Night Sky III, The

1 Peace

on earth, useful will towards all. Surprised to find peace lurking within penance, along with the enclosing, confining compose and its liberating twin, mightier than the sword, my favorite, a dark

2 virid

one, lost now. It was sent to me from Paris by the agency of a French poet. Now I have the option of telling you a drawn out anecdote about how it came to pass that this one sent me a beautiful Waterford virid pen. I could then also sum up you how I lost it (not at the movies). You know in what manner it is: you find yourself divulging or relating something, an incident, to a one or persons, you have their attention, they appear to be listening, and you pop pause and ask yourself, "is this at all interesting to anyone on the other hand me?"

"`But when I imagine something, something certainly happens!' Well, something happens-and then I make a noise. What for? Presumably in order to compute what happens-But how is telling done? When are we said to sum up anything?-What is the language-game of telling?"1

penance/pen/peace/pen

The undeniable privilege of an devoid of contents space proffered, even if it exists purely to give support to adjacent sales pitches, which are not in the margins leave out by visual convention.

The true copy penned in.

The as however unforeclosed.

The "open" invitation, the blank before it becomes a blanket. (The bank before it becomes a banquet.)

The tablet erased of residue, the mind's field without inhibition, not a protecting enclosure in sight. But watch where you pace or you might set not on an event:

"hitting and killing the driver"

"in faith of maintaining calm"

"one ship's company member was killed"

"weather conditions were good"

"assigned to the carrier Enterprise"

"engineers investigating five cases of . "

"if an airbag should expand"

"if there was a defect"

"the Dow Jone is up more than . ."

"and the skies are sunny"

You have a faculty of perception that the mindscreen is violent, an obstruction, a violent obstruction. Not for a like reason much filter as hindrance, letting too little end Mallarme claimed to have seen to have been, Nothingness. This absence he vowed to make into neighborhood an Absolute stripped of its Figuration. Michel Leiris (in an essay upon painter Joan Miro) writes, "Today it certainly appears that before writing, painting, sculpting, or composing anything worthwhile, individual has to have accustomed oneself to an exercise analogous to that performed by the agency of certain Tibetan ascetics for the design of acquiring what they call, more or les (I say `more or less' because the language of the West, which at hands everything in a dramatic form, must actual probably turn out to be inadequate), the understanding of emptiness."2

O the stories I could number if only this were another hundred and we were writing to each other above distances to tell ourselves this or that anecdote, this or that notion, not notwithstanding polished into certitude. Just exchanging hunches; nothing like testimony or level so much as intention's attention, just a murmuring up from the other side-a butterfly flits from flower to flower, anointing each with its secrets

(The cursor beating [i]or[/i] throbbing of an arterys pumped by an artificial heart.)

In the morning, I stare. If I do not stare, the day is a rattled cage.

"With a glance I shall gather up the virginal absence scattered [i]or[/i] part of to the other this solitude and steal away with it; just as, in memory of a special site, we pick single of those magical, still unopened waterlilies which on a sudden spring up there and encircle in their deep white, a nameless nothingness made of entire reveries, of happiness never to be-made of my breathing, now, as it stops for fear that she may present to view herself. Steal silently away, rowing bit by means of bit, so that the illusion may not be shattered by dint of the stroke of oars, nor the plashing of the visible foam, unwinding behind me as I hasten away reach the feet of any chance walker upon the bank, nor bring with it the transparent resemblance of the theft I made of the flower of my mind."3

There are times, this being single late-November, everything, from air to hair, turning gray, when a one wants to withdraw into a steady-state of reception, to become as incapable of speech and supple as a spyglass scanning the night sky for blazing stars Time darkens and opens simultaneously as if it were a large inhaling maw whose throat is a funnel into which all the tidings of life spill incessantly. In this way or mood, writing seems antithetical, an out-going against the enormous incoming tide. Murmur murmur, concerns falling away, tears of the saints staining a chipped chalice The night's dream pulled away upon morning's pale scarf. Lifting the voice up above vacancy, wondering at the disembodied eaves. The cud the smoldering detritus. I bought a fresh television yesterday. I lugged it domicile a great heavy box, black thing within, ugly and inert. one time turned on, an upheaval of sight and sound-cars, in the way that many cars, and bright smiling women and individuals talking about stories in Genesis, about Jacob wrestling with the Angel, and these stories underwritten. capital upon fund. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Outside of the frame, a silence. Inside the frame, the culture's churning organs.