bialy/s

To saturate the image function: that all realms where things are seen respond to the faculty for projecting affectively charged seen things. Here is the machinery of thralldom, the bleeding of coercive cognitivity, compulsive emotionality, the very mind-fold and its manacles, the songs that can never leave the ear, the pain that forever dulls the flesh, the thought of flesh itself, the obstacles and obscurations that impede the concentration of the light, canceling the being-right of eternal self-liberation.

The doctrine would be, that one must saturate the materium wherein imagery takes form with imagery itself to attain the ultimately inalienable real.

It is patent that the museum of the asidereals, telestics, and further object functions and their derivatives have had from the beginning as their telos, the stabilization not to say neutralization of all processes instinct in the image-making ability, whatever the technical procedures of said ability’s deployment: the idea was to anticipate the bardo, whereof it is said that all sensation is intensified enormously because the material inhibition of imaginative action is itself inhibited-so far is this doctrine from the notion that the mortal depository and the intimacy of its neurological intricacies determine the figures that occupy any awareness in all its detail whatever. Freed from such determinacies the will to inhabit a world, to one’s detriment or delight, is released without restraint. One will see what one has willed and wills to see, however one has conditioned the ability.

In Here it is less a matter of what the entities are that greet or threaten one as one enters upon their spaces, or worse, that fail to recognize the presence of an optically preoccupied intruder and therefore continue to secrete the very poisons whereby their enthrallment is sustained-it is less a matter of what these entities are than of the fact that by seeing (now) at all, one has entered upon an itinerary on which one’s corporeality has been suspended or, perhaps, superceded. And if one is able to return that which is seen in its instant to the instantaneous processes and procedures by which it is seen, the tormented beings that inhabit the site (that is to say, that inhabit the will) will expire in a corresponding gesture of self-liberation. The sight-imprisoned entities one addresses with forthright and non-coercive awareness in order to effect thereby one’s liberation from them, resolve in the very substance of gratitude whose root is grace.

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Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 30.07.08

It’s My Party & …. (05/2008)

A Dream of 3 Swords & Sorrow (09/2008)

A Final Fling (06/2008)

Ace, 5, the Whole Megilla

The Universe

The wounded stone
Rises in the blood

Like any Cell

The great professors cogitate
an outline

All the supreme distinctions
Mumble in the offing

In the final divagation
There is no word but one

That must (not) appear
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Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 07.08.08

Anticipation of the Night

On many Greek shields, as depicted on classic ceramic vessels, one can find a not-quite formidable, conventional image of the head of Medusa-with-her-tongue-hanging-out-the mortal Gorgon slain by Perseus and presented to his patroness, Athena, daughter of Zeus, who holds the aegis. Athena fixed the Gorgon head to the aegis, where it remains, the original for that image on the shields, formidable indeed.

Before Perseus encountered her, the fear of Medusa (or was it one of the other snake-haired, subterranean maidens? There were three-but only Medusa was subject to such treatment as Perseus meted out to her)-it was the fear of seeing a Gorgon that sent Odysseus out of Hades before he had had his fill of interviews with the illustrious dead. He was apprehensive that Persephone would soon find tedious his intrusion into the regions of Chthon and cause the terrible head to appear before him. Circe had not had to tell him that one glance at the Gorgon would turn a man into a statue, i.e., turn a man to stone.

Another turn on the turning to stone business no doubt is reflected in Dante, where Virgil has to break the poet’s attention to the fascinating torments of the damned lest his soul become a fixture of that fascination.

Parmenides called the tribe of ordinary mortals “utterly astonished ones,” as a characterization of our wonted processes of cognition: that the manner in which we traverse existence, with our differentiation of the properties of things according to such polarities as Day and Night-demonstrates that we are already turned to stone: something we have seen, no doubt, being responsible for the thrall under which we labor, lost in the common world.

But Night in an earlier mythology was an awesome goddess with her own provenance, not the contrary of daylight merely (Hesiod, for instance, says that Day and bright Aether were progeny of Night), but the mother and granddam of all darkly tinctured generalities, also, awesome, goddesses:

Sings Hesiod:

And Night bore hateful Destiny and black Fate
and death and Sleep and the tribe of dreams;
and as a second brood, the goddess murky Night
gave birth to Blame and painful Woe,
though she slept with no one;
and also the Hesperides,
who care for the beautiful gold apples
and the fruit trees
beyond Okeanos, the glorious;

and she bore the Destinies and the cruel-avenging Fates:
Klotho and Lachesis and Atropos,
who give to mortals at birth
good or ill.
They pursue the transgressions of men and gods,
nor do these goddesses relent
from their uncanny anger
until they’ve doled out their judgment
on whomever has missed the mark.
And grievous Night gave birth to Nemesis,
an affliction to mortals,
and Friendship and Deceit and terrible Old Age
and strong-spirited Eris, that is, Strife.

Hesiod goes on to enumerate the progeny of Eris. But you get the notion.
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Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 14.08.08

Basil Valentine Forges a Sword for the DL

off at the edge you begin to see
that the real hot
not like your aunt’s kitchen range
is blue

the blue of devils that rule the common red
the blue of sky that fries the earth in Aphrica
and freezes the earth last night in Annandale

tho it’s only October, go figure,
it is Poseidon after all again
licks us with his blue tongue.
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Robert Kelly, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, 07-10-08

What the River Brought (09/2008)

“Pouring from the Empty into the Void” (10/2008)

it is a woman you found in the Hoggar
her body made of rain

and now that you have found the colors of her difference
at a word from you she’ll

drench that desert and New Aphrica
will happen to our heads,

our silly Tassili bone-dry brains

————
Robert Kelly, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, 25.05.08

I was dancing with my loved one at … the Memphis Ptah Hop…I mean I THOUGHT it was my loved one. Prob’ly not. After all, no one other than I EXISTED in that epoch. I wondered: Could it be that the origin of jealous panic lies in the inexistence not only of the Other Lover but of the Beloved Herself? Is she not a creature of the Rules of the Dance, and the literal efficacy of the crooner’s mood and modality?

Well, on THIS dance floor, between red-headed I and indistinctly tinctured red-headed me, (deploy that aged dichotomy?-deploy or deplore-your choice), the towering ghostly priest-thing holds his crossed flutes, flails, and hammers, having stretched himself, mage-wise, into a transparent garment-being, one half stellar-luminated, one half all dark,
out among a space of intergalactic fogs and attenuated gasses, as well as among the stars.

Nebulae of insubstantial matter guash the ambient.

The Dance-now there were three of us-measured out the ecliptic-a luminous upward arcing streak across the image’s two lower quadrants.

The ecliptic and the changes that mark the ages prove that whatever we mark as time (time), is surely not. The very fact that we mark time marks time. Whether it is ours or some other collective makes the marking. We stipulate just this much regarding a certain canon of objectivity. It is not my horoscope that invented the wheel.

The world is parceled out between cows and horses: cows the Zeus-lot, horses Demeter and Poseidon. Our researches take us through the Mycenaean, so that we want to know just what has come to birth in the perpetual arrival of “the god who comes.” A consequence of having two many mothers, of both genders.

In the upper reaches of the image field a silly moose or petulant Flubadub-like animal, whose very existence struts disturbance to the ontic stability early television toyed with. There were philosophical discussions, as I remember, in the early fifties, the peanut gallery be my witness, whenever new kritters were introduced among the arrant characters.

Unlike the chatter in those precincts, the current telescreens purport the very happiness that beauty is-as a play of watery color and tentative outline, the comfort zone of outer space, a will to settle down wherever the horses run and all contented cows really do come home.
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Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 25.05.08

The Last Dance

is a Coptic fox-trot, a Nubian two-step

It is performed sans feet in the sky that is sand that is sea

Save it for the me who is not “me” but a memory of aspirant ghosts

Save it for the moment the wrecking ball levels the ballroom

Save it for the hand that wrought these hosts

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Mikhail Horowitz, Saugerties, NY, 27.05.08

Magnetic Lines of a Mirrored Cross

Washed in the Blood of the Invisible

There is he says a substance in which magical information transmits other than through the propagation of wave forms. The experiment, he says, thus yields the unexpected result…

that the image in question, itself, is, in spite of everything, a re-presentation of an otherwise unrepresentable ontology. It is only here because it cannot possibly be here. Watch and listen.

Not yet delivered to its measures or to the terms to which any measure whatsoever ever might apply, one enters the region of such a substance in accordance with happenstance, surely, but not without preparation and commitment, at least a general commitment to the form of magical will.

Manifestation, willful; the declension from the inapparent, magical.

But the substance appears in the quality of its ambient atmosphere, the nose for which requires an exaggerated relaxation of the musculature deep about the thoracic vertebrae. Way down there, very still. Very open. Very susceptible. The fascia all unglued and preternaturally resonant.

The passivity of The CruXified requires this. The rippling wave-form of agony passes right on through.

Various symbolic articles have been cast abruptly into that atmospheric quality, their materiality-ominous, miraculous, extravagant, improbable. The probability of the materielle canceled in the self-confirmation implicit in its epiphany. One has simply entered the corporeal regions where only magical configurations apply. The thought of the inexistence of this atmosphere-an inexistence that is the provenance of Reason itself-an extravagant dream. The Dream of Reason extruded from the ambient. The mirrors, he says, the mirrors.

(Write something, he says he says, for chrissake…write….some…thing…)

Are the crumpled heads mementos of some inescapable biography of violence-some accumulation of minute acts of grim volition, each skull one vile intent, and shall they waken and bespeak us? Only the verbal occupation of The Crucified requires this. To wash the ambient in the blood of the invisible.

What do these sorcerers imagine we will make of their stark yet lurid, hyper-material, technically Decadent histories? Whatever it is we will not make of them “histories.”

The magical is thus revealed to have several boundaries, only one of which degrades the rational.
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Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 03.11.08

Death of the Virgin con Caravaggio

The event is not recorded in Scripture. It occurs in the false memories of later men, who must contemplate biographies at all cost, and for whom a life has no focus at all until the final chapter has been scripted. The Christians certainly were Greeks in this: that they addicted themselves to a blind ontology of narrations. Nothing is so but that it inspire the tale of the tale of the tale of it. “Historical” paintings project this obsession with storied closure as far as their artists do manage, convening an episode in an image, focusing the ephemeral character of happenstance into the illusory stasis of a supremely contrived illustration.

But if we are alive to the life of the moment, we find no static image anywhere. Every point of surface flows, or rushes rather, jet stream along its own accumulating oblivion, each detail but a line in the long-body of a ferocious and impossibly strained desideratum: that the eye might have a pathetic corpse or dismal tomb to come to rest on, even while enjoying the largesse of spontaneous free survey.

Caravaggio’s image is both slice of life-the grieving apostles and the Magdalene are living enough-and figure of death, for the tale is finished in its image, though the image convenes itself beyond both death and life, the duplicitous surrogate of both, the faithful proxy of neither. In the picture, the Virgin’s body has clearly not been assumed living into heaven, as later dogma will hold it must have been; but neither does it wait in state to elevate at last in sweet post-mortuary rapture. Furthermore, there is not a hint of imaginally mediated spirituality, no allusion to or embodiment of that ancient goddess, whose many names from Erishkigal to Ouranian Aphrodite we might rehearse; names the tedious major years of Christendom violently repress, and which, however anemically, the modern Church has sought to resurrect in the Virgin’s name and image. Here, the pathos of her mortality releases no blue lunar luminosity, no contemplative harmony or solicitude, no transfinite ocean of comfort, compassion, pity, or transfigured human will. The thing is leaden. Story over. The story of the story. The story of the story of the story, as it must be. Over.

*

In a famous sermon of Meister Ekhart, the figure of the Virgin is contemplated as both Virgin and Wife; the paradox resolved by the Eternal Birth of Christ in the Heart in every moment; the radically transitory itself-the condition for timeless epiphany.

In the Chaldean Oracles, Hekate has two wombs: one with hymen unbroken, the matrix of all planetary worlding; the other broken indeed, eternally giving birth to all phenomena.

We read herein the effacement of Caravaggio’s sullen image: an effacement at last of all that the image of the virgin (propagated for two millennia of obtuseness in the name of sexual abstemiousness and drystick purity) has betrayed. Yet it is not so much that the refusal of the sexual body (the cover story of Virginity) sidesteps (as it does) that Death whose sexually orchestrated inversion is life’s possibility-which must be rued here. Such effacement alone shall give us The Virgin once again, who stands on the ledge like a pitcher in an ancient cave. Her secret name indeed is Hekate, the Double Wombed, the Moonlight Holy Doghag.
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Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 18.11.08

The Temptation of Wyatt Gwyon

For only in the excessive success of its intimate betrayal, does the truth abound.
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Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 25.02.09

The Temptation of Wyatt Gwyon, II

Being has no scale, no multiplicity, hence no orientation. All orientation orients on It. The vagaries of symmetry-breaking are the qualifications of manifest worlds. A long history of establishing symmetries makes history itself the twin of that which cannot appear to be. That which has no scale is twinned in conditions of apparency, where those conditions themselves offer balanced, symmetrical, pairs. When the doubling deviates from itself ever-so-slightly, apparency takes off on its own flight plan, occulting Being, forcing all the delusions of ontology. Where pious mimesis might have been the only candidate for the twinning of what is most real, forgery is born as the Mimetic Shadow. But as Being itself falls under darkest occultation, forgery beyond mimesis grapples with that which history has abandoned or forgotten or perhaps never realized at all as its innermost vitality.

Far beyond the shadows and the objects that are thought to cast them, beyond the light itself and the space that receives its radiations, we would cleave to the most productive of all simplicities, the most egregious affront to apparently productive life. Being itself does nothing at all, and all things are taken care of. Draco interfecit se ipsum.
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Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 22.04.09