bialy/s

Unheimliche. Deinos. Not at home. The pleasures of these entities cannot be identified.

Nor are the inhabitants of this locality emergent forms, extrinisic to some digital matrix, though certainly light specks suggest the presence of little eyes that might of course be Windows. Wind’s eyes.

Or E.D.:

“And then all windows failed,

And then I could not see to see. ”

And yet it would be my delight simply to mark things seen in the scenes of this “sad tableau”:

A sphinx with the head of a bearded thug and the body of a douchshund, on whose back a windowless factory shadow rises instead of wings.

A hill. Horizon and well. A muddy pond, yet clear enough that reflected figures populate that which sits on its surface and that which mires below.

Above the horizon rustic life toils, hanging kettles and cow carcasses, and the silhouettes of untoward birds, or fragments of birds, slinking around things, or fragments of other things the birds have riven, the indelible shreak of a small hawk that will not integrate with the calls and peeps and chirpings of morning birds, an portentous avian agony streaking across bucolic thrustings towards happiness..

In the apartments below, a shredded leviathan, a running man, a ladder under a dead tree from whose perilous horizontal branch a scaffold dangles.

A bull sacrifice

hands on

a spit,

the proper cuts of the beast not yet submitted to the gods: no smoke goes up, no folding of fat and thigh pieces, no ululation of women with arms upraised as the pitiless bronze does its business. Rather, an ant man

with a cubical head

extracts large chunks of the roasting animal

in defiance of ceremony. Ceremony

nevertheless

is everything.

It is a moment in agonic time

populated by large birds that only fly once

———————————–

Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 24.08.08

Ester’s Easter

Ester Astarte a star. True.

She had no king.
She is the twin of the sky.
Her real name is The Light.

—————
Robert Kelly, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, 18.03.08

The Last Station

Extend the arms their full amount; the kindly magus welcomes all beings in a virtual embrace that summons every world unto its robust if transient extancy; his own world, meanwhile, his own extancy, meanwhile, retain their problematic complexities. For the Master Self, whether resurrected or cruciform, lotus-born or waving wielded daggers, wands, or dorjes-no longer serves us, imagewise, to convene that primordial superposition wherein all selves cohere.

Here it seems that the Master Figures not only multiply, but dance their own

decrudescencei through a scabby patch-work of textural postu(-re-)lations-head over head, gesture over gesture; robe rag or raiment, magus bat or badger, mink or mule or goat.

One really must let one’s sentience rip loose, right brain rip loose, the images run on the image path, the path of their transition the path indeed, each point of fixation asserting a ludicrous comment on the point it appears to repress, each commanding figure helpless to impose its will upon the image, instanter, to come.

But how curious: the course of these transitions will not articulate itself. For, pace Heraclitus, there is no flux among the successive images, no path at all, each fixed figure does command the whole, for just such time as it does hold command:

“Fond lover, never wilt though kiss…”

There is no death or birth then, no transition among the singularities …

The language of which one despairs is neither nominal nor Rxed by supplantation of nouns by verbs-it is the prepositions that do us IN:

About above across after against

around among along and by…

Pfui!

Take up dagger and torch. Set out ever again

to stalk the inaccessible.

———————

Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 12.03.08

 ”Strange things would happen to these gods, like Osiris, Isis and Horus, and others, when they grew old. They were found to be as accessible as tax collectors, irrigation officials and other ordinary mortals, and could be ‘approached’ if one only knew the ropes.”

New Telestics or Hephaistos Knows The Ropes

I am looking a the top of a Cadillac, he says, from a site in the rafters of the underground parking garage where the Lord of the Lot plays solitaire, he says, in a booth whose walls are walls indeed. No one else around from 3 to 4 a.m, the only hour that passes, but it never passes, on the only day, of a terminal year, whose termination is postponed, interminably. There is writing on the roof of the car.

Though time never passes, time never returns. The words are incised in black chromium, and as the eye traverses the letter string, the letters dissolve and return. The thought in the sentence will neither cohere nor even for a moment leave me to be, he says, O leave the garage man to be. The cards, O the cards, O the cash drawer, O the silence of the parked sedans.

Elegance is an edge of the criminal, he says, and the top of the car is my invocation, my device to cause the night to open, even as it composes the enclosure wherein the only vehicle sits without a driver, without anticipation, without its own event.

2

There is an engine whose brief it is to generate alphabets; and the language whose presumption the letters assemble, exists; yet no decoherence into speech has ever arranged its elements other than to tolerate the superposition of all that can ever be uttered. There, in the syncope of an instant, the thought that is the language entire, an ineradicable writing, elegant, with adequate menace and intimacy, the tracings of an old old workmanlike devotion, in a booth beneath the void.

It is believed that this person composes only at the behest of the other deities, but its stylus scratches on the chromium the very sigils that compel the gods. Their ignorance of their own nature is his only oxygen. The dazzle of his craftsmanship affords a sensation momentarily adequate to mask his timeless sighs.

3

Wake up Bialy. It is impossible. It cannot be done. Extancy has becomes unavailable. But the oblivion that owns the Cadillac will never arrive.

———————
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 07.03.08