Doren Robbins

Whitman, Artaud, and the Punk Apportionment 1 So was Artaud a poet of the body. The body reversed into heroin and electro-shock. Elegies for his un-expressed art. Antonin Artaud read the future in the bleeding hole Van Gogh shot through his gut. The Punks don’t know what Artaud means, they would know if they read his ethical ravings on Van Gogh, that “Van Gogh’s painting doesn’t attack a certain conformity of manners and morals, but the conformity of institutions themselves. And even nature with its climates, tides, equinoctial storms, cannot maintain the same gravitation after Van Gogh’s stay on earth.” It’s the “institutions” part of Artaud’s statement contains the meaning. What your chances are if you don’t work for, make money for, never inhibit the flow of, money to businesses. Including museums. The mad Artaudian idea about nature affected by Van Gogh’s art, about climate, tides, equinoctial storms—nature couldn’t’ve handled any more than it was already incapable of forfeiting to the human sacrifices: Isadore Ducasse, Mahatma Gandhi, Malcolm X, and Oedipus Zex.     Traveler’s profile   2 What would Whitman, 1892, claiming the U.S. “a nation of lunatics,” think of the entire military-industrial global internet Imperial semi-culture commercial scene? The whole corn and rice profits conspiracy? The $87 million a year blackholed on psychotropic emotion sewage-ing medicine? The continued cheapest labor oil-profit gluttony? The grazing cattle on deforested ground imbroglio? The almost completely nuclear power cars cars cars economy? Advanced biological weapons job recruitment fair? The penis non reduction paste industry? What would Calamus Whitman write about nuclear and nano ammunition, the Atkin’s Diet, the Amazon after Nike exploitation ring, nose crust nasal inhaler erasures, minted smegma detoxifying ointment, irradiated tomato soup, impotent hard drives, Tampons with and without extended wings, loan officers paid off by sweatshop owners? Would he purchase a Miracle Blender or the spray that keeps mites out of your pillow? Would Walt one of the roughs Whitman muckrake the lunatic class owner-manufacturers of these products, including their managerial lepers, their lesser paid product contamination control lepers, their “armed services” oxymoron lepers’ shelf life estimator morticians, and secret police? What comrade would he find ready for armed response in the cloning laboratories, the gardeners of human toenails, iguana embryos, bi-racial fetus eyeballs, the international investment and private police of clandestine ownership? You could end up with numb-nuts, homeless, Veteranized, disabled, picking through dumpsters. You could run out of money for the omelet that adds roundness to your breasts, the exercise manual for locating and strengthening the muscle for male orgasms magni-fying the sense of hearing. You could lose your identity apparatus. Credit unreconciled. Causations intact. A nation of lunatics. Can you say it enough for no answerable reason or contradicting logic? Land mines production Unlimititis and carcinogenic Waste Puffs Disposal must be some investors’ Mozart and Fleetwood Mac. 3 Nurse Read family letters to the blinded, face-shredded derma-dread, opium daydream amputee post-operatives. To them. Losing it. Not leaving them. Dread facts known. The impasse known. Talking to a guy with one ear, sweating through blood-sick gauze. Not getting up. No bleeding hole in the gut language left for them. Between annihilations destruction has wet dreams. Zero recollection if scorned enough. Hovering profiteers. Inflictors. In the meantime. Puppet-instigators’ code names, Johnny the Short, Lizard Donkey, Sexual Cloud, Head Dug out of the Ground (“H.D.O.G”) (H-Dog). Gone what he was just looking at. Holding in his hand. Biting from a spoon. Listening to moonlight in Vermont. Flying With the Rockwell Brothers Seat in front of the wing. Self-righteousness messing with my judgment again. Rockwell salesmen part of the plane. California convention veterans. Two-party business chatter delusions. Gin. Tonic. 1992 American-Iraq War aftertaste. Quarter of a million there already inside the stomach of a wolf. In front of the wing outside seat from Mr. Gombrowitz. Thinking of his conscious decision: “Not to love.” Not to live with anyone. No further appearance, reappearance, or continuance or disappearance inspiring friction. On either side of the plane no one was driven not to love and not to sell missile parts. Or at the same time not to talk about celibacy and not to increase profits on circuit boards. Maybe only our dear Mother Teresa surpassed those considerations, though she too was forced to the capital to visit with missile-dispatcher Bush the Elder. Some speculated the keeper of one kind of lepers and the creator of another kind reviewed donations for her colony and heart surgery. Confirmed the privileged agreement. Not even Mother Teresa can escape the economy. Rumored management at her hotel tried throwing out our saint of conscience-cleansing. They didn’t want the calf born without a spine, the tightrope walker with uneven testicles, or the manic crack comic who set her toy rooster on fire to remain in her room. Mother Teresa. Caretaker of lepers. Mother of the dead word empathy, and love without a cock. Embalmed with the Rockwell boys and their likes. Bush and his likes. Or the coming Gore. Still some faith we wouldn’t drop lower than Gore. In front of the wing, over-caffeinated, going through The National Boycott News, statistics on carcinogenic products, Death Squads, famine, torture to unionists, dewinging of pelicans, figures on clitoridectomies, Agent Orange poisonings. At 30,000 ft. with my Gombrowitzian phantasm, and my anti-Gom-browitzian fossilized stone that LD Janakos gave me for luck before flying. A flat stone from the lower Cambrian period, holding intact what’s left. Two knobbed creatures swept toward each other wrapped into a shirt stuffed in my carry-on bag. To keep from breaking in flight. Humming a Melancholic Kozlowski Klezmer Tune 1-2 1 Studied the Huichol Indians’ peyote ritual. The Cloud Gate where the cloud opens. No way to join them, memorize and hum to myself their ritual violin music frenzies played on toy sized violins commemorating The Old Peyote Farm. I’m on Venice boardwalk. An American weirdo tapping a melancholic Leopold Kozlowski Klezmer tune. Across the boardwalk, hauling leaf blowers, maniacs in the Rite Aid parking lot clean-up ritual. All the raunchier ups and downs because I didn’t eat psyche-delic oatmeal with the Huichols. Didn’t go with them like they do making a short sacred vest and pants out of beads so small you spend weeks to learn how to hold them steady enough and in the exact order of the design enough to tailor a sleeve or collar. Didn’t sign up with the Huichols, didn’t translate like they do into songs, what white tail deer say to them when they’re transformed on peyote, living again with the first people of their tribe. They believe this. The ones that make it back. And what do the first ancestors of their tribe look like in their beaded underwear now? Would never’ve gone to the Huichols the way French poet Antonin Artaud went to the Tarahumara tribe. Artaud traveled to them suffering from a congenital nail in his tongue. Artaud went to make his peyote report and wear out the Tarahumaras recounting the change he wanted to see happen to himself. Thinking it was going to happen. It better happen. It needed to happen. He was Antonin Artaud. Only a wizard clown would arrive like Artaud did with a cane received from a magician, a cane he literally believed St. Patrick had spoken of, and that the actual Mr. Jesus Christ used in his battle against demons. I understand the simulation. So many pains in the ass it’s a wonder the old squat box goes on with its life’s work. Mine, yours, any of theirs. Peyote. No peyote. Whether you literally talk to deer or sing like a Huichol that you peyote-dreamed you did. Literally singing. Shivering and high. Maybe too—probably too—most likely too–high in the geometric flame depth peyote speaks to you with the tongue of a deer, a tongue with a nail cut out of it, a tongue still unhealed. Time not yet one up on you. Fed-up or mis-fit. You Memorize the radio-phonic alphabet. Account for the mental schematic. The pictography. Go pickle a duck. You’re too hard at clarity. The foreshortened dimension is not the issue. Of course it is. Vague of all tone. Clarity intrepid. 2 Peyote Broth Lucky I didn’t puke out a kidney when I ate peyote. Sweating pink Chablis. Drank two puddles of mineral water. I believed there were spirits, and they were hungry. The dangerous ones. The delirious ones. I fasted. My friend took a multivitamin coffee enema. I didn’t get the health benefit of that at all. I was disoriented in one-third of my left brain. Then—the race began. Another time we cooked pureed peyote button hearts into something out of a can called Scotch Broth. In the last ritual we used Chowder Jack. We didn’t know what we were doing. I don’t think I would recover from it now. I don’t know if I would even complete the peyote pilgrimage to pick up cigarettes at Owl Face Liquor or finish the costume without either cufflink hole preparation the Huichols need to go through on their sacred journey. Takes five to ten years to learn how to make one of those costumes and I already gave thirty three years to finish carpentry, tantric attraction, the pagan potato diet, inferiority complexes, transcendental absentmindedness, trans-substantial resignation, tall tales, civil disobedience, changing diapers, infallible cheese crepes, the blind-sided instinct cure. I don’t know if I would return from peyote if I ate such buttons cut into pieces again. And where would I go to I wouldn’t come back from? That still interests me. Not convincingly. No ultimate remediation. The peyote cloud exhausts itself. “Not convincingly” remains to be understood. The interlocutor’s fate. I still lived part of my existence in a cloud of Marlborough 100’s and Rancho Cazadores Tequila. The silent fat one, Uffizi Rubens’ drunken mass, that “Bacchanal,” my only Uffizi genealogy. Archimedes the Mechanic reckoning how many piles of ashes there are in the cosmos still interests me. The birch trees tongue and lip sounding devices, the vacuous part to the part filling up before the releasing part, preoccupies attention. It’s not always the matter at hand. The matter not perceived slurs the matter at hand.

Doren Robbins is a poet, mixed media artist, and literary critic.

Three new books, (1) Apocalypse Contemporary, on Sharon Doubiago’s book Naked to the Earth.
Can be ordered from the author or from the publisher.

(2) Not Fade Away: Poetic Prose Monologues, Three Sequences, which can be ordered from the publisher and also through the author at the email address above.

and (3) Sympathetic Manifesto, Selected Poems 1975-2015.
Order from the publisher: https://www.spuytenduyvil.net/sympathetic-manifesto.html

 
 

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