Easter, and these pages have taken on the concentration of my former hand-kept notebooks, the hand-painted hand-written mosaics I carried everywhere with me and filled with daily intermittent entries in an effort to keep presence of mind within reach. To watch days unfold their obsessive contingencies. To hope for something, almost from without, revealed in the tracing of monuments. Annunciation.
Over time, a matter of weeks, pages, a whole book (almost the tree from its leaves), though those old closed pages are filled with the fictions of the closed mind, so pained, so transparently the said of what one wants to say aloud but doesn't, out of anxiety, yes, but more so out of self-indulgence. I wouldn't let you read that crap. And so for someone like me--so often self-encapsulated--there is a futility to those closed pages, the same circling futility of subject. The subjecting of self to one's loneliest self. Subjectivity. So this open notebook: what am I saying? I cannot tell you everything. Which is part of what you require of me: our agreement. Which is why this work is more useful, at least.
***
And the angel answered and said unto her, the Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. --Luke 1:35***
from the Annunciation notebook, April 17, 2003:
How the creation story is negated by fantasy; how it becomes the contemptuous voice of God. How one wound leads to the desire to defend against more more wounds--and the shields of choice are all those of gratification. And fantasy. The aestheticized thing. Oh poem.***
Fantasy: as much as the camera I think of the photos lying in wait inside it, half a roll, black and white. I remember some of what I saw. An evil yellow chick Easter cookie on a paper lace doily, that especially. I imagine the film being torn from the camera and discarded. I imagine someone snapping the rest of the roll, but not developing it, or developing it and discarding my half of the photos after shuffling through them quickly. I imagine walking into the nearest pawn shop and finding the camera and film intact.
***
Land Camera
After
The self-regarding religiosity
Of music-critics shuts itself
Lilting in a mirrored box
If I thought anything was endless
---------------------------- and the cloud
A fixture, as breathing twenty dollars
Meet and hold ourselves aloft
On a fine breeze, a jet
Distraction we agree on but if
The intellectual future depends
On essays
----------------- below this line we are
Having a parallel experience again
An evening of stars and kids
A pasty and probably anti-semitic vocabulary
Impatience having led in this case to
A desk in Euclid, IL
Office where no one anticipates
The onslaught of radical decency
But they're happy to join when it comes
Jordan Davis
***
Book V of The Prelude tomorrow. The book of Books. Rereading the Arab dream sequence tonight:
While this was uttering, strange as it may seem, --------------- 110
I wondered not, although I plainly saw
The one to be a stone, the other a shell;
Nor doubted once but that they both were books,
Having a perfect faith in all that passed.
***
