My Aurelia: Le Rêve de la Vie

            My Aurelia: Le Rêve de la Vie. The case of the famous poet Gérard de Nerval whose real name was Labrunie. Invented a name for himself with Dr. Blanche, no tabula rasa but an erased palimpsest. “I managed to color this group of figures by squeezing the juice of grasses and flowers.” Revivifying and reifying, imbuing representation with the essences of things themselves, sanctifying and sacrificial, perversely vital. Diagnosis: Erotomania. “I lost myself in dream before the beloved idol.”

            Achilles Rizzoli’s symbolization – people embodied as architectural space. Buildings propose a city (Y.T.T.E.; Yield To Total Elation,) civilization nurtured by a suckling she-wolf. His mother, at the foot of whose bed he slept his entire life until her death, invariably depicted as a cathedral, Emma’s Temple. Sending hand-drawn birthday cards to her every year at his own address for twenty years after her death. In the absence of detachment she continued inside him as an idealized object. A.T.E.: Achilles Tectonic Exhibit. A few neighborhood children came to view the one-man show in his sitting room. Art filled the void he felt left by the inability to engage with people sexually and socially: a 43-year old virgin prince.

            Henry Darger, a bandage roller/lavatory cleaner, discovered by landlord, photographer Nathan Lerner, months before his death. A miserable childhood: mother dead when he was four giving birth to his sister who was given up for adoption. Abandoned by father at age 8. At 12, committed to Lincoln Asylum for Feebleminded Children. The loss of his sister had proved pivotal. Collecting stories and photos of kidnap and murder victims (“the Great Drotegar,”) he removed, collaged, and traced pictures, a process akin to adoption. Devout Catholic, attended mass daily. Diagnosis: masturbator.

            Malcolm McKesson’s drawings, erections of sexual excitation coupled with anxious torment and basic asexuality. The good boy syndrome: the double bind of growing up vs. remaining innocent, a world dominated by internally strong but socially impotent women. Hypnagogic sadomasochism, a life spent in servitude to powerful women (a la Crumb’s Mr. Natural). Matriarchy is freedom in bondage: “Mistress reducing man to rage.”

            Morton Bartlett, Harvard-educated, orphaned at age 8, made an alternate world of half-sized children with complete hand-made wardrobes, photographed and kept safe locked away, a replacement family, sublimations for a divided self. Aloise Corbaz’s lifelong infatuation with Emperor Wilhelm II, her love letters, filling in of gaps, covering the entire surface of the paper, as though the biophobic’s nature is to abhor a vacuum, abandonment. “It came to kissing. They were embarrassed. So they wore glasses.”

            Memory functions by fixing things in organically spatialized forms, semantic mapping onto neural networks. Roland Wilkie’s “fearless water,” unremitting and brutal, sublimated pedophilia and voluntary commitment. A mania or obsession, a compulsive attachment to favorite materials and infinite repetitions of the same forms. Martin Ramirez, making a virtue of necessity, flattened paper cups and glued them together with a paste made from his spit, mashed potatoes, and chewed bread, metabolizing the confused outer world into art. An entire dream world like that of the afterlife in the Egyptian Book of the Dead constructed out of stages and tunnels, with horses and trains. Karl Genzil, Prinzhorn sculptor: “A piece of wood in front of me. There is a hypnosis in it. If I follow it, something comes of it. Otherwise there is going to be a fight.”

Source: John M. MacGregor's The Discovery of the Art of the Insane (Princeton, Oxford: 1989)

Six days I rested dreamed yawned read then stirred

picked up my pen heaved retched and spewed
while all the world’s climatologists were
going apeshit over the core sample studies
dissecting the evidence for heavenly signs

of obstacles reading data like bird entrails
aggregate numbers for distributive aridity
conniving with the nightly news audience
to assuage several degrees of odious duty

incongruously sedate incomparably sedulous
irrigating with astute results high altitude
timber sales so that forest fires don’t spread
into the nimby namby-pamby of residue

slumped in the backseat of a crop duster plane
while circling doing fly-bys of the Pentagon
I told you I had never escaped from
Cape Canaveral wearing adult diapers

***

in the pecking order of the desert birds
in the alpha males dominant growl
they don’t call them the family jewels
for nothing in the throes of filial piety

after all I too was a consumer in the vale
of the mighty dollar doing the palooka
polka down rural alleyways braying
incontinently I’m doomed we’re all doomed

manifest destiny mission fulfilled
ships remodeled and outfitted as shopping malls
mixed steel and reinforced cement construction
you could never be too stern or too silent

may the priests of commerce smile and confer
upon you their blessings lining your pockets
extending a line of high-grade credit rating
on planet Honda every sales day is a holiday

***

the trade papers raved the stock markets rallied
cell towers lined the main streets of steel city
U.S.A. Gary Indiana even sadder than Toledo
scanning the skies your soothsayer-advocates

The best way to grow hair is to listen

The best way to grow hair is to listen;
bears keeping in mind it’s bound to happen.
You prick up what you’ve got and the world
is a mystery (all out of doors, of course.)

Most of this conversation is automotive.
The cars fume and hum; an ambulance chases
away silence with a wail, wagging its tail.
Here are all the dogs that have gone missing.

Four generations of one family passes
your open window. An old woman says
we come in pairs, old man John, young Johnny,
grandchild Jana, grandmother Johanna.

The toddler staring at her attentively
though pre-verbal understands and forms a
world-view of radical subjectivity.
Car doors slam shut flapping like loose mouth parts.

Splat: fish or a wallet hitting the street.
An airplane roams roaring homeward port-wise,
its prolonged, distant, percussive hum and whirl
as though a boiler had grown wings and snarls.

The fifth trick tire of a tripping tired wheel,
its thread stutters and struts, sputters, rattles.
The crickets are pretending it's Christmas.
Somewhere far away the sea is singing.

A dead man walks home alone saddened.

Six days I rested dreamed yawned read then stirred

Gabriel García Marquez’ Shiner

The best way to grow hair is to listen