BELIEF & TECHNIQUE FOR TELEPATHIC PROSE Compose real poems telepathically, with mind control powers, inside your glorious brain. You are your own best advocate. Insist the world acknowledge your poems as artifacts of tiny doom. Accept nothing less. Threaten to smash yourself in the face with gasoline and set your hair on fire. Leap over the seats to stand inside the world’s personal space and get up in its grill. Take this container of Tic-Tacs and aggressively smash it on your forehead. Crush each Tic-Tac individually in your eyeballs and ask the world if it likes your poem, and if it likes your poem, then eat your poem: “Do you like my poem? Then eat it.” Always seek constant approval, then punch your cat in the face. Arrive alive. Don’t text and drive. Always write poems all the time. Never professionalize writing. Professionalism is the last refuge of responsible people looking for work. Your life is your poem. Take care to write it biographically. Failing that, invent false biographies and post them on Wikipedia. The life of the poem is synchronic; it exists, fully formed, in your brain. Edit the transcription of the poem, but mess with the poem, and I will sneak inside your brainstem to kill you, repeatedly. Be virtuoso prose stylist of instantaneous awesomeness of space & time & language. Get as much education as you can, then murder your education in the face to save it from sloppy education. Get enough education to respect your contempt for education. Give it all that you have, as deep as it goes, as desperate and total as taking a breath. Also be pedantic mundane pig-critic of precise punctuation juggling and ruthless crossed-out darling murdering of your own puny sentences. Save every draft and revert to original after enormous work, then drown yrself in the bathtub. Remember: Editing is organization. Be long-sighted prodigy of skeptically believing in nothing, but also believe in destiny, but quietly, and hit yourself in the face for naivety’s sake. You are a seamstress of words—place each stitch carefully, deliberately. Develop a series of rituals and perform them, without variation, prior to placing each word. Allow the frequency and intensity of these rituals to grow until you spend hours, each day, touching and retouching your left index finger to the tip of your nose in a rhythmic, counter-clockwise motion, in sets of thirty revolutions, in order to place a single character. Spend years of your life shut away from the world, wasting away into an awkward, unhygienic shadow of your former self, and have, to show for it, a two-syllable word of Germanic origins on an otherwise clean, white page. This word will be redoubtable, the bedrock of your writing career. Go on to spend vast sums of personal wealth and total dedication, alienating the remaining handful of long-suffering friends who continue, despite all odds, to solicit the memory of your humanity, in order to learn the arts of metalworking, Medieval alchemy, and font design, recreating a metal-cast, alpha-numeric set of Times New Roman font, from scratch, going broke long before “numeric,” and with only the half-formed germs of the characters W, N, and sometimes-vowel Y. hat are such restrictio s to ou? ou are a poet, ot a mathematicia . ou are a creature of steel. ou ill rite a e and better orld, a orld ithout the letter , forgi g it, o e smoki g husk of a ord at a time. Turn over a new leaf. You’re not getting much done like this, anyways, let’s face it. Break the chains of your censoring, conscious mind; tap into the spontaneous well of unconscious human brilliance that springs from the source of dreams. Thwart the stick-in-ass tyranny of your internal editor by making a commitment to write constantly, without ceasing, editing, or even thinking, no matter what, ignoring the anally retentive quips your brain will no doubt make. Make a further commitment: you will not only write, irrespective of internal censorship, but in a way that is unconscionably terrible, on purpose. Your writing will be, by turns, embarrassing, infantile, automatic, and marmaduke poppers—or shall we say, antagonistic to the indoctrination in repressive concepts such as “sentence” and “word” of your reader, who is always, and only, you. Let your writing be a spiritual discipline of Bat-a-rang pancakes and lightly alarm clock, ding—your toast is done. Always Alkaseltzer eyelids all the time. At last, you are ready to make it new, to murder your darlings, to first thought, best thought, to your heart’s content. Your adverb will be the enemy of your verb, the difference between your almost-right word and your right word will be the difference between your lightning bug and your lightning. You are ready to have a spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling, then edit the shit out of it. You are ready to turn your extremes against each other: Unlearn your apple pancakes and burst through the mental barriers; then slow the flood, let the lovely trickle out & edit, edit, edit. Capture spontaneous gem of native human genius, then marshal vast armies of technical knowledge & self-discipline to ensure it glimmers and cuts. Believe in things like destiny. No really—the path to writing will shatter you so many times your shards will have splinters, your bombshells, shrapnel. By the time you get there—which you probably won’t—even your exhaustion will be tired. Exhaustion of mind and body will have passed so far beyond the physical, and through malaise of spirit, that it will emerge on the other side, as physical exhaustion again. In the face of this, nothing but a little Big Purpose will do. Besides, a little ideology never hurt anyone. Feel free to be all Voltaire with your bad self, in public—but don’t give up. After all of this, when your will is finally broken (again), and you have given up for the final time (again), start over. The former model wasn’t working. Refashion yourself and your writing. Lather, rinse, usurp your noble half-brother, and repeat, until you get somewhere, or die in the trying. Avoid drugs and alcohol like death itself. Many great writers have become so in spite of their personal struggles, not because of them. I tip my hat to these men and women, many of whom have been dearer to me than my own two eyes. But to confuse correlation with causation, in this, is to court destruction. (At least, that’s what personal experience has taught me.) It is a statistical fact that writers are proportionately more prone to debilitating mental health and substance abuse disorders, than are individuals in almost any other line of work. We do, after all, sit by ourselves in a room all day, transcribing imaginary voices for posterity. We are prone to too-big transmissions, seismographs wanly scribbling, sensitive to the slightest earthquake. We are also prone to chanting fascist propaganda across the public airways of Mussolini’s Italy, ending our lives in a nuthouse. Go figure. As much admiration as I have for ol’ General Ez, and trust in his strategery, in matters syntactic and musical, this latter is not a thing I want to emulate. Separate the raving fascist within from the occasional flash of brilliance. Likewise—caution the sauce. Achieve consistency of voice; it is the signature by which you will be known. Your “you” should ring out clearly from each individual letter. In this, the writer is like the salesman. Like a new car, neither the writing’s merits, nor the reader’s needs, will be the final, deciding factor. Ultimately, the deciding factor is you. Unlike a new car, it is difficult to drive a poem, to use it to get to school or work. Unlike a car salesman, a writer does not wear enormous ties. Be so consistent that your writing consists in composing the same words, in the same order, creating the some overall voice and style, consistently, over and over, an eternal return of the same. Maintain this disciplined drudgery over the course of years. Let years become decades, and decades, an entire life: You will have “found your voice.” Variety is the spice of life, but consistency is its signature. Be so consistent that your writing consists in composing the same words, in the same order, creating the some overall voice and style, consistently, over and over, an eternal return of the same. Maintain this disciplined drudgery over the course of years. Let years become decades, and decades, an entire life: You will have “found your voice.” Variety is the spice of life, but consistency is its signature. Then again, consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. Throw things up a little bit. One day, put on your hobgoblin hat, the next day, your small mind. On second thought, re: \#18-19: Stop here. You don’t look like much of a writer. Save yourself the trouble of a deep investment that is sure to yield no returns. The prize is big, and not many take it. The Iliad showed us that the prize of writing is eternal life, and taught us to long for that promise; but the Odyssey taught us not to bother. There are many suitors, a single Odysseus. While the husband wends arduously homeward, Penelope weaves impending glory, an evaporating glamour, enchanting them, until he arrives. We are in for a bad end, if we chase another man’s wife, or a prize not rightfully ours. There are many suitors, a crowd of them. They begin as a chittering swarm of bats and end in the very same manner. You cannot have what is not yours. What is yours, no man can take. So, like Emily says, I smile when you suggest that I delay ‘to publish’—that being foreign to my thought as Firmament to Fin. If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her—if she did not, the longest day would pass me on the chase—and the approbation of my Dog would forsake me—then—My Barefoot Rank is better— Therefore, take all these Sturm und Drang commandments to the trash heap. Return to step 1, as the only useful piece of advice: Compose real poems telepathically, with mind control powers, inside your glorious brain. BELIEF AND TECHNIQUE FOR TELEPATHIC PROSE Compose real poems telepathically, with mind control powers, inside your glorious brain. You are your own best advocate. Insist the world acknowledge your poems as artifacts of tiny doom. Accept nothing less. Threaten to smash yourself in the face with gasoline and set your hair on fire. Leap over the seats to stand inside the world’s personal space and get up in its grill. Take this container of Tic-Tacs and aggressively smash it on your forehead. Crush each Tic-Tac individually in your eyeballs and ask the world if it likes your poem, and if it likes your poem, then eat your poem: “Do you like my poem? Then eat it.” Always seek constant approval, then punch your cat in the face. Arrive alive. Don’t text and drive. Always write poems all the time. Never professionalize writing. Professionalism is the last refuge of responsible people looking for work. Your life is your poem. Take care to write it biographically. Failing that, invent false biographies and post them on Wikipedia. Get as much education as you can, then murder your education in the face to save it from sloppy education. Get enough education to respect your contempt for education. Give it all that you have, as deep as it goes, as desperate and total as taking a breath. Be virtuoso prose stylist of instantaneous awesomeness of space & time & language. Also be pedantic mundane pig-critic of precise punctuation juggling and ruthless crossed-out darling murdering of your own puny sentences. Save every draft and revert to original after enormous work, then drown yrself in the bathtub. Remember: Editing is organization. Be long-sighted prodigy of skeptically believing in nothing, but also believe in destiny, but quietly, and hit yourself in the face for naivety’s sake. You are a seamstress of words—place each stitch carefully, deliberately. Develop a series of rituals and perform them, without variation, prior to placing each word. Allow the frequency and intensity of these rituals to grow until you spend hours, each day, touching and retouching your left index finger to the tip of your nose in a rhythmic, counter-clockwise motion, in sets of thirty revolutions, in order to place a single character. Spend years of your life shut away from the world, wasting away into an awkward, unhygienic shadow of your former self, and have, to show for it, a two-syllable word of Germanic origins on an otherwise clean, white page. This word will be redoubtable, the bedrock of your writing career. Go on to spend vast sums of personal wealth and total dedication, alienating the remaining handful of long-suffering friends who continue, despite all odds, to solicit the memory of your humanity, in order to learn the arts of metalworking, Medieval alchemy, and font design, recreating a metal-cast, alpha-numeric set of Times New Roman font, from scratch, going broke long before “numeric,” and with only the half-formed germs of the characters W, N, and sometimes-vowel Y. hat are such restrictio s to ou? ou are a poet, ot a mathematicia . ou are a creature of steel. ou ill rite a e and better orld, a orld ithout the letter , forgi g it, o e smoki g husk of a ord at a time. Turn over a new leaf. You’re not getting much done like this, anyways, let’s face it. Break the chains of your censoring, conscious mind; tap into the spontaneous well of unconscious human brilliance that springs from the source of dreams. Thwart the stick-in-ass tyranny of your internal editor by making a commitment to write constantly, without ceasing, editing, or even thinking, no matter what, ignoring the anally retentive quips your brain will no doubt make. Make a further commitment: you will not only write, irrespective of internal censorship, but in a way that is unconscionably terrible, on purpose. Your writing will be, by turns, embarrassing, infantile, automatic, and marmaduke poppers—or shall we say, antagonistic to the indoctrination in repressive concepts such as “sentence” and “word” of your reader, who is always, and only, you. Let your writing be a spiritual discipline of Bat-a-rang pancakes and lightly alarm clock, ding—your toast is done. Always Alkaseltzer eyelids all the time. At last, you are ready to make it new, to murder your darlings, to first thought, best thought, to your heart’s content. Your adverb will be the enemy of your verb, the difference between your almost-right word and your right word will be the difference between your lightning bug and your lightning. You are ready to have a spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling, then edit the shit out of it. You are ready to turn your extremes against each other: Unlearn your apple pancakes and burst through the mental barriers; then slow the flood, let the lovely trickle out & edit, edit, edit. Capture spontaneous gem of native human genius, then marshal vast armies of technical knowledge & self-discipline to ensure it glimmers and cuts. Believe in things like destiny. No really—the path to writing will shatter you so many times your shards will have splinters, your bombshells, shrapnel. By the time you get there—which you probably won’t—even your exhaustion will be tired. Exhaustion of mind and body will have passed so far beyond the physical, and through malaise of spirit, that it will emerge on the other side, as physical exhaustion again. In the face of this, nothing but a little Big Purpose will do. Besides, a little ideology never hurt anyone. Feel free to be all Voltaire with your bad self, in public—but don’t give up. After all of this, when your will is finally broken (again), and you have given up for the final time (again), start over. The former model wasn’t working. Refashion yourself and your writing. Lather, rinse, usurp your noble half-brother, and repeat, until you get somewhere, or die in the trying. On second thought, re: \#16-17: Stop here. You don’t look like much of a writer. Save yourself the trouble of a deep investment that is sure to yield no returns. The prize is big, and not many take it. The Iliad showed us that the prize of writing is eternal life, and taught us to long for that promise; but the Odyssey taught us not to bother. There are many suitors, a crowd of them. They begin as a chittering swarm of bats and end in the very same manner. While the husband wends arduously homeward, Penelope weaves impening glory, an evaporating glamour, enchanting them, until he arrives. There are many suitors, a single Odysseus. You cannot have what is not yours. What is yours, no man can take. So, like Emily says: I smile when you suggest that I delay “to publish” — that being foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin. — If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her — if she did not, the longest day would pass me on the chase — and the approbation of my Dog, would forsake me —then — My Barefoot-Rank is better — Therefore, take these Sturm und Drang commandments to the trash heap. Return to step 1, as the only useful piece of advice: Compose real poems telepathically, with mind control powers, inside your glorious brain. \* Begun 4/27/14, Sunday BELIEF AND TECHNIQUE FOR TELEPATHIC PROSE Compose real poems telepathically, with mind control powers, inside your glorious brain. You are your own best advocate. Insist the world acknowledge your poems as artifacts of tiny doom. Accept nothing less. Threaten to smash yourself in the face with gasoline and set your hair on fire. Leap over the seats to stand inside the world’s personal space and get up in its grill. Take this container of Tic-Tacs and aggressively smash it on your forehead. Crush each Tic-Tac individually in your eyeballs and ask the world if it likes your poem, and if it likes your poem, then eat your poem: “Do you like my poem? Then eat it.” Always seek constant approval, then punch your cat in the face. Arrive alive. Don’t text and drive. Always write poems all the time. Never professionalize writing. Professionalism is the last refuge of responsible people looking for work. Your life is your poem. Take care to write it biographically. Failing that, invent false biographies and post them on Wikipedia. The life of the poem is synchronic; it exists, fully formed, in your brain. Edit the transcription of the poem, but mess with the poem, and I will sneak inside your brainstem to kill you, repeatedly. Be virtuoso prose stylist of instantaneous awesomeness of space & time & language. Get as much education as you can, then murder your education in the face to save it from sloppy education. Get enough education to respect your contempt for education. Give it all that you have, as deep as it goes, as desperate and total as taking a breath. Also be pedantic mundane pig-critic of precise punctuation juggling and ruthless crossed-out darling murdering of your own puny sentences. Save every draft and revert to original after enormous work, then drown yrself in the bathtub. Remember: Editing is organization. Be long-sighted prodigy of skeptically believing in nothing, but also believe in destiny, but quietly, and hit yourself in the face for naivety’s sake. You are a seamstress of words—place each stitch carefully, deliberately. Develop a series of rituals and perform them, without variation, prior to placing each word. Allow the frequency and intensity of these rituals to grow until you spend hours, each day, touching and retouching your left index finger to the tip of your nose in a rhythmic, counter-clockwise motion, in sets of thirty revolutions, in order to place a single character. Spend years of your life shut away from the world, wasting away into an awkward, unhygienic shadow of your former self, and have, to show for it, a two-syllable word of Germanic origins on an otherwise clean, white page. This word will be redoubtable, the bedrock of your writing career. Go on to spend vast sums of personal wealth and total dedication, alienating the remaining handful of long-suffering friends who continue, despite all odds, to solicit the memory of your humanity, in order to learn the arts of metalworking, Medieval alchemy, and font design, recreating a metal-cast, alpha-numeric set of Times New Roman font, from scratch, going broke long before “numeric,” and with only the half-formed germs of the characters W, N, and sometimes-vowel Y. hat are such restrictio s to ou? ou are a poet, ot a mathematicia . ou are a creature of steel. ou ill rite a e and better orld, a orld ithout the letter , forgi g it, o e smoki g husk of a ord at a time. Turn over a new leaf. You’re not getting much done like this, anyways, let’s face it. Break the chains of your censoring, conscious mind; tap into the spontaneous well of unconscious human brilliance that springs from the source of dreams. Thwart the stick-in-ass tyranny of your internal editor by making a commitment to write constantly, without ceasing, editing, or even thinking, no matter what, ignoring the anally retentive quips your brain will no doubt make. Make a further commitment: you will not only write, irrespective of internal censorship, but in a way that is unconscionably terrible, on purpose. Your writing will be, by turns, embarrassing, infantile, automatic, and marmaduke poppers—or shall we say, antagonistic to the indoctrination in repressive concepts such as “sentence” and “word” of your reader, who is always, and only, you. Let your writing be a spiritual discipline of Bat-a-rang pancakes and lightly alarm clock, ding—your toast is done. Always Alkaseltzer eyelids all the time. At last, you are ready to make it new, to murder your darlings, to first thought, best thought, to your heart’s content. Your adverb will be the enemy of your verb, the difference between your almost-right word and your right word will be the difference between your lightning bug and your lightning. You are ready to have a spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling, then edit the shit out of it. You are ready to turn your extremes against each other: Unlearn your apple pancakes and burst through the mental barriers; then slow the flood, let the lovely trickle out & edit, edit, edit. Capture spontaneous gem of native human genius, then marshal vast armies of technical knowledge & self-discipline to ensure it glimmers and cuts. Believe in things like destiny. No really—the path to writing will shatter you so many times your shards will have splinters, your bombshells, shrapnel. By the time you get there—which you probably won’t—even your exhaustion will be tired. Exhaustion of mind and body will have passed so far beyond the physical, and through malaise of spirit, that it will emerge on the other side, as physical exhaustion again. In the face of this, nothing but a little Big Purpose will do. Besides, a little ideology never hurt anyone. Feel free to be all Voltaire with your bad self, in public—but don’t give up. After all of this, when your will is finally broken (again), and you have given up for the final time (again), start over. The former model wasn’t working. Refashion yourself and your writing. Lather, rinse, usurp your noble half-brother, and repeat, until you get somewhere, or die in the trying. Avoid drugs and alcohol like death itself. Many great writers have become so in spite of their personal struggles, not because of them. I tip my hat to these men and women, many of whom have been dearer to me than my own two eyes. But to confuse correlation with causation, in this, is to court destruction. (At least, that’s what personal experience has taught me.) It is a statistical fact that writers are proportionately more prone to debilitating mental health and substance abuse disorders, than are individuals in almost any other line of work. We do, after all, sit by ourselves in a room all day, transcribing imaginary voices for posterity. We are prone to too-big transmissions, seismographs wanly scribbling, sensitive to the slightest earthquake. We are also prone to chanting fascist propaganda across the public airways of Mussolini’s Italy, ending our lives in a nuthouse. Go figure. As much admiration as I have for ol’ General Ez, and trust in his strategery, in matters syntactic and musical, this latter is not a thing I want to emulate. Separate the raving fascist within from the occasional flash of brilliance. Likewise—caution the sauce. Achieve consistency of voice; it is the signature by which you will be known. Your “you” should ring out clearly from each individual letter. In this, the writer is like the salesman. Like a new car, neither the writing’s merits, nor the reader’s needs, will be the final, deciding factor. Ultimately, the deciding factor is you. Unlike a new car, it is difficult to drive a poem, to use it to get to school or work. Unlike a car salesman, a writer does not wear enormous ties. On second thought, re: \#18-19: Stop here. You don’t look like much of a writer. Save yourself the trouble of a deep investment that is sure to yield no returns. The prize is big, and not many take it. The Iliad showed us that the prize of writing is eternal life, and taught us to long for that promise; but the Odyssey taught us not to bother. There are many suitors, a crowd of them. They begin as a chittering swarm of bats and end in the very same manner. While the husband wends arduously homeward, Penelope weaves impend3.ing glory, an evaporating glamour, enchanting them, until he arrives. We are in for a bad end, if we chase another man’s wife, or a prize not rightfully ours. There are many suitors, a single Odysseus. You cannot have what is not yours. What is yours, no man can take: Therefore, take all these Sturm und Drang commandments to the trash heap. Return to step 1, as the only useful piece of advice: Compose real poems telepathically, with mind control powers, inside your glorious brain. What the age needs is not a genius — it has had geniuses enough, but a martyr, who in order to teach men to obey would himself be obedient unto death. What the age needs is awakening. And therefore someday, not only my writings but my whole life, all the intriguing mystery of the machine will be studied and studied. I never forget how God helps me and it is therefore my last wish that everything may be to his honour. (20 November 1847) \* 5/2/14, Friday, PM hours, Glenbrook, moleskine gamma gamma The promise (of poetry) is beyond reality, staggering in proportion: For the individual to carry on. To go out on the seas of time. Even as it crushes the individual. The fact is, for every Sappho, who saw & obtained the promise, there are countless, untold millions who saw, with equal clarity, the promise, who burned, with equal intensity, to attain it, who wept, clawed, and gave their lives and received not a morsel in return. This is the reality. For every one who shoots through the jaws of the tender beast, unbitten, to be kept, perhaps, as a pet, it swallows a thousand mouthfuls more, the toothsome fare of actual human lives. What then? The living are speaking to us all the time, while we dead bats squeak through chittering tunnels, a flotsam flock. 99.99% pass, deaf & childless, into the deep, deep pit. They don’t come back. One in a million become accidentally distracted from the careening dance, & catch a glimmer of sense in the hollow-sounding echoes In one in a million of the one in a million something ancient & living & new is born for a moment a snapping rat beak of shrinking distance then the journey is up. The words comes to us hairless & birth-blind & in the same state, we release them. What then? All the time we are being born and all the time, we are dying. It is not enough to hear & die when the aftertaste lingers when to taste is the soul of the living being it is not enough to live if to live is to pour out a song for a nation of dying moths life is life among the living to live is a nation of living beings to live is a nation of listening songs who never lose music whose singing is a chorus of remembered gongs to live is a flawless energy system receptive to novel pulses and never releasing them. \* 5-3-14, Sat, Glenbrook, 3:30 PM The world is growing smaller, a hell of the Same, from which there is no escape. I am on my couch. My couch is a boat in the winedark Mediterranean. Lee Sharks is currently completing twenty-six separate works of staggering length and genius in twenty-six separate genres, on twenty-six separate computers, color-coded by project. He types them, simultaneously, on a single wireless keyboard he paid for with his imagination.