You are not even here
"We would all believe in God if we knew He existed, but would this be much fun?" – J. Ashbery, “The Invisible Avant-Garde,” 1972
1.
The room I entered was a dream of this room. Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine. The oval portrait of a dog was me at an early age. Something shimmers, something is hushed up. We had macaroni for lunch every day except Sunday, when a small quail was induced to be served to us. Why do I tell you these things? You are not even here. – J. Ashbery, “This Room”, Your Name Here, 2000
Why indeed.
2.
Due to circumstances beyond control or comprehension but for which we (by which I almost always, invariably, mean me) bear varying degrees of responsibility, many of “our” most resonant terms – art, for starters – no longer bear any commutative or noncommutative connection to what it means to be us. The same is true for all variables in this order of equation, including tangent vectors, transformation groups, differentiable manifolds and contact of spheres. You, me, he, her, it, them, thus: power equals science equals history equals love.
For some takers, this is the cake. For others, it is mere crumb. Regardless, from here on in questions of what or where and is or isn’t will – indeed, must – remain unanswerable. Location and identity, forever lost. Ditto essences and predicates. We are all, it seems, everything ∴ absolute.
Still, the quest for clarity will persist.
“We all sort of feel the presence of “it” without necessarily knowing what we’re thinking about. It is an important force just for that reason, it’s there and we don’t know what it is, and that is natural.” – J. Ashbery, 2016
3.
The only reason I got here is by sheer luck and an unexpected collision of sentiment with you. The two melded and formed in my brain to my very toes and out jumped this hell of a stump. My larva tippy-toed through the saloon of lavender table-cloths, beautiful rich green shabby rugs and sumptuous French egg delicacies.
I heard a shout through the glass. My mother. She arrived at my doorstep, clothes in rubber belts, zippers and red and black. She has bright orange hair and little squeezed-through pockets. Her hands are speckled with white, and she lies down.
Flappers are clipped like tuneful bugs. And salacious energitas is a nervous bumpobumpo. In my fields of figolity misty eyed-blue, I disease in a peak of wild chivalry shyness. I stink up a mild pink, forget to balance it on a check, injure an emerald gadget, and deliver a synonym of thanks.
Fuddy-duddies and bilbillybobbi sticks are to my liking, and I can doo-dad with them all I want. It's easy to me. For I am of a jellyfish silver earring with a red bead, made of a can of beer, by a friend of my family. It is shiny like bluebeers, because I delight in swimpears, foxes, moons, nightime rides in pajamas in a dirty white van to the planetarium, with one stop along the way at Siegel's bagels. It is shiny with purpose, for the ringlet is of a tiny ancient amulet, that does not care about your recent interview. – S. Mooney, last week
4.
First she let her hair fal and down it flussed to her feet its teviots winding coils. Then, mothernaked, she sampood herself with galawater and fraguant pistania mud, wupper and lauar, from crown to sole. Next she greesed the groove of her keel, warthes and wears and mole and itcher, with antifouling butterscotch and turfentide and serpenthyme and with leafmould she ushered round prunella isles and eslats dun, quincecunct, allover her little mary. Peeld gold of waxwork her jellybelly and her grains of incense anguille bronze. And after that she wove a garland for her hair. She pleated it. She plaited it. Of meadowgrass and riverflags, the bulrush and waterweed, and of fallen griefs of weeping willow. Then she made her bracelets and her anklets and her armlets and a jetty amulet for necklace of clicking cobbles and pattering pebbles and rumbledown rubble, richmond and rehr, of Irish rhunerhinerstones and shellmarble bangles. That done, a dawk of smut to her airy ey, Annushka Lutetiavitch Pufflovah, and the lellipos cream to her lippeleens and the pick of the paintbox for her pommettes, from strawbirry reds tonextra violates, and she sendred her boudeloire maids to His Affluence, Ciliegia Grande and Kirschie Real, the two chirsines, with respecks from his missus, seepy and sewery, and a request might she passe of him for a minnikin. A call to pay and light a taper, in Brie-on-Arrosa, back in a sprizzling. The cock striking mine, the stalls bridely sign, there's Zambosy waiting for Me! She said she wouldn't be half her length away. Then, then, as soon as the lump his back was turned, with her mealiebag slang over her shulder, Anna Livia, oysterface, forth of her bassein came. – J. Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake, 1922-1939.
5.
Hideous, my lunch. I stir. Grandiose plans of the day fall off of my head and into my soup without sound. The stirring must quicken if I am to add wine and starch, and show my devotion to family and my love for small rocks, the loose formation of gravel. Of all my sons, none share the appetite. Yet gravel is the devotion made aggregate and devotion is the gravel I walk upon, leaving small rocks in my shoes, asking how long I can put up with these little annoyances before I too begin to separate into loose rock, leaving particles of myself in the shoes of others. Quietly, I flatten myself into a long dusty road, traversed by truckers and wildcats. I am a road with angles and hills. But even a road must make plans for the day! And even a road must make soup! And sometimes the plans fall flat, and sometimes the soup becomes the day’s diplomat, negotiating angles, hills, the odd wildcat. The gravel is still but one small rock stirs and separates, says road oh road you are my supper, you are my soup, keep your angles close and your hills still closer, and I will make you my wife, for I am long for the sea, and cousin of cliffs. And the rock gathers mass and becomes surface, jumping, becomes being uncertain of being, like sand, a whole separating into its parts. Some sand sits, and some sand leaves in the shoes of others. But the road is still and unjumping, curving around mountains, with black trees casting finger-shaped shadows upon it. The road is strangled by forest, growing narrower and narrower, until, reaching the sea, it forgets its grandiose plans for the day and returns to the kitchen with pocketfuls of cold sand.
– Z. Mooney, “Gravel”, accompanying text to Lene Otis Finn, Greater Lanarkshire Auricular Research Council (Glarc), 2024
6.
∴ 2025
"For some, this is the cake; for others mere crumbs," I will be using! But, for now, I have to go lie down to recover from the mere view of Z's math problem.