#5 A Scarab and His Violin...

...Are the Stuff of Poetry

I know the image, “A THOUSAND PLATEAUS,” as designed, is too big for an 8”X10” page, but the detail, at least what I could pull out with Photoshop, is essential to fully appreciate the connection to the writing… or close to fully.

As always, when reading my material you’ve got to “mentally repunctuate," so to speak, significantly alter your expectations, shift gears to a new Perceptual Semiotics, whatever that is, to have the writing produce any “impact.” By that term I mean generally that there will be some emotion, feeling provoked despite that first sense of flummoxed pique because “meaning” is…uh…elusive… if its there despite any grand shifts. Re-reading some of the earlier posts that I used to introduce this Substack might help. Re-reading the poem (or almost any poem) a hundred times can also help.

For those of you unfamiliar with the phrase “A Thousand Plateaus,”(ATP) it is the title of a remarkable work in the realm of metaphysical philosophy by Gilles Deleuze (Philosopher) and Félix Guattari (Psychoanalyst) (DG) published in 1980 which created quite a stir in the “haunted grottoes” of philosophy that I find it difficult to have missed over the last 44 years! They have rewritten the entire metaphysics of philosophy that has been girding (as in “that which binds”) the Western Canon observed since Aristotle and Plato, the philosophical formulation creates a gap (duality) between a thing and its essence making it difficult to know, “what ‘is’ is within metaphysical philosophy?” (Huh?) Despite my status as a novice when it comes to philosophy, I found that what they propose, as I have gradually understood it, slowly cutting through its dense, murky and at times daunting/impenetrable fortress of discursive, wandering, overdone prolixity [as I am now falling prey to] created a resonant connection between me and my phoetry. Plateau = “a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities.” Sounds like Phoetry, eh?

Read the Wikipedia article for starters on Deleuze and Guattari. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Thousand_Plateaus

or the easy to absorb 250 page “Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: A Critical Introduction and Guide” by Brent Adkins. ATP is 575 pages.

There is also a substack on ATP and DG’s philosophy in general:

Enlarge for better view. kindly forgive a few typos in the image. Image made with @nightcafestudio. TV frame from Adobe Stock.

Please think about leaving a comment when finished reading. Good,bad, ugly will do.

a scarab with his violin is the stuff of poetry

“Audacity, audacity and more

audacity.” -Danton

It comes as a surprise to learn how history too often overlooks, waiting for something to happen

that could have swept away all danger of succumbing to a delusion. The temptation here

is always some version of, "Truth is anything stripped to it artfully rugged vocabulary.”

So poetry, you know, it's fascinating. Among its virtues is an intimate glimpse into the application of common

Nonsense, my signature, so tickled scorching unwary customers ankles, dropping bicycles and cars off

tranquil balconies, watching them fall for each other, despite the claustrophobic aura of a definite interpretation.

Still, when birdsong falls in love the snow goose spreads its wings, floating on the wind’s landmine, a massive dose

of amnesia. Your imagination’s flirtation with the logic of a dream’s forbidding clots of nervous electricity,

its velocity of heuristic error, and the momentum of a dying planet at the edges of the day merge in perfect balance

shepherding You toward the subtle language of poetry in Cage’s, Zen-inspired "Lecture on looking over your shoulder

for the undisturbed color of emptiness… ." We can come back and talk about it later over a biopsy of botanical martinis

in the haunted grotto where my rhetorical style, coming up over the horizon, does something spooky to make you nervous.

I could have sworn an icon is now in place, and it's air of permanence is mesmerizing captive imaginations without

one eyebrow raised. My poem’s need for infinite strangeness is where things get tricky. The reader must impossibly sift

from thought-bubbles’ surface bonhomie the tiny cut-outs of hummingbird topiaries, the hemorrhaging tears of baby mice

from this saboteur’s nefarious inspiration, every knot in the story, where history’s many follies can defeat a goose

in unarmed combat. Here it is difficult to follow; with nostalgia that always screams at you, “nothing” is really

the point of dreams? You’re starting to understand why self-possession needs language washed in from the lonely ozone.

As with any plague, approach obstacles without loyalty, free from hesitation, coding the flows of desire,

a blend of what you love pasted together; vagaries imported from the real world, a floating bubble brightly lit.

The “aha moment!” of poised contingencies, the mosaic scarred with a touch of reality,is, at best, a coin toss

where the last word may not be too precious.

I will answer most anything