Jericho

Tags

2011, being, defining, emptiness, groundlessness, Have, identity, letting go, life, living, non-doing, play, pointlessness, practice, quiet, realisation, reality, relaxing, seeing, sitting, walls

 

 

 

                                Jericho

                                pointless
                everything is pointless
                                I can see it
                everywhere like a needless wall

                                I don’t chose to
                it just seeps through everything
                                quietly
                makes me feel dank;
                                makes me crumble
                just when I thought I was getting footing

                never anything I can feel good about nothing
                                by which
                I can define myself
                                nothing
                I can’t see through
                                nothing that won’t show me up

                                this is my reality:
                no intrinsic reality
                                to play to, to play in;
                this is my reality

                                this is me; I
                should exploit it fully by not hoping
                                that here
                is where I can find myself at last

                                the point is
                that there is no point
                                to HAVE

                                the struggle
                is in worrying that the point
                                cannot be found

                                the salvation is
                in the relaxing with there being
                                no point

                                really
                really and truly there is nothing
                                to do

                                but to sit
                still in the reality of there being
                                no point

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

being & emptiness & life & pointlessness & sitting wormhole: the both passive and transitive / non-presumptive pre-conceptualist attenuation of being
groundlessness & letting go & seeing & walls wormhole: the writing’s on the wall
Have wormhole: B le tch l ey P ark
identity wormhole: aghh – we’ve been infected / it’s spreading through the system / we’re losing our files … / it’s taken out the processor … / I, I can’t open with this program anymore … / it’s scanning me – / I’ve got to buy a Virus Protection Program / from it …
living & realisation wormhole: Michael Redford: triptych
play wormhole: teached / in the ass
practice wormhole: what I am about to say is true / what I just said was a lie
reality wormhole: Doctor Strange I – the trashcan tilted the better to see now the street

 

Doctor Strange I – the trashcan tilted the better to see now the street

Tags

2012, avoidance, change, comics, conventional reality, Dr Strange, Edward Hopper, ellipsis, encounter, eyes, Gene Colan, hands, humanity, life, living, moment, quotidian, reality, seeing, skyline, step, Steve Englehart, streets, time, trees, walking

 

 

 

                                                              I

                                the always-aslant encounter
                                                              of humans and street
                                              making their lives
                                                              in the grounds they see
                                making their lives in the grounds they are given
                                                                                 constant encounter
                                              as variable as the daily

                                                                                 for those who see
                                elliptical to the happenstance –
                                                              the skyline to the treeline
                                                                                 the glide to the cobble
                                              the palm to the point
                                                              the both-step-aside to avoid each other’s path
                                                              and collide –
                                                                                 Hopper saw it
                and Colan saw it and Strange had already
                                                              stepped into it
                                                                                 stepped through it stepped out again

                                              moment

                                                                                 but now
                                his pupils are that much more round
                                              the trashcan tilted the better to see now the street
                                                                                 the face in the orb implied
                                that everything had changed and that
                                                              things
                would never be the same again

 

I am psyched that the first trailer for the Doctor Strange film has just been released; I think this is going to see me lose my 56 year old jaded-cool; I am more excited about this than I was for the Batman movies, even though Batman is my character (oh, sorry, didn’t you know?), (in fact, I envisage Batman, ideally, as more akin to Doctor Strange, the character should be more mystical than he is generally presented); I am glad to see the trailer dealing with kaleidoscope-reality, this has a lot to go for it from the start; Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One is a genuinely creative piece of casting but I hope she is not as ‘explainey’ and active as this trailer suggests (or even as dynamic as she was Gabriel in ‘Constantine’, a female sage should have more devastating effect but with less of the door-slamming); (and talking of door-slamming: I was disappointed that the trailer starts of with the ubiquitous iron door slam portending dire catastrophe for gawp-eyed Humanity, I was hoping Doctor Strange, at least, would approach tale-telling differently, but I suppose superhero movies have hit their formula now, no one’s going to play with it with that much money going in … mind you, Stark’s humour, and the first Avenger’s humour were interesting innovations, I might hope for something innovative in Strange, not humour, so much, as power through deft and understatement, rather than grunt); the round loft-window gave me The Smile at the end; Cumberbatch has a Good Walk as he broaches realities, he has the right eyes to see-through fingers for the part as well; I once hoped that David Lynch might write and direct Doctor Strange … that would have been interestingly different and so right … it was not well-received (have a look in the comments section of https://longboxgraveyard.com/2012/11/28/76-superhero-greenlight-doctor-strange/) … actually, dab’n’abbit, here is my tender, but I’ll settle with what this film seems to promise:

Dr Strange operates in worlds which are ‘mystical’ in the sense that they function within natural laws and forces which are alternate to our own – they are worlds which we just don’t get and it would be better for us that we didn’t know about them so we can continue functioning ourselves.   And yet Stephen Strange is of and from this world – he is all too human but has mastered the Mystic Arts.   He therefore lives between the two worlds – the physical/political and the occult worlds – or rather he lives amid, at the same time.   He is ‘strange’ because he bridges these two worlds, and this is the central pull of the character for me.   In comics the ‘occult’ world was depicted fantastically (the floating-island footsteps of Ditko, the swirls of Colan) because it was a visual medium meant for younger audiences (growing up); but the occult world doesn’t so much ‘look’ strange (like a childishly re-arranged physical world), in fact it isn’t even a different world it is the same world ‘seen’ (and ‘heard’ and ‘felt’ and acted in) differently.   What was equally attractive about Dr Strange (and under-used in the comics) was the depiction of the character in ordinary, recognisable surroundings but knowing he was actually operating in a world out of the space-time continuum.   I would conceive that Strange’s ‘battles’ took place while he was strolling through a park, while walking on the street, in the blink of an Eye (herm).   I once heard David Lynch talk about how he achieves perspectives in his work by ‘filming through the eye of a duck’ meaning that he doesn’t just film ‘lineally’ he films simultaneously/alternately – he shoots a scene/whole films which physically depict one narrative but which affectively show an alternate landscape in which they play out.   What better ‘mise-en-scene’ist than David Lynch to depict the life of a character who has ‘mastered’ the arts of living bridged across two worlds-in-one?   No need of CGI, no need of costumes, not even much need of action!   I know, I know, not the ingredients for your standard superhero blockbuster money-maker.   But they have been done and will continue to be done under their own momentum.   Dr Strange has always been a peripheral character because he is so … strange.   Perhaps this would be time to make a different take on the comics-to-film translation formula …

Anyhoo, I wrote a series of poems tracking Doctor Strange through a key set of issues written by Steve Englehart and drawn by Gene Colan; (Dr Strange #6-13 (Feb 1975-April 1976)); these issues are some of the best comics I have ever read; they were also seminal in shaping me to become the significantly un-noticeable writer I have become to this day; I posted them in 2012 and then re-posted them again in 2014 because I thought the film was immanent – it wasn’t; but, dammitall, I like these babies so I’m going to post them again, spread out until November 4th …

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

change wormhole: top table
comics wormhole: Poewieviews
Dr Strange & Gene Colan wormhole: Dr Strange VII – the madness of Mordo
Edward Hopper wormhole: New York, New Haven and Hartford, 1931
eyes wormhole: b / r / e / a / t / h / i / n / g
hands wormhole: really
life & reality & streets & time & walking wormhole: 1964
living wormhole: dash
seeing wormhole: rhymed
skyline wormhole: miss / ad / venture – poewieview #22
trees wormhole: like ink – poewieview #23

 

1964

Tags

1960s, 1964, 2014, angel, archetypes, beauty, Burt Bacharach, Diane di Prima, Dionne Warwick, dream, emptiness, feeling, hair, humanity, identity, imagination, life, light, lightning, lime, Manhattan, morning, myth, reality, San Francisco, shadow, streets, table, tectonic plates, the Summer of Love, time, walking, years

 

 

 

                           1964

                           she stood up from the
                           lime-green tablecloth we bought and walked
                           down through the streets
                           between morning shadows …

 

you’ll never get to heaven (if you break my heart): Dionne Warwick, Burt Bacharach, Hal David; soon after I posted this I sat down and had lunch (sultanas and banana in porridge) and read the following passage which was so apropos that I just had to add it to this work; it is by Diane di Prima, “Recollections of My Life as a Woman”, the beginning of chapter 19 – I haven’t asked permission (don’t know how to), but I just wanted to share it, it’s brilliant:

Certain times, certain epochs, live on in the imagination as more than what they ‘actually’ were, and there is always a price to pay for them.   They are, if you look close, times when the boundary between mythology and everyday life is blurred.   The archetypes break out of prison, as it were, and by some collective consent we or many of us, simply choose a myth and live it, heedless of the restrictions of the so-called ‘real world’.   Or we are somehow chosen by the myth we were born to live.   Sometimes with deadly rapidity.

This meeting of world and myth is where we all thought we were going.   Where we thought we wanted to be; it was so beautiful.   Vivid, bright, and deadly, like some tropical flowers.   Not human.   Not cut to our measure.

But we – we couldn’t see that.   Thought we were gods …

‘The 60s’ are often referred to as such a time, though what is usually meant by the term is merely ‘The Summer of Love’ and its aftermath: 1967 and 68.   Tip of the iceburg, if you ask me.

For me most of the 1960s, and on to about 1976, was a time bathed in the mythic.   It was a time when the archetypes stalked the streets of Manhattan, numinous and often deadly.   When angels, incubi, and other dreams of what could be settled in your hair and refused to be brushed aside.   When we see the creatures that lived in the fog worlds of San Francisco as casually as you see your corner grocery.

                                                      .

We had struggled so long and so furiously to find, reach into, the world of our feelings, our secret knowledges, and intuitions, and it was as if Something had caught us up, caught the hand we had slipped through the gap, and that Something was now pulling us in.   Pulling us under.   For as certainly as we knew that behind the facades our parents had lived there was the world of human feeling, behind that world was yet another that sought to claim us.   What I have called the World of Archetypes.   Inexorable bundles of soul purpose, often wearing human or humanoid form, sometimes walking among us.   Without conscience and without regret.   And so beautiful!

As I can tell you now, behind the Archetypes are vast impersonal patterns or textures of energies we might call Orisha.   Or Yidam.

And behind that, perhaps the Void dances, not black, cold, or empty as we have believed, but dancing with light, sheet lightnings spread as a series of surfaces over nothing.   And moving faster than the eye can register.   Even the eye of the mind.

Our downfall was – it was so beautiful.   For us, who had replaced religion, family, society, ethics with Beauty, who saw ourselves as in the service of Beauty, no warnings were understood, no traps anticipated.   To go down in the servive of That – that was the ultimate grace.

But archetypes have their own drama: a vast uncharted cycle of Comedia dell’Arte, which they play out through us, without our informed concent.   And with, ultimate, no concern for human purpose.

And it is not without reason that we have been handed by the science of our time the image, the fact or metaphor, of tectonic plates.   Earth continents floating on a core of molten magma.   As we ourselves float, melting a little, changing shape.   Bumping against each other, lifted by, dependent on, in total chemical exchange with, the molten soul stuff I have here called Archetypes.   That seeks to brek through to the surface wherever the plates are thin.

The plates were very thin in 1964.

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

1964 wormhole: sixty four sixty five – poewieview #1
beauty wormhole: [s]
[Burt] Bacharach wormhole: 1963
Dionne Warwick wormhole: nothing to write
dream wormhole: dream career // groggy
emptiness & walking wormhole: and that’s where I are
hair wormhole: Shonagh – poewieview #17
identity wormhole: rhymed
Manhattan wormhole: 1959 –– MANHATTAN –– 2012
life wormhole: mauve
light wormhole: don’t look / at her eyes – poewieview #18
lightning wormhole: first Spring storm
lime wormhole: thick thick fog
morning wormhole: hinged – From Hell ch. V
reality wormhole: top table
shadow wormhole: up on the hill
streets wormhole: tabla
table wormhole: Soir Bleu, 1914
time wormhole: a theremin note – poewieview #21
years wormhole: the sounds of 1969 // [would have] seemed that way – poewieview #13

 

top table

Tags

2015, change, defining, disappearance, glance, information, power, reality, stairs

 

 

 

                                              always
                information rises up the stairs,
                      twirling

                                              as it
                remains the same success
                      ively

                                              re-
                defined through perpetual storey
                      until it

                                              dis-
                appears amid highly-trained shift of glance
                      at the

                      top table

 

seen amid the rising wallpaper of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” (2011); Directed: Tomas Alfredson; starring: Gary Oldman, Benedict Cumberbatch, Colin Firth, Toby Jones, Mark Strong

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

change wormhole: finding my own true nature – Plumstead, Woolwich, 190915
power wormhole: teached / in the ass
reality wormhole: four-colour pulp into cinematic di[gital]pix[el][live ac]tion so easily makes for semantic palava (if you read what I mean) … the foredreading of Dr Strange
stairs wormhole: twisted / pulled / and chipped

 

four-colour pulp into cinematic di[gital]pix[el][live ac]tion so easily makes for semantic palava (if you read what I mean) … the foredreading of Dr Strange

Tags

Batman, comics, David Lynch, Dr Strange, film, Gene Colan, genre, occult, reality, Steve Ditko, Steve Englehart, translation, transliteration, world

Hello everyone.   Batman is a special character for me (because I cannot be certain if I am not Batman), and, I didn’t particularly like the recent Nolan trilogy of films!!!   They had the elements of the character all there but made him way too blatent in delivery.   It just all read wrong.

The translation of character and story from one genre to another takes SO MUCH more than just transliteration!   Everything that grew and worked and contextualised in four-colour panel, everything that filled that form and then manipulated it to reach beyond itself to become transformative [art], everything that emerged during the 1960s (and there is a whole, American history that nurtures the bloom of Marvel and DC during this decade and the next); all this needs to be deconstructed and re-realised to make it anything more than a literal, phonetic transliteration which doesn’t enable anyone in any way to speak a different language … anyway, I digress,

I hear that another seminal character of mine is being put to film – Dr Strange.   I once put a pitch about filming Dr Strange to the Longbox Graveyard but he laughed me back into the box (if you make the link you can read his ripost – I like the guy, but he has dollar signs as pupils).   I still like the pitch, however:

Dr Strange operates in worlds which are ‘mystical’ in the sense that they function within natural laws and forces which are alternate to our own – they are worlds which we just don’t get and it would be better for us that we didn’t know about them so we can continue functioning ourselves.   And yet Stephen Strange is of and from this world – he is all too human but has mastered the Mystic Arts.   He therefore lives between the two worlds – the physical/political and the occult worlds – or rather he lives amid at the same time.   He is ‘strange’ because he bridges these two worlds, and this is the central pull of the character for me.

In comics the ‘occult’ world was depicted fantastically (the floating-island footsteps of Ditko, the swirls of Colan) because it was a visual medium meant for younger audiences (growing up); but the occult world doesn’t so much ‘look’ strange (like a childishly re-arranged physical world), in fact it isn’t even a different world it is the same world ‘seen’ (and ‘heard’ and ‘felt’ and acted in) differently.   What was equally attractive about Dr Strange (and under-used in the comics) was the depiction of the character in ordinary, recognisable surroundings but knowing he was actually operating in a world out of the space-time continuum.   I would conceive that Strange’s ‘battles’ took place while he was strolling through a park, while walking on the street, in the blink of an Eye (herm).

I once heard David Lynch talk about how he achieves his perspectives in his work is by ‘filming through the eye of a duck’ meaning that he doesn’t just film ‘lineally’ he films simultaneously/alternately – he shoots a scene/whole films which physically depict one narrative but which affectively show an alternate landscape in which they play out.   What better ‘mise-en-scene’ist than David Lynch to depict the life of a character who has ‘mastered’ the arts of living bridged across two worlds-in-one?   No need of CGI, no need of costumes, not even much need of action!   I know, I know, not the ingredients for your standard summer blockbuster money-maker.   But they have been done and will continue to be done under their own momentum.   Dr Strange, as you mention, has always been a peripheral character because he is so … strange.   Perhaps this would be time to make a different take on the comics-to-film translation formula …

Anyhoo … I would like to steal some of the hype and hollywood on the project by publishing a series of poeviews on the character taken from a run of issues of Dr Strange from the mid-1970s written by Steve Englehart and drawn by Gene Colan … they’ll be falling like leaves over the next few weeks

letters to Mum III – ongoing-term // eventually

Tags

1970s, 1998, 2014, blood, cancer, childhood, death, family, giving, hospital, laugh, letter, letting go, life, living, Mum, reality, Ryokan, speech, teaching

 

 

 

Dear Mum,

                                finally
                I sit down to write –
too much draining into reserve too much exhaustion of voice controlling 30 pupils in a class; this job of constant give and demand leaves me slumped and inert, little use to anyone …

                … your illness, the hospital
                the cancer in your blood
                the ongoing-term shock

                watching you audit your life
                watching you simplify a life
                already simple, coming back
                to terms with it again and again

                now you are back in hospital
                because of a cold –
this is not something to be sorted with a little rest and a Lemsip –
                it won’t ‘be over’ at all will it but rather
                fought through better and worse
                (all the struggles of the last year
                 not in vain but in reality)

(in the 70s we saved up for the smallest things; things went wrong – we even got burgled! – (I saw you, you kept our worry to yourself) but then you ‘tut’d up a ‘this won’t do’: a good laugh all together in our house at what we had left –
                Ryokan’s moon* –

                eventually)

                love,

                Mark

 

 

*Daigu Ryokan (1758-1831): ah, the thief / left it behind – the moon / at the window

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

part of the ongoing life and page of … Mum
childhood & death & living wormhole: letters to Mum I – a walk / and talk
death & Mum wormhole: letters to mum II – family // like a grate
giving wormhole: poessay VIII: / educational behaviourism
letting go wormhole: the precision // the gentleness // and / the letting go
life wormhole: our life
reality wormhole: poessay VII: // true revolution
speech wormhole: g’morning
teaching wormhole: the Telescope

 

poessay VII: // true revolution

Tags

2010, 2013, being, breathing, doing, emotion, emptiness, living, others, poessay, reality, revolution, Sartre, sitting, talking to myself, thought

 

 

 

                                              poessay VII:

                                              true revolution
                                is in the mind
                                              it starts as Sartre said
                                when you say no but does not
                                              inevitably
                                become transitive action
                                              denying for others
                                              denying through others
                                                              that would be a violence
                                a personal experience made to shape another’s reality no

                                              the no
                                              actually
                                isn’t even a denial more an
                                              acknowledgement
                                              more a watching
                                more a not-becoming-beguiled-in-it
                                              not becoming en-guiled
                                                              by not caging reality
                                                              by not declaring reality by it
                                by not ‘avving a word’ so

                                              what is it
                                that you say no to?
                the eternal tapestry of thoughts and emotions
                                which are the froth of reality
                                but not the reality itself
                                              once it has all settled
                                                              of its own accord
                                                                                 the form is emptiness
                and all the thoughts and feelings that tessellate during sitting
                                              which are noticed – thinking –
                                              and let go – breathing –
                                                              return to the emptiness that they never left

                                              sitting
                                is practising revolution
                                              like a Moebius strip
                                              and so is
                                living
                afterwards

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

being & doing & living & talking to myself wormhole: the pocket
breathing wormhole: ‘til death do us part
emptiness wormhole: multifarious: the Dark Knight Returns (1986)
others wormhole: silent crash // … / after all
poessay wormhole: poessay VIII: / educational behaviourism
reality wormhole: I glimpse above the rooftops
sitting wormhole: the en-gentled / end of a wan / writing retreat
thought wormhole: words

 

I glimpse above the rooftops

Tags

2012, buildings, dream, grey, hill, life, looking, parent, rainbow, reality, rooftops, sleep, streets, town, train, valley, walking

 

 

 

                                   with determination to juxtapose
                                   grey formica reality with

                                   raindrop rainbow joy
                                   I went to bed and slept a dream

                                   travelling with my young family
                                   by train to a town in the north

                                   we walk uphill the high street
                                   I look down the side streets

                                   I glimpse above the rooftops
                                   something towering behind

                                   we reach the top turn left my chance
                                   to see the tower – glance – light grey brick

                                   circular base granite-like construct
                                   like a wasp’s nest atop must be

                                   several hundred feet tall attend to children
                                   making our way across the road

                                   glance back the tower is built across
                                   a whole hill the other side of a broad vale

                                   so huge it seems near it must be
                                   several thousand feet tall … I cannot look

                                   what if the granite top
                                   is living?

 

prequel to the edges of my reach

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

buildings wormhole: tag cloud poem III – the journey to BEING and back again
dream wormhole: and
grey wormhole: 220712
hills wormhole: King of the World
life wormhole: Do Nothing Usually / Take Everything Regularly / Consider It All Clearly / And Step Aside It Waltzingly
looking wormhole: the sounds the difficulty and the long long strands of liquorice
reality wormhole: 20th century
rooftops wormhole: wha’
sleep wormhole: tired
streets wormhole: practising
train wormhole: Eridge Station
walking wormhole: … walking down the street

 

20th century

Tags

2011, 20th century, 3*, creativity, democracy, economics, mercury, reality, society

 

 

 

                                                      20th century

                      from the mercury of private discovery
                      to the market of supply and purchase –
                           oh, let’s just call it ‘democracy’ –

                      is this the only route left to us now
                      in the twenty first century to reality?

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

20^th century wormhole: it was the breeze wot did it
creativity wormhole: thar she perched
economics wormhole: poessay VI: // truth
reality wormhole: here
society wormhole: you don’t talk to me

 

here

Tags

2011, 5*, awareness, being, frustration, identity, life, living, pointlessness, reality, sitting, talking to myself

 

 

 

                                pointless
                           everything is pointless
                                I can see
                           the pointlessness in everything

                                I don’t chose to
                           it just seeps through everything
                                quietly
                           makes a fool of me
                                just when I was getting a foothold

                           there is never anything
                                I can feel good about
                           there is nothing by which
                                I can define myself
                           nothing I can’t see through nothing that won’t
                                show me up

                           this is my reality: no intrinsic reality
                                to play to, to play in;
                           this is my reality

                           this is me; I should exploit it fully
                                by not hoping that here
                           is where I can find myself

                                the point is
                           that there is no point
                                to HAVE

                                the struggle
                           is in worrying that the point
                                cannot be found

                                the salvation is
                           in the relaxing with there being
                                no point

                                really
                           really and truly there is nothing to do
                                but to sit
                           still in the reality of there being
                                no point

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

awareness & life & sitting wormhole: some steps
being & pointlessness wormhole: both
identity wormhole: stop
living & talking to myself wormhole: gulp // spout // and recede
reality wormhole: the very gradual / practice of sitting