Text Reads:

I bought this at Chelsea Fleamarkets for twenty-five cents. I can’t help but wonder that if maybe Karen had scanned it into her computer and applied a decent black border around, perhaps I would suddenly consider it art. Images like these are ubiquitous in Art; we all like to think that we are somehow profound because we appreciate images such as this one. We look at this photograph and we think, “That’s someone’s great grandmother” and we yearn for the identities of these people. And we yearn for our own identities as well, because we have no sense of family in the way that our grandparents do. And so we yell everyone that it has aesthetic value because we don’t even know who we are, and then we blame them for not understanding our Art. We subject the entire world to our idiosyncratic insecurities and then we think we are somehow deeper when they don’t get it.

“The sweetness of sorrow and love. To be smiled at by her in the car. That was the most beautiful thing of all. Always the longing to die & yet keeping oneself alive; this alone is love.” -Kafka.

Admission:
In April I bought 8 colored pencils and 5 different pads. They were beautiful things. The possibilities inherent in their eventual interaction were exciting. I imagined them as they’d look here on this screen. I imagined the birth of pixels rather than their simple relocation. I imagined the characters of A Voyage to Arcturis with their many eyes and foreign limbs rendered and neatly titled. I imagined my hand moving in sweeping arcs and careful angles. I imagined a flow which I’d call freedom. The pencils and pads are beautiful things still, dusty things in the museum of my desk.

What if I wrote? Wrote like a machine without a grammar-module or spell-check? Wrote like the eyes of a man lost in a jungle? What if I wrote hard and wild and whistled into the necks of empty bottles in the nighttime? Would you be gratified? What if I cast it all aside and hunted the head of my potential’s long shadow? Isn’t that what you do already? Can anything slow the relentless narrowing down of possibility into reality? No.

Admission:
I’ve forgotten how to write. What you see before you is what you see everywhere-compromise. It’s the road paved with good intention. It’s an anagen hair hiding its precious root-tip. It’s about as funny and beloved as a woman’s laugh lines. It’s all excuses. It’s the personal failure which passes for public accomplishment. You think I kid but I do not. No creator ever hungered to be a curator instead.

People enjoy it. So what? I brush up against thousands of people every day on the subway, in the elevator, on the sidewalk, in the hallways, at the bank and the deli; They file past my desk and window in an endless shambling stream. Their children shit themselves and scream and want; their dogs walk on the left and they walk on the right, taught leashes strung between like tripwires. “People enjoy it?” Yes. What the fuck do I care what they enjoy? Is it my job to tickle their asses with a delightful little feather? I don’t like them much, not sure I ever have. “Hope you enjoy.” How many times have you written that? Weak moments, punch-lines, every one.

Admission:
All is not what it seems. It’s less than it seems, and perhaps even less than that.

What if I called a spade a spade? Do you destroy a delusion by naming it as such? What if I called it what it was, self-absorption, and rather than prostrating myself and pretending at remorse I embraced it as my birthright in our culture? What if I wrapped myself in my own weaknesses? What if I split apart all syntax, ignored all context, and defied all expectation? What if I broke the contract and burst the bounds and spit in the eye of every passerby? That wouldn’t be like you. Exactly! And if “it” is me then to change it… But why would you want to change it?

Admission:
Because eventually the repetitive act of rooting out links and following them to their connected pretty pictures makes you want to do nothing so much as vomit.

What if I wrote a self-indulgent, rambling prose-poem, and posted it accompanied by meaningless scribbles? Would the result still be The Nonist? I don’t know. And does it matter?

Six Significant Landscapes

I
An old man sits
In the shadow of a pine tree
In China.
He sees larkspur,
Blue and white,
At the edge of the shadow,
Move in the wind.
His beard moves in the wind.
The pine tree moves in the wind.
Thus water flows
Over weeds.

II
The night is of the colour
Of a woman’s arm:
Night, the female,
Obscure,
Fragrant and supple,
Conceals herself.
A pool shines,
Like a bracelet
Shaken in a dance.

III
I measure myself
Against a tall tree.
I find that I am much taller,
For I reach right up to the sun,
With my eye;
And I reach to the shore of the sea
With my ear.
Nevertheless, I dislike
The way ants crawl
In and out of my shadow.

IV
When my dream was near the moon,
The white folds of its gown
Filled with yellow light.
The soles of its feet
Grew red.
Its hair filled
With certain blue crystallizations
From stars,
Not far off.

V
Not all the knives of the lamp-posts,
Nor the chisels of the long streets,
Nor the mallets of the domes
And high towers,
Can carve
What one star can carve,
Shining through the grape-leaves.

VI
Rationalists, wearing square hats,
Think, in square rooms,
Looking at the floor,
Looking at the ceiling.
They confine themselves
To right-angled triangles.
If they tried rhomboids,
Cones, waving lines, ellipses—
As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon—
Rationalists would wear sombreros.




Poem Written at Morning

A sunny day’s complete Poussiniana
Divide it from itself. It is this or that
And it is not.
By metaphor you paint
A thing. Thus, the pineapple was a leather fruit,
A fruit for pewter, thorned and palmed and blue,
To be served by men of ice.
The senses paint
By metaphor. The juice was fragranter
Than wettest cinnamon. It was cribled pears
Dripping a morning sap.
The truth must be
That you do not see, you experience, you feel,
That the buxom eye brings merely its element
To the total thing, a shapeless giant forced
Upward.
Green were the curls upon that head.




Theory

I am what is around me.

Women understand this.
One is not duchess
A hundred yards from a carriage.

These, then are portraits:
A black vestibule;
A high bed sheltered by curtains.

These are merely instances.




Negation

Hi! The creator too is blind,
Struggling toward his harmonious whole,
Rejecting intermediate parts,
Horrors and falsities and wrongs;
Incapable master of all force,
Too vague idealist, overwhelmed
By an afflatus that persists.
For this, then, we endure brief lives,
The evanescent symmetries
From that meticulous potter’s thumb.




Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.




Gray Room

Although you sit in a room that is gray,
Except for the silver
Of the straw-paper,
And pick
At your pale white gown;
Or lift one of the green beads
Of your necklace,
To let it fall;
Or gaze at your green fan
Printed with the red branches of a red willow;
Or, with one finger,
Move the leaf in the bowl—
The leaf that has fallen from the branches of the forsythia
Beside you…
What is all this?
I know how furiously your heart is beating.




Gubbinal

That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.

That tuft of jungle feathers,
That animal eye,
Is just what you say.

That savage of fire,
That seed,
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.




All by Wallace Stevens.

The photographs (and a couple of the quotes) were all taken from the book, Solomon D. Butcher. Photographing the American Dream put out by the University of Nebraska Press in 1985.

Notes on the images: Very few of butchers own prints survive so the images here are reprinted from his negatives. in that he often cropped his shots drastically there is no way of knowing what his intended compositions really were.

For a bit more more on Butcher, his photographs, and the homesteader life in general see the following:

Prairie Settlement, the