From a Hypnagogic Journal, Part Four

Posted on January 18, 2006 by ubu507

Great, great, I said, getting up too, and we smiled dumbly at each other.

So?

She asked finally.

Oh, ah, yeah…

At this point you’d expect me to say something like I’ll call you, but in our college even the mighty telephone had undergone a change in status. There was only one phone per dorm hall or upperclassman bungalow and due to the close quarters (the entire college and all of its students were contained in one square mile), the peripatetic nature of students, and the unreliability of roommates as message takers, you didn’t call people much, you just inevitable ran into them. But since seeing Kathy had proved far from inevitable, it was clear we’d have to make unusually concrete arrangements. How about – I tell you what, why don’t you meet me on the steps in front of the movie for the 7:30  show on Friday?

Of course our college didn’t have anything as mundane as a commercial movie theater. Three films were shown on a rotating basis at early and late shows Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights. The offering were painstakingly programmed by a committee of dedicated cinema geeks with a catholic love for the medium – we saw European art films, classic Hollywood screwball and melodrama, campy sixties exploitation – everything, in other words, except the contemporary schlock the rest of the country was seeing.

What’s playing?

I’m not sure.

My friends and I went to the movies as if they were church, never looking at the program but just always showing up at the same day, place and time every week. Bergman, maybe. I said, a safe enough guess.

Hmmm She wrinkled her not inconsiderable nose. Subtitles.

Hey, come on, you know it’ll be good no matter what it is. But if you don’t want to…

No, it’s fine. I’d like to. Seven-thirty on the steps. I guess I’ll see you then. Don’t forget,

she said, as if five days was a long time in the future, and for the first time she seemed coy and uncertain. Well, bye, UBU.

See you. She turned and I watched as she walked away, setting her tray down on the conveyor belt and pushing the bar of the exit, a prickling apprehension rising through me, electric as the edge of a thunderstorm.

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From a Hynagogic Journal Pt. 3

Posted on January 13, 2006 by ubu507
if statistics are accurate ABSOLUTELY NO ONE has read Part Two. Due to this total lack of interest there’s only one thing to do — immediately post PART THREE!
 

She was relaxed without seeming bored, responsive but not overeager, effortlessly revealing so much ready warmth and quick wit as we laughed and gossiped that I had one of those flashes of transcendental certainty, the kind usually sparked by a woman’s word or gesture, a deep appreciation of something I hadn’t even been able to see before, in this case the qualities of Kathy – her good nature, her optimism and sweetness, her sheer comfort in her in her own skin despite an appearance that many would find uncomfortable – that her many female friends (including, of course, Virginia) appreciated, and, ironically, it was my appreciation of those qualities that allowed me to appreciate the things guys usually appreciate, i.e. the erotic perfection possessed by her body below the neck, qualities which, because she wasn’t pretty and didn’t present as a slut, had hitherto been largely ignored.

 

And it was that realization, the charm and gravity of her as she took a last sip of coffee, the sharp morning sunlight outlining and illuminating her, that wouldn’t let me let her walk away for what I knew would be for all intents and purposes forever, that made me want to change what might have been into what WAS, to say Wait a minute, Kathy just as she was picking up her tray to leave.

 

This has, uh, been really nice, I said.

 

She stood there with a thin, tenuous smile. Yes, it has.

 

I mean, well, I was wondering if there wasn’t any way we could get together again or something…

 

Get together?

 

Yeah, you know, at night for a movie or a beer or whatever…

 

Are you asking me for a date, UBU? She asked with an ironic emphasis on the word date.

 

And in context the irony was entirely justified because at our college people didn’t really go out on dates. It was such a small school in the middle of such a large amount of nowhere that there was no place to go out TO. Everyone just sort of ended up at the same party or one of the two bars and paired off. It seemed like people were either sleeping together or unattached with no middle ground, rendering meaningless all the complex dating etiquette I’d only begun to master by the end of high school. But I’d never seen Kathy at the bar in all my misspent hours there, and we moved in such radically different social and academic spheres that that morning had been the first and, if I didn’t do something about it, the last time we had ended up together.

 

Whatever you want to call it, Kathy, I said, feeling the growing flush of anxiety of someone who’s been turned down more than once. I’m just saying I’d like to see you again. I mean it’s ridiculous that we’ve gone to the same schools for so long and we’ve never, you know, really gotten to know each other…Her silence drew me on to ever more embarrassing waters. I had this feeling right now that I really, I’d really like to get to know you…

 

O.K., O.K., All right.

She laughed, deciding, perhaps, that I was too agitated to be handing her a well worn line. It sounds like a good idea to me too.

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From a Hynagogic Journal 2

Posted on January 6, 2006 by ubu507

But the key to Kathy, or rather the key to my future relationship with Kathy, was right there, in the form of the empty chair across from her as she sat alone at the long table in the dining hall, and all I had to do was to take the chance to sit in it.

I probably hadn’t gone to breakfast more than once or twice that semester, but that Sunday morning the alcohol, etc. of the night before had refused to settle into either stupor or nausea, and I’d woken up after only a few hours sleep, restless and energized, still a little elevated but not at all sloppy, the early morning world unfolding in front of me with a relaxed, inevitable clarity, my heroic and only dimly remembered overindulgences of the night before having had the serendipitous shock effect of lifting the bell jar for a moment, of oxygenating the atmosphere, of giving me PERSPECTIVE – allowing me, in other words, to be unselfconscious enough to turn the key, to set my food tray down, sit in that chair, and meet Kathy’s eyes.

There was nothing particularly enlightened about it – at that point it was still something more in the nature of a whim. The dining hall was so empty that it would in fact have been weirder and taken more effort for me to pass her by and then sit by myself watching her sit by herself. After all we’d known each other a long time – a total of six years, three in prep school (she’d come in as a sophomore when the benighted place finally went co-ed) and three in college (transferring from a part school in Florida that she, not being a party girl, should never have gone to in the first place). Despite that we hadn’t exchanged more than a dozen words in all that time, not antagonists, really, but certainly moving in different circles, with no mutual friends except for Virginia, who I’d tried to woo while ignoring or deriding everyone and everything she surrounded herself with (and we all know how well THAT went).

But I’ve learned that you can’t cut a girl’s friends out of the picture – they’ll always return, stronger even, taking over the foreground, blocking out the person they were cut out for, revenants who will haunt you the way Kathy came to haunt me.

 

YR PAL,

UBU

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Good Night Liberty

Posted on January 3, 2006 by ubu507

Just a quick note to UBU’s devoted public – I saw "Good Night and Good Luck" yesterday, and while it’s not a great movie it seemed (as I’m sure it was designed to) powerfully apt and pertinent to our present situation. When is someone of Murrow’s stature going to stand up to the Bush regime and say "It’s not un-American to question the president. It’s un-American to invade other countries with no authentic threat to the U.S., to knowingly mislead the public and congress, to torture, to imprison, to eavesdrop, to spy on American citizens without due judicial process?" Maybe it’s because there isn’t anyone of stature around anymore – we’re all Lilliputians and we have the Pygmy president we deserve (except UBU of course).

YR PAL,

UBU

P.S. If anyone should happen to come across this site and read these words I’d appreciate it if you’d leave some feedback as to which version of "Tyra" in the picture show you prefer…

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Bush rant

Posted on December 31, 2005 by ubu507
While I work on the next section of Hypnagogic Journal I’ve got to vent at (once again) a few stories in the news. The first is the headline something to the effect that the "Justice" Department (and in the Bush regime you need the ironic quotes) is going to investigate the revelations that the Bushies are spying on American citizens — but once you read the article you discover that they’re investigating the LEAK of this information (which certainly should be available to the body politic) rather than the possibly illegal and/or unconstitutional spying itself! That’s been the Bush way hasn’t it, to attack the fact bringer rather than the fact, to slime the enemy rather than face reality. And who is the enemy? A White House spokesman defended the pursuit of the leakers of the horrific fact of internal surveillance by saying that they didn’t want their anti-terrorist game plan on the front page of the newspaper for Al Qaeda to read. But the enemy of this administration in ANYBODY who reads the front page of the newspaper. They’ve been telling us to shut up and trust them since before the disastrous invasion of Iraq — "trust us, we have secret information that they have WMD’s" — "trust us, they’ll be dancing in the streets to see us" — and now it’s "trust us, we’re only targeting the bad guys," even though it’s already been established that Military Intelligence has already targeted anti-war groups. Who are the bad guys? Anyone who questions them is automatically charged with aiding the terrorists. The "bad guys" they want to persecute and destroy are you and me, brother, and anyone who remembers when America stood for Freedom and against torture, and a time democratic discussion was considered healthy and not subversive. How do you like this little story?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051231/ap_on_hi_te/white_house_bug

They don’t trust ANYONE who questions them or even wants information about what’s really happening. It’s become so Orwellian — an endless war against an invisible enemy — that you’ve got to wonder how real this enemy is. Certainly the insurgents we’re fighting in Iraq have little to do with the guys who did 9/11, and despite the torture, internal spying and endless airport searches and harassment on anybody who isn’t a rich Republican there have been precious few dastardly plots spoiled. Again it’s "trust us American lives are saved by destroying American freedom" but if there were really concrete cases of that you can bet they would be leaked right away for maximum spin, and certainly NONE of the much trumpeted cases of anti-terrorism that got to the legal courts have amounted to ANYTHING. It’s almost amusing to see the shills of the corporate world contorting themselves to support Bush in every way, not because they really believe in the anti-terrorist crusade as anything but a way to sell him to the public, but because they want to get their taxes cut again and run roughshod over the various Governmental agencies that are supposed to protect the public against them. Occasionally some natural disaster or military losses will blow back the curtain to reveal the utter ineptitude and just plain wrongness of this administration. Soon enough, however the din of right wing radio, TV and bloggers, all underwritten by Bush’s corporate friends obscures everything in noise. But wrap yourself in your "patriotism" and belief in Big Daddy my friend, let Rove spin you into dizziness as they pick your pocket and kill your son and murder your freedom. Just trust them — they know what they’re doing, right?

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From A Hypnagogic Journal

Posted on December 23, 2005 by ubu507
There’s always a key with a woman, isn’t there, or rather the conjunction of key and hole (so to speak), that brief window of light, the narrow opportunity to get inside, to get to really know her. In our crowded modern world and most of its institutions it’s imperative not to acknowledge everyone you see, but rather to cultivate the ability to ignore them. There’s so much stimulus, so many people around that we have to train ourselves to filter experience just to protect ourselves against sensory overload.
 
Women especially, I think, have to resist intimacy in order to guard against all the loonies, the psychic vampires, the predators and hyper-aggressive losers. I’m sure a woman like Virginia, for instance, has to keep herself indifferent, insensible even, to all the wolves, the leers and comments and clumsy pick-ups, has to deflect the unrelenting attention without even seeming to be aware of it. It must be second nature to her by now.
 
On the other hand someone like Kathy, say, who’s not so conventionally attractive has a different set of problems. Although they habitually ignore or dismiss them, guys think that when they do deign to engage a plain woman she should automatically be pathetically grateful for their attention. When the guy isn’t derisive or dismissive, he’s apt to be crude and frank, not willing to waste his usual bull on the kind of girl who’s the living punch line to the old gag about how much better she looks in the dim light of  last call than in the harsh dawn when you wake up next to her.
 
And Kathy embodied a few myths and urban legends. Her face was frankly ugly, as ugly as a stepsister’s in a fairy tale — a helmet of coarse, wiry black hair looming around furry eyebrows, a big beaked nose, and a complexion mottled by way too many freckles. Her body, by contrast, was outstanding, with generous, shapely breasts, gently rounded stomach and womanly hips, all set on a pair of the most perfectly flawless legs, making her just the kind of woman the philosopher jerks of the barroom recommend be made love to with a bag over her head. As usual the wise guys were wrong — when I finally did make love to her, her face became as enchanting as the rest of her.
 
 
 
YR PAL,
UBU
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The Bridge

Posted on December 20, 2005 by ubu507
I used to get off the bus a stop early and walk across the Washington Avenue bridge over the Mississippi river every day when I was at the University of Minnesota. There’s a nice pedestrian level on top of the traffic lanes with an enclosed walkway in the middle of it and that’s where I came up with this poem. It’s the same bridge that John Berryman jumped off of.
 
 
The Bridge
 
 
 
You stop to pull up your knee sock
Smiling with that careless disdain
Which was once a virtue
 
Six planes in close formation
Pass over a circle of women, heedless
Sitting in the middle of the bridge
 
Children’s voices,
Laughter
Or do they scream
 
 
 
 
 
Yr Pal,
UBU
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Nerval/Rimbaud/Rossetti

Posted on December 16, 2005 by ubu507
I love both Nerval and Rimbaud, but they’re hard to translate simply because they’re so hard to UNDERSTAND. There’s a lot of deeply personal symbolism going on and, especially with Nerval, a lot of esoteric references too. But I believe in the immersive search too and have my own private mythologies going on. I had a teacher once who compared poetry to instant soup — the poets have reduced a numinous experience to concentrated form and it’s up to you to add your own essence to it to create a new, living vital brew. They’ve walked their own field of experience, drawn a map, and now it’s up to you to make the journey too.
 
 
That said, here’s a couple of "After" poems in which I’ve taken poems by Nerval and Rimbaud and wrestled and whittled them until they’ve become something quite different, something that means something to me, and, hopefully, that will trigger something else altogether in you:
 
 

After Nerval

 

The thirtieth return

You’re here again

Once again the only one

In the only moment

 

You Virgin Mother

The first the last

My original

And final love

 
 
 

After Rimbaud

 

When the world’s reduced

 

to a single dark wood

for four astonished eyes

 

to a white beach

for two faithful children

 

to a musical home

for one pure harmony

 

I will find you

 

 

SPECIAL BONUS POEM! Hey, I got a million of ’em — This is my only other "After" poem to date. With Dante Gabriel Rossetti the problem is not a foreign language or symbolic obscurity but sheer prolixity — he’ll have passages of stunning merit followed by lines and lines of sheer puff — anyway I adapted and rewrote these until they were my own…

 

 

After Rossetti

 

 

This is her picture as she was

I look until she seems to move

 

In front of the ocean, among the trees

Where the light falls in hardly at all

 

A covert place, where you might think to

One day find the memory of these things

 

 

 

Yr pal,

UBU

 

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Goodies

Posted on December 13, 2005 by ubu507
Most of the universe is actually made of mysterious, invisible material of totally unknown origin.
 
 
— Michio Kahn
 
 
…at least I was quite aware that my soul had strayed into dirty back alleys, but that was precisely the whole priceless, demonic charm of it. That’s what it meant to be a twentieth century adolescent.
 
 
— Stanislawa Przybyszewska
 
 
The danger zone in which you make mistakes that are in fact not mistakes but your deepest desire.
 
 
–Lauren Kelly
 
 
There is one temple in the universe, and that is the human body.
 
 
— Carma Helzer
 
 
For the last wave is God himself. Not a melting into him, no, a growing into and becoming God. And whoever feels this, he is God.
 
 
— Hanns Heinz Ewers
 
 
Might as well be cool
Because today
Could be judgement day
 
 
— Dinah Washington
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Bushaster

Posted on December 10, 2005 by ubu507
It’s a sad commentary of the sheep-like quality of the American electorate that a few weeks of frantic spinning have improved George Bush’s approval ratings. The problem for King George is that reality will always intrude of his policies which are based on faulty premises and thereby doomed to failure. Tax cuts for his rich and super rich pals may drive the consumption of BMW’s but they don’t help sell Fords and Chevrolets, and the latter is what drives (so to speak) our economy. In Iraq — well, it’s seems to me a lot like Vietnam. The idea seems to still be that we’re liberating a country from domination, when in fact it’s more like we’re fighting the whole country itself, and the only way to "defend" it from itself is to destroy it. Another "critical" election is coming up, the third or fourth one of those we’ve had. Bush ran in the last election on the idea of the January election solving everything, when in fact it seems to cause more tension. It’s just another one of the ideological points of faith that he sticks to regardless of reality, the belief that elections will be the magic bullet to end strife and bring on the American way of life. Well, they have elections in Iran and they had them in South Vietnam. Spin that.
 
Here’s a chilling quote that’s very apropos:
 
 
 
"Bush’s closest advisers have long been aware of the religious nature of his political commitments. In recent interviews, one former senior official, who served in Bush’s first term, spoke extensively about the connection between the President’s religious faith and his view of the war in Iraq. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the former official said, he was told that Bush felt that ‘God put me here’ to deal with the war on terror. The Presidents belief was fortified by the Republican sweep in the 2002 congressional elections; Bush saw the victory as a purposeful message from God that ‘he’s the man,’ the former official said. Publicly, Bush depicted his reelection as a referendum on the war; privately he spoke of it as another manifestation of divine purpose."
 
 
                                      –Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker
 
 
 
In a way that’s why Bush and the radical Muslims are at loggerheads — they’re both preaching the same thing, that God is on their side and that their enemies must be totally destroyed. They both think that they are completely good and people who don’t agree with them are totally evil. They both have narrow, medieval black and white views of the world which are at odds and they’re dragging the rest of us down with them. I’ve always thought that was one of the reasons the Nazis hated the Jews so much — how can a "master race" and a "chosen people" co-exist? The Jews sensibly wait for some future date for Jehovah to excise the rest of mankind, the Nazis unfortunately had to try and do it themselves right then and there, producing one of the more horrific events in human history. (Or not, if you’re Mel Gibson’s Dad). Inflexible ideologies are the recipe for disaster in a flexible world and we’re witnessing one humdinger of a disaster right now in Iraq, the worst part of it being that these religious zealots are acting in the name of America.
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