My Blog

Jacqui Naylor and Company did it right today at SGI’s inaugural Peace Concert. In a time when hate and mean-spiritedness have become fashionable, they let loose some powerful counter notes, proving you don’t have to play to the lowest common denominator to make an impression.

Speaking of which, I just learned that next to the bible, the capitalist ideologue, Ayn Rand’s books are the most-read books in the USA. That’s one more point for the “will to power” (!?).

We were on location at UC Berkeley for the totally dubious occasion of CAL DAY. After chatting with the bomb unit and checking out their latest robot for ferreting out explosives and helping the SWAT team in crowd control situations, I had the pleasure of receiving literature from two fresh-faced co-eds delineating Rand’s strained theory of “political” versus “economic” rights, which goes something like if you require sweatshop owners to pay workers a living wage, you are enslaving the owners.

No doubt this sort of mental pabulum fueled the ENRON corporate lackeys’ rise to the heights of self-interest, but really what is wrong with the American people—why so eager to go the way of German fascism lapping up a misapplied version of Nietzsche—pimping contempt to distinguish an elite from the masses? What is the intellectual maneuver by which we so admire institutionalized greed and thievery, its heroes and fictions that we misrecognize our own material and collective positions within this system—like, who’s really benefiting?

The surgicalized super-human, like the personality cult leader is actually weaker, dependent upon invisiblized props, and besides, until we become cyborg, they get sick and die just like the rest of us.

By the way, have you noticed, typically under-reported, an organic movement is springing up in mobilizations of our “invisible” immigrant workforce in places like Chicago and Milwaukee, not to mention LA. And Bay Area High School students staging walk-outs. Check the Atlas: remember the Paris suburbs burning? MAY DAY. There is more to come.

Suzanne Stein, talking poetics on Saturday, spoke among many things of “constructing a tool for moral disambiguation.” (She also talked about cab drivers’ enlarged hypothalamus’s)

Surely part of the singular collective task of re-engineering the brain web is discernment of our responsibility to one another (c.f. Levinas).

Meanwhile, check out Jacqui’s new CD (www.jacquinaylor.com) or catch her at the SF Jazz Festival this August and be happy the Buddhists are chanting for everyone.

Monk told the horn-player “Let some things go by. It’s what you don’t play that matters.”

an Italian woman called the law on me. it came in the form of an sfpd officer who introduced himself as such, as if the uniform were not a dead give-away. he looked all of 12.

“align” I’d said.
“not a line” she corrected, “a law.”
“a low?” I asked.
“no! law!” she repeated, spelling L A W. “you call forth the law.”

apparently.

she stung with just enough venom to get my attention.

I called my friend.

“you’ve been initiated” she said.

this particular law concerns covering your backside, and only a friend can do that.

the law becomes the law by being broken.

“you misunderstood” I told her. When I said align, I meant to be in accord.
“no!” she repeated. “you are so superficial—you in san francisco and the east bay—its very important how you speak, what words you use. in italy, we study this.”

I resisted.

then she sent me the law.

he wrote me up. he told me to fix it.

fisticuffs: the given is what we suffer. it has to do with fixing.

as color fixed in dye
a junkie’s
difficult or awkward situation
a position determined from the bearings of two or more points

[ML. fixare, to fix; fixus, pp of figere, to fasten, attach; for IE. base see /FINISH]

5. to make rigid.
8. to reach a decision about
10. to repair
12. prepare and cook
14. to punish
15. to make solid or nonvolatile
16. to make permanent

Before Job, the Buddha wondered about suffering. some mystics take suffering as its own reward. of the many words for suffering, one is exile. in a talk on Edward Said entitled “the house is past” Dr. Mohamed Salama said “nation” is the opposite of exile. nation is another word for suffering. as is house or home.

“exile. who is not in exile.”
“the occupiers are not in exile.”
“but isn’t occupation a form of ‘leaving behind’?”
“what must be left behind in order to occupy?”
“knowledge of the rift between body and place.”

protesting recent legal attacks on undocumented workers, an activist held up her wrists:

“if helping them is a crime” she said, “then put the cuffs on right now.”

thus she demonstrated voluntary suffering on behalf of another.

all suffering is written in the body; likewise the denial of suffering. the given is what we suffer.

the minute you try to fix something you are messing with the law.

an old man carried his one eye out in front of him–dangling from a string attached to a long pole that he grasped with both hands like a flag or a prayer. the eye saw and told him many things and so the village woman often came to him with offerings of food to find out where their husbands were or which of their relatives was talking about them behind their backs.

as news of this eye spread powerful men sent emissaries disguised as children to find out the actions of their enemies. though the eye usually only spoke to these petitioners in riddles that would befuddle their parents, one day a young boy saw what the eye saw and knew his father was false. when this boy returned to his father’s house the father saw new knowledge in his son’s eye and cast him out. fearing his son, thus expulsed, would see and learn more he sent the village thugs after him to kill him and when the body was found spread rumors that it was the blind old man with his dangling eye who committed the murder. then he hired a hoard of teenaged boys to steal the eye and destroy its owner.

thus the eye saw and told the old man that the day of his death was coming.

the understanding of his impending death startled the old man for he had put his eye on the string on the pole and carried it in front of him so that he would always see what was coming. but now that he knew his day was near he fell into a fit of terrors and the eye swung like a pendulum and its beam blinked like a search light and the voices and cries of all those to whom the eye had given knowledge filled the old man’s ears.

the old man was weeping when the mad boys came with their teeth and their knives and fell upon him in a frenzy of blood and did the work of jackals. so entranced were boys in their deed they forgot about the eye and didn’t notice when the dead boy’s sister (who had tagged along disguised as a boy) slipped it from its string and sequestered it in the folds of her shirt and made herself scarce in the woods until finally sated, the boys roared off en mass drunken stupor, the leader carrying the old man’s pole like a staff and shouting raucous songs that would become the stuff of lyric.

then the girl returned to the corpse of the man and placed his eye in the gash on his forehead where it sunk three inches down to the center of his head and she took her thread and re-stitched his body and it became a boat, a drunken boat, which she sailed away.

The sound of birds draws my eye to the window and I lift the shade. Three crows are engaged in what appears a life and death struggle, one or two more circle overhead and swoop down. It looks now that one maybe the victim of a group attack and I wonder if I am witnessing bird murder or gang rape but then positions switch and a raven on the sidelines pulls with his beak at the wing of one seeming to go in for the kill. An intervention? Are they fighting or fucking? Now they are resting two combatants laying side by side, beaks open as if catching breath and one standing above the two like a warden. They remain this way a moment then suddenly as if in one motion the three take to the sky, followed by the others and are gone.
What have I just witnessed?

I lack adequate knowledge of the life of crows (or is it ravens? — they were so large) or possess too limited powers of observation to discern whether they were in pursuit of life or death. Knowing this can I resist the impulse to make a meaning of their so appearing before me? Is there a purpose served in the bird world if one of them dies like that, at the beaks of the others. Were they thinning out the flock? Or having a lovers quarrel? I know I cannot understand what I saw in these terms. Yet it remains that I was doing the looking and they did not even know I was there.

“These are singular journeys” an old friend recently said.

and I sketch some equations: singular = cellular or singular/cellular

(I can only do this twice before advertising intervenes)

thus the impossibility of a private person.

[L. ambo, both], a combining form

[ML. valentia, worth, value < L. valens, ppr. of valere, to be strong],

1. in biology, the ability of chromosomes, serums, vaccines etc. to combine with definite organisms, allergens, and allied matter, or produce a specific effect upon them.

2. in chemistry, the capacity of an element or radical to combine with another, as measured by the number of hydrogen atoms which one radical or one atom of the element will combine with or replace: as, oxygen has a valence of two (i.e. one atom of oxygen combines with two hydrogen atoms).

3. a unit of valence

am • biv • a • lence

a conflict of two

the day after the witch told me of my clubfoot, I received a simple instruction from another person re: intensely conflicting impulses “see if it is possible to hold . . . all together rather than going with one and running with it.”

OK. so what happens in the space between and around two conflicting notes? dissonance. and if the notes keep being struck? (as I write this an eyelash falls on the page) [in music a chord that sounds harsh and incomplete until resolved to a harmonious chord.]

I am interested in the vibrational field (of/between) creation and destruction that holds them both, that does not necessarily seek to resolve into traditional harmonic structure though the possibility of a new thing emerging from this interaction is ever present. That night Kim Jensen read at the Poetry Center from her new novel: The Woman I left Behind (see http://www.kimjensen.org ) articulating a conflict between human desire and the will to power enacted via characters entrenched in historically responsible positions.

Back to the site of a body: when these conflicting impulses arise/fight within me I create a ring around them, and my legs begin to shake with current. (In yoga I am told this is an action of burning stored karma.) If I stay in posture w/o attempting to allay or discharge the energy it opens into another field, which I have imagined as a pasture with a giant red gash or a column of fire moving through it. It was under these conditions that I released the nine horses.

Again, Apollinarie:

La Victoire avant tout sera
De bien voir au loin
De tout voir
De près
Et que tout ait un nom nouveau

(from La Victoire)

“Understanding cinema as kynema, motion, and understating that image is not a visual prerogative, blind films hitch perceptible sources in a homemade animated theatre place.” So writes Basque composer, improvisor and instrument builder Alex Mendizabal, who will visit tonight for a rare presentation of his mysterious and moving Blind Films, spatialized cinematic experiences of pure sound, performed live in pure and total darkness, over, under, around and through the traditionally seated audience. “A set of sound motion and low synthesis sources such as wall harps, voice transmitters, cowboy horns, distant string-actioned cups, cold-water boiling pans, chamber birds, low fi acoustic multi channel, …. pursuing daguerrosound images and movies out of vision.” (Programmed by Steve Polta)

*Though I do not know if he coined the term, I first encountered blind cinema through the work of Alex Mendizabal. Here is a link from Cinematheque’s January-March 2004 Calendar—scroll down to March 21st.

http://www.sfcinematheque.org/calendar.shtml?x=44

a use to which fear is put

“At the blind boy’s asylum someone asked
Where do you keep the kid with the wings”

-Apollinaire (trans. D. Revell)

no one is authorized to speak for or in place of another—a basic un-graspability of that which is experienced outside one’s body, in fact in the body of another, renders this so, to the point that claims to the contrary register as violation of another’s not only physical but psychic integrity. at least if you get it “wrong.” and if one accepts bodily boundary as a kind of absolute, which also means accepting implicit limitations of the physical organs of the senses and mind consciousness—and thus what is possible to know. through science and love humans attempt to exceed these boundaries—but it is through violence that we most recognize their crossing and perhaps violence is implicit to the attempt itself, no matter the form of its articulation– thus lovers enter each other through their bodies, the same bodies that science dissects. and both forms of knowledge are necessarily incomplete.

Perception deceives—objects appearing solid are in fact in motion—the terrain of self and other are constituted as continually shifting fields—what appears as a singularity in a moment of time is more likely a constellation of singularities—we co-exist—thus I respond on a cellular level even to your thought of me. thus the air in California responds to the wings of a butterfly in Argentina.

So I met a witch last night who told me I once had a clubfoot in a Dickensonian time and I believed her. The clubfoot lingered that is migrated with me across the borders of life and death so that it is still with me, only invisible, though some of you may see it—its traces, a hip rotated inward, torquing of the knee joint, the downward pointing of the toes on that foot, a desire to walk on the wrong side of it, and a posture that goes with. Maybe you recoil a bit to imagine this or the shame of the one who made me, my deformity reflecting back to her the figure of her imperfection. thus we see and are seen and are marked by those visions. but my clubfoot is a secret weapon for once I know I have been bared from the ranks of beauty, I cannot fall in love with her image and so am granted another kind of sight.

This vision is not the same as Kristi Yamaguchi’s, whose long list of medals and honors do not cancel the corrective surgery, casts, and special shoes she wore to overcome the same condition, though her discipline and perseverance testify to what it is possible to make a body do. And certainly my sight differs from that of the young woman whom I met on the beach at Nha Trang, Viet Nam, who wore sandals on her hands and drug her body over the sand to sell post cards to tourists, both legs so deformed she could not walk. I have no aspirations to be a world-class figure skater but I walk and pass for normal. Shit, I am normal. You only know about my clubfoot because I’m telling you. And I didn’t know until the witch told me—though I used to play that I was a “cripple” as a child to gain pity from strangers.

What I’m saying is that the body is the thing we leave behind, only not entirely. I’m saying these bodies appear to divide us, and yet we cannot separate one from the other– The body that we see and a body that we don’t see. And I’m wondering what Kristi did with her club feet, now that I know their name. I think they serve her so far as she does not forget them. So I wrap my head in a scarf and tell you I am looking to make myself a body without organs and so the first thing that I retract are my eyes.