Sorry, Honey, You Peaked

EXPLODING THE SPRING MYSTIQUE

Good Morning, World! Captain Eileen her
At her little morning desk
Dying to tell you at the crack of dawn
How Dearly she hates it
How Spring truly sucks.

Here we have it outside my morning window
Birds twittering, buds newly greening on perky branches
            “Tweet”, another fucking bird.

And I had to go through a whole night to get here.
That’s the part that’s really hard to swallow.
I had to lie awake for hours thinking of how I hat just about
Every man, woman and child who walks the face of this earth
Myself included, I find self-hate extremely motivating

I thought of everyone I’ve ever fucked or wanted to and
Thought how unrewarding it was. “Can’t take it with you!”
Like they say.
I thought of the conversations I’ve had.
Nearly the mystery was unraveled in 1962.
Then in 64, 67, 72, 73, 73 and 74. And those were the transcendent
Conversations. Not to mention the warm friendly variety, or
The pitiful confessional motif. Both of you
Pour out your sorrows and feel instantly better.
“And I thought I was fucked up!” each thinks.

I thought of my dreams of becoming a great poet & then I
        thought of
My poet friends who dream no differently. I thought of my 
Poet friends and how they have no right to live within
The revolting egocentric realities uniquely expressed in
Syntax all their own and then they print their own poems
In their own little magazines.

Was it Marlon Brando who said, “Looking up the asshole
        of death.”
Anyhow, by 35 most poets either can’t do it anymore
Or have ruined their lives of or the lives of others  or have
Simply realized that all of it was a farce.
Suddenly strack at 35 by the genuinely mediocre fact of your
        life
Which previously stood as a backdrop to the cosmos or
        culture
And now ... Har, Har, Middle-Aged Poet!
Joke’s on you. Broke and not very good-looking.

Though I don’t plan to stop at this moment.
Sure, I hate my friends and they hate me and there’s no one 
        around to
fuck except the ones who won’t fuck me and they like to 
        torture me
And I like it - my poems keep getting better and better.
But the fact is
If I am no longer a poet, then I will to face being a 
        useless and
Mediocre human being now, rather than when I’m 35, as is
        the norm
35 will be terrifying.
A) Unless dead or raving mad or abandoned with a large
        shopping bag
And a pint of Wild Irish Rose, I will be B) teaching a
        workshop
or C) penning a villanelle, as one poet puts it, or
D) just taking a shit and suddenly the joke will be swarming
        all
Around me, a nettle of fears and doubts, cold icy sweat, 
        perhaps
I’ll be standing on a stage reading a fucking sonnet and
Whomp! “Your life is meaningless! This is the last
        message!”

“What, What...” I’ll mutter, swinging my arms around
        spastically
But I know what it means: “You blew it, Baby it was a joke.”
So I go home to my lover (If I’m that fucking lucky when I’m
35 ... Why should it start then? But listen, this is the clincher...)

I go home to to my lover, who’s of course in her early 20s
A Younger Poet. There’s a note on my pillow
Sorry, Honey, you peaked.
Arrrgh! I shriek at the heavens.
All those years I chortled at men: Ha! You guys are done in
at 18. Your “prime.” We women don’t peak until 35. 
I collapse on my bed, a sexual and artistic homicide.
Though still breathing, and it is Spring.

— Eileen Myles

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Nur Zwei Dinge

Nur zwei Dinge

Durch so viele Formen geschritten,
durch Ich und Wir und Du,
doch alles blieb erlitten
durch die ewige Frage: wozu?

Das ist eine Kinderfrage.
Dir wurde erst spät bewußt,
es gibt nur eines: ertrage
– ob Sinn, ob Sucht, ob Sage –
dein fernbestimmtes: Du mußt.

Ob Rosen, ob Schnee, ob Meere,
was alles erblühte, verblich,
es gibt nur zwei Dinge: die Leere
und das gezeichnete Ich.

— Gottfried Benn, 1953

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Im Kreis

In jeder Art seid ihr verloren; –
Die Elemente sind mit uns verschworen,
Und auf Vernichtung läuft’s hinaus…
Was soll uns denn das ew’ge Schaffen!
Geschaffenes zu nichts hinwegzuraffen!
Es ist so gut, als wär’ es nicht gewesen,
Und treibt sich doch im Kreis, als wenn es wäre.

Goethe, Faust 2

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Raum wird Zeit

Parsifal:
Ich schreite kaum,
doch wähnte ich mich schon weit.

Gurmenanz:
Du siehst, mein Sohn,
zum Raum wird hier die Zeit.

–Wagner, Parsifal

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On Faith

 

The “Equivalents” remain photography’s most radical demonstration of faith in the existence of a reality behind and beyond that offered by the world of appearances. They are intended to function evocatively, like music, and they express a desire to leave behind the physical world, a desire symbolized by the visual absence of horizon and scale clues within the frame. Emotion resides solely in form, they assert, not in the specifics of time and place.

— Andy Grundberg, 1983 on Alfred Stieglitz “Equivalents”

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We Are Poorly Placed

We are poorly placed as biological individuals to witness the more fundamental dynamics of history, glimpsing this or that incomplete moment, which we hasten to translate into the alltoo-human terms of success or failure. But neither stoic wisdom nor the reminder of a longer-term view are really satisfactory responses to this peculiar existential and epistemological dilemma, comparable to the science-fictional one of beings inhabiting a cosmos they do not have organs to perceive or identify.

Perhaps only the acknowledgement of this radical incommensurability between human existence and the dynamic of collective history and production is capable of generating new kinds of political attitudes; new kinds of political perception, as well as of political patience; and new methods for decoding the age as well, and reading the imperceptible tremors within it of an inconceivable future.

— Frederic Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic

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Wolfsschlucht

 

Milch des Mondes fiel aufs Kraut!
Uhui! Uhui!
Spinnweb’ ist mit Blut betaut!
Uhui! Uhui!
Eh’ noch wieder Abend graut –
Uhui! Uhui!
Ist sie tot, die zarte Braut!
Uhui! Uhui!
Eh’ noch wieder sinkt die Nacht,
Ist das Opfer dargebracht!
Uhui! Uhui! Uhui!

— Weber, Der Freischütz

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All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

Others believe that the really distinctive forms of contemporary art and thought have made a quantum leap beyond all the diverse sensibilities of modernism, and earned the right to call themselves “post-modern”. I want to respond to these antithetical but complementary claims by reviewing the vision of modernity with which this book began. To be modern, I said, is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one’s world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction: to be part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air. To be a modernist is to make oneself somehow at home in the maelstrom, to make its rhythms one’s own, to move within its currents in search of the forms of reality, of beauty, of freedom, of justice, that its fervid and perilous flow allows.

— Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

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Aufgabe der Fotografie ist die Vor- und die Nachbereitung des Krieges

 

Die Form ist in Zukunft von der Materie getrennt. In der Tat ist die Materie in sichtbaren Gegenständen nicht mehr von großem Nutzen, ausgenommen sie dient als Vorlage, nach der die Form gebildet wird. Man gebe uns ein paar Negative eines sehenswerten Gegenstandes, aus verschiedenen Perspektiven aufgenommen – mehr brauchen wir nicht. Man reiße dann das Objekt ab oder zünde es an, wenn man will. 

–Oliver Wendel Holmes

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Take the Place of an Image

‘An object is never so wedded to its name that another cannot work just as well….Sometimes the name of an object can take the place of an image.…Everything tends to make one think that there is little rapport between an object and its representation.’

— Rene Magritte

 

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