-sources any such …. Circumspection… to the circumstance of the viewer herself—

because the attempt to penetrate the mixedness of that which the sphere sustains defeats attention: that so much pictorial space is given over to the indiscernible is precisely what works the charm and charms the work.

And charm it is that promises, in Dr. Jung’s intervention, the integration into, of, and as…the Supervenient Self, which we discover in the superposition of all identities as the wave-function not collapsed, recovered

not from the position of an individual (“Individuation” notwithstanding) whose determinate possibility seems realized because the function has collapsed indeed, but from among the singulars, the materium itself, the inseparability of First Matter from Lapis, the integrity of the perfect stone.

-----------------------
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 27.05.08
[Harvey Bialy, 17 May 2008]
Our Lady of Good Voyage [ in memory of Mr. Olson ]
[Harvey Bialy, 15 May 2008]
Take 2 Now, and Call Us in the Morning


Diagnosis: Prosopognosia.

I will and I won’t. Imhotep don’t make house calls. But the consequence of trepanning is that the fluids that swell the cranium are relieved somewhat, the swelling that is. Something is wrong with the fusiform gyrus in the temporal lobes on both sides of my brain.

The guy that presents the placards on both sides of the entrance passageway is some kind of Hollywood thug or night club bouncer, skin-head big guy character actor.

The lover of Art is “straightened out” by means of brute threat. You are either in the club or you don’t get in. And if you don’t get in—there are nothing but beasts and attitudes teaming in the textures. It is a test. This is art, man. Not an inch of wiggle room.

The shifts in image content are discontinuous stagger gestures. It is this and then it is that. You cannot control them, or if you can, you fail the test.

Today, the pixel matrix withholds the pixeled images. Something wishes to direct our ocular intelligence along some not yet available passaging, The skrying stone is clouded. I do not see. A little horse at the end of the scepter. The figure of Horus barely emergent among the critical granules. The hawk’s head supplanted by a jumble of –can’t tell what the provenance.

Something is definitely wrong with my fusiform gyrus. I know who these people are supposed to look like but I take them to be imposters. No, doctor, you are not Imhotep at all, though you look just like him. When the sun arrives at dawn in his infinitely repetitive god bark, he too will be somebody else. And the raining yods or seeds from the great black sky. And The crystal moon. Their evident qualities are fraudulently evident. They do not seem to be what they seem to be. They can’t fool me. I’ve been their mental exegete far too long.
------------------------
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 16.05.08
[Harvey Bialy, 8 May 2008]
Within a thing there is always another thing
[Harvey Bialy, 7 May 2008]
Izi Wigi Ley Ba Nana

The title of this piece comes from a southern African guitar song of the mid-1950's.

[Harvey Bialy, 30 April 2008]
Bookends

When we are young, and when we are old

Love makes Time stand still

[Harvey Bialy, 30 April 2008]
Memory of an Elephant

Memory’s Elephant

I was somewhat perplexed by the allusion of the title for this image to the commonplace that pachyderms never forget, until I realized the allusion was not to this unsupportable generality but to the elephantine phenomenology which, were such a generality supportable, would have to be elicited to support it. A speculation, that is to say, on the form of the elephantine consciousness per se. The evidence for this is initially negative: the absence of any allusion at all to the elephantine proboscis, to its ivories, to its magisterially lumbering gait or legendary burial grounds. It is certain therefore that we have entered upon something uncommonly under occultation, secreted beneath the original commonplace.

It thus would seem that the elephant teaches an essence of the memorial, not because it possesses some preternatural capacity for mere recollection, but because the elephant itself is of the memory. As in the verses:

“Memory’s red city is a prop.

“Though you are rich and old; though you keep excellent white dogs;

you are also of the memory.”

The color of the elephant’s memory seizes the human soul once its atmosphere suffuses inspection.

Unlike the human infant that comes equipped with the capacity to recognize its mother’s face as a face before it has any knowledge of its own; the image of what would seem at first glance to occupy the site of an elephantine countenance is clearly an internal model of something else—some internal space special to the elephant, say, over which spatial configurations appear in special variants—the a priori of the elephant world distributing its phenomena, thusly.

Against a startling mantle. A murky brown black collar-like thing, so that the bat moth bull and Chinese madame thing—the thing with narrow blue eyes—the thing with plumes and sequins and interior compacts with other beastial things—lays in against an ominous absorbing emitting irrefutable ground. What all our crimes denounce sustains this memory and its variants.

------------------------

Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 30.04.08

[Harvey Bialy, 17 April 2008]
Plasmaphoresis
[Harvey Bialy, 4 April 2008]
Cava Lucis



The light can come from anywhere, whose origin is nowhere.

In the Priory School (Conan Doyle) the cave where the stolen cows of Lord Holverness's ancestors were hidden, was known as the Cathedral.

We are embraced by the avenues of a beaver deity with a funny hat surmounted by a bat, surmounting a kiste containing sacred things whose sacred nature is in recess. The nature of the sacred is a step away. Distinction and its logic forces the removal. When the light is present, the light reports the holiness that for a moment, in the flush of it, we thought it was. Similarly the faces suddenly opening –the little eyes that tell us, among a surfeit of abstractions, that a Holy Living Creature is at hand. But then our gaze transforms the image into an image, or into a jackal, sporting on our spontaneous credulity, and we, we think, deserve it, returning to the image for a further hit of that which it cannot contain.

Or the cavernous space itself of cave or cathedral, whose hollows echo such vastness as MUST portend the infinite itself, if ultimacy be infinite, or THE infinite. What harmonics it must organize—what combinations, what summers!

Or the hypogeum of light—the Light Below—bridged by structures, of dubious emblemality—for we see the combinatorics of which they are composed, that they tell of some superintending bureaucracy appealing from the tourist trade of light, or that a carpet is spread above the hypogeum, or that we must sink into the light to enjoy its possibility, or that a black nipple tumesces from it so that all milk is light or light is milk.

And on and on, the reaching owl of intellect only apparently remaining poised on its branch beyond the tennis court—its absence is an accident, no less than its presence, were the owl in view…

for distinction creates the tincture, the sense, not only of the distinguished thing, but the other from which it establishes the distinction, so that a faux totality forces intellect to make one distinction more—to find the thing that the duplicity of distinction failed to push away; and this were iterated again and again, until the nearmost site from which the working first began, seem far indeed.

Audio

------------------------
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 04.07.08
[Harvey Bialy, 24 March 2008]
Mother Watches Over



There are two mothers, or two classes of them: the Dark and Sterile Mothers, the Bright and Fertile Mothers. But what is surprising is their habitation within a surface. For surface suppresses depth and then recalls it, on the surface; the existence of the picture plain convening the displacement of unpictured existence itself, that it might offer itself to be the object of some knowledge.

Here the surface divides in its own dimension; and we must iterate the logic whereby the dimension of surface compensates the abuse of depth, the old interiority of speech and spirit rewritten straight through the brutality of its exposure. For what was depth if not our mothers, the mother before our mothers, the matrix from which all apparent being wrenches itself, inverts itself, compounds itself, allowing the Bright and Fertile mothering function to perform her operations under conditions of dark sterility indeed—the errancy of the wrenched Shekinah and her ubiquitous Queendom has rejoined the darkest understandings, through her vertical transposition along the ancient diagram (?)

How many acts of layerings, coverings yet contrived to elicit and reveal, must we anticipate finally to receive the consolations of Her countenance? For surely there was a Face before we knew ourselves to broach the origin of all faces. The Mother’s Face—whose separation and absence was the very root of the anguish her own sweet form assuaged—appearance itself the wound of every healing—the sound that broke the silence that its own desert music restored to being.

Oh how much silence can this music mean?
---------------

Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 23.03.08

[Harvey Bialy, 23 March 2008]
Gardens of Unearthly Delights
[Harvey Bialy, 20 March 2008]
Astarte's Equinox

Ester's Easter

Ester Astarte a star. True.

She had no king.
She is the twin of the sky.
Her real name is The Light.

---------------
Robert Kelly, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, 18.03.08



The Last Station

[Harvey Bialy, 14 March 2008]
Odes to an Immortal "Slinger"

"False fronts make the people mortal / and give their business an 'outward' cast"


Back of an Undisturbed Setting Sun


"The Crack We've Been Waiting For"



The languages we wager were not devised beyond the worlds they temporize. Yet
what appears as a limit point for life, is exit and entrance point for that which the common world cannot devise.

Eye holes or nosthrills [sic], Round and jagged stones. A spirit of animation clings to the quasi painterly surface as the image forms upon the cellular granules: flatness obsesses the picture plain where faces yet set themselves inside other faces. The stunned look that may seem to rise upon them will not resolve as an intrusion of another world, yet there it is,--there behind the screen of the manifest, another manifest vibrates oblivious to its own reception.

The silence of the impossible and its invidious stasis portends a principle:

The softer the focus, the smaller and more insidiously intransigent the matrix.

*

The baron behind the crime scene advises circumspection. He passes an interdiction upon final action or any suggestion thereof.

*

A throned old man, not yet bespoken, waits to see the issue of the comportment he has not varied since the third iteration of the function that composed him.

That which exceeds the imagery of his nature, succeeds all attribution. What comes next returns to an earlier legitimacy.

*

He says he says: “There is no legitimacy anywhere, certainly. Thus persons know me as an entertainment, little more. I report to the young senator from Elsewhere, and as I approach him, I am impelled to take matters into my hands, according to the principle:

“The greater the proximity, the more sullen the ubeity.”

In the offing, the military functions he mediates, are residua of an authority that rests in being itself and elsewhere nowhere.

The great-headed blot-like creatures feign their exits and manifest across the tesserae. Teserae inside tesserae, an unheard of lability to all pictorial provenance.

*
The world is a consequence of enframement, the application of a virtual boundary to the undecided preponderance of the materium. No measured steps will bring the indefinite to finite fruition. The provocation that masks as the informative mocks its own quantification. The advantage of methodology does not apply. Thus it is that you cannot reach the possibilities broached in the matrix, according to the principle:

The more adequately drawn the parameters, the more elusive the fringe.

But it is only the fringe that allows manifestation at all.

-----------------

Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 20.04.08

The Return of SLLAB


“We have been here all along. Even if that’s what they ALL say.”

They all say.

But the timing of their arrival, from the moment of the first blank incursion of these colored impactednesses on this viewer’s consciousness seems precisely gauged to modulate the shock that their arrival quietly induces. Just as quietly, we pass, in our reflections, from the subject of permeable surfaces to the monothetic upcrop of many abandoned layerings. No sooner than the thought of a matrix arises, but that the matrix, made thinkable, induces a further, still unthinkable matrix, to put pressure on the place, not to say the space, of these continuously jittering cogitations.

There is a river coursing through a coursing river, a planar universe consisting of objects that understand themselves to be the very channel down which the signals of themselves are confidently coursing.

Or else the message massively comes towards one, through a channel that opens on the image surface and projects directly towards reception, here on the front of our body, surface accosting surface, creating surface, passing right on through.

As for the matrix, it is also the uppermost layer of itself, for the form of the matrix is tabular, optically a sort of distorted tiling—one thinks of the chess- (not the checker-) board patterns that for so many years were vanishing from Thorpe Feidt’s canvases. This one day will be a famous datum , I know it.

And yet it is the color, not the form, or the color within the form ,or the color that transmits the form, or the formal transmission of the color, that effaces all thought of matrix, layer, surface, course, or signal; demanding—as color ever has done—a fulfillment far in advance of this demanding—the inauguration of another species of registry—more instantaneous, more familiar, more insinuating than information, with its probabilistic exhaustion, ever can promote for us.

And here the entities, whether vertically stretched, minutely incised, or broadly enscutcheoned in the pseudo-painterly enjambents of scratch and edge, are slightly distressed to appear the mere matter out of which the forms that elicit them are themselves more prominently proffered. Through the ontologically foregrounded rumble of moody chromatic jostlings, we hear the somewhat crotchety, not to say disgruntled, edginess of the beings themselves. “We have almost had enough of the nervous density through which we are compelled to surface here, “ say they. “Enough of this topological jitterbugging. Soon,we too must be called forth to some more articulable nature, however transiently composited.”

We do not fear that any definitive responsive will be forthcoming. For the artist himself as well as his exegete are no less arrayed in jitterbugging topologies of their own.

---------------------

Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 23.04.08



Bean News II


The Spontaneous Is always real

Happy Felton’s knothole gang on this side, but no knothole. No game today on the other side of the fence. No this side, really. Only the variegated surface, happly chromatized, of the formulae of night, of the night itself.

A book--again with formulae. A signifier in the hands of a magus is not the same species of object as the same signifier in the hands of a litigant, a general manager, or a mole in the centerfield bleachers reading with high-tech binoculars the catcher’s signs.

We will rather speak of sigils here, or the whirlwind of absence or the absent whirlwind, cold precisely where semiosis is thought to be smoldering. Not so hot any longer, semiosis. Yet, new management is curious about a certain residual pressure from a past that has quite unaccountably not gone by. The Voice in the Whirlwind, it seems, will not be denied its say. “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I‘ll blow your ballpark down,” says Semiosis—and splinters of wallboard and painted shingles are recomposed into obstructions that even today signify the violent ecstasy that assembled them.

The evidence however is not merely of someone having composed, in an appropriate ambience, a rigorous “action” that forbids the world, only to return the world at a later date, a factor in its own equipage. Once the pitch is delivered, it matters little how you propagate the further products of your intellect.

I’m not thinking much about anything these days. That’s why I come to you, whoever you are, and append myself to a chamber that is generally believed to encompass me. It is suspiciously like an outside. The night is cold, in spite of such evidences as trainers and commissioners ahemmed onto the court record; but our curiosity has gotten the best of us as always. The knothole gang can always hear the crowd as its clamor rises and falls, though for more legitimate witnesses, there’s no one there.

---------------------------------

Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 23.05.08









[Harvey Bialy, 13 March 2008]
Theseus in the Bardo
[Harvey Bialy, 11 March 2008]
Their Cup Runeth Over



Extend the arms their full amount; the kindly magus welcomes all beings in a virtual embrace that summons every world unto its robust if transient extancy; his own world, meanwhile, his own extancy, meanwhile, retain their problematic complexities. For the Master Self, whether resurrected or cruciform, lotus-born or waving wielded daggers, wands, or dorjes—no longer serves us, imagewise, to convene that primordial superposition wherein all selves cohere.

Here it seems that the Master Figures not only multiply, but dance their own

decrudescencei through a scabby patch-work of textural postu(-re-)lations—head over head, gesture over gesture; robe rag or raiment, magus bat or badger, mink or mule or goat.

One really must let one’s sentience rip loose, right brain rip loose, the images run on the image path, the path of their transition the path indeed, each point of fixation asserting a ludicrous comment on the point it appears to repress, each commanding figure helpless to impose its will upon the image, instanter, to come.

But how curious: the course of these transitions will not articulate itself. For, pace Heraclitus, there is no flux among the successive images, no path at all, each fixed figure does command the whole, for just such time as it does hold command:

“Fond lover, never wilt though kiss…”

There is no death or birth then, no transition among the singularities …

The language of which one despairs is neither nominal nor Rxed by supplantation of nouns by verbs—it is the prepositions that do us IN:

About above across after against

around among along and by…


Pfui!

Take up dagger and torch. Set out ever again

to stalk the inaccessible.

---------------------

Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 12.03.08

[Harvey Bialy, 9 March 2008]
"Roots & Branches" [Remembering Robert & Jess]

[Harvey Bialy, 26 February 2008]
"Telestics" According to Van Loon [1939]


"Strange things would happen to these gods, like Osiris, Isis and Horus, and others, when they grew old. They were found to be as accessible as tax collectors, irrigation officials and other ordinary mortals, and could be 'approached' if one only knew the ropes."

New Telestics or Hephaistos Knows The Ropes

I am looking a the top of a Cadillac, he says, from a site in the rafters of the underground parking garage where the Lord of the Lot plays solitaire, he says, in a booth whose walls are walls indeed. No one else around from 3 to 4 a.m, the only hour that passes, but it never passes, on the only day, of a terminal year, whose termination is postponed, interminably. There is writing on the roof of the car.

Though time never passes, time never returns. The words are incised in black chromium, and as the eye traverses the letter string, the letters dissolve and return. The thought in the sentence will neither cohere nor even for a moment leave me to be, he says, O leave the garage man to be. The cards, O the cards, O the cash drawer, O the silence of the parked sedans.

Elegance is an edge of the criminal, he says, and the top of the car is my invocation, my device to cause the night to open, even as it composes the enclosure wherein the only vehicle sits without a driver, without anticipation, without its own event.

2

There is an engine whose brief it is to generate alphabets; and the language whose presumption the letters assemble, exists; yet no decoherence into speech has ever arranged its elements other than to tolerate the superposition of all that can ever be uttered. There, in the syncope of an instant, the thought that is the language entire, an ineradicable writing, elegant, with adequate menace and intimacy, the tracings of an old old workmanlike devotion, in a booth beneath the void.

It is believed that this person composes only at the behest of the other deities, but its stylus scratches on the chromium the very sigils that compel the gods. Their ignorance of their own nature is his only oxygen. The dazzle of his craftsmanship affords a sensation momentarily adequate to mask his timeless sighs.

3

Wake up Bialy. It is impossible. It cannot be done. Extancy has becomes unavailable. But the oblivion that owns the Cadillac will never arrive.

---------------------
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 07.03.08

[Harvey Bialy, 21 February 2008]
Total Elclipse, 20-02-08



The orbital motion of multiple objects, a site from which to observe appearances, and the truth that we are far from resolving the issue of what a circle in time might be. These.

Isis in the form of a Buddha, sits in spectacular livery; her garments and her ambience absorbed in a matrix of small eye-flowers; at every node a way of seeing, at every node a way of being. Yet the spirit of Isis and the essence of Buddha are surely under eclipse when this multiplicity of perspectives rather than the silence of their light put themselves on sublunary exhibition. Then the fact of apparency itself is overwritten by the possibility of occultation, which of course is true; for occultation in this grand prospect is hardly limited to the special conjunctions of the sun and moon wherein the virginal silver light of the latter is enhanced or sullied by submergence in the terrestrial umbra. Apparency reigns throughout the entire orbital system and beyond.

Total Eclipse

This does nothing if not serve to mark the velleity that it is the symbolic resonance of phenomena rather than their occasional instantiation that draws or fails to draw the attendance of the blasé population, satisfied to know that the thing has its explanation and that therefore the symbolism is in an adventitious take-it-or-leave-it mode. In the small Pennsylvania city from which we viewed the episode, we were to all appearances, the only mortals interested in the occasion. Even the winter birds had other exigencies to occupy them. One of us was so exercised by the obliviousness of the general populace that he threatened to compose one of his inimitable missives to the local weekly, expressing god knows what irritation and outrage.

The explanations available on line, however, do not so much as raise the question of the true nature of periodicity, or the relative apparent diameters of the two celestial objects (more pertinent to solar than lunar eclipses, it is true, but which surely come to mind on these occasions also). Heraclitus says that the diameter of the sun is the size of a man’s foot, exercised as he was by the triviality of his contemporaries’ cognitive preoccupations.

And it is not even in evidence what the symbolism might be, were the general populace of a mind to attend to it. “O might the sun and the moonlight seem / One inextricable beam / For if I triumph I must make men mad,” croons Yeats, if I remember it rightly. Under such conditions, it is symbolism itself that toggles between the exaggeration that mistakes fascination for singularity, and the more canny inverse attitude that finds itself fascinated by the singular. For the singular does not function by the enforcement of any symbolism; quite the contrary. But to toggle is not to run in circles, and at all events, the Buddha’s Isis body is but an outline among the stars.

--------
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 22.02.08

[Harvey Bialy, 19 February 2008]
"Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday"




Outline and shadow. And all the gradations of focus and articulation in a continuum that suggests pseudo-photographs of extra-galactic-cluster space depths—fantastic displays from radio frequencies in excess of the audio/visual, far in excess of the audio/visual, dumped down onto the audio/visual, just as hyperdimensional spaces can also be dumped down onto four- or three- or two- dimensional surfaces. All that exists in apparency can yield its information on a line shorter than the Planck length.

One senses that in general, the asiderials, if that is what they still may be referred to as, are in each case the dump of information from some indenumerable phase space, whose rules no sooner than formulated, generate their own excess, and by some peculiar frenetic jiggling of the local photo-digital apparatus, are forced to present themselves, on humbly articulate screens—as if the higher regions of the transfinite had the largesse to stoop, like the body of Nuit, to make themselves or herselves, open to our fascination. No danger that their essences are betrayed here. Scratches in a cloud chamber. Noises in the wall. Intimations of the inaccessible. Infinitely receding phantasms of the absolute.

So here, there are coils of light and luminous dots that have not bothered to bring themselves into sharp focus, and casual spicules, closed superstrings, why not? They seem to mumble—and the trace of that central channel, middle pillar, articulate in previous asiderial productions, now but gesture towards or from emblemalities and realities previously and ever-so-transiently imagined to have been realized.

But the shadows that background these scattered articulations, show ever-more prescient variations; as if each formulated darkness, through the very absence of manifestation, nevertheless were swollen with further withholdings to come. It is an elegant strategy to keep the channels open under conditions where the metaphorics of channeling itself blatantly have crashed and are woefully dysfunctional. O well, says—and is it none other than our old-acquaintance-not-forgot whose initials pretend to be DL who pretends to speak here?—“O well, if I cannot sing myself, I still may offer an infinitely resonant valediction, whose tonalities continue to manifest rubeous-ly indeed.”

---------
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 23.02.08
[Harvey Bialy, 17 February 2008]
The Road to Mount Maha-Maya
[Harvey Bialy, 12 February 2008]
Never Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth


According to Mathematica's implementation of the function "Tuple":

Tuples [list, n] generates a list of all possible n-tuples of elements from list.

The elements of list are treated as distinct, so that Tuples [list, n] for a list of length k gives output of length nEk.

The order of elements in Tuples [list, n] is based on the order of elements in list, so that Tuples [{a1, ... ,ak] gives {{a1,a1,...,a1}{a1,a1,...,a2} ... {ak,ak,...,ak}}.

By setting n = 3 we can obtain three channels of information consistent with making RGB images. On a zero to one scale, black is {0,0,0}, white is {1,1,1}, red is {1,0,0}, green is {0,1,0} and blue is {0,0,1}. All other colors that can be displayed use fractions between zero and one in each of these three channels. We define the concepts of 'anti-color' and 'super-color' to be, respectively, lesser than and greater than the R, G, B values used in color imagery. These concepts are embodied in the following computer-generated graphics. In the image shown below, one can think of the row of lines on the top and the right side of the image as comprising 256 different 'color guns'. Some of these guns 'fire' anti-color, and some shoot real color. At all positions in the image the tuple value from a top gun is added to the tuple value of a right gun. Only the ‘real colors’ are visible displayed, i.e. the pixel’s R G and B values must be in the range of zero to one. Pixels with any R G or B value greater than one or less than zero are assigned the value {0,0,0} which is black. The ‘fractal-like’ characteristic of these graphics, where microscopic structures mimic macroscopic levels at three levels of magnification, is due to the canonical ordering of the elements within the list of tuples.

Starting with an eight letter word, one can construct a list to be the starting set for tuple formation. In alphabetical order all letters are assigned a value equally spaced between -1 and +1, with the exception that “_”, space, is reserved for the first letter of the alphabet. For a given word, the lowest and highest letter is search such that the expansion of the numerical values of the letters is expanded over the full range. For example, ANGELICA is encoded into the Mathematica program function as:

Tuples[{ -6/7, 1, 0, -2/7, 5/7, 2/7, -4/7, -6/7}, 3]

Which generates 512 triplet values for R, G, B. These values are loaded into both the rows and columns of two tensors, the tensors are added, and anticolor and super colors are set to black (as displayed in the image named xxxx).

For words shorter than 8 letters, space ( _ ) is encoded as -1 in the list, and all other letters are stretch between one increment above -1 to +1. For words or phrases longer than 8 letters, and image series is required. These larger strings are parsed 8 letters at a time creating one image each. Five images are required to encode “never look a gift horse in the mouth” because, including the spaces between words, 5 parses are needed to place this phrase into five 8-character lists.

(Douglas Youvan, San Diego, CA, 12.02.08)

what does

"never look a gift horse in the mouth" mean?

all horses are the same color?

all horses have 6 legs? [2 in the back and 4 legs in front

all horses with one mouth have a uniquely horsey set of dentals and surround that are generally unappealing to the average mortal?

it might bite your nose off?

something else entirely?

(Harvey Bialy, Cuernavaca, Mexico, 09.02.08)


it seems parallel "beggars can't be choosers"

basically a remark with a complex messy underbelly--I
give you gift
in some ultimately not quite generous way

to buy you off
and clear my conscience
from what Levinas says is the infinite
demand that is
the other person
and when the gift turns out not quite to satisfy the
famous
desire of the other
indignantly one says
don't look a gift horse in the mouth
or beggars can't be choosers
both of which reduce to
fuck you
unless offered by a friend
who means--wake up, schmuck o--
you weren't enTITled
to ANYTHING but you got a
horse
to which one might offer the rejoinder
never trust
geeks
bearing
grifts

(Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 09.02.08)

[Harvey Bialy, 11 February 2008]
Lunar Rites of the Pharoah's Daughters



Though the Pharoah undergoes all phases of singular existence from infant dawn to mummy’s tomb—

Though the energetic forcing of singularity upon typicality abuses even high Egyptian symmetry—

Though the old man has his own daughter(s) to contend with—

the Pharaoh is still an imprint of his own form—like Shakespeare’s beauty’s rose which must increase that it not die –

the dark red atmosphere that holds the forced ambient of the emblem
absorbs the distraction it composes—
so that the concentration that IS the emblem’s just milieu—
the truest “setting” of the amulet—
the bezel of the ruby…

And it cannot be that the concentration of the emblem is but the means of an induction to the concentrated state—no concentration but hath its ambience—its ambient distraction—

To be God’s spies,

wishes Lear with his one true daughter, too late at last understanding himself indeed to be an Egyptian

who
in spite of the bilaterality of the symmetry of his emblem

must choose his face
-----------
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 12.02.08

Goddess of the Melon Cactus

[Harvey Bialy, 9 February 2008]
In the Garden of Good



To saturate a surface with intelligence is a natural desideratum. A surface with a minimal suggestion of depth.

For one thing, symmetry returns, at a later turn of the mind-spin—and a symmetry that no longer organizes the appearance of the surface, but seems to hide, though not excrutiatingly, on said surface’s depth. Or one cannot quite decide if the symmetry in fact is broken, or, if broken, what contingency has effected this. And where this matter is undecided, undecided too is whether a further duality, between the unbroken and the broken state, by fresh redoubling, attains here. For the self-reflected symmetry maintains its own contingency, and the essential matter is as far from trivial as may be. Indeed, we stipulate the following:

The thought that Being is a being is sufficient to break the Symmetry of Being.

That that which is prior to Distinction nevertheless motivates the distinction of Distinction—is sufficient to break the symmetry that breaking it reforms.

Or simply: Breaking the symmetry of Being reforms the symmetry of Being.

Here, for instance, dualities proliferate: subtle geometries fold within a smoke that mottles the glass; but what appears as glass is both shard and crystal facet; that is to say, quasi-polygonal figures hover between surface and imperceptible bottom. And there are bats’-wings and sheep’s-horns, cathedral windows and demonic, mind-infested countenances peering into what ecclesiastical interiors! But then we ourselves, as witnesses or speculators, are such interiors, ecclesiastically or elsewise, interiority being dual to every outside, if constituted such. And the welcome garden punishes intrusion, and the Good is an extrusion on indifference, the coupling of Good and Garden, a spectacle anticipated from the parking lot.

There is more to say in this, but we leave it, like they say, as a “problem” for the studious.

The Dark Lord lifts his wings, and the Crown of Horns remains, as it has these six thousand years, on the intelligential surface of ubiquity.

-----------
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 11.02.07

[Harvey Bialy, 5 February 2008]
Pharoah's Daughters

For once we are on the other side of the wall where, egregiously, Pharaoh has no daughters; rather he IS his daughters. Here, the silent spasm and gentle energies that relieve all gendered fixities, allow a passage from quality to quality of such sublime suppleness and subtlety that the spirits that flit into being through the bouquet of certain floreate distillates, commend their own evanescence as the trick which qualifies the officiant at the dawn rite, like they say, to have it all.

And yet the working that established such happy not to say breathy deliquescence, retards the temporal mechanism with such thoroughness, that all the stages between even momentary forms, manifest too; putrescent angel glares from purple countenance; the wall from which we have decidedly emerged is not without signs of the tear; and for a moment a face at the center of the image seems to project itself in ignorance of its own transmigration.

Nevertheless, the general temperature is dawn breath, that, like a certain fawn, shakes its being free of disturbing recollections redolent of recent slumber and passes without preparation to a nymph’s sweet welcome, as if, though zooming on the winds of a most ebullient temporality, regards not time at all.

--------

Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 06.02.08

[Harvey Bialy, 31 January 2008]
The White Angel Working

23.01.08

02.02.08

At what date did the western mind “stop”

the process by means of which crystalline mineral forms came into their natures as physis—instances of self-inductive growth? No doubt at the moment when thanatos itself blossomed in certain quarters as quintessentially petromorphic: without that black imagining, to rebirth as mineral were the achievement of eternity.

Every stone, but hath its angel. The angelic hierarchy, a cave of stones.

Not to reduce the image to one factor of its fascinating set of overlays: for stone is also dewdrop, or stopper drop, and the deliquescent substance maintained within the confines of the dewy membrane, a handsome gray-black vapor of carbon particles, no doubt comprises the hylic substrate for a figure neither menial nor masterly, but whose gesture prepares for its own crystalization as the amethyst, prefigured in the spiculated aura about his crown.

Of course the date per se of the denigration is of no particular pertinence, unless the entire of historical time be distracted, calibrated, and morphed into an astrological crystal whose nodes, with some derision, read out as our impertinent calendric.

- Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY

03.02.08

The angel’s wings are samari sleeves, spiked and mounted to a stone background whose partial presence suggests a towering eminence that, curiously, is time herself, as time itself both recedes and comes forward, less and less legible as anything but a parameter in a fabric whose other dimensions are yet to be discerned. Only time will tell.

The samari, whose head and shoulder girdle appear imprinted on his very garment, cannot quite decide what species he belongs to (angelic species, that is, for his head is a temple, his moustache the roof of a portal, his comportment that of a guardian—not guardian angel, by any means—but welcoming: this angel initiates the thought that color, when sufficiently individuated and subtly selected from an appropriate electromagnetic palette, will serve as the inverse of its own opacity, its opacity, the mineral registery of time himself, the elevator in the

T

A

L

L

building, whose basement is unfundable, whose attic is beyond release.

To exit from this architecture is to pass beyond all bodily things.

- Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY

04.02.08

It is what Mr. Orpheus descried in his rear-view mirror. Consider this latter day transposition of the Middle Pillar, the hierarchy of vertebrae, no hierarchy at all, for each is the office and the zone of an entirely satisfactory transition through the Depository (the hylic substrate of the artist himself). No longer housed in a mortal corpus, that is, but dispatched to an elsewhere, that can be glanced at, behind, and in excess of the famous regimen, only in violation of which might it be glanced at all. What did Mr. Orpheus decry in his rear-view mirror as he strutted magisterially away from Hades’ halls and palaces? Surely not his Eurydice. More likely Hades himself, the content of a stony vessel, as if the repository of cosmetic powders (pre-solar dusts and chondrules), if as Mr. Hades (pronounced Haids) – but there is no Hades himself (pronounced…

The vessel, whose contents is cosmos, is reflected in an object composed of silver particles, luminous, moonlit. But the chakras that organize the anarchic hierarchy of the diffragillating Depository (the hylic substrate of the artist himself) continue to pursue themselves thoroughly.

- Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY

Paldenlhamo

Gate Soha

The White Angel's Dark Twin Drinks Deeply

Footprints of a Passing Angel

[Harvey Bialy, 28 January 2008]
Mi Madre [& My Headstone

No dyes or tints of any kind were added to the stone. The image was brought to life (so to speak) using 3 different lacquers and 4 different varnishes, applied slowly over several days. The colors are as they appear in the soft shadow of an early afternoon on 28 January 2008, and the photograph was taken in the SW corner of the garden, where the stone resides next to my mother's - beneath which is a golden urn with some of her depository's ashes.

[Harvey Bialy, 12 January 2008]
“The Great Tao is making me all crookety up like this!”

"Tzu Ssu, Tzu Yu, Lzu Li, and Tzu Lai said to each other: “Whoseover can make nothing the head of his existence, life its backbone, and death its tail, whosoever knows that death and life, existence and nonexistence, are one—that man shall be our friend. The four men smiled, silently agreed with each other, and thus became friends.

Not long after, Tzu Yu fell ill, and Tzu Ssu went to see him. “The Great Tao is making me all crookety up like this!” said the sick man. His back was hunched; his viscera were at the top of his body; his cheeks were level with his navel; his shoulders were higher than his crown; his neck vertebral bones pointed to the sky: the principles of his whole body were out of order. Nevertheless, his mind was at ease and not affected. He limped to a well, looked at his reflection, and said: “The Great Tao has caused me to have such an appearance!”

“Do you dislike it?” asked Tzu Ssu.

“No,” said Tzu Yu; “Why should I dislike it? If my left arm would be transformed into a cock, I should use it to sneeze as many times as possible. If my right arm, would be transformed into a crossbow, I should look for a bird to bring down and roast. If my rump bone would be transformed into a wheel, and my spirit into a horse, I should mount it, and would have no need of any other steed. When we come, it is because we have the occasion to be born. When we go, we simply follow the natural course. Those who are quiet at the proper occasion and follow the course of nature cannot be affected by sorrow and joy. Why should I dislike my condition?”

- From the section called ”The Great Teacher.” In: Chuang-Tzu translated by Yu-Lan Fung - with a few slight modifications.

[Harvey Bialy, 10 January 2008]
The Celestial Taco of Maestro "Matacuas" [9.08.1940 - 25.12.2007]

Sr. Roman Serrano Gonzalez was the 3-cushion billiard champion of the State of Morelos at the age of 16. His parents used the prize money to enroll him in the finest billiard academy in Mexico City so he could develop his potential.

The first day he arrived at the imposing, polished cahoba wood portals he saw the equally imposing sign - No Entrance Without Suit and Tie and Proper Shoes.

He told me he turned around with tears in his eyes and didn't play again for a long time.

He earned his livlihood as a master technician of billiard tables.

He was my friend and teacher.

[Harvey Bialy, 27 December 2007]
Seamless Mind

Gracias amigo

[Harvey Bialy, 22 December 2007]
The Ghosts of Christmas Present

Happy Solstice

& a Prosperous New Year

[Harvey Bialy, 21 December 2007]
Ancestor{s}



Before Bwiti are the ones who came from the Stars


Before Bwiti are the ones who came from the Stars II


[Harvey Bialy, 13 December 2007]
The Object Function

From Harry, Pure & Simple

From Harry, Pure & Simple

Lavalou Man [for Memo]

And the question would be – where is the Lavalou Man? Be he aficionado, devotee [or] purveyor, of the favored botanical. Or rather where, in the image delivered, is he among such entities and articles, as rather flatly are emerging from this rather intransigent presentation of materials?

Where is the Lavalou, man (man).

Purveyor, affianado, devotee, the Man Himself. This series is not disjunctive. The Lavalou Man resides in the folds, the passes, the occlusions. Affined to the evanescent personality of the botanical itself.

A clue. There is, it appears, a thing here, not an image only. And the thing is an extrusion of the particular will to feast on imagery. The business begins with a will to see. And ends with a thing to be seen. An unexceptionable itinerary.

Folded metal slabs of unshook foil: a la derecha.

Bottom left: A slab of metal spoiled by paint.

The transformations of beinghood are perpetrated within small compass. We shall delete reference to the particular entities as they initiate and terminate attention, and concentrate upon the transitional modalities within which said entities resume each other’s “portion”—side-stepping the order of fatalities entirely. Not that it is uncommon that an image occlude the issue of its destiny. Attention to the elision thereof—that is uncommon indeed.

The little images do elide among each other. We shall not count them. The fatal motion is neither serial, (disjunctive), nor controlled by any habit of pure order. That fatality remains in spite of the dissolution of access to narrativity through such machinery is worthy of note.

I have hesitated till now to bring to our attention the writings if Bruno Schultz. There are things, says Schultz, whose being is excerpted from time, left behind, or simply out-posted to irrelevant lodgings, no school describes this.

But these things are not exempt from a certain fatality, though one which quite anomalously excerpts even fate from time. An itinerary that is uncommon indeed.

Blue night, not without its representations of velocity – quasi-stellar sources darting off to the margins. A silver machine composed of straps and flattened buttresses and a wall to frame the landscape of that which defies what cannot be.

I would not pretend to preempt the cogitations of the Lavalou Man, especially in regard to his own teaming ground; his “authority,” such as it is, comprises an entire territorial imperative, and his invitations, like invitations quite generally, come along with an expectation that they will not be refused. He does not suffer solicitations in this regard. He will leave you quite alone on the condition of simultaneous reciprocation.

The dispossession that arises in one’s attitude when he makes himself scarce at offensively inappropriate intervals, is, in an inverted sense, exemplary.

Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 12:07

Lavalou Man II

"Hey Cisco, Wait for Pancho" [for an honest Paco, the optometrist around the esquina]

Alternate Titles

Hell Bent for Leather

Headed for the Last Roundup

Life's a Bicho, and Then You Dies

"Hey Pancho, Wait for Cisco"

An Illusion of Projective Intransitivity

At the bottom of the sea, cruel as it may be, all things attain their intransitivities. Such is the nature of the “sea-change” Ariel sung of, “into something rich and strange”; Neptunian nevertheless. “I have always known my fate would be timeless.” This text is starting off intransigently allusive, the advantage of which is, beyond intransitivity, the violation of any sort of seriality whatever. The arrows that join the dots and the dots themselves, sink into their own occasion with what finality, what recourse. For the intransitive IS intransigent and taken advantage of to the logical limit finds, through all recursion, that impossible entity, the “thing itself.” And that is what we see here, the very Rock of Elsewhere, which is at once the radical Prince of Heredom and together their abusive emblemality: their capacity to assemble the qualities of every thing that seems, into the Monster Singularity; impossible in just this: that they extrudes a symbology of the singular. A beautiful optical song scored by light. One brick in the wall of necessary inconsequence. The overwhelming monstrance: the color blue.

Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 24.01.08

Assumption of Beautiful Persistance

They Travel Together 'on the Wings of Time'

Travelling Together 'On the Wings of Time'

A few words of relational explanation: All of the pieces in "Inverted Everything" [and a few in other recent galerias] derive from constructed "objects" [what I call 'the object function'] that were made in order to be "photographed" with minimal (or no) computer transform intermediates.

For example: "They Travel Together on the Wings of Time" is essentially a horizontal rotation and 50% blend of the image of the object in the fountain with the similar title. (HB 16:12:07, Cuernavaca)

How the Leopard Got Its Spots - 1st ∂

How the Leopard Got Its Spots - 2nd ∂, for Gerrit.

How the Leopard Got Its Spots - 3rd ∂

A temporary, tertiary object - containing both the first derivative and its object function.

4th ∂ - How the Leopard Lost Its Spots

A reified object, containing no trace of the object function.

If You Require Attention, Contact Me at That Number Not the Other One

Once We Were One

"Once We Were One", 1st ∂

[Harvey Bialy, 12 December 2007]
Every Thing Sings
[Harvey Bialy, 7 December 2007]
"Did It Ever Get So Quiet, The Dark Began To Speak?"


A Very Black Magick - Red Shift

Magick Red Shift


It is unnerving to think that the essence of an amulet involves, in spite of everything, a principle of sleight-of-hand and misdirection. It is as if the circuitry indicated on the talisman were the plan for a contraption, devised to allure or fascinate the energies that the operative seeks to harness—by demoting attention itself to an attitude of entertainment, i.e. that awareness cannot perform the separation whereby it is to be distinguished from the most trivial episodes of psychic thralldom. Such a talisman is one part engineering diagram, one part cartoon. And the mind that aligns itself upon it, regresses accordingly.

What’s wrong with this story. It is just that there is no ostensible audience for such a procedure of fascination / misdirection. This omission is itself suggestive. Think of the magical pneuma, the general medium that serves as vehicle for the conductance of the magical will. The pneuma is collective, and though personally modified, impersonal, and surely without “personality.” The circuitry on the talisman configures the pneumatic substance. What appears to be transmission or, as we say, conductance, in fact conducts nothing but that it also induces its own object, carves out the channel of conveyance, constructs the transport vehicle, composes the message, and, singularly, measures “the signal to noise ratio” pertinent to the operation. For the message itself is far less distinct from the impedance of the signal, its distortion or dispersion than in the transmission of more purposively communicative missives. Here, the message modifies the principle of existence, that otherwise ought to supervene, so that the transitivity presumed for “signal maintenance,” cannot apply. It is this elision of the transitive that is most unnerving.

Unnerving too is the relation between the magical will and the sky-like expanse out of which there percolates, indifferently, a background noise (at whatever temperature, proximity to equilibrium, negentropic gradient, etc.) out of which the message is configured. At the essential cite in the operation the distinction between distinction and its own impossibility cannot be distinguished. Everything depends upon the way the operative disposes the moment at which this essential impossibility imposes itself upon the operation. There is a discontinuous continuum between the most egregious, ultimate steps in the working: how to begin and how to terminate fuse in a manner that, where methodology is most requisite, methodology is also quite impossible. And yet this fusion is in the end (or in the beginning) beside the point. The point itself precedes the oscillation in distinction. Happily, as they say, we all in fact do hold it in its hand.

--------------------

Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY

2/34



Blood of the DL



Some sort of fullness in the belly informs the texturing. As if the brain took hold of its own matricial intimacy and allowed itself to bespeak all thoughts at once. At least, it seems that such is the desideratum of the energies released here.

Yet the entities that climb from the tomb of an inessential pixelation survive, for an instant’s thought, say 1/50 of a second.

There is a point when the thing appears. After that a glide, an inquiry of attention. The thing becomes another thing, or else is frozen by the rigidities of the cognitive gaze, extracted and lodged in some database or other, not only off camera, but in Blake’s space “outside of existence” i.e. Albion’s couch, if you know what I mean. As if it were its own name, and in that, provided itself with the “bad” eternity that don’s the mask of identity.

1/50 of a second is an epoch, actually, measured against Planck’s time, say, or any duration spiked down to such a scale—where there are entire elements on the periodical table that have founded their being on far less.

Let the thing be its own name, certainly, and then withdraw. And let the thing withdraw, without an interval between it and its name, the name resolve into its own oblivion. The oblivion of the name, the name’s inversion. For the name is the nothing that covers the intimacy of the real, foisting its atemporal inability to abide, upon the true atemporal abiding of that whose velocity is acidic to any naming. Space. Light. Stone. Your choice of metonym.

Now consider the cone, whose geometry organizes itself as if to focus on the locus where its vertex stands. It is of course imaged in inverse, the vertex—above, the mouth a sort of table where all hidden process delivers its product, but AT the vertex, a small skull wakes up, and its interior comes alive.

Now the skull itself, with its internal structure, black hole eyes, is invariant over several degrees of magnification. At different settings, what might be wavulets are luminous rope-like tubules, whose contents, unimaginable, sustain the only secret left, for the little skull, were it capable of vocal articulation, might haunt us with the cry, “All is Revealed.” All is not revealed. In fact it is precisely “All” that has absconded into its own ascent. All matricial segments or positions have delivered themselves over to the scribulariae through which they precisely refuse to determine themselves. By becoming them. Super-transitory written signs, that is.

The verticality that aligns on the vertex of the cone, or drops perpendicular from it, does not particularly telegraph the entity heads that inhabit it, but rather allow a noise jam of microtubules, worm hairs, strings and foams, and other yet untheorized quantum glyphoids to co-postulate their own spaces, so that the Kings and Presidents of the Central Boulevard are relieved somewhat of their magisterial regimina.

-------------------
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY

Dakpa Tamdin



Red smoke fulfills the ambient. This is a small amulet. Being small, it is a signal from the smallest. If you insist on the scale of it at all, its shrinkage goes to singularity. The information it contains is vectors driving to the limit. But at the limit. It is not about what with some strenuous investments can be seen here. It is about what cannot have—what is about it. It awakens in the cockels of ignominy. It fulgurates in the glory of the gods. In that respect, there is nothing but the tanrtist’s ploy in it. At the moment that discomfiture, great or small, is objectified in the ken, a small room has opened and it is here, not there, where you are. Beyond this you are neither here nor there.

It is thus an amulet against all possible (actual) discomfiture.

Still, Lord Cat-Wolf holds a candle to the Dream-Lord.

Transference is not Transmission.

But Transmisson may occur
in Transference Only.

Thus and only thus:

Obeisance to the Guru.

All take note of this.




Jesus Loves You




Jesus Loves You, and We Do too



Dakini of the Crystal Cross


The Demons that were Left at the Door Last Night


It is a question and a wide open one at that—though open to such densities and thickets of incongruous roilings—whether the tangles of language can appropriately wrangle with the tangles of brujeria—opacities and coilings of a darkly promulgated magical will. For the factor of will factored out of Being descends, in a platonic hierarchy, to and from the darkness of matter itself—and is inextricable and inevadable because said matter, when rendered by language, shares a nature with the highest substances and states.

It is not a laughing matter, though it is possible, by a kind of sudden glancing, if succeeded by an equally sudden glancing away—to find in the two toiling figures that serve as temple columns in this image, a kind of crazed jocularity—the hilarity of the undercosm—the weird conjunction of laughter and horror that can be discovered in Vincent-Price level cinematic thrillers and as parodic moments in the Eleusinian Mysteries themselves. The exhausted initiates cross a magic bridge after the long treck from Athens towards Eleusis. Under the bridge there is a swamp that serves as a portal for the dead as they, on equinoctial wings, rise from their fixities in the underworld; while on the bridge the initiates are assailed by taunting jesters, the fixities of their beings assaulted from two intertwined dimensionalities: immortal ghoulishness and preternatural hilaritas.

Fail to glance away with sufficient celerity, and the jocular figures seem composed of an effusion of tears, a savage intent relieved only by the savagery and releasement of unrelenting grief.

But the beings in the central column—the Middle Pillar—seem clamped and stretched, the all pervasive tedium of the enmity registered in these magical doldrums having gotten the best of the equilibrium that portends relief. It is the place of Kings and Mighty Presidents in kliphotic parody. So much so that it is indiscernible whether structure here mocks substance or, by an inauspicious inverse, substance itself has been ground up into antinomies of structure—the assault upon the door turned to the only transformations yet possible, a dense and alarming invitation to speech. But speech wrangles with image here, not to mention substance, for where the darkness tends to its own extremity, in spite of moral fatigue, or rather quite on account of it, why should we not anticipate, beyond all parody, eversion towards inversion—the inextricable catastrophe of the inalienable? For language alas is formidably imbued with structure but only has substance where it is allowed to stretch beyond itself, entangled with the wicked eructation of a contumacious world. Already demonic, is it any wonder that language, involved in such a wrangle, has no recourse but to spit, and quite indeed nastily, back?

Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 23.01.08


The Window & The Void [Hotel San Miguelito, San Miguel de Allende] - for Ezra Thelonious

What sort of writing remains when the null cartouche
erected for the empty monument
witnessed by the tormented hieroglyph
has found its happy Sunday sunlight but for a moment
and the interpenetration of the principles of witness
catapult obliquity so graciously across
the traces of symmetries broken before emanation—
and can we read them?

To read in this case is to retard the little party favor quality to the vignettes seized
from what must have been and is a fulsome fabric
mocking the endeavors of what is called history—
not the inquiry, not the tale, but the body of event itself
dissolving in the intimacy of the experience thereof.


A window imbricates a witness, a witness no doubt a spectacle
but it is only ideology that forces from the spectacle its void
by severing things-seen from facts-of-seeing.
And what is the void into which the void itself has absconded?
or else has the void rescinded from nothing other than its own
excessive contumacious erasure?
The absence in essence of the essence of absence? And that from the beginning.
Try as you might, you will not make out what it is.

Such an itinerary of optical extravaganzas
expresses a certain volatility on the vital plane.
To not be or not to not be begs its own question,
one gesture before so consummate an arrival,
that no whiteness ever would add itself any longer to The Whiteness
but the latter sits refulgent
as the most forthright of renderings.

When the proof text scratches itself across the pinched fold
orthogonal to its own extenuation,
does this not herald the loss of one’s very self in a blink?
No matter how nearly the end approaches,
its moment refuses the anticipation of closure.
Admit this as frustration? Never!
Lest Time
ever finish a poem.

------------------
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 30.01.08



The Shadows of Deception's Daughter [19.02.08]


Heaven Be Damned, or The Bardo According to "bialy/s"


"Well, while I live, I'll fear / no other thing / So sore as keeping safe / Nerissa's ring"


Bialzebub & His Grandchildren

Two Venom Delivery Devices in the Style of Porceline Miniatures in the Persian Mode [for Jorge David Estrada Ochoa, who made the device on the left]


Dakini of the DL


The face of the woman exchanges with a mask of itself, wrenched strangely on the same body and its pretty neck. As in some split brain optical textbook trick. There are water marks scribbled on a transparent surface, or else incised on space. You are in the parking lot, tasting flakes of red rust, and you cannot see her. Her face refuses to form. Look at her. Look at the face. The Dark Lord cannot see this woman. For him, his own face displaces her face. It looks like there is a world there. But standing outside of the abstract vestibule forbids that.

It looks enough like a world. Transluminal vapors smudge the recording surface, jiggled chromatically to make a pleasant enough pseudo-cosmographic poster, $29.95 at the planetarium. The Dakini is overwhelmed by the rumors of so grandiose a scale. But in the dusts and vapors attenuated and stretched across so many billions of parsecs, innumerable little faces form and deform just before the tricky pixels rise into view. It remains quite true that nobody knows why faces form. The attitude that wants to read the water marks, finds faces.

You look for the face of the