Time Runs In

on the curtain
of woven
faces
hung
to conceal
what the harlot
charlitan
croupier
card cheat
legerdermain
prest-o change-o
me

was doing
behind it
it
stupidly
made a picture of the entire
behind the scenes
operation
thinking to engorge
whole onstage red woods
by the instantaneous sleights
nobody came to visit me
some sheikh
connected to transitory royalty
had himself imprinted
on the fabric
and later
they brought the thing
to christy’s
and the descendents
in different weather
bid on it
and bought it
and brought it
back to the desert
and there was a coup
and the palace museum was looted
and the looters
sold it to nomads

and the nomads
vanished in the sands

and gave it
to you
——————————–
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 20.01.10

The Universe in an Oscillating Wave Packet

Is Athena’s idea

The head of an owl

Holds

The thing together

A predator

On her branch

In the June Zone

In an ontological year

Whose attitudes

Perk up

From slumber

Flash from the matrix

Get tired of themselves

Pounce

Gobble

And are gone

(An old owl actually

attached to her famous baubles

in every weather
——————————–
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 29.03.09

An expanding wave packet experiences a phase transition – or collapse of the ‘object function’ (04/2009)

Curie’s Law

Curie’s Other’s Law

Curiouser & Curiouser 

Why do I want to turn you on your side. (Don’t answer that.) Criminality, though relative, is nevertheless of some stability in the psyche, i.e. the unrelieved constancy of the need for compensatory agitations, the sense that something menacing and authoritarian is ever already at the night window, and this is a structural feature, like they say, that no obedience to or negotiation with authority will ameliorate or allay; to be a psyche at all is so tediously licit. One is in denial, therefore, not of this or that fragment of reality, however of public note or private pathology, but of the entire nexus of any explicit mindway in which one would appear to be ensconced. Turn things another way, and the web of connections is torqued somewhat, frayed, and soon ripped apart. Or the weaver in the corners of the fabric are unmasked. They are not fabulous women, composing existence with infinite patience and forbearance, while their males in absentia engage who-can-imagine what teratologies. No, they are not women, but surly pater familiae in “rooms,” smokey or elegantly paneled, closeting associates of various social strata. They are not patient. And the machines they organize and operate are not remotely consanguineous to a loom. And regarding the details of one’s poietic economy, auto or otherwise, they show no curiosity at all. Rather they importune the gods themselves with such animadversions as:

“In our old age we discover that there are limits to the fascination of imagery, comprising semiotic overlays; the game of what-has-he-done-to-elicit the panting “wows” of the innocent, the ignorant, or the docilely feminine; the seductions of texture; the manic arcs of instantaneously manifesting and simul-taneously vanishing, yet photodigitally ineradicable entities on the margins of noetic pertinence; “ye gods” we will not call them.”

Attention, however discontinuous, remains vulnerable to fascination, seduction, erotic misprisions of all intensities, semiosis, morphogenesis. Multiple grids superimposed on an output for which the scale of attention requisite the elicitation of the appropriate emergencies is itself a matter of that which is nothing if not forthcoming. Fur or flurry. Ground or turbid atmosphere. Light relieved in absentia. Without authority ever.

Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, November, 2007

Nude Descending a Starcase (01/2008)

A Rose By Any Other Name