The Falling Leaf Review, FALL 2017 by The Falling Leaf Review

TheFalling Leaf Review

Falling Leaf Review

Fall 2017 Vol. 2 No. 3

A Quarterly Review

Fall 2017

Falling Leaf Review

PHOTOGRAPHY BY PHOTOGRAPH BY JVR

A Quarterly Review

Fall 2017

Falling Leaf Review

A Quarterly Review

Fall 2017

Falling Leaf Review

TABLE OF CONTENTS FICTION A WAKE OF THE WAVE BACK INTO THE SEA ...................................... 6 NAUSEA ..........................................................................................................10 ANOTHER LIBRARIAN ...............................................................................30 WHICH PERSON SINGULAR .....................................................................31 LUNCH POEMS .............................................................................................32 SISYPHUS UP THE MOUNTAINSIDE DOES ...........................................34 WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN BORN ..............................................................35

A Quarterly Review

Fall 2017

Falling Leaf Review

Fall 2017

THE FALLING LEAF REVIEW FALL 2017

Jay V. Ruvolo PO BOX 40510 Brooklyn, NY 11204 j22r@msn.com fallingleafreview@hotmail.com

A Quarterly Review

Falling Leaf Review

Fall 2017

A WAKE OF THE WAVE BACK INTO THE SEA The sun approaching noon, the skies clear, blue, I imagine jewel blue--what color is that? What does it mean to ask what color? Signifying nothing imaginable to anyone else, the recently anointed King had said--yes, the sky was crisp, the color--what is it to the eye that not only looks but sees, yes, blue, pristine, a special blue . . . I think I recollect having remembered once in the color of a carpet I had laid in an apartment I imagine I can see as it was, one time more definitely--no, not more, nor less, but equally as definitely . . . I see it as I have never been able to see any other apartment--never? Any apartment I have ever lived in. The sky unspoiled by humidity--dry, today as dry as sand, today . . . a cliche sky? This blue, nearly 0% humidity, sky?There are no clouds to speak of except thin wisps of cirrus. The summer we were in Madrid, blue, blue, blue, the sky blue every day, no clouds, no cumulus, no nimbus, no cumulonimbus, only sometimes maybe stratus or cirrus, almost vaguely, and often at great distances, I imagined I thought the mornings I would watch them to see if they would move, and no, as implacable as stone, carved, they were, in the sky that was blue, Madrid then, not here, not now, a deeper blue then there than at home, I did think then: the Madrid sky, that summer we were there, the day at Plaza de Toros, in Madrid, how possible not to go to the bullfights, I do not want to count the days then or now, what Ms. Stephens says, how she says when she says with pen and paper, often times though thinking out loud in her room overlooking the hill down to her neighbors she on occasions sees and says hello to without much conversation, what transpires in the hours of a day, through the hours, this speech, ephemeral, my writing is permanence? Who wrestles with himself except in the dark? Who knows what he knows when he imagines he does? His way among others, to see himself in, to see himself through: reflections, refractions, friends and loved ones are prisms for our light? I remember the downhill from the back of the Montmartre Museum. She paused. I paused. I said nothing. I thought nothing. I watched her pause in mind again as I had––how long watching her body in mind, watching her day dreaming in my daydreams, recollecting her having said something about pausing with me not to think, not to imagine, not to intedn anything, just stillness, silence, pause; yes, remaining silent with me, she said she wanted––words, words . . . more words, all of them repeated, and often, as I would time again and again. Monkey hear, monkey say––it was an afternoon in Madrid, the temperature was 112F, we were on our way to the Prado. It was the day we saw the Goyas that were called Goyas Blacks. I do get to say what she said, what she had chosen to say. I then chose to relay as I am relaying the relaying now; here and there are mutually concentric, all of this said on the subject of being a fool, all folly should be praised, I remember thinking, turning it into a belief––in praise of the goddess Folly, of course; something especially trenchant said on this, on praising folly, Folly––everyone needs to be a fool. On what I had come to know from reading––much of what I have come to know I have come to know through reading, not so much in line with America's anti-intellectualism, huh? We are a a stupid people. Rabid, it is. And you still wonder why literacy has decreased, and it has, abysmally, I remember she had said once when we were, what were we, where were we, why were we . . . ? What were we then when she said what she had, something about--no, what was it? How to speak on the subject of how I had fallen in love, for some reason, or so I had thought, and then had come to say, would say, did say, as at other times about other things, again and again, yes, as I do now, yes, how I loved and do love the 16th century--reading the writers from the 16th . . . what means this for anyone lost to the manner of metonymy? PretenseWhat does A Quarterly Review

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that mean to say that? I am not speaking to the herd. I am not speaking to the Public. I am not speaking to the mass of Americans too full of themselves to imagine think believe know that they are and have been horribly, systematically under-educated, dis-seeing what they think they know, what they think they need to know, what they think they imagine correctly is how to educate. What means this or that on how to say I love this century, why I love this century, when I came to know that I loved this century. But then what does that mean, could it mean, would have meant? What will this then mean for some future me, whoever he will be, come to be ot not come to be? Moreover, for me to love the writing, the vision, the sense of humor, its grasp of political satire, commentary, critique; its handle on religion and religiousness--religiosity--knowledge and Truth were sacred--no, not sacred. There was an appreciation of the profane matters. Wait! What am I trying to say . . . more so, what is it that is trying to be said--I need to listen . . . is there one or many--what? Whom? How many could I know? I do know more than sometimes I imagine I do, how can I know more than our dogmatically instilled, imposed, enforced Doubt as the highest that wisdom allows? Was it something that she did, or was it something at another time that did not allow her to count herself as one, a fool, yes, she said, The fool denies all in losing the arsenal of his fear, my fear, I have said before that fears are not to be rejected but held close, understood, I should have said stood under. Did she say anything about what it was that I had come to know about Folly, what to praise, what to say, what to critique, what to pass commentary on? Of course she did, even if only in words formed by me in my mind remembering this. Most of memory is fiction, no? Of course . . . Angular features--she had sharp features but an uncommon set of them, what some might call beauty, yet others an unusual attractiveness, either of course admitting that her good looks were both uncommon and unconventional. The fool's question begs why, why, all the time asking why, why, why once again, he asks with conviction, I am he; he is I as I am she as I am we as I am them as I am another he and another he and another he, each one creeping it his petty paces along the route in pursuit of knowing, in pursuit of the Truth, which I still believe in, having made up my mind a long time ago that Truth was a destination for which the journey was the most important, the most immediate . . . it is a compass direction, you know--we steer by it, or we used to. Now we're adrift in shit's ocean without a compass and no longer any knowledge of the stars . . . torn sails, no oars. Knowing no doubt as to why he should ask his question why, every fool faces what he needs to see the way he sees foolishly, seeing what he needs to face, when without gain, to gain, to increase, the horrors of the mind (the bourgeois mind) when it eclipses all other views as it also tries to pass itself off as not only in itself free, but in itself freeing, the most freeing and the most open social structure, social order, social . . . what then must I do, must I say, must I determine, must I argue . . . bullshit! The most of what? The least of what? How so the measuring? How could it be otherwise for the fool but to see as he knows he sees what he needs to see the way he has said to himself time and again and again, no gain, the ironies we speak without knowing them . . . nothing is the same, ever the same, identical has nothing to do with identity in spite of what every father thinks for his son; but what is the same; truth finds its expression in tautologies, I am I; I am you? Identifiableness? I was exactly like my father in every way I was different, I remember having heard or read somewhere . . . what remains is the puzzle . . . puzzled? Who are you? I sometimes ask myself ion the mirror, never really needing to know. Are you, you, yourself every time you are . . . anywhere, every place you are . . . any-when? Yes, who you are to you--which you are you whenever you ask? I ask you; I ask myself, too, in the A Quarterly Review

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mirror, not every morning, not every night,. not every time I go to wash my hands . . . washing my hands of all this that has to do with finding out who I am--who does not know this? Are you your original self--what is this original self, or is it, Self ? When is it that that happens to you? Originality of plot was not something that Shakespeare treasured. It sometimes never happens to others, discovering this original self. But then others are not you, not me, who are they--these others? In the tribe, the mind excludes others. Only you, never to anyone else, how could that be, for you or for me to be what either of us could be to anyone else, only what we are to ourselves? I did not ask her. I might have thought what else to say. I paused. Who are you in the mirror that you are not in my eyes? If she wanted to know really badly, as if she could not wait for a reply, she would not even venture to expect an answer. I paused again. Ah! Silence. Not golden, though? Music without pause is not music, cannot be music--silence and sound have to . . . coalesce. No one knows who I am, I am certain. I watch a seagull on the sands matted by the wakes sweeping the sands again and again; lowtide. I stand and watch him run up to the water's edge and then rapidly retreat from each oncoming wake. It is not summer unless I spend a week in Montauk, unless we spend a week there, a week by the ocean, on the sands, in the surf, by the sea, under the sky, the clouds and sun and sea gulls and the Hoo-Doos and the echoes of the waves off the walls of the cliffs of Shadmoor on our way to Ditch Plains to watch the surfers surf. Waves come; I stumble; I totter and almost fall as my feet are sucked under the surf's sands, rapidly rushing, the wake of a wave back to the sea. To see or not to sea--you see what I have done there with see and sea, how we come together . . . what I see in the sea I see with my eyes closed, primordial, foreboding, I used to imagine that the ocean was all about the fear of the unknown, all responsible for keeping the night light on. I am so glad that I have more than a nightlight on in my head--I would have to have more than a night light on . . . I stopped. I recollect a time I was imagining she was only going to pause and then continue speaking . . . what was she going to say--I am certain now that it is important to know what she was going to say, in my mind, she does not continue, but she did, I certain I was certain enough to remember . . . I put my pen down. I closed my journal. I picked up the copy of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy that was on the reading table next to the chair I was sitting in, writing. I did not open it. In a few moments, I put it back from where I picked it up. I walked to the window in my room and looked out onto the roofs below the hill on which my house stood. I took a breath, an audible one. I stepped back a step. I closed the curtain. I turned and went for the door. I said to myself under my breath that I was hungry, that I wanted to eat that I needed to eat, that I was wondering how long it was going to be before I got to eat. I wanted lunch. To eat or not to eat is not the question but one among many incidental questions that are as important existentially as any question of suicide or being versus becoming, other questions of ontology, all of them wrapped up in one or another metaphysics. I had a professor who asked me if I had one, a metaphysics, or better put, she revised afterwards, do I know what my metaphysics is, and she said is. She was the daughter of a famous twentieth century philosopher. I won't tell you who he is, the latter, or who she was, the former, the professor who asked me if I had one, if I

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knew what mine was because everyone has one whether they think of it or not, whether they spend time in forming it--formulating it? Yes, everyone has a metaphysics, I remember a Ms. Ariel saying in an undergraduate seminar saying? Everyone has a metaphysics . . . metaphysics is not what the Positivists claimed that it was, nor does it deserve the fate it has suffered in the latter pat of the 20th century, nor anything at the hands of Post Structuralists or Post-post Structuralists, and I am not going to go into this any further, not farther than this line. But what I am going to have for lunch is a present question, perhaps at the moment more important than whether I be or I become. Metaphysics is not a discussion of how many sprites can fit on the head of a pin, but is a discussion of the foundations of reality--and I know you say, no it's not . . . that assertion turning to a question? Is there a metaphysics of eating? Where would this wind up in your hands? Whose hands? Not yours? No, in my hands? What is it that happens to a subject in the hands of . . . in a different place? What does place have to do with being? I think that I want to dam it up. To just stop the flow--I used to like bending a garden hose that was onfull flow to watch what happened to the hose that was behind the kink in the flow . . . I think I will have sushi lunch at the place I like up on the avenue near my home, where I live, by a small bay that looks out onto a beautiful bridge, a necklace of jewels hung in the night I remember someone saying someone had said she had heard someone else say he had remembered his girlfriend saying her cousin from Provence had said one time visiting how many decades ago . . . and their special rolls are good and the special on the special rolls is even better . . . than what is there to say but that I will have the three roll lunch with soup, miso, white miso . . . yes, it will be enough for me. I won't have a small sake with it as I might have thought I could have had, would want to have at any time--no, I do not want to have any sake with lunch this day, and for no reason, yes, none--certainly not for any of the rationalizations I find in our recurrent Puritanism--what is this that I am now saying, one tangent after another, every line consists of an infinity of points, therefore, every circumference consists of an infinity of points therefore there are an infinity of tangents to intersect these infinite number of points on the circumference, correct . . . what does this have to do with correctness or incorrectness? Yes, spicy white tuna, spicy kani, eel avocado--green tea . . . the sun and the moon travel a lot as I do, as we do, as humans have for millennia, eternal travelers, or just infinite ones? Life lived is as a boat adrift? Direction-less? There is a difference between eternity and infinity--time and space are of the infinite; eternity is outside time and space, all of It, one--past, present and future space-time, One. I have been adrift; I have often made reference to our existence--and I am not now using this as a synonym for being--what is it that I used to say. We are a lot like drift wood found on the beach . . . in time, in space, in our existence, in what we call the larger collection of events, Life or History or something else other than either . . . if you travelled in a what could appear as a straight line in space for infinity, you would come back to where you started--there are no straight lines in space--straight lines exist only in geometry textbooks?

A Quarterly Review

Falling Leaf Review

Fall 2017

NAUSEA A fire hydrant by any other name will still be a urinal for male dogs. I read Sartre’s Nausea when I was in college. It wasn’t for a class; it was for me. I had already read “The Republic of Silence” and No Exit--I saw an English language production of the latter when I was still an undergraduate, Hell is other people. I had read No Exit in English. I picked up a copy of it in French years later, used books, a shop near NYU. Existential hell; I don’t know how I could have made what I am writing here like his novel--I don’t think I wanted to; no, not really. I remember the form of the novel, in journals, entries kept, observation made. I observe much; to serve Ob. Who is Ob? Sounds like Oz in a way, but no way will I go there. I could never tell where my journals began and where they ended. When they were sketchbooks--sketches of objects or places or persons in lines either drawn in pen or pencil--or a sketchbook as in keeping sketches of poems, as we said back when we were in college, those of us who were writers or writing, either to save our lives or save ourselves from having to face the fact we needed to get jobs we were going to hate, which is what most people do, in fact, virtually all of us hate our jobs. I wrote; it was me; genre came later, not before. I kept sketches of poems I had collected in journals for decades; decades of writing poetry I haven’t revised, pages and pages of poetry in notebooks in boxes in closets. Very queer not to publish them. I still want this culture to explain to me why I can1’t kill anyone I feel like killing, I mean, there is no God, there is no Truth, there are no little, minor ‘t’ truths, so what is there to keep me from killing, from exercising the will to power? A stronger will to power? That seems a lot like Nature--we do prefer what we think is natural to what is civilized, don't we? Erasing the boundaries is like breaking down all the walls, which is like dispensing with the ability ot use categories which is exactly like not being able to use a hammer and nail or a pair of pliers. Imagine not being able to use a frying pan, everything going from the pan to the fire, no boundaries around the skillet? As if anyone would prefer to sleep in the rain rather than under a roof; as if everyone needed to dispense with shelter, with their homes because they are less natural than the Nature they imagine they love. I wrote fiction and non-fiction virtually on the same line sometimes one running right into another without a break to distinguish where one began and the other ended. What is the goal? What am I shooting for--to shoot or not to shoot, my finger's on the trigger. So far, what is different from any other journal? I did not always mark the date and or day or year or time or mention the weather or orient my writing as to place or season. Sartre’s protagonist is, as I am, nauseous. He suffers this nausea in a way not simply as one experiences it in the gut, something after eating, or something from some other illness with the symptoms of nausea and likely diarrhea. He is sick, sick like people get when they have had enough of whatever it is they have had too much of. Lines, again, lines and lines of words. It’s amazing that lines on the road keep people from driving over them, from driving into on-coming traffic. Now we know why writing in school must be within the margins. The world as it is makes me sick, but not as sick as America makes me, certainly not as sick as her politics make me, certainly not as sick as her Democrats make me, not as sick as the Republicans make me, almost as sick as our President makes me, more sick than usual for how Presidents often make me sick . . . and we will still in reflex say the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks were wrong. But then 1

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Russians make me sick more than most, not nearly as much as Russian Ashkenazi who I happen to like a lot more than I do American Ashkenazim. Sartre’s protagonist is sick in a way I have been sick, not exactly unto death, but with my life, my living, my family, my friends, my thoughts, my experiences, what I see, the world surrounding me, the world surrounds each of us, and each of us part of the surrounding of everybody else. What does everyone else have to do with me, do with how sick I am? I am not sick to death at the moment, as another protagonist I know--protagonist? How so this entrance into telling you-whoever you are, whoever you may be, become from having read. I love reading . . . wandering a city named for a woman? Yes, another protagonist buried as he is under layers of societal norms, manners, gestures, affectations, received ideas, patterns of speech, each of us myself as a member of a speech community, what idiom do I speak? Yes, what do I think? To think or not to think is what Hamlet is really saying, being as Cartesian as he is. What do I want? All wanting is desire, desire is another form for will--do I choose to do when thinking is not enough? What to believe when faith has disappeared--do you need faith for any belief ? I think so. Or do I not choose to do and thus just believe because I can do that, flip the switch. All believing for us has become adjunct to doing--here, here in this society country place what have we in words to express where we are--where are we? I could have asked but do not. What about the ideas the gestures the manners I have received learned imitated? Monkey me see, monkey me do. Who has taught me the things I use the most, need the most, love the most? Everybody is underground. Everybody a runaway slave? I am? I know too many AfricanAmericans who might be offended by my discussions of the perils of selfhood in analogy with slavery. Everybody everywhere is a member of the resistance whether one likes it or not; everyone buried alive? I once saw a male chimpanzee bring a banana to a female chimpanzee. It was confirmed for me that primates bear gifts when they want sex. I was thinking the other day about my Dad, the corporeal Dad who is no longer, has no more body, is reduced or relegated to memory . . . ashes, ashes . . . . Why would I think memory is a reduction? My dad was reduced to ashes. His body burned and his bones crushed and I have to take it on faith that what I got in the urn was the remains of his body. I sometimes imagine that I could think that I was the kind of person who could indeed kill another person--most murderers have very little imagination, though, I thought one day. I have too much imagination to become a murderer, no matter how much I would like to kill someone--and I have wanted to kill people, or just have understood that under different circumstances there are a few people who would be dead, and that it would have been easy to kill them and almost get away with it . . . I do faith in the efficiency of contemporary law enforcement. It used to be easier to kill your supervisors, for instance, how many years ago. I could still do it--and pretty much not get caught. The trick is never to get anyone to help you, and wait a very long time for revenge. How cold must it get? To be able to kill another person, you would have to have so very little imagination; it’s really a lack of creativity that leads to murder. Many have taught me to think as I think--yet I choose what I choose. Why do I choose as I do? I do not ask. I don’t want to say I honor them, the people who have taught me, because if I began to talk like the girls I went to college with, I might puke and perhaps drown in my puke as I almost did one night having come home terribly drunk I was lying on my back throwing up onto my face and back down my throat his mother had come home and beat him awake with a sneaker to get him out of bed having the hardest time just trying to turn him over as big as he had gotten at fifteen--his mother was small. She saved his life.

A Quarterly Review

Falling Leaf Review

Fall 2017

For me, revenge is not murder, but justice, execution. You have to jknow that that is how most revenge homicides are committed. If my father and my teacher were drowning I’d save my father, there’s no teacher regardless of affection or recognition of his contribution or her contribution to the development of my mind, who could be saved before I would save my father or mother. I am, you are, he is . . . the nausea I have herein is also a symptom, but one derived from seeing clearly, having one’s eyes opened, being awake as the Buddha said to the man who asked him over and over who he was, what he was, on the road, meeting the Buddha. Knowing the Truth is in itself a nauseating experience. So is losing weight, through diet or diet and exercise, digesting your own fat is sickening; how many toxins are filtered through the fat, are present in the fat of an animal. When I don’t eat for too long I get sick to the point I think I’m going to throw up. Yes, I am sick, as I said. I said it at the kitchen table sitting with my wife over coffee and toast with butter and raspberry jam, thinking again about what I had said. Who is he, though, this person I was going to talk about, having, as he does, a like nausea with mine? I could say that he paused, that he waited for a response, that he was a man not so unlike any other man, including me. How could I not include myself in anything I say write think none again, the responses that remain plentiful even though they stay unspoken. He thought about saying the same words again, he did not. It is I. Who I am here is who I am on the page? What I say in the way I say it, who he becomes in the telling, the explaining? You ask. It doesn’t matter, I say he would say. I agree. I am me, I am I, I am you and I am he and him, I am her as I am she, she is who she is when she is who I am when I am the author of her--how do any of us avoid becoming many others other than who each of us is when we insist on limiting the I to a rigid and unwavering singularity? A singularity in astrophysics is what has been called a black hole, a star whose matter has collapsed creating a density so great that gravitation increases to the point where not even light can escape. Yeah, I want to be singular. Would you have the courage to gouge out your eyes as did Oedipus? She asks me. She who is with him, she who is near him, she who stays over his apartment until morning, they are having coffee when she asks what she asks how she asks it of him. How many stories have you heard about a guy or a gal, a man here or a woman there, from someone recollecting, I knew a girl once, and then everything recollected about her follows without you hearing her name, perhaps she has none, maybe she is every girl, Everywoman as there once was Everyman. Is it courage? I ask. You don’t think it would take courage. I say She says. I guess so, but it would have to be something else before he got to the stage of doing the deed which would require this courage. There would have to be courage of convictions, a sense of duty or responsibility that would go before this cutting out of the eyes. Speaking of whom by whom for whom, I do here, I have done so before, elsewhere, other pages of other stories told, what I tell, choose to say. None of us have what Oedipus had. We can’t conceive of what he does, Can you? I know I can’t, not really, what would I do? Do I think I could do what he did? No? We talk-talk around the idea of responsibility, but so long as it is another person who needs to take it, or how we do take responsibility but in words that circle around the notion without ever penetrating to the heart of the idea. There isn’t nor has there ever been any age, any culture, any society more full of shit than this one today here in America. We stink through future ages, for all the world to smell. I’m sick. I say.

A Quarterly Review

Falling Leaf Review

Fall 2017

He read it when he was an undergraduate; I did when I was an undergraduate. I had discovered existentialism when he was a young college student, then reading Sartre, De Beauvoir, Gabriel Marcel, and Camus, as I had, would have agin afterwards. Yes, I read the same as you might have suspected. I read them in college where and when I first contacted them, thinking to myself that I was an Existentialist, saying this I can’t imagine how many times--no one I went to school with thought of himself or herself as an Existentialist. What does it mean to say this? He says so much, writes so much he forgets so much. Who is he? You ask again. I say some more. I have always read what any protagonist reads. I used to ask the same question of myself (himself) in the mirror every morning, sometimes addressing myself as he, sometimes as you, sometimes as we, did I ever use they for myself, I could have for the selves, the plurality that I was that I remain. Who is she? I have asked, this she for him, he for her, reciprocal, as for me, always she, she, she everywhere she was, she had, she did, she loved, she liked, she hated . . . all as too before, but no questioning now. I cannot be Rosalind or Gertrude or Electra or Antigone because I am a man? He wonders who she is but doesn’t take the time to further his inquiry--he wonders and that’s all of it, no more, just wonder without question without answer. He no longer asks, hasn’t for a long time. He hasn’t asked why not for slightly less. He is who he is, he says. He has said this for some time. He has not cared much about explaining for almost as long. What does it mean to say that he is who he is--what he is another reasoning? I agree. I do the same. I have done the same for longer than he has. Questions follow everyone everywhere anyone has wondered about being and not being, to be this or to be that as opposed to not being anything at all, not to be, period, completely nothing, he used to say. What his name is, he used to insist, could not be more irrelevant--what mine is you do not need to know, unless he had a name like Ishmael, which you could call him, he used to say, just as he would also say, no, there’s no reason to call me Ishmael, or call me Hamlet, or to call me Electra or Orestes or anyone else you might think of calling me, he said, as I have too said. Every woman he has known has been Dido, Magdalena, Mary, Clytemnestra, Electra, Penelope, Medea, Phaedra, Helen, Antigone, Viola, Juliet, Rosalind, Desdemona, Laura, Beatrice, Isolde, Catherine Earnshaw, Guinevere, Gertrude, Ophelia, Eve, Lilith, Isis, Mardou Fox, La Maga, Jane Eyre, Moll Flanders, Clarissa, Clarissa, clear water, which one, both of them, et cetera, et cetera, all together all at once and none at all ever at the same time. A question to ask--perhaps I can ask this of me. Justine? He used to say, I am Hamlet; he did, he said he was Hamlet, but then he would also say he was MacBeth, or that he was Lear. He often referred to other selves he housed; he said everyone housed in his Self other selves. Call me Lear, he said; or call me Narcissus, or call me Aeneas, or Orestes, or Theseus, or Odysseus--yes, he said he would like it if you called him Odysseus, but you could just as easily call him Tom or Mr. Jones, or Heathcliff, or Don Quixote, most assuredly Sancho, Mr. Panza to whom would it be relevant to call him Mr. Panza? Is there a line anywhere in Cervantes that calls Sancho Panza, Mr. Panza? I don’t remember. Nonetheless, he has no name? He is anonymous. I am anonymous. Virginia Woolf had said that the history of Anonymous in literature was the history of Woman’s Literature. If he is anonymous, then he is the history of Women’s literature? What if what he said were from the mouth of John Doe. What if you called him John Doe? Yes, you must call him John Doe. John or Jane Doe is not really anonymous, is he she? The name tag John Doe on the body at the morgue bestows some identity on the otherwise anonymous male corpse. It is a name. It’s just the name given to all males who have no name, or have a name except it is unknown. He is unknown in the way we mean to be known. He is mostly unknown to himself, how could he be otherwise to anyone else A Quarterly Review

Falling Leaf Review

Fall 2017

who is not him? What is in a name? Any name associated with anything says what about what it names. Romeo, dog shit, a fire hydrant is still a urinal for male dogs, you know it would be even if you called a fire hydrant a rose. I am a man named Murphy, why not Murphy, why not Malone, the family name is Grady, from County Kerry, faminie Irish . . . there is no condition that human beings cannot get used to, everything unnameable, the Nausea comes and goes in waves, an ocean of nausea, tides come in and tides go out, storm surges raise the height of the waves sometimes, overcome as you are with this special nausea, especially sickening, how queasy would I have been on the Pequod, on the Bounty, on the Mayflower? I remember one time after having seen a production of Beckett’s Endgame, I met up with friends and drank myself until I puked bile, that brownish yellow acidic fluid that rots the enamel off your teeth in the time it takes you wake up hung over, violent regurgitation he doesn’t feel well, he feels sick, he listens to his stomach gurgling, he listens to the drumming in his head, the pounding in his skull, his empty skull echoing his nausea like Echo, Narcissus. Who feels well today? Could any of us? There’s more to feeling well than personal health; it’s about social wellbeing, the health of a society and its culture--don’t get all high and mighty his mother used to say when he would say what he would about society. No one lives in society, she used to say. Everyone lives in his skin, on his bones, in his head, alone in his soul? Don’t even try to imagine we are well, he would say to her. Everywhere every when, day-in, day-out, nausea, nausea, nausea, just look around you everywhere at everyone every day, a sickness, yet unto and not unto death. Debilitating, it is debilitating in the way it undermines his movements, how he can’t take a step without feeling as if he were going to puke, to fall to the ground and throw up everything he has ever ingested, taken in, ideas, he wants to puke from his head, not his mouth, open his head like Zeus does when he gives birth to whom--who was it he gives birth to out of his head. Mind puke; he wants to puke from his mind. He says again and again that he has it, this kind of nausea, yes, I am about ready to puke, he said. Others would feel the same if they had awareness enough, he thinks. He imagines Electra must have this nausea. he imagines Hamlet must have it. He imagines Othello must give this nausea to himself. He imagines Iago being this Nausea personified. Hamlet must be understood though Sophocles's Electra. Prisms shattered, shattering . . . pieces everywhere. Whatever I can say about him I must be able to say about me, a man not so unlike any other man, but unlike every other, no one is another, all of us other. He is sick in a special way that keeps him sitting here for the time being sipping water too afraid to take a gulp, only little sips, he thinks he needs water, perhaps he is dehydrated, he always gets dizzy and nauseous when he is dehydrated. I do not drink enough water, he says. He gets it more often now, this gastritis too, which is not exactly what he was talking about when talked about this nausea, but the fits of clenching going on in his stomach today, from the inflamed lining he was told, lend themselves to this nausea. What does it mean to say I when telling what needs to be told, what I think I need to say, or he when I think he needs to say what he must want to say. I am who I am; I am he as well, whether I inhabit this he or this he is something I wear. The parallels between mind and body are clear to him. There is a mental nausea, too, you know, a nausea also of soul, sickness unto spiritual death, the death of the soul, maybe for the reasons and in the way the Good Sisters of Saint Therese’s church in Brooklyn tried to impart, depart, they were supposed to pray for the departed you can experience a death of the soul, just as you can a little death when you fuck. That’s not exactly what the Sisters said to me. They were A Quarterly Review

Falling Leaf Review

Fall 2017

focussed on spiritual death. It was their job to guard us against that dying you do when everything inside shuts down, all reason, all feeling. How often he has it is another question, this nausea. He’s talking about a special nausea, neither of mind, nor of body, nor exactly of soul, but perhaps of Self--what are the differences between Self and soul he has not yet delineated for him, let alone enough for you, but he does not intend to leave this in the dark. He has not yet considered if his anonymity lends itself to this nausea he is trying to tell you about, what he says, what he writes. To write or not to write is a serious philosophical question, a serious question of whether he can cure himself of this nausea or not. Do you think he can? Does he or doesn’t he? What does he do or does he not do? He does many things that do not require him to have a name, an identity may not be exactly the same thing. Terrorists with fake passports have identities, no? He is who he is as I have said before about others in one or another circumstance. Who he is when he is where he is how he is to be or not to be by becoming what? He asks, as he has before, always a before, no one is in illo tempore aborigine. He says he becomes; to come to be who he is, has been--he suggests he has always been, an original self trying to follow its nature? Do you imagine there is an original nature, all of it in that time out of origins? You know how all cultures used to be about eternal return, history and cosmos, the cosmogonies we live by, we must live by them. I am that I am before these pages. Yes, as it has become apparent, my name is irrelevant. My ethnicity has no bearing. The religion I was raised in does not matter. How could his? I am we, I have said before. Each of us many players on the stages of life, those stages we walk upon, perform on, as well as those stages that pass in our lives as we move through them, our lives stages, stations, seasons every season a stage. When he has become who he thinks he is, he then can come to be again, but what he becomes again he cannot persist forever. We are not beings of pure actuality; we have nearly limitless potential, but not in the way you think, not in the way we mean it, but only in the way it is meant when pure actuality is a reserved being for God. Only God is pure actuality, in no part potential. This is not word play, you know. Nothing is just a matter of words as we like to say, as if words did not matter, were not matter, no thing, just a mere word. Yet words are never mere, they are more than we understand when we say the things we do about the things we need to say, around and around, everything returns. Breezes breeze by; all winds wind; to wind as in winding a watch, as in winding roads, is what the wind does. I wind up my father’s watch; the wind winds around and around. When and where and why and from what is he? He wonders. He does not wonder. He sometimes does one more often than the other, wondering, wondering, wondering, and then not at all. Sometimes he wonders more intensely than at other times. I am that I am I think God says to Moses, he remembers, I recall. Call me whatever you want. The gray skies for days are getting to me. We are all of us God-like in our minds, are we not? Isn’t it mind in the image of God were made? What is this God Yawh the Hebrews called He who has no name: No Name is God? Everything was by the Eternal for the Hebrews. God was outside of time, outside of space. Jesus is the Word--in the beginning was the Word and the Word was God. I like words; I play with words; I allow words to play about me too. Language, I love language. What does it mean to say I love language? I love wine. Is that true? Do I love wine? What does language help us say? I love cunt pussy vagina. Chimps don’t have Gods, or do they? We all saw Planet of the Apes when we were boys, my friends and I. Jesus was the Word become flesh. Isn’t Yawh the Light of Eternal Mind? I’m also wondering about the Heat of Eternal Cunt. To fuck or not to fuck has been my to be or not. I sing of arms and the man, I remember my father reading Virgil to me, in English and in Latin. A Quarterly Review

Falling Leaf Review

Fall 2017

This is not for any of you, then, who either cannot read or write, or do not read and write; and there are many more of you in these United States who cannot read, than any of us who can read would dream of if we were to dream of all the things that were in the heaven and earth of reading and writing. Those who do not read and write at the level I infer might as well be among those who cannot. Hamlet is my brother, I used to say. I read him, my hypocrite reader. If you ask why I say what I say then you are a bigger hypocrite than I thought. Superficially skimming the pages is not what reading is. What kind of Gods do you imagine Chimps having? You can spell your names, certainly. Taxpayers would be up in arms in America if graduates from High School could not sign their names correctly after receiving 12 years of state funded education. It used to be a way to get out of jury duty, spelling your name incorrectly, acting like an idiot, and I guess acting like an idiot is more acceptable these days, more people idiots the norm. What then is an idiot? Idiocy one of the most pervasive human conditions. Aristotle told us that an idiot was someone without general or social concerns, and I’m not talking about the concerns manufactured by monied elite controlled media. Aristotle’s idiot though is not a clinical idiot, or the old clinical idiot, the once ago term used. “An idiot according to Aristotle is a kind of solipsist. For most Americans today under forty, there is no reality outside their minds. There is also no Truth or little truths, that’s little ‘t’ truths. We live in an overarching doubt thinking that this will free us. We’re like teenagers who first discover that life thoughts feelings the world are not each of them full up literal. This is what Dostoevsky means when he calls Myshkin an Idiot; he has no guile, he is a social misfit in the way he cannot succeed among the cunning, the shrewd, the intrigue that others everywhere around him plot. These are things of the world. Christ asks you to be in the world and not of it--and don’t tell me that you don’t understand what I mean. It’s the biggest difference between Catholics and Jews, you know I was taught . . . Jews are so much more of the world, or so I was taught, even when they are not in the world. Aristotle says that a man without general or social concerns is an idiot. A man without these is not a political animal. He is an idiot, wrapped in himself, not necessarily in the way an egoist is wrapped up in himself. Pasternak has reserved some of this for Zhivago; Forest Gump succeeds in spite of his idiocy. With literacy as debased as it is, you can’t imagine that the alphabetics we support has garnered any respect from anyone anywhere in the world who is literate. Literacy is an archipelago. It doesn’t matter if you can spell. My son’s history teacher can’t spell and can barely write intelligible sentences on his exams, and that’s at a Special School and in an Honors class, he said. He continues to feel nauseous. I get dizzy when I do, or do I when I get dizzy? It is alphabetics and not literacy we teach. Alphabetics is part of the program, part of receiving dogma. I can spell my name; and even that inability is no longer a guarantee of being excluded from Jury Duty. All you needed once was to misspell your name, write like an imbecile and you were sent home. Now, the morons are on juries; the ones who really can’t spell their names are deciding cases in the courts. Help us Lord! We should be saying, I say as I have said as I have said he has said as he has said independent of my saying so or not. It’s Jeremiah’s Jerusalem. Is he independent of me? No dependency, trees that fall in the woods with no one there to hear them fall do not make a sound. Sound is something created in an ear; ears create sound. No hearing ears, no sound. The falling tree makes a compression wave, but there needs to be an ear to transmit that wave as sound.

A Quarterly Review

Falling Leaf Review

Fall 2017

Don’t imagine that literacy is not debased. We have brought the bottom up in a way it had not been, but in the process we have exerted a gravitational pull downward on the top. More of us are functionally literate, but fewer of us are better than that, right up to the top being lower than it has been in all the history of literacy. You wonder why we are in the shit we are in? I asked. A person would have to at least be able to read at the eighth grade, if he received twelve years of schooling in this city of ours, New York, and you can’t imagine that much more than that is attainable by any less than half of the students that go through the city’s high schools, systematic under education is the way we work it in NYC and over all in America where freedom is slavery, reading is drudgery, and being as mindless as you can be without killing yourself is setting yourself free, liberty, liberty, liberty, he said with what he sensed at the moment of speech was conviction. He meets in interview with one supervisor after another supervisor of ESOL programming here in NYC and the passive arrogance is amazing--and how full of themselves they really are, astounds him . . . and how little they actually know about language, about mind, about anything other than how to appear as if they know how to sound as if they know what they are talking about, every one of them spitting out jargon, parroting one cliche after another trite explication of what it is they imagine they believe they think they should be doing . . . each of them wanting ESOL certificates in place of experience, successful experience they couldn't codify or quantify--not that they are qualified to quantify what could be quantified about what is mostly qualified. I know you read the tabloids without difficulty, if you can read as high as the eighth grade. The Post and News are not written at a level much higher than fourth. The New York Times Sunday Magazine is another thing if you read only around the eighth grade, sometimes that won’t go so smoothly, but if can negotiate the text of the NY Times Magazine, you will feel yourself special, far above the crowd. So what do we mean when we say someone is functionally literate? How sick is that? It makes me sick, so it is, sick, if you can understand that this is not supposed to be women who are pregnant get nauseous in the morning and sometimes puke. I feel like I have to puke. I pause, what did I do that he would have done . . . I remember reading Dostoevsky. Notes From Underground. I am underground. Everyone’s underground, underground as in buried alive, underground as in hiding, underground as in the dark, another way to express the cave we have all come from. I also remembered from College, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. We are all retreating back into our caves, preferring the shadows inside to things in daylight. I have spoken of this I could not count how many times. Buried alive? Living under the ground, a mole's life is for me, any one of us says every hour every day. Literacy is dead . . . I can't even figure out how to tell you how fucking stupid most of the people I meet with in positions of petty authority are . . . and they want people as stupid as themselves, certainly never anyone smarter . . . or smart enough to do the job . . . only limitedly smart so as to need the supervisor, always to be just dumb enough . . . but then none of this should surprise. What passes for education today in America makes him nauseous, but was it ever really much, much better? I know we did read more than we do, and required of reading greater capacity at literacy whereby today we play a shell game with reading. America is a sickening country. We are fat and weak and stupid . . . and he knows how most people today love to include all caucasians in America in what they are now referring to as White People, another

A Quarterly Review

Falling Leaf Review

Fall 2017

bureaucratically created demographic altered or reconfigured from what was once sociologically White, which not all Caucasians were identified as, nor identified themselves as . . . The Olympics are a charade--where did that come from? These are positive assertions. It’s certainly not negative to say we are gross in these fore mentioned ways. If I said we were not fat, not weak, not lazy, not stupid--this would be negative. A B C is the best we can do, but we are fast coming to a place where we are managing the letters of the alphabet as well as many are able to manipulate the numerals in addition, subtraction, division and multiplication. Just imagine how many more semiliterate cops there are with guns. Aren’t cops really fatter and less literate than when they were just fat and not too smart? She asked. Anyone who has graduated high school is supposed to be able to fill out applications for credit cards, but soon this will fade. Today’s high school graduates can at least address letters that contain nothing you have written other than your name on the check, she said. Oh! So someone can fill out a check. That’s a fucking achievement, he said. If you can fill out deposit and withdrawal slips at the bank, but you cannot read, you cannot write, not in any way considered literate anywhere but in this debased and overtly crass America--we know the truth, she said. We just turn away from it, he said. What would I have said if I were he--he is I, of course you would have to conclude? America is crass, she said. We no longer provide students with trades in our public high schools. Everyone must become a bourgeois drone, just semiliterate enough to work in the bee hives of bureaucracy that mismanage foreign production because finance capitalists don’t want to produce for themselves and don’t care where their profits come from and care even less that less and less money gets filtered back through our economy, he said. Thirty per cent of New York City High School students drop out and that’s because most of the teachers with degrees in Education instead of real disciplines of knowledge are pedagogic monkeys. Teachers are to blame, but that’s because the state’s to blame. We have all of us become slaves to the state, the idea we have of the state, of serving the state, of abdicating our role as a People for the tiny bit more lucrative and the laughably more secure role as a good Publican, one who serves the state as a member of the Public, she said. What's the pedagogic equivalent of consumerism in a consumerist society? Failure! There is no writing for slaves and we are all of us now slaves, she said. We are slaves to our desires. We are slaves to those in power. We are slaves to an idea we will never realize. Slavery is the new democracy, a unilateral commonality everywhere for everyone whenever we get together all us in our trees swinging like monkeys to our immediate delight, he said. Society is a jungle, society is a zoo, society is a prison, she said. Pick one; it’s any one of the same as the others in a way not immediately obvious to the man who reads the way he has contemporaneously been taught to read, she said. Freedom is slavery, she said. Do you imagine we are free? She asked. You can’t imagine we are free or that we are not living the Orwellian nightmare, or that Wall Street does not own Congress, or the oil companies do not own politicians, she said. Are they that naive? We are slaves in our thoughts, slaves in our sorrow, slaves in our joy, our meagre ability to be happy rather than just satisfied as an infant is satisfied at his mother’s tit, every day every hour everywhere our mouths formed for the tit. We are slaves in our thoughts, our minds that bind. Our thoughts the manacles that chain us, she said. The Bitch Goddess's tit is shriveled.

A Quarterly Review

Falling Leaf Review

Fall 2017

We are the origin of our unhappiness, he said. She said that that was not true. She said that unhappiness has a way of finding you no matter how much you try to avoid it. He said that in trying to avoid unhappiness we often bring on unhappiness. She asked him if I believed what I was saying. I told her that sometimes I did and that sometimes I did not. There were times, I said, when I did not know what I believed and that what I thought was how I could argue for both sides and that somehow I could talk my way into another way of thinking about this, the origin of unhappiness is the root of all psychology. He added that Freud was in search of the origins of unhappiness, as many in the nineteenth century were in search of origins. The Romantics were in search of the origins of the Folk, others were in search of the origins of language or families of languages, yet others in search of the origins of the earth, Lyell, for instance, and for the origins of species, of course, like Darwin. It was a preoccupation. That origin of the Folk lead the Nazis later in the first half of the twentieth century to pick up this idea and use it for other purposes. The Aryans were the hypothesized first people of the Indo-Aryan language group, what we later call the Indo-European group. The Nazis forever tainted the word Aryan, he said. These Indo-Aryans spoke an earlier and hypothesized ancestor to all the Indo-European languages, the fore parent of all the parents of the language families, the fore runner of all the European language families. Latin is the forefather of Italian and Spanish and French, for instance, and the fore parent of Latin was Proto-Italic, and the fore runner of this was yet another language traced back to an inferred origin in the Caucasus, and this language is also the ancestor of Hindi and Persian and Ancient Greek and all the current Slavic languages as well as the Germanic ones, which English is a part, he said. The root of all psychology is in me, she said. I am the origin and arbiter of happiness or unhappiness, he added. He wished he could see things differently than he did. She did as well, wanting him not to say what he sees, what he feels how he should think, how it might make more sensitive people feel everyone is today walking on eggshells. That’s what politeness has come to, asking everyone to fear speaking the truth for whom it might offend. We fear offending more than we fear the lie, more than we fear living a lie, she said. To lie or not to lie is not even the question, I say. But when to lie and how much to lie about is the question. We are a culture of liars in a world of lying; it is worse than it has been in a long, long time. There is no Truth, no Absolute, no transcendence; there are no longer even any truths, small truths, not big ‘T’ Truth, but just a truth here, a truth there, the truth about this, the truth about that, so help us God, we need to be able to tell the truth; however, we do not believe it is possible or if we believe it is possible, we no longer think it is necessary, I say. A publican will always take it in the ass from power and from money or from the state. I’m not disparaging anal intercourse as an expression of love, but aligning this metaphoric anal rape as an act like that expressed in our prisons or among male gorillas, I say. When there were sanitation strikes in London, the people came and dumped their garbage on the steps of Parliament. Would we do the same? No, I say. Gandhi said that it was preferable for a man of violence to commit violence if that’s what was in his heart than it was for another man to wear the cloak of non violence to cover his impotence. For the former Gandhi said there was hope, for the latter there was none. We are the latter, I say. We should know this is true and not because he says so, or because I say so, because if either of us had never said so, it would still be true, I say I said. Why would Oedipus kill the first man old enough to be his father that he has a violent argument with?

A Quarterly Review

Falling Leaf Review

Fall 2017

He didn’t say anything. It seemed as if she wanted to say something else, maybe a little something about how he should have remembered, how he should have headed the warning, but he escaped the warning he said, he had left his home and his parents, the only mother and father he had ever known, it wasn’t as if he was a Japanese infant adopted by Bahamian parents. Words we say, words we mean, words, words and more words, never really, though, do they, say what we mean at? How can they without first there being some negotiable contract of words in language, meaning, what to mean, how to mean, when to mean, to be mean, the mean’s between, you know? Nothing else, nothing more, what more could anyone have said when all the saying at says not what we define by putting words around things. We think of words as if they were things, sticks and stones are things words I was told by my mother were never going to harm me,” he said. “That’s not what we say today think today react to today the words we think are things, they seem to be in every seeming I face. What do we face? I asked. I paused. I love to face her, face her looking at her, face her embracing her, face her cunt as in a kind of fucking or humping as well as looking. To face or not to face, to nose or not to nose, to lip, to mouth, to drink, to swallow, to taste, to everything anything else to be done when we do what we do, I said. A long pause. We are Uncle Tom’s Grandchildren. America is a plantation. Everyone must smile like blacks on the plantation. We are the niggers of power and money. Obama’s not a nigger, but I am in this America of the rich, by the rich and for the rich. We have no hope for freedom because we have no way to defend it or define it. We are never more inarticulate than when it comes to defining or defending our freedom. We have no desire for freedom. Everything is in what we want, and what we want is very far from being free, I said. We understand only appetite, I say. Liberty is license to us. We each had a tacit license with each other, how we felt, how we responded, in word or in action, how we touched one another, caressed each other, held the other as close as was possible. The times we’d walk the beach holding hands in the morning were the sweetest, waiting for the sun to come up, just several or minutes before dawn, the sky already having gone from black to blue-black to lighter and lighter shades of blue, I say. Bread and circuses everywhere in America: Hollywood, TV, Theater, pop music, what else have we in the way we placate the masses in America with ever debasing forms of entertainment. Mass is mass is mob is not a people, the great social en-masse. We pretend to fear communism, yet there’s nothing more communistic than our pop culture now. Please don’t imagine Hollywood is an opponent to this. Look at the popularity of the Help and see how the received ideas of the culture popularly reinforce dogmas that are not relevant to our social reality. We are always out of focus. Let’s continue to preach the gospel of racism as if it were 1963, all the while we sell a set of values that says the only authentically way to be black is to be a nigger. In any society where moist of its people had any dignity or self-respect, Hollywood actors would fear for their lives, would act differently because they could so easily be killed, hung from the marquee of any movie theater naked and abused. If Sambo is not now the latest rap artist, then no one ever was. How much more Uncle Tom can you get than you name him, it doesn’t matter? He asked. He paused. Rap as subversion? He asked. Don’t make me laugh. Rap is the space created by power to control subversion.

A Quarterly Review

Falling Leaf Review

Fall 2017

I want to drown in her, I later imagined, as I would daydream of her, day dream her, at night, sitting awake in bed staring at the headlights off the ceiling across as the cars outside on the two way avenue pass intermittently. I thought about her legs, about her lips, tasting wine in her mouth, caressing her tits, my father told me that a man must reach for a woman’s tits as he would for broken glass, carefully, slowly, gently. I thought about her cunt, the lips of her cunt, the wet of her cunt, the warm never ending of her cunt. My father did not tell how to reach for a woman’s cunt. I imagined you would have to reach for the cunt as you would her tits, approach the clitoris as you would her nipples. Reveries about her vagina notwithstanding the desire to fuck is love, to love or not to love, there is no such thing as just sex. Sex is never really separate from love. I guess we haven’t guessed right about love and sex and the limits of desire, I said. Fuck responsibly doesn’t seem to go hand in hand with drink responsibly, I said. There are many different kinds of love, degrees of intensity, but love is love is love and it does make the world go round, it is, as Mozart said, the soul of genius, why do we degrade love and loving by thinking that there is such a thing as meaningless sex, or that sex can be without love? What about rape someone asks? Is that sex? No, it’s not sex. Sex is consensual, right. What I feel whenever I think of her--that wasn’t really a question, overcome as I am, as I have been, I overcome myself when I remember, everything about collecting souvenirs is about collecting memories. They are one. I overcome myself. I am overcome by my thoughts of her, to think of her is to lose myself, to lose myself, this ego I am, I say I have said as I have for . . . the nausea comes back, comes again without warning, arising like a particle in a vacuum of space-time. Media managed America is the center of the Global Village, emphasis on ‘village,’ but with light at the end of the tunnel. I remember my mother saying, and I mean always saying, all the time saying, almost every day, I hear her voice clearly I think the way we imagine we do when dreaming. Imagine hearing that every day. I imagine some friends who ate hot dogs every day. They still do or they never do. I collected a box of super 8s my mother and father had made when I was a boy. I’ve made a series of silent Super8 films in color of the waves at the beach myself. I used my father’s old Bell and Howell Super8 camera, the one he used for the movies I collected from my parents after my mother died. The films are not cut I need to splice them I don’t have the means to do that. I need to have them transferred to DVD by the Video store guys up on the Avenue a few blocks away. I can do all the cutting and pasting I need to do on my MacBook Pro. I think I’ll spring for the money for the film editing program that Apple produces. It’s about 300 dollars or is it 399 and really 400 dollars? That’s not really a lot, now is it? Not with what it allows you to do. The light out in Montauk was different from in New York, on New York beaches, what is surrounding us on each beach contributes to the color of everything else, reflection, refraction, the sky is wider, broader, bigger here there in Montauk. Waves of water, waves of light, waves of nausea overcoming me, I remember when I overcome myself, by overcoming myself, I remember. What is in the word nausea? By any other name it would still be sickening. “It was as much rhetorical as interrogative. I am overcome with desire, preoccupied with images of her obliquely seen when we make love. Have sex? What is the difference? The desire to fuck I’ve said before is love. I liked looking into her eyes when we did it. To do or not to do; you know what that is. To die, to sleep, you get the euphemisms, no? Dying is not a euphemism for orgasm; la petite morte, as the French say is what it is. I thought about Oedipus, I thought about Hamlet. I thought about Electra and I thought about Orestes. Hamlet is Orestes and Electra. Shakespeare’s genius is putting them in one character. Aeschylus has one protagonist with the chorus; Sophocles has two protagonists at a A Quarterly Review

Falling Leaf Review

Fall 2017

time with the chorus; Shakespeare has the Greek-two in one with others who match his complex interiority, or maybe not. Instead of the chorus, we get asides to the audience, reflections of interiority against a mute chorus, the audience. I thought about this, I thought about her, I thought about before, I thought about when we were sitting at a table in French Roast on Sixth across from the Jefferson Market Library, with me photographing its Clock Tower. I thought about the question above rooted in a prejudice we hold about how we act and why we act and it presumes we have more forethought than we do or even can have why would Oedipus, why would Hamlet, why doesn’t Hamlet? The question above presumes we are hyper aware of ourselves and our lives and our surroundings and the people we interact with, and the fact remains how much of our lives is lived without thought, without consideration of others for others with others they shall always perish from our minds, thinking ahead we do not do; warnings are heedless. Why shouldn’t Oedipus have killed the man who turns out to be his biological father? Is it patricide, if he does not know who the man is? Oedipus believes the step father he had was his real father and not a step father at all. He has no reason to think otherwise, any more than he has reason to suspect that Jocasta might be his mother when he marries her and has four children with her. Solving the riddle of the Sphinx and lifting the plague on Thebes, he must marry the Queen and be its King. The audience knows what it knows; there is a form of irony at work, but it certainly does not interfere with the play, and this is Sophocles’s genius at work, really, how he manages the material everyone already knows. Oedipus does gouge out his eyes after learning the truth too horrible to tell, he cannot speak it. He blinds himself because what good are eyes he must think. His eyes have surely failed him, but it was not the eyes he plucked out that failed him, as I alluded to above, yet these eyes, these physical eyes are symbols of those other eyes others of us think are the symbolic eyes, the inner eyes are real. The eye balls that we gouge out and step on and squish are the symbols of those other more penetrating eyes that failed Oedipus, but do not fail Tiresias. We imagine we are more compassionate than Oedipus--there is an element of compassion in his act. However, we cannot fathom the depth of character, or of mind, or of soul that is necessary for compassion, let alone the kind of act Oedipus performs. It is a performance. The theater was a viewing place, but not exactly for spectacle. Oedipus without eyes is theatrical in the most ancient sense and means more than we do by saying it is symbolic. Oedipus has more compassion than we do in our feigned kindness. A society bred on the idea that package is as important as, or more important than, product, cannot understand the distinctions between passion and emotion, or how depth of feeling is opposed to the appearance of having felt. It's the Passion of Christ, not the Emotion of Christ. You understand what I am saying. We are lost. Everywhere we go we are foundering; everything we do, the same; every way we try to think, also everything we do we do in repetition unacknowledged. We are always turning around and around on their merry-go-round we go on and we do not realize it. Those science fiction shows or movies where everyone does everything until someone has the gnawing sense too strongly felt that everything is not as it seems what appears and what is are the same thing for all of us most of the time. I’m not pronouncing a golden age, but there is a fallacy we fall victim to, and that’s the fallacy that history is progressive, and that because we are further along in the chronology, things are somehow better than in other ages, and that’s false. How did primitives living in their caves in prehistory avoid the conclusions they must have made concerning the shadows they saw from the fires they kept for warmth? Caves and shadows and echoes in the dark. What was it like I try to imagine for a primitive human living in a cave? A Quarterly Review

Falling Leaf Review

Fall 2017

What was their fear like? We know they had to have fears we don’t. We have anxieties that can only occur in our world, in our time, in our culture, our civilization. Flames flickered, shadows jumped, danced, moved, wavered, souls, spirits, otherworldly creatures, aliens, angels, demons, what were they? They had to be something other than themselves, the people watching them, shadows. I recall Magdalene’s candle. Souls trying to free themselves from the bodies that held them captive. Perhaps these souls wandered while they were asleep. The essence of the soul in the existence of shadows. The light of Truth about our souls too much to bear? Sisyphus at least had his rock. Prometheus, his rock and chains and eagle. We run kicking and screaming back into our caves to be with our shadow selves because we cannot bear the light of day, the light of day, the light of Truth. Ask Saint John of the Cross about his dark night of the soul, the shadow self is soulless until it merges with its corporeal self that is made to house the incorporeal soul. We go to museums, we sit in bistros and drink good wine, and we fuck. These are the only things we do. I love art, I love French wine, I love her cunt. Art, wine and cunt . . . her cunt, to fuck or not to fuck; to drink good French wine or not to drink good French wine--to drink from her cunt like from a fountain or not to drink from her cunt . . . these are the only pressing and serious philosophical questions in my life. To love her cunt or not to love her cunt and thereby to love or not to love her. Where are the slings and arrows? I knew a girl when we were young who said that men think without thinking that their pricks are arrows and that the cunt is a target but this means men always hit the bull’s eye, no? Men can miss the bull’s eye. Don’t think that most men have the right aim, she said. Just getting your prick in a vagina is not hitting the bull’s eye, it’s just hitting the target, there is a whole set of concentrically arranged hits you can make, closer or farther from the bull’s eye. You can't love a woman and not love her cunt. The camera eye, the camera eye, wherefore this camera eye . . . what does it see, how do we see, no one looks at things as they are . . . everyone looking at a sunset on their cell phone screen rather than there before them as it descends into the ocean, the actual live ocean there for them to see touch smell . . . we are the oldest mass media society in the world. We are the father of everything crass in the world. We are the crassest civilization in history, next to the Nazis and the Soviets. The Soviets more than the Nazis, a civilization, and that is independent from any of your connotations for civilized. Camps beaches sky clouds wind waves water salt spray the sun shining relentlessly this August that July we were here one April and almost froze. We’ve transformed ourselves right out of the image we were made in during the eighteenth century, a time more dedicated to liberty and justice than our own, in spite of what the bureaucracy preaches. The assault on Truth was launched by the Bolsheviks first, then taken up by the Nazis, then by us when power elites figured they could use the weapons of our enemies in revised ways here at home; GeStaPo, KGB, CIA, Mossad, whatever else we have in the way of thinking we protect ourselves from enemies when these organizations protect our enemies and manipulate our fear instead to maintain order for power outside the law? Presidents after Truman have all of them been the bitches of power and money, banks or oil. Our President is Wall Street’s bitch, and unless he does otherwise from what he has been doing, I’m never going to change my mind about him. Things do not get better for anyone like us, the slaves in America are now multi-colored? If everyone is MOney's nigger as my friend Jay has said, then what does that mean for African Americans . . . but how does that apply to African Americans with money . . . A Quarterly Review

Falling Leaf Review

Fall 2017

I have no idea why we didn’t fuck. Maybe I could have learned something. I don’t know if it’s the world around me that’s incidental to my fucking, or if it’s fucking that is incidental to the world around me. Everything is incidental in another view. I like the views I get of her when we make love, nothing incidental, everything significant? Incidental and significant are not synonyms; they are mutually exclusive. The incidental can be significant. I think the world and its history and its events and its politics and its economics are all of them incidental to my fucking. It has always been to fuck or not to fuck. So, no, I would not gouge out my eyes and would most likely live as any one of the many scoundrels we set up to emulate in our horribly degraded popular culture. I remember reading recently graffiti on the subway wall in Manhattan, where someone wrote in red, red letters: Kill them./Wipe them out,/All of them/ Murder them/To a man /to his wife/ to his children too./Impure blood must flow./The body is diseased. Who spends time carefully writing this in verse lines, coarsely or not? What conditions cause a madman or a prophet to express what he’s expressed on the walls in the subway of New York? A people who have suffered a usurpation too long endured? I don’t understand liberals who do not understand or willfully misunderstand the role of the Second Amendment that Jefferson put right after the First. Jefferson was no stupid man,” he said. “Power that has no fear for its position from the people, the only institution that can counterbalance the state, is a power soon corrupted and corrupting. Power must fear the people. It will always seek to get the people to abdicate whatever power it can and turn them into a public, that is, the people serving the state. Yes, we should kill many of the mother fuckers, he said. Vive! Mes freres, Les Jacobins. Vive! Jean Paul Marat! My father used to tell me that the government is not your friend, never your friend in America there was a time when it was less your enemy than in other places. Without the Soviet Union Capitalists have become worse as they too have gotten stupider, less literate. No Truth, no truths; only now the will to power, you ignorant, ignorant bastards in the universities preaching the gospel of No Truth and that metaphysics is nonsense. Do you have any idea what ethics are without metaphysics--what they have become, again, the will to power. And someone should have fist fucked Milton Friedman in the ass to the elbow . . . Friedman was the devil and for reasons other than him having been a Jew . . . he is dead, is he not? I know what he meant now more than I had ever. It’s amazing how quickly and totally the reversal from the age of civil rights and protest we have come. I know first hand cops are worse than they have ever been, fatter and stupider and less literate than even they were fifty years ago. Tell me again why I should listen to the media or to the public schools or to the academies of learning or to any one of you anywhere who have no clue either and no determination to find out. There are truths too horrible or just too uncomfortable to acknowledge. How do I understand this? To stand under is another way of wearing the necessary shoes? We don't want to walk two blocks to the store--we are so fat. Rather than park a half block away from where we want to buy the paper, we double park and then get annoyed when we get a summons as if double parking were necessary and right. How can nations of starving masses not hold us in contempt as obese as we are? Don't all wise men and women enter the dark at least of their souls? You must see San Juan de la Cruz in his Dark Night of the Soul, the spiritual path of Truth. Recall the Psalms, ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley in the shadow of Death .’ Would you or I have Oedipus's courage, or A Quarterly Review

Falling Leaf Review

Fall 2017

Saint John's, or the hero of Plato's most famous allegory who ventures into the light of day. I remember Tomas in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. He asked in an essay that got him in hot water with the Czech Communist Party. He ended up washing windows after having been a surgeon. I like to believe that I would have his courage, but then there is no one easier to flatter than myself. I am too weak not to succumb to self-flattery; who is stronger? Would any of us be as responsible as he was, answerable as Oedipus becomes? I remember what Primo Levi discovered in the Nazis camps--hem arrived later in the war, sometime in the spring of 1945, from Italy. He saw first hand how many of society’s alleged betters acted horribly in the camps, less than themselves, less than their assumed station would allow, less than their alleged breeding, education, manners could possibly let them--they were abominable. It was pimps and prostitutes and coal miners and other laborers and drunks who acted better, with greater compassion, more courage, more willingness to help others. If you want to believe this, you can. My saying this is not what makes this so any more than someone else’s denial makes it untrue. There is nothing that cannot be denied. We cannot let the deniability of an assertion, or an inference, or a fact make it possible for us to disbelieve what we need to understand. Perish the thought that Jews betrayed Jews in the camps because our mass media culture has made new saints out of victims of the Holocaust. The dead are martyrs and the survivors are all of them heroes whether their survival depended on working for the Nazis in the camps as Soder Kommandos or not. I cannot judge and do not judge but facts are facts and truths are truths as Truth is truth, so lets stop with the ping pong between one extreme of negative stereotypes and the other, positive ones. We cannot live in anything but one set of diametrically opposed stereotypes or the other; ask anyone from the former Soviet Union if Jews participated in the Bolshevik terror and atrocities or not, and if later in Stalin's horrors because they did, and it is true that a few of the 20th century's greatest mass murderers were Jewish, although they just happened to be so, as Russians in Russia just happened to be Russian and Nazis in Germany just happened to be German. There is not a person of any people who has not been in part subsumed by the tidal surges of received ideas, and anyone's desire to get along is consumed by what is then assumed to be the natural desire to go along, right along--yes, power has right, which is why when we go along we go right along. So, do you or I have Oedipus’s sense of justice--and it is justice he has a sense of as he gouges out his eyes? I know I would be too attached to my eyes to pluck them out. Christ understands our vanity when he says if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out. I hope Christ understands mine. The truth of something is true whether all disbelieve or even if only one person believes. Everyone believing something is not what makes the something true. Truth is like this. The Truth is the Truth whether you believe there is a Truth or not. The Nazis were voted into power by local majorities equalling a national majority. Maybe the Germans did not know what they were doing for Germany. The Nazis had little support from Catholic Bavaria. After communists, Catholics were the first group targeted for systematic persecution. Imagine that in this here America where history is nearly as distorted today as it was in the Soviet Union in another historical yesterday. The dogma of political correctness was preached by the Nazis and the Bolsheviks before them; by Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and so on; by Franco in Spain and Mussolini in Italy; by Pinochet, by Mao, by Ho, by Pol Pot, by Castro, by McCarthy, by Maggie Thatcher, by Petain, by Gaddafi, by Presidents Obama, Reagan, Clinton, Bush I and II, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, A Quarterly Review

Falling Leaf Review

Fall 2017

Roosevelt, Truman and every director of the CIA appointed by these men; by Herbert Hoover and by every cop you meet whether a pig or not. Bull Connor preached the dogma of Jim Crow political correctness and it is the push toward correctness that adds to the horror. You can’t use this dogma of political correctness for any politics other than one that will eventually oppress. Weimar tried it and failed through a gross and grotesque mystification. Political correctness is right out of the epistemology of totalitarianism. Everyone suffers his or her dark night of the soul in a totalitarian society. Winston Smith is a secular Saint John of the Cross, La Noche Oscura de la Alma. There is no Truth in our culture; there are no truths; right and wrong and good and bad are what we think because there is no reality outside the mind. We've been solipsists for so long, how could we not elect a President who is one. Some Jews having collaborated does not take away from the horror suffered by millions. Every destination the soul departs for is reached by indirection. Be quiet, be still. Be sure. I am sure of nothing. I must be sure of something. I am sure of my name. I am sure I am who I am whenever I am, even when I am not being who others would expect me to be, even when I surprise myself and become someone I have not been. To be somebody not me, as we mean sometimes when we say we are not ourselves--even then I am me. I don’t want to pause and ask who I am or who I could be if, or who I should have been. We’ve been raised in dishonesty. We are a dishonest people. All people are dishonest in ways, Kings of hypocrisy all of us led by our political pimps. Whores of a different kind, the way we mean when we say what we do about them yet whores acted in the camps of the Holocaust differently than the wives of doctors or the women who were school teachers--it was the school teachers that came out and voted for the Nazis virtually en masse. We like to say it makes me sick. But are we? What nausea, then? The word ‘whore’ gets flagged for being politically incorrect. ‘Wives’ gets flagged too for the same reason. There are two kinds of whores. There is the whore who sells her body, her talents with her body; and there is the woman who is a whore in her soul, the wife of a man who makes money and does nothing else but spend his money in return for giving him awful children, lawful children. She resents everything her husband has to give his workers, and although he might be cheap, he is cheaper because of her, more unreasonable because she drips poison in his ear against his workers, especially if they are women, most certainly if they are younger or prettier, absolutely. Whores to the left of us, whores to the right of us, whores in front of us there are the traditional bourgeoisie of Europe who are the greatest whores the world has ever known. America is fast becoming the whorehouse Europe has always been. I don’t imagine Asia or Africa are much better. The Americas are other bordellos. Sodom is a city of righteousness compared to these Dorian Grays everywhere in our banks, schools, law offices, accounting firms, hospitals. How is Hollywood not Babylon or Sodom and Gomorrah? All of us will be whores in this America headed for a fall, and we are going to fall, fast and hard and we will not have it in us to pick ourselves up as we had during the Great Depression. President as Chief Pimp? I'd send to the purging guillotine every White Suprematist leader in America, and as many of their followers as I can find, I'd love to face down David Dukes with a million American Girondists. And I would send as many of our Republican politicians and supporters as would be possible, and a whole lot of the Democrats too--way too many Democrats, you would say. I would send too many of our broadcast media CEOs and I'd include how many of our Social Media nouvelle riche, as well as the top ten CEOs on Wall Street and how many Wall Street Presidents and Vice Presidents too, former Secretaries of the Treasury, anyone? The top ten money-making Hollywood Actors and the top ten actresses--for sure--as well as the top ten A Quarterly Review

Falling Leaf Review

Fall 2017

producers in Hollywood too. How many of the Status Quo staff writers for the NY Times, the Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, supporting our Totalitarian Bourgeois Capitalist tyranny; and I could not exclude much of the leadership of BLM, or any person of color who reflexively spouts the pseudo-pseudo derivatively second-hand or third-hand Marxist bullshit about White privilege as if he or she knew what they were talking about, ignorantly absenting any critique of class and doing for white people in their grotesque analyses what Racists have always done when talking about black people; which is not to say that they are merely the flip side of White Nationalism because that would be idiotic to say. They are not in any diametric with White Suprematism. But of course, let's keep playing ping pong so Power can get more powerful and Money more monied and both more elite yes, I'd send to the future guillotines anyone who calls himself or herself Alt-right or who runs an alt-right website, and every single Reaganite in America, man, woman, child, Christian, Muslim, Hindu or Jew, black, white, or other shades of another color. And as well, every single person who has ever extolled, praised, lauded, applauded, supported, defended, or preached the gospel of Milton Friedman-Moloch himself, defender of Mammon against the children of God. Stop playing ping pong you fucking idiot Americans. And there would be a whole lot of former communist party bullshit artists from the former Republics of the Soviet Union going to get their heads chopped off--fuck you, mother fuckers! I had to be a communist is like saying I had to be a drug dealer, or I had to be a member of organized crime. Long live Jean Paul Marat in our memory; long live the People in their struggle against Power. Truth demands a purge like no purge has ever be let. Yes, let the gutters run red and the sidewalks be awash in the torrents of blood, and if you cannot grasp the Politics that runs this way, the way I have said, that embraces this, then you are too stupid to see that you are serving power through your orchestrated mock subversion or protest. In America, left, right, middle; black, white, Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Jew are every one of them participants in the grand Orwellian illusion. If thy Right eye or Left eye offend thee . . . We cannot avoid this fate, and it is fate as surely as the Furies follow anyone guilty of Hubris. Any person can be a whore, of course; men can be whores as can women, Presidents and mayors as well as Priests, Rabbis and writers. They don’t have to be gay or effeminate either, these men who are whores. Every prison punk is a whore when he is another inmate’s bitch. It has nothing to do with homosexuality any more than anal rape does among gorillas. Every man is a whore when he sells himself, sells his soul. The prison punk is given the choice, shit on the dick or blood on the knife. There is payment in that. We sell our water for money, our future for money, our sons and daughters for money. All so a few can get richer at the expense of our children's future, the presence of happiness no longer. We let our political pimps tell us it's our fault our economy is in the shit hole, and that we have to do with less because we want to get America back on track. We are all of us, fools. Solipsism, solipsism, solipsism--how fucked we are. Why then shouldn’t we just fuck? No, really, why don’t we just fuck. The desire to fuck is in itself love and should be treated as love. Why we separate the two in the unspoken ways we keep them separate, is beyond me? Puritanism, we still hold dear in our hearts. The desire to fuck has been corrupted by the idea that to fuck is dirty; that’s what underlies everything. Just look at the pop culture. If this culture didn’t have serious issues with sex we wouldn’t have a pop culture as grotesque as we do. We’re twisted around and around so tightly wound we cannot breath. Fucking is the way to God, but not as cheaply as we do in package over product America, controlled by the Anti-Church of Advertising and bound by the morality of the Ledger Book. What good are eyes, though, we could ask? Lear must ask the same when he is on the heath, when he is finally blind. He comes to wisdom only after his folly. Nausea. Everywhere nausea. A Quarterly Review

Falling Leaf Review

Fall 2017

Have we yet come close to wisdom as a culture, certainly not now as a society--they’re not identical, I don’t know yet what I am to become, how to behave. What do I already have when I do? Lear does not see on the heath, does he? Is Heathcliff Heathcliff because of Lear’s scene on the heath, his cry of the soul from the soul, the test he walks through, imagine that when you dream rain you are trying to purge something? Last night I dreamed a tempest so fierce, the hurricane last I saw when I was a boy and the eye passed over and we went to the shore to see the waves coming in at ten or more feet high I don’t exactly recollect, how does anyone recollect anything. I am Lear. I am MacBeth. I am Iago and Othello and Desdemona. How am I not? Rosalind and Hamlet and Ophelia; just as I am Orpheus and Eurydice; just as I am Orestes and Electra, just as Hamlet is Electra and Orestes in one. Lear was a fool. I am a fool. He was a fool from the start. I am no different. Day in day out from my birth. Lear’s hubris leads to his blindness; hubris is already blindness. We are stumbling around the coffee table of our lives, hands stretched out unable to see two feet in front of us. I'm waiting for the chickens; they do usually come home to roost. Yesterday I watched Kurosawa”s Rashomon. The visionary company we think we keep; prepackaged media sponsored wisdom. The visions I have, the company with them that I keep. What visions do we pay attention to. I close my eyes and see all that I see within, the back of my lids as when I lay me down to sleep, a screen for other shadow plays. A montage of the rich getting richer, the powerful more powerful than ever? An image of we the people remaining smaller case, doing nothing, remaining psychopathically polite or grotesquely rude and crude as what some might imagine is an intelligent response in critique of how psychopathically polite we have become in face of Power and Monied Elites, almost as deferential as peasants in old Russia were for the Czar. We did imagine liberating ourselves by freeing ourselves of traditional metaphysically drawn ideas about Truth and truths. We only gave power just what it needed to become more powerful, for monied elites to become more monied more elite. We’ve cut down all the trees of knowledge because we thought we were going to see more clearly. Fools and their folly . . . missing De Tocqueville's prime observation about the liberty loving Anglo-Saxons . . . it was their unruliness that made them freer people than anyone in the world, even in face of how English society was based on gross inequality . . . it was a relative observation. I mute prophets in me. We murder our prophets in America, they cannot be packaged on TV. Murdering to dissect prophecy? We then think we understand, and in our folly, we imagine ourselves wise. We hold up nothing with our acumen, an Emperor's New Clothes of Intelligence and Education. Where is this wisdom I've been waiting for? I've led myself to believe that I would not mock the man who made it out of Plato's cave to see the world by the light of day. I have led myself to believe that I would not prefer the shadows to the sight of things in the light. Today we are all of us in our caves. Tomorrow I will leave my cave with my rifle. I have to shoot somebody, preferably someone who deserves it. America will be like the Soviet Union in no time because we are far too undereducated and semi literate. Really, these are the reasons we will suffer a totalitarian America controlled by an oligarchy of monied elites. Remember when we thought that it was possible for it to happen here, for fascism to come to America under the guise of Americanism. The left by undermining literacy to democratize education let the devil in our house. Fascism is our next step and there is no tree of knowledge for us to hide behind because the contemporary liberal hegemony in the academy has toppled all the tees in our western tradition of knowledge. A Quarterly Review

Falling Leaf Review

Fall 2017

We are all of us out in the open for the devils of our living hell to get us. The hells we imagine are greater against us because we allow them to arise within. No one from any religious or orthodox religious context suffers the same hells unless he turns his psychology around. Hell is something outside of us with demons and devils. it is a place we can go to get to but not inside of us. There is greater fortitude against the horrors of hell when hell is outside. We can defend ourselves better against them. The trials, the tribulations we suffer are tests to pass and we do have the means to pass these tests, however much we sometimes have to struggle to do so. All of these make it different for me than the poor bastard who can fall into hell because hell is a trap door in the mind, of one’s own devising. Sickness unto death, a sickness that makes him dizzy; a headache that makes him nauseous, making me sick, sick. The humidity these last several days has made me sick, made me dizzy, nauseous.Why do women get nauseous when they are pregnant? I do not ask?

A Quarterly Review

Falling Leaf Review

Fall 2017

ANOTHER LIBRARIAN Looming, a word, I say, any word. For the thing I name. Things are in themselves only things. Nameless, they remain. Yes, things are until we do not. Name. As it has been called--what has it been called? This thing, a thing, what thing, what about this thing, now an act of naming gone awry? I would like it to mean something. What could it mean? I mean, I know I want these things to mean everything when I get to thinking about them. But nothing can mean everything, no one can be everyone, who can be anyone? We love to say that anyone can be someone--how awful of us, no? It means nothing? What is in a name? I do recall something about roses and dog shit, something I read somewhere, some-when. To name or not to name, I would like to say is the question, was the question for sure for Adam. No thing is ever but the thing in itself. Each in itself is a thing without a word. All is no more.

A Quarterly Review

Falling Leaf Review

Fall 2017

I have to reiterate for you that if there is no one in the woods to hear the tree fall, then the tree does not make a sound. Sound is made in the ear. Yes, we have been calling dog shit a rose for so long that we have nothing but contempt for roses because they do not smell like shit. Call me Adam WHICH PERSON SINGULAR? Clouds appear as if they were mushrooms. He seeks a serpent––he hunts for serpents; vanity in his garden––pride is his garden, the daffodils this spring springing overnight, I tend to them in the plot. In the garden I keep––I keep a garden, I become Death, Death becomes me as mourning does Electra, watching over her life, her life spilling out of itself. The living that harbors loss, a variety of vanishing comes, each one of us plants the plants, the darkness within, within the dark, the mushrooms grow.I am a mushroom, I am a mushroom––I repeat myself, in the market of making motifs to live by, we are much closer to mushrooms than we are to grass. All of us are mushrooms, mushrooms to be or not. Death comes as––how it comes––how does it come? Death comes––He comes when He does for whomever He does; it comes in as many ways as there are those to come for . . . hope comes like ice––I wish I were; I hope I will; the future is ice, frozen, I take the waves as they come. Sometimes I stumble; sometimes I do not. I no longer ask questions begetting yet other questions, more doubt, asking is the greater futility. I wonder if I should have learned more from the sea––talked to the sea as I had in Barcelona to Jimenez I have been able to talk to the dead. Seemingly, spending my life squandering time––past present future illusions, delusive the dreams––the sea never gets any the less. ButI do.

A Quarterly Review

Falling Leaf Review

Fall 2017

LUNCH POEMS Infinity or eternity, now that might be a question. Most of us presented with eternal happiness or infinite happiness would choose the latter. Most of us would be mistaken, grossly in error. What is it that we imagine would happen to us if the possibilities presented to us were infinite; wanting infinite anything is a mistaken apprehension? Infinity is an avalanche waiting to bury you. And it eventually will. Eternity has a door. It opens from now. There is no time to come that will have gotten closer to eternity. Forever never comes. Infinitely far is infinitely far always; a billion and one is no closer than one is to infinity. Eternity and forever are not the same; they are not synonyms. You cannot miss this fact. One and one billion and one are equally far from infinity. I have said this before; I have said this in these and other words; I will say them and others again and again and again, but not forever. Eternity is transcendentally accessible from now; eternity is always right next to now. Infinity is infinitely far from naw perpetually. A pregnant woman gets off the D that I am taking on my way back from Park Slope. She walks like a penguin. She's dressed in black. She walks like a penguin. I have said this already. I am beginning to find more and more people too hideous to behomd. Raindrops pepper the landscape window. I look out to the span-towers of the Verrazano Bridge from my seat across from the landscape windows of this D Train I am taking to Coney Island where a friend will be waiting with her friends Julia and Avis. I am coming from Park Slope where I cash my check . . . I'm riding with Frank O'Hara. He is my friend. I had lunch with him at Yamato's on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope. I am also riding with the pen and paper that I always carry with me. It is my discipline, as I say, say since Allen told Giovanni and me that the only discipline a writer needs is to carry pen and paper with him wherever he goes. Since then, I have done so. What more should I say about this, about anything any time I say what I do--are the words enough? Are they too much? I have had enough from the dogma of balance, the dogmas of moderation . . . what then am I saying. I wish people would not use facts like they would stones if they were even more primitive than they are or have allowed themselves to become . . . thank-you Allen, I think I should say . . . say here, never having said it any there in the past when I met him with Giovanni. I thank him now for his help? His advice? I do carry pen and paper with me everywhere, just as I had always done before our conversation before you died, but only with renewed and deeper conviction. I made to City Lights Books when I was in Frisco last. If there were a way for me to know exactly what was inside the expansion of the universe, or what was outside the expansion of the universe--and there is an inside the expansion and an outside the expansion--it would be easier for me to determine just what I believe when the decision comes to whether I believe in God or I do not believe in God--and I can say that I do, but just how much faith I carry into facing the times when it is most difficult for me to persist in believing; yes, faith and belief are not the same thing; they do not even have to be contingent; they can remain separate; they can be non-determining factors on one another, if this latter assertion makes any sense. No one knows. I hear an aunt tell me that God does. With pen and paper, I have a firmer grip on me, or so I have been able to say and thus believe because I can say so convincingly. I have learned to manage thinking through writing, by writing as much as I do as often as I do, as I have written; I really do not know what I think until I write. A Quarterly Review

Falling Leaf Review

Fall 2017

I have also taught myself to speak as one should write, which has gotten me in trouble on too many occasions because most people, even educated people, rarely listen to the inane bullshit we defecate out of our mouths; never mind anything intelligent or articulate--but oh so much less ambiguous. Knowing now is a lot like believing in God or reading the Bible with seriousness, or believing that Shakespeare is the center of the Canon, or that there is something we could call the Canon, or that there is Truth, absolute and transcendent, or that there are any kind of universals, or that a plurality of selves in the Self does not equal fragmentation.

A Quarterly Review

Falling Leaf Review

Fall 2017

SISYPHUS UP THE MOUNTAINSIDE DOES Everyone's rather like Sisyphus, you know. The universe is absurd, brother. God sets it in motion and sits back and laughs. He likes watching us the way we like watching the monkeys in the zoo. How can I conclude that the universe is absurd if I have concluded that there is a God? You ask, you must, I think. What does the existence of God have to do with negating the possibility that we live in an absurd universe? Question follows question. The notion of an absurd universe was developed in response or rejoinder to the pronouncement that God is dead. But that pronouncement was rather premature, don't you agree? I don't always ask. I do not know if I agree or not. You can't really believe that, can you? I imagine someone asking me. That you do not know if you agree or not? I pause. I wonder again. I think out loud. I hear me say in response, And why not? I really do believe one more firmly than I do the other, even if I am undecided, right? I do not always ask this. But if I believe in God, why do I think the universe is absurd? Should I be as vain as those who believe in a loving God just because I believe that there is a God? God is--he, she or it--no! He, She and It, are not this or that. So you do not believe in a loving God? A voice asks me in my head. Now that's the absurdity of absurdities--just what I mean by an absurd universe, the entire lack of design, or the entire design indifferent to human life? Do I believe that? God sets the universe in motion and lets it progress; evolution is part of his design. His? Hers? Its? Whatever else the fuck you or I want or need. God has so little to do with the needs spawned by our vanities. Remember Michelangelo's panel on the Sistine Chapel Ceiling, God's finger to Adam's. That's it; evolution was part of the design he set in motion, and then he insert's his divine will, shifting the Homo-Sapiens into the human . . . no? You don't get it, you don't agree? I am not sure I always will. Whether I agree or not is not the issue. I'm still not with everyone else in his or her understanding of the universe as absurd. The absurd universe for many is the universe without God, without the hope of redemption, without the hope of intervention, but with still the hope of humanity, of a humane existence. No? Whatever anyone wants to believe. I am not in need of his agreement. I'm like radio; tune me in or tune me out; I keep broadcasting. Everyone's rather like Sisyphus, you know, how we live, neither tragically nor comically, only absurdly. That's how I understand it. Action is action and has neither the potential to be tragic or comic in its resolution. See? That's absurd? To me the existence of God leaves opened the hope of redemption. Aren't humans redeemed by one another, in another's eyes, another's actions toward, another's love. There is nothing more absurd than love, no? You can have God, have no hope he will ever redeem you, and still have redemption from other human-beings; that's what it means to be human; to be humane. What is more humane than redemption, forgiveness or compassion? Great sex.

A Quarterly Review

Falling Leaf Review

Fall 2017

WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN BORN If I am everyone in every dream I dream, and life is in itself a dream, no more than, no less than, no? It couldn’t be anything other than a dream, this dream I dream . . . what is she dreaming about? More or less than dreaming, and all about a subject other than I am dreaming. Isn’t each one us everyone in each dream each of us has? I am everyone who appears in my dream, each dream I have, the dreams I dream are themselves nothing more or less than dreaming, and all about a subject other than I am dreaming. Love needs imagination to be at all. Love is being, it cannot be becoming. Love is not a form of becoming. Love is, as Beauty is, as Freedom is, as God is. Without imagination there could be no faith, no belief, no ritual action, nothing devout, nothing sacramental in our actions, nothing transcendental. The solitary Self is the universe, no? Imagination is eternity, no? The smartest one of us would be an idiot if he found himself tomorrow in a Chinese village in Canton, let’s say. The human mind, what then is intelligence? Intelligence is a social thing, she said. It can’t be determined except by what the society says it is. Good fences make no neighbors.Yes, why do any of us think we think about anything else but thinking, and how it is that what we think, this thinking we do when we do, oh what passes now for thinking, the limits of the universe are inside each of us, are they not? No. The walls we build, the fences we erect when everywhere we are, and for some poets a room could be an everywhere, and now for us everywhere is a cell, this anywhere prison cell we are all of us locked up in, because the universe, the world, this cosmos of ours, of yours, of hers, of anyone else’s, whose then, is only the human mind, the individual mind thinking as it considers what it thinks when it does, where and why again—I had begun to live too much in my home space like Neruda, or so I recall vaguely a friend of mine many years ago saying something that makes me think what I am thinking. He asked her if she had thought about that, thought about anything else like that, about how we are all together alone in the world, in this life, your life, his life, mine; whose anyway is anything other than a complete solitary cell. He is absolutely like every man I’ve ever known, she said. And I didn’t say that he wasn’t like any other man, he said, I said that he wasn’t like a man at all. He’s not in any way like a man, Thomas had said. Who else should say? How should it be said by whom––decide very carefully who spoeaks for you, who you soeak for, who you identify with . . . Yes, and so on and so on. We did see sandpipers on the beach the last time we were on the beach out there. What do you mean he is not like any other man, Madeleine said? A Quarterly Review

Falling Leaf Review

A Quarterly Review

Fall 2017

Falling Leaf Review

Fall 2017

He isn’t, he said. He is too. No, he is not, he said. He’s not like any other man? She asked. That’s right, he said. You think he’s not like every other man. Now it’s every . . . I think Narcissus is every woman’s animus. Don’t you think that men want more than just a voice? How long ago was it that she had told Thomas that she was not going to fade away into voice, that she refused to fade away into voice and voice alone, it seems as if you want me to be Echo, she said, why would I want that, he said, and you blame Narcissus too much for what he could not avoid, falling in love with his reflection, isn’t that what love requires, though, each the other lover reflecting one another, he had asked.

Back Cover BY JAY V. RUVOLO Mirror at CAFE LOUP, NYC

A Quarterly Review

Falling Leaf Review

A Quarterly Review

Fall 2017