how we got our name

http://robinamer.com/2009/02/10/inside-out-names/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/kent/content/articles/2005/10/17/rugby_match_report_aylesford_151005_feature.shtml

"Me han estremecido un montón de mujeres..."

love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love

"Y tú apareces en mi ventana, suave y pequeña, con alas blancas..."

Pieris rapae, male. As if it manifested directly out of the energy of my unseasonable butterfly-hunger, or out of the vibration-field stitched through the many lepidopterical books that I'd left piled around the desk by the window against whose panes it was so suddenly flittering. Its tiny delicate abdomen, thickly furred, its hindwing undersides shot through with the pierid's special greenish-yellow cast. Irreducible. What cabbage brought you here, into this house, into the room I grew up in, in February? Where did your larval self live? Chant me your lines, how many generations of milky flight from Québec 1860 to here & now?

Vanessa atalanta

Last year it was almost the whole season before I saw a red admirable, even though I'd been down in the Crimea those couple deep summer weeks among the long-tailed skippers, hackberry emperors, common snouts, gulf fritillaries, etc., and the Gallonses had gotten to see that one in Central Park. I was walking in Zeke's orchard, late fall, with Pavel Durgeyevich: he was the one noticed it and called me over. It sat for us a long time on the gloss of a toothy apple leaf which bobbed lightly with the afternoon's breathing. The blue patch was pretty much faded out, but what a lovely creature! I had no film with me; nevertheless the color-saturation comes easily to me now even against today's wintry palette, fat bright apple-skins punctured by the stubbly green gold at our feet like that moment in Emily Dickinson.

Ong textbook:

"Lack of verifiable context is what makes writing normally so much more agonizing an activity than oral presentation to a real audience. The writer's audience is always a fiction. The writer must set up a role in which absent and often unknown readers can cast themselves. Even in writing to a close friend I have to fictionalize a mood for [him], to which [he] is expected to conform. The reader must also fictionalize the writer. When my friend reads my letter, I may be in an entirely different frame of mind from when I wrote it. Indeed, I may very well be dead. For a text to convey its message, it does not matter whether the author is dead or alive. Most books extant today were written by persons now dead. Spoken utterance comes only from the living."

Wa mā adrāka mā l-Lulu? That vital shakti which Wm. Blake called Orc, what makes the heart run, lets its holes work, lets the whales surface & breathe inside my chest which is almost hers, almost hers: identity happens, I become tidal desire without object, gas footlights grab & catch at the hems of me – all flames, like Emma Livry! A woman lives her full soul's size and the man-worlds around her topple like cardhouses, damning. Almost she routs the evil even from the Ripper's own heart but the poison letter of maleness arrives, enfin, as the letter always arrives. «Male journey» comme on dit. Must this letter always arrive? It musn't; with your help, héros, with your ashes and answers, I begin to rip the Jack from my own root. Jack, Mack: stiff, flip-flopping lozenge of green barred with black. Le couteau sur la table disparaît au cours du repas.

Wa mā adrāka mā l-Lady Lazarus? Death finds its way into a body's life like psychology into the jīva but my heart sometimes blinds its fingers' tips down a run of big jade or smoky-quartz beads all the way to a darkness so big it equals all of space and brings calm as it's clear it can't ever end: and the beads were words, we find, when the lamp gets its wick lit & the glass chimney's set. Words made into pomes. Hard linguage-forms exceed the page, strange fruit in excess of her mouth and mine. Slang & psychology mix, promiscuous, with simple sublimity of space in the uneven rise of the lines, my dory good and wet, its seams all proven, off beautiful Nauset. Elle est partie, elle est là.

Wa mā adrāka mā l-Sassafras? Bright insensible steel of the kettle at purr on the meetinghouse stove, quaker-light invading the space like vodka. Sunday morning always resists being kept outside with the dogs and the ducks. I wonder if you understood the way I felt about the stove, an Atlantic, cast at a forge in Portland (556) half a century ago. I remember slipping you a note rolled tight round a heavy little bottle, launching the surplus of me otherward, into the meshes of the Symbolic Order, from my island. Mon naufrage. The streaming light from the window snags its beams against a hip of the kettle, forming a little pucker of emptiness. I stare into this clear glare-knot and it's a tear, a hole, a puncture in the colored field of forms filling the jewel-organs of my sight: stove, pipe, steam, painted & unpainted wood – behind all this rich ecstatic maya-tissue lies a pure spatiality of empty light et ça c'est toi, c'est Toi.

SANJURO

We were all thirty, like Sylvia Plath. Clouds had been scudding across the squinting eye of each of our hearts ever since we could remember. That they began to clear off, that a sky was found to be behind them, seemed less important at the time than that we were suffering suddenly beyond precedent.

Want to be punished like this.

I was such an idiot. I didn't know anything about mystery or majesty. I didn't understand how plants worked & wasn't interested in learning. None of the food I liked to eat was good for me. I hurt people, I didn't know how to open up to them. The word "love" was as blank a thing to me as a butterfly was; and that latter I'd just as soon have killed as photographed – that is if I were ever even to notice one, which I never did.
Happily, though, my crianza played itself out in brutal Bucks County, where one is not allowed to go on for too long without being made to account for oneself.

Recordar

To remember;
from the Latin re-cordis,
to pass back through the heart.

Žižekniks bloggling

Things appear when the balance of the void is disturbed. What we call creation is a cosmic imbalance, a cosmic catastrophe. [...]
Love is a cosmic imbalance. I have always been disgusted with the idea of universal love. Love is an extremely violent act. It's not "I love you all." Love means "I pick out something," it's a structure of imbalance. Even if this something is a small detail, I say "I love you more than anything else." In this quite formal sense love is evil.

TANTRAMAR

Les foins qui nous ramassions dans nos doris –
salt hay like down Plum Island where the Merrimac dumps –
midst clamor of waterfowl, Akkadie!

Someone took this picture of me ten years ago at that Vienna kaffeehaus (whose name eludes me) famous for having been the first place in "Europe" ever to serve the stuff, back in Ottoman days. I was there to celebrate the release of my cousin's first record. It seems like I was much younger than I am now. Her record was great, we all loved it then, and it's since become a classic throughout Mitteleuropa. Massy tides of memory. I hadn't seen the photo for some time: it surprised me last night coming out from between two pages of a volume of Βιζυηνός that I've been revisiting. I like the affection I feel for myself when I look through this little window across a decade's distance.

The floor shakes under my belly for a minute and a half as the Odessa train hauls itself past our house. I'm on the parquet most of the morning, my torso propped up on its elbows to effect a slight back-bend (countering the ache resultant of too far a walk on pavements last night with heavy bag of new books & no arch-supports) and to free up my hands for the sketch-work spread out on the floor before me. Sketching the several interesting varieties of flowering shrub that hang so insistently, so independently, so immediately in the dense silver-washed air of the world captured by the collection of Crimean War photographs my brother brought home for me from Jassy. I'll show my sketches to Pavel Durgeyevich who is sure to be able to identify them.

Thin paper, weakened by the wet of a drizzly run of days & a crying jag, parts against the slight tug of Beard Street's cobbles like the jib sheet of a Gloucester schooner struggling against gales up the Gulf toward Βοστόνη. Voice gives to gulf of silence, inscription eclipsed by the hollow behind it. Day blooms.

Awake too late, three calls already having come in for me to the phone that my brother and I use in the house next door and we're all out of pu-erh till he (my brother) gets back from Jassy. Make do with a mate (Ilex paraguariensis). Scrambling my morning body all over the empty house. The days go quietly, by evening-time my ego relaxes and becomes "self", I harmonize the chaos of cosmic forces in me: then I go to sleep. Morning poses the entire question again. Beautiful, deciduous lives of consciousness.

Love Tārā

I am Yeshe Dawa, the moon is on me.
I sat in mahāmudrā for ten million years:
शिव's throat burned dark blacking-blue
my milk came and went, tides of κέφι
and the suffering of many millions of creaturitas
passed through the open chamber of my heart.
I was approached by monks & told I was a great buddha
& should consider maleness as a form of birth
with perhaps greater potential for further attainments.
From then on I resolved always to be born a woman.

In orbit between the high crypt of the windowless 5th floor (better now, less toxic, but still a space of deprivation) and the cold shuffle of home: from bed to blanket-bunkered couch with stack of books, to bathroom, to changing clothes directly in front of heater (the one shot of heat in our otherwise parsimonious corn pellet usage). A 3rd stop added in later days: SWIMMING!: the mini orbit of lapping, the attention to tile patterns, the enforced breath rhythm – a retraining (recently having gained awareness of a habit of unintentionally holding the breath). These patterns are punctuated by the thrill of excavated winter limbs, flesh flushed pink underneath all skin colors, drippy, shiny, rubber headcaps, foam, the exciting activity-specific equipment of goggles, echoes. Finally, the quick and pleasurable shock from cold pool to hot shower before wetheaded biking. STAYIN' ALIVE!

RIP Lapidaria margaretae.
I trust: lithops energy is underground in winter.

meat is flesh the morning was
zero degrees fahrenheit snow dry
& powdery sky clear but with a brief
bluddy smudge for a sunrise the piglets

all huddled up shivery against their old
ma and the next morning same time the
sky was dark and blowy and it was fifty
degrees with the snow almost rained out
and the runt was pretty much dead