Sirens in Captivity

Terebra turritella

In acid waters long overdue, the siren contemplates what boils behind her
In the waterworks, building up in scales and furs, and instilled in the affected eye--
Further deprived of the choice, from the dark water, she salvages the industry

Marks on a page, mulberry stain. Meanwhile flatfish perceptibly bend the sea bed.

In the waterworks, building up in scales and furs, and instilled in the affected eye--
Compelled to field work, she finds the regenerated tail is never as nice as the original.

Mean meal to the eyes, she thinks of the murky ink, though soil carries it away, to her bed
To dream--After the banquet, like silk moths baked in a precious cocoon before a chewed escape.

Compelled to field work, she finds her regenerated tail, although it is never as nice as the original,
Pulls at a fiber of solutions, which are then noted by a pair of turreted eyes extending in all directions

To dream during the banquet and float about as fine among the dismembering maws, eschewed escape,

Granted this formal escape from sludge on the ocean floor. You see, all is discharged, ultimately, to the sea.

Pulling at the fibers of potential answers, she thinks with a pair of turreted eyes extending in all directions

Seeing through places--established vines or holdfasts--a terrain rebounds by the then-known methods,
Her questions are granted a formal escape from sludge on the ocean floor. Carried to the sea bottom
To the supplies of copper banding the green oyster. This fluency in my chest, she cannot suffocate it

Purple in a flame tip, frill extended, facing the trench base--a terrain refound by methods then known
Small wonder that the tongue, in acid waters long overdue, the siren boils under what is beneath her
Spine-columned invertebrate fluxes around a soft body, where this fluency, she cannot suffocate it,
Further deprives her of the choice. Away from dark water, murex, mulberry, she salvages the industry.

Leonard Cohen - Joan of Arc---Death by Immolation, May 30th, Feast Day, Patron of Soldiers

Now the flames they followed Joan of Arc
as she came riding through the dark;
no moon to keep her armour bright,
no man to get her through this very smoky night.
She said, "I'm tired of the war,
I want the kind of work I had before,
a wedding dress or something white
to wear upon my swollen appetite."

Well, I'm glad to hear you talk this way,
you know I've watched you riding every day
and something in me yearns to win
such a cold and lonesome heroine.
"And who are you?" she sternly spoke
to the one beneath the smoke.
"Why, I'm fire," he replied,
"And I love your solitude, I love your pride."

"Then fire, make your body cold,
I'm going to give you mine to hold,"
saying this she climbed inside
to be his one, to be his only bride.
And deep into his fiery heart
he took the dust of Joan of Arc,
and high above the wedding guests
he hung the ashes of her wedding dress.

It was deep into his fiery heart
he took the dust of Joan of Arc,
and then she clearly understood
if he was fire, oh then she must be wood.
I saw her wince, I saw her cry,
I saw the glory in her eye.
Myself I long for love and light,
but must it come so cruel, and oh so bright?

Soft Body on the Tooth's Graze

Ne In Cielo, Ne In Terra

"I started to ask her what she wanted, but she did not seem the kind who accepts questions. I jumped off the bed and offered her the only chair in the room. She didn't want it. She looked at the chair and then at me, thoughtfully, smiling her disinterestedness in merely sitting down. Then she went around the room reading some stuff I had pasted on the walls. They were some excerpts I had typed from Mencken and from Emerson and Whitman. She sneered at them all. Poof, poof, poof! Making gestures with her fingers, curling her lips. She sat on the bed, pulled off her coat jacket to the elbows, and put her hands on her hips and looked at me with insufferable contempt.

Slowly and dramatically she began to recite:

What should I be but a prophet and a liar,
Whose mother was a leprechuan, whose father was a friar?
Teethed on a crucifix and cradled under water,
What should I be but the fiend's god-daughter?

It was Millay, I recognized it at once, and she went on and on; she knew more Millay than Millay herself, and when she finally finished she lifted her face and looked at me and said, "That's literature! You don't know anything about literature. You're a fool! I had fallen into the spirit of the lines and when she broke off so suddenly to denounce me I was at sea again" (80-81).

IV YOUNG AMERICA: "The days passed; and one of them rang a bell in the soul, of Cornelia Thornwell. She had kept her vow, she had won the wager with herself. For a whole year she had taken care of herself, asking no advice and no favors from any one. She had got a job as a manual worker, and held it for a year, and lived on her earnings, and had twenty-five dollars put away. Now she might go home if she wanted to.

Did she want to? It was hard to be sure; at one time she would find herself thinking about this one and that, and she had happened to them all this time. But then she would remember the desperate determination of everybody to dominate her life; all those highly disciplined and rigid people who knew what she ought to do at every moment of her life, and would never cease from telling her! Well, she would have a way to escape, a city of refuge!

She had made up her mind to tell no one where she had been; it would be a scandal, a mystery with which they might torment themselves for the rest of her life; a skeleton in the family closet--the bones of a runaway grandmother! The imp of mischief kicked up his heels in the depths of Cornelia's soul; she thought of each person she knew, and what that person would make of the problem. The secret would be a club she would hold over their heads, to make them behave. 'Let me alone, or I'll disappear again!'" (81).

William Sheller - Un Homme Heureux

Le Jardin des supplices

Woman possesses the cosmic force of an element, an invincible force of destruction, like nature's. She is, in herself alone, all nature! Being the matrix of life, she is by that very fact the matrix of death - since it is from death that life is perpetually reborn, and since to annihilate death would be to kill life at its only fertile source. ~"The Manuscript"

Controlling the Look, Slow Lean into the World

The GreekFile

"Most home remedies are more sane and include cooling compresses, hot showers, and herbal poultices. A favorite topical treatment is the application of the juice Impatiens biflora, jewelweed. This common swamp and ditchside plant was used medicinally by American Indians and is still pronounced a sure cure by many urushiol victims. The intrepid naturalist Ewell Gibbons kept a mash of jewelweed ice cubes in his freezer for winter and early spring urushiol emergencies.

The reputation for the success of this natural, no side-effects, cost-free remedy has for generations outlasted medical skepticism about the chemical effect of the plant on poison ivy or oak rashes. An article in the Journal of Wilderness Medicine in 1991 reported that, in an experimental setting, the use of Impatiens biflora as a preventative or treatment for urushiol dermatitis did not duplicate the success related in personal anecdotes. Yet the actual effect of it and other home remedies on some individuals cannot be denied: Claims of relief and cures are not uncommon" (50).

Mr. 137 : "First opportunity, I sidle up and ask the talent wrangler how it is she knows so much about vaginal embolisms. Almost a thousand women dead every year? Killed by carrots and batteries forcing air inside them? That seems like a remarkably rarefied set of facts for anyone to reference offhand.

'Sorry,' I tell her, 'I couldn't help overhearing.'

Holding one end of a ballpoint pen, the wrangler taps it like a wand in the direction of each man still here. Her lips silent, making the shape of each number—27 ... 28 ...29—she writes something on her clipboard, at the same time saying, 'That's why Ms. Wright pays me the big bucks'" (88).

Many foragers sell their minds at markets...

Black Tulip

Oliver Sack's Seeing Voices : "For it appears as if the nervous system, given the constraints of language in a visual medium, and the physiological limitations of short-term of memory and cognitive processing, has to evolve the sort of linguistic structures, the sort of spatial organization, we see in Sign. And there is strong circumstantial support for this in the fact that all indigenous signed languages--and there are many hundreds, all over the world, which has evolved separately and independently wherever there are groups of deaf people--all indigenous have much of the same spatial structure . None of them resembles signed English, or signed speech, in the least. All have, beneath their specific differences some generic resemblance to ASL. There is no universal sign language, but there are, it seems, universals in all sign languages, universals not of meaning, but of grammatical form" (114).

Welcome to Tarbox: "Every marriage is a hedged bet. Foxy entered hers expecting that, whatever fate held for them, there were certain kinds of abuse it would never occur to her husband to inflict. He was beyond them, as most American men are beyond eye-gouging and evisceration. She had been right. He had proved not so much gentle as too fastidious to be cruel. She had no just complaints: only the unjust one that the delay while she waited barren for Ken to complete his doctorate had been long. Four intended years of post-graduate work had been into stretched into five by the agonies of his dissertation; two more were spent in a post-doctoral fellowship granted by the U.S. Public Health Service; and then Ken squandered another as an instructor in the vicinity of the same magnetic Harvard gods, whose very names Foxy had come to hate" (42-43).

Caravaggio 4/12

Derek Jarman's allegory for the exigencies of inspiration--

Originally named Michelangelo Merisi, Caravaggio was born
September 28, 1573, in the Lombardy hill town of Caravaggio...

Jarman cleverly incorporates the conversion on the road to Damascus...

My favorite painting:
http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/c/caravagg/05/29ceras.html

Let the Weather Have Its Way With You: After the Iron, Wet the Day for a Tempest of Provocation

The Fire That Matches the Flower

[6] Dolphin Courtship: Brutal, Cunning and Complex: "Although biologists have long been impressed with the intelligence and social complexity of bottle-nose dolphins -- the type of porpoise often enlisted for marine mammal shows because they are so responsive to trainers -- they were nonethless surprised by the Machiavellian flavor of the males' stratagems. Many primates, including chimpanzees and baboons, are known to form gangs to attack rival camps, but never before had one group of animals been seen to solicit a second to go after a third. Equally impressive, the multipart alliances among dolphins seemed flexible, shifting from day to day depending on the dolphins' needs, perceptions of what they could get away with. The creatures seemed to be highly opportunistic, which meant that each animal was always computing who was friend and who was foe.

In an effort to thwart male encroachment, female dolphins likewise formed sophisticated alliances, the sisterhood sometimes chasing after an alliance of males that had stolen one of their friends from the fold. What is more, females seemed to exert choice over the males that sought to herd them, sometimes swimming alongside them in apparent contentment, at other times working furiously to escape, and often succeeding. Considered together, the demands of fluid and expedient social allegiances and counterallegiances could have been a force driving the evolution of intelligence among dolphins (33)."

Chapter 33: "I was given no time to doze off. I had not been there five minutes before I heard a rustle and, simultaneously, smelt the sandalwood perfume. I pretended to be asleep. The rustle came closer. I heard the tiny crepitation of pine-needles. Her feet were just behind my head. There was a louder rustle; she had sat down, and very close behind me. I thought she would drop a cone, tickle my nose. But in a very low voice she began to recite Shakespeare.

[SCENE V. Another part of the Park. ... FALSTAFF
My doe with the black scut! Let the sky rain
potatoes; let it thunder to the tune of Green
Sleeves, hail kissing-comfits and snow eringoes; let
there come a tempest of provocation, I will shelter me here.]

'Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices
That, if I then had wak'd after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me; that, when I wak'd
I cried to dream again.'

All the time I was silent, and kept my eyes closed. She teased the words, giving them double meanings. Her dry-sweet voice, the wind in the pines above. She ended, but I kept my eyes closed.

I murmured, 'Go on.'

'A spirit of his comes to torment you.'

I opened my eyes. A fiendish green-and-black face, with protuberant fire-red eyes, glared down at me. I twisted up. She was holding a Chinese carnival mask on a stick, in her left hand. I saw the scar. She had changed into a long-sleeved white blouse and a long grey skirt and her hair was tied back by a black velvet bow. I pushed the mask aside" (203-204).

Mary Renault's The Bull from the Sea: "It was dolphin weather, when I sailed into Piraeus with my comrades of the Cretan bull ring. Knossos had fallen, which time out of mind had ruled the seas. The smoking of the burning Labyrinth still clung to our clothes and hair.

I sprung ashore and grasped both hands full of Attic earth. It stuck to my palms as if it loved me. Then I saw the staring people, not greeting us, but calling each other to see the Cretan strangers.

I looked at my team, the boys and girls of Athens' tribute, carried to Crete to learn the bull-vault and dance for Minotauros on bloody sand. They showed me myself, as I must look to Attic eyes: a bull-dancer of Crete, smooth-shaven, filed down to a whiplash by the training; my waist in a guilded cinch-belt, my silk kilt stitched with peacock eyes, my lids still smudged with kohl; nothing Hellene about me but my flaxen hair. My necklace and arm-rings were not grave jewels of a kingly house, but the costly gauds of the Bull Court, the gift of sport-loving lords and man-loving ladies to a bull-boy who will go in with the music and fly up with the horns (3-4).

Certainly Audible

Sunday afternoon with Lucas Samaras

I am the same, [it is] you [who] changes.

The Scroll That Wouldn't Be Caught

The dead are reading, and here are the things you need to know--
We are steadily leaching phosphorus, forcing the appetite to keep
Up. Blog poetry is a means of connecting particles, in a very bad style,
My private fire lookout on Desolation Peak, seeing nothing but the unseen.

We are steadily leaching phosphorus forcing the appetite to keep
Soiling our own seawater, and yet this filth you read is employing the medium
You use least. A nobody like me is afire, a lookout amid links being seen,
I must say, you look handsome with horns--the personage of events

Singular and wordy to keep degrading, this is no lapidary piece. The medium
Is yesterday's news, yet the flint and stars you are seeing, are my own
Until they are large enough to see with your own eyes--the personage of events
The plectrum is mine, in another time just as one, continuous, twelve-meter

Long roll of paper survived, not to the washstand. Seeing the words are my own
Just as they are the words of the author, who wept blood over its length and loss.
Just a kind of prison missive hidden under its master's bunk, is thrown one, continous
Twelve-meter stretch of bars to carry out the hit. No sense crying over sunken

Triremes. Metals can be impressed in the face of an author who wept blood over
Their loss, when he is grown up into himself, having pulled out of the godforsaken sea,
The gold it contains, is seen. Like a twelve-meter stretch, maybe less, of sand over sunken
Dead Sea scrolls, which now brings a watermark penetrating deep in the memory

Never lost since it has grown into itself, and out of consciousness's godforsaken sea--
One-hundred and twenty-foot scroll of tracing paper by one, whose name in Irish
Reads, "language of water," now deeply penetrating the American myth and memory
A devilish, fringe element burns as the morning star. Yes, we've attached ourselves to him,

His one-hundred and twenty-foot scroll of pieced paper as one, whose name is kept
Up, this poetry provides a means of connecting particles, while in a very bad style,
Is spawning from watery dimensions the next burning star. Yes, we've attached ourselves
To find out, until she floats in the dead you're reading, this is all you need to know.

Bubble and Blister Pack: The Chilly Waterfall Just Above the Coffee

Hundred Waters

Elspeth Huxley's The Mottled Lizard: "And then his choice of subjects was not at all what we were used to. The waterfall just above the coffee nursery, the view from a bluff above the pulping shed, even the new house with its smart Dutch gables, none of these stand-bys, normally so attractive to our visitors, aroused even the mildest interest in Hilary. He was fascinated by a chameleon on a shrub, by the flowers of a passion-fruit creeper on a low wall, by the nests of a weaver that built in a swamp. These nests hung down like little pockets attached to the reeds' heads, and were extremely difficult to get at, for the swamp was deep and treacherous. Hilary thought he could best reach the nests by boat" (115).

Ideas About Love / 135

"Freud concludes that when lovers act irrationally what they're really doing is regressing to the needs, insecurities, and obsessions of childhood. Using an archeological metaphor, he pictures the mind as the many-layered city of Rome, where different eras and societies rub shoulders. Right below today's bustling metropolis lie other cities, and each one has its own set of morals, principles, punishments, customs, rulers, piety, and red tape. In contrast, attachment theory looks at Rome and sees, in the remnants of the past, more than artifacts:

...some of the important historical landmarks, bridges, and crooked streets are still there. But few of the ancient structures exist unaltered or in mental isolation, so simple regression and fixation are unlikely. There is continuity in attachment behavior, but there can also be significant change.["]

The Meaning of Each Tarot Card : All About the Empress Tarot Card

The Hottest Part of the Flame—Though it Looks Receding—is Blue

Provided your backyard lighter flame is free of contaminants that might skew the color, a slightly lean violet-blue flame is the hottest. Blue-violet = high frequency= high energy = high temperature. A white flame has its visible radiation energy spread out
more evenly across the spectrum and isn't peaking on the high-energy blue end. Thatindicates lower overall energy, and thus lower temperature, than a blue flame.

Kate Bush - The Ninth Wave part 3. Hello Earth / The Morning Fog

Sound for Herbert Draper or John Galliano's Spring 2009...

L'étoile chabrier

Submerged in plexiglas

"This bromide project was the first commercially successful attempt to mine the sea for a chemical other than salt. It provided experience of saltwater processing which was invaluable in the second modern seawater project--the extraction of the metal magnesium.

In 1939 magnesium was a comparatively expensive metal that was made only in modest amounts. It was the strange, inflammable metal that the photographer burned in his flashbulbs. But magnesium came into its own during the war. It could be made into alloys with strengths comparable with that of steel. Yet magnesium is less than a quarter of the weight of steel.

Magnesium was needed urgently and in large amounts for making incendiary bombs and as a contructional metal for aircraft. Once again chemists used seawater as their raw material; every cubic mile of seawater contains four million tons of magnesium.

With the experience of bromine extraction to help a huge magnesium factory was built on the shore at Freeport in Texas. The first ingot of magnesium from the sea was cast there on January 21, 1941.

Every day 300 milion gallons of seawater were pumped through the factory, the magnesium being extracted with the help of lime dredged from oyster-shell deposits in a near-by bay. Like the bromine factory, the magnesium factory was built on a tongue-shaped promontory, so that water could be discharged where it would not again be drawn through the extraction plant" (The World of Water 54-55).

Sex: The Brain Below the Belt : "Female sexual turn-on begins, ironically, with a brain turn-off. The impulses can rush. to the pleasure centers and trigger and orgasm only if the amygdala--the fear and anxiety center of the brain--has been deactivated. Before the amygdala has been turned off, any last-minute worry--about work, about the kids, about schedules, about getting dinner on the table--can interrupt the march toward orgasm.
...
...For a woman, the neurochemical stars need to align. Most important, she needs to trust who she is with" (Brizendine 77-80).

Joyce Carol Oates - On Writing Characters

Some Dark Knowledge Floating

Swift birthing, my unsolving, Stranger...make me, new.

"It was remarkable how often he talked to her about these things. The Agency was the one subject in his life that could never be exhausted. Central Intelligence.  Beryl saw it as the best organized church in the Christian world, a mission to collect and store everything that everyone has ever said and then reduce it to a microdot and call it God. She needed to live in small dusty rooms, layered safely in, out of the reach of dizzying things, of heat and light and strange spaces, and Larry needed the great sheltering nave of the Agency. He believed that nothing can be finally known that involves human motive and need. There is always another level, another secret, a way in which the heart breeds a deception so mysterious and complex it can only be taken for a deeper kind of truth.

There were anemones in a bud vase on the table. The phone rang and Beryl went to her desk in the living room to answer" (Libra, Don Delillo, 260).

YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS The Green Island [Two paragraphs before Chapter 13]: "Still he said nothing. He seemed hardly aware of her except as a presence, a body giving him some small unwitting resistance, his will was dominant, all-obliterating. Enid understood that he was detached from her and from the rather anguished mechanical act he had performed, even as he stood swaying drunken against her, his arm crooked around her neck locking her in place, his hot shamed face in her hair, still he was somehow separate from her, saying her name, her name, so sweet so sweet --he swallowed a belch and Enid smelled beer.

Her eyes were open, staring. She was staring sightless as the sky darkened by degrees, the clotted clouds thickening, ridged with black. Now she could hear the lake again, dull spent waves, at dusk most days the wind died down and the lake became flat, merely rippling, shivering in motion. From somewhere up the beach came the sound of voices, gay drunken voices, waves of laughter so faint and chancy they might have been distant music. Now Felix had taken her hand, he was closing her stiffened fingers over his penis to stroke him hard again" (110).

"But all ex-dreamers are mildly irritated by the naiveté (sometimes, indeed, the irritating earnestness) of those who have been able, for one reason or another, to keep something of youth's idealism alive in their chosen work."

"She welcomed every breath of knowledge that came her way, all the better for its element of disquiet, but this time the foreboding shook her strongly. She sensed something out there in the Wall, a muddled shuffling danger that waited for the girl on her lithe passage through car bodies and discarded human limbs and acres of uncollected garbage.

Mother of Mercy pray for us. Three hundred days" (251).