Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe eingestellt

Nothing, no matter how low or high, profane or sublime, escaped P’s prescient eye. The weightiness of her representation in arrangements of found objects of art and the everyday was only apprehended by perspective – it was as Arendt observed of Benjamin’s quotations… But I’m getting ahead of myself here, and have theorized without having rehearsed my first encounter with P and all those subsequent intimate moments, which ultimately led to a rupture that haunts me to this very day. What I will attempt to do, is to create a Figura, an earthly drama which has been embellished only in its duration, and “without aesthetic restriction in either subject matter or form,” present an allegory for our age.

Let us first grant that we stare into windows, habitually and with great obsessive uniformity. Every one knows these windows, their type, their particular form and manner of display, but we will spare the prose the name we have given these windows of late. It seems that finally we are all flaneurs and connoisseurs...

When I first viewed P through one of these windows I met a gaze as if I had scanned some distant object through a looking glass...

The glaring eyes of a siren or Svengali as some friends intoned later...

But I thought,

Child of the pure unclouded brow

and dreaming eyes of wonder

Once Upon a Midnight Dreary While I Pondered Weak and Weary

Herr Prof. Immanuel Rath at a low point,

'Der blaue Engel,' Josef von Sternberg, 1930

It's well past midnight and two Cohen albums in,

I'm running through my hermetic wheel again.

coveting while turning pallid, feckless and flaccid.

a coveted image in hand will wear and fade,

but this icon will lie hidden

in some damp piss-soaked corner of a shadow.

"Poor Muse, alas, what ails thee, then, to-day?

Thy hollow eyes with midnight visions burn,

Upon thy brow in alternation play,

Folly and Horror, cold and taciturn."

misery is a veil, it's terror that's real

just sit alone with Ravel

- where "even damnation is poisoned with rainbows,"

it could be two notes on the piano and I'll smile.

still terror lurks behind us, an awful noise,

a string quartet hell-bent on twisting the gut

in the mood of savage laceration

terror inscribed on the body:

Here lies misspent toil and too much spoiling rotten sentiment.

So the still small voice let forth a lyrical refrain;

And here we are all cold and numb, are you happy that I've come?

when you fell in aching pleasure, melancholic, in earnest tether

you found your place in the chain reviled after fits of lust and guile.

Now we know which side your on, please give in to passing on.

Davnen un Daf Hayomi far undzere tseyt'n; courtesy of Kropsky

The Lubliner Rav, Yehuda Meir Shapiro, founder of Daf Yomi

From Hans Morgenthau's Diary, 18 November, 1926: "It is easy to see why religions prescribe praying morning, noon and night, when I note the effect on me of reading one of Nietzsche's sentences...And is it not the equivalent of religion for modern man? We should impose on ourselves the duty to read one of Nietzsche's essays every day to live better lives, to achieve greater things."

At Walden

While hiking one day around Walden Pond, Sanford Kantrowitz, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies and a votary of Elaine Pagels, made a remarkable discovery. As he gazed at a giant uprooted oak, evidently felled by the previous week's Noreaster, he caught a glimpse of a small leather pouch lying exposed on the ground where the great tree had once stood. Affixed to the pouch was a piece of metal inscribed with the name Sewall. Inside was a pocket sized manuscript on vellum, about the size of the Shambhala Pocket Classics that Kantrowitz so often carried with him. There was an inscription on the inside cover, almost illegible, but Kantrowitz could make out the words "gentle boy", followed by "Virtue" and "Beauty." Later research revealed that Kantrowitz had discovered a hitherto unknown Gnostic text, transcribed by a 19th century hand, perhaps Thoreau himself. Kantrowitz began the painstaking process of reconstructing the original Greek and translating, all in preparation for a critical edition to be published in National Geographic's new series, New England Gnosticism, under the title Sewall's Gospel.

Here is the first excerpt to be released to the public:

I am a lover of Nous and the boys in the forest are my teachers.

They are like trees with roots firmly trenched in Hades.

Orpheus leads them in sweet song and I am drawn to them like a hungry cow before whom a bough or a bunch of fruit is waved. Brilliant golden Nous, the gift of great Priappus, whom having ravished me, is now become my divine darling.

I will know and be known round Attica and the whole world.

Lost in Red Hook: For P, Stylist and Connoisseur

When Mercury was in retrograde

And Saturn was in full glory

Dark eyes stared stone cold

From a woman in overalls

a statue seared in a space I’ve never known

So I called to you as if I’d grown

And you drifted lost across iconic city-scape.

You are the Owl of Williamsburg

The coin of a thousand dreams

Whom Athena chose

For your prescient eye and practiced pose.

When in a booth beneath the fox and crow

I asked bemused:

What ails you?

What do you fear?

You met me with irenic smiles

then solemn eyes slowly closed

but listless is treacherous and I can't play cool

splayed out supple and in the mood,

I fell for the artful ruse

as one more fitful fool.

If my guts could cry out across the elevated screaming highways

Brooklyn walls would fall

Eurydice would rise

We’d sit by cool lakes

I would catch trout

and you would bake pie.

Then we’d really feel it

first as a young boy and girl

Under iridescent skies

Then as great trees

rooted by rivers

Where no one dare cry.