36 Chambers: Canto V

Canto V

that we be a descent, serpent from high

where our path winds to travel swift

one cycle to the next we six times level

through chambers guarded and don’t you know

blocked paths mark our particular tests

how far long will you stand to gain entry

so too this chamber is where we let go

too it would be weather fair and rainy

this cloudy version of design was desire

that held us down in lifetimes, it was desire

that shaped its jealous tongue into how we

would be clipped of wing, clipped of song

you will never wander farther past this door

if you don’t learn to surrender all that you

would grasp, love itself can be twisted

let not the width of how long we carry on

here confuse that it is not dangerous, let

not the width of that path make you believe

many can fit upon it: we push against

an always dream, and it’s no matter

what else you got left, he sings to the wind

whoever you are traveling with now is who

you are traveling with now: poet is prophet

come to any of this with small intentions

now i am the door of adoration

how devoted to this animation

can we beset as it were to a billion

where there is light there is reflection

of sound, where there is sound there

is an echo of what we hope to contain

a poem is imitation as sure as the line

of our own songs is a mirror of all

we choose to give attention, that not

one story be held over another, that not

one breath more precious in the evermore

we confuse here the terrible rending

of what is offered in a temporary held

for an eternity, here in the manifest

we dense matter into what can possibly

surface for sane. we held tears back

now we share newly minted tales of our

dear suffering & cry in the bliss

of devastation, this is how the stars

were seduced down, she hisses, we were

winded by how much it took to cross

the sweet twinning of self mirrored back

all the other could hold was our dreams

& how we were hungry, oh how desire rode

us as if we were winged starlings, a susurrus

branching into constellations dressed in faces

familiar: better remember her name was Eos

better watch them gather there on the levee

at dawn, will you with me, will you with me

I spent all my miracles for two gallons

of gasoline turned round just after the new

year, right below the rim of dawn, you’ll

catch the shades of us wandering always

at that end, river in doubt, river in trespass

be careful or you will erupt into the next

lost of your own grounding, lost of the name

secreted under your tongue, you can find

yourself spending a whole life chasing what

is just a glamour,  flash of I have summoned

you with love & to be nailed to the source

that each poem is a love poem, each song

our desire to be beyond the border of skin

  

here like everyone I love who I can still touch

and not, we think loss is what breaks us

in this silly temporary shadow swan song  

as if love so small between just two had any

reason to be named in the universes, walking

around dead and with your ghosted head

specialized love was a poison we poured

hand over hand and spoke so sweet,

feathers fold over your ears when I come

home, treat me as you would no other

arms once accustomed to the thrum

don’t give to deities what you would give

to any, surrender absolutes, the digging

to the core of conversations, a coupling

divides, invitation to betray, this lie

as if thrown from the garden made

some sense, a man & a woman forms

an incomplete gesture, some loving

but the mothering of all is a chaos

that would never tolerate such a miniscule

thorn in the bounty of these misgivings

to look to any other to fill us is a closing

our eyes to truth: there is no other

who can love you outside of you

any other feeling is the pretend we mask

in this place of plenty, watch it turn

to suffer: what they name love is a little

wind blown off course, not the storm

not the tempest of consume that served

our earliest poems, our songs of union

no simple cadavers bound to a touch

but of fire burnt so hot at the core

when a goddess calls, you answer

  

how to out that net of lust, for the body

is a war, for the body is template for taste

and touch and all that would fill, oh poet

willingly, we nestle in the womb and pull

sound from the heart’s beat so all of us meters

to a tune we watered on, shelled monsters

emerge to a coddle, seek all our hours

a way back: do we surrender to desire

or do we surrender our desires, are we

branches calling bird-song closer look

in the mornings i would weep under

the clouds and healthy the lungs gasping

healthy the heart beating and still i could

not hold it all, the unbearable being, names

listed of the dead unfurled and not like a poem

a poem is a song not a death note reminder

of how we failed one another always, We’ll

let them hurt us, even as we tore each

other apart or worse, how our greed

colored nature till we believed we needed

to suffer to even be alive, we needed to cling

in fear to the scarcity handed over and be

grateful they say as the cell doors lock

be grateful they’ll say as the noose tightens

sad eyed lady of the low lands hums air

cooled to the touch and my skin is barren

my heart is a sieve, nothing holds here

Monsters do travel outside. this chamber

is my whole life, don’t speak. i’ve

been in this wound so long i sift dust

In the end there was so much light

it stifled, from star we disaster, this

game is a matter-if-you-choose-it, stay

inside if you want to live, hide away

Everyone I think of is alive somewhere.

i forget how to be a belief, even here

I chase tail feathers instead of choices

no one has ever kissed me and meant

any thing more than damage, poetry

is an imaginary maze you can tread

here thinking there’s a solve in language

it’s a waiting, at the door to death, let

me in. i will knock here for all of time.

Notes:


Italics: 

Jerika Marchan, Swole

Jessica Smith, Trauma Mouth

Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, Vintage Sadness

Rebecca Wolff, Warden

Paige Taggart, Last Difficult Gardens

Travis & JenMarie Macdonald, Graceries

Megan Kaminski, This Place

Annah Browning, The Marriage

Sarah Mangold, The Goddess Can Be Recognized by Her Step

Kris Hall, Dillinger on the Beach

Jen Denrow, How We Know it is ThatJessica Fiorini, Take it Personal

Tell Me I'm A Bad Girl, Dick

Dear Chris:

Let's talk about voyeurism and how it relates to art and how it relates to sex and how it relates to being alive.

The astounding thing about pornography is the amount of repetition and how little variation is needed to stimulate response.

In Episode 2 of I Love Dick, there's a great sex scene right at the beginning that works on several levels to capture a "female" gaze from both within the scene and external to the scene. It's interesting that the word "scene" is often used in S&M play to delineate the borders around fantasy and reality. A scene has parameters, and it has a clear beginning and an ending with characters "acting" out their roles. This fact is crucial. Within the anatomy of the S&M scene, there is at once the person and the role played by the person, a duality from which pleasure is derived on a single body.

Take note: This is art. This is the body. This is the body. This is art.

We as viewers of the scene in I Love Dick interrupt. We have not been made privy to the rules of the scene. We know the players, but we don't know the guidelines. Film creates a heightened sense of the role of the voyeur more so than almost any other medium. Here we are in the bedroom while Chris and Sylvere fuck and while a fantasy Dick watches, and we watch. The artist aware always that the art we make is subject to an audience we will never meet. And so we watch the watcher watching and even here now, as you read this, find yourself the watcher watching me watching Dick watching Chris.... it's an endless gaze.

Not a male gaze.... an endless gaze. For what is sweeter than the thing itself is sometimes knowing the witness is there to absorb your pleasure, to record and take note of your experience. It's why children look to the gaze of the parent. I both experience the world and I experience the world through that which adores me... my experience witnessed. It's the appeal of social media, the root of all religion. The gaze. We are never alone. We are so precious as to elicit the desire of a constant gaze.

There is no couple that does not triangulate. Here the scene is literally made flesh through Chris' desire. It's the woman's fantasy, and yet it still pivots on the standard roles. Dick is bad daddy. Chris is the bad girl. Why does this get repeated so often? Role Play like pornography seems to be suspended in its own repetition, an ouroboros of caught langauge, a script from which we enact and reenact the Freudian theater of childhood abandonment and desire for total union. Dick, with Chris' letter in his hands is actually taking cues from Chris. She is calling the scene and it is as if Sylvere is not there at all.

Classic Cuckold S&M game: 

In 1966, Lenore Kandel wrote a small pamphlet of poems called "The Love Poems." It was seized as pornography and the book declared obscene.

from God/ Love Poem

I love you  / your cock in my hand
         stirs like a bird
in my fingers
as you swell and grow hard in my hand
forcing my fingers open

What is it about a woman's desire that is most monstrous? Most ob/scene?

Etymology of "obscene":

1590s, "offensive to the senses, or to taste and refinement," from Middle French obscène (16c.), from Latin obscenus "offensive," especially to modesty, originally "boding ill, inauspicious," of unknown origin; perhaps from ob "in front of" (see ob-) + caenum "filth." Meaning "offensive to modesty or decency" is attested from 1590s. Legally, in U.S., it hinged on "whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to a prurient interest." [Justice William Brennan, "Roth v. United States," June 24, 1957]; refined in 1973 by "Miller v. California":

The basic guidelines for the trier of fact must be: (a) whether 'the average person, applying contemporary community standards' would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

Who is the average person? Who decides if a work lacks literary or artistic value? Can we even allow for the average person to have any parameters for what constitutes artistic value?

Dick tells us when to CUM. His hairy chin is the average chin of an average man demanding a woman's pleasure be performed for him, and we are watching to see if language has that power. What can a word make you do? 

 From To Fuck with Love Phase 1

positions and pleasures of need my body
transforms into one enormous mouth
       between my legs
suckfucking oh that lovely cock

 When does pleasure turn to pain? When does desire make us suffer, and why can our bodies sometimes not distinguish the difference?


 From To Fuck with Love  Phase II

my cunt is honeycomb we are covered with come and honey

The best moment in this scene is when Chris throws Sylvere off of her to make herself cum. She takes over the whole scene. She is the sub and the dom/domme, she is the writer and the actor, the bad girl and the daddy, she is the alpha and the omega. That is the core of this scene.

From To Fuck With Love  Phase III

I kiss your shoulder and it reeks of lust
the lust of erotic angels fucking the stars.


There are just four poems in Kandel's obscene pamphlet The Love Book. While I think censorship is horrifying; I must admit to a kind of romantic notion that is fascinated that four poems about a woman extolling fucking and the pleasure it gives her as being seen as a threat to society. What did the average person find offensive then and what does the average person find offensive now? Are we post-obscene? Is violence the only obscenity left to us that we hunger to consume?

"There are no barriers to poetry and prophecy; by their nature they are barrier-breakers, bursts of perception, lines into infinity." L. Kandel, 1967

"...you eroticize what you''re not, secretly hoping that the other person knows what you're performing and that they're performing too." -C. Kraus, I Love Dick 

Does the artists know the space between making art and living? What is that space called? When does one begin and one end? What is the scene and what are the roles assigned?

I have nothing but questions tonight, Chris. 

M

 
Notes:
Collected Poems of Lenore Kandel by Lenore Kandel, (North Atlantic Books, 2012)
I Love Dick by Chris Kraus, (Semiotext(e), 1998)
Etymology:  http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=obscene

Sidenote: I could write a whole other blog post just on the spelling and usage of "cum" vs "come." I prefer cum when talking about sex, so that is what I always use.