TC: Double Feature

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After the moon goes down, the nearness of the night, fair
And dark in its standing against the remaining trees,
Comes off as not an embellishment
But a facsimile. Where have I seen this evening before.
Past is past. It is no longer the small town nineteen forties.
But living in the moment is postponed by
This uncanny sense of repetition.
For example, at the filling station
On the corner outside the theatre,
Beneath violet neon, near green garbage cans
And racks of bright red cans of motor oil, and rows of whitewalls
Stacked for sale, a young man in blue overalls pumps
Gas, over and over, in my mental reproduction of this scene,
Remembered from a foggy night on Pico, Santa Monica,
1951. Sometimes images will never leave your mind.
It's as though you were merely the carrier pigeon
For messages of unknown origin, to be delivered over and over.
As when, after a long day of construction
And assembly, the factory worker and the apprentice escort,
Having put workaday cares aside for a rare night out
At the movies, sitting rapt through the double feature,
Shyly holding hands, turn to one another at last
And sigh, and one whispers to the other,
In a tone of concession gentler than the soft summer night wind,
This is where we came in.

The new movie house in Greensboro, Greene County, Georgia: photos by Jack Delano, June 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

TC: Ray Milland: An Unnoticeable Star

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Just another pretty face
but behind that blank
and vapid mask
a supercilious nonchalance
with just a faint
undercurrent of malice

A safecracker hiding his
whiskey bottles in the chandelier

Something disturbing

yet horribly true about

his mixture of extreme
irritation and disbelief
with almost gentlemanly disgust

Something about reality

Ray Milland couldn't stand

Ray Milland, from the film A Life of Her Own (1950): screenshots by Thirdship, 2008

TC: Punctum

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Hot spring, Leirhnjúkur, Iceland: photo by Andreas Tile, 1996

A point is fixed at the
intersection between the
personal and the rest

of the cosmos, and that
nexus is the source
of the flood of speech

the desperate polyphony
of conflicting meanings
empties continually into,

all signs condensed into
a single line leading
out from this dust mote sized

fraction of the history of
a very tiny star into the
silence everywhere around it

Wolf 359, the orange object just above the center of the image, a red dwarf star located in the constellation Leo 7.8 light years from earth, one of the faintest and lowest-mass stars known, with a photosphere temperature low enough for chemical compounds to form and survive: astrophotograph by Klaus Hohmann, 2006

TC: The Headless Woman (Mistress of the Labyrinth)

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She runs over something in the road, perhaps a dog, or was it something else, a child?

A death is at the center of the labyrinth.

Persephone drives on, into the suddenly pelting rain.

At the center of the labyrinth, shocked, in a fog, in her car, becoming the mistress of the underworld. Her domain now the kingdom of ghosts.

"The house is full of the dead -- ignore them and they will leave," mumbles her demented mother, who is perhaps Demeter.

Argentine director Lucrecia Martel's film is a dream of disembodiment, drifting in and out of focus. Back and forth across the shadowland between death and life.

At Knossos, in Minoan Crete, Persephone, the mistress of the underworld, presided over the ritual enactment. A roofless dancing ground was spoken of as "the labyrinth".

A dry arroyo that is suddenly flooded with a confusion of memory.

To all the gods honey, reads a tablet inscription at the foot of a female figure at Knossos. To the mistress of the labyrinth, honey.

Karl Kerenyi tells us that to the Minoans, honey was equated with divine blood. The ritual gift.

I remembered the haunting images of this film as if viewing through a clouded glass scenes from another life.

Classical Seven-Circuit Labyrinth: image by James Jen, 2009
Persephone Cnidus, c. 330 B.C., found at Baiae, Campania: photo by Jastrow, 2006 (British Museum, London)
Lucrecia Martel, director of The Headless Woman (La mujer sin cabeza): photo via The Auteurs, 2008

TC: Edwin Denby: Sonnet: "Disorder, mental, strikes me"

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Disorder, mental, strikes me; I

Slip from my pocket Dante to
Chance hit a word, a friend’s reply
In this bar; bare, dark avenue
The lunge of headlights, then bare dark
Cross on red, two blocks home, old Sixth
The alive, the dead, answer, ask
Miracle consciousness I’m with
At home cat chirps, Norwegian sweater
Slumped in the bar, I mind Dante
As dawn enters the sunk city
Answer a one can understand
Actual events are obscure
Though the observers appear clear

Edwin Denby: "Disorder, mental, strikes me": from Later Sonnets in The Complete Poems, 1986

125th Street, Uptown New York City: photos by Walter Payton, April 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

TC: The Great Sphinx

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The great Sphinx who rests solemn and enigmatic with paws folded across
his beauteous white breast

Mister Twister who astonishingly back-flexes his neck as if upon a swivel so
as the better to rearward gaze with benign wondering eyes

Old Cow able to jump over the moony night at will

Big Panda nuzzling shyly with snout and head butts and bumps reserved for those he loves

Big Bounder who comes running and leaps headlong upon tables and through doorways

Snowy Belly Boy who gazes at you blinking as if from another world

Big Penguin whose excellent black and white coat is made more splendid by careful grooming
and whose intricate and industrious pedicures are a thing of joy

Moonface Boy whose large round head contains sublunar thoughts sly and ever fleeting

Society Boy who always wants to keep his friends company and whose friends
never want to say goodbye





Doing his thing (tuxedo cat): photo by YvetteAL, 2009

TC: Mnemonic

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If on the moon palace stairs
A thin wash of water colour bleeding

Across the body chemistry frontier blurs,
As traffic slowly hones the blade of evening

And scatters its eyes across dusk's drift and growth,
That sharp outline we think of as reality,

It would perhaps be time to go to Plan B --
That is, to try to remember the colours of the morning.

Udaipur: Charles W. Bartlett, 1916 (Honolulu Academy of Fine Arts)
Taj Mahal, Sunset: Charles W. Bartlett, 1920 (Honolulu Academy of Fine Arts)