bialy/s

Copyrights to all images and texts remain with the contributing artists.

Harvey Bialy is represented by Buratti Fine Art, 222 Queen Victoria Street, North Fremantle WA 6159, Perth, Australia (www.buratti.com.au). For availability of museum quality, certfied, large-format pieces, contact: mail@buratti.com.au

BioHaZart

I am here
behind my crashed
snake
watching a ledge
that has broken from me.

The orange sky
is sentient
and tinctures what sentience
is left of me,
looks through me.

He who knows Himself
knows his Lord. Selah.

Blue scales
scratch the snake corpse–
the watery element
in
absentia.

We wait and wait
too long too long
for the noetic equivalent of rain.

If it come
will it soften my ledges,
scour my rust?

Yet here is my black iron intransigence,
the acrid insomnia of my lust.

Oh Draco . . .

This present moment itself
is long ago
————————————————-
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 28.08.11

Unspeakable You

Oh, we were standing

on the left side

of the embankment

watching the “views”

fall like water

in the shadowy gorge

there was an elephant

and the ear of one, etcetera,

but the old magician–

something like him–

stood,

on the wall

attempting to haunt

his own paradigms

but reflections and reiterations

rose from the depths

roaring,

erratic, edgy,

wind howls

at any given moment

Being has us

by our thought of it

as if the indenominate background

to all our jagged sculptedness

were the calls

of an infinite mouth

sustaining the pointed, grand intenionalities

of the mind we wore

when we were

simply ourselves

wrapped up in

credible histories

that the magician

on his balconies

were the product

of those selves . . .

as their signal operation

toward a grand displacement . . .

that he appears just now

as if to rise above

again, again

all his echoing scenarios

before dissolving

in the insubstantial coils

that long and long ago

had swept him hither . . .

—————————————
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 16.07.2011

Tomographos

we were there

at the interstices

where all that blackness

perpetually inverted

and now we are here–

light exploding through the tooth

of what strange tumescence

that the will to being being

indeed perdures

———————————————–

Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 23.06.2011

A nameless derivative

above
the median

fencetop
horizon

we collect ourselves
from a timeless
evacuation

vacillation and return

you must search
my mask
for my eyes

presence
hath no
quality
before itself

thus the instructive
necessity
of every sentient
monstrosity:

to slake off the erotology
of attention

for that to which we are drawn
will fall away

until the jowls of hunger
the rivers of decrudescence

the hunched and muscular shoulders
that lurk and threaten in the mist . . .

Only geometry
remains to evolve
the archetype:

an accord of diagrammatic space

such that the blue jellies survive
the holy goblet–
its shape, that is, that is
more puissant than any shadow

ululations of blueness, silver, bublets
that might be eyes

below below
skeletal incandescence
embryonic

enframing outline reenters the entity

the crystalline blackness at the bottom
encourages

the incorrigible
sky

—————————-
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 2.12.10

~~~~~

The Yang & the Yin of Me

~~~

Bird of Paradise

For a long time I thought the earth

was a bird, a blue one, wounded
by a heavenhawk or who
would dare to do that to

this bright broken business

and now the image answers information
it always does, one picture
spoils a thousand words,

nobody knows what I know
nobody knows the bird it is
the bird will be

savagely like a drunken sage
indigo-winged wobbling up
to be new

we hurt nothing.
We are only who we thought we are

and the bird thought too
but the bird was right.

Apocatastasis a feather fall’n.
—————————–
Robert Kelly, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, 22.05.10

~~~

~~~

~~~

Navigation Chart to Nowhere (possibly bogus)

or the place itself

for there’d be no

aerial photography…

so certainly, the chart then.

The scrubboard whitenes, the horribly contaminated

puddles, wells and springs; the impossible concentration

of mammal blood, yours and mine included,

in bright sun

in May or anyway springtime the evidence

that instead of cloverleaf, interlocking crisscross

fat brush highway or outdoor parking garage–

parking garage. Familiarity and tedium

the last word of “civilization”

uttering itself.

The thinkers that imagined panpsychism

have their supposition or if you prefer insight

ghoulishly verified

in the point of view, not a point really, but the wingspan

of the last giant avian

hovering

over nowhere

scanning

without report

for a place to land.
————————
Charles Stein, Barytown, NY, 07.05.10

~~~

~~~

~~~

German Expressionism

we were there

on the other side of

whatever side

it seems

that we were

(t)here on

the earth and its urbanity

riven, rifted, breaking

apart suave beauty, the ceremonial

manager

pocketing his take without so much as a glance at

that which

he had engineered so gorgeously, egregiously

too late for that)

he waited for the griffens

to arrive, the hatter rat with the salt, the regal lobster

sailing

interrupt and entering

aerial view

the hatter magus also, his downward arrow,

dorje,

delta–

And the savage masks are poised above his shoulders–

how queer those torqued horses, if they are horses

how lordly their deep savagery

transposed

and do we release our need to reprove the horror?

all parts and anthems

all cries

all untampered-with vitalities

all vitalities stripped down to their final rigor

all rigors unjoined

from their vital corporation

when all the eyes are just too small to celebrate

the happiness

removed from which

these dark and sumptuous seeings

are to be allowed their flows
———————————
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 04.16.10

~~~

~~~

~~~

I’ll See You in my Dreams (03/10)

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~~~

Continue viewing ‘Epiphanies on a Road to No Place’ »

The Heads of the Towns up to the Aethyrs (For Jack Spicer)

“Roots & Branches” [Remembering Robert & Jess]

Our Lady of Good Voyage [in memory of Mr. Olson]

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

“The Constructive Process of Ruin”

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 in Cuernavaca on 28 January 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

Fifth Yartzheit :: Mother of the Mormodes