Esthetic revelation

ESTHETIC REVELATION

The girls are down for a nap and I have a moment.

What will I do with my moment to make it a MOMENT?

First I will read. I pick up Elizabeth Bishop's “PROSE”

and turn at random to a letter in the middle and read,

“I’ve always thought one of the most extraordinary insights

into the ‘sea’ is Rimbaud’s L’eternite: ‘C’est la mer allee,

Avec le soleil.’.” Wala!  I don’t read French, but I do know this 

line in translation and even used it as an opening 

quote of a poem written for my daughters, plucked 

it out of a New Yorker article on Rimbaud in translation:

“I have seen it. What? Eternity. It is the sun matched by the sea.”

(The word “plucked” by the way I use here because I just read 

Nicholson Baker’s meditative novel on rhyme,  “The Anthologist” 

wherein he points out that “carpe diem” correctly translated is “pluck” 

the day, not “seize,” a notable distinction. “Seize” would be “cape.”)  

I kept reading the Bishop, my interest piqued by the Rimbaud. She 

writes “This approximates what I think is called the ‘anesthetic revelation’.

(William James?).” I was intrigued and did a google search 

for “anesthetic revelation.” I arrived at a wikipedia page not for William James 

but for one Benjamin Paul Blood, a 19th century character. I read,

“After experiencing the anesthetic nitrous oxide during a dental operation, 

Blood concluded that the gas had opened his mind to new ideas 

and continued experimenting with it. In 1874, he published 

The Anesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy.”

(The first time I had nitrous oxide at the dentist I experienced this,

a rushing backward away from all current reality into somewhere

other, I want to say nether, and was filled with a bright euphoria

so intense that when the assistant took off the mask I took her 

and kissed her, passionately. Oddly, she kissed me back, as if

swept up in my ecstacy.  Reality quickly came back to me

and I acted as if nothing happened and, funny enough, so did she.)

The Wiki article also pointed out that Blood admits never lifting a finger

in anger and that his entire life had been fun. Fantastic.

Finally I read that Blood also patented a successful swathing reaper. What? 

I had a moment of recognition, a super-recognition.  A revelation

(perhaps more esthetic than anesthetic) wallops me between the eyes. 

First I have to back up and tell you that there is another Adam DeGraff.

If you google me, you’ll probably get him. He’s a virtuoso violin player

who’s YouTube video of himself playing “Sweet Child ‘O Mine”

has gathered (plucked) over a million views. He is me. “I is another”

wrote Rimbaud. I recently noticed this Adam DeGraff had given

a TED talk and watched it out of dopplegangerly curiosity. 

Surprisingly it was not about violin playing at all, but rather

about reaping, literally, reaping swaths of grass by hand

as opposed to using a lawn mower. Adam said he had found his thing.

There is something about scything swaths of grass that just 

makes me happy he said. And this is what I remembered when I read

about Ben Blood, the happy farmer, who must’ve also loved to reap,

and who must’ve found there, like the musician Adam DeGraff, the secret 

of the trance. I sent the other Adam DeGraff the Wikipedia link for Ben Blood.

Imagine his surprise when he gets an e-mail from this other Adam DeGraff

all about reaping and anesthetic revelations. I went back and looked 

at the Wikipedia page again. I noticed Blood also just happened to be friends

With Lord Alfred Tennyson, another poet I love and a circular link

back to Bishop. It then became clear to me that this entire moment 

was a poem waiting to be written. Therefore I am quickly dashing it off, 

before the babies wake up so I will remember.  (So far so good.)

FOR REAL

                    I read

an atom 

was recorded

                    in the key of D

20 octaves up

                    from middle C

Make book

Make Book

I blink for ink

Giver

For Preposterity

Fake time

Real time

Fake time in perpetuity for preposterity

Fake out time

Fake you

Faker

Super Why

Palms Up

Under The Rainbow

Sic

She's guitar

He's bass

A flat cricket

B flat frog

Musical

Playground

angle hour

Dear Chris,

I can never write Dear Chris without thinking of Berrigan's sonnets.

It's 5am. The true witching hour. Or maybe the angel hour.  I just woke from a dream. I was setting up an office space with my friend Brian (you might vaguely remember him from the wedding) and you had sent over a large artwork (6' by 6') as a gift for the office. I was horrified to find that the frame was broken when some janitor tried to jam it into a closet. The canvas could possibly be saved I thought, but I was afraid to tell you about it, and was wondering how I was going to do it.

I can't remember what the piece looked like.

Then I walked back into the actual office and Brian was sitting behind a desk. He told me you had sent some more pieces to choose from. There were 5 large works.

The first was a drab Baconian painting of two girls in a hot tub. One of the girls had her back to the viewer. She was sitting close to the other girl who was facing forward. The second girl had her eyes closed with an expression of pain, or maybe pleasure, pleasurepain, on her face. What was happening was mysterious. There was the feeling that something was going on under the water. It was sexy and emotional and slightly disturbing. Beautiful.

On the second piece you had somehow transferred a GIF to the canvas. The moving image was of a girl being pulled away at a party from several of her girlfriends. She had that look of both reluctance and willingness, a laughing, embarrassed, tipsy look that said, sorry, I guess I have to go over here now.  The girl was played by Alicia Silverstone. (Wow, I thought, Chris is working with bigtime actresses now.)

 

The third piece was framed behind a screen door. It was just a single word, perfectly placed. After waking I tried to remember the word, but couldn't recall it. My waking-up mind wanted it to be "forge." But no, that wasn't it.

The fourth piece was a wash of grays.

Suddenly you were there in the room and I said, "I didn't know you painted" and you just nodded.

The fifth piece was an explosion of overlapping particolored pinwheels. In each little sliver of pinwheel was a handwritten word in an 80's faux computer font. It was dazzling and I would have liked to have spent hours with it.

I woke up. 

Sorry it's been awhile since I have written. I was hurt when I asked for help with the review of my friend's show and you didn't respond. That was the straw anyway, on top of a chain of other things that I've forgotten about now.  It's all fine now. I regret letting so much time pass before reaching out.  But I didn't have much to report anyway.

Life is good. I've been in focused dad mode.

I've written plenty over the last few years, but it mostly goes unread. Hopefully I'll manage to get some of it out there into the world, but I'm not so good at that part. The book for Anselm is finished. Long story, but should be coming out in the fall. We'll see. Threw a reading series with my friend Tyler Burba that you would have loved. I'll tell you all about it sometime.

How are you?

mikhal poem straight up one day post death

mikhal,

yesterday you drowned,
  a victim of a malady
     not of your own making,
         yesterday gone.
so glad i was your friend.
    wish i had been better.

          where are you?

             i don't want to just feel you,
               i want you here.

i want to see you smile
   i want to hear your music
     want to float on the melancholy
         melody of your river-like flute,
             play along upon a skiff,
               drift with you to the sea.
i don't want you
   to just be a memory.
i remember all the way back to mike
  (later you would change your name to mikhal
       in honor of your polish grandfather)
          mike, rocking out to jane's addiction. you were cock sure,
            scrappy, a business school tycoon,
              a european fashion model wanna be,
               a ladies man in the making, all
                sinewy muscles and hair gel.
this was some previous you, though.
  he left to make room for who you became
       (an unlikely hero, as alex put it)
           via what catalyst?
              psychedelics?
                dr. lee's eastern philosophy class?
                 (he was a true buddhist and you began to wake up)
did i help? yes, i'm sure i must of,
   all of my mother's love for other
    and all of my father's love for self
      channeled through me
          and into you:
so, though i was uncooked, unrefined,
    still i could offer you something.
(i failed you more often than i was there.
      forgive me.)
and what is it that you became?
  a poet, a mind so attuned to magic
   that linear thinking would not contain you.
      your prose was ripped through with errors
        of syntax, incomplete argument.
           your professors all failed you.
              none (save lee) could see
               that you were merely
                     poetry.
in this way, too, i was there for you.
i could see that the truth you were after,
the truth you often found, was deeper
than the shallow rules, more round
than the square pegs you were trying
to fit into. only poetry could contain
all that color, all that light. but there
was shadow too, demons i could never
fathom. when they came to the surface
it was too terrible and awesome to face.
where did they come from? your mother's
suppression of her depression? your father's
anger? your intolerance for intolerance?
and who knows what chemical concoctions
arose from your dna, from the epilepsy.
perhaps there was even some real demon
attached to you, haunting you, a metaphysical
disease tenaciously holding onto your soul,
perhaps even the spector of pure evil, if such
thing exists. i always refused to believe it did,
despite my superstitious intuition. i always refused to
accept the fear if i noticed a bias influencing
my love for you. still, i often failed.
though these monstrous, terrible forces
working in you were more than i could handle,
i refused to accept them. this enabled me
to stick around for the long run, allowed me
to stay objective. still, there were walls.

your epilepsy, too, changed you.
you became obsessed with finding
a natural cure, disdaining western medicine,
even, it seemed to us, if it would kill you.
we hated this stupidity in you, but could not
help but admire your courage in the face of death.
your philosophies slowly changed as the methods did,
but since nothing seemed to work you adopted a stoic optimism.
you began to view the seizures as a blessing. you were grateful
(as long as no asshole cops were arresting you upon recovery,
as long as there was no sirens in your face) for the chance to be reborn.
for you did become a child again after the electrical storm in your brain
scrambled all of your memory. everything was glorious in the natural
state to which you awakened. this constant reminder of the true
beauty of the world was part of your wisdom, your simple
love of an apple, the mountains, your friends.
you once told me, pre-epilepsy, that you wished
the mind could be better organized, that memory
should be more effectively indexed. in this way you
could reference the information you needed by, say,
pushing the correct button. as if the countless desiderata
of each moment could be labelled!
the irony is that with each successive seizure
you would lose more and more memory. and then,
truly, you had to turn to a more organized memory aid,
a pen and paper, or to me, keeper of many of your
most strange and beautiful memories.
(i have no memory more intense, for instance, than your
melt down in the mountains of ecuador.)
you fought hard to maintain mental coherence
(you were eating high octane brain food,
twelve bucks a can, on the last day i saw you.
and though you were less hazy than normal,
nearly clear, still, you were trying to sell
the nuts and berries to me as some sort
of multi-marketing pyramid scheme. i
wasn't buying. you even made the mistake
of quoting bible passages that seemed to tout
the miracle mix. i had to gently tell you why not.)
and, perhaps to counter the failing of your mind,
you kept your body in maximum condition.
you were the only person i ever knew who
could spend hours running up and down mountains.
you were physically beautiful, had a stunning feline grace.
you had a beautiful style, too, in which form always followed function
and yet still managed to keep ahead of fashion, otherworldly, future primitive.
there were strange experimentations with your facial hair, usually
with striking results (though shaving your eyebrows
was probably a bad idea. i applaude your
courage, though, in trying it. you had that...edge.)
your aquiline, angular face was a perfect setting for
your piercing blue eyes. the icy blue of your eyes
seemed to match the burning intensity of your gaze.
your gaze was more than polite folk
could take. as brice put it,
you wanted to establish
an immediate relationship
with others in the real.
you would want to immediately
be true and naked. polite society
could never understand this. they
were too invested in their invisible armor.
so you were ostracized, too much to bear.
sometimes you even became aggressively antagonistic.
this was sincere for you, as was almost everything else.
you were nothing, if not rigorously honest.
what caused that love for truth?
it was one of the things i most loved about you.
i try to stand back and see your death as the natural processes
of life, try to be objective. but your very uniqueness won't allow
for it. i cannot accept the loss. who else, but you, will so fully
appreciate how beautiful she is? i'm losing it. my thoughts
are becoming a jumble. why is it i never missed you
a tenth as much as i miss you right now?
as if all my love were condensed
in the heartbreak of this moment.
is it because i always thought
i had tomorrow to appreciate you?
ah, well, i'll imortalize you in poetry
(if in the illusions of my mind only)

     i'll write you as you,
     a living poem, wrote me.

Big splat (high romance)

The Match

Upon a maroon swan there lay

 A black velvet blanket from Bombay

Upon the blanket from Bombay sways

A torch of elemental fire ablaze

Herr Swan is flying through a maze

 Of skies -through a blinding haze

Searching for one for whom to say

 what only the lit flame may

Found

Take out Strong and from while to slobbering.