thoughts on college no. 5

bathed in the crepuscular beauty
of a lamp's lonely dying light

a boy at the piano
sits and sees the last notes on the page


morendo




morendo






morendo





it is the movement's end
but not the end of movement


it is the beginning of another movement
but movement has never ceased for one moment

crescendo






crescendo

not yet



crescend

no!


any louder the boy can
not




but it is the beginning of another movement
although before his eyes a final somber
dance macabre

and it is the beginning of another movement
and the next pages are written

but not yet for him
pages blank without blotches

he must enter the movement
begin the movement

and play
without knowing the blotched end

knowing the theme but not
the end

the beginning but not
the end


"at the still point"


but he must enter the movement
for movement never stops

not even in
stillness


he knows not
the end

but he sees
blotches

he knows not
the end

but he knows he must
begin

an overly idealistic attempt at a poetic essay

imago mundi

                only a draft

Images and the image

          —for it is only an image—

                                  of man—

                                      grayed out,

                                      corpulent, but

                                      sickly, (as a

                                      corpse)

                                      corpulent with info,

                                      sickly in mind.

Problems will perpetually plague

words—written words—

and they hulk yet larger in

the epoch of today.

Films, films, films.

“The Avengers was awesome.”

“Hey, you watched Divergent?”

No, I watched The Godfather.

But let me talk about films.

They’re the apotheosis of the

Image.

Moving images,

And thrill,

And you know I’m talking about the

Action film that Marvel/Disney has perfected.

The cume of these films are

Staggering

And the extent of their influence

Is enormous,

And, I won’t be a snobbish elitist here,

I love Marvel films (not Divergent, please spare me),

But they do eventually become scratchy disks

(But that metaphor isn’t relevant anymore, is it?)

And the thrill is gone away.

But I’m off on a rabbit trail

(Notice the inordinate amount of beginning conjunctions).

The reader will be alienated—

The serious reader I mean

(But what delineates “seriousness” in a reader, huh?)—

Because the reader doesn’t get the image pre-fab.

The reader has to create,

Become a co-creator of the image,

Has to actually use the faculty of

Imagination.

Imagination is usually lost after childhood,

But the reader who has read from five,

Who has read under covers with a flashlight,

In the car, in the bathroom,

Retains some of that imagination, no matter how vestigial.

I, for one, associate imagination with books,

Old musty books—

Wardrobes to Narnia, private portals to god-littered Greece—

Books which jump from thought to thought now,

Because the pages are like the hairs of my dad’s head,

Stressed out.

The book demands use of image-ing,

And children don’t mind,

And hence the teen, the grown-up who carries in the pockets of the heart

Some residue of child-ness,

Doesn’t mind, at least not as much as the non-reader.

But the pervasive pull of the image that requires

Minimal work

Affects even the reader.

                                        I mean,

Look at the state of the novel.

The Hunger Games, film-adaptable?

Yes. Divergent, Maze Runner, and what have you,

All adaptable for the silver screen?

You betcha.

Not that the popular novel hasn’t been perennially full of schmaltz,

But that it is now losing the one commendable quality it carried:

The impetus for imagination.

But now, how does the literary novel react?

Murakami and Rushdie both

Seem to think that the response apposite is to

Hie to the Weird Cave.

Franzen et the disaffected al. will not deign to use commonplace vocab.

But the power of evocative imagination is very much within the grasps

Of these, but what?
Filmability? 
Franzen has it, a bit.
But go back half a century. The 
Southern Gothic pack. 
Adapt Walker Percy's novels, Faulkner's.
Can't, huh
?

Rabbit trail again.

                             (I’m tired, can’t think.)

i. can't. read

went to Booksale two days ago and bought
    a translation of Gilgamesh,
    a book by Alan Jacobs (Wheaton professor at time of publishing, now at
   Baylor - surprising find)
       on testimony: narrative theology but focused on the
                  individual contra
                         Hauerwas (heh);
      and a book on Spanish
            (embarassing, but I did
             just read Pablo Neruda
             and it doesn't seem a huge
             stretch: Tagalog, Bisaya, Latin, what could possibly
              go wrong? [Dunno, maybe
                  the fact that you might
                  not actually read it?!])

- and added a few poetry books to my incessantly expanding hoard of ebooks:
      Robert Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins
GERARD. MANLEY. HOPKINS.
Who in the world is
                              this guy?
What the heck is he trying
                                        to do?
Not only unconventional English,
   but also
      baffling, almost Greeky-Latiny word order (and if you've made acquaintance with either you know
       the struggle, the labyrinthine mud-miasma glare blur slap-facey struggle
[and such constructions as this are not beyond Gerard])
        baffling poems with the exception of
        "God's Grandeur" and a couple others
         striking evocative lines
              but only two and then
                  "let me revert to
                  nebulosity again plox.
                  thx."
Twenty poems in and I'm still all
      Wuuuuuuuu
          uuuuuuuuu
            uuuuuuuuu
              uuuuuuuuu
                uuuuuuuuu
                                t

- but
             anyway -
      
      Browning, Gerard Butler Leonidas Hopkins,
      Andrew George's translation of Gilgamesh (heh)
         [and this Alan Jacobs fellow has piqued
           my interest in Auden]

and I bought Jonathan Franzen's
     The Corrections
           500 pp.
   and do I have the time?
        Yes yes nope yes

But
         I
             Can't
                        Reeeeeead

The distractions
                                    T.V.

       Keyboard (BACH BACH BACH BACH)

               the Interwebs
                                     
                .                        Mooar books

(you ever get the feeling that you want to read something anything so bad you end up reading nothing and instead find yourself retreading the saccharine staircase down into the depressing dregs of the internet
     horrid
              feeling)

I read a chapter and it's still
  wuuuuuu(u-jollywell-near-infinity up-up-up the y-axis)t

    And mp3 music (muzak?)
        on my phoan

"I hear in my miiiind
all this muuuuusic
and it breaks my heart
and it breaks my heart
And it breaks my he-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-eart..."
              ~ Regina
                     Spektor

Interestingly, I read best when listening to Bach or to Mahler or
to Jack White's weird croons
   and Meg White's brutal beats,
"but that ain't whatchu wanna hear
  but that's what I'll do."

Frustrating frustrating
Frust
                                        
                     ra

                                         ting.