Notes on Vision
The city forms-often physically, but
inevitably
psychically-a circle. A game. A ring of
death
with sex at its center. Drive toward
outskirts
of city suburbs. At the edge discover zones
of
sophisticated vice and boredom, child
prosti-
tution. But in the grimy ring immediately
surround-
ing the daylight business district exists the
only
real crowd life of our mound, the only
street
life, night life. Diseased specimens in
dollar
hotels, low boarding houses, bars, pawn
shops,
burlesques and brothels, in dying arcades
which
never die, in streets and streets of
all-night
cinemas.
When sex dies it becomes Climax.
prone on the sweating tile. Chlorine on his breath
and in his long hair. Lithe, although crippled,
body of a middle-weight contender. Near him
the trusted journalist, confidant. He liked men
near him with a large sense of life. But most
of the press were vultures descending on the
scene for curious America aplomb. Cameras
inside the coffin interviewing worms.
and expose strange worms beneath. The lives of
our discontented madmen are revealed.
for omniscience. To spy on others from this
height and angle: pedestrians pass in and out of
our lens like rare aquatic insects.
••••••••••••••
Yoga powers. To make oneself invisible or small.
To become gigantic and reach to the farthest things.
To change the course of nature. To place oneself
anywhere in space or time. To summon the dead.
To exalt senses and perceive inaccessible images,
of events on other worlds, in one's deepest inner
mind, or in the minds of others.
••••••••••••••
The sniper's rifle is an extension of his eye. He
kills with injurious vision
unconscious, instinctual insect ease, moth-
like, toward a zone of safety, haven from the
swarming streeets. Quickly, he was devoured
in the warm, dark, silent maw of the physical
theater.
Oswald enters taxi. Oswald stops at rooming house.
Oswald leaves taxi. Oswald kills Officer Tippitt.
Oswald sheds jacket. Oswald is captured.
He escaped into a movie house.
Everything is vague and dizzy. The skin
swells and
there is no more distinction between parts of
the
body. An encroaching sound of
threatening,
mocking, monotonous voices. This is fear
and
attraction of being swallowed.
Inside the dream, button sleep around your
body
like a glove. Free now of space and time.
Free
to dissolve in the streaming summer.
At morning, awake dripping, gasping, eyes
stinging.
Inside its ugly shell.
Come out in the open
In all of your Brilliance.
burns my eyes.
I'll pull them out
and get rid of the burning.
Crisp hot whiteness
City Noon
Occupants of plague zone
are consumed.
(Santa Ana's are winds off deserts.)
Rip up grating and splash in gutters.
The search for water, moisture,
"wetness" of the actor, lover.
The idea of chance is absent from the world of the
child and primitive. The gambler also feels in
service of alien power. Chance is a survival
of religion in the modern city, as is theater,
more often cinema, the religion of possession
The cleavage of men into actor and spectators
is the central fact of our time. We are obsessed
with heroes who live for us and whom we punish.
If all the radios and televisions were deprived
of their sources of power, all books and paintings
burned tomorrow, all shows and cinemas closed,
all the arts of vicarious existence...
We are content with the "given" in
sensation's
quest. We have been metamorphosised from a
mad
body dancing on hillsides to a pair of
eyes
staring in the dark.
Depressions, impotency, sleeplessness...erotic
dispersion in languages, reading, games, music,
and gymnastics.
The prisoners built their own theater
which
testified to an increaible surfeit of
leisure.
A young sailor, forced into female roles,
soon
became the "town" darling, for by this time
they
called themselves a town, and elected a
mayor,
police, aldermen.
out of the shrewdness of his own soul or one of
his advisors'-a week's freedom for one convict
in each of his prisons. The choice was left to the
prisoners themselves and it was determined in
several ways. Sometimes by vote, sometimes by lot,
often by force. It was apparent that the chosen
must be a man of magic, virility, experience,
perhaps narrative skill, a man of possibility, in
short, a hero. Impossible situation at the
moment of freedom, impossible selection,
defining our world in its percussions.
astonishing vision. A gray film melts off the
eyes, and runs down the cheeks. Farewell.
Modern life is a journey by car. The
passengers
change terribly in their reeking seats, or
roam
from car to car, subject to unceasing
transformation.
Inevitable progress is made toward the
beginning
(there is no difference in terminals), as
we
slice through cities, whose ripped backsides
present
a moving picture of windows, signs,
streets,
buildings. Sometimes other vessels,
closed
worlds, vacuums, travel along beside to
move
ahead or fall utterly behind.
From the air we trapped gods, with the
gods'
omniscient gaze, but without their power to
be
inside minds and cities as they fly
above.
At that instant a jet from the air base crawled
in silence overhead. On the beach, children try
to leap into its spift shadow.
The bird or insect that stumbles into a
room
and cannot find the window. Because they
know
no "windows."
Wasps, poised in the window,
Excellent dancers,
detached, are not inclined
into our chamber.
Room of withering mesh
read love's vocabulary
in the green lamp
of tumescent flesh.
and closed themselves in chambers,
first trees and caves.
You never walk through mirrors
Male genitals are small faces
A nose hangs over a wall
These dry and secret triumphs, fought
A horror of empty spaces
In the seance, the shaman led. A sensuous
panic,
Dull lions prone on a watery beach.
Absent and peopled mirror, absorbent,
Door of passage to the other side,
Turn mirrors to the wall
or swim through windows.
above the public highways for the dubious
hygiene of loose tides of men whose
potential
lust endangered the fragile order of
power.
It is even reported that patrician ladies,
masked
and naked, sometimes offered themselves up
to
these deprived eyes for private excitements
of
their own.
of the voyeur. Not in a strictly clinical
or
criminal sense, but in our whole physical
and
stance before the world. Whenever we seek to
break
this spell of passivity, our actions are
cruel and
awkward and generally obsene, like an invalid
who
has forgotten how to walk.
forming trinities of thieves
and Christs
Fathers, sons, and ghosts.
and two half eyes, sad eyes,
mute and handless, multiply
an endless round of victories.
in stalls and stamped in prisons,
glorify our walls
and scorch our vision.
propagates this seal on private places.
deliberately evoked through drugs, chants,
dancing,
hurls the shaman into trance. Changed
voice,
convulsive movement. He acts like a madman.
These
professional hysterics, chosen precisely for
their
psychotic leaning, were once esteemed.
They
mediated between man and spirit-world. Their
mental
travels formed the crux of the religious life
of
the tribe.
The universe kneels at the swamp
to curiously eye its own raw
postures of decay
in the mirror of human consciousness.
passive to whatever visits
and retains its interest.
the soul frees itself in stride.
in the house of the new dead.