On 07.23.21 Mary was unable to write much, haunted and paralyzed by that apparition all those years ago—now making residence again somewhere deep in her mind. She had a day full of distrait, disinhibition, and discountenance—deliberate and unseen.
(these were all she did)
“His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald / “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”
this lacks a title
there are no words in bold to be found here
it’s disjointed and attenuated
there’s distortion to static
don’t panic
it’s all under control thought many
(but said no one ever)
this writing lacks images
no ideas but in things
(said a wise man)
you will find nothing here
but attrition
and contrition
(you may return to your regular programming)
“If there’s one thing you can say about mankind
There’s nothing kind about man
You can drive out nature with a pitch fork
But it always comes roaring back”
— Tom Waits / “Misery Is the River of the World”
Minimalist clap trap insouciance get away from my baroque personage. Someone once said they were transpecies extraordinaire, and someone cut in and quailed: surrender your gender; then an acerbic other cut in sniping: exploiters, exploiters, exploiters while standing in gray back-alley New York. Some tinkling, and someone singing this is the day, followed by a slew of pimply-faced youths miming the lyrics and someone doing an accordionist’s job at playing as if they were in earnest. What did it mean as it flashed by, a mere whir of postulates without proofs—proofs without antecedents. And the best you can do now is remember something you read from Kierkegaard, who was too much religious, (and worse a christian, just as you had been hoodwinked into when you were too young to do anything about it) for your palate, but it was an incisive leap on his part, that century and a half ago: “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” The angst-y freedom to be a serf to your lifestyle, to your politics, to your country, to your family, to your life and how you’ve lived it … and it dawns upon you in ever sharper cubist shards—it’s awful. It’s offal. It’s awful offal. Oh, take another shot of distilled teenage epistemological tripe and go back to your dark corner counting the moldy efflorescences on your shower stall. Really! No one ever.
“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”
— Søren Kierkegaard / The Concept of Anxiety
If properly designed the machine will kill and photograph us simultaneously. It could be a best seller!
Oh, the schadenfreude we’ll feel the day a billionaire blows himself up rocketing toward escape velocity—no one ever escapes.
“If we can fool ourselves into believing we’re happy, aren’t we, in fact, happy?”
— Elisa Gabbert / “Picture Yourself Happy”
Mary has a budget of eleven nails—
She scores her shy puppet
On a cross that revolves on the ceiling fan—
In her austere grey room.
“Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow …”
— T.S. Eliot / “The Hollow Men”
Small sharply defined puffs—
No heat, no air compressors,
Gaskets, rubber seals, rubber feet—
Cloud-like, a shy homunculus,
Trapped beneath a 5 o’clock crowd.
“In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!”
— Allen Ginsberg / “A Supermarket in California”
On July 17, 2021, Mary Arroyo wrote a cut-up poem “Burroughs/Gysin” style—based on Leonie Adams’s “Midsummer”—in her journal:
star-break silver stanzas
the bluebonnet hydrosphere
the slow-know kiss
the jewel carbuncular
my air color chamber
my starbreak grasses
the spurn of the moon
my carnation silver color deep
the all go day bed
the dust pallor changing
to brightened summer
the clay dew waters mark
earthlight as honey shore
the air risen lovely
my frost earth dying by color catch
time fruits
star-break waters gain before the flood
baffled berry amber like the moon’s breaking
the deep celestial fall
beyond the jewel sink chambers
the grasses moon-pressed and flower
a silver issue
“I have taken to photographing
my every moment
in an attempt to locate
the place where I lost myself.”
— Cynthia Cruz / “Phosphorescence”
on 07/16/2021 Mary Arroyo writes:
today i‘ll make a short film & call it pansophism: the pretense is the matter—there will be someone with ague & someone arguing: “why didn’t you take better care of yourself?” a sweet shimmering sound will rain down upon disturbed souls…
NO NEVERMIND I’LL CALL IT APOPHENIA
“I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning …
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.”
— Stevie Smith / “Not Waving but Drowning”
Mary Arroyo wrote in her journal:
07/15/2021
Numen: a spiritual force or influence often identified with a natural object, phenomenon, or place
The older I grow the less life makes sense to me. Every directive, every normative “bow!” every look askance, is one more insult to endure … and I keep hearing echoes that “we all grew up on Mc Arthur … Mc Arthur milk!”
I return to the fact that nothing exists until it becomes the object of my consciousness … but what to do about the word “provender” — or the concept of diacritical encoding—neither existed until I searched them out a moment ago?
Is it something akin to a crabwise couscous crumbcake?
I mean, surely someone before this moment has strung those three words together in the English language—maybe in a flarf poem or it was uttered at an oulipo/newlipo garden party scenario designed to Last Year at Marienbad your neural synapses?
It all begs the question: what is a crabwise couscous crumbcake, and why is it installed in that spot that being force-fed cod liver oil at the age of four once inhabited in my frontal lobe?
That cod memory once displaced a bar of soap on the tongue memory— a brusquely driven far back into the molars bar of Irish Spring!
What did I say? Surely something I’d overheard. Yet, I never witnessed the person who uttered it before me being tortured by some third-rate inquisitor threatening thee belt-buckle-rain next.
There it is: crabwise couscous crumbcake.
Make of it what you will. I’ll be here for the next 7 minutes staring at this cracked section of drywall, wondering why I don’t feel like going upstairs where my rack awaits.
I am dislocation incarnate.
“This Machine Kills Fascists.”
— Woody Guthrie, sticker on his guitar
I have well trod ways of going off the rails. I have multifoliate multivariances and polyvalencies of texts. I have Brakhage films and John Cage bubblegum. I’m gonna chew chew chew ’til my teeth get numb. I have the eyeless in Gaza player piano bolweevils in exploding plastic shades. I have a plastic covered couch and a take ‘n tape cassette player. I have gutted all my victual fish and lived a livestock week in panoply and cornucopia. I have called upon Mr. Pharmacist to make my life more bittersweet but he only succeeds at distanat quasar sounds. Oh please be here because I am, and I don’t really want to go there where you’re not. That’s impossible, that’s im… that’s impossible, that’s im-poss-i-ble… you’re in Nova Scotia but I’m not…
Rimsky-Korsakov was lying in an arroyo under the noonday sun. His eyes blistered. His lips chewed away by ravenous coyotes, who were now digging deep into his viscera. He hummed a new melody he thought he might be able to develop into an operetta. One of the coyotes had offered to write the libretto in a picaresque style reminiscent of Count Von Yorga Difibrio of Romania. Korsakov thought Sikorsky would be excellent in the lead, as he had a tin ear and leaden lungs.
“Yes, Sikorsky it is…”
(This was the day she started to write again. It didn’t matter much what she wrote, just that she did… so she wrote this…)
“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only hours, nobody can say.”
— Virginia Woolf / A Room of One’s Own
thee istsfor manity reader 