Sunday, November 30, 2014

racists getting fired (& getting racists fired)

Over the last few days I've noticed a lot of folks on the Twitter and the Face-book linking to the new Tumblr sensation. It's called racists getting fired (& getting racists fired), and its purpose is to find people saying nasty racist shit on social media, finding out where they work, directing their superiors to aforesaid racist shit, and getting them fired.

I kind of really hate it.

I'm not apologizing for racists. It's unnecessary to explain why not: their beliefs are ignorant and atavistic and should have no place in the twenty-first century (or any century, for that matter). But it makes me uncomfortable that many of the same people who were so livid at at the Gamergaters' doxxing tactics are the ones linking to and applauding Racists Getting Fired.

When you disconnect the politics from either scenario, what you essentially have are a group of motivated zealots targeting a total stranger who has offended them and proactively working to ruin their life. We would certainly be upset if, say, some mean-spirited trog outed somebody—someone they've never actually met face to face or spoken to—as gay or transgendered, or got them fired from their job at a Catholic relief services nonprofit by pointing to a blog post where they refer to undergoing in-vitro fertilization. But then we Like and Favorite and Retweet when someone performs the same sort of attack on a person whose views we don't like.

"Bullshit," you say. "People need to be held accountable for believing and saying things beyond the pale." Sure. Remember that when you arrive at a moment in your life when your personal compass doesn't align with the crowd's.

I think it speaks to how personhood has been revised by the internet. The people (assholes) on Racists Getting Fired aren't really people to us. They're just the part of them that says racist shit. It's really easy to advocate for a stranger's public humiliation, to go behind their back and divest them of their income, to hand out their phone numbers to thousands of acrimonious anonymouses when what you're dealing with isn't someone you see as an actual and complete person, but as a remote abstraction of a person. (Funny: don't we often think of racism as the reduction of a human being to a single characteristic?)

What bothers me most (as someone who would like to consider himself a progressive) is that tactics like these aren't going to be very effective in the long run. They're great for rallying the believers, but not necessarily for winning converts, which is what we want to do. The successes of the queer community towards achieving social acceptance over the last thirty years weren't achieved by an intimidation campaign, but by what was essentially good PR: by demonstrating to an ignorant and hitherto biased public that, gosh, these are people with feelings, aspirations, and contributions to make, just like anyone else. Winning hearts and minds. You don't persuade holdouts to change their beliefs by subjecting offenders to a digital auto-da-fé. More likely than not, it will leave their noxious beliefs unchanged or reaffirmed (how often is a forced repentance honest?), and help "SJW" further along its way to becoming a slur. We don't want social progressivism to become associated with vengeful thought-policing, with people who only care for free expression when what's being said is what they agree with. Not only will its proponents risk being discredited, but so will the cause itself.

People like Daryl Davis have the right idea. (I wish I had occasion to link to that piece more frequently.) We can't all do what he can, but the key is to make our ideological opponents into our allies. We can't very well round up and gas all the racists in the world; we have to give them cause to sincerely become non-racists.

But yeah, it's much easier and more immediately and viscerally satisfying to terrorize them via the internet, and it'll win you more followers on Tumblr. So carry on.

Friday, November 28, 2014

The Descent of Winter: 11/28

     I make very little money.
     What of it?
     I prefer the grass with the rain on it
     the short grass before my headlights
     when I am turning the car——
     a degenerate trait, no doubt.
     It would ruin England.


(W.C.W.)


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Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Fires and Ferguson


I wish I could watch the violence in Ferguson with some satisfaction. This whole thing has just sucked, dismally sucked, from beginning to end, August to November.

"Everything in moderation, including moderation," I saw someone saying on Twitter on Monday night, when downtown Ferguson started to burn. This has been a salient theme in the Twitterati's response to the fallout from the Michael Brown verdict: the rioting is unfortunate, but if it isn't justified, then it exists in a kind of moral vacuum, isolated from and unassailable by the judgements and admonitions of anyone watching from the outside. Let it happen; it had to happen, the crowd had no other recourse.

It's interesting how this strain of social exegesis accurately, albeit indirectly, acknowledges that the actors in the Ferguson danse infernale were not behaving as totally autonomous agents (whose actions were determined by some obscure factor called "free will"), but as organisms doing precisely what organisms do: answering their present environment precisely how that environment has developed them to answer it.

A tautology: riots are caused by environments apt to cause riots. We can refine this by inserting the appropriate sociological diagnoses, but it is enough here. The social environment is much more at fault than the human beings or human behavior it produces, whether considered individually or as an aggregate.

Fires must be put out. Letting a blaze run its course is one way of seeing it extinguished; it demands the least effort of intervention, but is certainly the most costly in the long term. And that is why I can't condone the rioters, why I still have to be one of those sententious assholes who sits far away and yawps about nonviolent civil disobedience.

Where fires are concerned, it is most sensible to subtract from the environment the necessities for ignition: if no fires start, there is no need to put them out.

We are doing a very poor job of this. The Micheal Brown case has been like trying to extinguish a spark by smothering it with kindling.

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Ferguson: Dispatch from an Alternate Dimension


A few hours ago the grand jury announced its verdict in the Michael Brown case, and I haven't been able to turn away from the videos of cheering and dancing in the streets. The system might be imperfect, but as we've seen tonight, it works. The people who enforce the law aren't above the law, and justice is colorblind. And that is truly cause for celebration.

Though it came at a grave and irreparable cost, the Michael Brown saga, from start to finish, has been a reaffirmation of the rule of law America. The eyes of the world were on us as the first outraged demonstrators took to the streets in August, and we can all take pride in the professionalism and calibrated response of the Ferguson Police Department as they sternly but quietly observed the protestors' right to peaceful assembly, even as they themselves were the subject of the protest.

It really is astonishing that the protests never grew violent. The discipline of the protestors has been almost unbelievable, as have the responses of government officials at nearly ever level. Remember how Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson's public address on August 11 went viral? ("The police exist to serve the community...and today the community is wounded.") And there was President Obama's impassioned speech in Saint Louis on August 15 when he promised, in essence, to investigate and scale back the militarization of local police forces, and House Speaker John Boehner's formation of an ad hoc committee to investigate police training and procedure. (It really is a shame that it takes a disaster like this to get congressional Republicans to agree with Obama on something.) Everyone rose to the occasion, but special accolades are due to St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch for gracefully stepping down from the occasion, acknowledging that any perceived conflict of interest or partiality would discredit the entire proceeding.

My friend James has been in Ferguson for the last few days, waiting on the announcement of the grand jury's decision. I asked him over the phone what he thought might happen if Darren Wilson escaped an indictment—were we looking at a Midwestern sequel to the 1992 riots in Los Angeles?

He just laughed. "Absolutely not. No way. That would solve nothing. Everyone here knows better than to shit where they eat."

I actually got another call from James a few minutes ago. Even though the celebrations are winding down, it was still hard to hear him over all the cheering and music in the streets. I reminded him that this isn't the end of it; Wilson still has to stand trial, and there's a chance—we can't guess how much of one—that he'll be acquitted in the end.

"Maybe. Just maybe we've been wrong about him. But we'll have to wait and see. Let the system do its work."

Judging from what I'm seeing on Twitter, most observers are sharing James' sentiment. People aren't out for blood or revenge here: from the beginning this has been a murky case with wildly inconsistent testimony, and what most us want is to get to the truth of what happened on August 9, 2014. Taking the matter to trial will ensure that it is given a fair, rigorous, and transparent examination.

I don't know about the rest of you, but tonight I'm proud to be an American. Despite its foibles, America has once again proven the efficacy of its justice system and the gentle rectitude of its people. Imperfect as we may yet be, we are drawing ever closer to the vision of "a city upon a hill" espoused by John Winthrop, the Massachusetts Bay Colony founder and governor renowned for his religious tolerance and commitment to an equitable coexistence with the Wampanoag tribes.

Monday, November 24, 2014

The Descent of Winter: 11/24

Paul Klee, Comedy

  If genius is profuse, never ending——stuck in the middle of a work is——the wrong track. Genius is the track, seen. Once seen it is impossible to keep from it. The superficial definitions, such as "genius is industry, genius is hard work, etc." are nonsense. It is to see the track, to smell it out, to know it inevitable—sense sticking out all round feeling, feeling, seeing——hearing touching. The rest is pure gravity (the earth pull).

  Creations:——they are situations of the soul (Lear, Harpagon, Œdipus Rex, Electra) but so closely (subjectively) identified with life that they become people. They are offshoots of an intensely simple mind. It is no matter what we think, no matter what we are.

  The drama is the identification of the character with the man himself (Shakespeare——and his sphere of knowledge, close to him). As it flares in himself, the drama is completed and the back kick of it is the other characters, created as the reflex of the first, so the dramatist "lives," himself in his world. A poem is a soliloquy without the "living" in the world. So the dramatist "lives" in the character. But to labor over the "construction" over the "technique" is to defeat, to tie up the drama itself. One cannot live after a prearranged pattern, it is all simply dead.

  This is the thing (obvious and simple) that except through genius makes the theater a corpse. To intensely realize identity makes it live (borrowing stealing the form by feeling it——as an uninformed man must). A play is this primary realization coming up to intensity and then fading (futilely) in self. This is the technique, the unlearnable, it is the natural drama, which can't imagine situations in any other way than in association with the flesh——till it becomes living, it is so personal to a nothing, a nobody.

  The painfully scrupulous verisimilitude which honesty affects——drill, discipline defeats its own ends in——

  To be nothing and unaffected by the results, to unlock, and to flow (They believe that when they have the mold of technique made perfect without a leak in it that the mind will be drilled to flow there whereas the mind is locked the more tightly the more perfect the technique is forged) (or it may flow, disencumbered by what it has learned, become unconscious, provided the technique becomes mechanical, goes out of the mind and so the mind (now it has been cut for life in this pattern)) can devote itself to that just as if it had learned it intuitively or not at all.

  To be nothing and unaffected by the results, to unlock and flow, uncolored, smooth, carelessly——not cling to the unsolvable lamps of personality (yourself and your concessions, poems) concretions——


(W.C.W.)


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Saturday, November 22, 2014

The Descent of Winter: 11/22

and hunters still return
even through the city
with their guns slung
openly from the shoulder
emptyhanded howbeit
for the most part
                 but aloof

as if from and truly from
another world




(W.C.W.)


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Thursday, November 20, 2014

The Descent of Winter: 11/20

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, The Idiot

       Even idiots grow old
         in a cap with the peak
       over his right ear
         cross-eyed
       shamble-footed
          minding the three goats
       behind the firehouse
         his face is deeper lined
       than last year
         and then the rain comes down
       in gusts suddenly


(W.C.W.)


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Tuesday, November 18, 2014

The Descent of Winter: 11/13

Giacomo Balla, The Speed of a Motorcycle

TRAVELLING IN FAST COMPANY

   As the ferry came into the slip there was a pause then a young fellow on a motorcycle shot out of the exit, looked right and left, sighted the hill, opened her up and took the grade at top speed. Right behind him came three others bunched and roaring by, and behind them was a youngster travelling in fast company his eyes fastened on the others, and behind him an older guy sitting firm and with a face on him like a piece of wood ripped by without a quiver. And that brings it all up——Shakespeare——plays.

   . . . Its hands stuck up in the air like prongs. Just sticking up in the air, fingers spread apart.


Goethe was a rotten
dramatist . . .


(W.C.W.)

Sunday, November 16, 2014

The Descent of Winter: 11/16

Pablo Picasso, Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar & Newspaper

   The art of writing is all but lost (not the science which comes afterward and depends completely on the first) it is to make the stores of the mind available to the pen——Wide! That which locks up the mind is vicious.

   Mr. Seraphim: They hate me. Police Protection. She was a flaming type of stupidity and its resourceful manner under Police Protection——the only normal: a type. One of the few places the truth (demeaned) clings on.


(W.C.W.)

Thursday, November 13, 2014

Some Thoughts on Ferdydurke

Though I am a fuddyduddy bookstore apologist, I confess my favorite mode of shopping for books is online—at three in the morning, after a night out with friends. It's great fun: you're back at home, still buzzing and crackling, you've browsed from your email inbox into some book review or recommendation, and your heightened suggestibility presently enters into conjunction with your one-click-enabled Amazon account.

Ten days later you find an unexpected package in the mail, and in that package is some 1937 surrealist Polish novel called Ferdydurke by a guy (Witold Gombrowicz) you're pretty sure you've never heard of.

"What the fuck is this?" you say to yourself.

So you read the book, because you suppose that must have been your plan all along. And you finish the last page and study the back cover for a few moments.

"What the fuck was that?" you say to yourself.


So: Witold Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke.

It's a weird book, especially to the twenty-first century reader dipping into it without much context, intimate knowledge of Polish society circa 1930, and who has to rely on a translator to convey what must very clearly be an idiosyncratic and neologistic writing style. But the surface of it is easy enough to follow: a thirty-year-old author, "Joey" (a surrogate for Gombry himself) wakes up one morning after an unsettling dream, and as he sits around mulling over the failure of his novel and seething at the fatuousness of the Polish literati, a schoolteacher barges into his room. The prof sits down, flips bemusedly through Joey's book, quizzes him on Latin verbs, and tells him it's time to go to school. "Chirp, chirp, little chickie!" And he takes Joey by the hand and leads him through town to school.

Things get kind of strange from there.

The Descent of Winter: 11/13

Salvador Dali, Cubist Self-portrait

SHAKESPEARE

   By writing he escaped from the world into the natural world of his mind. The unemployable world of his fine head was unnaturally useless in the gross exterior of his day——or any day. By writing he made this active. He melted himself into that grossness, and colored it with his powers. The proof that he was right and they were passing, being that he continues always and naturally while their artificiality destroyed them. A man unable to employ himself in the world.

   Therefore his seriousness and his accuracies, because it was not his play but the drama of his life. It is his anonymity that is baffling to nitwits and so they want to find an involved explanation——to defeat the plainness of the evidence.


   When he speaks of fools his is one; when of kings he is one, doubly so in misfortune.

   He is a woman, a pimp, a prince Hal——

   Such a man is a prime borrower and standardizer——No inventor. He lives because he sinks back, does not go forward, sinks back into the mass——

   He is Hamlet plainer than a theory——and in everything.

   You can't buy a life again after it's gone, that's the way I mean.

   He drinks awful bad and he beat me up every single month while I was carrying this baby, pretty nearly every week.

   (Shakespeare) a man stirred alive, all round not minus the intelligence but the intelligence subjugated——by misfortune, in this case maybe——subjugated to the instinctive whole as it must be, but not minus it as in almost everything——not by cupidity that blights an island literature——but round, round, a round world E pur si muove. That has never sunk into literature as it has into geography, cosmology. Literature is still mediæval, formal, dogmatic, the scholars, the obstinate rationalists——

   These things are easy and obvious but it is not easy to formulate them, and it is still harder to put them down briefly. Yet it must be possible since I have done it here and there.

   Such must be the future: penetrant and simple——minus the scaffolding of the academic, which is a "lie" in that it is inessential to the purpose as to the design.

   This will do away with the stupidity of little children at school, which is the incubus of modern life——and the defense of the economists and modern rationalists of literature. To keep them drilled.

   The difficulty of modern styles is made by the fragmentary stupidity of modern life, its lacunæ of sense, loops, perversions of instinct, blankets, amputations, fulsomeness of instruction and multiplications of inanity. To avoid this, accuracy is driven to a hard road. To be plain is to be subverted since every term must be forged new, every word is tricked out of meaning, hanging with as many cheap traps as an altar.

   The only human value of anything, writing included, is intense vision of the facts, add to that by saying the truth and action upon them,——clear into the machine of absurdity to a core that is covered.

   God——Sure if it means sense. "God" is poetic for the unobtainable. Sense is hard to get but it can be got. Certainly that destroys "God," it destroys everything that interferes with simple clarity of apprehension.


(W.C.W.)



[NEXT]

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

A Gentleman’s Guide to Long-Distance Relationships, Fig. 1

I've been doing some sketches for a new and probably fairly long Sisyphus strip, and thought I'd turn out a very quick "cube" comic beforehand to make sure I still sort of know what I'm doing. It's been months since I've drawn anything but marginal doodles.

(Click it if you'd prefer not to squint.)

I actually am going to a writers' conference this weekend. I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up being a big ol' waste of time and money (my time and money, I mean), but who knows? The secret to life (I've been told) is to just show up.

The Descent of Winter: 11/11

Pablo Picasso, The cat

A cat licking herself solves most of the problems of infection. We wash too much and it kills us.


(W.C.W.)


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Monday, November 10, 2014

The Descent of Winter: 11/10

Robert Delaunay, Rythme, Joie de vivre

    The shell flowers
    the wax grapes and peaches
    the fancy oak or mahogany tables
    the highbacked baronial hall chairs

    Or the girls' legs
    agile stanchions
    the breasts
    the pinheads——

    ——Wore my bathing suit
    wet
    four hours after sundown.
    That's how. Yea?
    Easy to get
    hard to get rid of.

    Then unexpectedly
    a small house with a soaring oak
    leafless above it

    Someone should summarize these things
    in the interest of local
    government or how
    a spotted dog goes up a gutter——

    and in chalk crudely
    upon the railroad bridge support
    a woman rampant
    brandishing two rolling pins.


(W.C.W.)


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Saturday, November 8, 2014

The Descent of Winter: 11/8

Maurice de Vlaminck, Landscape with River

Out of her childhood she remembered, as one might remember Charlie Wordsworth's print shop in the rear of Bagellons, the hinged paperknife, the colored posters of horses (I'll bet it was for the races at Clifton where the High School now stands). Once Pop made a big kite, five feet tall maybe, with the horses' heads in the middle and it flew and I couldn't hold it without help. They fastened it to a post of the back porch at nightfall, real rope they had on it, and in the morning it was still there. She remembered the day the old man painted the mirror back of the bar: He took off his coat and laid the brushes and pans from his bag on one of the barroom tables. No one else was there but Jake who sat with his head in his hands except when someone came in for something or to telephone. Then he'd unlock the inside door and sit down again watching the old man. It was a big mirror. First he painted in a river coming in over from the door and curving down greenywhite nearly the whole length of it and very wide to fall in a falls into the edge of another river that ran all along the bottom all the way across, only a little of the water to be seen. Then he put in a blue sky all across the top with white clouds in it and under them a row of brown hills coming down to the upper banks. Green trees he made with a big brush, just daubing it on, some of it even up top over the hills on the clouds, the trunks of the trees to be put in later. But down below, under the top river and all down the right side where it curved down to the falls he painted in the trunks first like narrow dark brown bottles. Then he drew in the houses, with white sides, three of them near the falls. "A good place to fish," Jake said. The roofs were red. On the other side of the falls, between two rivers, the houses were brown, two of them on brown hills with trees all among them. Then, after the paint of the rivers was dry, he began to paint in little boats, above and below—— She never saw the work finished, for the saloon had been sold and they moved away. The last thing she saw him do was paint in the boats, "Look out that boat up there don't go over those falls," Jake said. The rivers were painted flat on the glass, wonderful rivers where she wanted to be. Some day she wanted to go to that place and see it. Like the song she remembered in school and she always wanted them to sing when you could ask what song you wanted sung, "Come again soon and you shall hear sung the tale of those little green islands." She always wanted to hear the rest of it but there was never any more. They moved away.


(W.C.W.)


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The Descent of Winter: 11/8

Albert Gleizes, The City and the River

     O river of my heart polluted
     and defamed I have compared you
     to that other lying in
     the red November grass
     beginning to be cleaned now
     from factory pollution

     Though at night a watchman
     must still prowl lest some paid hand
     open the waste sluices——

     That river will be clean
     before ever you will be


(W.C.W.)


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Friday, November 7, 2014

The Descent of Winter: 11/7

Pablo Picasso, Woman with Pears

           We must listen. Before
           she died she told them——
           I always like to be well dressed
           I wanted to look nice——

           So she asked them to dress
           her well. They curled her hair . . .

           Now she fought
           She didn't want to go
           She didn't want to!

The perfect type of the man of action is the suicide.


(W.C.W.)


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Thursday, November 6, 2014

The Descent of Winter: 11/6

Natalia Goncharova, Cyclist

   Russia is every country, here he must live, this for that, loss for gain. Dolores Marie Pischak. "New York is a blight on my heart, lost, a street full of lights fading to a bonfire——in order to see their hats of wool on their heads, their lips to open and a word to come out. To open my mouth and a word to come out, my word. Grown like grass, to be like a stone. I pick it. It is poor. It must be so. There are no rich. The richness is everywhere, belongs to everyone and it is hard to get. And loss, loss, loss. Cut off from my kind——if any exist. To get that, everything is lost. So he carries them and gets——himself and has nothing to do with himself. He also gets their lice.

   Romance, decoration, fullness——are lost in touch, sight, a word, to bite an apple. Henry Ford has asked Chas. Sheeler to go to Detroit and photograph everything. Carte blanche. Sheeler! That's rich. Shakespeare had that mean ability to fuse himself with everyone which nobodies have, to be anything at any time, fluid, a nameless fellow whom nobody noticed——much, and that is what made him the great dramatist. Because he was nobody and was fluid and accessible. He took the print and reversed the film, as it went in so it came out. Certainly he never repeated himself since he did nothing but repeat what he heard and nobody ever hears the same words twice. Homekeeping youth had ever homely wit, Sheeler and Shakespeare should be on this Soviet. Mediæval England, Soviet Russia.

   It is a pure literary adjustment. The supremacy of England is purely a matter of style. Officially they are realists, such as the treaty with Italy to divide Abyssinia. Realists——it is the tactical spread of realism that is the Soviets. Imperial Russia was romanticist, strabismic, atavistic. Style. He does not blame the other countries. They fear what he sees. He sees tribes of lawyers tripping each other up entirely off the ground and falling on pillows full of softly jumbled words from goose backs.

   I know a good print when I see it. I know when it is good and why it is good. It is the neck of a man, the nose of a woman. It is the same Shakespeare. It is a photograph by Sheeler. It is. It is the thing where it is. So. That's the mine out of which riches have always been drawn. The kings come and beg for it. But it is too simple. In the complexity, when we try to enrich ourselves——the richness is lost. Loss and gain go hand in hand. And hand in hand means my hand in a hand which is in it: a child's hand soft skinned, small, a little fist to hold gently, a woman's hand, a certain woman's hand, a man's hand. Thus hand in hand means several classes of things. But loss is one thing. It is lost. It is one big thing that is an orchestra playing. Time, that's what it buys. But the gain is scattered. It is everywhere but there is not much in any place. A city is merely a relocation of metals in a certain place.——He feels the richness, but a distressing feeling of loss is close upon it. He knows he must coordinate the villages for effectiveness in a flood, a famine.

   The United States should be, in effect, a Soviet State. It is a Soviet State decayed away in a misconception of richness. The states, counties, cities, are anemic Soviets. As rabbits are cottontailed the officeworkers in cotton running pants get in a hot car, ride in a hot tunnel and confine themselves in a hot office——to sell asphalt, the trade in tanned leather. The trade in everything. Things they've never seen, will never own and can never name. Not even an analogous name do they know. As a carter, knowing the parts of a wagon will know, know, touch, the parts of——a woman. Maybe typists have some special skill. The long legged down east boys make good stage dancers and acrobats. But when most of them are drunk nothing comes off but——"Nevada" had a line of cowboy songs.


(W.C.W.)



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Sunday, November 2, 2014

The Descent of Winter: 11/2

Marie Vassilieff, The Dance / A Cubist Portrait

A MORNING IMAGINATION OF RUSSIA

The earth and the sky were very close
When the sun rose it rose in his heart
It bathed the red cold world of
the dawn so that the chill was his own
The mists were sleep and sleep began
to fade from his eyes, below him in the
garden a few flowers were lying forward
on the intense green grass where
in the opalescent shadows oak leaves
were pressed down hard upon it in patches
by the night rain. There were no cities
between him and his desires
his hatreds and his loves were without walls
without rooms, without elevators
without files, delays of veiled murderers
muffled thieves, the tailings of
tedious, dead pavements, the walls
against desire save only for him who can pay
high, there were no cities——he was
without money——

                Cities had faded richly
into foreign countries, stolen from Russia——
the richness of her cities——

Scattered wealth was close to his heart
he felt it uncertainly beating at
that moment in his wrists, scattered
wealth——but there was not much at hand

Cities are full of light, fine clothes
delicacies for the table, variety,
novelty——fashion: all spent for this.
Never to be like that again:
the frame that was. It tickled his
imagination. But it passed in a rising calm

Tan dar a dei! Tan dar a dei!


He was singing. Two miserable peasants
very lazy and foolish
seemed to have walked out from his own
feet and were walking away with wooden rakes
under the six foot nearly bare poplars, up the hill

There go my feet.

He stood still in the window forgetting
to shave——

The very old past was refound
redirected. It had wandered into himself
The world was himself, these were
his own eyes that were seeing, his own mind
that was straining to comprehend, his own
hands that would be touching other hands
They were his own!
His own, feeble, uncertain. He would go
out to pick herbs, he graduate of
the old university. He would go out
and ask that old woman, in the little
village by the lake, to show him wild
ginger. He himself would not know the plant.

A horse was stepping up the dirt road
under his window

He decided not to shave. Like those two
that he knew now, as he had never
known them formerly. A city, fashion
had been between——

Nothing between now.

He would go to the soviet unshaven. This
was the day——and listen. Listen. That
was all he did, listen to them, weigh
for them. He was turning into a
a pair of scales, the scales in the
zodiac.

  But closer, he was himself
the scales. The local soviet. They could
weigh. If it was not too late. He felt
uncertain many days. But all were uncertain
together and he must weigh for them out
of himself.

  He took a small pair of scissors
from the shelf and clipped his nails
carefully. He himself served the fire.

We have cut out the cancer but
who knows? perhaps the patient will die.
The patient is anybody, anything
worthless that I desire, my hands
to have it——instead of the feeling
that there is a piece of glazed paper
between me and the paper——invisible
but tough running through the legal
processes of possession——a city, that
we could possess——

  It's in art, it's in
the French school.

  What we lacked was
everything. It is the middle of
everything. Not to have.

  We have little now but
we have that. We are convalescents. Very
feeble. Our hands shake. We need a
transfusion. No one will give it to us,
they are afraid of infection. I do not
blame them. We have paid heavily. But we
have gotten——touch. The eyes and the ears
down on it. Close.


(W.C.W.)



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The Descent of Winter: 11/2

Mary Swanzy, Woman with White Bonnet

   Dahlias——
     What a red
       and yellow and white

   Mirror to the sun, round
          and petaled
       is this she holds?
       with a face
     all in black
       and grey hair
       sticking out
     from under the bonnet brim
   Is this Washington Avenue Mr. please
           or do I have to
         cross the track? 


(W.C.W.)


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Saturday, November 1, 2014

The Descent of Winter: 11/1


I won't have to powder my nose tonight 'cause Billie's gonna take me home in his car——

        The moon, the dried weeds
        And the Pleiades——

        Seven feet tall
        The dark, dried weedstalks
        make a part of the night
        a red lace
        on the blue milky sky

        Write——
        by a small lamp

        the Pleiades are almost
        nameless

        and the moon is tilted
        and halfgone

        And in runningpants and
        with ecstatic, æsthetic faces
        on the illumined
        signboard are leaping
        over hurdles and
        "¼ of their energy comes from bread."

        two
        gigantic highschool boys
        ten feet tall


(W.C.W.)


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