Zoopraxography In Motion (Ain't We Got Fun?)

"Go your way and God be with you. I know your path is the path of honor!"

He paused.

"I missed you at Bucharest, but I needed someone to send."

And changing the subject, Kutuzov began to speak of the Turkish war and the peace that had been concluded.

"Yes, I have been much blamed," he said, "both for that war and the peace...but everything came at the right time. Tout vient à point à celui qui sait attendre...."

[Leo Tolstoy]

Three Dog Day

“No, I don’t want another dog,” said my mother.

“You get attached.”

She said it two times before my father

brought home another dog.



Whenever she remembered their first dog,

her face brightened into shining happiness.



“He was a Cocker Spaniel”, she said.

“He was smart. You never needed to tell him anything.

He knew.

He guarded your baby carriage when I went shopping.

You don’t remember. He brought your father his shoes.”



Skippy was the Collie

Of flowing red and white hair,

Daredevil and fearless

Like a Spartan at Thermopylae.



He faced down cars and was run over.



In a last vast burst of overflowing energy

he galloped back onto the front porch

bloody and screaming and expired.



After that my Teddy Bear became important,

which he had never been before.



Half a decade later my mother said,

“I don’t want another dog. You get attached.”



The third dog was a boxer bitch.

When my father brought her home

she pranced down the hall to my mother

of the waiting white bright smile of mind.



Dusty died when I was in college.



She was a teenager in human years.



My mother held she was almost human,

and had mastered English, not just to understand,

but to make her meaning known.



“She could talk”, my mother said.

She nodded her head knowingly.

“You get attached,” she said.


[copyright EAC]

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N.B. Part of a much larger work, this poem stands alone as a dedication to the poet Belden Crane Johnson, whose Snake Blossoms, in its truth and simplicity, was, and remains, ahead of the times. Indeed, since the times have been in reverse for at least a generation, perhaps more ahead now than when it was first published.

Wings (Readymade)

About a year has passed. I've returned to the place of the battle,

to its birds that have learned their unfolding of wings

from a subtle

lift of a surprised eyebrow, or perhaps from a razor blade....

[Joseph Brodsky]

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N.B. The artist who signs his work as "R. Mutt", has been observed to use several different spellings, depending on the occasion, including R. Mut, R. Moot, R. Mute, R. Mutmut. Most of the signatures seem to be in a shade of red, and are associated with "Readymades."

Stroll

Followed by a handsome borzoi and the pomeranian "Snob," the two were taking their usual post-prandial exercise beneath the trees.

"Let me come, Mother dear," he murmured without interrupting, "over the other side of you. I always like to be on the right side of my profile...."

[Ronald Firbank]

The Naked Eye: Speculum Anaglyphicum

"Imagine all those girls working like mad at their looms, and think how little they were paid."

[Greta Garbo]

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N.B.: This is a combination of negative and positive mirrored anaglyphs with graded depth and projection. To see it as 3D, red and blue 3D glasses are needed, blue right, left red.

The image is also deliberately "bioptic" or "bivalent", and designed to be viewable without the 3D glasses as well.

Click on the image to see at full size.

Gusari, Molchat'!

MAN. You never saw a cavalry charge, did you?

RAINA. How could I?

MAN. Ah, perhaps not--of course. Well, it's a funny sight. It's
like slinging a handful of peas against a window pane: first one
comes; then two or three close behind him; and then all the rest
in a lump.

RAINA (her eyes dilating as she raises her clasped hands
ecstatically). Yes, first one!--the bravest of the brave!

MAN (prosaically). Hm! you should see the poor devil pulling at
his horse.

RAINA. Why should he pull at his horse?

MAN (impatient of so stupid a question). It's running away with
him, of course: do you suppose the fellow wants to get there
before the others and be killed? Then they all come. You can
tell the young ones by their wildness and their slashing. The
old ones come bunched up under the number one guard: they know
that they are mere projectiles, and that it's no use trying to
fight. The wounds are mostly broken knees, from the horses
cannoning together....

[George Bernard Shaw]
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Ménage à Tub

"That really does put a cap on it. One would think that since you are a man and get about a good deal, you ought to know the value of things, yet you sell a tub for five silver ducats, which I, a mere woman who hardly ever puts her nose outside the front door, seeing what a nuisance it was to have it in the house, have just sold it to an honest fellow here for seven. He's inside the tub now, as a matter of fact, seeing whether it is sound."

When he heard this, her husband was delighted, and turning to the man who had come to collect the tub, he said:

"Run along now, there's a good fellow. You heard what my wife said. She's sold it for seven, and all you would offer me for it was five."

[Giovanni Boccaccio, tr. G. H. McWilliams]

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Click on image to see full size.

Shu (Prelude)

She says: "Have you seen...?"
He says: "I been."
"Let's again." Over Wei
Pleasantly.

Ready girl, ready man
offer mutual medicine.

[Ezra Pound, rendering after the Songs of Ts'i]

Gran Apacheria (Cuatro)

[In My Youth I Was a Tireless Dancer....]
But now I pass
graveyards in a car.
The dead lie,
unsuperstitiously,
with their feet toward me--
please forgive me for
saying the tombstones would not
fancy their faces turned from the highway....

[Ed Dorn]

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Click on image ot see at full size.

Le Miroir D'Amaterasu (L'Anti-Narcisse)

Steely stars and moon of brass,
How mockingly you watch me pass!
You know as well as I how soon
I shall be blind to stars and moon,
Deaf to the wind in the hemlock tree...

[Sara Teasdale]
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Click on image to view at full size.

Only In Sleep...

I try to catch at many a tune
Like petals of light fallen from the moon,
Broken and bright on a dark lagoon...

Sara Teasdale

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Codpiece(Musée Nanook Nanook)

It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.

[Frank Zappa]
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Terra Isometrica (Pars III)

It is quite foolish to suppose that Heraclitus, after the quite H. Jamesian precisions of the Odyssey, and before the Shakespearian humour of Plato's character drawing, merely said "Everything flows", or that any one abstract statement wd. have made his reputation.

It wd. be sheer prejudice not to suppose he and a good half-dozen of the sages tried, that is to say tried to correlate their thought, to carry a principle through concrete and apparently disjunct phenomena and observe the leaves and/or fruits of causation....

[Ezra Pound]
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N.B.: Click on image to see at full size.

La Mort Du Cid: Vignette For A Blue Guitar

A: ....I was playing with Macedonio's pocketknife, opening and closing it. A nearby accordion was infinitely dispatching La Comparsita, that dismaying trifle that so many people like because it's been misrepresented to them as being old....I suggested to Macedonio that we kill ourselves, so that we might have our discussion without all that racket.

Z: (mockingly) But I suspect that at the last moment you reconsidered.

A: (now deep in mysticism) Quite frankly, I don't remember whether we committed suicide that night or not.

[Jorge Luis Borges]

Parmenides And Teleportation

Parmenides And Teleportation

For most people, being in two different places at one time takes some getting used to.

Parmenides makes it simple enough.

On the one hand, you are where you are and cannot not be.

Then again, you are wherever you happen to be--now.

[copyright EAC]

And Now To Review Our Plot

Now, whether we observe it or no, continued my father, in every sound man's head, there is a regular succession of ideas of one sort or another, which follow each other in train just like--a train of artillery? said my uncle Toby.--A train of fiddlestick!--quoth my father,--which follow and succeed one another in our minds at certain distances, just like the images in the inside of a lanthorn turn round by the heat of the candle--I declare, quoth my uncle Toby, mine are like a smoak-jack--Then, brother Toby, I have nothing more to say to you upon the subject, said my father.

[Laurence Sterne]

The Large Door

Stade Du Miroir (Encore)

Stade Du Miroir(Encore)

Stade du miroir, no?
Evergreen never sleeping,
never dreaming too.

[copyright EAC]

Block Seating

In relation to nature a positivist scientist is almost in the same position as a savage in a library filled with valuable rare books. For a savage a book is a thing of a certain size and weight. However long he may puzzle over the purpose of this strange thing, he will never understand it by its appearance, and the content of the book will remain for him the unfathomable noumenon....

Pyotr Demianovich Ouspenskii [tr. Kadloubovsky]

The Cyrillic Gorilla (A Nasty Story)

As he went on remembering he became more and more thoughtful. Everybody knows that whole trains of thought can sometimes pass through our heads in the twinkling of an eye, like so many sensations, without being translated into any kind of human, much less, literary language. But we shall try to translate our hero's sensations of that kind and present to our readers at any rate the substance of them, what were, so to speak, their most essential and plausible aspects. Because after all many of our feelings, translated into ordinary language, seem altogether unlikely. That is why they are never brought out into the open, although everybody has them....

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (tr. J. Coulson)

Chin Money

Go With The Wind

"to and fro in shadow from inner to outer shadow

from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself

by way of neither..."


[Samuel Beckett]

Shadow Dance: An Essay On Minimalism

"The oddest product of terraphysics--and who knows, perhaps the one that promises the most to knowledge--is reckoned to be the so-called Polyversum hypothesis. According to it the Cosmos is dual and we, together with the matter comprising the suns, stars, planets, and our bodies, inhabit its "slow" half, the Bradyversum. It is "slow" because movement is possible here at speeds ranging from the static up to locally the highest, that of light. The other or "fast" half of the Cosmos, the Tachyversum, is reached via the light barrier. To get to the Tachyversum, it is necessary to exceed the speed of light: in our world this is an omnipresent frontier separating each spot from another region of existence...."

[Stanislaw Lem]

Kafka's Laughter (Still)

“I always wanted you to admire my fasting,” said the hunger artist.

“But we do admire it,” said the supervisor obligingly.

“But you shouldn’t admire it,” said the hunger artist.

“Well then, we don’t admire it,” said the supervisor, “but why shouldn’t we admire it?”

“Because I had to fast. I can’t do anything else,” said the hunger artist.

“Just look at you,” said the supervisor, “why can’t you do anything else?”

“Because,” said the hunger artist, lifting his head a little and, with his lips pursed as if for a kiss, speaking right into the supervisor’s ear so that he wouldn’t miss anything, “because I couldn’t find a food which I enjoyed...."


[Franz Kafka tr. Ian Johnston]

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Note: click on the image to view full size.

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