from Hinge Picture By Susan Howe

“Crawl in,” said the witch, “and see if it’s hot enough to put the bread in.”
—Hansel and Gretel

All roads lead to rooms.
—Irish Proverb

a stark

                  Quake

               a numb

                  Calm

                      *

               clutching my Crumbl

               ejumble

                  among

               Tombs and

               in Caves

                  my

                Dream

                Vision


https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6189/susan-howe-the-art-of-poetry-no-97-susan-howe

William James says that in times of trauma and crisis a door is opened to a place where facts and apparitions mix.


When I was a visiting poet at Temple, I encountered two huge volumes called Melville’s Marginalia. Its editor, Wilson Walker Cowen, had collected and printed all the passages Melville had marked in his personal library. At first glance, this alphabetically arranged collection of quotations from numerous authors resembled a giant Charles Olson poem. The preface said Cowen died young. All this immense labor had been for his graduate- student degree. I thought of the pale usher and the sub-sub-librarian in Moby-Dick. Then, as I was going over the material, I came upon Melville’s notes in his copy of the Irish poet James Clarence Mangan’s collected works. I remembered singing Mangan’s “Róisín Dubh” with the Reddins. I looked into Mangan’s life and work, and by following Mangan—God! I couldn’t believe it—I found that he may have been a source for the character of Bartleby.
Earlier, when I was writing the poems that would become Frame Structures, I stumbled on Longfellow’s wife Frances Appleton, who died by fire in their home library. She was trying to paste locks of her children’s hair into an album, using a candle to melt the wax, when a spark fell on her dress. His beard you see in the famous photograph was grown to cover the scars on his face, which was badly burned when he tried to save her. The Longfellow House is now a National Historic Site, and when I took the tour I asked the guide which was the room she burned in. He brushed the question aside as if such a thing had never happened. It doesn’t fit the sunny portrait of the author they are hired to exhibit.
In the same way, I came upon Jonathan Edwards’s sister Hannah by chance when I slipped her “private writings” out of a folder in the Beinecke Reading Room at Yale.
I don’t want to be so arrogant as to say these are recoveries. Maybe certain people find me.

***
 from My Emily Dickinson

When I love a thing I want it and I try to get it. Abstraction of the particular from
the universal is the entrance into evil. Love, a binding force, is both envy and
emulation. HE (the Puritan God) is a realm of mystery and will always remain
unknowable, authoritarian, unpredictable. Between revealed will and secret will
Love has been torn in two.

Dreamwood By Adrienne Rich

In the old, scratched, cheap wood of the typing stand

there is a landscape, veined, which only a child can see

or the child’s older self, a poet,

a woman dreaming when she should be typing

the last report of the day. If this were a map,

she thinks, a map laid down to memorize

because she might be walking it, it shows

ridge upon ridge fading into hazed desert

here and there a sign of aquifers

and one possible watering-hole. If this were a map

it would be the map of the last age of her life,

not a map of choices but a map of variations

on the one great choice. It would be the map by which

she could see the end of touristic choices,

of distances blued and purpled by romance,

by which she would recognize that poetry

isn’t revolution but a way of knowing

why it must come. If this cheap, mass-produced

wooden stand from the Brooklyn Union Gas Co.,

mass-produced yet durable, being here now,

is what it is yet a dream-map

so obdurate, so plain,

she thinks, the material and the dream can join

and that is the poem and that is the late report.

October/November 1987

A Dream of John Ball

Illustration to William Morris' A Dream of John Ball

Wood engraving, 1892

 

'Ah, ye good people, the matters goeth not well to pass in England, nor shall not do till everything be common, and that there be no villains nor gentlemen, but that we may be all united together, and that the lords be no greater masters than we be. What have we deserved, or why should we be kept thus in servage? We be all come from one father and one mother, Adam and Eve: whereby can they say or shew that they be greater lords than we be, saving by that they cause us to win and labour for that they dispend? They are clothed in velvet and camlet furred with grise, and we be vestured with poor cloth: they have their wines, spices and good bread, and we have the drawing out of the chaff and drink water: they dwell in fair houses, and we have the pain and travail, rain and wind in the fields; and by that that cometh of our labours they keep and maintain their estates: we be called their bondmen, and without we do readily them service, we be beaten; and we have no sovereign to whom we may complain, nor that will hear us nor do us right.'

John Ball, in J Froissart, Froissart's Chronicles (1385) translated by GC Macaulay (1895)

The Commune of 1871

On 12 April 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel into outer space. In his space capsule he carried the remnant of the red flag flown over the Hotel de Ville in the heart of the Paris Commune in 1870.

 

the French insurrectionist Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805-81), ... spent most of his adult life in prison, and whom Walter Benjamin (writing in the 1930s) judged the most famous revolutionary before Lenin. Blanqui was elected as leader in absentia by the Paris Communards who offered to release hostages in exchange for him, but were refused, and it was in the wake of the Commune’s failure that Blanqui wrote his cosmological treatise L’Eternite par les astres (1873). In an infinite universe made from atoms of a finite number of types, Blanqui argues, the same combinations must arise again and again.

“The entire universe is composed of stellar systems. In order to create them nature has only one hundred simple bodies at its disposal… Every star, whatever it might be, thus exists in infinite number in time and space, not only in one of its aspects, but as it is found in every second of its duration, from birth until death… What I write now in a cell in the fort of Taureau I wrote and will write under the same circumstances for all of eternity, on a table, with a pen, wearing clothing… The number of our doubles is infinite in time and space… These aren’t phantoms: they are the now eternalized.”
Whereas Tegmark emphasises spatial repetition and variation (the idea that there is another “you” reading this article right now), Blanqui additionally highlights temporal repetition, leading him to conclude that progress is illusory; everything that can possibly happen has already occurred. It was this aspect that led Benjamin to see Blanqui’s cosmology as a precursor to the doctrine of eternal recurrence in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-5).
In The Arcades Project, Benjamin considers Blanqui’s significance as both revolutionary conspirator and pseudo-scientist, concluding that Blanqui’s cosmology is a capitulation to the principles of bourgeois capitalism that Blanqui had spent all his life fighting against. Blanqui’s multiverse is, says Benjamin, “the phantasmagoria of history”, a nightmare projection of capitalism itself. 


Andrew Crumey

potential /// delivered

protocols of escape / suffocating town

...besides, people around here are obsessed with anything like that -safari parks, dolphinaria, stunt flying, it's all the same to them, they're forever dressing up as beefeaters or Hanoverian infantry and re-enacting the battle of Austerlitz...

ballard/ the unlimited dream company


the "political action" which is at stake ... is ... liturgy [ returned to its etymological meaning  of "public practice".]

agamben / the kingdom & the glory

the desert is growing

Gilles et Jeanne / body armour

jerome appears to augustine

wesley's heart is warmed, brion and william dream together, augustine dreams of jerome

Ocelli

Father, can't you see …

Pietra paesina/ l’orée du songe—the shore of dreaming

Meanwhile the tree of life goes on putting out branches. A multitude of new inscriptions is added to the writing in stones. Images of fishes swim among dendrites of manganese as though among clumps of moss. A sea lily sways on its stem in the heart of a piece of slate. A phantom shrimp can no longer feel the air with its broken antennae. The scrolls and laces of ferns are imprinted in coal. Ammonites of all sizes, from a lentil to a millwheel, flaunt their cosmic spirals everywhere. A fossil trunk, turned jasper and opal like a frozen fire, clothes itself in scarlet, purple, violet. Dinosaurs' bones change their petit-point tapestries into ivory, gleaming pink or blue like sugared almonds.

caillois/ the writing of stones

warner on caillois Roger Caillois among the Nonhumans












Their sole desire was to become solid -- as solid and perdurable as the rocks about them. They therefore practiced the rites of petrifaction. When the hated breath at last left the human body, that body was carried to special caves, and there laid in troughs filled with the petrous water that dripped from roof and walls. There it remained until the body turned white and hard, until the eyes were glazed under their vitreous lids, and the hair of the head became like crisp snail-shells, the beard like a few jagged icicles. But this process was merely a long purgatory, for when the body was finally petrified it was removed from its watery trough and carried like a recumbent statue to the halls of the dead -- caves in which the alabaster bodies were stacked, one above the other in dense rows, to wait for their final beatitude, crystallisation. When the body, no longer recognisably human, but rather a pillar of salt, took on the mathematical precision and perfect structure of crystal, then it was judged to have attained its final immortality.

herbert read / the green child /

Semé

In geothermal drilling operations, lost circulation of drilling fluid is a huge issue That's because the downhole rocks are so brittle, their natural fractures alone cause significant fluid loss. This affects mud pulse technology (where data signals are sent from the bottom of the hole to the surface with the help of a continuous fluid column). If telemetry signals disappear because of a fluid loss, the operator is suddenly working "blind" since drilling data signals have been interrupted. halliburton website

Mud pulse telemetry

This is the most common method of data transmission used by MWD (Measurement While Drilling) tools. Downhole a valve is operated to restrict the flow of the drilling mud (slurry) according to the digital information to be transmitted. This creates pressure fluctuations representing the information. The pressure fluctuations propagate within the drilling fluid towards the surface where they are received from pressure sensors. On the surface, the received pressure signals are processed by computers to reconstruct the information. The technology is available in three varieties - positive pulse, negative pulse, and continuous wave. wikipedia