Tossed up by the Ankles

From the armchair

I think to myself: How painful it must be to be born over and over

While there is always a death, lurking

Waiting for the chance to bust from its backyard chain. 

When I turn to the outside

I watch the feathery blossoms

blush their respective season.

At the same time

the two of us

tangle and wrap

like drapes

by an open window

Someone across the street

takes our picture

And it makes your nervous

And it makes me terribly sad

that someone could strip us

from the living room.

So just for fun

we get closer to the sill

and stare in silence 

at the street traffic

take everything we see

and bring it closer to us. 

Timeline

In the evening

I mistake your face

for an entire days worth

of river stones,

like the ones in my hand

I launch into splashes.

It comes to me then

that I can look for you

in a line

Among its infinite points

you are somewhere

between two ends

Sometimes it seems

I can never find you. 

I have made the mistake

of being at both 

start and finish

having come to regret

my fullness,

having less parts per whole.

Its the same reason

you keep running downhill,

hoping that by the bottom

you'll have something

to crash into

From where I see you again

for the first time

and I remember

You've been gone

for more than a year

And I can't remember

How long I've looked this way.

Comizi D’Amore

Thoughts on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s documentary “Comizi D’Amore”:

In this documentary Pasolini travels around Italy interviewing people on their position on the “sexual problem”. Mainly focusing on questions of sex education, marriage/ divorce, chastity, machismo, sexual abnormalities, and so on. His technique is less of the Kinsey model, that is to say, less scientific and statistical. Pasolini engages with his audience, conversing in such away that the nature and beliefs of the people interviewed are revealed. He is more socially aware of the conflict people have with their own ideas. However, that is not to say that there isn’t an organized agenda.

Pasolini interviews people from different regions of different ages and economic background, the aim being to paint a fuller picture of Italy as it stands for the individual and the whole. The question of completeness than becomes issue. What about the people who were not interviewed, those who remained silent? If it were possibly to interview everyone, could we reach a point of saturation of knowledge enough to educate an entire country? Pasolini recognizes this weakness, the limits of his own project. This I find is more satisfying that Kinsey’s sex surveys. The interview, in all its flaws is aware that it exists in conflict and uncertainty, its not idealistic. It opens the discussion so that each can extend their own beliefs further than was originally possible. Unfortunately it also makes it so a resolution or synthesis may never be reached.

So what is the sex problem in 1960’s Italy, what is the diagnosis? By the end of the documentary I am concerned less and less by these questions. Instead I am more  focused on the looks of the people as they speak, their shyness or conviction. It brings my attention to each individual voice as they formulate their own opinions on sex. 

Lorca

Lorca: Poetry and History

After leafing through the latest issue of the New Yorker, I have developed some thoughts of Spanish poet Fredric Garcia Lorca. The article writes form the political angle and debate around his death and grave excavation.

After returning to Spain in the early 1930’s to a country that was deeply trenched in civil war between the Republicans and the Nationalists. Lorca, a “visible figure with known Republican sympathies” had reached a level of celebrity that kept him on Nationalist radar. Lorca was known to socialize with other popular figures such as Salvador Dali and a personal favorite of mine, director Luis Bunel. He was also openly gay, which is suggested to be further cause for his death.

            A military rebellion in the summer of 1936, lead by general/ dictator Francisco Franco resulted in Lorca’s execution, death by firing squad. It was later learned that his body and several others were dumped in an unmarked grave in Andalusia.

The article addresses the interesting political discordance around his exhumation, namely on the unresolved issues of the civil war. Still today Spain has either historical amnesia, or is unwilling to come to terms. For me it raises some interesting questions of the relationship between art, and history.

How can law and the judicial process help the historiography of a celebrated poet? And on the questions of ownership, at what point does the image of the poet become processed by the public, does that give them access to the physical remains? How is the excavation of Lorca metonymic for the unresolved conflict of the Spanish civil war?

His excavation is an attempt to confront a Spanish past and rewrite history. In my opinion it emphasizes most importantly, how a poet can be symbolic of what political philosopher David Crocker calls “an emblem of a contested past.”

Crimes of the Human Form

The hide of a Rhino

to the human form

has the same natural urge

for violence. 

Perception is also skin-like

is also crushed by its own field

with its on frame to tend to

crouching like a voluptuous nude,

among the cornstalk,

flanked by the waist side.

The body realizes

its in the wrong place

that it has never moved

screeching at the transparency 

of its form,

tempting to reach out,

to be the image

beyond its environment,

groping for a face,

escaping through the mouth

But with no legs for landing

it rumbles with its mass of bone

coddling the floor

crowned under the wattage

of wriggling light bulbs. 

Enclosing on the Historic

the gallery of faces

portrait the anonymous 

process and scrutiny 

of exhibition.

the succession 

eventually coheres 

into a marvelous blur

underpinned

to the root of chaos,

upon your breath

that is the only 

principle of life

I am certain of,

the breath as it is--

immaterial. 

Louise Malle

There are many obvious reasons why someone could be effected by this movie, its existential, its dark, its French, but there was something beyond these elements that I found striking. Malle manages to forge an unfamiliar sense of the everyday. Objects are dissociated, people watching from café’s are more than ever, obviously strangers, without history.

There are moments when the camera closes in on the face, and you can see, deeply the heavy mascara of the 1960’s cosmetic. But what I find so terribly sad about these moments is the incredible lack of intimacy, as if the gaze were never met with an actual look. As if you could feel the desperation of clutching for a lover’s arm and at the same time feel as if its already wriggled away.

 Still, no matter how personal the camera gets to the expression, I am pulled through the movie as if I were its shadow. Somehow watching makes me even more isolated. There is little interiority from Ronet’s character. Our impressions of him are his basic confessions, his routine, but most importantly his relation to the things which surround him, the space he occupies. In this, I think Malle does something genius. There are no over worked settings, spared of any elaborate design. Its Ronet’s awkwardness, his inability to take possession, to really hold something that fully expresses his solitude. 

 

 

Basic Information

            My favorite new French director originally studied political science at the Sorbonne. Although he filmed in the time of Godard and Truffaut, he’s not associated with elements of the nouvelle vague aesthetic. Malle made his first feature “Elevator to the Gallows” at age 24, going on to make “The Lovers” whose controversial sexual content became judicial when taken to the Supreme Court. Believed to be too obscene the theater was fined $2500, but because the court could not agree on a definition of obscenity the charges were dropped. Malle made 20 feature films in his life; but my favorite and most recent obsession is “The Fire Within” (Le Feu Follet). Made in 1963 staring Maurice Ronet as suicidal alcoholic Alain Leroy. Based on the novel by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle. It is often regarded as his best from his earlier work because it’s the most autobiographical.

            Interesting facts about the film:

1. Malle made Ronet loose 45 pounds for the role.
2. The wardrobe for the movie was all of Malle’s own clothes. Malle wished he could have played the part, but admitted in an interview in 1992 that he is a terrible actor. As a result of this particular physiological obsession he was particularly hard on Ronet during filming.
3. Louise Malle worked with a close team of friends, whose particular specialties became part democratic and collaborative effort. Le Feu Follet was an entirely different project and became a solitary expression and documentation of his emotional history. He wrote the script alone.
4. The Pistol was also Malle’s property.
5. Ronet’s scene at the dinner party was shot so many times, the editor, Suzanne Baron chose the best takes from each of the camera shots to mirror the choppy inconstancy of his mental break-down.
6. Similar to director Vittorio De Sica, Mallle preferred to use non-actors to get closer to the purity of the moment. But after months of unsuccessful casting he finally decided on Ronet because he best resembled the novel’s protagonist French Surrealist poet and friend of La Rochelle.

Malle had to buy the rights to use the novel from author Andre Malraux because he was the administrator of La Rochelle’s will. 

Linguistics

Where everything passes through

A hysterical smile

An accursed, sinister burn

In constant interaction

With the dramatic labor

Of the thing described

Emerging

Out of the mastery

Of presence

The narrative, as it tends to

Convulses

To the sense of life

Exhibits

All you are incapable

Striking upon language

Tearing as the body does

Taking on volume

The cavalry tongue

Rebelliously interprets

Reluctant to correspond

Bears within itself

Cold war fictions. 

New Wave inspires me

Godard and a Photo booth

 

 

Imagine something like this:

You are getting out of the pool

Your shoulders tilting from the weight

Of your serpent torso

My sopping feet are the first thing

You see at the tile’s edge.

At this moment you think

About our canvas bodies

In a blanket canal

Or maybe

The two of us are on the roof

Where the spider web silk

Comes down like streamers.

We take a pause

To find out where they come from.

You point above the next row of roofs

I look beyond your finger

Past where I can no longer see

Maybe there is a spider there

Maybe that’s where it begins. 

Francis Bacon

1. Introspective

 

Where the sense

Of the everyday withdraws

To the inexperience of knowing you

Revaluating permanently

In lamination

As I see you

As you see me

Physicality becomes conquest

A stimulated apparition of anatomy

A mute exterior

Striving against.

 

 

2. Faced With Being Lived

 

An excess of genre

Besieged by mania

Declared by provocations

Is fragile and desperate

To a recover a center

Where neither of us are between

Or concentric

But our own phantoms

Filling with our own torment

Under dying

Of absolute value

Taken in the brutality

And the powerlessness

            Of being lived.

 

 

3. Flinching

 

A rigid need for resemblance

A hazardous echo

Transforms into the blending

Of two referents.

Changing direction

Does not pursue

Or dictate

The chance of a natural logic.

It’s enough to be moving

Pulling off the shelves

The apparent sense

Of being caught in one’s own circle

Of being in consequence.

 

 

4. Picture Frame

 

What the canvas gives

To the form

Is the anguish

And the heritage

Of weakness

Too great to facilitate

A crude strength

For the manner

Of movement.

The parts concealed

The parts constant

And lacking

Weary, or convinced

That dimension

Is a place

We can’t fully fit.

 

 

5. Portrait

 

The controlled world of the face

On itself, invents a scale

To spin the imposing others

Into something restless

(like an expression)

who knows its fallible instincts

and hesitates.

at the moment of a photograph

when it’s given

something to be called by

like all other pictures

immediately regrets being

rendered from what is fundamentally invisible

to being named.

 

This day for the past four years

‘05

            Today is somebody’s birthday

I remember telling you that on a field

Coming face to face                             with the worst

                        Just then, I left the comfort of these walls

                        To be my own open      space

Reminds me of going into fall

            Perpetual

            Heavily memorialized.

 

‘06

            It was an afternoon in the park

Crowded by lazy feet

The rim of benches

                        From where

            Headphones

            Hallow

            Hairlines

Circling the pavement strip

Muscles and heels coming through

                        And disappear

                        Behind the width of a tree

Captured by something prosthetic

                                                                        Like earphones from the lobes

Hair staunchy

I had seen him before

                                    On the slopped path

                                    Bound by the reservoir

Pulling from the mass of people

 

                        I tried to follow

                                    Those fingers  clutching the black   paint   fence

              Buildings peered on the water

                        The only distinction from strange bodies

                                                Wrapping from the bend

 

Following direction feet

Of magnificent space growing      in benevolent gaps     between us

 

Knowing before the first step

                                                            I had already lost him

                                                                        Roped in among them

                                                                        Being taken

 

‘07

            At the Beach in Varna, Bulgaria

 

the feral nakedness of children

            No pretending here

                        The shame of a pre-adolescent chest

Or swimmer bottoms

                                                Covering parts private with age.

                                    The etiquette of space teaches us

                                    To be in control of seeing

 

‘08

            Airplane to Argentina

Memory has a plea for opulence

                        Held by the sincere belief that

                                    It’s always somewhere else

As restless as an airplane                    both quickly moving

                        Nothing to keep of it

                                                            After it dies. 

I do my Best thinking in the shower

Every once in a while I think about the difference between going backwards and forwards. It reminds me of a day when I was precisely in that moment of thought. I was walking along a pier, nearer to the edge of water. There was a boy there. He saw me alone and asked me to stand with him. I took this as an invitation to start saying what ever came to mind. 

I started by saying:

I used to run along this path when I was in High School, when I was a runner. I hate saying "I used to" because it never makes me feel like I have advanced over time, it only makes me feel further from myself. 

He didn't really seem to understand, but I could tell we both liked being in a movie. It made it easier to be dramatic. So I went on.

I think that's why people need to believe in a heaven, or a life after dying. Otherwise, we'd be too nostalgic. Because all we have ahead of us is an end and it makes us want to turn backwards. 

I knew it was a stupid thing to say. In my head it had already sounded over worked. I resolved to looking out on the water again. It had smoothed out where the ships came. He didn't say anything. He put his hand on my hair and he kissed me.

He was a bad kisser. 

Bedroom Deliverance

Some promises to the world

                        Delivered

When you get to the ocean

                                                Turn around,

Look into the camera

Where else is there to run to?

 

 

 

                        The view from the river: Ezar

Bandits of bear limbs

                        Climbing out of rocks

The skin holds the water

                        And keeps it there.

 

 

The cure and the oblique

Overlook more raking paper.

                        Titling toward the web

            Where spiders make their own progress.