no no gesso

the act of continuing

Each step precedes the next
outside meditation
Immersed in the fortress of words
endangered by
renegade beetles emboldened by the sun.

Our conifer is talking
but only
whales perceive the sound
in a rush
while shifting to the next wave
coming on.

Coming on
thick waves of snow
Building fortresses around each object
dressed down
to match the rest of winter
to these movements.

Locking in an expression
laying down, sitting, thinking, working,
walking up subway stairs
ambivalent seats open and close like firecrackers
set off
by tiny shiftings of rail.

for all

O omni bus
sprout edifice
Scab flowers unroll
4 circular buses
unrolled flowers
scabbed in the eddy fence
spouting o omni

numerology...we guess.

What, for example, should be made of the following similarities (not all of them numerological) between U.S. Presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, taken from a far more extensive list in Martin Gardner's The Magic Numbers of Dr. Matrix (1985)?
Lincoln was elected president in 1860, Kennedy in 1960.
Both were assassinated on a Friday.
Lincoln was killed in Ford's Theatre; Kennedy was killed riding in a Lincoln convertible made by the Ford Motor Company.
Both were succeeded by Southern Democrats named Johnson.
Andrew Johnson was born in 1808, Lyndon Johnson in 1908.
The first name of Lincoln's private secretary was John, the last name of Kennedy's private secretary was Lincoln.
John Wilkes Booth was born in 1839, Lee Harvey Oswald in 1939.
Booth shot Lincoln in a theatre and fled to a warehouse; Oswald shot Kennedy from a warehouse and fled to a theatre.
John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald both have 15 letters.
The first public suggestion that Lincoln should run for president proposed that his running mate should be John Kennedy. (John Pendleton Kennedy was a Maryland politician.)
Shift each letter of FBI forward by six letters in the alphabet and you get LHO, the initials of Lee Harvey Oswald.
One explanation for coincidences of this kind is selective reporting. Anything that fits is kept; anything that does not is discarded. Thus, the coincidence of day of the week for the assassinations is emphasized; the differences in month and number of day in the month are ignored. (Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, Kennedy on November 22.) More subtly, only one choice is made from many possibilities, the one that maintains the numerological pattern. Sometimes the date of birth is used, sometimes the date of election. If those do not work, how about the dates of college graduation, marriage, firstborn child, first election to office, or death? Moreover, some “facts” turn out to be false. The correct birth date for Booth is now thought to be 1838, not 1839, and Booth actually fled to a barn. It is common for coincidences to be exaggerated in this manner. And once one starts looking…Lincoln had a beard. Did Kennedy? No, he was clean-shaven. Do not mention beards, then.
Many of the coincidences listed here are exaggerations, lies, elaborations chosen from an infinite range of potential targets, or the result of a hidden selective process. Still, a few of the coincidences are quite startling. Although rational explanations exist, a true believer cannot be convinced. It is in this fertile territory that number mysticism thrives.

http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9390162/number-symbolism

moo knows

May 29, 2007
N.Y. Steer's 6 - Week Romp Ends in Capture
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 8:38 a.m. ET
MATTITUCK, N.Y. (AP) -- An escaped steer's six-week romp through back yards, roadways and beaches ended when he was finally cornered and returned to his owner, authorities said.
The roughly 600-pound bovine, named Moo, was captured Saturday evening after showing up on a crowded beach.
Moo led police and a veterinarian through sand, swampland and into a back yard, where his escapade finally ended. The steer was shot with a tranquilizer dart, said veterinarian Dr. John Andresen, then taken back to Greenport farmer Joseph Barszczewski.
The farmer said Sunday that the steer -- secured with a rope -- seemed content now in the company of a horse and dog.
''It looks good right now after a very ugly whole situation,'' Barszczewski said.
Back in April, the newly arrived Moo broke through a metal fence, starting his life on the run, Barszczewski said. The farmer had just bought the steer to raise for slaughter.
Moo hunkered down in woods near Barszczewski's vegetable farm and then began to roam, covering about 10 miles of eastern Long Island, police said. At times, the steer turned up in homeowners' yards; at other points, he nearly caused car accidents on a local road.
''He didn't charge,'' said Southold Police Sgt. Raymond VanEtten. ''He wasn't an aggressive-type animal -- he just was on a mission not to get captured.''

not knowing naught noing

Synergistic capsule floating against
a rejecting oil claiming continuity
as a non-chore, as fact, as immutable
against water downed claims of the same
not being the same.
Differentiated outside withers against
the backdrop of another one born,
ten toes and all,
recorded in books bound to outlast
the materiality of feather shrouded skin
basking within telos and incapable of denying
not knowing
just the same.

Attachment to Fleeting

Rotating dice between two hands
They bounce and add
Then three fall out across the grass
And tell all
Before rolling away

We chase after in pint sized shoes
With the shoelaces chronically untied
No worries, no life
Only intermittence of an easy limbo
Lacking obligation, a destination
Acting out the clouds imploding
Mimicking multilayered waves
Exploding in white stripes leaping
For the running

china

office products
from dayton,
ohio
fresh from somewhere
in that china
divided yet
all the same
to an american
who calls plates
china

oil pastels

Oil pastels can be used directly in dry form; when done lightly, the resulting effects are similar to pastel chalks. Heavy build-ups can create an almost impasto effect. Once applied to a surface, the oil pastel pigment can be manipulated with a brush moistened in white spirit, turpentine, linseed oil, or another type of vegetable oil or solvent. Alternatively, the drawing surface can be oiled before drawing or the pastel itself can be dipped in oil. It should be noted that some of these solvents pose serious health concerns.
Oil pastels are considered a fast medium because they are easy to paint with and convenient to carry; for this reason they are often used for sketching, but can also be used for sustained works. Because oil pastels never dry out completely, they need to be protected somehow, often by applying a special fixative to the painting or placing the painting in a sleeve and then inside a frame. There are some known durability problems: firstly, as the oil doesn't dry it keeps permeating the paper. This process degrades both the paper and the colour layer as it reduces the flexibility of the latter. A second problem is that the stearic acid makes the paper brittle. Lastly both the stearic acid and the wax will be prone to efflorescence or "wax bloom", the building-up of fatty acids and wax on the surface into an opaque white layer. This is easily made transparent again by gentle polishing with a woolen cloth; but the three effects together result in a colour layer consisting mainly of brittle stearic acid on top of brittle paper, a combination that will crumble easily. A long term concern is simple evaporation: palmitic acid is often present and half of it will have evaporated within forty years; within 140 years half of the stearic acid will have disappeared. Impregnation of the entire art work by beeswax has been evaluated as a conservation measure.

real tooooooo000000

Kristeva, Lacan and.....Zizek? : Psychosexual Development

JULIA KRISTEVA for the most part follows the general parameters of Lacan's model of psychosexual development (see the first Lacan module); however, she adds a number of elements that recast the valences of Lacan's terms. In particular, Kristeva offers a more central place for the maternal and the feminine in the subject's psychosexual development. For this reason, she has been particularly influential on feminist psychoanalysts looking for a less sexist and phallocentric model for the subject.
Here, then, are Kristeva's variations on a Lacanian theme. I will here repeat elements from the Lacan Module on Psychosexual Development, clarifying how Kristeva reworks elements of each stage:

0-6 months of age. Kristeva refers to this stage as the chora. In the earliest stage of development, you were dominated by a chaotic mix of perceptions, feelings, and needs. You did not distinguish your own self from that of your mother or even the world around you. Rather, you spent your time taking into yourself everything that you experienced as pleasurable without any acknowledgment of boundaries. This is the stage, then, when you were closest to the pure materiality of existence, or what Lacan terms "the Real." At this stage, you were, according to Kristeva, purely dominated by your drives (both life drives and the death drive).

4-8 months of age. Kristeva posits that between the chora and the mirror stage occurs a crucial pre-linguistic stage that she associates with the abject (see the next module on the abject). During this time in your development, you began to establish a separation between yourself and the maternal, thus creating those boundaries between self and other that must be in place before the entrance into language: "The abject confronts us, on the other hand, and this time within our personal archeology, with our earliest attempts to release the hold of maternal entity even before ex-isting outside of her, thanks to the autonomy of language. It is a violent, clumsy breaking away, with the constant risk of falling back under the sway of a power as securing as it is stifling" (13). Like the subject's confrontation with death, the threat of falling back into the pre-linguistic stage of the chora strikes the subject with fear and horror because it means giving up all the linguistic structures by which we order our social world of meaning. Kristeva sees the stage of abjection as "a precondition of narcissism" (13), which is to say, a precondition for the narcissism of the mirror stage, which comes next.

6-18 months of age. This stage, which Lacan terms the "mirror stage," was a central moment in your development. The "mirror stage" entails a "libidinal dynamism" (Écrits 2) caused by the young child's identification with his own image, what Lacan terms the "Ideal-I" or "ideal ego." This recognition of the self's image precedes the entrance into language, after which the subject can understand the place of that image of the self within a larger social order, in which the subject must negotiate his or her relationship with others. This "Ideal-I" is important precisely because it represents to the subject a simplified, bounded form of the self, as opposed to the turbulent chaotic perceptions, feelings, and needs felt by the infant. In particular, this creation of an ideal version of the self gives pre-verbal impetus to the creation of phantasies in the fully developed subject. It establishes what Lacan terms the "imaginary order" and, through the imaginary, continues to assert its influence on the subject even after the subject enters the next stage of development. Kristeva offers a different spin on Lacan by emphasizing the fact that this stage is preceded and troubled by the subject's relation to the abject: "Abjection is therefore a kind of narcissistic crisis" (14).

18 months to 4 years of age. The acquisition of language during this next stage of development further separated you from a connection to the Real (from the actual materiality of things). Lacan builds on such semiotic critics as Ferdinand de Saussure to show how language is a system that makes sense only within its own internal logic of differences: the word, "father," only makes sense in terms of those other terms it is defined with or against (mother, "me," law, the social, etc.). Once you entered into the differential system of language, it forever afterwards determined your perception of the world around you, so that the intrusion of the Real's materiality becomes a traumatic event, albeit one that is quite common since our version of "reality" is built over the chaos of the Real (both the materiality outside you and the chaotic impulses inside you). Kristeva adds to Lacan her sense that language is ultimately a fetish, an effort to cover over the lack inherent in our relation to death, materiality, and the abject: "It is perhaps unavoidable that, when a subject confronts the factitiousness of object relation, when he stands at the place of the want that founds it, the fetish becomes a life preserver, temporary and slippery, but nonetheless indispensable. but is not exactly language our ultimate and inseparable fetish?" (37).

of Novalis and...Buber?

He transformed Fichte’s Nicht-Ich (German "not I") to a Du ("you"), an equal subject to the Ich ("I"). This was the starting point for his Liebesreligion ("religion of love").



sounds like I and Thou