TC: Blur/Lens

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The "I" and the eye

A glass for seeing
Always cloudy

The days go by
The world spins round
The subject is always moving
The mind can't keep up
It's all a blur
The eye and the "I"
A glass for seeing
Always cloudy

Every two hours I wipe off my glasses

Colorful blur created by moving subject, moving camera and 1/13 second exposure: photo by Robert Lawton, 2006
Golden Gate Bridge refracted in rain drops acting as lenses: photo by Mila Zinkova, 2007
Magnifying and light collecting effect of a drop of oil on a glass plate held a short distance above a text: photo by Roger McLassus, 2005

TC: Multiple Screen Window Display

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Like so many tiny pixie tv's
Flashing messages to each other all night
The hundred billion neurons in your brain
Replace identity as such with deep
Cosmic gossip while your body's arrested
in mid flight back toward an old savannah --
A hundred billion neurons seeking shelter,
Losing that deep self because you're asleep,
Lost in your dreams, a functional state
Of your brain lapsing into disappearance,
Your brain not bothering to compute you,
Your sense of who you are going up in smoke,
Though if the soul be several not one
There's only now and that now has presence.

Windows: Charles Sheeler, c. 1952 (Hirschl and Adler Galleries, New York)

TC: A Diary

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Thurs. a.m. Headache mental insensibility heaviness oppressed. That acid feeling.

Tues. extremely late. Few improvements no advancements. Citizen of no nation. Stupefaction, shortness of breath & c.

Sat. night, call it morning. Done nothing need of doing pressing time of doing short.

Mon. Sounds, late. Little mice if I am not wrong. Or something. (Cats hear this.)

Sun. Day of darkening drips then night. Indolence indifference. Mind encumbered. No plan pursued or formed. Want of rest. Nor ad nor product.

Tues. Survey past life many faults many deficiencies much to be repented very little reformed. Time not expected to be long. Dark stain shadowed ceiling.

Wed. Misspent time infirmity of body perturbation of mind. As ever, tea. When p and ~p have a common boundary.

Sat. Seventieth year. Mandrill. What can be done ought not to be delayed. Delayed reaction. Left the p out of swimming. It is NOT ENOUGH to point to ~p's lying outside p. Relentless peaks & valleys & c. Whereas p and ~p have a common boundary. Already presupposing the existence of a whole world of propositions.

Thurs. Again. As before.

Sat. after long unquiet and perplexing thoughts. Thoughts not my thoughts ways not my ways much to be done little to be known. Unprofitable and dangerous enquiries. Curious doubts impossible to be solved.

Mon. too late.

Obverse fog Tues. early. Stood silent on the iron trellised balcony crept over by shining white flies.

A GREAT MEMORIAL NEARS COMPLETION: Life, 09/30/1940
Your engine makes this much acid every day: Boris Artzybasheff, Life, 04/30/1951
Now -- All America can have JESTS: Life, 09/30/1940
Do you ever awaken like this at night?: Time, 08/17/1953
Appointment in Electronia...: Life, 12/20/1943
angry young computer: Newsweek, 10/12/1964
His wife is right... the blowout wrecked the party!: Time, 08/17/1953
ELECTRONIC "FINGERS" to speed up today's automation!: Life, 06/24/1957
Why we chose the NCR computer: Time, 2/23/1962
(All images via Graphic Design Gallery Labs)

This post dedicated to Angelica

TC: Vincent Katz: An Old Song Made New

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On the porch at the Mississippi John Hurt Museum, Avalon, Mississippi: photo by Matt Lancashire, 2007

to Angelica and Tom

Listening, summer finally, to a new singer
Sing an old song, first heard when
The world was young
Everything was morning

Friend brought that song a long way
Played through an apparatus
No one then yet knew
Friend to me and to you

Then we sat there listening
Thought of other friend on porch
That song was heard together
In a dream almost now it seems




July 31, 2009
Solebury

TC: Wallace Stevens: The Snow Man

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One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

The Snow Man: Wallace Stevens, 1921, from Harmonium, 1923

Cat dancing in snow: photo by Matthias Zirngibl, 2006

TC: Feeling for the Ground

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MV Pasha Bulker grounded on Nobby's Beach, near Newcastle (Australia): photo by Web107, 2007

At first, and perhaps for a very long time, I existed as if at sea, drifting, and did not know what if anything lay under me.

Then came a change.

When my elders named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and vaguely grasped that that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out.

I glimpse myself in baby photos, attending curiously to such sounds, pensive, ignorantly wondering.

It all comes back to me now.

Adrift in my wordless sea, I was trying to read their minds, as if feeling for the ground.

What did they mean, when they uttered these strange sounds?

Their intention was shown by their bodily movements: the expression of their faces, the play of their eyes, the movement of other parts of their bodies, and, especially, the tones of their voices; which, I dimly now perceived, expressed their states of mind in seeking, having, or rejecting something.

In this way, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learned to understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires.

It was then I began to have a feeling for the ground. I walked a great deal, mostly alone, perhaps mostly on a hill, or then again it may have been a small mountain. Certainly it seemed solid enough.

As the scenery passed by, I could now put words to it; there was a sense of dwarf mastery in this; the achievements of the mind have their own satisfactions. However minor, however transitory.

But before very much more time had passed, I realized I retained a powerful longing for the open sea from which I had come.

This feeling of longing has remained with me to this day.

Glaucous gull (Larus hyperboreus): photo by Alastair Rae. 2005

from: Tom Clark: Feeling for the Ground (BlazeVox, 2010)

TC: Waitress

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Waitress serving at restaurant counter while wearing Halloween chicken costume, Leroy's Restaurant, Monrovia, California: photo by Ross Berteig, 2002

Not under pressure of a private grief,
Oh for but a few years yet of useful

Life, for all's complete once your rat
Race is run, that's how things go, no one prescribes to

Or gets to presume to order life
Around as though it were a sort of waitress race

Sister Life has better things to do than wait
Around in the wings for her part

In the next act of your however
Interesting meditative history

Mason's Cafe: truck driver, sailor and waitress at highway coffee shop on US 90 in Southern Louisiana: photo by John Vachon, 1943 (Farm Security Administration/ Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)