Logical Necessity

“Logical” necessity is necessity deprived of its essential ingredient: its “sharp pinch” (Shakespeare). Necessity is pinchy. It is the pinch-nosed huswife pinching household pennies. It is a hobgoblin, pictured jabbing a pitchfork in a naked burgermeister’s buttock. Logical necessity is homogenized necessity and therefore ultimately indistinguishable, by dint of sheer indifference, from the other logical “modalities”: possibility, actuality or chance (i.e. luck: nota bene). Logic: the bromide pantomime. Original creation’s colliding stars and suns turned into harmless banners in a guild pageant of organized trade unions—the logical functions. Logic sets itself the problem: how can we acknowledge the pressure of necessity in all its bitterness, reverse its flow and turn its prickly commandments into the effusions of our own arbitrary will? Herd them in the form of electrons around the printed circuits of a silicon chip? How can we subdue necessity to our own sweet ends? Necessity, the dragon, the goddess, unfathomable, wild destiny. Greek Ananké, a dinosaur, lumbering, ankylosaurus, a looming monster bristling with spiked armor plates, primordial but extinct. Ankylose: rigid, unbending, the decrees of fate, the will of Zeus. Rigor, constraint, anguish.

6/29/2014
 

  

NYC

Story of my rise to wealth. (In NYC, the town so NYCE they named it TWYCE.) I moved here at age 42 and hung out my shingle: fatherhood services available to all New York City women. Cream splash in the coffee gene pool. And Brighton Beach devochkas: Masha, how pouty you are. But the fact that I was not “employed” and never had been “employed” apparently prejudiced women against me. So I was no more successful at fatherhood or at any of its preliminaries (the sweet stricture of having sex for example: I would have gladly born that yoke) here than I had been in Omaha. Admittedly, my love of women always took a back seat to my love of laurels. But I was an ardent suitor of both. Single-minded, one might say, in my conviction that both were somehow one. Singularly crushed by the rejection of both. Nescis, temeraria, quem fugias. Per me concordant carmina nervis. (“You know not, rash one, from whom you flee. I am the god who marries words to the lyre”—Ovid.) Poor Stephen. Chrysoi stephanoi estephanomenos. Crowned with rank fumiter and furrow weeds. Melting snow makes me cry sun tears, by Apollo. Shield your eyes, readers, from my words!

And my landlord came to me in a dream and said “O thou afflicted, tossed with tempest and not comforted! Behold, I will lay thy stones with fair colors, and lay thy foundations with sapphires. And I will make thy windows of agates, and thy gates of carbuncles, and all thy borders of pleasant stones. (Call pest exterminator for blowfly infestation.)” And the Rent Regulation Board rolled over and said “Amen.”

Stalking the premises, owning them, I extend both arms down vanishing corridors, don them like the sleeves of a regal mantle. Behold, my kingdom. Princely purlieus. Ducal privileges. Stove, refrigerator and a pot to piss in. Speaking of which.

Fortune peed a puddle of gold coins on my kitchen counter.

Fortune, dear reader, squatting, peed a puddle of gold coins on my kitchen counter. Urine-colored Krugerrands trading $1321.30 per ounce on APMEX. Three hundred and eighty seven of them to be exact. (She has a big bladder I guess, the kinky young darling.) Pirate gold.

Moist palm. Lubricity. Your moisture is a sore decayer of your whoreson dead bodies. Studs and joists: corpse and bones of a tree. Mildew. Rot. Blowflies. Smell of dead rat, unseen good old man.

Dame Fortune the strumpet. Welcome to peeteenagers.com. The number one site for beautiful peeing young teen girls. This site will absolutely satisfy all your needs for peeing young girls.

And behold a wonder: Fortune’s bounty slid over my skin like slippery golden rain, in waves of liquid, splashing warmth. I felt epidermal horripilation and surprise, and an eyelid sprang open in each pore. My skin became all-seeing, golden-eyed. Poetically pockmarked, as it were, with vatic pustules. Visionary.

Like a vista I once saw in Omaha as I topped a pitted concrete road in the suburbs one evening on foot: sheer incline, close to heaven, spoonfuls, medallions of molten gold, a liquid feast, a summer fortune, scattered over the crest of the hill ogling the distant, clear sky with flushed eyes after a hard rain. Plastered wet maple leaves, agate-green, clutched the pavement for dear life with little clawed hands, trying not to fall off the steep road onto which they had been dashed by punishing hailstones. Into the void, into the perilous, picket-fenced deep. Pirate doubloons. How did the houses manage to cling to the pitched escarpment? Wondering if I could step off the summit of the hill into the pale, gilded sky, which shivered, naked, at the end of a sprawling avenue of shade trees, as if the angel of the Bethesda fountain had just emerged from a refreshing summer dip in Central Park lake, divested of all her woolen angel robes heavy with pigeon excrement and sordid human endeavor. Emma Stebbins. Into the radiant, sad cold light of evening. Friend: may the road rise for you. Convalescing from my sick bitch mother. When I lived in Omaha all I did was walk day in, day out and patiently recite myself to myself. I was afraid if I didn't fortify myself with ego vitamins I might vanish with grief.

Whatever is must be storytold. Planted in thrice-ploughed fallow and come to harvest.

A mortgage, a marriage and a car in the driveway.

All squirting out of her little fire nozzle, her honeybunch, her goddessportal. She turned on the girlhydrant and anointed me with goddessnectar. Here’s looking up you, kid.

Spun me silly. Spinning of yarns. Spinning of planets. A great spinning is taking place, I've always felt, winding everything up.

Reverse metamorphosis. Girl in yard. Tree in yard. Girl from tree. Tree from girl. Ovid. Divo.

Fortune. In the city that never sleeps.

Fortune. She's a very kinky girl.  But sweet too, the cozy little slut. Tumble-haired beauty. Hot-cheeked, with the delicate morning scent of wine, urine and apples. Like the ancient Camenae (muses). We satyrs should know!

Not scary loco like my mother. My mother, the goddess of Clinical Depression. Not hers, but everybody else's. Everybody around her. Like some kind of terrifying head nurse in life's psychiatric ward. Deranged policeman of the psyche. She emanated clinical depression like mustard gas while somehow remaining immune to it herself. Her healthy young metabolism excreted it from her skin like a poisonous cloud. Psychiatric wards erected and filled themselves up spontaneously with suffering in her vicinity. My father almost died. Kathleen Marie Brady. The Typhoid Mary of middle-class dementia.

June night filled with sweet linden-and-locust scents, fireflies and insect fairy moans. Whiskered nightjars, dusk’s whirring bull-roarers, purring, square-eyed beauties the color of charred wood, unscrew their lids, let out spook, charm, like captured junebugs. Thelkteria: charm, spell, enchantment. Zone of stars. The girdle of Aphrodite. The enchantment of Aphrodite’s diaphanous knickers.

(What is “dusk”? No one can say for sure but it has a voice, impossible to localize: the plaintive whisper of a nightjar, like the mew of a kitten hungry for milk—a sound you cannot localize but can nevertheless feel on all your exposed flesh as if it issued from a cardboard toiletpaper tube. The brush of nightwings against the skin. It flies on dislocated shoulders like a crippled spider. Its spindly bent wings are marked with white moon-squadron insignia. It manages astonishing feats of spatial agility in aerial love-dance with its prey, small winged insects. I call it by its European name “nightjar” because at dusk, when you unscrew the lid, something magic comes out. Night itself issues from the nightjar. Isn’t beauty always jarring, queen of smoke and darkness?)

Wild celery and rue at the garden borders. Two wreathes of celery crowned Xenophon son of Thessalos at the Isthmian games in 464 B.C. Wedding parsley. Funeral parsley. Oak leaf clusters. Coronets of ivy. The laurel, the bay crown. Herbs of grace. Memorial herbs. My father’s oak leaf clusters. Where are mine? They withered on the branch. Doused with a mother’s sweet herbicide. Milk of her murderous breasts. Nursed in smiling secrecy on the fountains of an immemorial hate. Hatred for my father. Hatred for his son. Pah! I spit the milky venom from my mouth. From my withered antlers sprout Jove’s own green, not even Diana can turn my hunting dogs from their scented prey.

Tomorrow again. On the hunt. After I have showered and gargled and sung my morning battle song. My prayer to Zeus, the Allfather.

Thus ends the story of Pluto’s gold and my rise to wealth.

6/29/2014

The New Lyre

Look up at the sky, her shimmering skirts. You probably see power lines. But all I see are fists, squeezing electricity from the air, shattering the lyre. The great blue lyre we call the sky. The great blue ribbed cathedral ceiling stretched over our heads like music. Transformers transform transformation into uniformity. But Apollo’s forked swallow tail will sever the city’s nerves, enforcing a new music. And the only catgut in the new lyre will be feral cats in the throes of love, howling their guts out.

Friends: an evil haze envelopes us, of diabetic fat and greenhouse gases, entombing our future.

Hearken, neighbor, in your peaceful house. Outside, chaos is beginning to sing. Chaos of broken strings, the broken bits and shattered pieces of the lyre. Music is memory. Thanks to memory (and her daughters, the Muses) the dismembered is re-membered. Harmony loves chaos. Join the love hymn. The refuse on the highway side is beginning to sing.

Muses. Daughters of memory. Daughters of creation. Remember something long forgotten and listen to it chuckle, newborn, in its basinet of Yesteryear.

All I have are words, broken remnants of a shattered harmony.

Contact high. Contact music. “Increase” is a passive verb. A boy, I increased: I was increased. Taller by the altitude of a chopine, I fell into the sky. Many summers ago. My parents grieved.

Lovely lyre-tail. Barn swallows conducting avian music with rapid baton-swing wing beats against the low light, chestnut-plumed, of evening. Sky’s breast. Heaven’s vault cloaked in cobalt blue opera mantle. Banker’s barn. Summer job. Eighteen. Sour reek of grass sap staining shirt, pants. Hirundo Rustica.

Backstory. As I write, above my head, in a ceiling fan with a drooping glass belly full of neatly coiled fluorescent intestines, two talcum powder pinecones of white light, gonadal cocoanuts, shower their leprosy in the room.

On the day of my birth I threw my ribcage on over my thoracic organs, buttoned the ribs at the sternum and strode forthright into the light.

Outside, it is morning. The sky is humming. You’ve never seen a sky so blue it hums? “Matter” rhymes with “chatter.” Out of the fenced yards, vistas and avenues of being, something like a baby’s chuckle is rising, the discourse and palaver of universal matter in its infancy.

6/18/2014

Feral Cats

                                             Inhuman howling? Pay no heed to that.
                                             It’s only Cupid torturing a cat.

                                             (Cupid is a knavish lad
                                             Thus to make poor felines mad.)

                                             6/15/2014

Breath of a God

We are all ears—though many of us are plugged with wax. A garden of ears (Nabokov) watered...from where? By what? By something that precipitates out of thin air, as mysterious as rain, and trickles through the auricular canal and the cochlear labyrinth into the center of the clay flowerpot we call the “skull”: the voice of the nonhuman world, what we call “language” or “word” (which speaks with a peculiar freshness in children). Every human being is a voice from the nonhuman world. Human larynx: silk road to the Orient of silence. There are places where a certain gatheredness collects. A gathered strength. A sovereign emptiness. Places that are zatheos, ripe for divine emanations, epiphanies.The human throat is one of these. Something not even close to human has us by the throat. In the struggle to regain mastery of our own throats, only the stupid prevail.

If thou speakest sooth, then of a surety have the gods infatuated thee.

The poor dumb world, its mouth too swollen with human flesh to utter speech, now chokes on its own syllables.

Will gods again visit the ravaged earth?

They seem to require more breathing room than the present real estate situation permits. Breath of a God, blow on the earth, blow all our cities away like cinders, motes of dust.

There are no meanings, no syntactic rules. Grammar is Platonism. The putty of your language facility is still too cold and stiff, it won’t flow into the cracks of the text, so what does it matter if you can “solve” the grammar of one phrase, you miss five more, or better yet there is no grammar in the text for you to “solve” at all, grammar is Platonism, a creation of your own mind, a crutch used by those who still lack language facility. Throw grammar from the train. Nevertheless, every word is a glint of light from something concealed, fish scales, a dolphin’s back. Rare and dainty things. Bird’s milk. Language mantles like wildfire over the surface of the earth, like breath on a crystal orb, coalescing in intricate hoarfrost patterns, then melts away, along with the earth itself. And no one speaks it. It is as if a god breaths it onto our faces.

A thing is nothing but a large level expanse of cold, desolate water. Suddenly it breeches the surface of itself and vents a plume of moist, blood-warmed breath in our face.

6/14/2014

In My Dream

In my dream I had a wife. She was only nine years old. She had been tramping hard through wild country in heavy boots and alpaca vest and held up a hailstone melting in her hand to show me, but the hailstone was also a starfish, and it was melting quickly, and I knew I had to respond quickly with the appropriate word or gesture or. Emissary from sea or sky. The seal of the great king (symbolon para basileos tou megalou). But as a wet wind stroked me with gentle fingers on the side of my neck I stood melting in fear and embarrassment, fear of her impatience, embarrassment at having neglected to get married for so long. How could I have forgot? In the intervening years I had become more than fifty years her senior. Each of your two hands, my little darling, is already like a starfish. And now you hold a real one in your hand, at the beach, to show me. In your star-spangled bathing suit, no less, with the open back and string tie, your salty wet hair glued to your narrow neck in spikes of surprise.

A maid of summery aspect. A summery maid.

Her boots crunched on wet gravel as she climbed the steep driveway towards the rustic house and the dirty white 4X4 pickup truck, bearing messages, destinies, reprieves, royal commands. Her child’s lower body (she seemed to be decreasing in age as she ascended) was clad in the heavy denim of sturdy-legged farm women.

Twenty Lashes In Twelve Point Type

                                      I do not repine, I do not repine
                                      Slander’s scourge or the withering brine,
                                      My back is voluble and proud
                                      With festering wounds, defiant, loud
                                      With green and purple mouths that speak
                                      Heart’s blood and the good red reek.
                                      This body gouged with cunning’s tooth
                                      Shrouds a poet whipped for truth.
                                      The poisonous tones of liars’ tongues
                                      That soil the air and sear my lungs,
                                      Purring smooth as milk, presage
                                      Scarlet slashes on a page,
                                      Much like the dulcet tones obscene
                                      That hemorrhage from your tune machine.
                                      All my music issues fresh
                                      From my agéd, tortured flesh
                                      To scar the mind with fingerprints
                                      Blood red through the second rinse,
                                      For fear and pity’s strangled cry
                                      Stains my soul like smoke the sky

                                      6/4/2014