The Writer’s Desk

Art is Dirty

The lens is a gun.

Art makes you a victim.

Move along, nothing to see here.

Nobody should ever be allowed to do this.

Because you can is not a reason.

Think it over, and you’re lost.

We invented art criticism because you can never really be too sure about art.

Most art is guilty of impersonating something else.

Art is the kind of person who writes bad checks and gets away with it.

Art is the kind of person you wish you were if you had the courage to live naked all the time.

Art is the kind of person you wouldn’t bring home to meet your mother.

Art is what happens when you’re trying to do something else and didn’t.

Art is never art until someone else says it is.

You can’t make art when you’re dead but when you’re dead your art can make you rich.

Everyone should get the chance to live with art.

If you can’t afford art you can make it yourself.

Most art is bad but no one has actually seen good art.

Most art is worse than you think but most people don’t know what to think.

Art is intended for mature audiences.

Art can make you blind.

If you swallow art it won’t show up on the x-ray.

If you get paid for art you can live on it otherwise art is a lumpy mattress.

Don’t think too much about art or you’ll get a headache.

Art is flammable.

Art is dirty.

Art is a pain in the ass.

But my art is love.

The body lovers and the etiquette of the mirror

Man seeks to divest himself of recollections. A ghost or vagrant he has no sand in his shoes, no gravity in his lungs. To make the world more closely conform with his own divinity he descends into himself becoming a temple where each of its parts correspond to the parts of a female serpent's body. Weird, but boys will be boys, an imperfection that devours function. Boys spit in the ocean just to see the water rise.

The poet asks the muse to sing of love. Pretending to be innocent and not concerned with mortal love she ignores the question and bends to pick up apples. A white unicorn appears, lifted down from the stone pedestals and rules over a totally hedonistic domain. A pretty sight, too, positioned upon the painted phallus a likeness of a hero, staring into an empty bird cage. Trees have branches below and roots above, around the staff where the sheltering serpent twines. Having conquered the world of shadows man now lives east of Eden, perhaps in Poughkeepsie or Burbank, where into his arm he shoots the reality principle.

Any observed facts about space are completely eliminated. In the various attempts to solve the problem of events, whether of substances determined teleologically and qualitatively or whether to encompass the models in a finite number of observations, the truth of the matter itself is a subject to doubt. There are means of which events are explained and I am hardly the man to deal with it. The painter himself may not enter the painting.

The body lovers and the etiquette of the mirror. A narcissistic exercise. Every movement is naturally infused with memory. Their eyes can never meet, not in flesh, not in glass. The implications of the open legs, tightly bound in leather pants are rendered invulnerable. The poses are exaggerations of the ignominity of existence. Physically resonating surfaces are anonymous, upon which the interior is realized. The underpants momentarily cling to a toe, then fall wingless to the floor.

We dissolve in the annihilating shape, a subject for itself

The original relation to consider is neither interaction nor causality. This, and the other, abstraction that separates what is united, is not the apprehension of quality but undifferentiation of the inner and absolute equilibrium. A certain power of deliberate action, the mind proceeds by bewildering inventions. We dissolve in the annihilating shape, a subject for itself.

The artist disintegrates while he lives. An imaginative engagement with the subject and eccentric syntax without limits placed on the inventiveness of rules of proof. The artist is a person, not a catalyst or set of technical abilities and has overcome his own tenderness. His inward soul has an appetite toward disintegration and death, a sort of pleasure in depravity and self-destruction. The penman and the painter are apt to clash, no doubt a question of equilibrium. No final cure for the difficulty, still a page covered with meaningless marks of such a formalized statement does not assert anything, it is simply an abstract design possessing a determinate structure.

Moments of being.

The pain of seeing within.

Words are abstractions and fictions of self.

It is not inside skin but outside skin.

Logic is necessary when looking for logic.

Vision is necessary when looking for vision.

A right combination of image and tune. Outbursts of noise and motion. This is not just a matter of spiritual dandy-ism, but also of existential commitment to an underlying spontaneity. For all its waste of energy, in its very formlessness, it is the shape of chaos which one must have within oneself, if one is to give birth to a dancing star.

Persistence of thought, the tapestry that weaves itself. Whenever I am asked the question: When was the last time you completely stopped thinking? I imagine that M. C. Escher picture of the hand drawing a hand drawing a hand drawing a hand. I escape the cycle when I realize: There is no hand.

The abstract conception of the thing is sufficient for the most part to consider the object real

Idea eternal, law of nature in form, time, space. Essential forms and all its knowledge, not abstract. The chain of circumstances that brought these objects beyond the limits of actual personal existence. Nature has endeavored to make, yet could not make because of conflict. Pursuing awkward enough through glances, topographical notes, we do not linger. It only seeks to know its own way. The abstract conception of the thing is sufficient for the most part to consider the object real.

One primary is modified by just a tint of the other. Canvas made of linen or cotton but preferably of the former prepared with a proper priming is used. One part Damar varnish, one part of rectified turpentine and one part of refined linseed oil. Yellow and blue give green; blue and red, purple; and red and yellow, orange.

The theory of color is based on a ray of light broken into its component parts by the prism. The resulting color band, called the spectrum, shows the colors merging by imperceptible gradation into the other. The presence therefore of light is the presence of color; the absence of all light, the absence of all color.

Technically, you need separate keys for each room, although you must experience the relevance of a certain state of mind

As we can see here we are dealing with a plenitude which determines itself. There is negation, to the extent of being beyond-being and connected with the appearance of a sensible form. There is a logic to the essential sensory objects. A particular event linking actual physical actors. Give special attention to the capacity words have for saying something for themselves. Technically, you need separate keys for each room, although you must experience the relevance of a certain state of mind.

I stared at the ceiling, there was no room

I'm carving my initials into blocks of ice. They form the corners of my room. Intent on the grinding of the spirit to be fodder for a wild beast. A desperate homage not directed toward me, I am not worthy of it. A sudden reddish glow infused the white radiance reflected thereon, no possible blur between them. The beautiful glorification of the loathsome evil will come highly-priced, though in time I believe a true angelic motive overcomes any degradation. The neon tubes resumed their original appearance. I stared at the ceiling, there was no room.

Poem, Mixed Media

This is a poem
That lives on the paper
Not much else to do
For a poem

The work demands all my energy, every second of my waking concentration to watch over my charge, to ensure the quiet passing of each day in the desire

The back of a nun's hand. Impossible twisted limbs in sheets. The physical and emotional aspects of personal identity that transcend the commonplace. Grappling with the strange destiny that this life has wrought. Faultless, distinct, the voluptuous veer to the edge. An involution of desolation by necessity. The work demands all my energy, every second of my waking concentration to watch over my charge, to ensure the quiet passing of each day in the desire.

An aborted story as objects of narrative consumption. The characters disgorged from the main story by the obsessive re-framing. A minimal narrative, they are shown as leftovers in an open-ended event which seek closure, a sense of ending. Their sensibilities have so developed, or degenerated in concert, that they engage in competitions to outdo one another in the indulgence of utter abjectness. The final event in the displacement process, the nightmare of nightmares, is an epic struggle of forces rather than persons.

Fantasized myself as an animal, a pet, then a worm and a subhuman. I evolve to impersonating furniture, or to becoming invisible. It is held that a piece of bone, flesh, or even the scrap of the shroud of a saint possesses all the qualities of blessedness and make manifest upon a relic a focus of power. It is a form of necrophilia, a love and attraction for what is dead, decayed or disappearing.

By virtue of semantic substitution this writing succeeds in bringing together two very dissimilar conditions: real and real. The human subject is in constant tension between the imaginary and the symbolic. The process of decomposition and repetition remove the characters from their events within this fictional universe. They find themselves stuck within the spatial boundaries, unable to conclude that their actions only occur within the confines of the paper surface.

The Bop of Be

Drugstore zen mechanic no lunch

alibaba poet

Acrobat of bebop

William Carlos Williams shuffle all night

impossible music

impossible guitar, in

Love and torn sheets of

sacred spoken carma Zarathustra,

Miracle bongo baby Jack,

Jack Zen,

Jack 'n the Barbar-ians

Jack o’love, Jack o’truth, Jack o'mercy, Jack o'lunch,

Jack apotheosis in your hair,

Jack in a sandbox all the way from Long Beach in

jazzed up Carma Bum Cadillac, living

The poetry of impossible music, impossible
Ice-cream sutra,

S. A., Scott and Rafael F. J. singing

Hey Now logic, singing

indestructible lotus

Singing all we have is love,

love is all we have

The dance of miracle bongo, bebop

got Yeah, Yeah, Yeah,

got Baby, Baby, Baby,

got poems in jazzed up

Carma Bum Cadillac, living

the impossible ice-cream sutra of

macaroni and cheese of Rock and Roller, dancing

to the sacred Hey Now beat of outlaw logic,

the be of bop, the bop of be,

the beat in beat and the all in all; and the

love is all we have.

This is the world not so much we know but the world that still remains to be known

A canvas of complex painting can be made blank again by adding just a single stroke. The poem is changed by adding a single word. I no longer have poetry but conceptions of a language of theater. I no longer have painting but visualize the action inside-sight. This is the world not so much we know but the world that still remains to be known.

Everything became quiet and calm once again. Study closely the experiment in cutting up the prosaic into a poem. Give special attention to the capacity words have for saying something for themselves. I have written the painting and painted the poem and found that my preoccupations have taken me in somewhat the same direction I was already going.

Birth-being and destruction-non-being examined from the central point of view of beautiful verses. Knowledge of the true nature of things. The voidness of one's being has to be established in the light of theory and literary meaning. On this last function the mind is liberated.

How you should always make a practice of working with fine gold and with good colors. The poetic coherence, being either verbal or pictorial, is interior the image. To express the true function of thought, liberty of mind, and oneself, we anticipate the form as a possible experience. We create infinitely shifting reality, an object in itself.

A child cutting the slender threads of life. The paradisaic sphere taking upon itself the sorrows of birth. We are walking up and down the steps of space where God is a blinding light. Having passed through the metallic gates and standing at the base of the pyramid, the soul departs.

Poem for Nettie Rose

Nettie Rose

You wanted a poem

I no longer write poems

For girls

I am a man without philosophy

I live in empty rooms

Poem-less

Time ain't enough reason

Rhyme ain't enough reason

To write poems

(To be sung out loud, like an old Country tune):

Net-tie Rose, Net-tie Rose

Here's a po-em, Net-tie Rose

(You wanted a poem?

I will sing you a poem)

Words like a Rimbaud

Voice just like Merle's

Because I no longer write poems

For girls

The eye must forever be untamed

Immediately a monkey came and sat in my mind. An inexplicable amalgam of humorous pleasures casting doubt upon the stability of the real. Verbal images. A philosophy of the absurd to which the man still being raised by animals does not believe he has language. I have driven you out of my dreams, there is no longer any place here except for me. The eye must forever be untamed.

How from the wall you may enter upon. Your life should be arranged just as if you were a shadow, and notice where its dark’s and half-tone and high-lights come. On the character of a red called Dragon's blood with obvious translations, any observations become withered, teeth black. Given some degree of ambivalence this is easily recognized. Even such a limitation still leaves us with a very striking case of simultaneity of discovery. This will have to be enough discussion of the matter because of all this I shall keep silent.

Altogether adequate in the expression of complex sensibility. We first sink to the bottom but soon rise to the surface. There is a particular poignancy in abandoning the hiding place, the dead end of imagination and paradox of the poet's curse. Fascinating in its antithetic eloquence we realize that one has to know a phenomenon before one can try to account for it.

All these layers and elements only camouflage a reality and remains indecipherable. Invented language and the fascination with the process. Combination of necessity and mechanism. The process by which the entire objective universe is caused to issue forth from the first monadic dot. Birth, death, decay, the circle and the line. The trinity of the dot. The physical world sinks away into space. Consciousness has merged with reality.

Black in back, black in front. Eternal law life is dream, revealing in this form eyes both open. Alone by virtue can understand the true nature of virtue. The present inquiry in the abstract is by no means demanded, clear to whoever has attained all phenomena.

There is nowhere that you cannot go

To become fully saturated in the spirit of matter. The pointing of the finger to one's own native nakedness. Stuff and nonsense, ofscurum per obscurius, this is where thought is useless, what knowledge cannot fathom. Neither chicken nor egg, neither cause nor effect, there is nowhere that you cannot go. Coal is not black.

I have the key to my chamber right here in my pocket. This coming together depends on the going apart. Aware of her nudity, my gaze moves over her chubby pouting breasts, her tummy and her plumply smooth legs, then fasten on the thatched apex between them. But do you agree with me that dreams are no longer a dusty figure of rhetorics, but a palpable, tactile substance?

In the heart's mouth. This second language could well be a first language. Words are circumcised, speaking of the heart. The relation to meaning or thing was suspended, traversed by a multiplicity of meanings. But beyond these meanings, it acquires the value of a river, a stream, or a number. The language may concelebrate the poetic, time's anniversary of singular events, spread out like stars en route from a place toward something open.

The perennial urge to beat disciplinary bounds and fence the subject. The conditions of meaningful utterance, of conceptual grammar, is what passes for current history on its own territorial claims. The idea that things exist just as they are is quite apart from our ways of perceiving or knowing them.

Empty-handed I go, and behold

the spade is in my hands;

I walk on foot, and yet

on the back of an ox I am riding.

When I pass over the bridge, Lo,

the water floweth not, but

the bridge doth flow.

It is a crisis of what is and what is not

Related to the whole of nature and in this way coming closer to the organism that possesses life. Like a piece of flesh, the word presents itself: the birds, the dancers, the homonym and the synonym, the vowel and the diphthong, are a skeletal less structure impossible to diagram.

It is a crisis of what is and what is not, the true and the false, a crisis, equally, of rhetoric and hidden philosophy. A philosophy of meaning, of the word, of the name. The production and annihilation of the thing by means of the name has liberated its energy.

The distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments. Figure, impenetrability, extension. One has only to extract from it and look around the field to go beyond the concept. It is not necessary to conclude of a body in general with predicate weight. Nevertheless, a concept indicating an object of experience through one of its parts. I Simply assert this in the most direct way since there is nothing to take hold of as only the spirit is to be grasped.

Let the points of light illustrate certain aspects of objects. Ordinary life without a stage. Complete darkness or possibly a small lamp. The point of attention is outside form and movement. Idea is open, which is essential, and the moment itself is not concrete. Life itself is used to create artistic results.

To avoid all misapprehension it is necessary to explain what my view is regarding the fundamental constitution of sensible knowledge. Objects in space and time and space and time themselves. Before today man did not exist.

The possibilities of experience where man creates himself through language is an inscription written inside the outside. Eternal justice draws itself. Knowledge and vision is sufficient. Vindicated by fictions out of a life full of suffering. Requiter appearing bound to that particular with innumerable others. Beggar becomes king.

Freedom is impossible. Avoid choosing

Not only movement and quiescence but enlightenment and illusion. If we suppose that all things are illusions, that everything is meaningless in the ordinary sense of the word, we are misunderstanding the doctrine that all is mind. Without inner activity, proper quality and function, freedom is impossible. Avoid choosing.

If you love something you never get tired of it. How to think about generating sound. That certain problem in music might be solved by viewing sound as a complex dynamical system. Pure light shining through the colored glass of the archetypes. Monkey DNA. Weird and naked. Electronic instruments are really voice extenders in terms of how we do music.

Nothing is important. How important can it be that I think? I am nevertheless aware of my total significance. I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. There are moments when I feel responsible for all the suffering in history. What is the meaning of all this? Why raise questions, throw lights, or see shadows. I have never cried, because my tears would turn to rivers of thought.

The word's inner space. What can be said of it? What exactly is this interiority of the exterior, this extension within us? Almost a being, illuminating itself while the world extends itself. Already beyond, we have perceived its reflection, and see itself in everything. The work is mind, never finished, never real, ever transformed.

The fragmentary, what comes to us from it. Question, demand. The two seeming to pronounce themselves together, outside one another. A possibility of life, outside of everything. Useless and endless, they study a completely different logic. (Repetition, limits, return.)

There is a perpetual double movement by strange compulsion. Dismantling distinctions, grounding dialectical reason. Where opposites merge in a constant undecidable exchange of attributes. The opposite of writing.

This is where man must go, if he is to swing

Man rejects permanence, order and continuity. Instantaneous moment vortex sensation colliding. Hip is a way of life. To set out on uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self. Boredom is security, and therefore sickness. The enormous present which is without past or future, memory or planned intention. This is where man must go, if he is to swing.

What a strange, contradictory undertaking is this effort to act where immeasurable passivity reigns:

The sight of the bed, of the rumpled sheets,

the night clothes carefully spread out.

I am always coming into this world

out of that obscure life in that obscure room.

I believe that a new type of engagement is demanded of the writer and artist nowadays. Thus we have arrived at pure appearance and have arrived at full being. In particular there is no point in replying that in fact subjectivity implies objectivity and that it constitutes itself in constituting the objective. Being is everywhere.

Empty, lucid, self-illuminated.

The lotus blooms in the midst of the fire.

Seeking the mind with the mind,

is this not the greatest of all mistakes?

The truth has no distinctions. Perfect like great space, the way has nothing lacking, nothing in excess.

This presence to being can only be realized on the level of possibility

Principle with vague reflections and integrationist solutions. Setting and factor, scale and multiplicity are symbolic relations to the fundamental. The body of intuition with its absolute interiority is experience without evidence. This presence to being can only be realized on the level of possibility:

Idea-experience;

sleeplessness;

contemplation.

Yet, something outside it. The immediate objectivity I know and confirm by degrees:

Surprised by what follows,

whatever it is,

it runs away from me.

Temporal dimensions of self-itself, before and after. Being overlaps in the original future, modified present moving bodies. Future is revealed fully constituted, now with content and absolute design. There must already be a world and after, apparition.

The distinction you can invent your own. The cult of form in raw dynamism. An unknown vitality with the moral intensity needed to restore primitive energy. Native and sentimental. Swinging always toward more and more freedom, the form seems to have been dictated by emotional tensions.

Manufactured landscapes from an unknown territory. The illusion of time. We have not gone anywhere but nevertheless have traveled very far. Gaps, repetition, the only reference we have that can tell us what speed life here is moving is the view outside the window. Our boat of millions of years pushes us out in all directions, simultaneously.

I, right now, see nothing

I, right now, see nothing. The canvas is totally blank and very, very white. Yesterday is a canvas heavy with paint: intricate lines, intersections thick with events. Tomorrow looks exactly like it—but today, right now, it is all white.

The image may look different than what I imagined. Beauty comes from the discovery. The light will either burn or illuminate. When I see it clearly, I recognize the face in the mirror—with perhaps a nose that is just a little crooked and lips that may be a bit too thin.

Chaos threatens to implode the structure and almost succeeds. Gaseous, glowing, drifting apart without coalescence. The field becomes charged with magnetic forces, static and fluid. Nothing here is related. Textures emerge out of joint which bend away from each other to compound the problem.

If we desire to give a logical title to the paralogism contained in the dialectical syllogisms of the rational doctrine of the mind, we shall call it substantiality. This is of pure intellectual concept and of no use whatsoever.

The object of inner experience, namely the permanence of object as empirical absolute is treating our thoughts as things. This being which thinks in us is under the impression that it knows itself.

Poem written in Paint

This is art
It lives on the canvas
There are words
Scribbled in the paint
The words say something

This is a mystery
But we know what it is

Painting, that degenerate and somewhat superfluous expression of discursive thought, is a painter painting the naked image of the thing

The sign is understood according to the structure and movement of reason. The spirit is elevated above nature. Internal freedom transcends thought. The written sign transcends its material and language is manifest, presenting intercourse of graphic inscription. Painting, that degenerate and somewhat superfluous expression of discursive thought, is a painter painting the naked image of the thing.

The rim of the unknown. Space time something nothing. The method is civilized, the treatment literate. But I am humbled with stresses of craftsmanship, the spotless light of perfection. The fable of colors. Only the worthless, gleaming homage of mind and this intoxicating air filled life. The scentless multitude of flowers staring into mathematics. Alone.

Writhing and squirming into a vast host, I am the naked flame conceived in a test tube. Each ability is a serious stupidity. There are no words in the limited language in which I write to encompass them, using a distant ABC, writing an invisible type. The seclusion of mirage, petrified iron scribblings, unbearable, motionless. The friction of stars. I imaged I saw shadows moving, it is good and I am awakened.

Poem, Mixed Media no. 2

There is no poem here
Words are on the paper
But no one can see them

Paper Poem from a song I sang to a girl I met who lived in a nice house at Sunset Beach and had an antique pump organ in her room

Dreams, delusions, flowers of air
With words, or no words we arouse
the deepest truths in our common minds
All action is history, here is there
According to our accidental coming and going

I never feel sorry for loving you this much

I never say I'm sorry for loving you so much

Reflection-Reflecting, A Poem in Oil on Canvas

The word, it burns me

Died, in my hands

Remain to me always,

beautiful scar

I have stolen your blood and gambled it away

Winning only this song:

Behold the oceans of tireless lust

Walk upon the firmament with saturated gray wandering

Sit you down in grisly meadows

Despair, I slide inside the wound of it forever

Loving, like oceans, the tedious investigations

Once upon a wave

& so it curls

The Atomic Café

Attack of the 50 foot poem

Radioactivity must be to blame

The dictionary is glowing and words

are too hot to handle

The Atomic Café doesn't serve your kind

You don't speak the nova cosmo jingle

But I got my universal translator

right here in my pocket

The mutant poem is served with ketchup

and mustard at the Atomic Café

Open all night

The Atomic Café is just around the

corner in the bad part of town

where the best words hang out

Under the neon sign

with a couple burned out letters

You go in and feel welcome

Sit down and

write something

Close your eyes

I close my eyes and see the smoke heading for the flame

Feeling the same we both cry together

The sky is weeping at our loneliness

The earth melts and falls away

Tell me what you see?

I see smoke heading for the flame

Tell me how you see?

I can't tell if it's smoke or if it's me

I hold you erected but you are dying in my hands

You wore wings but you thought you couldn't fly

Tell me you are not afraid

Tell me to fear no man

We are born of woman and a tear

Tell me what you see?

I see smoke heading for the flame

Tell me we can be or that we cannot be

We are truth but dissolve in error

The cold will keep your love warm

Your love The cold Your love

The cold Your love The cold

I have died more times than love

My love And time My love

And time My love And time

I will come again just as young

For love I die For love

I die For love I die

Naked Jazz and A Half

If it's cool it swings. Wait for it. Lay back and take your time. There it is. In the pocket. The space between the notes. Use the emptiness as if it were a substance. The best notes are not necessarily the ones you hear. Simple is always better (but simple is not necessarily easy).

You may be wrong but it is always right.

Rock My Everything

Just turn it up until it sounds good. Stand close to the amplifier so that when you hit a chord your pant legs flap a bit. There's a sweet spot where the guitar and the speakers disappear and music begins. You are not playing music you are making music.

That guitar riff you're doing, if it sounds good then it is good. Good music will sound familar because all music was written in infinity by the Universe and you are only just now remembering. You should play it like you wrote it and that will make it your own. If it doesn't sound good, it's not yours. You're Rockin' now, you own this. Now, give it away.

Rock 'n' Roll is about Youth because the young are willing to believe.

It is when you doubt that you become old.

Stay Young. Rock Hard.

The Music was wearing lingerie and came in through an open window while I was dancing in the bath

Lingerie. Remember lingerie? The Music was singing itself. The Music was improvisational: instantaneous live no edits. The night was alive. It would develop the sound into meaningful poetry. The rhythm gave itself a spine and it walked up and down the world with someplace to go.

The microphone, the drum machine, the tape-delay were determining themselves and completing the score before anyone knew its name. Electric guitars sounded like electricity moving through wires. There was a motor somewhere, and it went around and around, turning the sound into a new dance.

The Song you wrote will

teach you how to play it.

You will hear it clearly when

you are willing to obey its voice.

Obscured instances, minute particulars

A still, glowing epiphany worthy of the Italian masters, this flawless miniature presents a stained-glass window portraying a bath-time Madonna. There is a tiny hint of gallant frustration expressed through the charming rococo gesture; tension joyously released into a voluptuous depth. The fierce paradise is held tight, leaping from its dynamic-static rhythm and the emerging horizon, while patient emotion is evoked hyperbolic-ally within all space as One Great Kiss. What shall we say to this? Elements echo our experience, the golden gleam in the night, and we are reflected in the room. Whether or not the final moment is achieved, the image returns to us as sharpened light.

Facts are seen side by side. The difficulty is not being able to hide in the light. Language seems to prohibit association with the unpleasant truth that human affairs are entirely inexcusable. Inevitably, fumbling coherency is readily mistakable for workings of self-conscious Providence. This is one of those convenient, question-begging aphorisms without a Nickname. Naked without a word. We are only casually acquainted with its presentation, having a satisfactory outcome with its mildly reluctant slender line. Finally, clarity hopes at correcting any bulky proof of dispelling the Black Emptiness with a generous and lucky aftermath. Still, a handsome letter of introduction addressed to royalty that has been as liberally paved with gold as the road to it.

An opportunity presents itself. Obscured instances, minute particulars. A pabulum of minds, deliberately conspired to defeat the ends of justice and to act as an accessory before the fact. An integral part of the affair, an explanation is no more than an effort to minimize the scheme. Other than a satisfaction out of curiosity, you may ask yourselves if that would not have been the conduct of a mentally unbalanced child rather than that of an intelligent man. There is nothing here to be afraid of. The objects purge themselves of usefulness and perceptions are looking more and more familiar. A delicate question demanding immediate action is pointing us to the top floor. Far from being superfluous we are getting used to this sort of thing.

You can see the way from here

The Great Symphony. Shall we try to finish this one? Risky, always risky. There are not enough lines and dots in the universe to challenge our triumphant arrangement of self. I am the Invisible Man, without a form, without a function, without a future to hang my bones on. There is a tiny hole, can you see it? where we poke through from the other side, looking for a neck to hang our head. You can see The Way from here, walking around inside this space. We are not really lost, we just no longer have faces and cannot get here from there. Are we Visionary? We are so far out we are in. Okay. Let's begin.

At once we come to terms with its economy of direction. It will ask whether we prefer our corpses shot or bludgeoned. The difficulty is navigation, with stylistic revision and thematic correction. A bitter-sweet drama. Everything is questioned but there is no compass. What we have is the absence of the thing it is trying to be but is not. Untitled, although a significant clue, is a title I cannot determine. It remains unsympathetically American and cannot be translated. "Are you" is understood; "Yes" not so much, but we are sure we are of the people we are supposed to be. A Self-Portrait? Perhaps, but we will always look better after a bottle of Scotch.

Forward is the new. We are drawn to its sweetness, the inviolable method in the handling of its material, between defect and genius. Since no one paints if he doesn't have to, this art creates the man, from the brush up:

Between the living and the dying

and the drying of the paint,

the whole of life appears.

Repeatedly the surface is pushed back, back into the background, into memory, into a history of events where a moment will blossom then decay into a glory of resurrected vocabularies. The centuries are here, millions of them; but they are silent. They are content to breathe unspeakable hymns, building a harmony of minutia, a Symphony of powerful lost ideas.

New Color-4

The image of to-day, and not for long: Still,

a radical way to fill our fleshy pockets and while

there is nothing new or Modern about a sunset,

an Artist is a Prophet who's vision is always modern

and who's way is always New.

All signs presage a revolution and a next step toward that eternal harmony: dissonance. I have made an attempt to exhaust the possibilities of the arrangement of degrees within the color scale, and succeeded by raising and lowering the intervals by .01 percent; and, furthermore, a series of new color (New Color-4) is of peculiar interest, besides the blending of any such colors in harmony and counter-harmony. A strangely familiar euphony with this presentation may be finally pronounced and justified. But there is no apparent reason for chromatic substantiation and we are forced to be left behind or march up to its tempo. “With the eye and not the hand” and “absorbed by the absolute” is a way of choice.

A tidy little drawing. What's important is what is hidden, what we cannot see. Note the extreme reduction of plot, in which the incarnation of language takes on greater importance than any view. A battle of line, the bloody irreverent dot. The protagonist is mad, that much is clear. We must have found this conversation on the barroom floor, being swept away with the sawdust. Flawed, distasteful, crawling around on its belly beneath the tables. Disgusting view of unknowable actions. Unspeakable, this is a beauty which should have never touched human lips. Silence in the midst of shouts, a word among words, I cannot even bring myself to talk about it. The Artist will be of little help. Not knowing what it is, it derives its name from silent screams and whispering:

Whatever it is, it has a wonderful shape,

which is very important if you are invisible.

The Art you are looking for is not here

What is Art? By the end of the day, this is what you have. It gets you from here to there, and sometimes, that's enough. What I don't have is what I need, because if I had it I would no longer want it. That is why so much of what we desire we give away. Art will die in our hands because by knowing it we will kill it. The only way to handle it is from a distance. The only way to be sure is with some uncertainty. I will not speak of it because to understand it is only in the mind and it will only exist outside of space.

Painting is not narration. There is hardly a pronoun to be found anywhere. Hardly. The surface must first be rendered philosophically then transliterated back into a painterly convention before any linguistic viscosity can be achieved. The nuances are perfect. The idiom is native. I have no language but my own. Can you hear me? There is nothing to say and I'm saying it. (John Cage wasn't always right but was right always.) We see through to the invisible and nobody is home.

Why are you looking here? The Art you are looking for is not here, not here within this frame. The Art you see is always just a little bit outside the picture. Where is Art? Art is not here, but will always be somewhere over there.

Sometimes, it takes 4 or 5 hours. Sometimes, it takes 4 or 5 minutes. Sometimes, it takes four or five days. Occasionally, it never happens. What can you do? I have seen ideas that look the same many years down the road. I have looked in the mirror ten minutes later and do not recognize the man.

There is a shape that I make, that I always make, and a mark that will always appear even when I am not looking. I am always at my best when I am not trying to be something. Being nothing is best but one cannot truly be nothing as long as something exists. The shapes are persistent. The marks are everywhere. I try so hard to draw myself out of the picture that once my hand disappeared:

With a hand that is not there may not be the best way to hold a pencil but still is the best way to make Truth.

Stirring time in a teacup with a long red fingernail

I just painted something. This happens occasionally. It is meant to be continuum. I admit that painting is a poor substitute for making love but will say it is the closest I've come. The painting is pronoun. The image is commentary. The language is critic. Whether or not the painting succeeds is what matters otherwise why do it? I paint to erase myself. I do not matter. But still, the best paintings are the ones where the battle rages. Just when you thought you've seen the last of him, there he is again. You say my paintings are Art? They are not. But if you understand that they are not art, you have seen me.

The force of the Circle begins. With some success, the territory grows. This position, while being antagonistic in a psychological existence, is nonetheless being reflected in sordidness and is plainly discernible. This new “American phase” can only hope to continue, a mobile history where many have come but only a few survive. Thus disenfranchised, the image is driven to its fate by the quality of its beliefs.

A little soul for the corpse of man. Dust (since people no longer read Latin) remains thirsty even without our interpretation. A curious power mounts up in one's memory, a dull grind of an affair. With a massive head and elaborate phrasing, the lightening incision and weight of its gesture bring the final solution and reveal the vision of its character. The drawing will exist even when no one looks at it. But unless he looks, the looker will never exist.

Not a work more performance laid up by man from the moment of decision although much that is original and perishable may live on in the idea. We find no limit in space. My final conclusion concerning it is this: Every gesture is in itself the transcription of an abstract idea. The instant the brush seizes it, the idea loses its original form. The very intention to mark down the idea, compels a choice of form and space.

Why is no longer important, How is the only argument. The form and the visual energy, which the artist must decide upon, will define the way.

It's all spirals and loops, God help me

No picture is comparable to the standing on the vantage ground of truth. All is pretext unless you come with a flower in your hand. I did not want to paint. At first I did not because I had nothing to guide myself, then in the end I did because I had nothing to guide myself. It's all spirals and loops, God help me: unpredictable in direction, manifestations of noise. It happens like poetry in a restless air; never going silent, waiting for something to begin—it will not end.

I understand nothing about duration, is this day or night? I have no sense of color, is this black or white? Here in the dark, I will mix color to mark out time. I have forgotten their names; is this a body, is this canvas blank? I have no explanations to offer, and then the silence.

I shall call it Artistic Impossibility—it is the only painting I've done where nothing happens, twice. It's real name is About Beckett, but that is only for those who know him. One cannot actually know Art because what we know is that understanding Art is understanding why it cannot be understood.

I have looked at this painting for a very long time and I still don't understand it. I just painted it and I don't recognize it. I have never actually seen it because what I saw was some other painting that was somewhere else when I saw this one when I was looking here. Then, when I look away I see it again.

The painting is everywhere because every painting is actually the same painting. I painted it and it is nowhere until someone sees it. Then, off it goes, everywhere. After all, there is only one painting. We paint the same darn thing time after time. It's starting to look right, don't you think? Finally, something I can look at all my life, and never understand.

The Painting Without A Title looks back at me from beyond the surface and rears its angry head. I hang up the phone and dial another number, shoot! no one at home.

Woman in Four Dimensions

1-2-3-4, the walls have no walls.

The problem isn't our lack of wings:

to fly we just needed space.

We are witnesses to the last transformation of matter. The process is often slow, manipulating every circumstance, moving the paint around. Focus and intent with a clear purpose, and of course, the accident.

But these two kinds of interpretation, satiric and affirmative, are illuminating only to the extent that they are properly defined and not pushed beyond what is achieved on the canvas itself. Even admitting the element of clean academic fun in this, one can hardly accept it as evidence of existence.

The search for self in the protean flux of paint concludes with such partial knowledge as we are incapable of discovering the nature of the search. To grasp the significance of the sterility of solipsism, the woman image still represents something of value to us, although the Woman also recognizes the meaning for herself in an empty space.

The sharp juxtaposition of this Mystico-Symbolist nonsense with the grainy sand of jagged line begins with a maze of dark cunning circles and parodies very seriously the aesthetic attitude representing something of value (although we have no memory of forgetting) to remembering the retrospection with critical perception.

Where it began is where we end up:

The Woman is no longer here,

like emptiness she has left for a better place.

To have nothing and have it all

The paradox returns. It's the baby from beyond the cradle. The probability ghost. If the train stopped now the track would get up and walk away. I once painted an image and in the new light of morning I was different. What I thought I saw is not what I am seeing. The person of yesterday is not the person of today.

Whatever happened somehow changed what I saw to what I see and what I see to who I am. Some art just changes you. Sometimes it's black and sometimes it's white. Some art has color and some color has no art. Some color is hot and sometimes cool is the best color.

I love the clean intent of appliance white, the thick dark shine of Mercedes-Benz black. Black and white are truer than color, but since the world is not pure, we shall use color and see ourselves honestly in light and shade. Gray is an illusion. What is between the pure colors is not seen. The eye cannot detect it so the mind senses it as gray. Whereas the eye will mix the colors, the mind separates them. The mind can only combine what is true with what is true, and make art from what is art:

Art cannot create mind, but only the mind can create art.

The Origin of Light

What is painting? It is a compulsion to travel without stopping. Moving the paint around, that is the only objective. What is The Origin of Light? This is where we find The Long War Against Art and we learn that Art, being uncreated is indestructible, and man, being created is corruptible.

Is this praise or is this folly to touch truth with paint and marks? Is it better that mythology takes one part chance and one part time, shaken together, and the evolution of drawing with light and shadow will somehow mutate into art? We create art in our own image, to touch God, to come down from the mountain glowing with the pure light of invention. I am getting close because I feel the fire.

Painting is what happens when I haven't thought of anything else to do

The art of speaking. Yes, we can speak about art. The art of thinking. Yes, we can speak of the mind. We can write like we speak and we can write like we think. I think like I speak so my thoughts become what I write and my mind hears the words that are in my mouth. If I paint like I speak I wouldn't know what to say, so I paint like I do and what you see is the action of living what is done.

I paint like I do and

I write like I speak

The difference to intend the thing makes no difference either way. The mind sees the mess on the floor and already the hand is sweeping it up. The actions have done nothing the mind did not see before being being-before and after-being is now more the broom than the hand. The tool has become device and invention the mother of all action before the act.

I know what I like

and I like what I know.

I think this through and find that I have not yet made a mark on the canvas. Paralyzed before the act by the act of thinking before acting. I decide that this nothing I have just painted is not very attractive and what is needed is some action that actually involves putting paint on the canvas.

I must act before thinking decides that I could be doing something else. So, painting is what happens when I haven't thought of anything else to do and somehow ended up here before this canvas with no place else to go.

What else is there to do?

It will not be made no matter what I will

We are but common dirt sprinkled with extraordinary light. Light: a constellation of fluorescence. Advanced photography now show us that at the moment of conception, when the sperm hits the egg, there is a spark of light. God said "Let there be light" and He really meant it.

God uses ordinary things for extraordinary results: He did not use precious metal or valuable jewels, no gold, platinum, rubies, diamonds—He used dirt:

The dirty man that I am, working in dirty art, does occasionally make use of glorious light and give birth to something truly wonderful.

And. A man does what? Being born he earns no glory. There are these poems. Worthless. There are the stories. Fodder. What of the art? A chasing after wind and my feet are always too slow. Maybe tomorrow. Tomorrow is tomorrow and I am not fast enough for tomorrow either. Yesterday is a poison drink made of regret.

I am broken and have been broken. The music, a song of self—but reaching higher. This dreadful creativity, this self-expression and art-making could not break me down and assemble me anew. The pieces of lost lives are scattered all over the floor and will not be made no matter what I will.

This gift of art, when it does happen—I admit to a certain wonder and even delight. Some of it is quite good in spite of myself. The man who has destroyed most of his relationships is survived by some of his art. Today I am alive.

A dot. A dot that is moving is a line. The moving line becomes a shape, a rotating shape a cube. The fourth dimension happens when a cube pushes out in all directions, filling all the corners, my molecules spilling out all over the floor and I become bigger, bigger than the earth, becoming the Man with the Atomic Brain!

Now I am the man who didn't exist.

Copyright © 2021 by Rocco Ingala

All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Moments of being.

The pain of seeing within.

Words are abstractions and fictions of self.

It is not inside skin but outside skin.

Logic is necessary when looking for logic.

Vision is necessary when looking for vision.

—Rocco Ingala

This is a poem

That lives on the paper

Not much else to do

For a poem