Jaap Blonk, Asemics

Eavesdrops Nr 27

Five Encrypted Proposals

Omens & Harbingers Nr 13

Pleiades Nr 4

Stampscapes II, Nr 110

Two Abstruse Questions, Nr 1

Wiretaps Nr 427

Joel Chace, toe

toe

image by toe

toe

 

               Not knowing how to begin,

               so penciling lines up, up

               the long page.  Cut off

               your toe!  When you are

               Queen, you will no longer

 

               have to go on foot!

               Two phalanges in the big

               one; the others, three each  --

               base, shaft, head.  But why

               this nature, with these laws?

 

               Not the loneliness, but the

               winter, the room.  Not knowing,

               so turning the pencil point

               on its side and smearing

               one line after another, up

 

               the long page.  But what

               would that final equation mean?

               Abductor hallucis, flexor hallucis brevor,

               abductor hallucis.  Stopped in mid-flight

               by an atrocious pain in

 

                                the big toe;

    the feet  independently lead an ignoble life. 

 

*****

 

               I’ll explain when we get

               to the funeral parlor.  This

               line, this, another, sweeping up,

               up the long page.  Repeating

               cycles of the stance phase

 

               and the swing phase.  She’s

               no longer in our world.

               Gravitational.  Electromagnetic.  Strong.  Weak.  Rook

               di goo, rook di goo!

               There’s blood in the shoe!

 

               The shoe is too tight;

               this bride is not right!

               However, in his account, hardly

               anything happens: the struggle isn’t

               between good and evil, but

 

           really between boredom and faith.

 

*****

               If I know what I’m

               doing, there’s no reason why

               I should do it: if

               you know, there’s even less.

              This funeral parlor is quite

 

               like a diner turned into

               an apartment.  In our world,

               she’s no longer.  Their committee

               promotes the construction of a

               monument to entropy.  Melanoma eventually

 

               metastasized to his liver, lungs,

               all the way to the

               brain.  Doubts.  Dirt.  Daydreams.  Not

               the roundness, but the moon.

               Lumbricals, quadratus plantae, flexor digitorum

 

               brevis, dorsal and plantar interossei.

               The wind is on the

               other side of the world.

               And as the boy sat

               there in gaping, silent shock,

               the driver gathered the five

               bloody, muddy toes.  Picturing a

               solid stress ball encircled by

               its event horizon.  Good and

               evil lie one over the

 

      other; like oil and water, never mixing.  She thinks

      about thinking without language, without thinking.

 

*****

 

               Why can’t gravity-big and gravity-tiny

               get themselves together?  The big

               toe, ceasing to grasp branches,

               is applied to the ground

               on the same plane as

 

               the four others.  That angelus

               bell, hardly audible through thick

               fog.  Daydreams.  Dirt.  Doubts.  Grace,

               to dig down so far,

               to God.  She occasionally wonders

 

               if anyone has found her

               opal ring setting that bounced,

               once, off the perfectly flat

               marble museum floor.  Apart from

               the big one, the others

 

     are broken and curled under the foot, which is

     then brought level with the leg, and the arch broken.

 

*****

 

               Up, up the long page,

               thick graphite lines, which  --  if

               even longer  --  would converge.  The

               fact that the physical world

               is comprehensible is a miracle.

 

               She and a museum guard

               spend a good half-hour hunting

               for her opal, searching until

               she begins to imagine what

               his life must be like,

 

               after work.  Went to market

               means what, exactly?  Stayed home

               means, precisely, what?  Under his

               toenail, a dark lesion, wrongly

               diagnosed as a soccer injury.

 

           Might as well go sermonize to fish.

 

*****

 

               Picking up the phone, then

               remembering that the other end

               is dead.  One is seduced

               in a base manner, and

               to the point of screaming,

 

               opening eyes wide:  wide, before

               a big toe.  These tiny

               vibrating strings might produce gravitons

              behaving under the laws of

              quantum mechanics, while carrying gravitational

 

               force  --  oh, and there’d be

               at least ten dimensions.  No,

               she’s in our longer world.

               The child took the toe

               into the house, and he

 

       and his barbaric family, ate it for dinner.

 

*****

 

               Kepler believed in it literally,

               that the universe is singing,

               reverberating with music inaudible to

               human ears, but as real

               as gravity.  He died ridiculed

 

               for this conviction.  What do

               those golden leaves look like

               on the lake’s bottom?  Eyes

               closed, she beholds fire spitting

               through a soul, five swords

 

               slicing another.  Bandages wrapped around

               the feet, pressing broken toes

               tightly against the sole, ends

               of bandages sewn so that

               they cannot be undone  --  all

 

       with no anesthetic, with no painkillers.  Eyes, ears closed,

       she simply cannot see or hear spirit hymning to God.

 

*****

 

               Up and up, among the

               vault’s corner shadows, movement of

               slow wings.  The fellow is

               made entirely of oxygen; when

               you’re near him, you get

 

               burned.  Abductor digiti minimi, flexor

               digiti minimi, opponens digiti minimi.

               No judgment, no sinners, no

               just men, no great and

               no small; there is no

 

               punishment and no reward.  They

               claim that under every building,

               beneath each lowest foundation, lies

               a leathery, fetal corpse.  And

              so we arrive at the

 

     final, incredible page, the closest we have ever come

     to experiencing the act of dying, of giving it all up.

 

*****

 

               Gravitational framing for galaxies, something

               unseeable.  In our longer world,

               she’s no.  At four and

               a half weeks, rudimentary foot,

               followed by toes.  Slow wings,

 

               invisible descent, until it finds

               one of the lonely ones.

               I am sweet as honey,

               and I am called Gabriel’s

               Bell.  One’s self  --  shadow blocking

 

               all of God but a

               thin crescent.  Half a millennium

               after his death, radio telescopes

               have detected the product of

               supermassive black holes colliding in

 

                the early universe:  each merging

               pair produces a different low

               note, all sounding together into

               this great cosmic hum, the

               universe singing.  The majority of

               those physicists are certain that

               their goal will be reached

               within several decades.  Cage of

               thick, black wire, as long

               as she is tall:  it’s

 

               mine, and it’s for me;

               it’s where I’ll live  --  her

               words continue, an aria that

               doesn’t fade, even after the

               accompaniment ends.  Disgorging of sin  --

 

               noisome, huge.  Naturally, indulgence is

               given to one who says

               the Angelus.  The slowness of

               that last page is terrifying:

               adaggissimo; then langsam, ersterbend, zögernd,

 

                                    and äussert at the very end.

 

*****

               A human, who has a

               light head, raised to the

               heavens and heavenly things, sees

               his foot as spit, on

               the pretext that this foot

 

               is in the mud.  It

               might all come down to

               a fish.  Funny old fish  --

               old, green  --  sickly green  --  jade

               bled through milk  --  old, sick,

 

               barely moving, teeth trailing seagrass

               in two strands, one up,

               one down.  Anybody can choose;

               St. Francis, St. Anthony might

               have chosen; anybody can  --  one

 

               strand, the other, neither, both  --

               it might matter.  It is

               terrifying and paralyzing as the

               strands of sound disintegrate.  One

               by one, these spidery strands

 

               melt away.  We lose it

               all.  But in letting go,

               we have gained everything.  Then

               it slips in, behind those

               lonely eyes  --  there in a

 

rear pew  --  and it becomes those eyes as well as

all at which they gaze.  This entering can be called

        grace.  Everywhere.  Everywhere.

 

—Joel Chace

Derek Beaulieu, Nature or Habit (for Kevin Stebner)

Adeena Karasick, ZERO’S EROS

 

Flux Me Fast and Slow
image by Adeena Karasick 

Though traditionally 0  (zero) is understood as a number representing an empty quantity, zilch, zip, nothing or absence; adding, subtracting, dividing or multiplying any number by 0 results in 0 -- for Abraham  ibn Ezra,  “zero” serves as a place holder, which he calls a wheel, a galgal to “save the position” in cases where that position has no value. Zero then should be acknowledged not as “nothing” but  “a place holder,” between the no longer and the not yet; the not yet and the always already  metonymically signifying and silently screaming for an impossible future that precedes  all  numbers – in  a  lacunaic liminality,  extolling the omnipresence of a past re-patterned in a volatized hyperreality, inexorably circumbscribed within the paradox of re-memoration. 

 

ZERO’S EROS

one should place a figure in the shape of the wheel O
...the symbol of a wheel O like chaff in the wind
and is there only to save space[i]

 

in the plenitudinal void

 

 

In the nothing that is affirmed in the darkness

of aching indices, amnesties, mysteries

 

gilgul galgal logos’ golos, gulleys galleys grids grammars

of ungraspable gaps

spurred in the surplus of ---

0

nothing’s nought, naught, nil, ought’s

[sic] cycles seychel circles

of weeping seepage 

Hold me like a place, place holder / as i stand in for

supplement, like the letters for the numbers

the image for the present, futures, icons, epochs 

 

Just hold me like a place

plaise / holder of substitutions, landmarks convulsing

 

in the futural unfolding

 

of nebulous ebbed / aberrated

erasures’ / abyssal billow valleys nihil, null

thrownness

in the anguish of unveiling thrashing in the dirty reflection

sucked back into / as night wedded to the light

 

place holding

in the dialectical calculus of radical fantasy fragmented

through the [un]wedded suspension, pretention

transgression apprehension

 

in the broken middle of disremption

0

And through zeros eros morose kairos’ borrows burrows harrows

sorrows accords succor’s coursing source

s’cœurses of thirsting aporias

hold me like a mishkan marooned

like the numb/erless number

in the monadic nomadics

of impossible reminiscence

 

‘n come opiate come opulent through

the aching onus undulant annulus

through the consanguineous scents / laments

of pierced palettes postulates

 

sefirotic zerotics

all catastrophically apostrophic 

between the light of darkness and the darkness

of [ ] bridges, burgeons, burdens

crests, cusps, gates, serrates

 

shadows, spirals, triggers, traces

thresholds // in the madness 

of mirroring withdrawal

 

and hold me

in the ghostly aghast

of efes, sifra sefer sofer sapir sippur sifr cifra ciphers[ii]

 

0

festooned in the liminal

nomos  //

                  

                  lacunae’s inlaid laden agon

           of ubiquities ventriloquy

    

    imprisoned indwell

of disrepair. 

---

[i]. Abraham  ibn  Ezra,  Seferha  Mispar,  recited  from  “The  Contribution  of  the  Scholar and Biblical Commentator, Abraham ibn Ezra in the Transfer of  Advances in Mathematics  from Islamic Spain to Christian  Europe,” Eran  Raviv,   Open Journal of Social Sciences,  Vol. 11, No. 8., Aug. 2023.

[ii]. According  to  Kabbalistic hermeneutics, the root SFR, (shin, pei reish), etymologically  stands in for the “books” that G-d created the world with sofer (scribe), sefer (book), sipur (story); all embedded in sefirah (emanation of divine light); which derives from the biblical, sapir, (sapphire)  whose    brilliance  is   associated  with  the   heavenly  throne  envisioned   by the prophets; and mispar (number) which stands in for the all the letters, which created the world. Uncannily, in Latin and Spanish, “Cifra,” means zero; and in Arabic, “sifr”.