Walking East Manifesto

Walking East Manifesto

Questions
1. Platelets of fat sticking plaque to our brains?
2. Thoughts robbed of oxygen and turning dim?
3. Black clouds cover your mind because of chromium poisoning of your brain stem?
4. Brain damage hurt your feelings?
5. Was love denied because of your stupidity?
6. Victim of lead poisoning, mercury rising and the detioration of nerve sheaths because of industrial pollution of cars and autos?
7. Did you drink wine with sulfides and presume in auto accidents?
8. Acidic aftertaste from lead, carbon monoxide, attempt suicide?
9. Multiple bad experiences slamming your finger or someone else’s (perhaps a small child) repeatedly in car doors?
10. This is what we’re talking about. Cars running our minds down in the streets.
11. Did you wake up on your head upside down sliding down the freeway at a fast rate of speed?
12. Does the person on your Driver’s License look like a ghost?
13. Is your car eating your brain with its heavy metal deterior pollution?
14. Cholesterol buildup of plaque deposits restricting interior life?
15. Thinking, gone totally wrong, fundamentally lower from bad insights?
16. Bad diet in cars, driving around town, junk food scattering litter?
17. And KCRW smelling like something is burning becuz of National Petroleum Radio diddling everybody’s ass-mind with jive?
18. Was, what about crushed coccyx and fracking polluted groundwater spreading underneath the continental shelf, under Taft, Bakersfield and Wyoming?
19. Your car turn you into someone you don’t even like? Happened?
20. Was it your car’s fault, you are no damn good? Cannot walk right?
21. What about your joint pain, stick legs and weak heart, too?
22. Drunken sex spurts of unhelpful alcoholic thinking, making you morose and sadness?
23. Cuz of your car and living in automotive nation by exhaust fumes lining sinuses of waxen school children, which you were once?
24. Tiny grains of robotic concepts petulant crudescences of oily skin?
25. Custard of discarded petroleum toxic waste for you? Oil of dinosaurs and ancient plants crushed by eons and burnt to greasy fumes in nostrils and lungs?
26. Nightmare civilization of insect shell vehicles parked along the roads to your doom? Somebody’s doom?
27. Neverending disaster of oil pouring into Golfo de Mexico and Alaska National Wildlife Refuge and blackened dreamscapes every time?
28. Lying bastards standing whispering crap in your ear at the pump radio, $4.01 per gallon numbers clicking over while 700,000 Iraqis and 50,000 Afghanis turn into fertilizer?
29. They kill a million people then gas is still $3.85 per gallon?
30. Smog sticks to your eyes, when dirty palm fronds of the day falls off for no reason?
31. Because you are not feeling good, by cars, for no reason?
32. No pills for vehicular manslaughter that can remove the visor from flapping like visual skin?
33. Once you felt freedom with cars but now it’s just freeways, avenues and expressways in a vast mess all over a Noise World? Of Maximum Minimum Universe?
34. Rush hour, even makes your teeth ache, the bottom drops out for one Korean man was struck in the face and killed on rush hour just by falling debris from overpass construction?
35. LAPD motorcycle officer Clarence W. Dean flew to death off a motorcycle on the collapsed freeway exchange from the Northridge Earthquake which you cannot even feel because you are always driving somewhere in your vehicle?
36. One day you might be driving to your Death, or you might have heart attack in the Cardiopulmonary Aorta Vortex of the San Bernardino 10 Freeway of 17 lanes?
37. Arteriosclerosis from driving alone with self-deluded thinking at all times catches up to you by movement!
38. Really screwing up your ideology, like a pizza delivery boy who has to run for his life every time from shots and bullets! (Cannot stand it!) (Or not!)
39. Were you seen weeping in your car, wiping at your face because of radio reports of War from of industry bankruptcy because government policy sickness?
40. Cuz of X-ray palm trees destroying you, destroying your love, in bungalows of hatred feeling the sun burning your arm?
41. Tore up, by beer cars and aluminum dirt, with all fees and licensing and insurance and taxation and lies and bitterness and fake reasons they just want your cash? To rotate your tires or some shit?
42. So many cars were also seen weeping inside you it was a traffic jam, replaced your insides with a bunch of machines zooming, had a shiny painted steel shell, inside your skin ideas or body movements?
43. Bucket seats, body found discarded in the vehicle, but it’s in great shape, still lots of miles left on the tread, new carburetor, feel that new car smell, radio?
44. Correct valve of S. Alameda Street tire nipple, galvanized male female coupling by East First Street, East 4th Street tear duct alternator, S. Central grimy destruction of your own humanity?
45. Participation of all of us as passengers or spoilers, drivers or corruptors? Car commercials playing in our minds 24 hours day or night?
46. War for oil bankrupting everyone’s souls over and over, like leaving the microwave on forever, your meat turns to infinite desiccation? Because of automotive lifestyle, your nostalgia keeps whining? Cuz you probably sucked on cars and door locks when you were a baby.
47. War of cars making everyone stupider, stupeder, crushing somebody’s hearts like motorcyclists fallen under the wheels of an 18 wheeler? Over interstates past dead towns?
48. Theocracy of cars hating your own daddy longlegs walking across your eyelids of a horizon of summers of civilization, arriving at outskirts of fucktardsville?
49. Combination of wars, cars, dog legs removed from dogs and stuck in place of your own limbs for you to use instead? Hollywood movie of you doing that?
50. A machine that goes in the direction it is pointed—somehow this became your main source of identification?
51. Romance of Vasquez rocks and 4th street bridge TV commercials inform our colon or prostate cancer, as we always have to hurry off—somewhere to go?
52. Drive thru life?
53. Insideous destruction of mental habit toes, inability to control fat genes’ implacable consumption of fried food items at all hours, like torture. No health or end to hunger for the road?
54. Retro world view always have to be inside machines.
55. Pop music will always be playing like in a coffin.
56. World slides by on the other side of glass like it’s all a movie?
57. Greasy fingers from fiddling switches?
58. Anxiety has to go faster and shoot?
59. Speedometer said 100 when the teenagers left the roadway?
60. Miles or klicks? Wrong way on a one way street?
61. Zooming? Point A to Point B?
62. Lost control of her car and rolled over, pulled herself from wreckage injured, then struck and killed by oncoming vehicles?
these people were killed in 1975: 44,525
1976: 45,523
1977: 47,878
1978: 50,331
1979: 51,093
1980: 51,091
1981: 49,301
1982: 43,945
1983: 42,589
1984: 44,257
1985: 43,825
1986: 46,087
1987: 46,390
1988: 47,087
1989: 45,582
1990: 44,599
1991: 41,508
1992: 39,250
1993: 40,150
1994: 40,716
1995: 41,817
1996: 42,065
1997: 42,013
1998: 41,501
1999: 41,717
2000: 41,945
2001: 42,196
2002: 43,005
2003: 42,643
2004: 42,836
2005: 43,443
2006: 42,642
2007: 41,059
2008: 37,261
2009: 33,808
2010: 32,708
63. That’s so many people.
64. 1,847,183 women, children, old people, men, couples, infants, dog lovers, cops, sailors, teenage girls, doctors, waitresses, whole towns of football players, whole regiments of soccer stars, kinesiologists and sales clerks, suburbs and whole blocks of musicians and nose pickers and iron workers, bad drivers asleep at the wheel, or excellent drivers having a seizure, truck drivers and candy stripers and flimflam artists—extirpators, disseminators, syndicalists, foodies, agitators, movers, twerps, bowlers, dimbulbs, actors out on loan/ dogs without a bone, rebels, true believers, Indians, Pakistanis, mumblers, eyeballers, slackers, geniuses, Poets of the Universe, pilgrims, travelers, white, black, brown.
Millions have greased the machine with their blood. I have put my hand on that handle.
I knew some of ‘em but I didn’t know most of ‘em, neighbor girl crushed underneath car on Hauck Street above City Terrace or motorcycle guys lying on Beverly in the middle of the night bodies steaming, or the guy who lay on his back on the San Bernadino freeway past State Street staring up spattered with blood? Our tireless dullness is manufactured from their travails and we think we can escape by driving?
65. This machine is around us at all times?

IF YOU ANSWERED YES TO ANY QUESTION THIS MANIFESTO IS FOR YOU.

Answers

1. Walk.
2. Resist the machine by walking away.
3. Corrode the internal machine by desisting.
4. Uncollaborate from cyber-mandibles buried in your cortex by the automotive complex by breathing fresh air, go.
5. Like a Mexicano, go.
6. Foot steps on the earth, go.
7. Realize it, the dream of walking.
8. Levitate five feet over the silent world as it goes by in slow motion like a dream, go.
9. Flow levitated by mental alertness to the world which changes from blue to white to blue again via oxygenation (lungs, heart, brain), go.
10. In spite of 99 cents only, free lap dance, AK-47, Orange Crush, Green Crack, Afghani Kush, friendly atmosphere handicap accessible safe discreet reliable, Homeland Security Start Your New Career, Grand Opening Specials, be seen by a California board certified doctor, Buy 2, get the 3rd for $1, revenge is beautiful, a raucous comedy, the perfect sit-back and enjoy the ride kind of movie, electrifying, innovative, stunning and amazing, outrageous! very funny! achingly romantic! romantic, funny and heartbreaking! *****! Laser toenail fungus treatment, psychic readings, love spells, do you experience upsetting or unwanted thoughts? Do you engage in repetitive rituals that are difficult to resist? Bipolar? Ladies… would you like to earn up to $2000 per week? Vintage, $19, $75, menudo, barbacoa, pare de sufrir, air conditioning inside, 110, Fair Oaks, Orange Grove, Via Marisol, Ave 60, yes, we’re open, 50% off, lowest price guaranteed! Brooding horror that gets under your skin. Check our twitter feed @
11. Theoretically you could ride a bicycle.
12. Like a lovelorn wanker, go.
13. Like a perturbed individual, go.
14. Like a common tree frog, go.
15. Like a disappearing act, go.
16. Like a wind in the trees, go.
17. Like a spirit through the dry goods shelves, go.
18. Like a weekend horde thru the thrift store, go.
19. Like a rioter thru the plateglass, go.
20. Like a one year old, go.
21. Like a two year old, go.
22. Like the leaves dancing in the street, go.
23. WALKING    EXCITES     EVERYTHING

WALKS reveal everything. WALKS extend all views to the horizon.

BUT . . . . . . . . .

HAVE YOUR LEGS EVER SPOKEN TO YOU:
1. about anticlines
2. about gravity and rain
3. about pumps and flats
4. about the airport
5. about sardines
6. about Fresno
7. about illusion (you exaggerate amigo)
8. about gentleness
9. about pet stores
10. what a horror
11. about incipience
12. about sunglasses
13. about gentrification
14. about sex with abandoned cars
15. about phenomena (it’s nice)
16. about Arizona
17. about the past
18. about odors
19. about labor
20. about unions, about unions, about unions
21. about the eight-hour day
22. about the oolitic limestone

        ALWAYS        ALWAYS       ALWAYS

YOUR LEFT FOOT doesn’t speak. YOUR RIGHT FOOT has no fixed idea. THE NEXT FOOT STEP doesn’t catch flies.

THE DELUSION OF SPEED IS OVERTURNED.   BY WHOM?

                       BY WALKING

The Futurist is dead. Of What? Of WALKING

A soldier becomes a poet or farmer. Because of What? WALKING
The solar fire licks your skin. Who invented it? WALKING
Someone walks on your feet. It’s YOU
If you have terrific secretions and excretions,
If you make seismic discoveries
and if all of a sudden your head begins to crackle with laughter,
If you find all your ideas electric and mechanical, know that

         WALKING IS BEGINNING TO SPEAK TO YOU

the internet constructs a private college of mental Super Glue
WHAT DOES WALKING DO?
microwave cell phones poison virtual sardines
WHAT DOES WALKING DO?
e-books are still at the first whiff of death
WHAT DOES WALKING DO?
Youtube wants you to swallow a fame-pill-elevator
WHAT DOES WALKING DO?
Visual culture embraces allism and fishes with an artistic wipe
WHAT DOES WALKING DO?
neo-catharsis discovers the good deeds of wannabe imAgination
WHAT DOES WALKING DO?
paroxysm makes a corporation of all artistic cheeses
WHAT DOES WALKING DO?
Speed recommends the mixture of these seven impulses
WHAT DOES WALKING DO?
spiritualism fascism aestheticism also propose more ideological recipes
WHAT DOES WALKING DO?
WHAT DOES WALKING DO?
$50 reward to the person who finds the best
way to explain WALKING to us

Walking passes everything through a new angle.
Walking is the sourness which opens its vista on that terrain which has been made consecrated forgotten in our language in our brain in our habits.
It says to you: Body is Humanity and the lovely manias which have made it happy to this civilized age

WALKING HAS ALWAYS EXISTED
THE STARFISH WAS ALREADY WALKING ON THE BOTTOM

WALKING IS NEVER NOTHING

Hey, comrades, ladies, gentlemen, boys & girls,

                        Beware of municipal ordinances and regulations which take away your freedom to walk! Limiters of Walking as a Movement want to present Walking as requiring technical laws which it has never had

PEDESTRIANS,

Cars are presented today in the form of subsidized corn syrup sweetness, a vulgar and conformist spirit which is not the FRESH AIR claimed by WALKING

BUT DOGMATISM AND PRETENTIOUS IMBECILITY

Alhambra January 12, 1921

Signed, Jane Applebee, Don Newton, Vibiana Andrade, Sergio, Swirling Alhambra, Ray Palafox, Jose Lopez-Feliu, Antonio Villaruidoso, S. Foster, Colapso Colonizado Co., ELADATL, Ericka Llanera

24. Free your smoky mind from Mental Internal Combustion.
25. Breathe out mental carbon monoxide exhaust particles and fumes.
26. Resist addiction to speed and instantaneous “Distracto-Snap” motion.
27. Peel 55 MPH like a cellophane wrapper off your world-o-rama.
28. Rise up five feet above the 110 freeway rush hour crash course.
29. Rise up five feet over the Arroyo Seco Parkway rainy day collide-o-scope smash derby.
30. Float horizontally along Whittier or some ELA boulevard with eyelids pulled down like train shades.
31. Float through the car crash world dreaming sunrise with eyes wide open.
32. Float through the emergency vehicle siren version with some clearer thinking about weird apocalypse that keeps falling.
33. Float through traffic jam hell on Golden State with rusty orange last light of afternoon illuminating its the strangeness from one side.
34. Brew powerful tea made of ocean water and Mormon tea or Indian tea on the granitic boulders of San Gabriel mountains on a smoky fire of the very early morning peeling your eyelids.
35. Dig your bare heels into the ground and the stairs to nowhere in order to stop the cancerous development and increase love past boundaries of the animate body and its sensitive forearms.
36. Don’t kill yourself because civilization’s engines injected these thoughts inside your membranes, these ideas inside your ideologies, these particulates into your lungs, these vibrations under your skin.
37. Don’t kill yourself driving 90 MPH to beat everybody.
38. Don’t crash my face into the sun visor some Florida guy doing 65 in downtown rush hour traffic in little red sportster, I was picking pieces of the mirror out of my face and broken nose.
39. Get up from the car crash and walk away, walk away.
40. Pick pieces of mirror out of your face and cast them aside.
41. Wipe your fingers on your pants, hold your shirt to your face and live.
42. Pick pieces of the sunset out of your face and cast them aside.
43. Check out your new look and act alive.
44. Pick debris of motorists out of your caffeine drink and slow down.
45. Stop for the bicyclist and let him or her pass on, and LIVE.
46. Stop for the pinche pedestrian and let her or him pass on, and LIVE.
47. Stop for the paleta man, for the school kid and the homeless cart pusher, let her or him pass on, and LIVE. Live clean now dirty bastards.
48. LIVE.
49. Don’t run the stop sign like a god damned half-wit, endangering yourself and oncoming traffic and me especially.
50. Don’t get crazed on engines, speed and industrial fumes and shoot motorists on the avenues.
51. Stop being afraid of perspirations and a slave to machines.
52. Stop being afraid of perspirations and a slave to machines. WALK/ (red hand)
53. Remember Detroit abandoned by bankrupt industries.
54. The machines of death want to carry you to Death. Go another way.
55. The machines of Death bare oiled with WD-40, elbow grease and lubricant of Iraq. Stop spending your life on a ticket.
56. The Machines of Death require insurance, license, fees, taxes, grid, infrastructure, maintenance, coins for the meter, and they treat you like a ghost. Instead, live in your skin.
57. Don’t be a ghost in the machine; feel your nerves raw in open air.
58. Get off. You’re not a passenger on a death train. Okay, what if you are?
59. Skate —if you can. They can show you how. It’s a form of levitation.
60. Wake the sleeper by speaking in a normal tone of voice.

Wake Up Test

* Close your eyes, check all which apply in dreams.
___ 1. Star artichoke, broad expanse opening.
___ 2. American war, let’s go old vacation.
___ 3. Wild radio of wire tumbleweeds, bow.
___ 4. Gold fish standing up for millions of Californias.
___ 5. Matte black intellectual grinding teeth.
___ 6. Collagist typewriter man + bicyclist womanish.
___ 7. Blatant white typewriter paper tens, nines.
___ 8. Bloody windshield evening beer ducks.
___ 9. Double, $5000 credit card I lunch with Thomas.
___ 10. Sigh rock cardboard forehead portable coughing.

*Open your eyes, check all who appear in the light.
___ 1. Miraculous viable tremendous shore-like mighty excellence.
___ 2. Poultry, highlighting the choice which is about to be made.
___ 3. Treetops of candles which are going to stand for days ahead.
___ 4. Colliding with grease, windows close and doors shut or open.
___ 5. Something pointy, I should have written down this sentence.
___ 6. Mike Willard told me he rode his bike 57 miles aluminum-listening.
___ 7. Progress to Detroit which rises in the manufacture of forgetting.
___ 8. Miraculous coats or jackets that felt dense to a body moment.
___ 9. Mock-style important-stamp over-radio lick-note spoil-if green-grip.
___ 10. Chop. Glowing.

* Look closely, check all that appear in lines beyond the figures.
___ 1. Mamayev Hill and Wounded Knee and the Cone of Disappearance and poemgranates and poem peaches and poem beetles.
___ 2. Thousands of dreams turning silver into hills and sweet breath cream, mild ointment.
___ 3. Logging wine bottles, dropping some on the other side of the Cone of Disappearance.
___ 4. Nagging dreams keep turning and sleeping, while Calif. resumes foggy coastline at sunrise.
___ 5. How much was how much, 30 millions’ sexual life determined overall mountainous folds of the night.
___ 6. Shadows, cracks or scratches caused upon my lenses, while nothing less than the glittering surface.
___ 7. Magdalen stairsteps where she swept off to sunlight, plausibly she is the Tree of Life.
___ 8. Widely poem bitch roiling poem pits whining poem tips tumbly poem pocks mostly.
___ 9. Fabric of darkness bright with the past. Folds whip along item survey lines.
___ 10. While I sorted the white socks, I did the dark laundry, remember.

Time Studies #75

I could be riding in a truck, but the narrative was familiar, constructed of big sheets of weathered plywood, encrusted with cement, something with girls, black fabric of night, the street corner in daylight

Usually I felt that I might retreat into my mind, but I soon realized most anyone could see in there what I was thinking, it was like an abandoned motel

The succulent cacti swelled with information, the purplish ravine coursed over the rocks, pungent sage and mountain laurel with red berries were full of small birds. It was breezy and confusing to some of us.

Her joy was so amazine it seemed to represent generations of women, both inside and outside of her family. Many wanted to feel a part of it. It marked a generation of people who passed on her street.

Some secret in the blood as if it were words, engineering, direction---something static, objective like that. Present in her voice.

Somehow we get the message that we are too late. Of course, we must go anyway, even if we are the last to know. We must go.

She invited me to go to her wedding in Vegas. I felt she might understand why I would not go. But I hoped that she'd be too busy, too happy, to even think about me.

And a thin film is brushed over the surface, as if by a deliberate hand, like water from the stream across smooth granite, like a sugar glaze across pastry dough, like history across sweetness of past seasons.

Time Studies #74

time to get up so get up
time to get up so jump up
time to get up and eat the coffee
time to get up and throw on some red cars and bills
time to get up and throw the Western states over East
time to get up and go an extra rice civilization and corn
time to get up and fill the water bottles and put on your backpack
time to get up and miles and books of forest rivers and rock hills rattlers
time to get up and ply the numbers of great wooden birds walking overhead with ticks
time to get up and meet our political isolation at the point of logistical gravity blushes

Time Studies #73

Three faces peer in at you, perhaps they're three aspects of one personality---or three cohorts oscillating through the middle distance of your cognizance

I picked up buns, salsa, sliced pickles, eggs, iced tea, carrots, mushrooms---chopped zucchini, carrots into ground turkey and fried the patties, sauteed the mushrooms, sliced tomato, red onion, with feta, dijon mustard, two kinds of salsa

The notes followed one another---one note closing upon another, following upon intervals, which---however long or short, moments or days---plinked frustration and overfamiliarity

Before the guests arrived, I fueled the vehicle, checked the oil, purchased power steering fluid ($3.99) to top off the reservoir---as the steering column had been protesting that the level was low---and cleaned off the seat

One thought that you thought to afix in memory, clarified by weariness to some fragile expediency, attenuated by darkness or whatever came next

I read Viktor Shkovsky's Third Factory and Bharati Mukherjee's The Middleman and Other Stories (which reminded me of New Yorker stories), several poetry books by Michael Burkard, reread Noelle Kocot's Sunny Wednesday, and was reading Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room

The vantage point is in mid-air, and there is a sea wind blowing, which means that you have stepped over the edge and are falling a great distance, or you are simply standing at the edge, or maybe you are aboard ship, passing through the clouds

I put in many, many hours---totaling hundreds of hours overtime, extra, taking care of the needs of others, and Sunday (my one day off in weeks) I woke to the message that my father had died, that day I worked building fence

All that was interior to me seemed strange and ossified and brittle and empty, and all the world seemed green and purple and murky and sweet and empty, so I knew I must not be seeing it for what it was, or thinking right

But there was nothing unfamiliar about waking in the night and knowing it was not yet time, nor the hour of winter darkness when the alarm went off, and it was time

Time Studies #72

Insistent narrative insists in telling this story, but you're not really interested in it, you're not really into it, though it's your story "and everything"---you're thinking about something else

I went between the houses and collected a full canvas bag of tangerines---they are oranges that are mostly tangerine---George the English bull terrier watched at me once in awhile through the fence (black patch over one eye)

Desultory, sitting in the passenger seat of the American sedan, in those days it didn't matter how far you had to go because gas was so cheap, everything is cheap---looking through the dirty windshield of the past at the bleary city in the glare of afternoon

I did what I said I would do, I did more than was expected, after everyone had long since given up paying any attention---what was I still doing getting the work done, attending to all the loose ends and details no one would bother to remember

You have to go by what you thought, even if you find out later causes you anguish or doubt or horror---you could not have known what the future held, what time would remove

wrote rec letters for Joseph Shannon, Bri Bruce and Brian Merrill, curious that the permanent tenured faculty were not more forthcoming at working with these undergrads (applying to grad programs or post-grad jobs), whether this was a complete sentence someone pronounced

The conversation proceeded above and slightly to the left (like seagulls flying above and keeping pace with a boat we were on---though we were on shore) while I said nothing, smiling and thinking to myself that one of the women who was speaking understood any random little remarks I might make

The manzanita I bought her at the Calif. native plant nursery outside Moss Landing seems to be dead from lack of water, but I unspooled the hose and watered it and the plants along the driveway anyway

The habitual manipulation of metaphysical planes and objects, trades places with figures who walk in and out of the room, even if the room becomes an intersection of a street and an avenue and the light rail line where you wait in a vehicle or pass on the train

I bought a small plastic spray bottle and filled with equal parts isopropyl alcohol and water, and wrote on it, "Warning: Do Not Drink--- Isopropyl alcohol" with that absurd nausea that I sometimes get from such deliberate precautions

Pathways and stairways led to streets and corridors, and turns and eventualities led to changes and other circumstances, time passing by, surely nothing could be done about that? You found yourself at a certain place.

Time Studies #71

there's junk, mine, my daughters', a dog cage, clothes, and stuff I am cleaning off the weight bench and piling against the wall

black line of trees is equivalent to my line of sight, which may be shifted, if I can figure out how to shift it from this vantage

I put on disk three of "Bill Evans: The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961," always pleased at Scott LaFaro's bass runs (he died ten days later, at age 25, fell asleep at the wheel and hit a tree on highway 20 outside Flint, NY)

the ground seems to shudder---as if I'm standing on the shoulder of a gigantic beast---as if the earth inhales a deep ragged breath, and leaves and dirt and debris blow up in a cloud about me

Paul handed off the phone to his Vietnamese roommate, Anthony, who asked me if I would edit his sister's application statement for a grad program at Santa Clara college

the visual world has a mental projection interior to the face; for example, if the column of air fills with a column of blood, the unwanted obstacle will dissolve

I wrote down the questions in my notebook; I went from one person to another till I got the answers---I didn't care about the answers, none of them were my questions

certainly it feels true, that I am a kind of radio transmitter controlling dispersed objects far-flung in the outside world, as if my thoughts will affect the distant crows, make them fly off above the telephone lines

Romo-Santillano returned from the weekend in San Francisco, and we sat down on his beige couch with his laptop to review text notes and material we had worked up for the performance that afternoon

Okay, you touched it, it's yours, it has your DNA on it now, it's part of you and will never be removed

flour, Bisquick, eggs, sausage, bacon, soy milk, orange juice---I picked up sausages at S & S Butcher Shop and bacon from the Chico Farmer's Market (it was a gray morning)

I sense that the mechanisms of things change, mutation and alteration occur as we go, so that even as we walk forward internal to our movements there are sticks, black pieces of wood which tilt back and forth with each stride, indicating the angles of momentum---repeated, as if pedagogically

Time Studies #70

I was in the vicinity of white buildings, or I approached vast cloudbanks in the sky

The rocker arm dangled broken, so I walked to have a Polish sausage and a lemonade while the mechanic repaired it

Some of the people knew me, and some did not, but I was evading the glance of one in particular

The wind had ripped off part of our roof, so I waited for the roofer to arrive, so he could go up on the roof for an estimate

I had the sense that when you merge into the thicket, that space deepens all about you---that space opens to infinity

The sewage line backed up so Erik the plumber (from where? Durango?) snaked out the line down the hill

I passed through stages and rooms, keeping people I knew between me and people I did not so that I could proceed unseen

I unpacked all the outstanding boxes of books and more or less shelved them, and rearranged the office so that guests could sleep there

Somehow I could not see, I was blind except for a small periphery about my own body

I transported tools and lumber, sunk fence posts and re-attached a gate the day that dad died

I went on in search of portals of entry to the next stage, the next larger room or plaza

Finally I had time to sit and think, so I took the clipper from the drawer and cut my toenails

Sometimes I felt I was the space, and that people passed through in their indifference and their urgency

Very early, I went and got my hair cut to start the day fresh

Had time and its illnesses been transcended, passing into lives in the past?

I washed a great big pile of dishes, thinking about what should be done about his death (or the life that had passed)

Sometimes I wanted to abruptly alter the narrative that we all went on living

I walked through Home Depot trying to figure out what I needed, and got out of there with whatever it was

You could feel it like a static charge in the air before a lightning strike, and I sniffed the air for ozone

I walked to the coffeeshop and back, trying to clear my thoughts

In a basket, or in a book somewhere, or in conversation with a guest I had not yet met, were the secrets and the information

“The Tiger’s Coat” (1920) starring Tina Modotti

At age 24, Tina Modotti plays a “native servant, a low-born Mexican peon” and suffers discrimination before finding happiness with Anglos in 1920 Southern Calif.

http://www.4shared.com/video/Cl0Pz5Lj/The_Tigers_Coat__1920_.html

The 3-Fold Marginalization of the Writer or Artist

i return to the point about marginalization because it’s important to me as a writer, it dovetails with literary aesthetics and cultural politics.

i think we’re marginalized on a number of levels and probably seek compensation any number of ways; as ‘minorities’ we’re denied hegemony and the political mainstream and the complacency and privilege that comes with it. hence iowa writing program is full of children of the affluent: one black woman told me her dad was a NYC headhunter for corporate execs & he called the president of u. of iowa and said “let my daughter into the program,” so they did—but she quit a year later, complaining that the instructors were racist, etc. (she told me this so i believed it.)

we’re marginalized as children of the working class, feeling the financial insecurity l. describes (which is covalent and hides the social and political insecurity that comes from extreme marginalization). the sense of privilege which endows the children of the rich with the empowerment to become artists (as so many are) comes from knowing that there’s a cushion to land on if art/writing/etc. doesn’t work out. case in point, adam hochschild.

and we’re marginalized as artists/writers, etc.: which itself is some compensation for marginalization (in that art attempts to operate on social levels beyond the quotidian and the practical—and in some way counter the marginalization), and that is one of the specific reasons for pro-capitalist marginalization of art—it is a kind of cultural interference in economic affairs. to prioritize the immediate financial job demands long-term over one’s own artistic activity (whether one does this for millions of dollars or for a regular salary) is to internalize capitalist marginalization of the artist. part of the significance and purpose and vocation of the artist is to assert aesthetic, ideological, and political independence in the face of the market.

yeah, i think these questions bear upon the artist/writer and determine the parameters of their production.

the union of a couple where one or both are artists/writers i think both lessens these 3 kinds of political isolation, and at the same time (like any union) feels these political marginalizations as stresses on some emotional or psychological or physical level.

most writing/art bears the imprint of these conditions in its face (teju cole’s lonesome traveler, etc.)

—from an email, 1-6-12

Ship overhead---photo by Ronaldo Oliveira