INSIDE UNDIVIDED (30)

a series of fragments & notes about Chance, Fate, Context & Intention by Dara Wier

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wordless, speechless, without words, no words for it, silent, maintaining radio silence, reduced to silence, noiseless, still, quietude, in secret, undercover, camouflaged

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There is a big difference between having nothing worth saying to say, and not knowing what to say, not saying something, and saying something literally metaphorically. 

And all of those differences among all kinds of saying, such as saying nothing and saying too much, saying a little or saying a lot, and being tantalizing and boring someone to death. 

And then there is the delight that can come with saying the obvious, what’s obvious, repeatedly.

The phrase hysterical discovery of the obvious does not mean the same thing in different locations.   

Repeatedly I remember someone saying to me, if it had been a snake, and so on.

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INTERLUDE REGARDING EPIGRAPHING

almost no writer I’ve encountered shies away from “meaning” in their choice of epigraphs, for now I’ll stick to books, though poems make use of “meaningful” epigraphs all the time, too----the epigraph page alone, standing alone, usually set off from the book’s beginning, as a kind of gesture of atmospheric definition, or an epigraph introduces almost a host whose presence now accompanies the book into your brain (an epigraph from Wallace Stevens, an epigraph from Simone Weil, from Wittgenstein, from James Baldwin, from Sappho, from ultra classic religious texts we all know, from a song, from a name recognized to be associated with something that will be taken to be relevant to opening

the book to which the epigraph is attached

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When is someone’s secret (secret handshake, secret code, secret hiding place………)

(in some sectors, say, the secret affiliations and co-operations, 

language uses to distort or extort or

otherwise unstraightforwardly fool and manipulate)

the secret place (mostly in plain sight) (to protect someone or something)  (to hide someone’s ill-gained booty)

When is it hurtful (and sometimes dangerous) for someone to keep something from you. 

When it would, if you knew what it was, figure in to important decisions, significant feelings, steps you would be taking or not taking.

I don’t know if I should be telling you this but.

I should have told you. 

I should have warned you.

I don’t know if I should be keeping this from you.

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when lack of self-consciousness keeps a secret about yourself from yourself, for your own sake

when self-consciousness, which we must have, can’t help but have,

must be able to pretend it isn’t a factor,

it is imitating, you find yourself imitating yourself, your self-consciousness

becomes most of what you are

do you lose the factor of being the agent of action or thought

because what takes over during bouts of severe self-consciousness

is the shifting of yourself from agent to audience,

while you are self-consciously choosing to act or think

you are losing the one and only original impetus

as it transforms itself from subjective actor to action

& thought to observing receptor

The terrible frozen panic of:

 I see myself thinking in such a way as to be required to decide how I feel about it.

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

We’re always being told by so many means the significance of knowing ourselves.  To be seeing ourselves for what we really are. 

As if all that what takes is a quick look in a mirror and some minor readjustments taking into account which side of your face is which and what illusions of depth involve

and relative values of exterior surface to interior dimensions, and what else happens to be within the frame of the mirror,  and, by the way, it’s said it’s bad luck for two of us to look into the same mirror at once, and everyone’s so used to idly reading on side rearview mirrors the arresting warning that objects in mirror are closer than they seem to be

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The allure we’ve felt since film’s beginnings, to see ourselves and to understand ourselves as we would be were we in a film, to observe ourselves this way, to add to self-consciousness, film-consciousness, another layer of perceived understanding and existence. 

 The thoughtless casual picturing of one’s life on film.

How common is this picturing?  What does it give us?  What does it take away?

Picturing yourself.  You see yourself as what you are, always.

That’s always been so.  It has to be done.  We have to do it.

Our mirror neurons or whatever those bits of brain are that magnetically draw us to imitate something….if not one another……..some thing……… 

why did the egyptian princess wear the headdress she wore? 

then why does monkey see/monkey do feel elementally sorrowful

why do galloping horses share so many principles of locomotion?  does the foal copy its mother?  what would it do without her? it would be fine with its built-in locomotion attributes

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 Odeon Redon:  …..once he has established his own idiom…….

once he’s taken from nature the necessary

means of expression, is free, free legitimately free, to borrow

his subjects from history, from the poets, from his own imagination,

from the thousand sources of his fantasy

[once he has established his own idiom]

My whole originality consists in having made

improbable beings

live humanly

according to the laws of the probable

by as far as possible

putting the logic of the visible

at the service of the invisible.

The designation of my drawings by a title is often, so to speak, superfluous.  A title is justified only when it is vague and even aims confusedly at the

equivocal.  My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined.  They determine nothing.  They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the

undetermined.

Odeon Redon

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…..the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing…… 

Pascal

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 A curious HUMAN INCLINATION TO PROGRESS THROUGH ERROR

AND TO DECLARE MOST SIGNIFICANT THAT WHICH IS MOST DETRIMENTAL

DAMAGING, DESTRUCTIVE, DEMEANING

THE HUMAN INCLINATION TO DEFINE ERROR (it’s called fault-finding) (if only it were as funny as its name is)

THE HUMAN INCLINATION TO FIND WHAT IS FALSE (A PACK OF LIES) MOST SIGNIFICANT OF ALL

THE HUMAN INCLINATION TO FIND FAULT FINDING THE MOST

ALLURING

THE HUMAN INCLINATION TO LEAN TOWARDS FAILURE, TO LEAN

TOWARDS FALLING

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people who don't want to be understood don't read poetry
do you understand me?

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What do you think that means?”— countered with a “Did you see that?”

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INSIDE UNDIVIDED (29)

a series of fragments & notes about Chance, Fate, Context & Intention by Dara Wier

censorship, surveillance, scrutiny & camouflage (cont.)

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in memory of Tomaž Šalamun who never diminished anything

"Some sentences walk in the mist, some bend strangely, I
like awkwardness, awkwardness is the crucial thing in my writing. Things
should not be clear. If clear they’re too domesticated. I dedomesticate,
invade the language, delogify." Tomaz Salamun to Brian Henry in an email

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The Right to Be Forgotten

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in increments, moving from shadow to shadow, stepping from corner to corner, moving from tree to tree, staying in the shadows, never stepping out of the shadows

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how many times can you say it without it becoming questionably over-stated?

how what is quantifiable almost, mostly, usually, typically, most of the time

is valued above what can’t be quantified, let me count the ways

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measurably

gives someone the means

to put a value on something

without all those messy and uncomfortable misgivings,

second-thoughts, multiplicities, negative capabilities, ambiguities and immeasurable omnipresent states of being

(though “state” is not what’s experienced in that fleeting sense of omniscience one ever  every now and then sees in little glimpses and can never ever be anything but glancing)

One can only say so many times:  I don’t want to know

what it is

that I want to know

(as if I’m practicing to accept the obvious

which is that mystery

ultimately

is all there is, is all, just is) 

(to be sympathetic

when one tries

to behave as though

I’ve got the jump on something,

we’re ahead of the game, 

I’m nobody’s fool,

we don’t miss a trick,

our radar is fully functional)

(or less gently, boasting

how much you don’t want to know

(I don’t want to know, what makes you think I want to know)

can be a kind of pretending to know

there is more than what’s obviously

not all that mysterious) (& convoluted)

(and sometimes……more or less equally confusing,

this seems to superstitiously deflect

our very human touchingly needy

and at times desperately in a panic fearful

facing up to oblivion)

it’s both exhilarating and terrifying to come face to face with the immensity of life,

what follows instantaneously

that shrinking down into the essential infinitesimal it might just be me  

that does take your breath away

that is what there is to live for

(when we can’t laugh about it, when even laughter has exhausted itself and turned into something else)  (then comes the cautionary warning:  stop taking yourself so seriously)

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I cannot have something to say, I cringe when someone asks me what’s the point; how come?  I suffer when someone asks what’s that book about  & why do I do that? 

I’m embarrassed, I’m at a loss, I’m used to it. 

It’s not good to wreck an illusion, it’s unlucky.

I can’t begin with something I know; I have to know that I don’t know what I want to know----that way of saying that.  That way of admitting one stares off into what’s beyond seeing.  The horizon serves us so many purposes.

One can say something (say what you will, say anything) with variations so many times one begins to suspect something is hiding something, someone is whistling in the dark (which can be a help, a way to be found, or a slantwise comfort)

Or deflecting.  Or refusing.

Who knows, hiding and deflecting and refusing and not seeing have sometimes been life saving.  And why not let that be a knowing just as knowing as any other kind.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(as the kind, for just one instance, one is wanting, hoping,

wishing to avoid;

the kind that’s infested

with ignorance,

didacticism, indoctrination, pomposity,

narcissistic self righteousness,

assumptions, presumptions, prejudice,

shallowness, stupidity and a closed mind,

that kind, the kind anyone wants to run from)

(and the kind we fear we most of all have been suffering under, we’ve participated in it)

(for instance, to be stupid is not to be incapable, it is to be by choice uninformed)  (to be stupefied, to be stopped in your tracks, to be dumbfounded, to be speechless)

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obscuring  possibility can be what that is

~~~~~~~~~

just as much as if one were to say: this is what I know and I’m saying it,  here it is, and this is all there is

to say

as if everything about the world is ruined and ruinous

a cheat and a scandal and I will be telling you this in bright colors,

in the bright colors that light up our brains when verbal action is alive there and in brainwork motions of the electrically biological kinds

(and then there’re the times when one is pleased

to have one saying something clearly,

precisely and true to the logic it proposes;

as if sometimes what one wants

is to hear something that sounds sure and certain

in spite of/because of our wanting to remember

how we always go without knowing

how everything goes without saying

~~~~~~~~~

and I know it,  or let’s say someone thinks she knows it:  and so we flinch when we hear anyone say: 

and I know it before you know it,

and when this happens

when what happens happens as though one of us knows and the other of us remains unknowing,

this appears to be one of the most terrible of all problems

And that way is dis-spiriting

(not to the me me---to the other me the one who stands in for us ---in a fiction of from time to time)

when it is you (not really you) who condescends to me (not really me) and you are I

in the words previous to these (and it begins to be more trouble than it’s worth)

and you are not you as in someone’s personal self (you can say that)

but you as a useful, a useful you, a you that is useful, a  (convoluted you if ever there was one)

part of speech and way in this case to avoid saying:

and I, the author of this, knows it,  (so why would you have kept it from me for all this time) and I knew it all along (which seems kind of smug), I’ve been knowing it  (which is beginning to be unbelievable)

(maybe this is why it’s bad luck for a writer to over think

what’s going on before hand,

before the doing begins to be being done,

or why it is unlucky if one does think a lot beforehand

to not be very careful to forget all one’s thought;

to at least pretend you know nothing at all

even if you’ve fooled yourself beforehand

into thinking and enjoying it while you’re thinking it,

if enjoying is the right word for that, that you know a little something,

but about what……..what do you know…….

and the author indicates (in so many ways) that she knows it before you know it or what happens when all is good and true and right and holy and infinite:  it dawns on both at the same time (you have to spit on your metaphorical hems, you have to say something to acknowledge your lucky timing, you have to undo, in some places, the so-called jinx of that, you say it is a coincidence, an occasion of synchronicity, simultaneity, you have to buy someone a coke

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I don’t want to know something before anyone else knows it.

And that problem, and artist building into their work the idea that I know it before you know it (and thus I will be telling it to you, or showing you, or even more hideously, I will be forcing you to see) is one of the most limiting of all for art’s expansive indications,

it is doing everything that’s important after the fact, it is a when-all-is-said-and-done time, it is putting the cart before the horse, it is ass-backwards, grotesque and probably (unless you’ve got some great purpose for it) hurtful

I guess there are always going to be those of us, those among us, who are art tricksters and while maybe they aren’t my all time favorites, maybe I like to see how necessary they are to round out any world’s collection of humanity. 

There is always someone around to remind me if I’m not being especially amused by being tricked there is always the chance I might be, and I certainly will be tricked. 

(don’t the hoaxer hoaxes for many many reasons, one of which is to remind me most of all,  I might be fooling myself) (and maybe that is a necessary reminding I should thank all hoaxers for)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The idea of forcing, of artists forcing people to see this or understand this or come to find out this (and most usually as if the artist (maybe perpetrator) sincerely (and sincerity is certainly in play) believes that there is a lot we don’t know that he will be taking the time and doing the work to show us or tell us…….the idea of “forcing” not a good one. 

(the way a stupid parent will try to force a child to open its mouth to eat)

And who first started saying writers “force” readers to do anything?  And from where does that language come?  And why talk that way?  Is there someone somewhere sometime who believes all authors to be sadistic?  Is there a masochistic reader to be found? 

(of course there is, leave them be to their own devices)

There must be.  How could there not be? 

Given we are all victims of variety.

Cautions to one another.

Seeing around us what we can’t see within us.

Who’s fooling who and for what?

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Scans By Lew - WELCOME TO THE TWELFTH LETTER OF THE ALPHABET - Childe Roland

CHILDE ROLAND – WELCOME TO THE TWELFTH LETTER OF THE ALPHABET AND ITS TRILINGUAL SOUND POEM (PDF)

You know that feeling when you open up a book, and let’s say you’re in a mood-need to rearrange the possibility of your future through the possibility that this book (of poems say) will hold a distance between poetry and writing (between writing and living) as yet unrealized (or merely forgotten) by the habits of approach you’ve been confined to these last horrible months…  and you open up this book to the thrill of this anticipation of an unrecognizable or rediscovered future (which is, of course, like all futures, necessarily the recorded forms of a past) let's say, and standing in the library stacks a little overheated because you’ve yet to remove your winter coat, and your right shoulder blade pinches a little from the weight of your bag, and so you remove your bag and coat (placing coat upon bag on the library floor) and open up this book whose library-bound spine reads “WELCOME TO THE TWELFTH LETTER OF…” opening it up to somewhere in its middle and you encounter the following spread (?):

On the left we see a poem or three poems written in three languages and on the right a compelling xerox-grainy portrait of a young man’s face (the face of a young Browning? naa…) with a black geometric figure below his left eye and the name “CHILDE ROLAND” printed below it (Browning’s? Shakespeare’s? hmmmm). Looking back to the poem it begins with an epigraph from Smart and then seems to follow on in that same Smartian (or Spicer’s martian) kinetics, that foremost figure of a compulsion of movement from language arranging it forwards. “we devised / in the arms / of our / l-shaped room / or galaxy / a world / that was / parallel.” Here is our encounter with a future, a para-allel-el world, a world beside our world devised from the el-shaped room within it, an alternative form of our world that has mutatively emerged from it to occupy its same position, the biblical god “el” to be entered through this twelfth letter of the modern Latin alphabet “L” (in English, French, and Welsh), itself a descendant of the 12th letter of the Hebrew alphabet (“lamed”).

 But let’s forget ourselves for a second and get back to you. You know that feeling when you’ve just opened a book in the kind of mood you were just in, hungry to be in the future already with that new mind figured within you, and you’ve just encountered a suggestively interesting few lines in this book, but wanting the holistic feel before you really hit the particulars you flip a few pages backwards towards the book’s start and refocus there (?). But here’s where something that’s never happened before to you happens, or maybe this is the way it always is when you’ve read as many books of poetry and borne as many futures as you have, but this time it’s finally for real. The page-spread you’ve turned to is, upon inspection, the same two pages you were looking at before, and so you flip again, but there it is again, every two pages the same. LOL (chuckle), right? In a pleased confusion you flip to the title page that reads:

So here it is by concept, a trilingual sound poem repeating itself throughout the whole book, repeated so that “the parallel worlds described” may be shared by detaching from the book as many pages as needed (how many pages must I detach to sustain the sharing of this world?). I’ve scanned it all here in full to be downloaded, so please print up and detach as is necessary.

The poem’s author is “Childe Roland,” a French-Canadian writer living now for many years in Wales, and author of who knows how many books including the intriguing Allo Bell (which I’ll relay more about momentarily), Boat Bottle Book (which in the words of the author “attempts to combine the elements of a ship in a bottle with those of message in a bottle through the agency of a paper boat, which can be entertained as the ultimate message in a bottle since the request of all who are stranded is for a ship to rescue them.”), Ham & Jam, A Pearl, and six of clubs (these three recent titles you can download for your own reading pleasure), and really many others (worldcat has 36 titles listed).

 I’d absolutely love to see Allo Bell, which Roland apparently unsuccesfully submitted as a graduate thesis and is described by Marius Kociejowski as “compris[ing] a hand-written 'allo', the loops of the l's covering a hundred pages, a hundred pages being the minimal length prescribed for a thesis, and… visually suggestive of telephone wire and bookishly reflective of the author's argument that one of the characteristics of literature is that it takes up space.” Do you any of you have a copy you’d lend me?

Roland’s range of work is various and includes collaborative digital installations (such as his and photographer Susan Coolen’s Astres | Stars | Goleuadau), collaborative explorations of human / non-human intersections in work such as Coolen’s and his’ The Rivers Project and his related choral composition Dee and Deeper, as well as publicly inscribed poems such as this poem sculpted into a wall on Pier Street in Swansea:

 The only US publication of his work that I know of is the couple of compelling poems appearing in Slope’s Contemporary Welsh Poetry issue in 2001, but perhaps there are places I haven’t looked, and/or regardless, perhaps we should change that.

 As you’re reading this, I hope you’re doing well today. I apologize also for the lag between posts, there hasn’t been as much time as I’d like for what I’d like to do these last six months. Hopefully this post will get me rolling again, and I’ll able to manifest a future in which the scans and write-ups of the pile of books on the little bookshelf next to my desk emerges in this space. 

Lewis Freedman moved to Madison where he’s starting a brand new reading series (OSCAR PRESENTS) with Anna Vitale, Andy Gricevich, and Jordan Dunn. He’s most recently the author of Hold the Blue Orb, Baby (Well Greased, 2013) and Solitude the Complete Games (Troll Thread, 2013), the latter a collaboration with Kevin Rydberg. non-symbolic non-symbolic non-symbolic is due out sometime soon from Minutes Books.

INSIDE UNDIVIDED (28)

a series of fragments & notes about Chance, Fate, Context & Intention by Dara Wier

censorship, surveillance, scrutiny & camouflage

Censorship and scrutiny (related to scrupulous, maybe, should check, will check) and surveillance, keeping an eye on each other, cautioning, being ultra vigilant (one can hear it, the disembodied voice coming over the universal speakers in the lobbies of the transportation areas).

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Censorship, how do we practice it…how is it practiced…..what do we do, what does anyone do, what do they do (what would we say without THEY and how

would we say it)

how does it happen that to stop people from saying what they want to say, and to stop people from being who they want to be happens non stop.  No matter what.  Irregardless.  Drawing that line is one of the hardest lines to draw (having never worked for any organization (e.g. ACLU) but for ones in which it is generally assumed that to speak freely one’s mind and one’s minds speculations is an ordinary, almost unremarkable assumption---though aren’t assumptions always dangerously obscuring) (isn’t assuming disregarding) (all the cracks in everything)

What subtle censorships do we lend one another, knowingly and unknowingly.

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Why it

is that and maybe how novels are so powerful. 

They are, for this moment, for right now, undoubtedly,

the best thing in the written world

when it comes to what it comes to concerning the never ending exponentially infinite complications of human nature. 

It sets us down in writing all in the prismatic observations (first observe this language we use everyday, then how we observe one another, and what we do with what we observe, how frangible and fragile we are, how easily everything can be broken, how generous true love is, what lasts and what can’t, who keeps who alive, who kills, who steals, who covets, who insults beyond justification, who got hurt, what reverence can never be assailed, who broke in to whose heart and mind, how can this be tangled and untangled, never.

It must be terrifying to choose to be a novelist.

Among other things.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Why, for instance, a list is such a funny object.  Just about any kind of list.

As if

listing is an act we can enlist to control the out of control thoughts our mind doesn’t stop providing.  A list is a great act of human vanity and/or humor.  It is another as if, as if this could be so.

 We are heart-breaking when we number things:  1.  2.  3.  4.  5.  6.  7.  8.  9.

Let’s say that’s the premise
and from there let’s add all the reasons

we can think of why this is the case.  Say, we list.

And we careen.

How she fell in love with him is almost bothersome.  How he fell in love with her unfathomable.  And take it from there.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Each little segment or incident, frame and pixilated scrolling stretch of experience, depending where one encounters it, in front of one’s eyes, on the face of one’s phone (which has tended to make everyone look sometimes as if they are impersonating a 1940s movie star looking into a diamond rimmed compact), close by one’s computer screen (and how big is, the smallest laptop, the broadest table model), in the regulation or small or ultra large pages of a book, or billboard, sign of any kind (all the way in to the secret signs and glances and glimpses we give and take on any given day)----each one amounts to a piece of the (the the plot plot) plot

and with each step (no one can say what a step exactly is

or say much about it’s size)  (or any steps eventual outcome)

the story of our lives
comes into being. 
In increments. 
In impossibly stoppable (as in stop action) detail.

One appreciates the appreciation of all matters
intentional at this time. 

Because who

wouldn’t want to emphasize one’s free choice and free will in all times, all times of such regulation, intimidation, homogenization, and confusion.  And who doesn’t love one’s own agency and freedoms, from constraints unbidden.

FO Radio Episode 3: Kate Greenstreet

Hosted by Kelin Loe.

Kate Greenstreet's latest book Young Tambling was published by Ahsahta Press in 2013. Her previous books are The Last 4 Things and case sensitive, also with Ahsahta. Her new work can be found in Court Green, Ping-Pong, Loose Change, Denver Quarterly, and other journals.

All the FO Radio episodes

INSIDE UNDIVIDED (27)

a series of fragments & notes about Chance, Fate, Context & Intention by Dara Wier

at the stately pace of a caravan disappearing into an undivided somewhere, all its secrets locked, swaying with the progressive movement toward and away from.  But what is needed is some act other than pressing a button and having it all happen, some way of living into the layers as they occur and not losing momentum in order to……….
(Three Poems The New Spirit p. 30 Ecco paper)

by which I mean poems saying as only poems can what can only be contained in what poetry is.  I love the book.  And I benefit endlessly from it. 

And I know what follows is not “fair” and one should not be asked to choose, and it must be so that for each one of us at different times and in different circumstances we have variously many various responses to artificially narrow choices such as these---nevertheless for the sake of just making some ways to say some things for a while, here is this:

 What affords, promises, delivers, maybe gives us a more sure escape from ourselves:

 Reading a book or watching a film, as if I had to choose…….

Which guarantees a greater escape from one’s self (and the claustrophobia of one’s cyclical looping thoughts waiting to jump their tracks………), the book or the film?
Why and how and stories and anecdotes please in words or in pictures.  To Dara Wier at darawier@gmail.com if you will.

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I feel I ought to show my hand and say my peace; for me, it is always a book first though a film can have a lasting effect and cause one to take what one’s come to expect (the look and what the look resonates and suggests, why then, the book; the book, the book and anyway everyone knows no one should feel the need to choose, not in this, no good reason, though since I am thinking about what if I needed to choose, here is why and how I would).

 What if one knows reason only in its physical manifestations? 

The deaf man skins a squirrel for his supper.  Ten thousand seedlings need to be culled for a hundred to thrive.  Thorns come in all sizes.  Snakes do get angry.  It is possible to tame a raccoon. Bloodhounds howl.  At night knots knot themselves in hair and twine.  They have lives of their own. Sometimes baby owls eat one another.  They eat one another just like Russian dolls do, only in reverse somehow, Russian dolls un-eat one another one at a time. 

The girl on the Morton Salt Box holds a box on which she is holding a box which pictures her holding a box which...........and so on and on was imagination asked to minimize the image-chain-link boring through the ordinary visible into the other side of a whole otherwise extraordinary reality.  The salt box sits on the kitchen table where everyone can see it.  In plain view, pointing straight on toward one of life’s mysteries.

I liked to sit on my grandmother's bed which was situated in the middle of her room.  On flanking walls were mirrors above dressers. If you sat on the bed facing either mirror what you were given in return were infinitely smaller images of yourself drilling into the infinitely vast mirror depths.  You could be a torch on a river bank drilling its reflection as far as one can see into a river. 

You could go on as far as you were willing to imagine.

During the same time these images and instances were fascinating my days, I was deeply involved in a closet.  In its small, maybe 3 by 5 floor space, I was busy building an altar.  Eventually my private altar mimicked all accoutrement accompanying the public, operative altars I visited with relatives. 

A twig here to be a cross, some little wax figurines for saints with various names:  Saint Blessed of the Blue Nets, Saint Bill of the Fancy Shirt, Saint Marie of the Endless Hair, Saint Jerry of the Secrets, Saint Grace of the Terrible Eyes, Saint Claire of Kindness, Saint Green and Gold and Orange and Black, Saint Lynn of the little Brownies, Saint Broadcast of the Midnight Anthems, Saint Scary, Saint Nail, Saint Pitcher, Saint Pot, Saint Sink, Saint Mule, Saint Snakes Be Still, Saint Traintrack, Saint Japonica Seeds, Saint of the Furious River, Saint of Rain, Saint  Queen of Clubs, Saint Singing, Saint Dancing, Saint Sleep.

So much of which seems, then it should be film, this is all something to look at, but it wasn’t it was all in my head, pretty much, most of the time, not always.

About the same time it was as if I saw a poem for the first time.  In fact, I had seen a lot of poems. But these were the poems I really saw, I stared into them, I watched them to see what they would do.  As if I'd never seen one before.  But I had.  I'd seen them in prayer books, on calendars, in greeting cards, on cup towels, in newspapers, and in my father's schoolbooks.

This is dedicated to the WORDS & PICTURES DAY SYMPOSIUM (happening at Flying Object, November 8th, NOON to NINE) HOSTS Laura Warman, Delia Pless, Sarah Nichols, Molly McArdle, Christopher Griggs, Patrick Gaughan, Elmira Elvazova, Max Cohen, Andy Bowers, Colleen Barry

And to Dorothea Lasky

INSIDE UNDIVIDED (26)

a series of fragments & notes about Chance, Fate, Context & Intention by Dara Wier

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“It is an intuitive journey that takes us through the killing of a
parakeet with an ax, and the thinking of shrinking something out
of existence, and registering pigeons at a hotel, and a dog stuck
to the ceiling by its back, not to mention a room overgrown with
grass...But these are only stations of the journey. I'm not sure the
journey has a psychological end; it probably has only a mortal
end.” (a salute to Russell Edson, it's him talking)

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of the many many essential paradoxes poetry lets us live with, is the
one that involves the complexities associated with poetry's private
and public nature, in public it is the most private, its privacies would
not be were they not public

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as if anything written must or should justly represent, reproduce,
reiterate or reenact----- reality.

Though any writer or writing has often been praised most of all for
this recreation and reiteration, as if everything needs to be underlined
in order to be preserved for all time, or to be understood

while at the same time anything we introduce via combining anything 
we gather by means of any means becomes and is reality

Which leads to our being so often asked to decide what's real---in
surprising ways this underlying broadly articulated notion keeps being
asked of anyone who writes (well not everyone, but too many)

what reality anyway......... is this one, that one, another one, some
other one..........

which quickly is answered: it depends on who you are

That is, that reality, that reality over there, 

the one something written can point toward 

or anyone standing can walk over to.

Writing's not ever only just been

 or aspired to be just any superficial mirror. 

But facing mirrors will land one smack in the middle of the illusion of
infinity.

(in the depths of the mirror though.......that will come on as another
story altogether) (a traditionally told looking-glass story)

(how our current rearview mirrors come with warnings that objects in
mirror are closer than they appear) (and in the convex mirrors, other
edges come near to us)

Referring to what in an everyday way, casual way, comes to us with
"real" or "reality" attached to it, 

things related to that may turn out to be the least things

I've heard how people like to say, as if this is big compliment: she
really captured the reality of that 

situation.....place......time...woman....man....animal...psychological
dynamic.....impossibly vivid situation

As if reality were fugitve, something feral, ever shifting, elusive,
maybe illusive-- as in now-you-see-it-now-you-don't

which it is

Still, there can be a case made for it being itself just as it is with no
need of capture or reiteration. Who ever says there is THAT need?

On the other hand, nothing beats saying the obvious when it comes
to seeming to say what's marvelous

Another case can be made that what writing should do in fact, for
ever for why not----is defy reality, is to transform reality beyond
recognition, to disguise reality, to trick it out or make it once again
strange 

What's the point 

of it all (one big huge time capsule----not to knock the concepts time
capsules embody) (a good time capsule is such a human thing)

if what's to be found in writing isn't something we find nowhere else?

It's not realistic, there's no evidence in reality, no justification to say
we are immortal and yet there are the writers in prose and in poetry,
in every kind of mixture.......hinting how after the first death there is no
other means nothing if not after the first death there ought to be a
clearly marked escape route, or at the very least a very good
consolation prize

and there it stands something behind which there is nothing
impossible

That writing can act as if we are immortal, or at least let us imagine
what forever and timeless infinity seems to be------ 

that we defy gravity, that time isn't the time that we experience in
everyday day to day ways 

(and like, the depths of a mirror, the depths of time encompass
forever in the here and now) (and in like there is possibly everything)
(that mirror)

to not take infinite immortality literally, please as if it could

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if we lived before----what if we pretend we do, but we don't,

if we could, but we can't, 

if we imagine we do, and we can--suppose 

we lived before this sentence, not this one, the one coming, had been
composed and distributed: --before this sentence (a sentence about
how bad its author feels about Karl Ove's popular books):

"The novel strikes me as a giant selfie, a 3,600-page blogologue. Like
mumblecore or reality television, it’s premised on the notion that all
you need to do is point your camera at the world and shoot." (I think,
apologies for not knowing exactly, this was in THE NATION)

What if we lived without/before selfie, blogologue, mumblecore,
reality television and without going too much retro math, our camera--
- what would that sentence be saying? What if instead some other
things would have to be said? Because all that wasn't available.
What might these be?

(aside: the opening 30 or 50 or so pages of Ove's first book of his
many booked sequence makes for very very good reading and so
it goes, those few pages set a precedent by which all of the books
benefit from a boy's imagination, curiosity, nearness to mystery and
sensitivity or susceptibilities) (I'm a fan of those books)

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When ever I encounter in my mind, or see and understand to be
revealed 

by the words of another, 

how pervasively we can't do without this reminds me of, I worry. 

I worry how thoroughly the high speed transformation of one thing
into another blurs both (also can highlight commonly embodied or
high contrast qualities, yes this same action produces some terribly
fine combinations)

Think of how fearfully one hears: you remind me of
your________________ (you decide who or what to denigrate
in this little verbal equation)........, your work reminds me of
____________________ and there it all disappears in that single
minded concoction.......

on the other hand....

(when is it good to recognize how two things, two people resemble
one another............) (it feels deep down animal instinct necessary,
say before we had names, before we had mug shots, before we had
human language, we still needed to recognize what it was we were
encountering...........)

if something doesn't yet exist, how foolish is it to speculate about it? 

which makes no sense

making no sense, spending time in the zones of so-called
meaninglessness 

why poets have especially loved how Keats said how negative
capability is.........of course.....of course a poem will doubt, will
embody uncertainty, will yearn to be near mystery...............it can't do
otherwise

without these qualities and be its better self...

it's a poem, for god's sake, it's going to be ornery, perverse, difficult 

(as in difficult child not as in difficult class assignment),

impossible to pin down, annoyed by categorizations, willful,
dangerous, striking, arresting, purposefully inexplicable, resolutely
impossible to pin down, without a point, beyond understanding......

[To be understood......I realized while listening to two painters and
one poet adamantly say they do not want to know what is understood

that it was being understood that to understand is a deadend, 

is a sign that something, once it is understood, is over and done with

and that is the problem with that, that it is over and done with

it would be better if instead of understanding being involved with an
immediate conclusion, it instead referred to an eternal action, 

as in, understanding as continuous thinking

immediate conclusions can send any artist running away for another
territory....

....because when one is assuming something is settled ----there
isn't much to do with it.........that is the conclusion, and not the
situation.........

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INSIDE UNDIVIDED (25)

a series of fragments & notes about Chance, Fate, Context & Intention by Dara Wier

Emily Dickinson’s collected poems do not include any words that begin with the letter “X”.

When I ran across the phrase making sense of the world (in a book about indexing no less) I wondered if I'd often, it can't have been ever, had that feeling, and I thought no.

 I can't begin to explain why or how I came to be one of those for whom making sense of the world has not seemed an option.

What----I say, what......how can you call yourself a writer and not want to make sense of the world?  I don't know.  The desire to make sense of the immensity, mystery, ever changing, surprising, mind boggling, soul stirring, brain rattling this of this world has never been an option. 

I respect most people who try to make sense of this world.  No, maybe what I mean is that I respect that they do try to make sense of this world.  I admire the relentless passion with which humans relentlessly pursue sense.  I do.  I envy some for whom attempts to make sense of this world bring them right up to the brink.

The brink of what?  Not for me to know.  I remember the first time I ran my index finger over the surface of a mobius strip (first named in 1858, upon being discovered simultaneously by several mathematicians) (only one of them got his name afixed to the strip with the half-twist turning it into a so-called non orientable object) over and into an almost universally enjoyed metaphysical party trick.

The ant I felt I was being led to believe I can be, started one place and wound up right back where it started having touched both sides of this paper strip (not once knowing what it was doing).

While I relished the pleasure dimensional defiance seemed to confer, I didn't think I could make sense of the world. 

To be real, to make sense.

To say something is real causes confusion.  Say such and such is real

and everyone's sense of reality is shaken

maybe to the core, maybe so quietly and thoroughly it will never be the same again, maybe beyond repair

maybe all for the better, maybe beyond good

To call anything real puts pressure on me

to think that saying one thing is real seems to being saying there is something else

and maybe that something else is not real

confusing

and maybe exhilarating

Is this true----if there's real must there be an unreal?

It's pretty impossible to think that there is anything that is not real.  So it must be some kind of deeply understood figure of speech.  Our deeply loved brain playing with paradox as it often prefers to do.

Who says there has to be a frame of reference?

As if

there could ever not be a frame of reference.  There is always a frame of reference.

Too much narrowed everything and magnified nothing.

To not talk about an idea, is that the same as to not have an idea?

If you can't start anywhere you might as well start somewhere.

Can you make something that serves as, functions as, a conduit that leads to the opposite of the other end of the distant future of something to begin with?  Is this possible?  Is this desirable?  Is this the mobius of logic having its way with my brain?

(confession:  in the flesh I could never execute a somersault or tumbleset or skin the cat, in my brain the feeling does exhilarate and amplify)

Parallax.  A set of instructions to generate........what?

What is your minimum requirement?

What if there is nothing to disrupt?

Okay, beholder.

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THE MECHANICAL REPITITION OF PREVIOUSLY RECEIVED IDEAS OR IMAGES, WITHOUT TRUE REASONING OR FEELING; REPETITION OF WORDS OR PHRASES PARROT-FASHION; AN INSTANCE OF THIS:  psittacism (like a parrot)

_____________________________

He was always saying he was an open secret, he suffered from collateral damage, there was nothing but unintended consequences.

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The hypothesis is

that the gravitational interaction is mediated

by an – as yet undiscovered –

elementary particle, dubbed

graviton

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the idea of returning to a poem or piece of prose again and again is not by repeated encounters will you unlock its secrets, at last, finally, once and for all, it's because with every reading your brain is newly wired, because your ever changing brain will not be still, and your encounters will be shaded by your never static state of mind

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graviton

why words are attracted to one another, how

on account of reading MOBY DICK (in an excellent lab lead by the amazing poet Seth Landman) this happened to me, and I am okay with this:  thinking about gravity and why it always feels the same, and why it doesn't seem to hurt (unless you fall through space without your assent, as you trip or take a fall or crash or succumb to something......)

"fleeting impressions floating on a sea of poorly made waters"

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It isn't so much that a so-called mixed metaphor is bad (a mixed metaphor can be a combination of disparity that only reckless genius will conceive (or stumble upon) (and when conceived and executed----- on purpose) (on purpose is a sure story to behold))

Naturally an unmixed metaphorical passage can be satisfying the way following a long wave materialize, move and break can be satisfying.