Under the Sign Read Free Page B

from the merely sensed, intuitive guide that, listening, awakens us to follow, to find.
    From time to time we are summoned to transgress, or trespass, or just to be in an imagined elsewhere. The affirmation you are witnessing is blessed because it cannot know itself and therefore cannot find itself. Wind picking up, moon before long, hugely full, to rise. Poor overburdened Eros, asked to step into the breach between fact and feeling, into the very fact of feeling (William James) .
    9.
    William James: the pragmatic method: “the attitude of looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories,’ supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.” A kind of elasticity in relation to decisions, so that the past has no final jurisdiction over how the future might unfold; a tenuous relation to tradition as such; a form of curiosity that enables risk to occur without jeopardizing the discovery, or the perpetuation, of value. But we still need to ask: what value?
    10.
    Robert Rauschenberg’s art a matter of putting things next to other things; next to, beside, around, above, under; primacy of the preposition throughout late modernity. Knowing only as relation (Rancière). In the service of an arrangement that is not lifting elsewhere, not transcendence. What he, Rauschenberg, inherited perhaps from Matisse, great master of exaggerated or distortedarrangement, but not Cubist, not collaged enjambment, not about either the flat plane or edge; ease and generosity in compositional relations, these as the actual form of perception in which we are invited to dwell. Rauschenberg’s constant amusement, self-delight, games and finesse with words, origins, placement, displacement, borders, layers. Pleasure here distinctly neither guilty nor recondite.
    A friend, an architect, remarks that he thinks the desire to arrange material objects in a room is a form of optimism. I recall the joy of installing a show in a gallery. This delight in arrangement is not bound by culture, taste, age, or class.
    11.
    Integrity must be the site in which intention and action are as one, in unison, seamless, without abrasion; neurosis , that idea we rarely hear of anymore, pulls us away from what we most intend and most want to do. There is a rip, a wound, and so we attempt to heal in the place where this wound recurs and cannot leave it be.
    The poem forms around the impulse to find out what is going to happen to the poem. If one is under constant revision, does one lose integrity? Integrity ( whole ) as a form of the same. The same as an idea of consistency. But humans are flexible in being, in bearing; we shift demeanors in relation to others, an Other. As we change, we animate the historical pulse. Fashion pretends to reflect these shifts, but often is mere preening mask. Art is a better shape-shifter, both avatar and response to what informs. Charles Olson: “what does not change / is the will to change.”
    12.
    Poet Charles Wright was featured on PBS. He talked about his late style as being more stripped down; he says his poems come from going out into his backyard and waiting . Poem as stigmata .
    The work of art is already in the realm of the unreal; it attests to the way the unreal enters reality.
    Habit, habitat, inhabit, habitual . The monk’s habit; Saint Francis in his soiled robe. Etymologically connected to the Latin habere , to have and hold. The range of meaning distributed between habit dress and habitude custom . Also to temperament, disposition, and the native environment of particular species; also the lovely habitué .
    Language is an astonishment; it never betrays its capacity for renovation. Why, then, do we rush to turn it to purely instrumental purposes?
    13.
    Andy Warhol was a radically lonely person, as far as I can tell, and he attracted to him other socially alienated persons, gathering them into his Factory. The notion that one might be released from