Celestite City (12/09)
The Night Before Christmas, 2007
An object function containing a first derivative that existed prior to the function [see below]
In the Court of the Three Tourmaline Kings on a Night Before Christmas
in the court of the three tourmaline kings
the real presence is free to manifest without a body at all, but then a head floats in above where the true body might be –the true body is an organization of lights -a dias -an altar-anyway a flat surface -as if to show some gravity – charged by the sense of enclosure — as if an operating theater-in a space of free dream transforms -became-epiphany -cathedral and cave and subterranean juridical proceedings -the superposition of many mighty architectures -when the still living let death glare through mortal countenance -but we who are dead already -the full moon at midnight – the creative spirit in wb yeats’ system in its excess and manifest impossibility – no resistance anywhere -howling bats work their mouths with great precision and intricacy in order to operate echo location – the inversion – when the newly dead glare -both sides of the great divide-merry christmas – o merry merry christmas – it is night in the meeting tent -all the emblems hunger for their solvents – blotches of blank luminosity -something is very very old – ghost tents made out of, if one can put it thus, the pure white negative of light – if the new year come —–
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 24:12:07
Tourmaline (.25, 2x)
We are here that we are here. The royal dawn,
trumpets,
over the pageantry and complexity-damned complexity-
of a ceremonial so stuffed with artifice
that sweet sweet dawn is an oblivious triviality, an accident, an expendable contingency. why bother with mosquitos gnats and deer ticks when the parlor of the magus
provides, as it should, Etc.
Fantastic ceremonial rides
its loud and triumphant finality,
An imposition OF RED ROBES UPON
the transitory rouges, russets, and vermilions of …
An epiphany offered with such verbosity
and yet languor, such insistent presence
That the Mind Work once agitant to ward off all sensual thralldom falls thrall to sensual thralldom
“The Mind Very Bloody Damned Red” (and did I say LOUD?
It says
And green too
With an altar
Set up up above the prairies
The steppes, the taiga the tundra
The savanah, no matter
Set UP
And Above
And forever.
And monstrous birds FACE OFF
Who set on this Agony? The temple games
In celebration
Of the victory
Of temple games
On a mountain slope so organized
By a jar in Tennessee
That the god were seen
To inhabit
The roost thereof
To rule the roost
The rooster god Kadoodles
The dawn
But the dawn was the first impulse from night
First inkling that all that blackness
Was pregnant with the articles of day
It was she that came out of the bedroom
And with a towel around her
Stretched and yawned
And o so subtle were the colors
That wafted on her scent
Across the first gestures
Of Worldhood
The hell with that.
Let there be trumpets
And the degeneration of kings
Into warlords
And gang boss hoodlums
With residual intelligence
At their black disposal
No longer held by anything
At bay
—————————-
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 13.07.08
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Tourmaline II (.37, 90 ° CCW)
The hidden images do not bite from texture but are inlaid like floaters
on the humours of the aging eye, O gracious new opthamologies…
Floating in “from” what no longer reads as cosmos no longer inhabits an elsewhere,
the preposition “from” now sur rature, no elsewhere any WHERE only non-exigent contingency of infinite parametrical supply can deploy us now-
The indefatigable goddess standing by
To remove the mist that so recently clouded
That discernment twixt deity and mortal were possible
Like a lion
Stung
By runaway shepherd incompetent
To save his wooly
Flock from said lion
Aroused
Leaps over the fence and into the sheepfold
So Diomedes, etcetera
And so ourselves
Aroused by non-exigent
Contingent mortality
Leaps over fences to whatever…
Impregnable Design inevident anywhere…
Its own fence about it
Commends that which it is NOT
And for which it ardently hungers
In cultural secrecy
And on which, mired in deep wandering ignominy,
It FEEDS…
———————–
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 18.07.08
Medicine Quartz (12/07)
mountains and canyons, whose perforations– I once spent a week on a
raft watching the geologic figures and counterfigures rise and dissolve, as if the desert sun would exhaust the coruscations of all imagery:herein reverse that. Imagery itself shatters canyons. The Mind of Man, mercilessly blackened. Dosed with bitumen. Shoved down under. Bloated head and pitted rills for tears. And now I understand the Whole to be governed by the guidance of a ceremonial gesture, the white amulet fingered along the central channel, the audacious proclamation of the power spot along the fault lines that converge with field lines in a materiality in excess of the four forces assumed to have been long conjoined. The canyons at the Upper Most unfurl gravity. The Wing forms at the Bottom ponder levity. Juice throughout.
————-
Charles Stein
Barrytown, NY
16 June 2006
If we were dead, we’d be on the moon, according to a certain no-osophy. There would be an horizon, but no necessity of a path, the entire lunar terrain being, before the advent of probes to map its pocks and contusions, as smooth as Being herself. It is the smoothness of the lunar surface, which nevertheless harbors, macrophanoptically, images, determined variously by its many gazers. Whoever attempts to force an image from Being, gets what he deserves.
Now all rocks partake of the lunar nature, in some manner, peculiar to each. Which is to say, that a fiction of Death has always been the “aspiration to the condition of being a mineral” according to a certain no-ology. But double the rocks in the horizontal, and a central axis appears, and along the central axis, the same cast of characters as manifests under quite different optical circumstances. I don’t want to understand it. Death should not be so culpably predictable. It should not be possible for the mind of Dr. Bialy to unmask itself with such alacrity. Still, radical inscriptions cannot cease inscribing themselves upon surfaces sufficiently textured to solicit them.
Now, it is necessary to contemplate the nature of such solicitation in order to read anything at all. In the quotidian world, solicitation goes unnoticed and, when noticed, is fairly certain to be misattributed to the “stepped-down” consciousness conveniently displaced as Un. Unconsciously we solicit meaning from the surface of the stone. Were we to awaken, the meaning would enter the sky and cease to speak altogether. For the sky is already awakened beyond all meaning, beyond all anguished solicitations.
In the meantime, the doubled stone sits like an emblematic crown defying the obvious, hovers as a system of perfectly regulated auras, shares its textures with absence, and bears witness to a perfect luminosity that we always knew to be a necessary freak of stone.
If I were dead, I’d abolish the moon. All willfulness aside, like stone, beyond me.
The Ruby Maker
quietly quietly.
I had not known
a mouth
at the center. What faith is this, to enter the black maw of being?
But in the mouth, tonsils no less.
Symmetry pretends finality, closure, determinacy, the inkling that all things have their place, that an inexorable, consoling, spectacular, if rigid order, exfoliates and is an exfoliation of, the unmanifest continuum that, without particularity or prejudice, monitors all space. But it is not so. Nothing is determinate, nothing is fixed, nothing is in place. Nothing once seen but that it resonates another, elsewhere, off somewhere, even if perfectly aligned on the field lines of its abiding symmetries, still disconsolate and ungovernable, the faces proliferate along their own priorities, substances gurgle and pululate where structure claimed to command, and oh my, high in the exultations of cloudy roilings, the Mind of Man does mount all wings: gray face and cranium, with an internally radiant horticultural blasphemy, and eyes precisely just a little bit too far apart, to say it plainly were licit, that a certain water that will not wet the stone, makes sky of us all.
————–
Charles Stein
Barrytown, NY
16 June 2006