Folkcal Fraim 13
A Magi in the Conflict of Luck / St Petersburg, Florida / TSE / 2024
Yeats Unveiled, Peripherally,
With A Silly Point and Shoot
Reality (whose other name is Reading) is being held hostage by the new host of our age, the maestro and maelstrom of the mystic arts, magic. Like an old host in clothing designed to appear anciently new, this reboot of a shiny bootleg has many aliases, several addresses, and a variety of ready-player youth organizations all prepared to reward those bribed into believing they are talented with semi-prestigious mousetraps of merit, all funded by sorcerers, wizards, and witches who middle manage the vibratory control of society, the less than thrice great unknown, the Mr. and Mrs. Robot who dedicate their lives in flesh to the sleight of hand difference between audiences of the Apocalypse and stage techs of the Revolution, their talking points that shoot like small guns with compatible magazines. To photograph the unknown is to be inhabited by the unknowable, phantom-hood and phantasmagoria, the promise and surprise of the euphoria of possession, a spiritual charade, a benevolent creative force posed with other posers in the constant decay of heartbreak, the shutter smile of too many pixels. “Be blessed” never fails to make the less fortunate believe that being sensitive is the same as suffering, all other non-supernatural explanations extinct. The secrecy that breaks reality often wounds the intellect at the exact moment the applause potion reaches its last drop. Such reasoning has nothing to do with the balancing act of feelings. This lasso of experience, now lectern-less, nothing to do with listening. One must point the camera and shoot anything that has no origin in soil, and get the hell-up out of that spot just to prevent oneself from being sold to a faith-based “body of fate” that has nothing to do with earth, water, air and fire, the elemental attributes found at the apex of our pitiful world. Feasting on human frequency while leaning outside the frame, as if being rescued by an overworked and invisible ancestor, no believer dare abandon this theater of higher realms. At best their inflamed manipulations are habitual, ravished, and aside from “The Mind of God” acts of miracles described in religious texts or experienced in dreams, not the ones that have been turned into amusement park grimoires, their claims of supreme access to the whole of modern nature has only resulted in human commodities at conflict with one another––emphasis on the silent variation that changes “flict” to “flick.” Any word that contains an “a” and an “i” as in A.I. is quench-less and ever-living and knows what you want. Good magic: the living past. Bad magic: the dead present.
Unlike its dopey doppelganger of digital inmates, the internet of changeable things, real magic is not something that you can achieve via meditation, perform your way into with the aid of a slick spoken deliverance nor by foreclosing the metaphors of souls on a memory card. Real magic hates retail, trick moves, and “Now You See It. Now You Don’t.” Real magic is the root of all ripening and the wood of all Palace Yards of Wonder. It will even self-rot to prevent its seeds from becoming uninhabitable castles. Look around you, everyone with a coolpix nickname has experienced an apotheosis. When confronted by an unwanted buyer, real magic is always ready to point and shoot just to cut off the head of the assailant’s offer. No monopoly or new age of awareness has ever grounded it into the normalcy of an apology. Nearest to where the kingdom of heaven once stood, pre language, it begins the beginning, within. It is (in the widest sense of is) quite unimaginably the realm we had before this realm was, lab-forced, into all sharing the same face. Some say the natural knowledge of it was first known by the druids before they were felled by rumors of blood sacrifices. Translation: the ritual of Burning Man, the fertility cult of Woodstock. Today, gossipy goth is the word-of-mouth by which history lessons, damaging ones, are used to erase holy landscapes. Others say: the garb of the hermetic order and other such golden dawns, including all things Enochian, predate the rise of the void and the scented violence in all vials of essential oils. They cast their spells from robes, hand-me-downs, and every runway walk, or new faction of silicon spirituality betrays the treaties between the people’s allegiance to other people in the name of oaths and beliefs, boatloads of slogans, that guide the outsider apprentice toward self-sabotage. Centuries of control, generation after generation cut from the same cloth of struggle and fear but given a new name among names: Yeats. Aran-stitched as the loop of hope, the reactionary fabric that compels one back into the orders of the past, tricolored and motherless as magic.
Motion is the magus, the removal of aging from imagery, the get up and go of all stationary metaphors. Poetry in motion inhabits the motion picture like a chiseler of movement in search of the repeal martyr once known as wordsmith. A camera contains the same campaign a stanza contains, the eradication of the stillborn experience––but the action stoppers keep getting in the way of the visual vehicle. As a once useful and fun scout that became an industry plant, the point and shoot is running out of time. It’s machinery, compact and pocket-parked, will soon be replaced by wearables like smart watches, smart glasses and implants, all activity trackers, and claimed by the same archons who claimed the phonebooth before it became an outdated outpost of the coming onslaught on human communication. Over the phone lines we went (away from in person voice) into the bottomless regions of being more than or less than or equal to being a kind of human, no camera larger than a soap dish or a shirt pocket allowed anywhere near the womb’s incubator. Dial up, the new sundial, the sound of pseudo ascension, the soul trap of social meddling, the unmade digital data bed, a science program of nano-bio-info-cognitive conditioning. To this day, it is not clear which species of order, regular order, led the way: human curiosity, free will or artist expression? To this day, the entanglement of items resulting from the foulest ransom notes of history, including art, that Puckish hobgoblin of secondary transformative efforts, is one of magic’s most reliable mules. Art carries the load for human limitations, the immaculate magic of the imagination. The artist, once merely a combination of the bard and the shaman, repackages (via the formidable intoxicant known as abracadabra) the aristocratic tricks of the world’s oldest stagecraft: the Pledge as sculpture, the Turn as poetry and the Prestige as painting. Ever since art became work, it has had its hand out and is, thus, susceptible to an ugly dependence on the patrons of non-magic and their dulled versions of chaos. It is through art, for better or worse, that reality has become a religion, the deity of culture, created by the synthetic individual in search of its own shadow, shimmering shower curtain, and sideshow. Divided into various formulas of taste and treachery, the artist who would be a magician (by way of the fall to birth before earth) has many webs, many trapdoors, many wands––hazel and hushed––the biggest being the sacred act of funding, blood oath borrowing, the mental theater (at both sides of the mirror of dawn) in need of perpetual applause. Like a shy spell, support stands, posed in the frame, fresh out of the top hat that performs the service of a blender of social juices. They know not what they practice, these recipients of a compact craft juried by mini spirits who smoke like the ones in “Irish Traveler Children,” Jaime Johnson’s series of photographs. They know not what they accept, what it takes, to cheat the death that created cheating. And yet, in the dead of winter a burning flower adds ice to ashes. The urn of our focus. It burns, meaning under magus, images over ideas. Out comes a masterpiece, the piece of the master the master could not create, the believable hocus pocus, afoot as the hound by the bedside who obeys the cooing dove. Velveteen Bavarian tuned to the enlightened conflict, to the unwise bloom, absurdly reoccurring, as is his transcendent devotion to ancient Arya Land.
The word magic comes from magi, the mature sage, the soul stone of the mystical spark. In the creative order of the unknown ages, the magi occupy the primary frontispiece zones of energy healing between agency and purpose. The magi are the map of “the mind’s eye,” the visible oration, the moment in the spell before the eye on the triangular tongue becomes magic for magic’s sake, bald pharaoh beneath the nemes, striped cloth or flag-like headdress. The way of the lens, shot or shot by the British, long before Cromwell. RAW spells edited in SILKYPIX, many magi have been known to keep people in the shade by giving them degrees. Often the ego, trolled by the faintest of raise, calls upon the dullest of psychic swords to cast out the discomfort of dueling personalities. Selfhood loaded with lead; ten paces till the copper coating commits to caliber. Modernity, thou art a snobbish mob. I do thee dirty, do thee the same way photojournalists treat the end of a career. I slice thou boiled aftermaths into the unsightly skirmish of conventional idealism. Myself I can’t help, never could. Rescue reading, nor would-I-could. Be thee dim enlightenment or the real presence of “hairdresser stuff.” Be thee dim enlightenment or the real presence of “hairdresser stuff.” The alarm, due to the unique vocabulary of good looks, no longer sounds like an alarm. Do anything to survive, including disrespecting their foolish rules. In the darkness on a branch of the tree in the wood of wonders yet another vow (owl) well of evocative pictures, speculative economic predators, a bird-mammal, caught up in the mission of pretending to be a lens like the cannon lifted upward and the unsatisfied letter of the coalition of destiny. You’ve seen them in their jets, liars of the carbon offsets, commodifying the air. To the blue-eye hawk, cupid was clairvoyant. To O’Duffy’s Blueshirts, an infantile sniper who targeted non kissers, the gaol’s unworn scarlet coat. Alpha baby male, weekly newspaper aim, cropped (again) this time by the editor like “mummy wheat” circumcised by the gods of external fate. Glory to the giant ma, the “i” at the end of magi; but it’s the I see, eye see, seeing eye, the “ic” at the end of the grotesque parallel that the league of youth should worry about––all nuance and no essence, big muses in uniforms heavily influenced by Europe. The “ic” is an ick and an ick at the end of anything that enters or leaves the mouth is not a good look nor does it taste good. Is twilight transitional, or just the natural norm of being embittered? When one is younger, the visor keeps vision out. When one is older, the visor keeps vision in. Unable to read the reality behind the shadows of the blind math, how did the equal animals of the later generation come to care so much about Year Zero? When attached to “mag,” it becomes a novel in a snake clamp flexible mount, Mann’s magic mountain, but being literary folks (who constantly trek up our own Alps to private sanatoriums), we already know that the real poetry wars belong to the ballade battalion, barbarous envoi in utmost tow. The media is manic. The maniacs are magicians. The magicians are all manufactured, and the factories are an extension of geabheadh tu an sonas aer pighin (you can buy joy for a penny) whereupon it has become hard to tell the difference between weaponized magic and magical weapons. These premature apprentices know not what they practice; not one of them has ever seen a photograph taken by someone who has absolutely no knowledge of the bible. As ick is changed to ink and comes through a fiber tip, magic has many roles and one of them is not to slowly fall apart. William, the arch poet, the cognitive extension that frees the non-local silken stuff from its bag of skin. As soon as your eyes open, that first motion of life, magic, births the fire of spirit into the knowledge that returns to image. A great photograph reveals love, usually the beginning of romance or the end, never the messy in-between. Then there’s the geography of poetry, whose demolishers often attempt to airbrush the tense apparitions that embrace the native lout. Of these quiet quitters, beware.
The Adamic magic of naming every animal in every kind of man, every former human being in every beast, is bestowed upon the breast of the poet long before the path is interrupted, violently, by the beaks of indifference. Long before the camera came, like an object of household selfsameness, through one of those barely standing hermetic pawn shops. To this end some initiates are given powerful initials, a signature landscape, a guardian talisman imbued with an automatic vision, a spouse who understands the flame of the Order and won’t renounce the mighty scene, the drudgery nor the slipper-less cavern. Trial by the daily sketch of transformation. Not so much initials as they are vessels (or bolts) of Aengus, the randy sennachie hidden behind the presto chango of love-lorn proper nouns, the rebel countess. With an appetite for the court martial of sitting for portraits, the name Yeats is a wide-opened window with a beheaded tripod in it. “Silly,” hurry up and finish your siècle, so I can get spooky with the Thevshi who need traveling shoes. The white rabbits of Sligo left when the top hats left. Take your pick: Squire, Belled, Abe, Mad Hatter, Caroler, John Bull, Topper, Gambler, The Prince, The Beau, Black Collapsible, Black Non-Collapsible. There were cameras hidden in the shorter hats, firearms in the taller ones, both capable of erasing faerie dust from the yearbooks that would eventually become the spat-on swagger of brooms. Like inheritors from nowhere, they waited but the rabbits never came back, well, not like rabbits but more like bunnies, Easter Bunnies. Surely no sorcerer of substance paid it any mind nor dude bro banter, nah Slim, not for all the Merlin in Merlot did hard liquor ever transform a louse into a generous listener. And yet the magic, continued to record like a lesser-known camcorder accusing the grandparents of suedeheads of crashing the last cattle auction in Corcomroe. They know not what they practice, yet they applaud (as if in a video game) the raggle-taggle edges of a tradition that has been replaced––all on the strength of hearsay. Long before there was “Conspiracy Theorist,” the mouths were full of monikers like “Silly.” More than often, it is the pursuit of a pure folklore that places the body in the grave, but it is the occult that digs it up. The prolific devourer, Wystan Hugh, knew what he was saying, “Silly,” nibbling at the morsels of the deceased’s mental state. “Silly,” it echoes through the ages, pitting friend against friend, neighbor against neighbor. By “silly,” he must have been referring to the tattwa cards, ceremonial sashes, pantacles, daggers, lotus cups and wands. Here it comes again, like a Hermetic metaphor to claim the new year––father of the sun, mother of the moon. The wheel’s new face, labyrinth and gravel, the mistakes of youth caused by the rage of inexperience. From the pale ruins, another church. It never ends, conflict. Twin faces. It makes no sense but many of the dead bodies were found smiling in the sun. Silly. Two eyes: winter and spring. A Vision is two books, two mystical organizations, a double beard, mutton chop tumult of an ever-maddening matrimony. The later edition is philosophical. The earlier edition, more personal.
One of those poets with a camera, one of those point the traitor and shoot the firing squad types, wrote to me for contacts instead of film. Added to admittedly: I was worried. And sent “them” a badly reproduced chariot of closed doors, the knobs of which stank more than the stables of an aging Pegasus. Whilst they ever tire of chasing, leaving, fighting for, and returning to their wicker chair-less, portrait studio Helens? Dig my double vision moral cantankerousness, a Scribner of the scribe nerd tribe, a practitioner of name-calling, former cursed Platonist tossed into the shade allotted a beggar, an eye fuming in a notebook of fumes, fugues, ah the rosy diagrams, more memory, more negative-less photographic rubbish. I have a nickname for Yeats. I call him Ol’ Camera Face. You’ve seen the photograph taken by Howard Sydney Musgrave Coster, the one on the cover of the revised second edition of The Collected Poems, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Here is the figure in murky whatnot, not quite mind muck but a portrait of the potion that pre echoes the likeness: hue and hush of the Golden Dawn, the subdued lighthouse of the head, slanted on the studious cliffs that daydream into stare, bridge of the nose––a premature stone cross like one of Byzantium’s downward sailing fingers, ballad of the bottom lip balanced in soft citrus, chambermaid chin; and in the night of each iris: the stolen child of song, weary ephemera, so much so it’s hard to tell who is in charge of the editorial meeting in the back of the courtroom––those who continue to hate Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World or my own body of fate, the grief of “enforced intellectual action,” the fatal blow that wasn’t a fatal blow at all. Brightly darkish but important to look at. Yeats as body guardian of aesthetic anarchy, “loosed upon the world.” Ignore them and build a myth. It’s a nice purification, his hair, one of those partially lazy cascades, a castle––no beginning, no end––style of passage more so an actor’s than a poet’s. Is he wearing the same three-piece suit he wore when Edward Steichen photographed him, making him one of his own non-magical descendents. A bang on the ear, narrative and dramatic. Hello to the proverbial “they,” their retro bait of nostalgic camaraderie, a leprechaun in the tree trunk of the lens. Maybe Auden meant, “Maud Gonne hurt you into love.” Like it or not, Yeats did not leave a whole lot of room for anyone else (except Joyce) to be Irish, not in this world or the one next to the one after it.
Wee is the one mending shoes in the cave, wee, sturdy, and of bearded stock, bones stirring in O’Grady’s leafy newsprint where the pub and protecting one’s pot is the cause of nonstop dancing. Wee and of vulgar tongue, the sooty middle finger sort. Find a place in a revival, will he, just a few paces ahead of the plough and stars. Costumed with props, theater is a strange footnote––no matter the number of acts. Lights out. Sit in the back row (with the other bog bellies) if you want an earful of local talking points, purposely lyric, the flight envy of the falconer, as the ushers of any trilogy are never who you think they are. With a burning humor and a divine camera, Dan’s ant loves spilling tea. Immunity qualified. The madness of mist aside, vengeance upon a phantom is like trying to trust a Dub Poet who is not from Dublin, the superconductive event of da riddim, da rhyme. Suddenly, according to the lunar phases of the ethereal suspension trick, Jean-Eugéne Robert-Houdin becomes Harry Houdini. One photo is digital fact. The other, digital fiction. One inoculates. The other knocks too late. It’s easy: take less pictures of him, wish him away, make him less influential. Because it’s not about research, it’s about the search; here are the remnants of a Middle Age that never existed in any age, the prescription-based darkness, unvexed selkies shedding their wearable selves to become human members of the Mystery Schools of the entangled briar of hallucination. Stooges, every one of them who prefers the stage over the art-happy outdoors. Point the weather, shoot the weapon. Money Magic, Chaos Magic, Sex Magic, Enochian Magic, Magic Markers, Magical Realism, The Magical Mystery Tour, The Magic Kingdom, The Magic Flute, The Magic Christian, The Mystic Arts. Look no further than any unexplainable century long dispute, and you will discover the ultimate global gang sign of peace, two fingers split away from each other, both very hand-loyal, like a prayer nest before moth-hour, the unpersuadable injustices of battle magic. Wee is the one with both feet in the eye softener, hiding behind the fact that much of what we know of as magic loves only those with feral wings.
“Green Energy has two problems. It’s not green and it’s not energy” but the blanket the homeless magi wrapped herself in is––even in the black and white of night. I have never been so lucky as to fit so many faces in one face. In my camera, the perpetual rot of seasonal renewal, two bronze heads (not one) on the back of a centaur, black by golden work, Othered by something more beautifully monstrous than Order, reminiscent of Dulac’s lil’ ill ass illustration but not quite so archivally cared for––both jinn and genie in one bottle, conjure-trapped, an agony known only as data extraction, the promise of a longevity that pantinas the most secretive of grails. Studio, sublet. I point my eye and shoot through a snub nose camera so barrel-short it plays the ponies on Saturn in the alley. Hound voice, vernacular hyphen, high talk. In my camera, the watchmaker hides the great wings of her broomstick of illusions, her ability to make others vanish, akin to an exhausted male virgin. First lover, a Shakespeare. Last, a black tower. “If the trend goes viral,” a stick of incense says, “and you tag along, you become a part of the virus.” In my camera, books frighten the bed. The dream of the fiery library retains the turbulence of a tender ligament, hardwood knee of the heating pad; the hurt photographers know when to make the camera bleed in front of its subject. I point and shoot but the past will not shut up. Road of deeds on the floor where the scent flourishes, card playing, dealt deck cut of the merry dance. In my camera, the crowded jury stares. Racial ammunition, a verdict. Glenda in dreadlocks, male Rasta faeries, the narcissism that expresses a mood of small, outdated magical differences. Cultural appropriation makes a cameo, Celtic brooch like a trumpet, fastened to the blouse of ancestry. I have kinda-sorta forgotten what it is like to be behind someone else’s non-rechargeable eyelids, the one bull-quested by no king. The auteur of Ulysses was happy about the appearance of an unscheduled photographer. The exacting undertaker of “To a Friend whose Work has come to Nothing” was not. I recall the headaches of organizing group shots, disharmony, the nappy annoyances. All the photographers at the initial performance of At the Hawk’s Well were dismissed by Yeats, thrown out to keep the matrimony of Irish Folklore and Japanese Noh a secret, pure, and affordable to only the elite. Not a place of compromise or escape, my camera, not a dissatisfied voyager of the overworld, of floor model flow not a low follower. God-hated and soul-raffled by the vital longevity that accompanies death-longing. In my camera, an acceptance of well-nigh red caps. The creation of my costume, that lifelong improvisation of turning “silly” upper units of slavery like "ego dominus tuus" (I am your lord / I am your master) into the dungarees of the wilderness, may be well documented by other cameras, other giddy hermits, but me, well, I have been thrown out of The Less Than One Flash Club many times for using a sharper yellow filter than required. Green verdigris-gris, you are not the only harbor amulet capable of making copper a poisonous liberty.
Point and shot toward the senator, give the poet room to breathe where he has fallen, and be sure to bury the occultist with a pocket- handkerchief, woven deliberately in an anti-middle-class cloth. Yeats, the winding stair of spilt milk, had at least 138 portraits made of him in his lifetime, sitting for approximately 96 of them. He also had 27 studio photographs made of him, taken in 20 visits. Where I come from, he would have been called conceited, soft, a Pretty Boy who was, perhaps, fascinated with seeing himself––persona, and personality, a gatherer of talk, the pulp of old loins. In Hip Hop, Yeats would have been Yeezy before Kanye became Yeezus. In Rock, he would have quit Yes, the moment they became known for “Owner of a Lonely Heart.” That’s him, in the afterlife, disowning the album cover’s lame Y-pie hypnosis. Like a thorn tree, the (intended) ouch is there. Surrounded by the memory of all those sittings, he would have heard voices, seen faces, “this woman,” “that man,” Old Tom the lunatic, me, would rather defund the muses than sign him to a label with a hidden hand. Should the poet be remembered as his poems, or the poems be remembered as the poet? The photographs, those images, made of him were like a left behind voice waiting to be reheard discovered, Romantic masters like Matthew Arnold long doggone. In the photographs taken when he was younger, the gaze toward the camera is quite delicately fixed as William, the impressionable boy of books and the hunt for them in libraries. Vague then particular, political party buried so deep inside it cannot be removed without the scalpel of an unforeseen uprising. In the ones taken when he was older, the frozen brook of Auden’s eulogy has made a hostage of the spirit medium, the ghost thought lightning of a former flamboyance. Although disagreeable, methinks (for sure) the camera, the last one at Drumcliff, is one of the “instruments” Auden spoke of––the grave’s darkroom, bones above the bath, dripping and fixed in the future of weak sensors and the limited control that becomes memory, no different than: “Around me the images of thirty years: an ambush; pilgrims at the water-side;”. Ol’ Camera Face, I place thee in thy own poetic meditation, smitten heart of thine own approved pattern, in the place of the “revolutionary soldier kneeling to be blessed.” An art college dyslexic bad speller, I know you’d rejoice at not having been around long enough to receive a text message. Ladle in the tub like the wet tip of a spliff. For this juggling, this mash up, this remix of complicated beauty perishing, I am to blame. I am the maggot of the current crop of mini mastodons, magic-less by ignorance, but I am working on something. Across the seared lawn, tombstone moonlight sufficient, the stanzas on the table look like barcodes, perfection of form revisited. Conceited is what they would have said, full of yourself, then they would have stolen your homework (again) and copied it in what they thought was a more deserving handwriting, as you were always the content, the whole lore, spiritualized by more than the judgement of death, and fueled by a last known peacock’s monumental cry.
If there was such a thing as forever, the great mind would explode with memory, cemetery plots of narrative discomfort, the magic of dead tomorrows that won’t cremate or fade. If there is such a place as within, let there also be a fire to talk by (enough light to snap a shot) and Pan holding a pint of Guinness like one of those very small creatures known only to the Ever-living, the nocturnal one, the cruel claw of nightfall, the one whose reputation becomes a twisted theology for the village to fear. Too pagan for Pop, until now, not Celtic enough for the evil faeries of peasant treasures, the bitter glass of photography does not deny the persuasive perspective of the Old Post Office Bank, beast and anti-beast approaching from opposite sides of Blythe Road. The magic that degrades the art form so much that even one of Lancelot’s dim computers can do it. Inner Order, dead garden ordeal, outer Order. An essay is a classroom, a morgue of rationalism so why stand or sit in a room of prose when I could be out (disobeying Reconstruction) with a camera, the one I belong to, my poetry chaser? Which crafts are the wrong craft, the ones that rage like garbage, bewitched by a muddy mirth. There are no false things hosted by the air. Hay-field doctoring evolves the goblin into a guerilla, caught up and heavily guarded. From Wolfe Tone to Michael Collins, Intelligence was the first invasion––nothing artificial about it, certainly not the reactionary violence. The troubles to come, the noble casualties. No matter whether they bear fruit or not, the children of the betrayed foam-flakes never become war songs. Forever they are adepts of the wrong direction and must remain spiritual citizens of the lower end of the spectrum. The world of spirit, realm of legend, coliseum of myth, all honored Yeats with the unseen force of a nickname: Demon Est Deus Inversus which means, “a demon is an inverse god.” And yet we must eat the wheat that the butler has used free will to mail. I Yay! I Yay! Any name can be stretched, be framed, become faint refrain, be changed. O’Leary is dead. Say his fame. The green bloodshed, those broken gates. Suddenly, a cabbage-stump, burdensome as the steep limestone of Knocknarea, comes to thee (like worship) in scramble mode like a shield shaker proud of his prize of skins. Camera tombs and views of the ocean, the glen like a huge cathedral recovering from the open-heart surgery of Christianity. Unfold your own destiny through lore, ivy-covered. As the seeker is going to need more than luck in his efforts to de-radicalize the disastrous honesty. Torn gong, vengeance of God. The cross an airman’s tartan kilt pleats, the type of clover that shames rock.
Death is the changing of data, a new date, the magical dye that forces one aesthetic color or political climate to become another, the empty arms of the poet full of a companion’s knobby chatter again. And although the value of understanding has become a bit of a dump, the improved landfill of language, base reality is not data based. Title, comma, date. Weary from being just a label, punctuation and four digits, its incantatory value will never become the shouted savings account that equals a great nation. Doze off in the frame, backside to the not-so clean lines of history then turn, quickly, and peer into a reportage desirous of one wailing thing: independence. Today, however, the aim of data is to do away with dates, to do away with death. Every new usage of any symbol seems to say, “the dates must die, die with the commandments of time, now time and non-time.” The first poems I ever loved with dates in the title were, ironically enough, Yeats’ “September 1913” and “Easter, 1916.” The first essay (about poetry) I ever loved with a date in the title was, Joseph Brodsky’s “On ‘September 1, 1939’ by W.H. Auden.” Two poets from one hat, creating (as far as discourse allows), a three-poet rabbit hole, the Exegesis Trio, sleek exteriors, the triangulation that guides the razor-keen eye. Ireland, Russia, and England. While being pushed to the back of the line at the geopolitical food truck where it likes to pretend that it does not want to be political, poetry continues to run for office in the rooms of soft emotional disclosure where it can easily and safely referee the gamesmanship of cultural referencing. But every so often, perhaps once or twice a generation, a rock-bred murmur all but goes postal and the poet, in kind, returns the fire’s favor. The magic in such cases is murderous, the magistrate and the milkman scheduled back-to-back to talk about the taxman with a know-it-all great aunt. One hears (in confidence) what is relayed from one blown-cloud to the other and loses control (doesn’t matter which one or what is told) and the hell of all art, the misunderstood fiction, breaks loose. One fears the shape that never heals. Like Crowley being kicked down the stairs by Yeats, the leg that begins the end of a legend, each side cancelling the other but no cure for the wrong-headed magic and no magic between them, the biohazardous zone of the truly toxic, the plastic arts of cancer, a most difficult grave and its wild old wickless candle, the only crack in the craft and the carafe of the imagination. Rosses Point, the camera ephemera of a lame green tablecloth. Untiring cowards, would you know it was a deathbed photograph if the caption did not tour-guide-you so? Some weeping cannot be peeled. Captured so alive, white cat as landscape, there he lies in the lie of dying.
As a resurrection of sorts, the turbulent Celtic sort, and not to over Christianize, as if invoking the Lily of High Truth, a rebellious echo recast as a resurrection, a rising, the line before the penultimate line, the picket line before the famous line, the line that listens (as a paternal painter does) to the glossaries of color, the brush that becomes a blade’s offspring, field of vegetation at its peak, the melancholy of nature expressed by what we wear, neither blue sky nor night’s blackest sea. If you can hear it, you can sing it. Yellow is the scarecrow’s tone; red, the inner mood of the melon, its superhighway of speed limitless seeds; I call to white but nothing calls back, not a single dominant wavelength, no Maeve (or Queen Mab) to sting my dreams, and I respect that. Overlooked cyan, I am on my way like a rump of chlorophyll on the backside of a bitter misery. On my way to negotiate with the Goborchin. Camouflaged in passion, the opposite impulse and direction of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. No longer grene, I am grass. Grow I am. I know my gnome. She said she was a ragamuffin and I believed her, wrecked in the house, as we ate each other’s achy Bluetooth like ballads. Not enough light, so stay still and do not disturb the bed knob marcra shee. My blood dries brown as soon as the shutter sounds. Anxious and annual. That little camera you have there will one day make a fine ashtray. There is a day they say, named for a saint, when the vibrancy of Fighting Men comes to life. A long life hyphenated by funerals. A day when the realists make fiery automobiles of their enemies’ dragons. The crash sites, all at once, explode like a recalled shout, a collective thought thrown down to nourished whim. To what they can, they do, to make it all mean greed––in money and medicine, especially medicine, where the yuck is a perjurer of the Proto-Celtic. Medici magic. Visually nutritious even in rags, and emerald and commonplace as an Irish iris wrapped in red hair. Laboring nymphs of the kettledrum. Every photograph pulled from the slime of the press pile quickly becomes deep yellow and green-tinged like kelp. One of those colors made from the bloody hands of ambushers worn (with hidden notoriety) throughout Co. Cork, spellbinding and rugged. The southernmost of hues, rebel belly. Admire the coat of arms for its balance. A ship between red castles, blue water between green cliffs. The back of the courtroom is full of the lonely beauty of curtsies. Outside, Fergus Bourke kneeling near the dated brickwork, fierce tooth of a camera, ready to prove that the people want pictures and dreams no other color than the black and white of green, perishing garments.
The poets with a fondness for “bid me” have all gone into the dim kingdom, but the countryside remains for longing and complaint never to become the subject matter of the servants of kings. Afoot as the magic that attunes the drunkard to pooka, the lomna to koel shee, both to fands, I ask, “Is it the shadow or the shade that you are courageous enough to misunderstand?” Answer me in my third ear. You can blame the sun for the burn but not for the scorch that results from falling in love with a Valkyrie. Blame as thou will, all cameras for removing God from man, the mystery of the erased eye of Iesa from the lens life of the lazy dream maker. Like a coastline of peaked islands, Aran sweaters, the Yeats stitch that once turned a lesbian into a gazelle, knows the horrors are coming. Note: many so-called energy workers are just spiritual materialists in lower rank drag. The boiling kettle of the beginning comes so fast that the steam of the end can’t keep up. Prayer and baptism are forms of magic, overcoming the fear of the unknown one photographs the other. Both capture and both are captured. Given advanced perspective, given a point of view outside of their own, not just a momentary glance, are these the portraits the people would take out back and shoot: Sinn Féin, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael? Listen closely, there is something built into the variation, rocks skipping along the tall F’s and short n’s, the changing caps and bells of a governance that never changes––lime, forest, hunter, emerald, olive, jade, kelly, chartreuse and celadon all just dying to be scanned, folded flower hosting folded flower, to cover the land, the immobile artichoke bowing to the emotionally mute army. And what of all those male “althoughs” calling out to one another from the Mountjoys of opening lines? This is the tongue-tied toil that dares to speak, specifically, about the unwashed terrors of turf between “The Fisherman” and “The Fish” not of the who, who, confined in rann, rhymes (identically) with another who. Greeted by Fir Darrigs in the margins, the poet has landed on the breathtaking shores of yet another great archer who decided early on not to be an artist. As unfair as the faeries ready to fetch the broken shells from kneecaps, all there is left is a forgotten camera bag of Dog’s Bay.
Through the friendly silences, I have read you, Auden, in your idiom, which would have been best served with a bromance of ambrosia due to your many costumes of craft––camera held at the angle of vain glorious jealousy, those costly fumes, to hide your own obsession with “Falls,” Icarus and Rome. The whole mispronounced treatise of angry cat-lick instead of Anglo-Catholic, a few crucifiers wearing crosses to hide their crime but who (other than themselves) did they crucify: the harp strings, the dismay, the babes and bogs of Europe? No one at the crossroads but you so how can we believe in “calmly,” on or off? Male broodmare of the marvelous you were not! Yet another common travel area, framed and farmed in the secular order technique now known as verse. A lack of depth, these adepts, no tantric positioning in their flabby demesne. Ah dense as any misled audience, the splash the lash makes in the blood of camera flash. The third frame of “The Fall of Rome,” your best point and shoot, the great processor of increased sensitivity, the pondering of the spirit’s wound––
Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.
Written, typed into spell, eight years after Yeats’ death, has there ever been a more cracked contact lens, a more ragged shore, cheeky foot in cheek, white imbalance in the wink? The ultimate heresy. What kind of lens is “Silly,” the fixed type, the superficial kind that condemns any talk of spirit to surface, barely a burial. “Imaginary friend,” you say. “Muse,” the friend says. “Co-conspirators,” in middle-air, the camera sang. O the tree green treason of all elegies, ecstasy-stained, why take offense when we can simply put the toggle on, like a pair of boxing gloves, till our hells become bowels, our sicknesses mass measured in poetic meter, the holy purifications Euripides bespoke: whinny and hoof up in a puff of smoke. The soft blows of words, hardening into fate, in the muddy mouths of liars. We could take a stance against the infidels who crop photographs without the permission of the photographer, those croppies (unlike Heaney’s) deserve no requiem, no fee per lock of pre mod cocktails, urban shields, sniper and assault. Irishry, toe to toe, top to mop, clay beaten (many honey-mouths, many poems later) in the garden of streetwise Blackness, same revolutionary romanticism, huggie thugs in gun-powdered periwigs where there will one day be high-top fades and squiggly lines that grow into useful signatures before they sell out and become brands, the suicide kicks of surgeon sigils. The stolen valor of stolen pageants, careers taking their bows beneath the stage as they pretend to have vanished in sleepless stone. Not a single Fergus, Moll or black pig would switch shores on the eve of the veil’s trembling, not for a leading role in the theater of safety, not for the costumed protest of dressing room protection, not for the new syntax of muffled applause. By “Silly,” did W.H. Auden mean the mental maze of conspiracy, the spirit of race work, spiritual woe, the coincidences, so many, that take place in the shadows of shy daylight, those ruthless roots that sprout the pursuit of the back channels of truth? Playing the clever villain, did Auden mean vaudeville? Brutus and his academy. Silly, so silly, Yeats knew civilization had limits, guardian of the body aside; same as Blake who saw the industrial revolution before the ache of the rose revved its revival. Rose of the world, rose of peace, rose of battle, rose upon the rood of time, there’s magic in them thar theories and grassy roads older than age and time. Sick children, happy shepherds. Breughel’s water is green and will never be scrubbed. It pours through the reclaimed Gaelic meander with an intolerance for iambic pentameter. By “Silly,” perhaps he meant speckled, the evidence of unfinished wisdom, a Jeremiah for hire, or, listening from the envy of afar, “Speaks when sleep.” So silly-serious, this agitated ma- ass-gic, it leads to not a single photograph of the soul of a simile.
Homage as the homeowner of moaning priesthood, this written menagerie, forestalled and transfigured, an operative like then unlike then like the sexual rejuvenation of concealed surrender, like being at peace (am I?), the whole late life act more psychological than the physical petals one spreads, especially in youth, across the fertile pages of a lovely ground. Wack Job “Silly,” the tabloid type, maybe that’s what Auden meant before he undercut the odd comment with “like us” and “your gift survived it all” both of which read like the false and lofty beauty of a poetic apology, the late lament latent, an embalmed shotgun in the former for sure. Belief and unbelief carried off near Heart Lake. He might as well have said that “silly” things like magic can lead to a deterioration of the mental faculties. This world, he suggests, is made of time and magic can only exist out of time. The tiny coves of Connemara are for more fascinating than the fascism of the Galway Races. Intentional or something coming through the creative process; first, the addition of vowels then the rearranging of letters by mis-shaped, orange dhouls. Give them a monolithic inch and they will take a megalithic mile, no lake-dragon in the museum, fairy fort or mound. Don’t call them magi. Call those manger visitors: wise men. And don’t mention the Egyptians buried in Irish Soil. The captions beneath Press Photographs are not clairvoyant; they say nothing about the engineered division between Catholics and Protestants. Sober lullabies penned by some learned knave. The reason for so much swearing near Ben Bulben, the resting place epitaph, a “cold eye” for those emaciated memories of Fear-Gorta touching Crazy Jane, even afterlife, deeply in the head. Another heroic and sacrificial echo at the Abbey, but heroic is relative to the literary chore, isn’t it, at least that’s how the first word in a rhyme feels about its imitative follower. Had I ever been in the room with him, I don’t imagine he would have sat idea-still long enough for me to shoot the ni Houlihan that gripped him––those islands behind the doll-maker’s fleshy threshold of retinas, cleansed of England by the dangerous mysteries in the iris, the two-way nationalistic grievance between poet and priest, their bad tradecraft of illusions so low down in the broom its worse than being on the down low, worse than the outer order that forces University Science upon the inner fate. Is there any great literature being written that does not depend on the split identity of the point and shoot, its purpose and appetite for blood and heart, that civil war of the mysteries of the soul tearing the pages of love for country apart? Like horsemen, the pointy-head shooters have arrived, but every photograph looks as if it has been smeared with a layer of Vaseline, one that prevents the enthusiastic clutter from becoming a classic. Pardon fought for. Pardon found. There are only five places in the world named Silly.
Poet, photographer, professor and bandleader Thomas Sayers Ellis is the author of The Maverick Room and Skin, Inc. He co-founded The Dark Room Collective and The Dark Room Reading Series in 1989 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has taught in various Universities and published, both poems and photographs, in numerous journals, including The Paris Review, Poetry, The Nation, and Best American Poetry (1997, 2001, 2010, 2015). In 2015, he co-founded Heroes Are Gang Leaders, a literary free Jazz band of artists who were awarded the American Book Award for Oral Literature in 2018. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in Poetry. His latest book Crank Shaped Notes was published by Arrowsmith Press in 2021. TSE was recently named the first Photo Laureate of St. Petersburg, Florida.