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”
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The clouds are in motion, within the solarization, that is to say, within a certain treatment effecting inversion, without actually operating upon spatial or any group-theoretic structures. The activity simply takes on an inverted sense. The same clouds move in another locus, without an inverse at all, in fact without overt motion.
All tonal qualities are diverted by a principle of edges. That is to say, there are edges, each with its application of attitude, its recognition of another register for light. The duty is to render light as the quality of an affection. It must never be “light”; only then is it light. The sexual body itself and its commerce with light.
———–
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 08.06.06
2/17 :: The Day Monk Left & My Mother Arrived
Criss-Cross / Thelonious Monk, Charlie Rouse, Frankie Dunlop, John Ore (NYC, 1963)
(The beautiful young woman criss/crossing with Monk is my mother, who arrived the same year, 1917. The photograph used in the superimposition was taken by my father around 1935, and after hand-tinted with oils. The color values in the “trans-temporal” birthday card are pretty much as they are in the original, and always were to my remembering. Oil is an enduring medium.
A Vision of the Holy Ghost
Time Stands Still for my Mother
Contained within the circuloid, movement organized by it. The outside in. The outside is not phenomenal. It cannot be gleaned, reduced to, portended, or made the accurate object of one’s highest and most sublime arousal. And yet, this “cannot” itself cannot. There she is. The lines transgressing circumambulations of regressive alacrities. One does not complain that it goes too fast. It does indeed. Velocity at the limit of velocity is velocity no more. But a little man with a little hat. Even a straw hat. And a bow tie, or is it a collar with spats? And little black eyes. Or perhaps not. Perhaps no little black eyes. And a nice suit. It is the register, at all events, in which the most uncanny takes on the appearance of the unexceptionable: the intersection of the Singular with the Individual. Not even the type. For it is the Individual more than any other thing that masks the Singular. He walks about with surveillance technology diced into his every orifice. For the singular traverses infinite jointures that in principle such technology cannot glean. Its invisibility is perfect. Even to speak of it as to speak of a secret, as to send out dark emanations to protect where the secret dwells, does not speak of it at all. Hints and teases: hints are but teases.
And ever there is meat
where the Moon Shines.
It is positable that the eternal is the happenstance as we are. That the projection of the dead from their traces among the ones that “yet” live relative to that one, are projected for once and forever onto the unconscienable outside. Sentimentality aside, one’s concern is to remain staunch vis a vis all weirdness. With right view, there is nothing to shudder or flinch about. If there is something further that rhythm demands be said here, it is certainly not I but you that must commit to the saying of it.
Charles Stein,
Bar Harbor, Maine,
1 October 2007