Godlike by Richard Hell

Author:Richard Hell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-01-18T16:00:00+00:00

12

We are not physicists nor metaphysicians: we must he Egyptologists. For there are no mechanical laws between things, nor voluntary communication between minds.

—Gilles Dcleuze

Slobbering mud and rubies. Cities without evenings.

I’ve been trying to get what I can out of Mallarme the last few days. I don’t read French. I just go with my stack of translations and their footnotes and commentaries. Mallarme loved Baudelaire and so do I—and so did T. Mallarme is harder to get through the language barrier though. But then I realized all poetry is translation. My understanding of him has its reality. It’s legitimate. T. told me about Kurt Godel, way back then.

“That gutter drain [in Paris at the end of the 19th century], slobbering mud and rubies, is the mouth of a tomb, buried church, a subterranean temple (as in Egypt): the flickering muzzle of the god-jackal Anubis, guide to the underworld. While, above, the flame—inverted pubic-hair triangle—of the oil-lamp streetlight rises from the wick which gathers as a storm, as a storm gathers, the insults which comprise it, and the flame still always reaches upward, perversely, no matter how the lamp sways: poetry of Baudelaire. Baudelaire. Not funeral wreaths dried in cities without evenings could serve as offerings to him when the very city’s shimmering reality is the ghost, the soul, of Baudelaire, like an atmospheric element we must breathe even if it kills us.”

[What are “cities without evening” but reality in poetry?]

Paragraphs on pages do seem like clouds, like the interesting dirt behind the detergent container in the cupboard. And the men go somersaulting through them, physically fighting, suggesting sexual stories on the scale of cracked teacups.

Those who deliver the new poetry make it possible for the world to go on. Otherwise we would falter and harm ourselves as the repressed and neurotic do. (Though no one would even notice.) Because nothing is known that can’t be expressed, and the existing, but unexpressed, is the source of buggy behavior. (Though no one would even notice.) [New poetry shows us God: how things are.]

The poets aren’t supposed to be beautiful or sane. Shaggy, itchy, preoccupied, mal-educateds. It’s a dirty and stressful and antisocial calling.

[Does consciousness really evolve?]

Cartoons as paradise. Wistful yearning for cartoons. Cartoons as eternity. Daffy Duck, Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Woody Woodpecker, Roadrunner... The Simpsons count too. The sparkle of Daffy’s oily feathers in the eyes of Bart. Maniacally cackling amidst the mint-condition can of Rumford s Baking Powder, celluloid earring, Speedy Gonzales, the latest from Helen Topping Miller’s fertile escritoire, a sheaf of suggestive pixon greige, deckle-edged stock... Animated cartoons and comic books the pinnacle of the 20th century. Walt Disney’s Pinocchio. Oh, I will diffuse exquisitely in a mist of brave surrender to desire for entrance into great cartoons. Can I not be rewarded for this? If I think of a sunset landscape panorama for Porky Pig beckoning to me on my deathbed, can’t I get some points? Do I have a witness as I swing up over the horizon like a boy on a fishing expedition? I think I do.

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