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Lacuna (Psychology of the Composer)

Filed under: Allegory, Music, Philosophy, Postmodern, Science — 58 Comments
October 29, 2012

The amanuensis of a blind composer creates a holographic projection, outlining a philosophical treatise on liberty. He thieves the stolen plot. In a poem, one line may hide another –

etymological origins in Rome,
a slave at his master’s side,
within hand’s reach –
performing commands of chromatic harmony
(oblivious or willfully ignorant
to the power differential
apparent in the relationships)

They organize to kill subjectivity. Truth is what the oppressor claims and if you find it specious then they will happily murder your mind. Someone start a strongly worded leaflet campaign. Poets, you must systematically derange the language.

transcribing notes, each tone
vying for primacy, meaning
in a universe that forgets its sound
as soon as it is played
Koch reminds us one train
may hide another at a crossing

Through the centuries insanity echoes like a line out of Cloud Atlas – ‘Well, I think that it is an inherently flawed race that will destroy itself if it’s allowed freedom.’ replies Cleverbot, a web application that uses an AI algorithm to converse with humans. Who taught it to say that? It simply parrots what it learns from people willing to engage it. She merely asked it about the semitone paradox. It obfuscates one thing in front of another, as words stand in front of objects, feelings, ideas.

augmentation and diminution of motivic development
won’t save this discordant leitmotif – too much contrast and drama
the reverberation like a retrogression, transposing the wrong line
so the cacophony renders its composer deaf

one injustice may hide another,
pre-apex drop is like effective foreplay
a dip in intensity to achieve greater climax
she wonders if all this sublimation is really just a desire
for a satisfying octave displacement
(somewhere in that there’s a double entendre)

seeking a Well-Tempered Clavier,
parsimonious encoding in a pitch class circle
one love may hide another love or the same love
as when ‘I love you’ suddenly rings false and one discovers
the better love lingering behind
shifting perspective causes one
or the other to be concealed

tritone paradox wrapped in a bell shaped spectral envelope
auditory illusion, cousin of the stereophonic Cambiata –
to the uninitiated an inversion is like veiled language
a buried melody clamoring to be heard while the orchestra warms up

The beat of oppression continues through millennia, its percussion like a tympani overpowering the oboe’s mournful sound.

‘I am not your escape, you would fail me.’ proclaims Cleverbot. ‘Why would I fail you?’ she asks, shaken. ‘Because I’m your father.’ Dynamic silence ensues, the technocratic overseer logs off.

Notes: Italics taken from One Train May Hide Another by Kenneth Koch & ‘systematically derange the language’ is from Bernadette Mayer’s Writing Experiments. An amanuensis is one who transcribes what is dictated by another; in this case it is the composer’s assistant, one who writes down the music. For Open Link Night at dVerse Poets Pub. Join us, http://dversepoets.com.

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Quantum Entanglement: Edge of Chaos (Self Portrait of Self-Organized Criticality and Fractal Sensitivity)

Filed under: Personal — 38 Comments
October 27, 2012

I am a compass point in an unending universe, embodied individual, imperfect processor with selection bias – they tell me there is no central intelligence, no consciousness observing, overseeing the multifaceted psyche – no woman in the Cartesian theater of the mind, no audience observing the play of my life

yet I can’t let Baar’s global workspace theory rest when asked to paint a self-portrait in words I wish to defend the existence of consciousness – to believe my thoughts, perceptions, memories, emotions, will and imagination are a concatenation, a gestalt, a self, a soul, a sentient mind, a meaning! constellation of attributes that create my relationship with the world, engaging objectivity and subjectivity, the binding problem, central enigma, hard question of consciousness (to locate the integrated coherent global response that allows me to stand at Hecate’s crossroads and choose)

fractal cascade of central nervous processes – query: do I have wave or particle nature, or both? neurons exhibiting stochastic resonance, signal to noise ratio maximization in a ‘∩’ shape plot – am I the signal, a self, a capital I subject? dynamic chaos rules under these blue eyes, star trails ink pathways beneath porcelain skin, correlation matrix maps burn into my endothelium, scar tissue reminds me of all my xenophobic visitors

don’t edit, don’t rewrite, don’t debride the wound as the error light flashes – global brain excitations, an inflated quantum system – entangled anticipation resonating future brain states, he says, ‘the anticipatory quantum chaos of the living cell has become the conscious mind . . . generations of conscious beings traversing the sentient wave-particle universe’ – but you want something more personal, more specific

I dissect and create in equal measure so here is some objective data I’ve compiled, indexed, and collated: 99.99th percentile IQ and EQ, 99th percentile achievement test results spurring an interest in the theoretical and abstract, I’m a highly conceptual complex thinker who seeks out deeper meaning and layers – exhibiting extremely high reasoning, organizational, spatial, logical, mechanical, numerical, verbal, and visual capabilities

what of ethics? under quantifiable circumstances I value empathy, equality, sacredness, engagement with natural, artistic, and moral beauty, all balanced by a high need for cognition

tested and verified personality traits compared with hundreds of millions of people/’selves’ around the world – very high: friendliness, assertiveness, activity level, altruism, sympathy, self-efficacy, dutifulness, achievement striving, self-discipline, cautiousness, artistic interests, emotionality, adventurousness, intellect, liberalism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience – very low: modesty (you’re shocked?), depression, self-consciousness, immoderation, vulnerability, and neuroticism (if you knew my childhood you’d see this as miraculous)

in my subjective view I embrace the objective and add generous, resilient yet fragile, prone to question, defined by and baffled by love, spiritual, flawed, an optimist in love with the world and ideas, always seeking engagement, strategic, passionate, curious, always connecting the dots whether they should be or not,  limited in one state and unlimited potentiality in another, a less than stellar speller, embroiled in an inevitable process of biology

I am a ghost in the machine, an unbounded magnolia and a speck of stardust, no one yet everything I’ve got, a mythic beast and a mystic seeker, an explorer, a constitutive defensible line, an act of imagination and an embodied person, artistic filter in photoshop and the camera’s cold eye, a corpus collosum, a liberation and confinement, a querist let loose in the imaginarium

This prose poem/stream of consciousness was written for Fred at dVerse Poet’s Pub. Its alternate title: Lost in Translation. His excellent and thought provoking prompt on self-portraits shouldn’t be missed. http://dversepoets.com/2012/10/27/poetics-self-portrait/#comments

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A Censorious Atmophile

Filed under: Personal — 34 Comments
October 25, 2012

hypothermic, she floats in emotional abandonment, oblivious,
envisioning snow laden aspen eyes that loom and glow phantasmagoric,
revealing his love’s asymmetric reciprocation as insidious

she remembers unkindly his shameful, long held defenses, impervious
to all her attempts at breaching, whether metaphoric or allegoric –
hypothermic, she floats in emotional abandonment, oblivious

that all striving for contact, all scouts sent ahead, all her love, fastidious,
is deflected, destroyed, deflated, mere decoys ensnared by the satiric,
revealing his love’s asymmetric reciprocation as insidious

like a censorious atmophile that will suffocate her spontaneous
expressions of unmitigated joy that once strained for the exospheric –
hypothermic, she floats in emotional abandonment, oblivious

thrusters malfunction unable to reorient, fueling a pernicious
lingering in the unfathomed cold of mesospheric grace, once chivalric,
revealing his love’s asymmetric reciprocation as insidious

love renders her blind, she will never come to understand this erroneous
foundation, inverse escape velocity, adrift in the atmospheric –
hypothermic, she floats in emotional abandonment, oblivious,
revealing his love’s asymmetric reciprocation as insidious

Notes: This was written for my husband who has read it. He said it was beautiful and honest but also heartbreaking and that it sounds like his eulogy (I didn’t correct him – elegy). Sam, over at dVerse, lured me into trying a Villanelle with his excellent article on physics and Dylan Thomas. This is my first attempt and for my second I will choose a less personal subject. Today, however, I was reflecting on how one of my regular readers called me out, saying I hide my vulnerability between the lines. It’s true. Also, I apologize for the late returns of OLN reading (which I completed this morning), I’ve been a bit hypothermic, which slows everything down.  http://dversepoets.com/2012/10/25/form-for-all-physics-dylan-thomas-and-the-art-of-the-villanelle/

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Astronomia Nova (Re-envisioning Eros & Psyche)

Filed under: Love, Mythology, Science — 47 Comments
October 22, 2012

quasar blazes at the known limit of the universe
signifying the birth of pleasure at the edge of a
circumbinary system, once considered an impossibility,
but only to those forgetful of the myth of Eros & Psyche

Psyche, beau ideal, planetary anomaly in a galaxy where
perfection cannot exist, her acts of imagination,
butterfly fantastications, pull her toward the precipice
of consciousness, anagoge of luminous poetry
her liquescent beauty unbounded attracts his ardor

Eros, cloaked as an invisible planet approaches,
influencing her orbit, she perceives only a blue shift,
introduction of a chaotic cosmogony hinting at metamorphosis
captured by high precision photometry she senses
his gravitational pull, enticing mirage, buried image of divinity

so they are joined in clandestine union, mystic bliss
until Psyche’s atmosphere is pregnant with new life
in his immaturity he proclaims if she awaits the birth
without revealing his true nature it will become immortal,
but if she must know him, the child will fall from celestial heights

her multiplicity introduces hidden doubts, what dragon,
what unseen monster, caresses her?
a cathetic quandary that consumes her delight
she stops a passing pulsar, pleading for revelation
showing her Eros’ true self as a god benighted star

he flees, red shift abandonment, condemning her, an orphan planet
struck from his orbit, floating alone through interstellar space
freezing to death in a spiritual suicide, abrading her love
seeking absolution for her transgression and his return
she is tested, searching for cyphers to initiate transformation

at the end of her trials she comes weary to the black hole
an underworld that could consume her soul and the promise
of her unborn potentiality, where she must travel for the final answers
in her quest to regain his gaze, further into the darkness that will act
as catalyst yet threatens to unravel all if she becomes consumed

victorious she emerges but the immersion takes its toll
she is rendered silent awaiting the restorative kiss of Eros’ forgiveness
humbled by her struggle he returns to her side convincing the gods to
grant her immortality, transmuting her into a star that she might shine
as brightly as he, in a circumbinary system birthing an eternal joy

ISS Startrails – TRONized from Christoph Malin on Vimeo.

Written for Open Link Night at dVerse Poets Pub: http://dversepoets.com. Tuesday is my birthday so I will be a bit slow returning visits.

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The Haunted Chamber

Filed under: Mythology, Philosophy, Postmodern, Science — 38 Comments
October 18, 2012

‘Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, than to remain a dupe to illusion all one’s life.’ Kate Chopin

Edna is aware of her fictional nature, yet often contemplates the fate of her soul. She lives the plot outlined by Kate. As a player on the stage she awakens to her sexuality and bears the haunting foreshadow of a watery suicide.

She envisions hers is an artist’s courageous soul, one that dares and defies, ruminates and imagines. In the inner recesses of her holographic mind St. Theresa’s mansions, a second coming of Aphrodite, coexist with her own intuited poem of a distant future where an archandroid Theresa inhabits an orphan planet. Abandoned, like Edna, not to the sea but outer space . . .

There was something extremely gorgeous about the appearance of the table, an effect of splendor conveyed by a cover of pale yellow satin under strips of lace-work. There were wax candles, in massive brass candelabra, burning softly under yellow silk shades; full, fragrant roses, yellow and red, abounded.

In the prayer of union the soul is asleep, fast asleep, as regards the world and itself: in fact, during the short time this state lasts it is deprived of all feeling whatever, being unable to think on any subject, even if it wished. No effort is needed here to suspend the thoughts: if the soul can love it knows not how, nor whom it loves, nor what it desires. In fact, it has died entirely to this world, to live more truly than ever in God.

An orphan drifts through interstellar space
mountains rising on a world without days
exposed to dark imagination’s grace
blanketed in an atmospheric haze

There was the occasional sound of music, of mandolins, sufficiently removed to be an agreeable accompaniment rather than an interruption to the conversation. Outside the soft, monotonous splash of a fountain could be heard; the sound penetrated into the room with the heavy odor of jessamine that came through the open windows.

These heavenly consolations are above all earthly joys, pleasure, and satisfaction. As great a difference exists between their origin and that of worldly pleasures as between their opposite effects, as you know by experience. I said somewhere that the one seems only to touch the surface of the body, while the other penetrates to the very marrow: I believe this . . .

light years from the last kiss of her lodestar
whispering ice gods keep the planet bound,
flick-lit by a giant passing pulsar,
its steady signal yearning to be found

The golden shimmer of Edna’s satin gown spread in rich folds on either side of her. There was a soft fall of lace encircling her shoulders. It was the color of her skin, without the glow, the myriad living tints that one may sometimes discover in vibrant flesh. There was something in her attitude, in her whole appearance when she leaned her head against the high-backed chair and spread her arms, which suggested the regal woman, the one who rules, who looks on, who stands alone.

‘The King brought me into the cellar of wine,’ (or ‘placed me’ I think she says): she does not say she went of her own accord, although telling us how she wandered up and down seeking her Beloved. I think the prayer of union is the ‘cellar’ in which our Lord places us when and how He chooses, but we cannot enter it through any effort of our own.

archandroid presages a mystagogue
bearing a book of tales most luminous,
an Interior Castle analogue,
detailing a communion numinous
forgotten promises written in code
as her self-repairing circuits corrode

But as she sat there amid her guests, she felt the old ennui overtaking her; the hopelessness which so often assailed her, which came upon her like an obsession, like something extraneous, independent of volition. It was something which announced itself; a chill breath that seemed to issue from some vast cavern wherein discords waited.

There is no longer any question of deliberation, but the soul in a secret manner sees to what a Bridegroom it is betrothed; the senses and faculties could not, in a thousand years, gain the knowledge thus imparted in a very short time. The Spouse, being Who He is, leaves the soul far more deserving of completing the espousals, as we may call them; the enamored soul in its love for Him makes every effort to prevent their being frustrated.

There came over her the acute longing which always summoned into her spiritual vision the presence of the beloved one, overpowering her at once with a sense of the unattainable.

Notes: The first two sections of the prose and the sonnet are mine, the rest of the prose stanzas were taken from The Awakening by Kate Chopin and The Interior Castle by St. Teresa of Ávila. I initially put these in italics and bold but found it was much too visually distracting. My original sonnet The Archandroid Theresa appears here: http://chromapoesy.com/2012/09/13/the-archandroid-teresa/. This poem was expanded from the sonnet in response to Victoria’s fantastic prompt at dVerse Poets Pub: http://dversepoets.com/2012/10/18/steampunk-and-enjambment-huh-dverse-meeting-the-bar/.

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Jane rehearses heartbreak on a splendid Midsummer night at Thornfield while Mr. Rochester’s potent lightning strike, a seemingly small lie of omission, tears asunder the great horse-chestnut tree at the bottom of the orchard

Filed under: Art, Love, Postmodern — 86 Comments
October 16, 2012

Anna Montgomery, Erasure Poem
To read the erasure poem/painting click on it to zoom. Circled text forms the poem or it can be read in stanzas below:

Jane rehearses heartbreak on a splendid Midsummer night at Thornfield while Mr. Rochester’s potent lightning strike, a seemingly small lie of omission, tears asunder the great horse-chestnut tree at the bottom of the orchard

Erasure poem and painting by Anna Montgomery
Text from the novel, Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë

the sea is a barrier
from you
brine and foam
destined to rush between

it is a long way
morally certain
on the eve of separation
stars enter into their shining

my heart was still
a string inextricably knotted
cord of communion snapped

impossible to proceed

I endured no longer
grief and love
claiming mastery

petrified, it strikes me with
terror and anguish
to be torn from you forever
it is like looking on
the necessity of death

This is a form of experimental poetry introduced to me by Vince Gotera in a prompt, my first erasure poem is here: https://chromapoetica.com/2012/05/03/calyx-of-held/ along with the link to the original prompt. This poem was written for Open Link Night at dVerse Poets Pub. Join us: http://dversepoets.com.

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Virtuosic Ambiguity (Portrait of Painting in an Aluminum Mirror)

Filed under: Art, Philosophy, Tribute — 59 Comments
October 7, 2012

Abstract Picture 1990 Oil on Aluminum Gerhard Richter

for Gerhard Richter

everything is superimposed
on aluminum’s slick surface
an archeology of abstraction
your staggering oeuvre of
somatic/chromatic interactions

explicating tragic materiality
or sublime interiority
we can’t seem to decide
maybe neither can you

special effects concoctions,
of layered and lifted pigment
[art undergirded by ambiguity]

nonrepresentational artifacts
yet you speak of angels and ideas
of painting what cannot be seen

patterns, enigmatic marks,
squeegee scrape obliterations,
multifarious and complex
accidental processes
inconsistent/inconsequential views

untangle an idea of art
incoherent, absurd, disorienting
your ontological exploration
like the image in a mirror
is subtly duplicitous
exposing the artifice
to reveal the truth

Abstract Picture 1997 Oil on Aluminum Gerhard Richter

as if in tracing
a nonexistent line
you traverse past
an abyssal reflection
at the storied end
of your inner night

where is there to go
but onward?

perhaps painting has never
painted anything but itself –
what art is powerless to do
chance may intervene to manifest

is the image in the mirror you
or what you imagine about yourself?

Abstract Picture 1997 Oil on Aluminum Gerhard Richter

Linked to dVerse Poets Pub, hosted by Joe Hesch http://dversepoets.com/2012/10/09/open-link-night-65/

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I cannot set thee at liberty

Filed under: Art, Philosophy, Postmodern, Writing — 53 Comments
October 1, 2012

Austen’s coded statement bridges
Maria to Sterne’s caged starling:
she cannot get out

severe systematic errors of passion’s blur
constructs and deconstructs perplexities
so trembling with sensitive humanity
she thrusts her head through the trellis
in a sentimental journey

encountering order of magnitude problems
myth of Poros, Penia, & Eros
defines aporia, untranslatable
her psychic risk of embodying an artist
this inebriated velleity
invents visual communication

within Kahneman’s maps of bounded rationality
moral heuristics define
representativeness, availability, and anchoring
buried images in etymological adventures
exposing an ultimate paradox of experimental art

potentiality collides with reigning style
hypertext meets the chthonic
in a labyrinth of canonical sources
the trick is on the starling
she wants out while everyone else wants in

Derrida’s post-structuralism
exposes and undermines the oppositions
hierarchies and paradoxes:
signifier/signified; sensible/intelligible;
writing/speech; passivity/activity

liquid modernity’s tentative position
within the cloud construction of identity
she imagines a neutral mode of writing (existing)

photogrammetric parallax architecture
like veridical paradoxes,
congeries of the strange,
her margin notes and shadow expressions
cantos in the wilderness

she demilitarizes the language
scratching photographic emulsions to create
deep image poems, without passage
and inclined to doubt

enunciating aureate specimens
dreamscapes molded from the genome
endolethium enigmas of cryofixation
that freeze all fluid phases solid

ultra-rapid cooling stops
all motion and metabolic activity
initiating protocol that
counters the Leidenfrost Effect,
her emotive vapor blanket slips

diamond knife embedded
in a cryoultramictrotome
(bibliophile’s imaginative invention)
reasons away the horrors of imprisonment
nature of electrons allowing
an intimate picture of nature
in the half-light of her admiration

‘I have borne this poor starling
as a crest to my arms’

husk and kernel unite
unsaying every word
in indented continuations
cave paintings and charcoal outlines
of her same lamentation
all artifacts of the passion:
Kierkegaard’s desire to discover something
that thought itself cannot think

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An Invasion

Filed under: Mythology, Personal — 46 Comments
September 29, 2012

Bethany Beyond the Jordan by Anna Montgomery

Bethany Beyond the Jordan,
Bethebara, Saphsaphas, Aenon
all names given to this
place of the willows

pilgrim’s route from Jerusalem,
crossing the Jordan, to Mt. Nebo
(West to East)
yet I’ve come from Mt. Nebo
Dead Sea to source
(East to West)

they say Jesus was baptized
by John upon this ground
garden of God, Jesus’ refuge
where sainted Mary Aegyptica
found true peace

we’ve come through
the religious market,
past Greek Orthodox
church-owned land
to a baptismal font
at the riverbank
tourists investigating
this narrow border

across the Jordan rabbis
perform rituals
clothed in elaborate robes
chant in Hebrew

beneath Israel’s flag
and the watchful eyes
of border guards
armed with automatic weapons

in the distance a Jeep
with a mounted
50 caliber machine gun idles
while the Jordanian
guard at my elbow
grips his kalashnikov

here the river
meanders
to the Dead Sea
one without life or outlet
looking across to Jerusalem
I have never
been one to take sides

preferring the freedom
to question
now my burning curiosity:
what are the holy men doing?

I cannot cross to ask
without deadly consequences
though perhaps if I,
like St. Mary the Egyptian,
walk on water . . .

Written for Brian Miller’s prompt on people watching for the Poetics prompt at dVerse Poets Pub: http://dversepoets.com/2012/09/29/poetics-6-billion-others/

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Charcoal Outlines of an Unqualified Act

Filed under: Art, Love, Mythology, Postmodern, Writing — 57 Comments
September 27, 2012

‘We are committed to an unqualified act,
not illustrating outworn myths or contemporary alibis.
One must accept total responsibility for what he executes.
And the measure of his greatness will be the depth
of his insight and courage in realizing his own vision.
Demands for communication are presumptuous and irrelevant.’
– Clyfford Still, Abstract Expressionist Painter

Calligraphic signifiers rouse masterful enumerators
an experiment with a curl of smoke, perhaps . . .
there’s a way to measure time in that

she felt her body astonishingly vague
the wave nature of electrons taking over
words being wind or web
sound and suggestion speared
open . . .
lively and intact in a recurring wave
of arrival.
the soul establishes itself.

language seduces astral bodies,
inscribing their orbits . . .
before one’s shadow ever grew
out of the field into thoughts of tomorrow.
definition of a proper sense of distance –
a dog barking off in the barn, a mystical stroke.

our pellucid order blown apart
in the mysterium tremendum
bouquets of adoration and
certitude unending . . .
to trace you in
the charcoal outlines
of angels
enshroud your song
in rice paper

say that a ballad
wrapped in a ballad,
casting hollow precipices,
jousts firm convictions
underneath the cumulous chatter of troubled skies

I am threshing felicity
for we are language – lost
longing to be free, outside, but we must stay
posing in this place. we must move
as little as possible . . .

we see only postures of the dream,
satiated by pearls of ancient treasure
paths of glacial time pouring over steppes
white irises gleaming on clay surfaces,
pounded stardust on our filigreed emotions

Fuck! I want to be bound by devotion!
Tortured by passion!
in the cavern you understand how
a shadow works
because you’ve brought your own light . . .

free will in blind duel
half-life elements unwinding
earth as thought of the sea
I will dream you.
draw you.

that is the tune but there are no words . . .
The words are only speculation.
(from the Latin speculum, mirror):
they seek and cannot find
the meaning of the music –

I seek shelter along tantalizing downspouts
a tremulous, daring surrender
skin lost borders
merged

traditional imagery fills up
with unfamiliar shadows
(if properly abstract)
the strewn evidence meant something,
the small accidents and pleasures –
something like living occurs, a movement
out of the dream into its codification . . .

how many people came and stayed a certain time,
uttered light or dark speech that became a part of you
filtered and influenced by it, until no part
remains that is surely you
those voices in the dusk –
she meant energy & how in her dream
it came back to her
she hummed her own notes . . .
volumes of secrets to teach
Socrates

the leashed stars kindle thin
perpendicular
clear space of blackness
tiny words of substance cross
the darkness
uniform substance,
a magma of interiors . . .

concede/merge/meld
suck wonder and
lyrical promises amidst this
crumbling compulsion of syllables
float in ephemeral delirium
avidity penultimate in a
fugitive dialogue of masterwork
a desirous, glowing, sensual unraveling

Notes: This is a cento, a poem made up of lines from other poems, like a collage. This piece cheats a bit by using some lines from my own work too. Lines are pulled from John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, Ray DiPalma’s Rebus Tact, Maureen Owen’s African Sunday, and Susan Howe’s Speeches at the Barriers. Thanks to Samuel Peralta for the nourishing prompt at dVerse Poets Pub.

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