FROM the Rights of Man and the Rights of the Other

"Immediately, one and the other is one facing the other. It is myself for the other. The essence of the reasonable being in man designates not only the advent in things of a psychism in the form of knowledge, in the form of consciousness rejecting contradiction, that would encompass the other things under concepts, disalienating them within the identity of the universal: it also designates the ability of the individual, who initially appears to exist relatively to the extension of the concept--the species man, to posit himself as the only one of his kind, and thus as absolutely different from all the others, but, in that difference, and without reconstituting the logical concept from which the I disengaged itself, to be non-in-different to the other. Non-in-difference, or original sociality-goodness; peace, or the wish for peace, benediction; 'shalom' --the initial event of meeting. Difference--a non-in-difference in which the other--though absolutely other, 'more other,' so to speak, than are the individuals with respect to one another within the 'same species' from which the I has freed itself--in which the other 'regards' me, not in order to 'perceive' me, but in 'concerning me,' in 'mattering to me as someone for whom I am answerable.' The other, who--in this sense--'regards' me, is the face."--Emmanuel Levinas

THE PROTAGONIST

CHAPTER ONE
One night Jack Brady was seated on the mattress in his second floor apartment. A stack of rejection letters huddled on the nightstand under constant scrutiny of a nearby candle. He lifted a bladder of boxed wine to his lips, carelessly spilling red lines down his chin. Then placed it beside a stack of overdue library books and stared out into the darkness.
This was an important night in Jack Brady’s life because he decided, after much consideration, not to end his life. He planned on chasing a bottle of prescription pills with several liters of wine. Fall asleep and let shadows suffuse.
At the last moment he changed his mind. Dashed the handful of tiny spheres across the floor and turned on the radio. Trilling violins sent tremors over his flesh. Massaged them into his shoulders and thighs and stretched his arms. Reached for the wine and mouthed the spout of the bladder once more before resting it on the stained sheets.
Brady climbed from bed and stood with his bare feet on the cold hardwood floor. Legs stiffened contracting fever. An anxious sweat devised his face. Right hand flattened against the grain of the beige wall feeling the drum of a headboard next door vibrate his fingers before letting his arm drop to his side. Walked to the bathroom and cupped his hands underneath the faucet for a stream of water. Splashed his unshaven face and turned on the light. His eyes dragged down his cheeks by racks of flesh. He rested his hands upon the sink and inspected himself closely, peering up into his nostrils, sniffing and blowing, jiggled his index fingers inside his ears and then brushed his teeth voraciously, spitting gobs of toothpaste and blood into the rusted drain.
Removed a lone towel from the rack and wiped his mouth. A spider ruled an unwavering line, divided his face vertically in the mirror. He sighed gently against the line watching the pendulum sway in certain circles from side to side, the spider delegating an invisible crag before pedaling upward toward the ceiling.
Brady walked over to his only window and raked his eyes over the infectious animation below. Wrestled open the window and propped it up with his radio. Voices in the street broke like glass against dance clubs and late night jazz dives. Bodies shifting in shadows bore no explanation for their footsteps. They treaded laughter and applause irrecoverably into action. Flickering lights jabbed through darkness.
While the night bawled into the past, Jack Brady’s life was going nowhere. He made a meek living writing and creating greeting cards, distributing them for sale at various shops in the area. His specialty was staining 4 x 6 sheets of poster board with wet tea bags. He’d let them dry onto the board, the string threaded out beyond the border of the paper. The manner in which they rested on the page reminded him of message bottles romantically rushed ashore. Beside them he composed short verse, mostly lines stolen from published writers, hoping that someday someone would purchase one of his greeting cards inevitably awarding him triumph and success after his many grueling years of pedaling baubles to the masses. But this prostitution was wearing thin his patience. He wanted nothing more than to be a successful writer, but as each day passed he became more and more convinced of its intangibility.
What little money he had slipped quickly through his fingers on paper and supplies. He tried gambling on dogs like some of his idols, but quickly abandoned it after several losses. He also tried gainful employment at a number of positions: hotel clerk, waiter, janitor, department store assistant, but each one seemed to drag the soul from his very fingertips leaving him stifled, aggressive, and resentful of a day poorly wasted on false kindness and a pathetic paycheck. Though impoverishment was a lifestyle he had no ambition of surviving, his will to pursue the distinguished road of his predecessors became so pervasive that his reality allowed little else entrance.
Brady had been on rinse and repeat for about eight months. The alarm went off to the same three DJ’s squandering their wilted ethics over the best call-in sound effects contest: honk, gobble, and moo. He opened his eyes, interrupted from dreams of his ex-girlfriend, the sex they rarely had, her manikin body, unresponsive and resistant. Shower and dress and leave, splinter morning with irresolute mobility, spend money on something, anything at all, anything to gauge contribution, then return home and wait by the window until it was dark enough to drink wine without guilt, read and sleep and begin again.
There was nothing spectacular about him or his life and this, he felt, was the reason for his rejection. After his girlfriend left him, he had acquired enough rejection slips to wallpaper one wall in his apartment, which is exactly what he did. From small presses to large publishing houses he decorated his apartment with unoriginal lines from various editors who found his work unappealing or, while occasionally “exciting and emotional,” unsuitable at this time. Most of his excitement came from examining his body in the mirror each morning and debating whether or not shaving his chest and pubic hair would inspire great literature and opportunity.
Tonight, however, was different. Tonight and every day after this night would be forever changed by his actions. He realized that by killing himself he would deprive the world their god given right to the great American novel. And while he had no qualms about pushing daisies after the fact, he had not yet accomplished this feat.
What he needed was a female lead. Someone to share protagonist adventures, the mystery and eroticism of a fond love affair. He needed a story so compelling, so honest in its right it would be irrefutable to the critical eye. Brady paced the floor for several minutes, gnawing at the flesh around his fingernails, feeling the anticipation rise from his bowels to an inspired glaze over his eyes. Always told that to write a truly brilliant novel, one must write from experience. To write a tragic love affair one must have a tragic love affair. To write a murder, one must commit a murder.
Walked out from the bathroom beside his mattress and dropped to the floor. He began exercising voraciously, doing pushup after pushup, followed by a succession of crunches. He could feel his muscles resisting under tear and strain but continued forcing his body to exceed its expectations. To accomplish his goal of becoming a great American novelist he would have to experience horrible things, take actions he never thought possible.
Brady stood and walked over to the window. A group of girls dressed in dramatic club attire pirouetted through the smog and stench of hotdog vendors and alcohol ignited streets. A man in a hooded sweatshirt walked a dog at a hurried pace as if he were expected. Hundreds of others carried along fracturing the night to pieces with laughter and idiocy, heartbreak and lust.

Maurice Blanchot from The Gaze of Orpheus translation by Lydia Davis

"Remaining is not accessible to the one who dies. The deceased, we say, is no longer of this world, he has left it behind him, but what is left behind is precisely this cadaver, which is not of this world either--even though it is here--which is, rather, behind the world, something the living person (and not the deceased) has left behind him and which now affirms, on the basis of this, the possibility of a world behind, a return backwards, an indefinite survival, indeterminate, indifferent, about which we only know that human reality, when it comes to an end, reconstitutes its presence and proximity."

some thoughts on "HERE" by DL, AH, HG,DB,TW, and SMH

i wld like to offer a few thoughts about a chapbook i recently read titled HERE, authored by six authors whose initials mark their poems throughout the chap. 

...the writing in HERE is concerned with boundaries (as perhaps all writing is?)...HERE is framed and inhabited by poems searching out questions of identity... "who am I?" or " who are we?"...the horizon of this work existing as the possibility for difference and agency...the poems acting as kinds of technologies for metamorphosis...machines for constructing the temporary nourishment needed for transformation...or more to my thinking...lacanian psychoanalytic linguistic instruments for transformations...these poems are the search for identities in self- and co-construction...identities in relation...identities in transformation...the possibility of the being-in-language as an gestural agent of liberty...but also...part of the action of this writing is also necessarily about the pain of transformation...the poems themselves harbingers of dark transmissions of personal experience...in these ways i'm reminded of the power of writing to aid memory as well as writing being a psychoanalytic tool for self discovery...Not simply reportage or journal entries of activities HERE is a collaborative poetry manuscript built upon a polyformal and multiplicitous potentiality...the forms utilized range from anaphora, list, lyric, prose, free verse, acrostic, the poetic play, the google search, epistolary, renga, and hybrids and variations of these to perfom a geography of body and of mind...but one in which the boundaries and horizons of the future are being formed...

Here are some of my favorite excerpts..

...From DL's "My Heart's Language"...

...Love isn't easy

It is hard to gain and lose

Our beliefs change

I can't believe that was me

Afraid of time

When she was scared

She was her mother

She was her own being

We just have to dig within our bodies

...From AH's "La, Mariposa, the butterfly woman"...

...i dreamed of a girl whose soft body opened like a cabinet

inside the cavity were embryos shining, daggers on

shelves and bags packed with the first green color of

spring

this was the Skeleton Woman

she stretches from heaven to hell,

we're all here, here, here

...From HG's "Part 1"...

...She (the jumper) is already accepting, moving

on to the next moment in time, society places her back

and dwells like gulls in a stand still cold front unable to

fly out of it and enlisting her among their ever familiar V-

formation.

White Noise: Becoming a transfixion, an escape out of

hell. Rid the conscious mind of the tedious aspects of our 

tedious minds.

...From DB's "[Written in an address book]"...

...Stillness except for rocking,

Back and forth

Green, green, green, brown.

Darkened windows

A brick asylum

Darkened trees

Branches intertwined

Leaves cover every bit of light

Missing the escape holes...

 

...From TW's "[who am i?]"...

...I am a night owl who lives for the stars and

the crazy things that happen at night. I am a friend who

can be trusted until the end. I am on a journey to

discovery of what i want out of life. I am a girl who has

choices. I want to be free....

...From SMH's "Google Search"...

...You can't 

remember a time when your thoughts of purpose did not

include others. It is kind of a relief to feel sure of yourself

       You realize that we are all here for each other

and searching for a purpose. Suddenly a wave of 

exhaustion comes over you. You turn off the computer,

walk back to your room, and crawl into bed, soft and

warm.

...lastly here is the RENGA from HERE in its entirety...

Slick as a motherfucking architectural major

Building buildings off of my irises

I sometimes crave Newport's, but my

Mother and father completely disagree

I'm scared they might disown me

Let's pretend

This ended hopeful

My mom won't let me watch scary movies

She says their innapropriate

Just like church

I wish that black crows on their wires visited me oftener

And more than I would like, I find myself singing "wrong

way"

She winces at my smoker-alto voice 

The overall theme and structure of the poems in this work remind and encourage a reading of the order of the lepidoptera (moths/butterflies) as examples of the ways in which horizons and boundaries shift after metamorphosis...the ritualistic passage from one stage to another carries within itself the solidification of new social bonds and boundaries...to the caterpillar the personal relation to the boundaries of the world is one of gravity and nourishment...while through the ritual metamorphosis the moth/butterfly becomes relative to new amazing and dangerous stimuli, the winds sway, the vastness of travel, the settling on a flower, the availability and dangers of greater accesses of flight...HERE as a book exists as a series of texts reinforcing a collective experience of relational ritual...the ritual of transformation...as i read through the texts i view the diffracted angles of a shattered chrysalis...the poems of HERE are the pieces of a passed through space...it is an architecture for passing through, for passing time...but one marked with a horizon that is about to be different...an architecture with internal folds and excesses left as marks of the vast machinery of socio/biological (mis)understandings and frustrations that contribute to the shifting boundaries of an identity in...about....and beyond...transformation...

...i want to thank Tim Armentrout for sending this book to me...HERE is a testament to the powers of the imagination...the power to create your own path...the power to understand the paths of others...the power to continue to become...

Happy Memorial Day

Ted, an excerpt from "Memorial Day":

http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/dial_a_poem_poets/corpse/Corpse_05_berrigan.mp3

From Facebook (my apologies)

(from Charles Bernstein)- Thanks to Univ. of Calif. Press, PEPC Library is able to make available this key Robin Blaser essay on Olson and Whitehead. I tried to get the html as close to the book as possible, but let me know if you see any errors. Robin Blaser -- The Violets
Source: writing.upenn.edu
fromThe Fire: Collected Essays of Robin Blaserr, ed. Miriam Nichols Univeristy of California Press, 2006. PEPC Digitial Publication of one essay from the book.

tribute to blaser

the incomparable robin blaser