Work of the Day, While of the Day

You are trying and striving, working and failing, scraping by, until you feel dead inside and are all but willing to say you are done unless you work it out, then you work it out - a bolt from the blue, some say - but it's really just logical, or at least it's a result. It has happened hundreds of times you can be sure.

This is how it always happens.

And every time the near death is real. Like a walking shell, taking care of business but clueless. You want to stay home, fuck work. Just sleep. Screw that. Hours go by, you put yourself right, somehow. That circumstance or set-up. Then the leap, which after all is just progression, or a bit of mental-solar accounting adding up.

Tell me, what literary theory accounts for that? None that I know of. So we are left with this and religion, or just this and us.

I like the religion add-on, because I recognize that I don't make sense in a way I can fully account for or depend on, or explain in a form that would prompt replication of the experiment or effect. I have so little to say for something matter so much to me that would help or prompt a meaningful reply.

All too common, this dithering. The white coat and fresh-cleaned test tubes. Charts. Autumn light, lite. I can hardly explain the last few weeks, let alone a life. So here's the loose outline style.

Try to write poems. Fail.

Write religious poems. Fail.

Get idea about Open Catholic as a means of relating the dual/hinged accountability of self-identification and granting all others their identity. Idea about publishing religious books/poems/literatures under Open Catholic.

....dying inside...

Writing today this prayerful text, with no mention of prayer, God, Lord, light, hands, etc., etc. -

 

blue fall rain

stay desk rain

tops fall blue

then stay when

 

 

wind stop rain

come leap that

this hold near

lean into then

 

leaf stil glas

send iron send

come stay that

said iron blue

and this contemplative text -

 

The ironic one, I lost his number,

a shuffling of clogs, taxi signals

before we could adjust - which has

nothing to do with work. Look, I’m

on a tight schedule. Language is a

record of the liquid setting. This

can be forced. Versus this sort of

“narrative” or “facts” we want, or

we make the appropriate noises. So

it’s contract day. I love how they

just kind of drop by with the look

the eyes like coins of the vending

machine of love. You do this again

 



So, this is what I have needed to do. It is new as being written in the mind of the Open Catholic project, which, clearly should not be merely conventional "Christian" writing, though I can see opportunities to usurp myself and include my own rosary texts and ideas, and drawings, whether one thing or another, etc.

 



It's funny is what it is. I went outside for a cigarette (I almost always write in quiet little bars, this one being the North Bar on Division, near home) and thought, well, Lord, you had this all figured out, didn't you.

 

But this is not a religious blog. It is a blog firmly dedicated to concrete formalism, or form as realized in the visual, in what is present; or the concretion of procedure. One does not animate or serve language or the reader with abstract terms in one's attempt to provide principal or at least secondary materials. I am religious and so blame God; if I am religious poorly, blame me.

 

I am interested of late in the form of social occurrences. Ugh. That there is a lot to unload there. I mean, at the practical end of the spectrum, that how our actions or procedures can be represented or replicated; and at the more abstract end, how it is that one can make something occur, and the representations that are available to oneself in these acts.

 

And, so, this is not a religious blog. But let me say, that the process, if that is what it is, that I alluded to in opening this post, has been in place in my experience for a long, long time. As far back as I can recall since I began functioning creatively, so that would be over thirty years now. Yes, and perhaps it is simply a matter of the course of inclinations following the formal logic of effective outcomes, but my understanding has changed, or clarified. I knew all along of course that clarity was not only mine to be grateful for, that something more mattered. If I have a name or title to whom I address my gratitude, or amusement, or humility, is that such a bad thing?

 

This is not a religious blog, and only marginally a poetry or theory blog. What is the recurrent notion, underwritten?

 

We cannot afford not to fail; we cannot afford not to succeed, gloriously.

 

Okay. Maybe it is a religious blog. Maybe all art is at its base coined from a religious (or at least faith-driven) mentality. Ode to Rimbaud, etc.