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

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)

An Axial Miniature Meets Itself Along the Horizontal

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.

Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 12.25.2006

Tourmaline & Steel, for Thorpe Feidt (05/2005)