WHAT MR COGITO THINKS OF HELL

        The lowest circle of hell. Contrary to popular opinion is not populated by despots, matricides, or those who lust after the flesh of others. It is a retreat for artists, full of mirrors, instruments, and paintings. At first glance it is the most comfortable infernal department, free of tar, fire, and physical torture.
        All year round competitions, festivals, and concerts are held. There is no peak season. The peak is permanent and virtually absolute. Every two or three months new movements are formed and nothing, it seems, will halt the triumphant march of the avant-garde.
        Beelzebub is a lover of the arts. He boasts that his choirs, poets, and painters almost outdo those in heaven. Where there's better art, there's better government--that much is clear. Shortly they will be able to measure their strength at the Festival of Two Worlds. And then we'll see what remains of Dante, Fra Angelico, and Bach.
        Beelzebub supports the arts. He guarantees his artists tranquillity, a healthy diet, and complete isolation from infernal life.



--Zbigniew Herbert

(Trans. by Alissa Valles)

Autumn

To A. Simonov


Inside me the season is autumn,
the chill is in me, you can see through me,
and I am sad, but not altogether cheerless,
and filled with humility and goodness.

But if I rage sometimes,
then I am the one who rages, shedding my leaves,
and the simple thought comes sadly to me
that raging isn't really what we need.

The main need is that I should be able
to see myself and the struggling, shocked world
in autumnal nakedness,
when even you, and the world, can be seen right through.

Flashes of insight are the children of silence.
It doesn't matter, if we don't rage aloud.
We must calmly cast off all mere noise
in the name of the new foliage.

Something has apparently happened to me,
and I am relying on nothing but silence,
when the leaves laying themselves one on another
inaudibly become the earth.

And you can see it all, as if from a height,
when you manage to shed your leaves at the right time,
when without passion inner autumn
lays its airy fingers on your forehead.

1965

--Yevgeny Yevtushenko

(Trans. by Tina Tupikina-Glaessner, Geoffrey Dutton, and Igor Mezhakoff-Koriankin (Revised) )

( i )

Two words. One name. Baxter Bilingual.

Late fall, 2003, on the precipice of what was to be a very cold winter. 
She bought a one-way rail ticket to visit him again for the weekend. It would be the last time she made the trip to see him in that city, but not the last time they'd meet.
His one-room, sparsely furnished third floor apartment near Nathaniel Street--Dernier Square Station gave a view below of the only six-street intersection in the city and a nearby park with white stone statues of people dancing. Each frozen in time and form, one of the sculpted couples had their heads thrown back in laughter. On the bench closest to them an elderly man dressed in shabby clothes made his morning ritual of tossing bread crumbs to the pigeons while yelling obscenities at people passing by. 

"So, when you leaving?" he asked.
"Nice to see you, too, Bax."
"What?"
"I just got here" she said.
"Let me rephrase-- how long will I have the pleasure of your company?"
She laughed. "I didn't buy a return. Sunday. Mid-morning Monday at the latest."
"No return? That's good. Maybe this time you'll stay."
"Yes, til Sunday or Monday."
He lightly placed his hand at the small of her back. "Or longer."
"Right. And maybe you'll get a real job. How's the whole unemployment thing going, anyhow? You going about it or letting it go about itself?"
"The latter, m'dear." 
"Figures. You are so frustrating."
"And you're lovely." He pulled his coat off the hook by the door. "Hungry?"
"Always" she said.
His keys lay on his desk on top of the morning paper. Picking them up, he paused. "Get this," he said. "Says here 'Prominent Activist Went Missing.' Who the hell goes missing?"
She smiled. "You. You would, Baxter. But in your case it wouldn't be some grammatical pet-peeve. You'd do it on purpose."


And later, that's exactly what he did. Baxter Bilingual went missing. The one person she was confident could help her find a stolen notebook had stolen himself away.

When I Met My Muse

I glanced at her and took my glasses
off--they were still singing. They buzzed
like a locust on the coffee table and then
ceased. Her voice belled forth, and the
sunlight bent. I felt the ceiling arch, and
knew that nails up there took a new grip
on whatever they touched. "I am your own
way of looking at things," she said. "When 
you allow me to live with you, every 
glance at the world around you will be
a sort of salvation." And I took her hand.

--William Stafford
( from An Oregon Message (1987) )

(the prologue)

need i offer you a red-candied apple, my sweet, to lure you into this mysterious web?
its threads glistening silken and opalescent when touched by the sun's rays
weaving the background against which only such a meticulous handicraft as this
could stitch a luscious and intriguing narrative, penned in cursive.
or shall i leave a trail of breadcrumbs for you to follow?
arrows and clues that, if only averting the sparrow's hunger, hint at la naissance of this tale-- an immaculate conception.

it began with your castle painting. of that much i am sure.
you will receive a package in the mail with instructions. it will probably arrive the latter half of next week. before then, you should familiarize yourself with "A Night in Tunisia" (preferably the version off the recording entitled Diz 'n Bird at Carnegie Hall).

You have a deadly secret.
Time is running out...

   What day is it, anyhow? She glances at the calendar hanging next to her desk. Sunday the 27th. She woke at two in the afternoon with a splitting headache. Fucking hangover, she thinks. What she remembers of last night resembles a vague dream. Like the one her mother once told her about, though now she says she doesn't recall ever telling her, least of all dreaming it. 
Maybe you made it up, her mother says. A per usual comment. Ironically, it was her mother who was the bonafide writer. 
She described the dream as a dark blank stage over which thick fog hovered like a film-noir dry-ice mist. 
No movement. No sound. Just the stage in the fog.
She had always been fascinated, unknowingly haunted by the concept of this silent spacious reverie. Envisioning it over the years it had taken on a life of its own, become more ethereal. The stage floated above a swamp-like, dusk-lit green lagoon. Swans with black-tinged feathers elegantly glided over the murky waters, parting the bluish haze like keepers of this underworld. The thought of this scene over time had come to be like a refuge she held in her mind, a quiet place to go where she was undisturbed.
Nothing like the feeling she has now. Hungover. Irritated. Restless. Unlike herself. There's something she can't place. Last night. Something about last night.
She remembers going out, going to a bar called Le Meridien. He was there. After discussing the latest literature releases and the poetics of language over several drinks, he paid her tab and she invited him back to her flat. 
Once there she opened her last bottle of red wine and he phoned the boyfriend to say he'd be home later than expected. She read him a few excerpts of her latest typed work while he cut out fat lines on the glass table. 
It gets blurry after that, like a scene fading to black just before the end credits.
Suddenly, the sound of her alarm. Its monotonous pounding inside her head, a mallet against her temples. She glances back at the calendar on the wall. It's from the British Architectural Library Drawings Collection, Royal Institute of British Architects. The drawing for the month is John Alexander's unexecuted design for Northwick Cinema in Worcester, circa 1938. It's familiar. Eerily so. Perhaps the image had simply migrated into her subconscious.
Pen in hand, she lights a cigarette and walks over to the side of her bed. Reaching out to her headboard, cluttered with stacks of papers and books, she stops.
It's not there. Her journal is gone...

prerogative. your right

you are waiting for me to say something. preferably not contrived. no excuses, explanations, apologies, misnomers, ammunition. you are waiting for my directive. my bloom. full season. expansive breadth, realized scope... for my understanding of the meaning of prerogative. you're right. it's not what i thought it meant. 
but aside and yonder from words and their implicit approximation which i am so hesitant to subscribe to,
 i am waiting to know. 
to be. i am 
 in my becoming... and you, too,
are there. still 
 waiting. 
waiting but not still. expectant rather. you aim 
 to be present. you buy a ticket, climb aboard, take a seat. a spectator 
waits for the kickoff. for the shrill sound of a whistle commencing play.
 for the shot to fire. 
for the gates to swing wide or lift out of caged slots. hooves and feet kicking up dust. the feature presentation.
 for the curtain to rise as the lights dim and a hush falls over 
a room full of warm bodies
  alone together
    waiting to be transported 
by the experience. 

but maybe, this is it. this here. this now. that's all there is. i wonder if we can agree not to talk about the past or the future & wander through conceptual fantasies with patience. if this were a room we entered, it would have the variegated orange and brown shag carpet of our youth, a broken chair surrounded by abandoned ideas-- crumpled papers and carbon shavings, drafts of handwritten letters, disappointed sketches, vague musings... against bare ocher walls and a sheer curtain sighing like crinoline against a solitary window, soiled with the fingerprints of our attempted gaze. beyond...

This is the mill running to surpass time.
This is the hill nursing the stars.
This is the horse with rivers in its eye.
This is the flower, a strangler, and the ocean dressing
the scars of love.
Immanence. Mystery. Desire. An epoch
is finished, you would say, like a novel
you read and re-read
to recover the page where you were born.
This is the red cliff where the night cries
to no longer be night.

-- Alain Bosquet

(from 100 Notes for a Solitude (Cent notes pour une solitude) )
(trans. by William Frawley)