Charles Bernstein
Substance Abuse
Substance Abuse
I become convinced of the itinerant
congestion of filled out hollows.
Boards propose wefts, largely
inured of (for) baskets.
Forget these chilly masquerades.
I feel (felt) stripped by these
changes. Who takes me in
different directions and therefore
I do not let got. These clip
these oasis.
So these sorrows pronounce themselves
in rhymes before my eyes, but
no easier way arrives in which
to predict—to predicate—allusion’s
sentimental anorexia. You who, while …
I proffer the usual explanations for
this less than desirable behavior.
At this point I’m months behind.
I make this point because your gazing
at a so projected grouping “at a
distance” clouds your view—
I’d be reluctant, practices vary,
& certainly even out of the normal,
to include for instance, as
would be appropriate. This
is not avoidance behavior, the
very project cannot be reduced
to its least interesting motivation /
realization / abuse. Personally, I
don’t know what I recieved and what
I was shut up with.
These break at having mend
which wails absently as
substantial people rely on
ice. So long strokes in,
swabbed by ego’s reply,
adjacent but always curtained
off of what ruffles
and rumples.
I feel like a very nervous man. The
moments do not compel my compliance
to either your fugitive fear of
expiation or fever’s last embalming
of my own falsification. One
guise disguises itself within myself,
the other within my text.
Everything I write, in some mood, sounds
bad to me. It reads like gibberish—
unnecessary rhymes, repetitions, careless
constructions—a loss of conviction. Whether
I am content to want to let those
orders I find speak for themselves, if
it is the orders as I make them that
I want to compel my own lost recognition.
No matter how the slack is removed
I can see through it. Rough
cuts satisfy, intrinsically, no more
than seamless webs. “A person
must make their own occasions.” &
what are occasions than cross-hatched
projections of ‘person’ onto ‘event’. There
are, according to our lights, neither
one or the other. Michael said to me
the other day … & now I sit here and
the recollection is far more occasioned
than at the time itself. That solitude is
the most public place of all: not
institutions (for the “advancement of
the public”). The individual mind
is the “Divine parasite” (the phrase
is Christopher Dewdney’s) of the body
of us-all—the trick, then, to
keep the channel open both
ways. Nor is this simply a conjuring of
phenomena, or simply its production—
since we are inside of phenomena at all time
and move from the nodal point of the self
back and forth to the omnimorphic and
acentric locus of our collectivity
and our desires.
To move from moment to moment without
Break is the ideal from which there is no
Escape. But isn’t what is wanted to
Stop and hover, go back and forth at mea-
Sured speed, to dwell everywhere or only as
Chosen. Such reflections candy our lives
With conditional Appalachias, the
Real facts about which are as hazy as beet soup.
There’s no sport in supposing an
even bent to be resistant to.
I’m at a bit of a loss, but have never
figured out a system such that everything
is out of the way and where to go to. To
think I can plug sections into, cut-up,
detain. Or I just gobble conscious morsels
and am discorporated within them. “Edit
is act” but why waste time on sputter. Intense
bluing of the sky. Left-over concepts, hard
edged ingratiation. A gift so parsimonious
in its intent that there are immediately
blandishments on the part of forays. I don’t
even own a scale.
Nothing tires a vision more than sundry attacks
in the manner of enclosure. My thoughts toss
trippingly on the tongue—an immense excuse
for proportion [perforation]. What I am saying
here will only come out in joinings:
but to loosen the mind, limber it for
bounding. What does ear contain
that norming senses lack? A resolution
in the air.
I find the nature and tone
of your question to be
extremely discouraging, and to
reflect an alarming lack of
understanding of the nature
of our activities. You have
unilaterally and arbitrarily
determined new evaluative
criteria without regard
for the fact that current
documentation procedures do not
pertain to these new criteria.
In fact, the statistics upon
which you base your “analysis”
tell more about your attitudes
than our program.
The depths of consciousness can never be fully sounded, death is
the only apparent limit.
Trial impressions leave you perfectly
ordered. (Totally amniostatic sludge:
buzz, buff …) Everbody comes to
a stop in their own time; look at
each other, starts coughing. Which
tires very much wake up, snarl.
Gold plums plunge: better batter
better.
What hand hides
pleasures only suggest—
a glimpse of
its morsel, postcards
from the subjectless
static:
make-believe enchantments
in the erstwhile
gaze of a buzz
a milieu fades
rapidly into.
They only start slowly
who occasions
without chance of
redress. A while
warns its
first displacements.
Ongoing / undoing.
Fumbles with
fondled alacrity
without which
thumbs do not
choose a
staked equation.
Put oneself,
desperately, in the
neck of premature
going-on-ness.
leans
looms
remains
dwindling
fade
fumbling, quivering
pull
shade
dreary
slates
splits
record
Can a person who has never been bored be described as smug, or
mereley unsettled.
“It’s supposed to be pulverized.”
A frame of
some letting
wakes whatever
wagers contest.
To challenge,
pull behind.
Nominations demure in the receding music of stringed violet.
Why have I shied away from
this purposiveless actitivity, as
if the investigation of
purposivelessness were all
a thing of the past & was
no more to be visited upon
me?
I seem to be out-of-sorts with everyone
lately—after each interaction begin to
rethink it, where did I, (s)he go wrong?
You’ve gone all the further in appointing
me to your undoing; I only wish it were
mine.
Anxious and waiting for something, but not
definable—amorphous. What pans out?
I’m afraid to set it down, to contend with
the medium at hand. Or not
to be nice: reassuring. LOSE ALL
TOUCH. Return to base one. Do
the dishes again. Shopping for ashes.
“I’m all washed up”: i.e., come ashore.