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Old 11-13-2020, 06:10 AM   #1
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In Memory of Jack Jevons

Dear Virginia,

I’ve culled some of the voices of your father from this site, and from emails and IMs that we shared over the years. I only knew him virtually via words, but I’m thankful I had the opportunity to communicate with him in that way. He was a complicated human, with a beyond-next-level imagination and wit, and an almost impeccable taste in music. He is a gamma-bright soul who will always shine upon you, the one true gift he yearned for in life.


The small man
Builds cages for everyone
He
Knows.
While the sage,
Who has to duck his head
When the moon is low,
Keeps dropping keys all night long
For the
Beautiful
Rowdy
Prisoners.

-Rumi



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If anyone would like to, please add additional writings, quotes, stories or Jevonsisms to this page.
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Old 11-13-2020, 06:11 AM   #2
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Re: In Memory of Jack Jevons

Just like any clever artist will tell you, it's about the process, not the result. If it becomes about the result, you are more than likely an entertainer, at best a comedian, addicted to the laughter of the audience; at the worst, you are a narcissist, devoid of respect for life as a whole.

This does not mean artists aren't assholes. We all know most of us are (me more than most). It means that the process must be respected as almost sacred, which (to go on a tangent) is why i have abandoned the last decade of my life, all its work, so that i can one day create several installation pieces about the process of that time, exorcising the work itself in a way that will bring catharsis to me and everyone involved: a ritual of reparations, if you will. Essentially, i will be turning the process of a failed decade into a series of pieces in themselves. Not sure how yet. Maybe dynamite.

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Old 11-13-2020, 06:12 AM   #3
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Re: In Memory of Jack Jevons

mydriasis

A lantern hangs in rain
over the center of an ancient forest;
overgrown and twisted, it keeps you at a distance.
Each raindrop, like a child's tear in the eye
of nature's looming ambivalence
briefly bends white light across their surface,
weaves a nimbus of firefly arcs that each, alone
and bound as one expand the seed of their source
before that moment is gracefully swept behind
and everything is alone again, left to mature,
fall out of themselves to the dimly lit canopy,
be harvested by the mire and murk of the forest.

The lantern feeds the rain which feeds the forest,
where everything lends its will to shadow farmers.
Perched in the shade of the trees, they paint
themselves on the darkness like smoke on teeth.
They wait for the moon.
Step back, keep the light and rain in your eye.
This forest is a sickle;
they will harvest your pupils from the mountaintops
and waterfalls of perception if they can,
leave your husk hanging on a wire in smoke.
Stay out of the forest, stand in the rain and
keep the lantern's white light in in your eye.

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Old 11-13-2020, 06:13 AM   #4
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Re: In Memory of Jack Jevons

Taking Walks

With me
or without,
there will be trees
dancing in wind.
They will sleep
beside a road whose
builders have long since ignored it.
Poppies will come in summer.
They will mail their future to
the aforementioned
on the dancing partner of
the sleeping.


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Old 11-13-2020, 06:14 AM   #5
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Re: In Memory of Jack Jevons

- industrial sleepwalking –

Punish the skin around my nails, like it's their fault,
like they even know about my heads' secret location;
if they could grasp the need for something Draconian,
devoid of testimony or scales:
a cyclops swinging guillotines as cymbals,
perhaps then they might be justified.

Perhaps the crab out there 23 years ago has something to say
about tragedy?
Not impossible.
Hardly believable.

Perhaps it's that dusty kitchen
only ever lit with the soft tungsten of
nostalgia: that disease,
that limp raft;
perhaps unclean events make this blood
do its languid dance?

Not amorphous.
Hardly ichor.

Suppose I’ll sit blindfolded,
running my little pattern in the dark.


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Old 11-13-2020, 06:14 AM   #6
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Re: In Memory of Jack Jevons

-time machine-

10 years ago, on a page just like this one,
same weight, same shape,
a man stood dog-eared and blank in a room
barren but for old carpet and dust;
he watched the loops and rolls
of a sparrow through a thin,
imperfect pane in a crooked window;
in a misunderstood tense, I told you that
rain sunk down along the contours of the glass
almost purposefully, in convoys like a liquid metaphor
of his mind, the frame rate and cadence of his memories, each
droplet a note of a cellist in the soundtrack pitter patter of fear
and distrust across his tin roof soul;
but the bird had tricked his attention up,
away from the traffic, into the fabric of the sky
where two wings symmetrically sew themselves
in figure eights, an invisible calligraphy;
his mood was briefly split like a rainbow from light,
cast blue on unpaid bills,
red on tomorrow,
green on his room
and shone purple out the lone window;
disappointment folded in on itself and was sent further
and further away with each stitch and dip of the bird;
he followed the bird,
both blue-green eyes each baited with
the resurrection of a once long-gone perfect day
that squirmed up from his mud--almost in a panic--
and onto the windowsill.
10 minutes ago, i wanted to fill this page
with a painting of butterfly in your open palm
on a rainy day
under an umbrella we both held.


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Old 11-13-2020, 06:15 AM   #7
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Re: In Memory of Jack Jevons

Watching Water Move

One stone skips across calm water,
sending ripples into and over one another.
Once solid things disappear into gradient waves, interfere
with themselves. Twilight folds and crumples above the trembling
face of a child, whose avian features are muted under the frantic wildlife
and heavens. The moon blossoms into nine rings, shoots a silver light teardrop
into the dissonance, before returning it to the surface of the lake.
One stone collapses, elastic
life returns from chaos.


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Old 11-13-2020, 06:16 AM   #8
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Re: In Memory of Jack Jevons

snow, flake probability-

60 minutes per hour.
24 hours in a day.
60 x 24 = 1440
1440 x 365 = 525,600
Astrologers believe that, by corresponding the position of the heavenly bodies with the exact minute and location of your particular crotch of origin, every nuance concerning yourself can be revealed.
There are almost 7 billion people on Earth as of April 1, 2008.
There are 525,600 minutes in a year.
This is an overture, not science.
7,000,000,000 / 525,600 = 13,318.113
Earth's surface area is 510,072,000 km²
1 m² = 0.000001 km²
510,072,000 / 0.000001 = 510,072,000,000,000 m² on which to be squeezed out, assuming a normal human can be birthed on a squared meter.
Nothing is static, so the yearly astrological values attributed to any minute of the year and point on the sphere will change over the course....
It has been rumoured that there are more people alive than have ever died. Supposing that is true: add 6,000,000,000.
13,000,000,000 people, give or take, have existed on this planet.
Humans have existed for about 195,000 years, in their current, balding, form.
525,600 x 195,000 = 102,492,000,000 minutes of humanity, each with their own corresponding and unique star chart, so long as 1 of the some 13,000,000,000 beings crept out of the dark then.

-snow, flake probability-

Walk with me and my candle, down
our tunnel.
Pay attention to the things I show you.
Never mind those windows
(out which there are dark, succinct oceans of nearly vacuums
and distant, spherical lanterns
framed by the moist walls,
small bugs and vermin whose
shadow bodies make what little
light we have seem to writhe.
i can almost taste--).



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Old 11-13-2020, 06:16 AM   #9
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Re: In Memory of Jack Jevons

The Art House Bonfire

Something seeps from a pipeline between two rivers and ignites, divides
the sky with a diffuse flame. It tears at the limbs of infant clouds, solders
them into obtuse, limbic conglomerates: moaning, distorted lumps swelling
inside themselves, tugging at their own skin, sinking.
There is a fate in the pipeline, hiding beneath
its rusted iron as cobwebs awaiting
their turn down through the venturi.
You cannot not run.
They never chase,
but sit patiently in their shell,
biting their nails to the to the tune of the
seconds of our world being gnawed off old bone; until the overture,
brief muscular flame that it is
takes its leave of the proscenium over the empty rows
of our great, tired auditorium, bows through the damp
cloth and piled kindling at the entrance out to crowded,
filthy streets, shrinking the pupils of newborns, turtles
and featherless birds, turning
their tears and sweat
into steam.

Then, silence. As the cobwebs
creep from cracks in the pipeline--
across the battlefields, the temples,
the lies and the liars, the princes and
poppies, muscles and tendons strewn
and scattered lifeless through the past and old novels--
wrap themselves around everything--you, me--while whispering
"harlequin", pulls us closer, binds our deeds, subjectivity, until we collapse
under ourselves as the great mistake and disappear, for now, into Nothing.


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Old 11-13-2020, 06:17 AM   #10
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Re: In Memory of Jack Jevons

let the music fit the mood-

Fell out of a dream
down a spiral staircase and
face-first on maps.
Dust,
ubiquitous, indifferent
seems
to serve itself
up as a tendon,
but perhaps i bumped my head.
The atlas turns to flat bone
etched with metres and altitudes.
The whole scope of the space between
takes affect,
the dust turns to collagen,
grabs hold of every cell
and resolves me into a mouse.
Now the bone is like an ocean
of right angles,
line segments,
it seems even farther one to one;
no birds,
no bugs
no bugs.
Let the music fit the mood
and sail me out of here.


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Old 11-13-2020, 06:18 AM   #11
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Re: In Memory of Jack Jevons

-stale (the tramp)-

Just pebbles
rolling our eyes
back to old days,
sticks and wet moss;
they listen in tongues,
echoes of a missing arbiter’s campfire

whispering in nothing.

Just gears,
holding old Fort
Such-and-Such
with that tenacity
foreign to all wisdom:
echoes of the deaf.

Just rocks and metal in my throat.


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Old 11-13-2020, 06:18 AM   #12
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Re: In Memory of Jack Jevons

Awake.

Birds are written on a wet wire outside.
The line sags toward the street
with each character, artery, brush stroke.

A snapshot topography: rain and noise
pulse second to second in cones,
each truncated at adolescence
(their tangents, brief souls
untouchable as the rest
are dissolved into trees,
snuck through windows,
render the midst of brand new
dying forms).

Fading into sounddust, puddles,
still they veil what--if any--
code is draped
in damp life across the sky,
between disinterested margins.


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Old 11-13-2020, 06:19 AM   #13
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Re: In Memory of Jack Jevons

Dream:

To keep the river on the right like Carroll said,
let my left arm, exposed, grow colder, deeper
in pants slick with the lightning only seen on
that side. The water protects my right shell
listless and baggy, but a good shell
nonetheless. How fast can one clubbed foot
cleave the willow sprouts and thin weeds:
slap in the face
beaten by candlelight
never coming back
dust in the driveway
needle smiles
blue fingers scratching banquet cloth translucent
nails refracting dim light eons above resolved
as faces in the wet grass knee-deep
like a severed head staring at
horror nowhere anymore nowhere
present except wherever
the dorsal roots
lay pointless fragments
telling stories
in slow motion
to ants scrambling in my palm.

Keep the river on the right like Carroll said.
Nevermind the memories whistling around
your ankles and thighs and skin. Nevermind
the fangs in the grass.
Mark tracks.


This, like all things, fades.


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Old 11-13-2020, 06:19 AM   #14
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Re: In Memory of Jack Jevons

Awake.

Still awake:

Today nothing seems to fit.
Each new wave etches chaos on the walls,
strips the screws, collapses
scrap after scrap of paper and
time into another echolalic nightmare
on my fucking floor.
A parquet graveyard
far as I can see: pale, crumpled headstones,
incompatible, unstable
waveforms and time lost, lifeless
on my fucking floor.
The door screws itself
farther and farther
into my head with the sick joke
of its purpose.
It slides through itself,
down the hall yet stays exactly where it always was.
They oscillate, laughing indivisibly.
Iron out the corpses,
gently lay these two down
beside themselves;
let them get accustomed to their other dimensions:
five beats per minute,
with history,
thirty-one beats per minute,
missing the good parts,
eighty-four beats per minute,
the mirror,
chimera,
the river,
flatline. Parallel.
Nothing to write home about today.


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Old 11-13-2020, 06:20 AM   #15
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Re: In Memory of Jack Jevons

-gifts-

If I could film the falling of every leaf
since the day you were born
in three dimensions,
catch each step in their final dance as a still frame,
melt into the iris and fuse my thumbprint on the recording medium
as they weave fractal geographies of light, air, inertia through me
at thirty-three and one third frames per second--
if I could later knit what i then felt into a mosaic
revolving twenty-four times per minute,
longer and wider than God,
lay the prints on one another in an empty fishtank
deeper than this page,
paint it purple,
make a pinhole at the narrow end like a wish--
gift every frame their dream: a new dimension--
bring the universe inside with you all,
lock the still-moist lid behind me while
emptying magnesium from my pockets,
piling it under the spotlight of our new sun
at the center of centers of the room--:
and borrowing your last match
perhaps words would appear in white smoke
like the cries of orphans,
and they would bear our ghosts to every breath that pursed
"I love you".


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Old 11-13-2020, 06:21 AM   #16
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Re: In Memory of Jack Jevons

-janus dyslexic-

There are faces in the trees.

Walked in circles through time
to find globes blown in remorse,
wrapped and scattered--like dreams--
in distractions,
dropped and bound
across the gravity of fasting stars.

Approach a mirror
at the center of the desert
gripping every unresolved moment.
Mould them into marbles.
Slip them into a silk bag.
Align the muscles
of dissonant sandstorms into chords,
guide them around your heart,
let them play, vibrate,
sing you into a cloud.
Sift through the glass
as a million refractions of yourself.

Welcome.

There are faces wrapped in silk.
This leaden otherworld bathed in crescent moonlight
presents a perfect sterility.
Open the bag.
Take the marbles out one by one.
Weigh them in your hand.
Press your palms together
and let them sink into your veins
until the bag is emptied;
let it fall like dead skin to the frictionless
silver earth and disappear.
You are the silk Now,
the marbles, liquid fireflies,
a perfect cast of your yesterdays
in perpetual motion
running white light figure eights
like air through windmills.
Glow from your eyes and solar plexus.
Wash this vacant landscape away,
thank it with your new heart.

Dissolving under the proof of love
it implodes, pushes you back
through the mirror.

Returned, sunk again into the real
like a cripple lost in a sea
whose currents of memory and regret swell
around the bed frame, spinning you,
deciding whatever next and if
you walk again.
The walls are made of past faces,
curtains smirk in the tepid breeze,
veil the lantern light of the dream.
Clipped wings fall to the current
with a boiled heart cased in lead.
Three dog-eared snapshots slide under the door,
barely a fistful.
A sick-sounding owl sinks its talons
into the ground.
The alarm clock goes off like a gun.


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Old 11-13-2020, 06:21 AM   #17
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Re: In Memory of Jack Jevons

We sit at the last rung of a ladder
looking down at burning bridges;
we shift into illusion,
consider ourselves bricks, some
solid tile in a great design.

Clever trick,
to turn a perfect synapse
to stone and mortar. Better still
to make it seem some holy post,
plant the standard of mediocrity
on its breast, and the next day
mail a postcard of a bucket
upside down within a bucket
beside a bowl of fruit glazed
with hairspray under a sickly
sweet neon light;
the caption sprawled along the
straight lines of the opposite
wall is in the language of Mars,
written in black lipstick.
The address is illegible.
The ladder rocks back and forth,
back and forth, back and forth
in the gales consuming rung
after rung like stock footage
of wars does honour and courage.


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Old 11-13-2020, 06:22 AM   #18
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Re: In Memory of Jack Jevons

A ladder is braced in the eye of a cave painter,
stretches to the edge of wakefulness as she
sweeps organic amber and bark-like burnt sienna
from her fingers as tufts of golden clouds,
lines them with saliva.
Each rung has been scratched and whittled as we
sketched our path out toward the membrane of
our fluorescent consciousness, shedding pictures
with the flex of each palm, where our fingers
engrave a moment on a rung.


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Old 11-13-2020, 06:23 AM   #19
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Re: In Memory of Jack Jevons

Despair would be an excellent geometry student.
An encyclopedia of infinite possible permutations
for what you can fit in a box would beach itself inside him,
page after page of patterns pressing their spines
up on his shores like pinpricks on fingerprints;
there to sprout legs, crawl up, spread over the hills
and valleys of his mind like cracks in ice, sculpting death’s
sunken eyes and fence-lips on your face from the inside out:
digging him a damp midnight hollow in your temporal lobe


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Old 11-13-2020, 06:23 AM   #20
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Re: In Memory of Jack Jevons

Written on Brandon’s Birthday

A river picks up what it lives beside,
a life indifferent to what falls inside
off a boot, bank or cloud.

A river represents a divide.

A river is just a cross section of atoms,
a translucent plate passing by us
on its way.
They might see something, but they won't
share a thought


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Old 11-13-2020, 06:24 AM   #21
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Re: In Memory of Jack Jevons

A lonely streetlight through the rear window,
tip an adjective in the ashtray.
Lighten the load.


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Old 11-13-2020, 06:24 AM   #22
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Re: In Memory of Jack Jevons

Clouds are photographs of themselves, and yesterday's pools. every time i look out the window, i see a bridge between minutes, a land of ponds and pebbles. it's just an analog dream, looking at the rain fall, watching the clouds change


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Old 11-13-2020, 06:25 AM   #23
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Re: In Memory of Jack Jevons

Concords overhead
always going somewhere better,
somewhere brighter than the other planes--
even sound could not keep up with their anticipation,
row on row overflowing to be somewhere new--
engine parts too proud to deliver such magnificent
cargo that their own whispers and cheers lay
behind them in identical twin streaks of fume
and split air--
water laps across a face, summer wind pushes
locust leaves across a pale, thin chest
drifting under, above, across the surface
of a pool in an ambling spirograph pattern--
a dream sifts up:
silence and freedom, knowing
that future efforts have
one day earned a seat
to a new world.


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Old 11-13-2020, 06:26 AM   #24
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Re: In Memory of Jack Jevons

When i said i wished i was someone else, i meant i wish i was a real man, a regular guy who likes cars and books about war. I wish i was consistent. I wish i was a father. I wish i could love myself every day. I wish the last 11 years of my life had been someone else's. I wish i wasn't such a spaz, always making rash decisions in an attempt to change my nature, only to have them whittle and wane back out of view and leave me once again with a man in the mirror who is too honest to lie to pretend he isn't constantly ashamed of himself. I wish i wasn't a writer. We're all the same, and very few of us are friends with fellow writers. When i said i wished i was someone else, i meant that i wish my future could be someone else's problem. I wished to be a workman, or a ploughman out in a field, not someone who spends his life creating things that don't need to exist. I wished for my poems to be peach trees, or blankets or canoes; anything at all that matters. I wished my poems made people's hearts feel the way my head does when i write them.


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Old 11-13-2020, 06:27 AM   #25
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Re: In Memory of Jack Jevons

Yes, i am a writer. And i am slowly aching my way into my voice. I need to always remember my anger, my allergy to hypocrites and darkness; i also need now to be calm, be an adult, despite my utter lack of example for what an adult should or could be.

I have spent so much time in so much fear. I'm still scared, but... I'm still scared, full stop. My intuition is too much to bear sometimes, that the slightest lie will set me off. My psychologist has informed me that my TLE has a cumulative affect on moods. Again, i am faced with the concern of how much of my life is governed by epilepsy.

“What must it be, then, to bear the manifold tortures of hell forever? Forever! For all eternity! Not for a year or an age but forever. Try to imagine the awful meaning of this. You have often seen the sand on the seashore. How fine are its tiny grains! And how many of those tiny grains go to make up the small handful which a child grasps in its play. Now imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from the earth to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad, extending to remotest space, and a million miles in thickness, and imagine such an enormous mass of countless particles of sand multiplied as often as there are leaves in the forest, drops of water in the mighty ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on animals, atoms in the vast expanse of air. And imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried away all. Yet at the end of that immense stretch time not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended. At the end of all those billions and trillions of years eternity would have scarcely begun. And if that mountain rose again after it had been carried all away again grain by grain, and if it so rose and sank as many times as there are stars in the sky, atoms in the air, drops of water in the sea, leaves on the trees, feathers upon birds, scales upon fish, hairs upon animals – at the end of all those innumerable risings and sinkings of that immeasurably vast mountain not even one single instant of eternity could be said to have ended; even then, at the end of such a period, after that eon of time, there mere thought of which makes our very brain reel dizzily, eternity would have scarcely begun.”

I'm nearly humble, or nearly sufficiently close to humility, that i might actually begin my life as a writer. I'm still fearful, but at agonizing last i know what i fear: success, and failure, simultaneously and in identical weight, proportion, and gravity. My punctuation comes looser that it used to, i feel like i'm talking to others, rather than editing after editing, until all that's left is meticulously-organized violence and masturbatory pyrrhics. I'm nearly past my own genius, because for the second time in my life i feel like i've killed it all away, salted my fields. If such despair is required, so be it. I would much prefer to hate my own writing than to stare at it like Narcissus, starving on my own infatuation with being.

Now, the question is this: what do i want to share? Characters have never made much sense to me, because the forces most prevalent in my life take so many different forms that it truly is impossible to distinguish people as anything secular. If i run too far with that, i'll be left with another chapbook nobody wants to read, or worse, something seen as deliberately unintelligible, as such, worthless.

Genius and greatness are not synonyms. Genius is simply being incapable of doing what you're told. This is not an act of aggression, defiance, or any of the other trash thrown upon us by cowards and the dull. It is an act of confusion, of being wholly unaware, absent forever of the feeling of having one's thinking predetermined by external forces. It's perfect adherence to quoting only one person for your entire life, to slowly, painfully realizing life on life's terms, without ever conceding to take it for granted.

Yes, Descartes is passé, but i love imagining the madness of a deeply religious man, a religious genius, wrestling with the thought of being God's dream, nothing of his own Will or consequence, some dalliance of his Blessed Virgin--did he drink, did he sleep, was there music he drowned himself in until the sun was too bright or the night too dark?--with her grace, but without her, completely alone because he can't be sure if he is even real--what a fucking disaster, all this life, teeming with potential, and it might be the sparks of glucose-powered neurons in a being so infinite that it can never be known--to be robbed of the geocentric wet nurse and abandoned, alone in the night--this is so unfair! What kind of God would imagine me to feel such a way!--finally, collapsing under the weight of his own genius, he resolves: I am thinking, aren't I?

The best he can do to keep himself from losing his mind is ask himself the question again, reworded as though it were its own answer: "Do i exist, what exists; well, i'm thinking about whether or not i exist, right?"
Truly a dizzying intellect, if ever there was one. And a total fucking genius. How many of us are willing to live for the terrifying questions, rather than feign knowing the answer? Too many. But that's the path, where i am on my own; i'm trying.

"What, after all, is a clock? Without your grownup it is nothing. It is the grownup who winds it, who sets it back or ahead, who takes it to the watchmaker to be checked, cleaned, and when necessary repaired. Just as with the cuckoo that stops calling too soon, just as with upset saltcellars, spiders seen in the morning, black cats on the left, the oil portrait of Uncle that falls off the wall because the nail has come loose in the plaster, just as in a mirror, grownups see more in and behind a clock than any clock can justify."

I'll be a father someday. That will be the amends portion of the me/Dave portion of this curse. He will be forgiven when i am free, by way of my own proof that i am not beyond salvation. He is forgiven then, in the same song that reproaches, shames him for all eternity as a willing agent of these demons, a cognisant player on a stage where he was born and to which he was bolted. His bonds are his own to release, for that there is no cure my forgiveness offers. I am actually less able than a complete stranger to assist him in that, but Dave's psychological and otherwise conventionally empirical concerns are a manifesto in themselves, even just if analyzed vis a vis his and my entire family's reluctance to indulge me in any truth about others, all the while bathing themselves constantly in the minutiae--each atom of experience and gossip--of my own life.

I'm learning, slowly, to embrace the double standard of terms in my life and the one surrounding it; i'm trying to do that without moping, because after all, i might deserve it. I'm also trying to accept that it might really be as i always felt, that this might be my last spin before escape velocity finally, sweetly releases me from this planet.
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Old 11-30-2020, 02:49 AM   #26
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Re: In Memory of Jack Jevons

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