what is beauty? i have often asked myself. why does one feel compelled by one image rather than another? what emotions are there in between myself and a painting, a poem? what emotions which are only mine because the poem or painting instills them in me?
what has washed it all away? beauty and emotion both? a kind of pornographic violence, a dulling of the wits, an attention deficit raised to the level of world.
what is disgust? greater perhaps than anger i can speak beyond anger because my disgust for this world is such that i can stand away and vent far more than anger, and show all my pain. i can write it but i cannot show it without hurting. thus what you have done is to me impossible. my anger is invisible. it is a moment permanently superseded with words which flow constantly even when then pen cannot act.
what happened to Pasolini? is like asking what happened to the truth? why did the herd turn on him then? why was the sexuality of his pain so evident then? what did he go seeking? was he so consumed by guilt? an exit from love? from the love of his mother which dominated everything forever? could one hate society more than Pasolini? could it have grown worse? poetry in the form of a rose and 120 days stand side by side, antitheses one man could no longer bridge.
those who live without pain are not our friends. we can only disbelieve them. i write because i live my pain as an offering, a walking over, a step to the side, and i write it.
we live our pain victoriously. i do not mean we have overcome our pain. i mean we are unashamed to be who we are and feel what we feel. we call it a dialect of wounds.
so the shame at being human is a disdain for sexual practises which are locked within power games, within ounces of punch, grams of speed and high. it is a question of being to them when love is always about feeling. being is a sham. i have never been anything but a river of becomings. and yes i have been punched but i have retaliated. they have come for me in numbers just as they came for Pasolini, plotting his murder, plotting a rape, a perfect crime.
love and sex ever pushed further and further apart. money the liquid key used to exchange dreams for fantasies. fantasies of big and better. fantasies of forbidden. fantasies of a long way away, never to return… only you have to and sometimes there is hell to pay.
we seek poetry within certain fields, we seek it out but in a way it is the only thing you cannot find. it is there already or not at all. in that outside particle of becoming. when a guitar stands to play and propels us beyond with fingers from heaven. what is personal becomes universal, it unfolds a story which could never have been told otherwise. it was always there. it has just been chosen.
pornography is not a science. can it be an art? i have my doubts. but it is a form of commerce. and very effective at selling through subliminal manipulations. the kicks hidden. the broken jaws of children as they break on the rocks of disease and racism cleansed and polished. everything shines even the sexual organs of drugged actors as they oil the cogs of anti-seduction. pornography is monotony itself, the repetition of a knockout blow. bodies empty and fill in complete irrelevance. what is animal had to be overcome, the human being a stillborn nightmare. we are nowhere near achieving anything at all.
i saw the Pasolini in you. i saw the monstrous sincerity in your words. i cannot read your videos but i can string the abstract line which takes the sex away from your brain and lends it miraculously to the river of becoming. there is no sense in lying. we are too far gone for that. some of us can barely dance so scarce is this air we breathe, so full is it with the converted lies of dystopia's being, the radioactive insincerity of governments overcome by marauding reality.
our blood breathes in poems. every moment saved from murder writes itself to us in adulterous pitch. this is just the beginning of the end. it will take us a long time to die.
The world is full of simulation and fakers my friend - some say it doesn't matter and that intent, rather than content, is what matters - I say the counterfeit is false and the false holds no meaning.
ReplyDeletethat elusive quest for 'excellence' every artist and poets knows about....that is where beauty can be found.....
ReplyDeleteyes indeed, jan, thanks
ReplyDeletei think all art is either our grasping to keep hold of some beauty, or the need to create that is born within us, to give us a pathway forward out of the ugliness of life. Poetry does both. it also allows us to leap space and time to reach and be reached beyond our capacity to imagine. What love here Dom is your clarity, passion articulated without boodshed without bruising the brokenhearted, you have a gift for that, the passion and its containment that does not flinch from the telling of it in the least, running side by side over the road of musical clear-seeing words
ReplyDeletelovely comment marilyn thanks. glad you can hear me
ReplyDeleteIt is an admirable attempt to seek poetic justice in the ruptured vain of the martyr. You are the voice of innocence, you react seeking. When one seeks to understand the human condition it becomes intimate.
ReplyDeleteI am fascinated by the voices we adopt, shelter or kill. Voices to which we admit and confess. Would we be victims to the victims or a dominating voice, because at the end they want to break through real.
We have to dirty poetry in our human remains, blood, flesh, cum, spit, tears, screams sometimes to understand beauty.
The anger voice is still most natural, because when you are down pressed by the boot and violated even by your own blood rushing to the brain you oppose, you don’t beg mercy, you spit at faces
Is this a letter to the notorious and fascinating Barrus?
we explore the questions of questions. there are no answers
ReplyDeleteThanks - a good work.
ReplyDeleteto meditate, even where notions of brotherhood are absent... to ask the questions which cannot be answered and travel with them
ReplyDeleteor, the answers are always in flux as the questions are
ReplyDeletewe travel back and forth. there are no answers
ReplyDeletemoving target, the truth, and how we see it, or don't want to
ReplyDeletethe arrow
ReplyDelete"we live our pain victoriously. " Yes we try to, some days are better than others. Thank you Dom♥
ReplyDeletequestions and questions to questions allow the river to flow, it allows to breathe, it carries fertile muds along. Life can emerge ...
ReplyDeletepossible answers and their questions
ReplyDeleteand answers possibilities, of course
ReplyDeleteCan art be ugly? Can art represent horror? Disgust? Can we hate art? Can art be corrupt? Can it be perverse? The answer is yes. Is art sacred? The answer is no. Barrus is the nexus of these questions and the answer to them. Think about Leni Riefenstahl and the sordid purpose of her art; visually appealing, but ultimately corrupt. Very provocative stuff Dom - you started quite a debate
ReplyDeleteyes i thought the same thing john, start a real debate... would be good about real questions...
ReplyDeleteI agree there are no answers. Or at least no answers that hold on a constant plane. There are answers from time to time, in relation to a particular moment or experience, sure. Maybe that's what keeps the questions relevant.
ReplyDeleteLa beauté, n’est-ce pas le mystère de cette relation s’établissant entre deux pôles, le mystère de cet espace grandissant si on lui en laisse la place ? de même qu’entre deux personnes, espace inexplicable mais se produisant, né de l’aimantation, une affaire de relation, vraiment, la beauté alors, oui, comme religion si on écoute le sens premier du mot …
ReplyDeleteC’est vital de ne pas chercher à l’expliquer mais de l’effleurer, toujours de questions nées de la plume ou de l'esprit, de rester dans ce possible que la réponse clôturerait dans l’impossible …
Mais oui, toujours se demander comment, pourquoi, regarder tout cela, le tout, avec étonnement premier d’une naissance renouvelée à l’aube de chaque jour. La rivière des questions comme eau de vie. Mystère sacré.
Jusqu’où aller dans le beau, dans l’art, pour qui cette relation qui s’établit avec moi conduisant au beau, s’établit-elle également ? peut-on tout considérer comme de l’art ? qu’est-ce que l’art ?
J’entendais un jour à la radio que tout ce qui servait de matière à création pouvait être considéré comme de l’art. Il parlait bien du support et non de ce qui en naît. Et la personne faisait référence à la Shoah, support à création dans le but de panser la plaie je le crois, s’il en est. Choquant oui car pour moi l’art est – était – ce qui provoquait l’émotion, le sentiment, la sensation dans l’espoir, ou la relation au beau. Mais je peux concevoir ceci – si on en reste au sens premier du mot – mais pour moi la Shoah était l’anti-art par essence …
Toutefois, oui, l’art comme alchimie, vraiment. Epure du chaos pour que la musique s’en élève …
La question est infinie, et c’est parfait ainsi.
(Sorry, je ne peux pas faire cela en anglais …)
the allure of tim is that he always is navigating between impossible and disparate poles,of art,pornography,care for people sick from aids,struggle against prejudice,motorlanguage as poetry,highly
ReplyDeleteinformed and actual information set off against measures of a retarded government,constant renewal of the media with which he expresses his art,always looking for the edge,sometimes toppling over,or,trying to let morons topple over it,the rage of a volcano,achived in a life of pain and grief as its fundamentals,yet joy and velocity as its energetic drives.i think this open letter to tim is marvellous and it shows we will never forget him,honour him,let him live and flourisch,however and whenever we can.he is a living myth.
achived=achieved;flourisch=flourish
ReplyDeleteTim was a con man - a living lie.
ReplyDeleteLaetitia Lisa, en effet en francais c est mieux... je remarque qu'avec les questions auquelles on n'essaie pas de repondre mais seulement d explorer - ayant perdu les certitudes et le droit a l'unicite - on passe dans les zones infinies d'uyne pensee toujours en devenir, a venir, pourlaquelle la forme du poeme en prose est matiere parfaite... jabes et la question, prennent ici son sens
ReplyDeleteAad de Gids, yes i agree, love the idea of toppling over, always on the edge
ReplyDeleteJohn Jack, there would be a long debate as to whether there can be such a thing as a con man in Literature generally. you are either a good writer who writes well, good books or a poor writer who writes mediocre stuff. what is a con? to say you're good when you're average and write overly complex verbose poems continuously citing philosophy and psychological and political theory to back up your imposture? there's an awful lot of that as we now and have chatted about. you are an honest man who shoots down the barrel, you have a keen eye and rarely miss your target. Tim is an experimentor as Aad says. he had once upon a time written a book about an american indian which was refused by all the publishing houses. he then decided to change the author and make the author american indian, suddenly the book wins prizes and is heralded as a great book! who is the con man? where is the imposture? the publishing world would refuse any original or ingenious writer who brings a manuscript to their table. there are myriad examples from artaud to proust etc... open questions...
ReplyDeletejohn jack what is your interest in saying this. i have a feeling it is to profile yourself,unfortunately it didn't succeed. you know shite about tim.
ReplyDeleteThere's no need to be abusive Aad - I believe the reader in the final, perhaps most important link in the performance that is writing. The authors credentials and the terms fiction and non fiction play a part in this relationship. If it were not important - why would Tim lie? Here is the crux of his con trick - his original letter to Esquire magazine and the story they published plays directly on the sympathy of the reader... and misrepresents his credentials... 'In the entire history of Esquire magazine, you have never once published an American Indian writer. This oversight is profound. I am a Navajo writer who has written (enclosed) an article about the death of my son from fetal alcohol syndrome. FAS is an issue of concern to Native Americans. It should be an issue of concern to white people, too. I hope my article--The Blood Flows Like a River Through My Dreams--interests you. Thank you. Sincerely, Nasdijj.'
ReplyDeletejohn jack,this scam is accredited for.it,next to the crystal clear content you present,is still yet more complex than that.esquire had a role in it too,plus some jealous and hyperenvious and nasty scum,who all have been identified later.it has sored tim,yet,as dom also questions,it alone is still the question what the lying zone is in litterature and if there is a zone of integrity.yes,i found it in tims writings.he has spend his life helping kids with either multidunous learning- or developmentsdifficulties,and the last decade,kids with aids.the esquire scam was not at all a surprise for esquire,since they hired him on that premisse.the world of publishers,now luckily dying
ReplyDeleteout,is one of crooked and sick morons,with profitist and elitist perversions.tim has been vampirized.he enjoyed it.if we should investigate this domain in litterature,it would be a senseless and endless endeavour.all already is being said.all is either plagiarism or inpurity in one way or another.only to let loose of the notion of authorship and "authenticity",and,even,to a great extent,semantics and syntaxis,one would be able to escape the deadly traps set out by a voracious amusementsindustry,already forecasted by the frankfurter schule,horkheimer,adorno,marcuse,and later killed off finally by the french poststructuralists."we have never cited ourselves"--deleuze-guattari.to dig out the nasdijj affaire really isn't modern.
multitudinous
ReplyDeleteexcellent Dom...As for Tim being a con man, I think everybody has a past, even John Jack, and it is my belief that Tim has atoned for his past discrepancies. at least, I am hoping that is so. EVERYBODY HAS A PAST I KNOW I DO. and I am redeemed, redeem myselt, daily
ReplyDeleteThere is no debate where everyone agrees - sophistry aside this has been an entertaining debate.
ReplyDelete"what is personal becomes universal, it unfolds a story which could never have been told otherwise. it was always there. it has just been chosen" ---I have many thoughts on the differences between pornography and eroticism...bestial act and sensual expression~ Much of society has lost its art of subtlety in exchange for the shock value of what inevitably desensitizes~ Many do not understand nor appreciate the ecstasies within abstinence that permit one to explore the full spectrum of our desires and the root of where they really come from~ We are an age so lost in our masks that we have forsaken our most natural expressions...yet...I digress...I understand this poem is a flagship for so much more than this subject alone...of which I could not possibly begin to decipher or explain~ Namaste~
ReplyDeletePS~ I should expand here before I am subject to a great wave of misinterpretation- that I (quite obviously) do not promote abstinence as the permanent or only solution...it is merely (or greatly) a sort of meditation that inevitably leads to the enrichment, deepening, cultivation of our most heightened expressions for certain individuals at particular crossroads of life~
ReplyDeleteLeila A. Fortier i fully understand what you mean by abstinence, a very pertinent observation thank you
ReplyDelete