Wit’s Walking Blusters Brevity’s Sole.

by Ambon Pereira

Posted to Poetry on 2003-11-10 02:56:00

neurological mapping:
Professor Edelman believes
we learn through the engagement
of patterned routines firing their
precise function in the auxillary
structure of the basal ganglia,
these routines being accessed
and chronologically strung-together
through the central agency
of the neo-cortex,
whose highly dynamic firing the Professor
supposes to correspond with the mental/
psychological Self.

to provide Professor Edelman’s own example:
a pianist studies a composition
measure by measure,
learning each at a time
and then “stringing them together”
in practiced, semi-conscious
song.

——–

(The Reader asks:
“Why are you writing prose as if it were poetry?”

He Answers:
“I believe the essence of poetry lies not in any
formal aspect of rhyming or metre, but rather
in that it opens itself to multiple and simultaneous
comparison of its parts, rather as we might study
the body through its dissection, or as a modern painter
might discard the formalities of perspective
to show his subject from multiple angles
real and imaginary.
I would hold that the true rhyme is the act that
bridges time and space, bringing together
objects that appear far apart.
Returning to the work of Professor Edelman,
I suppose what I am describing is characteristic
of that agency of “access” and the “stringing-together”
of memorized objects and actions; perhaps what I aspire to,
and describe as poetry, is nothing less than the embodiment
of a Meta-Self, a consciousness larger
than my own immediate, and open to all.”

——

DISSECTION:

James Aloysius Joyce,
haphazard student of medicine,
takes his seat in the gallery
as the Greek priest
slits the throat of a bull
whose panicked expression
echoes harmoniously
in a poem by Keats,
who is himself something to do
with medicine, as he works
as an assitant in a chemist’s shop,
and is incidentally dying of consumption.

One can consider Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses.,
to be the painstaking dissection of a single day
in Dublin, not long after he (Joyce) had exited
the loosely aforementioned medical gallery
in order to rendevous with a young hotel chamermaid
named Nora Barnacle, whith whom he subsequently
co-inhabited various portions of “European exile”.

—–

Dissection involves
cutting through surface details
to arrive at the densely packed viscera
in the confusion of which we miraculously
draw sustenance from air, and the various
fluids we imbibe of wildly different qualities,
not to mention the death we chew–

The skeleton and musculature lend themselves
to easier interpretation, being founded along
Newtonian lines of force, of action and reaction
moving sequentially, offering us ample occasion
to quantify clearly observable effects;
truly, these are the basics of story-telling.

The neurological facillities remain the great mystery
in all of this, offering everywhere their effects,
but hiding their causes; leading many to conclude
that these manifestations must arrive from a cause
of divine proportions, straddling such great distances
of time and space that we can only guess at the original
intent of those actions, and hope that the ultimate effects
of such prove beneficient to ourselves
and humanity in general. In the meantime,
our basic picture of the scene remains steady:
James Joyce, scalpel in hand,
and covered in the gore
of all he might adore.

———-

WHICH BRINGS US TO MURDER.

HIPPOCRATES:
“For what cause shall we cut?
First and foremost, to do no harm–“

JACK THE RIPPER:
“Unless we suppose it isn’t really harming
anything worth preserving; myself,
I only cut whores, who are themselves
a source of harm to society in general.
They are a cancer, and I am the surgeon
who will excise them.”

SHERLOCK HOLMES:
“To interject the obvious into this discussion,
the Reader should take note of the fact that
Mr. Ripper is patently evil and insane,
and allow this to prompt the next supposition:
One should only cut, if one is sane.”

FREUD:
“But isn’t war a form of collective insanity?”

J. RIPPER, FOAMING AT THE MOUTH:
“The commies are disease-ridden whores!
We should cut them all!”

MONSIEUR GUILLOTINE:
“In this instance, wouldn’t it be moral of us
to cut Mr. Ripper’s head-off,
as quickly and as painlessly as possible,
for the good of society? His is obviously
a diseased nature, which must be excised.”

ROBESPIERRE, ALSO FOAMING:
“Silence, Monsieur Guillotine!
we already have evidence that you are
an enemy of the Revolution!
We shall not allow you to distract us
from our necessary course of actioon,
by bringing to mind the freakish
instance of a serial killer,
who may or may not have been an
acclaimed Victorian painter!
You are an enemy of the Revolution
and the People of France,
and so you must be cut!
Guards, release the mechanism!”

BLADE, DESCENDING, QUICKLY SEVERS THE HEAD
OF JOHN THE BAPTIST.
JACK THE RIPPER APPLAUDES FROM THE CROWD.

——

(Reader: “What is the meaning of this?
Do you intend to compare Joyce to a serial killer?”

“Only by way of contrast, and to make evident
the following:
mere curiosity, which is in part
the desire for power (as knowledge
is the equivalent of such,)
MUST BE CONDITIONED BY THE SPIRIT
OF EMPATHY THAT STEMS FROM A GENUINE
APPRECIATION OF THE BEAUTY POTENTIAL IN
THE AVERAGE; IN OTHER WORDS,
THE SPIRIT OF LOVE.
Otherwise, curiosity can degenerate
into the obsession for power,
and from this embark on the projects
of Evil. What I mean to indicate,
is that all true art
moves first from the spirit of Love;
even in those works/occasions
where Love finds itself at a loss,
or in despair.

I would assert that James Joyce’s Ulysses
is actually a complicated paen to the difficulties
of love, these being embodied in the central characters
Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom; but the novel itself
would be inconceivable, if that spirit of love
were not fundamentally in existence.
It is no idle coiincidence that Joyce
chose to set his novel on the very day
he first went walking with his Nora,
through the streets of Dublin.

The Literary Kicks message boards were active from 2001 to 2004.