re-dressing

Unseasonable Dress

                                                           

At the edges of re-dressing

each succession in taffeta

hand-sewing slows the pace

for pleasure of investigation

I can get near     by.

Much summing up done,

what keeps going is conversation.

What makes me care is why

I am interested enough to inhabit

where an accountant is tiptoeing through \\\ grass.

                                                                       

Laugh of obfuscation

quotes from arguments

had with other men;

scabby mountains are descended.

I dance through Dutch country

part tulips with my toes

leasing long this rented charisma

limberness, utter movement.

I laugh only for my friends

an offering of tears.

I stopped wearing mascara

as a pre adolescent.

So don’t say something for me.

Leaping forward, adding pathos

to an over soppy situation:

We went to custody over lost years --

not certain what really can be saved.

I do not feel sorry

for the woman alone. 

I wouldn’t kill her off

in an unexpected way

because we are tired of the story;

we think we know occasions

by talking about them -- 

Put on this unseasonable dress

of hope.

2003 

painting: laurence amelie

not indifferent

"i have not looked at a newspaper in twenty years; if one is brought into the room, i flee.  this is not because i am indifferent but because one cannot follow every road...by sanctifying our faults we create" -Cocteau
a friend once told me he hates the word "redemption". i bet "sanctify" is not a winner either.

all ends with beginnings

this is what baby sings about me, surely, at night.

she's up all night 'til the sun (crazy mom does not need sleep)
i'm up all night to get some (milk)
she's up all night for good fun (to laugh with me)
i'm up all night to get lucky (let me sleep in her bed)

D.H. Lawrence on Galsworthy part 4

Four Contemporary novelists by Wilbur L. Cross (Macmillan) E. 1609 Institut d'Auglair
--born a Forsyte with a silver spoon in his mouth
the son of an old man of fifty, with the chin and jaw tenacity and the possessive instinct was sent to Harrow and on to Oxford, took an honour degree in Law
--He set out on extensive travels, he falls in with Conrad (Torrens) Like Conrad Galsworthy found abroad his freedom of outlook.
Thenceforth all was not right with sea-girt Britain and Galsworthy was preserved from becoming a narrow-minded "man of property". (At least as he puts it, saying he had gained the critical attitude which signals the genuine man of letters)
--A first he writes under the name of John Sinjohn
--His first characters, though often but slightly sketched were fitted into adventures appropriate enough to pass muster -- in "Villa Rubein", "Jocelyn"
--The Pharisees (1904) Shelton, like Galsworthy, has inherited all the social ideas of the comfortable middle class
--The good citizen clings at all costs to his money, his wife, his good name
Keeping under cover such vices as he may have
--He comes under the influence of Ferrand, a waif of modern civilzation whose maxim is that whatever is, is wrong (Ferrand's vision through his cynical blue eyes)
--Converted to the vagabond's philosophy Shelton repudiates Antonia and all her ways --
The novel is, physcholgically considered, the illustration of Galsworthy pretended enfranchisement from conventional Victorian and bourgeois mentality (adherence to the letter of outworn laws and antiquated ideas concerning education, marriage, the church, government, crime and his punishment, and the distribution of property)
Having discovered the Pharisees, Galsworthy immediately undertook the task of tracking and unmasking them wherever they are just as Thackeray tracked and unmasked the snobs. But, unlike Dickens, Galsworthy treated them with little gall on his pen, and rather humorously
--A Man of Property marks an improvement   The characterization shows psychological insight as well as outward features.  And cynical satire becomes more ironical
He owed his inspiration and training to Maupassant Turgenev and Tolstoi

D.H. Lawrence on Galsworthy part 3

     This is the final philosophy of it all:  "Things happen, but we bob up"  Very well, then, write the book in that key, the Keynote of a frank old cynic.  There's no point in sentimentalizing it and being a sneaking old cynic.  Why pour out masses of feeling that pretend to be genuine and then turn it all off with:  "Things happen, but we bob up"?
     It is quite true, things happen, and we bob up.  If we are vulgar sentimentalists, we bob up just the same, so nothing has happened and nothing can happen.  All is vulgarity.  But it pays.  There is money in it.
     Vulgarity pays, and cheap cynicism smothered in sentimentalism pays better than anything else.  Because nothing can happen to the degraded social being.  So let's pretend it does and then bob up!
     It is time somebody began to spit out the jam of sentimentalism, at least, which smothers the "bobbing-up" philosophy.  It is time we turned a straight light on this horde of rats, these younger Forsyte sentimentalism whose name is legion.  It is sentimentalism which is stifling us.  Let the social beings keep on bobbing up while ever they can.  But it is time an effort was made to turn a hosepipe on the sentimentalism.  They ooze over everything.  The world is one sticky mess, in which the little Forsytes indeed may keep on bobbing still, but in which an honest feeling can't breathe.
    But if the sticky mess gets much deeper, even the little Forsythes won't be able to bob up any more.  They'll be smothered in their own slime along with everything else.  Whic is a comfort
                                              D.H. Lawrence

D.H. Lawrence on Galsworthy part 2

     The later novels are purely commercial and, if it had not been for the early novels, of no importance -
When you arrive at To let, and the end, at least the "promised" end, of the Forsytes, what have you? Just money!
Money, money, money and a certain snobbish silliness, and many more anti tricks and poses.  Nothing else.  The story is feeble, the characters have no blood and bones, the emotions are faked, faked, faked, It is one great fake.  Not necessarily of Mr Galsworthy.  The characters fake their own emotions.  But that doesn't help us.  And if you look closely at the characters, the meanness and low-level vulgarity are very distasteful.  You have all the Forsyte meanness with none of the energy.  Jolyon and Trene are meaner and more treacherous to their son than the older Forsytes were to theirs.  The young ones are of a limited, mechanical, vulgar egoism far sufpassing that of Swihin or James, their ancestors-
There is in it all a vulgar sense of being rich, and therefore we do as we like: an utter incapacity for anything like true feeling, especially in the women, Fleur, Trene, Annette, June: a glib crassness, a youthful spontaneity which is just impertinence and lack of feeling; and all the time a creeping "having" sort of vulgarity of money and sell-will, money and self-will (obstination opiniatrete) money and self-will so that we wonder sometimes if Mr Galsworthy is not treating his public in real bad faith, and being cynical and rancorous and his rainbow sentimentalism.
     Fleur he destroys in one word: she is "having". It is perfectly true.  We don't blame the young Jon for clearing out. Trene he destroys in a phrase out of Fleur's mouth to June: "Didn't she spoil your life too?" - and it is precisely what she did.  Sneaking and mean, she prevents Fleur. She is the bitch in the manger (la chiemme du jardinier qui n'aime pas les choux et empethe qui conque d'en manger) She is the sneaking "anti". Trene, the most beautiful woman on earth! And Mr Galsworhty, with the cynicism of a successful old sentimentalist, turns it off by making June say:  "Nobody can spoil a life, my dear.  That's nonsense. Things happen, but we bob up." (nous swinageous)

D.H. Lawrence on Galsworthy part 1

in 1998 i purchased Galsworthy's "A Modern Comedy" at a street market in Nice, France.  Inside were these letters. It is an exegesis on the book and on Galsworthy. I have yet to authenticate if these were actually written by D.H. Lawrence.
text:

John Galsworthy

by D.H. Lawrence

     All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, and this pseudo-scientific classifying and analysing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.

     The touchstone is emotion not reason. (?)

Macaulay juggles his feelings (thought he is emotionally very alive)

Sainte Beuve remains a great critic (a man of good faith)

Pater's standard was the lonely philospher of pure thought and pure aesthetic truth

We need a standard to go by and judge

We need some conception of a real man and a real woman by which to judge all these Forsytes

Standards -- The good man

                    the man of pure thought
                    the treasured humble
                    the moral individual
none of the Forsytes seems to be a really vivid human being they are social beings.
they have lost individual caste and humanity (animality?) 
                    animality = freeman's psyche = innocence = naivete
                    sociality = slave's psyche
Money doesn't touch the freeman it goes right through the centre with the social being a split personality with the death of the individual soul
a castrated man      the "at-oneness"
What is salvation is God
Hence money is God
the social being has lost his innocence
the bright little individual spar of his at-oneness

replication

from like being only 5 cells last year to sporting a wife beater and double fisting this year. 

he is not too outraged that morrissey did not get into the hall of fame.

laws

maybe it had begun in his bowels but we burned his bowels

the way you burn the long blue

scarf of the dead, and all their clothing,

cleansing with fire. How fast time goes

now that I'm happy, now that I know how to

think of his dead body every day

without shock, almost without grief,

to take it into each part of the day the

way a loom parts the vertical threads,

half to the left half to the right like the Red Sea and you

throw the shuttle through with the warp-thread

attached to the feet, that small gold figure of my father--

how often I saw him in paintings and did not know him,

the tiny naked dead one in the corner

the mortal one.

-Sharon Olds

what is not known now shall be known hereafter. 

oh the suspense .

Yes the tears came

out like juice and sugar from the fruit--

the skin thins and breaks and rips, there are

laws on this earth and we live by them

seasons

--& when you went out in the world
after the long disease of yourself
& saw the colors of the world
right before they arrive, the dulls
& browns of the absolute season,
mauves streaming in the waters
of a year, you knew the features
of the world are the same
as the language of the soul
& by traveling in those elements
you'd lose your fear - -
Brenda Hillman "To a Desert Poet"

our song

Decade

When you came, you were like red wine and honey,
And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness.
Now you are like morning bread,
Smooth and pleasant.
I hardly taste you at all for I know your savour,
But I am completely nourished.

Amy Lowell

silent smooth boy will soon be bigger then us girls. the most difficult one to get here by far.  his ages two to twelve is dream. twenty two awaits. 

fairy tale of the heart

i don't even know if there is a joke

whatever you want to be, whether it's a millionaire wheel-chairist, an orphan surfer, or a superhero mom, all you need is the nerve to exhibit that desire. then hit send.
truth beats fiction for strange.

be

"People will kill you over time, and how they'll kill you is with tiny, harmless phrases, like: 

'be realistic.'" --Dylan Moran

"A lot of parents will do anything for their kids, except let them be themselves." --Banksy

literally?

...if I be shaven, then my strength will go from me, and I shall become weak, and be like any other man. 

--Judges 17:17

little nordic samson was shaven, but even with the hair it is doubtful he could have torn a lion. he is scared of being alone once the sun goes down, masks, and black lighting terrifies him.