Joshua Clover

We moved into a house with 6 rooms: the Bedroom,
the Map Room, the Vegas Room, Cities
in the Flood Plains, the West, & the Room Which Contains All
of Mexico.We honeymooned in the Vegas Room where
...

For 8 months he lay in bed over the

difference between "the bell rings" & "he rings
...

They moved across the screen like a computer simulation.
They moved across the screen like complex models & we learned
to call this a nature show.
Animals but set in gray shades for video capture with a lighter area for
...

They basically grow it out of sand.
This is a big help because otherwise it was getting pretty enigmatic.
Welcome to the desert of the real,
I am an ephemeral and not too discontented citizen.
...

In one version you must convince every living thing one by one
to weep until he climbs back into the marriage-house,
that earth about which it is said that bread is the glue of the earth.
Certainly glue is money, the phrase "the tears of things" is money,
...

Now the summer air exerts its syrupy drag on the half-dark
City under the strict surveillance of quotation marks.

The citizens with their cockades and free will drift off
...

Music: Sexual misery is wearing you out.
Music: Known as the Philosopher's Stair for the world-weariness which climbing it inspires. One gets nowhere with it.
Paris: St-Sulpice in shrouds.
Paris: You're falling into disrepair, Eiffel Tower this means you! Swathed in gold paint, Enguerrand Quarton
...

Now the summer air exerts its syrupy drag on the half-dark
City under the strict surveillance of quotation marks.

The citizens with their cockades and free will drift off
From the magnet of work to the terrible magnet of love.

In the far suburbs crenellated of Cartesian yards and gin
The tribe of mothers calls the tribe of children in

Across the bluing evening. It's the hour things get
To be excellently pointless, like describing the alphabet.

Yikes. It's fine to be here with you watching the great events
Without taking part, clinking our ice as they advance

Yet remain distant. Like the baker always about to understand
Idly sweeping up that he is the recurrence of Napoleon

In a baker's life, always interrupted by the familiar notes
Of a childish song, "no more sleepy dreaming," we float

Casually on the surface of the day, staring at the bottom,
Jotting in our daybooks, how beautiful, the armies of autumn.
...

For 8 months he lay in bed over the

difference between "the bell rings" & "he rings

the bell." Did those 2 "rings" SOUND

DIFFERENT? The invisible disturbance which

is the bell's vibration beating at the air—a

FIELD EFFECT—does it shift with the

ringer's will? This, he thought, was the

smallest difference between things which the

human mind could hold (or almost hold, the

thought-of-it falling away from the thinking,

a penny rolling to the horizon & so to

sleep . . .). He couldn't get up. It became clear

that he was the murderer. Everyone knows. A

man standing at a podium reads from notes.

In the audience people nod in immaculate

suits, women & men. When I am done

someone will transcribe what I say into speech.

It will not resemble my notes. He is just THE

THING between his notes & his speech. This is

only fair, that he be the air. Some of the

women wear hats with feathers in them, wild,

candescent. In the audience is a boy named B,

not the letter, not the note. Another sound,

neither letter nor note—
...

I want to read at the white house.
I want to read poems at the white house.
I want to read poems at the white house with all the pomp available.
With celebratory music and all my beloveds watching.
With Baraka and DiPrima and Roque Dalton behind me
I want to read at the white house.
I want to read poems at the white house wearing my favorite clothes probably a hoodie or perhaps my Belgian suit.
Belgium is a failed state in the heart of Europe which is something to aspire to.
I like Belgium and one day I might like to read poems at the palace of the nation but for now I want to read poems at the white house.
I want to read poems and sing karaoke and I will probably tell a few nervous jokes.
It will be like all the other readings.
We will be there together.
I want to read poems at the white house and then like any house reading we will all clean up together.
We will clean up the mess we have made together.
All that rubble and all those ashes. These are my conditions
...

In one version you must convince every living thing one by one
to weep until he climbs back into the marriage-house,
that earth about which it is said that bread is the glue of the earth.
Certainly glue is money, the phrase "the tears of things" is money,
the revelation of the Woman Clothed in the Sun is money.
The lake is a disc of bright money buying a few plain birds down,
they climb back nervously as you hurry through, plain birds like a
plain song,
that moment when four or five are around your knees
like Zeno's arrow, rising by halves, like Eurydice's bread,
& still the possibility they might intersect,
you would be the one who was struck by a flying bird,
somewhere between a blesséd fool & village idiot,
the only one to persist outside the local economy,
drooling at travelers, holding yourself, slinging incomprehensible
advice,
you would learn the trick with museum wire
where you snap the heads off quiet animals in front of the store,
tempted equally by science & dirty work. . . .

I am trying to invent a way for you to buy me back—
...

They moved across the screen like a computer simulation.
They moved across the screen like complex models & we learned
to call this a nature show.
Animals but set in gray shades for video capture with a lighter area for
the face.
Almost white they moved across the screen like a compressed
meditation.
But the song was never familiar.
Because this was the only room this was the only room where we
undressed—:
that was the plot.
They moved across the screen across the room but it was not happening
to us.
The image burning in.
Coated with hair & then a lighter area for the face meaning exposed
skin.
We have learned to wear the architecture despite the sky's numerous
advances.
All these things—the speed & the music & the room—happened but
not enough.
We undressed in the room we could not take off where I handcuffed
you to the story.
This is the work of the brain—itself a bloody spring or electric wire
wrapped in ripe gray gauze—
you like it.
(2 lobes resembling the holy tablets delivered into the veldt's dry
speed—the Laws
prefigured in the neutral network's burning thicket.)
They moved across the screen howling but the sound turned down.
This happened over & over again—the blue light leaking into the
room like sand.
Burning into the brain in a finery of filamental fire.
The Laws which do not unravel into noise & make a kind of story of
kinked plot
which can't be straightened like a motel wire
hanger looped around your wrists.
The loop like a computer simulation—the thought of the thought—
the image burning in now.
We began to understand what they were—:
the Thou & the shalt & the not
...

They basically grow it out of sand.
This is a big help because otherwise it was getting pretty enigmatic.
Welcome to the desert of the real,
I am an ephemeral and not too discontented citizen.
I do not think the revolution is finished.
So during these years, I lived in a country where I was little known,
With the thunder of the Gods that protect the Icelandic tundra from advertising,
Great red gods, great yellow gods, great green gods, planted at the edges of the speculative tracks along which the mind speeds from one feeling to another, from one idea to its consequence
Past the proud apartment houses, fat as a fat money bag. I wish that I might stay in this pleasant, conventional city,
A placid form, a modest form, but one with a claim to pleasure,
And then vanish in the fogs of hypnoLondon.
All are in their proper place in these optical whispering-galleries,
The swan-winged horses of the skies with summer's music in their manes,
The basic Los Angeles Dingbat,
A housewife in any neighborhood in any city in any part of Mexico on a Saturday night.
Every Sunday is too little Sunday,
A living grave, the true grave of the head.
In one shout desire rises and dies.
Composed while I was asleep on horseback
I drift, mainly I drift.
...

We moved into a house with 6 rooms: the Bedroom,
the Map Room, the Vegas Room, Cities
in the Flood Plains, the West, & the Room Which Contains All
of Mexico. We honeymooned in the Vegas Room where
lounge acts wasted our precious time. Then there was the junta's
high command, sick dogs of the Map Room, heel-
prints everywhere, pushing model armies into the unfurnished
West. At night: stories of their abandoned homes in the Cities
in the Flood Plains, how they had loved each other
mercilessly, in rusting cars, until the drive-in went under.
From the Bedroom we called the decorator & demanded
a figurehead... the one true diva to be had
in All of Mexico: Maria Felix [star of The Devourer, star
of The Lady General]. Nightly in Vegas, "It's Not Unusual"
or the Sex Pistols medley. Nothing ever comes back
from the West, it's a one-way door, a one-shot deal,-
the one room we never slept in together. My wife
wants to rename it The Ugly Truth. I love my wife for her
wonderful, light, creamy, highly reflective skin;
if there's an illumination from the submerged Cities,
that's her. She suspects me of certain acts involving Maria Felix,
the gambling debts mount...but when she sends the junta off to Bed
we rendezvous in the Map Room & sprawl across the New World
with our heads to the West. I sing her romantic melodies from the Room
Which Contains All of Mexico, tunes which keep arriving
like heaven, in waves of raw data, & though I wrote
none of the songs myself & can't pronounce them, these are my
greatest hits
...

Music: Sexual misery is wearing you out.

Music: Known as the Philosopher's Stair for the world-weariness which climbing it inspires. One gets nowhere with it.

Paris: St-Sulpice in shrouds.

Paris: You're falling into disrepair, Eiffel Tower this means you! Swathed in gold paint, Enguerrand Quarton whispering come with me under the shadow of this gold leaf.

Music: The unless of a certain series.

Mathematics: Everyone rolling dice and flinging Fibonacci, going to the opera, counting everything.

Fire: The number between four and five.

Gold leaf: Wedding dress of the verb to have,it reminds you of of.

Music: As the sleep of the just. We pass into it and out again without seeming to move. The false motion of the wave, "frei aber einsam."

Steve Evans: I saw your skull! It was between your thought and your face.

Melisse: How I saw her naked in Brooklyn but was not in Brooklyn at the time.

Art: That's the problem with art.

Paris: I was in Paris at the time! St-Sulpice in shrouds "like Katharine Hepburn."

Katharine Hepburn: Oh America! But then, writing from Paris in the thirties, it was to you Benjamin compared Adorno's wife. Ghost citizens of the century, sexual misery is wearing you out.

Misreading: You are entering the City of Praise, population two million three hundred thousand . . .

Hausmann's Paris: The daughter of Midas in the moment just after. The first silence of the century then the king weeping.

Music: As something to be inside of, as inside thinking one feels thought of, fly in the ointment of the mind!

Sign at Jardin des Plantes: games are forbidden in the labyrinth .

Paris: Museum city, gold lettering the windows of the wedding-dress shops in the Jewish Quarter. "Nothing has been changed," sez Michael, "except for the removal of twenty-seven thousand Jews."

Paris 1968: The antimuseum museum.

The Institute for Temporary Design: Scaffolding, traffic jam, barricade, police car on fire, flies in the ointment of the city.

Gilles Ivain: In your tiny room behind the clock, your bent sleep, your Mythomania.

Gilles Ivain: Our hero, our Anti-Hausmann.

To say about Flemish painting: "Money-colored light."

Music: "Boys on the Radio."

Boys of the Marais: In your leather pants and sexual pose, arcaded shadows of the Place des Vosges.

Mathematics: And all that motion you supposed was drift, courtyard with the grotesque head of Apollinaire, Norma on the bridge, proved nothing but a triangle fixed by the museum and the opera and St-Sulpice in shrouds.

The Louvre: A couple necking in an alcove, in their brief bodies entwined near the Super-Radiance Hall visible as speech.

Speech: The bird that bursts from the mouth shall not return.

Pop song: We got your pretty girls they're talking on mobile phones la la la.

Enguerrand Quarton: In your dream gold leaf was the sun, salve on the kingdom of the visible.

Gold leaf: The mind makes itself a Midas, it cannot hold and not have.

Thus: I came to the city of possession.

Sleeping: Behind the clock, in the diagon, in your endless summer night, in the city remaking itself like a wave in which people live or are said to live, it comes down to the same thing, an exaggerated sense of things getting done.

Paris: The train station's a museum, opera in the place of the prison.

Later: The music lacquered with listen.
...

Listen I have something to tell you and it's too simple to tell it simply so

1872 Dostoyevsky publishes Бесы
1913 Constance Garnett publishes first
English translation as The Possessed
thus precisely within the brackets
of the Great War and the Commune
"human character changed"

A library is more like a palace than it is like a bookstore
a bookstore is more
like a hotel
a hotel is only something like a library
but a great deal like a
department store
while the department store and the high palace are one

Around that time we were leaving
behind realism and with it the struggle
over the working day
once that catastrophe was confirmed
the fighting
shifted to the front of consciousness and
then we were finally modern

In the main hall of the century the décor was a jumble of americanoiserie

I have read a lot of very thick books
and come to believe only three things

One do not send your army into Afghanistan
the Hindu Kush will swallow them

Two no matter the circumstance
do not grant emergency powers to anyone

I promise to finish but first an interlude on the romance of the lost manuscript

The Passagen-werk and Theorie du speculation
were both left to languish
in the National Library in France
while everybody was having modernism
and then recovered in the Fifties
and each book invented a new capital
one for the 19th century
one for the future of finance
oh those banky boys
swanning through the age of arbitrage
like hookers through the dizzy atrium
of the Hotel Future Foretold
and in Sao Paulo there is a department store
without any doors at all
what thoughts I have of you tonight Fred Jameson!

We make our plans among ruins
of the geopolitical baroque
at some point
we were all working downtown in bookstores
what a luxury!
like Coca-Cola
for breakfast
we took turns sitting on the floor
behind the back counter
reading new arrivals
I remember The Andy Warhol Diaries
I remember
Lipstick Traces
I remember all those black pocketbooks from Semiotext(e)

Now everyone is superflux
but like credit we are
getting ahead of ourselves

Later it would be translated as The Devils or Demons
the Russian word Бесы
actually indicating spirits
which may possess a body uninvited
but are not
themselves possessed
it seemed like a crude mistake had been rectified

To say it is a new era is to say
it has discovered a new style of time
we do not
do this in language
first but in terrain we have not chosen
and do not yet
understand
language meets us there and must be cajoled
into open air
by dangling the old forms
in their wrack and wreckage
this is the poetic thought

What true act would make every word in the dictionary political
Nina says
book-burning and that seems right
and it may be that a people can be
judged by how they answer this question
and this too is the poetic thought

Lautréamont
"mysterious and extreme Romantic"
was in 1870 already dead
in a hotel
a few yards from where I stayed last week
the Chants of Maldoror
largely unknown
until it was discovered in a bookstore 1917
hey Paris
you are beautiful but you are terrible at keeping track of books
it had been
filed in the mathematics section
and finally this too is the poetic thought

Like credit the book is unable to be
in the same time with itself
its meanings
run ahead while it lingers on a shelf
or its meanings come
racing to catch up
to the instant when the book is found
in some poor agent's hand
and so
we are always naming
the wayward motion of things
en route to realizing
themselves
the fate the itinerary the defile the fortune
"to have had their time"

But is there not a kernel of truth
concealed within Garnett's error
if we speak
you and I of the dispossessed
free and doubly free
to haul their flesh to market
why would we not call those others
within whom moves the spirit of money
why would we not call these
the possessed
green and gold in the springtime
in March and in April and in May
especially in late March
seize the banks
...

First it was one thing then it was
one thing after another. We
tend to think of fused flowers

as igniting outward from a
central place as in sex as in
Haussmann's Radiant City. I

saw it live on TV.
From overhead it's possible
to speak of the whole thing. First day

of the riots but before that
I was near home when S - this is
just a personal incident -

passed by in an old red shirt. They
weren't letting people out of
the stations as of the early

rumors of lootings. This after
Eastern Europe. Building burning
to the south as in parables

as in what punk rock promised. I
found this exciting. "He was
in control of the whole thing."

The word is S doesn't do men
anyway. A few shopping bags
came into the City via

the last trains before the curfew.
We saw the 81 seconds
on TV maybe a thousand

times. Enough house-burnings for night
visions in Los Angeles but
still the helicopters busy

not really looking just humming
overhead. A car rocked side
to side as in a carnival

ride then rolled it ignited as in
an excellent carnival ride. No
clear argument - the whole thing was

interruption. She was naked
the one time we met she was in
a friend's bed to be delicate

in a state of some déshabille.
Radiant as for example
1700 infrared

poppies blooming in the over-
head footage of south central. The
second night of riots. As in

Berlin years back - we have all seen
this footage - when the Wall came down
the main thing was chocolate also

blue jeans. "He kept trying to get
back up." We would not be allowed
to leave the station the police would

put us right back on the train. We
would not be allowed to leave . . . the
stations lacquered sanitary

eggshell tones. Architecture as in
a floral pattern of faint veins
radiating from her pubic

cup across her hips & down her
thighs. We like to think we would get
on our knees only for love. An

older woman bearing her purse
into the City 60 feet
below the broken glass bolted

across the platform from our
train to the opposite track. Hours
passed after S until I loved

the looters. In homes we watched
the ether as in shopkeepers
shooting into a crowd. To the

opposite track - hours where the
walled city of I wanted
was hidden by the bright city

of had need as in being blown
away from that place in fractures
of reflective rubble. I had

planned to practice the compliance
position with my hands on my
head not trying to rise but was

interrupted - as in fantasies
of S in riot gear. This was
the poppy vision. I admit

I found the whole thing exciting.
We have all seen this footage.
...