Friday, November 29, 2019

study in sylvia #2 - in conversation between neighbors

Dorei to no Seikatsu, anime girls, Hope posters, sylvie, Teaching feeling



We all have our hallucinations.  
That house she walked a few streets down.
A long walk from  Grand Central,
to  Brooklyn.
But its a walk we've all taken. 
Once I had to sleep on the Manhattan Bridge.
Before I made it back. 

On the way we see 
The world.
The bits of refuse.
The shapes.
Scaps of paper.

Sylvie is the name an unknown person scrawled in a child's hand on a list I found 
on my street, in a dream.

I never knew what the paper was saying.
Or why I found it on the street. 
Or who Sylvie was?
Or why she came to me. 
My friend Leslie lives next door. 
We talked about the dream.
Thinking about Sylvie.
Riffing on  the name like jazz, 
She improvises:
Sylvan
Sylvania
Sybil Sasson (from your trip to the museum)
Sylvia Rivera from the riots.

-S dog?
also:
vie, fight, compete

and
syl  acronym in texting for: see ya later!

Turning 50 .. stirred up your soul?
Loss in a dream is very painful, but it smacks of wanting something
and wanting is so much better than not wanting.

But not knowing what.
A stranger outside the house saying wake up - because they could hear you from the street?
This is unnerving. it's like there aren't any walls. The walls we think are around us are merely visual but they're not real. no walls, no boundaries. you're not alone.. everyone sees, hears.

That makes me feel ...
agoraphobic
and
unlonely
and
like your dream-logic knows better than your waking logic

Still pondering...

you lost your little one
you lost your notebook
you couldn't get to a note flying down the street - so you never got a chance to read it
argh!!!

That lost one:  implies a treasure, a message, something, content, importance...

And.. then you actually do find a note, the big one, with Sylvie.

The kids are out selling cookies on the sidewalk
The little Capitalists! what kind?.  

And one of the kids, unknown to you which one I take it,
leaves behind a piece of paper that has the list:

10 sylvie, 1030 pray, 1130 read 12-1230 lunch 3- sylvie

in BLUE CRAYON
A kids inc.
blue. not black. blue.
Those kids. with their blue crayons. Their blue chalk left on the sidewalk.

Sho brought her, you ask?
Was she part of the dream?

The sense of chasing after things blowing in the wind, thrown out
almost missing them
important things
and actually, finding them..
a feeling like.. wow, what a miracle, you actually found this thing that might have just blown away
like other things before

pray?
for an hour?
It comes after Sylvia,
Maybe Sylvie makes one need to pray
What kind of person made this list.
They sure are needing a lot of time to pray
And they sure are needing a list!
Lists!
Who writes lists?
People who need lists

Why do people need lists?
because they might forget otherwise.

That's a big one.
what is it they might forget?

What does it mean that if they didn't have the list they might forget to pray?
To eat lunch?
To pick up Sylvie...

If Sylvie involves a verb, what's that verb?

You're treating this dream in the way I treat important dreams.
My old shrink Frank used to say "talk to me as if you're Sylvie, talk to me as if you're the cookie, talk to me as if you're the neighbor calling up from the street.”

And I'd say "I'm worried about you because I hear you screaming"
Or
"I'm overcooked! I cost fifty cents. I shouldn't be sold, I should be given"

Hey I just realized - my relative was Sylvia Ageloff.
Raymon Mercador wooed her for two years, got to Trotsky through her and killed him with an ice-axe.

"Sylvia’s body becomes a place where different historical possibilities are played out,"
writes Eric Gurevitch.

Sylvie the anime character.  
A lost child.
Otherworldly hero.
Invisible to history. 
Wind blowing.
We can only see the leaves shuffle.
A note blowing down the street.
Stuck in the garbage.

One possibility after another.
What about Sylvie?
Seeing Sylvie everywhere?
That's how you do it.

Let her go, too. that's a good trick.
You won't be able to.
She'll come back

Monday, November 25, 2019

Sylvie and a Note in the Street


Could she be  Sylvie?


No she was  Nancy, one of the
 duane-michals reflections on aging.

as this blogger was turning fifty.


Hotpot soup and a scene from
SeashipSailing




While my friends were out doing activism, 
I was looking at  the sunset. 


Exploring lights and color on the water.
Peter Hujar Hudson River

Walking home from dropping off the little one.
A crisp fall in Brooklyn.
Leaves on the sidewalk.
Blue skies.
Trash piles on the street.
Papers strewn about.
Pieces of lives.
Discarded.
Residue from the night before.
A stranger outside the house from a dream
Wake up Ben, you are screaming.
The little one lost in Rome.
She’s gone.
Every night, the dream notebook gets thicker.
Sitting by my bedside. 
There were others,
a notebook lost on a road trip,
biking from this coast to that. 
A note flying down the street.
Kids out selling cookies, chalking on the sidewalk,
A paper left behind.
Blue writing:
“-10:00 Sylvie
“-10:30 Pray
“-11:30 Read
“-12:00-1230 Lunch
“3:00 Sylvie”
Sylvie?
Who brought her?
Was she a part of the dreams?
Flowing out, strewn  in the trash.
Memories and reminders.
I only know one Sylvie,
a French-American writer living in Brooklyn.
Think of her in my old life in New York.
Haven’t seen her in years.
But I’m not sure this is her.
Of course, there is Sylvia,
The novelist my daughter loves.
But I’m not sure this is her.
She died years ago.
Messages from the street.
Not sure what the note means:
Sylvie at 10,
Pray at 10:30
Lunch at 11:30
Read at 12
3 back to Sylvie?
If only I knew Sylvie?
Or the person who dropped off the note?
How was it at 3?
I wonder how it went.
Riding past the cemetery.
Through Sunset Park.
Past the Sea Witch Bar.
Wondering if Sylvie is there. 
Another body in Greenwood Cemetery?
Past the kids in the playground?

Out to the city,
Seeing Sylvie everywhere.
In every conversation.
Every hypothetical.
Every classroom.
We all come from different places.
But we all breathe.
Remembering, repeating, and working through. 
I’m triggered.
They are.
We are.

Up to Madison Ave,
Where Stanley is reviewing One Dimensional Man.
We’ve read it together many times before.
The proletariat is shifting.
If you have a theoretical perspective,
You can think and describe.
You don’t have to have facts.
You have events.

Formal logic counts on reason.
Symptoms and appearances.

Frankfurt School,
A post Marxism.
Why still be a Marxist?
Frankfurt School too pessimistic.
They talk culture, language, and psychology.
But what about poetry?
There is a dirty secret about Patterson, says Stanley.
William Carlos Williams was a dialectical materialist.

Why be a communist?
With a  lower case c.
Not a Stalin upper case C.
Commune is about community.
Who are part of it?
We all  are.
An ever expanding multitude.
Everyone, Sylvie, everyone.
Naming that which are part of it.
That is the task of the poet.

Who was Sylvie?
Freedom ontological
Was she free?
A poem?
A verse?
An angel?
Writing with crayons.
Its still prodigious.
With something still.

Read the Dialectical Biologist, advises Stanley.
We all are.
Dialectics help us look at change.
Contradictions & labor.
No one can escape living a dialectical existence.
Whitman contradicts,
Writing  poetry and working on  houses.
What’s Whitman’s  contradiction,  asks Stanley.
Referring to a queer sensibility he did not see
when he read those Leaves of Grass when he  was 14.
“Maybe I didn’t read it closely?”
Looking at essence and appearance,
Water and light, motion and movements,
 “Existing as the living contradiction between essence and appearance,”
Marcuse saw it.
Dialectics colliding,
Poetry pointing us outside,
Conveying the negative.
If you want to be a secure person,
Do not take a secure job.
Did Sylvie?
What  of the  person taking care of her?
Did she write poems.
Walt worked, thought, wrote, and flipped houses.

Leonard Cohen knows
“ there is a crack in everything…”
In the sidewalk, with the green weeds
Pushing their way up through the pavement.
“that's how the light gets in…”

Cracks of refusal.
People working together.

Emancipation of wage labor
Cooperatives.
Was Sylvie free?

What is the job?
What is her future, her past?

How can people resist

What are the horrors, the traumas of her past?
What fears does she carry?
Does she repeat?
The dreams?
The nightmares?
The hopes…

The morning light in  Laramie.
That  Matthew  saw all those years ago.
The cold blood in  Holcomb, Kansas?

Is she an organizer?
Will she be a Norma Rae?
Was she?
Bringing about a great refusal?

Will she give up on negative thinking?
Can she do it slow?

Can she help us imagine?

Lead affinity groups rethinking communities.

Re imagine mutual aid.

Re think freedom.

Democracy is chains.
There is no adequate response to the charge, you’re fired.

Find a real meaningful struggle,
For a new workspace?
Will she?

Make an appearance in this “insubstantial  pageant…”
Navigating a world of spirits,
Prospero among them.

I  walk into  Judson.
Homeless guys sitting on the steps,
Avoiding the rain.
Sleeping on  the stairs.
Sitting  in the back  pew. 
A man to my left writing notes.
Its ok  to jot down a line  or two  from the bulletin.
I do every week.
Sylvie reminds me.
He lives in a car in queens.
Teaching in  high school. 
Wandering in from the rain. 
I don’t know where to put them,
He tells me.
Submit there here,
I suggest giving him a copy of my Poetry magazine.

She accompanies  me to see
charcoal portraits of John Singer Sargent, hanging at the Morgan library
I recall looking at Peter Hujar black and white  photos.
Was she his subject?

Artists and illuminations,
things seen and not seen.

At the museum,  
a boy fell into an  enchanted melancholy,
god knows we've all been  there.

Duane Michals saw:
“Our lives just one  moment… a breath imagined…”
All at once, altogether the same…

We walked through the show,
Words and images
“…Come close so  I can whisper things I do not understand…” pleads Michals.
Black and white photographs,
Chance glances.
A look here.
A backward glance there.
Fateful connections.  
Queer moments.

“Perhaps everything possible has already happened?”
Odd moments,
Juxtapositions of light.
“And our  lives  are a slow remembering of long forgetting?”
Mom left him in the shoe store.
Then Dad left.
“I know that he is never coming  back…”

Maybe Sylvie was a sailor?
Fighting, finding something along the waterfront.
“To jump, to get a hardon, to dance: to be alive”
Jean  Genet understood it all with Querelle.
“When  we see life,  we call it beautiful.
When we see death, we call it ugly,
But it is more beautiful to see oneself living at great speed,
Right up to the moment of one’s death.” 

Looking at art all afternoon.
Riding the train back home.
Was she there?
Sitting across from me on the train?
Or had she gone somewhere  else?
Navigating with the demeans,
The homeless.
The hustlers reciting soliloquies for a buck.
Amongst the damaged.
The wounds.
The scene of the crime.
A talisman.
A love object.
The old familiar.
Keeping  me up all night.
When I need  to sleep.
Something else but the better angels of our nature.
A feeling inside,
A violence bubbling.
Like a witches caldron.
From deep inside.
I run  from as she begins to  appear
An old dream.
An uncontrollable urge.
Trying to beat her back.
Was she always there?
Lurking on the subway.
Up all night.
A multitude, 
Filling my dream notebooks.
Always.
Walking out into the
Sunset on Smith street?


A  Cannibal Girl returns home.

Stanley on Marcuse


Stanley and the Cannibal Girls. 

An art outing.