Into The New Year
1-03: I spent last night watching my roommate's television , which he found in the trash, down the block, where he finds all his ( largely useless ) appliances ... coing in last night with a vase of plastic flowers his brother gave him, and a large pack of carrots with which to test out the juicer that he brought home a couple of weeks ago ... there's a permanent bar of snow on the screen, which shifts position if you apply pressure to it, the placing on of the faux flowers tilting it to cover half the screen, making me cock my head sideways in a comical attempt to see under it ... he spent a good hour disassembling the juicer, showing it the same attention that my father would, in cleaning one of his guns ... later, we fed the carrots to the machine, surprised to find that it produced a large amount of orange pulp, and only a small amount of juice, a couple of small glasses, which tasted sweet, but gritty ( as he'd neglected to clean the carrots ) ... this morning, after i woke, and came back from the deli with my cinnamon bun and coffee, I find him with the radio on loud, his Christian station, an after-Christmas reprise of "Silent Night" filling the room with it's sober, warm glow, reaching into the crummy, linoleum corners ... he lovingly cleaning out the machine's compartments, still carrot-clogged from the previous night's vegetable debauch, telling me that he's going to sell it to the grocery store on Forest Avenue, and if that doesn't work, at the liquor store ... I come back from my day in Manhattan, early evening, see that he's watching the Spanish-langguage channel, a soap opera full of extreme facial close ups, betrayed grimaces ... find that he's taken the flowers off the television, improving the picture somewhat ... he tells me, sulkily, that no one wanted to buy the juicer, and drifts off to sleep, shortly after ... A couple hours later, he wakes up, while I'm watching Public Access, walks to the television, and turns it off. "I was watching that," I said. "It's my television," he replies, I deciding that it's not the best time to remind him that he always watches television in the mornings, while I'm sleeping ... the following morning, he gets up, cheerful, having decided that he's going to give the juicer to one of his "brothers", a Puerto Rican guy who'd done some 20 years in prison, and settled here, apparently giving up on life in society ... after he leaves, having offered my roommate $$ for it, which he refuses, he gets himself a glass of water from the tap, telling me, "we don't need juice, as long as we've got water," taking a sip, savoring it, "I love water. You can do a lot with water. You can take a bath in water, wash a car with water. All you need is water to keep your whole house clean. WATER HELPS YOU KEEP YOUR WHOLE LIFE CLEAN!" ... ( This making me think of Georg Trakl, who I'm re-reading, who is said to have first attempted suicide at the age of five by walking out into a lake, and having to be rescued; who told his friends that all he saw of the world, until the age of 20, was water ...
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In Philip Whalen's New Year poem:
"The Scholiast refers to a Gaulish custom of selling their lives for money, and, after a year of feasting, allowing themselves to be stoned to death by the populace" -- Nora K. Chadwick, The Druids
"St Honore"--being Balzac--"preserve us against black coffee
these japanese knickknacks & from writing ourselves
To death instead of dope, syphilis, the madhouse, jail
suicide
"What I have to do is practise music. Spending money isn't the answer
dope is only temporary. Magic is more useful and exact.
"Remember to be careful with magic.
Try for money next time. jewels & money"
"I hate parties, I always have a good time
And it always takes hours for me to recover my sanity
I go there to reassure you that the world is impractical
Magic and lunacy, poetry spells and music"
"Hope says:
'the European models have wrecked us all, they spit blood in my cunt'"
"The Frog Child has a new brother:
How's his insect taboo?"
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Incest evidence, in the poetry of Georg Trakl:
"Hands touch the age of bluish waters
Or the sister's white cheeks on a cold night" -- Helian
In the park, siblings see each other, and shiver"
& the prose poem, Dream and Derangement
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Fragment, from talk radio:
( talking abt. uniform sentencing for murder )
A. : "even if they're a drifter, or a whore"
B. : "I'm sorry to hear that"
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In Bailey Seton detox a couple months ago, as I was leaving the unit to go back to my residence, refreshed, a train of patients from the psych ward passed me, and another guy who was leaving, the staffer leading them raised his voice, "DEAD MAN WALKING," I griamcing, as I thought he was talking about me, "THE GREEN MILE!" A short, longhaired white kid at the back of the line hanging his head, "it's me", my heart going out to him, at that moment, regardless of his transgression, as I know how it feels to be in that position ... ( A lot of people will duck into hospitals after committing crimes, as police are not allowed to enter, or make arrests in them, even know if a suspect is in one ... for example, the Dark Angel of Brooklyn, or my buddy Anthony Fortunato, at Beth Israel )
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from M. Butor's Historire Extraordinaire: On A Dream Of Baudelaire's:
(g) Suicide and Poetry
The existence of the dandy, that inferior version of the poet, culminates in the moment of his suicide, but he is then victim only of himself, his own executioner; his disappearance is without consequences. It is his own nothingness he is punishing. His death reveals him as pure appearance.
In poetic existence, which is the reality of which dandyism is only the shadow, there is indeed such a thing as voluntary death, but this acquires quite different dimensions. The welcoming of death is no longer contained in the suspect brevity of a single, final conclusive moment, it is coexstensive with the entire fulfilment of the work. It is the latter which is the long, incomparable weapon of the crime.
But above all, the poet is not only victim of himself, but of the entire people, the entire crowd; he is not only his own executioner but that of the entire crowd. His voluntary death, though perpetrated by the very milieu that has produced him, condemns the latter, and is the greatest consequence to it.
Poe's work and life thus appear as one long suicide, in which he forces the society around him to perpetrate against him that crime which is transformed into a punishment.
'This death is almost suicide - a suicide prepared long before. At least it caused the scandal of a suicide.'
In this society, scandal confers a sacred character upon its victim. As a matter of fact, whatever the faults it may have been able to blame the poet for, the death penalty which it has inflicted not by the intermediary of executioner but directly, as though by its own hands, suddenly seems disproportionate. Society cannot say: justice has been done, order has been restored, we have saved ourselves an exexutioner; it is obliged to complain: things shouldn't have gone so far, and we must punish this dead man for having caused this disturbance, for having revealed this injustice; yet the dead man henceforth escapes any human punishment. Human justice remains with this wound.
'Society regards the man who commits suicide as insolent; it would gladly chastise certain funereal remains, like that of a wretched soldier, afflicted with vampirism, whom the sight of a corpse aroused to the point of madness.'
In reading this, I'd like to think that this qualifies me as a poet, rather than a mere dandy, as I believe i am living my death, on the installment plan ... knowing that, as far as I can tell, I'd never engage in the single, unremediable act unless to avoid some terrible, continued suffering ... that I cannot see myself practising suicide as an "gratuitous act" ( Gide ), or of the kind celebrated by the Surrealists ... Four Dada Suicides