Notes here wrestling with relationship of beauty to spectacle. I want somehow to tease these apart so that there can be beauty without murder. What follows are a few poem/transits over the issues.

1. Spectacle and Murder

The point is that every spectacle is a murder… the connection between spectacle, community, and murder. Gimmie Shelter.

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Beauty & spectacle angled apart, sometimes visited like old sisters and fought, had tea, rolled their thin bones.

Picasso and Stein did not agree with this & had a more occasional sympathy of strong references that transfixed avenues.

Aspect aspect aspect of body become more linear writ. Birds among car or flocked towards descending planes.

But the kill. At spectacle does not drown her beauty. Did not. Though suicide is also a kind of goat.

Somehow we are offered not just a kill. “just-a-kill” says a sparrow (not a killdeer)—among the branches you see what I mean.

We do other things that are like discs in our breath, hold us towards warmth. (We left coins on his lips he saw no more.)

Cusp. Lunar edging against. Shadows & buildings. Aspect here at ruin. At night. He says the kill-count dhikr. Holds it in his teeth. His breath. Skirt hem.

All beauty is not spectacle only towards. Hours that do not translate yet. That I make peace over here, in this corner.

Altamont is a different transfiguration of access. A blood. Spectacle he tore from a body. “Comin’ through the Rye”.

I am attempting to separate the spectacle into its segments. Planar. De-activate I’s dagger. Insert coulds. (or clouds).

Words rush, no words among the rushes, brush apart the rushes. They were over there. It was different from what I was seeing. This land was inside my heart.

Its my spectacle I am cast over, mudra, seal side down, is not the red sky her sky I wounded.

I put apart on you as a difference in the count. That way you are not covered. As a first step but, not yet generous.

We are separate beauty and spectacle here according to facts at the edge. It rains.

At the end of all exclusions a figure pushes necessarily back.


2. Success and Doubles

I get that fame, that success happening, being able to hold it together for some reason through several social moments, moving between a variety of looks could be satisfying. I almost remember feeling that solid, as if there was a normal world, and it was okay to have been better than someone else, or that people wanted you or whatever it was that made it possible to get up and go inside with the others. And that, having made connections, making it to the back room, makes it more possible to do the things you are already good at (she moved to Woodstock I heard after a few years and had kids with an Italian guy I think they were) there are doors you can move through like this, they don’t look like anything. That wanting this, a person would be indifferent to other kinds of friendships as not related to the gathering mural working its way out of you, but like I said, I can almost remember, which means its hard to allow a mural to occur in the spaces you make within the general assertion of an era when you begin to notice a mural is slowly occurring and you start to watch close and it’s a horror story.

David Lynch got this pretty exact I think the discovery that one is not famous and match up not only poorly with the nearby selections and distances between people just so, but are actually part of an accident of some kind is happening is slow motion, you are that too, carrying it around and happening to pose in such a way as on schedule was necessary to continue being this way.

Once you catch sight of one story there are others that seem available you could say, positions that appear plausible to suppose over there next to her or being your desire like Bob Dylan was (I have never really been in my body precisely and do not recognize myself in photos maybe this is why I see a place next to someone a thing they need and think oh I could be that I could make myself that).

Meanwhile you have to decide what to do with the others who appear to be aspects or partial doubles of the script you are operating for instance, many stars have a series of doubles operating in approximations of the script you can encounter as people can get all kinds of things by looking at you.

This has gone tangent but is related that when I talk about fame I end up talking about doubles I am always falling for doubles and seem to be located in the position of observer which is not the most desirable location—a non-speaking part—your mirror Lou called it nailing it every fame needs an audience which means what backdrop or surrounding mandala features that properly echo and are shaped by figuration (what Olsen calls “projection” or Prothesis imimium, burst fire) pushed out watch me I am yours.

Sure fame is possible I suppose Monica Seles see but in general I imagine it occurs where appropriate and so again, looping back, it is hard to do this if you are out of time slightly or even a few decades mis-placed the arrangements you are making in space because you are in two places (at least) and thus thread between (this is what tantra—from stretch, thread, weave, etc, and stake—is about I select, tying to times together or thread like I didn’t need to learn that but perhaps could have piloted more smoothly.

Stereoscopic sight of modernism (I’m all serious now Prof hat on) as if looking at stills is, as usual, two-dimensional criticism failing to account for what Burrough’s snapped to, that we are also double in time at least, see twice and some days are about a different time altogether gets difficult to proceed and hence medication as fall back plan you know you are fucking up resonant yesterday or even tomorrow here in this restaurant beginning rhythms you can’t talk about yet without slight disruption of surface you have to absorb to make sure a butterfly effect doesn’t happen erase all the roads, no bookmobile, no way back.

Broke loose in this way and didn’t even murder anyone I dream I did and so perhaps in a slight way I have also still you are across time like this it becomes more difficult to arrive at the right time for her to turn her head the way she did, there at the town picnic, looking across the table clothes, out from under the American flag.

And that’s what really matters that there is no way to sew it back up and say I never went to Mission San Juan Bautista and have no idea what happens next I am right here arranging things that way, and she was from Kansas too, did you catch that?

I mean that fame as such as a thing has to be grace I suppose but then why are we haunted he looked out and this desire to be seen and not just see, how’s that fit in any specular theory of the “look” as usual when its said out loud the wrong people are punished. Power likes to hide that way.

Someone equally despondent remarks on how calculated this all is. I must have been here before. (Cue Julie Andrew in the Gazebo) I suppose that is one approach to take. Just look for yourself everywhere. Then all the times are the same. We do it all the time.

3. Triptych

RgVedic poet proposes, realizes, three topoi—an evocation of the seen dawn (perceived world), an evocation of an imaginaire (figures, mythemes, etc of devas), and ritual space—location of figural expression/action.

How like Anne Carson’s assessment of the lyric moment in Sappo’s gaze on two lovers—the beloved, the figure who loves (in this case, the imaginaire or person taken as imaginaire, the man who woos the beloved) and the self-witnessed, the new ground of self opened up by the consideration.

Not inner ground yet then, but the conditions for it in the Vedic ritual. As poet singer negotiating these three “spaces” catches glimpses of self moving from one topoi to another, watches as a term correlates or is an axis in this, across which the light changes (i.e., the topoi shifts).

Not yet fixed as heaven or earth or in a hierarchy, not yet subject to definition, but proposing a set of terms, or images, locating them as points of connection, knots in the web.

That moment, the shift from a gestural circling between topoi, to the determination of an order, as a moment of crisis, a desire extended through, that this be that. Socratic, Upanisadic, metaphysical difference in which sense and imagination are separated, sent to their respective fields, in which the glimpse of self as she (or he) shifts registers is hidden by a preoccupation and only remembered as a fetish term, uneasy and now gross image or letter, gross term now isolate.

Art Noveau as a reaching back to the organic necessary of the term ripped free, never abstract or surrealist eye or dot, because always shaped according already to a shaping and weathering—we forget. Hence, we are never isolate star, point self, term ripped free of the weave that is proposed, that we suggest by voice, and only after we can no longer remember the deep, beautiful propositions of our singing would we consider self as such, as a remainder apart.

An what fantastic topoi we realize in art, in theatre, what fantastic, rich beauty we say to each other and by saying make bloom in an otherwise desert or slumbering. And bring to form, to matter, that we suggest into time—timeless flowers, absent a moment before.