Kissing

"The Kiss" by Gustav Klimt (1907-8)

Do you remember the first person you ever made out with, the way your lips found those of your lover and seemed to freely search out a cavity of the body that's even more intimate than the genitals? You were in love, but because you hadn't learned to fuck, you soon grew bored and even tired of the other's mouth. After all saliva is not particularly known to be an aphrodisiac. Spittle was all that was left from your moment of passion. Only later in life when you learned that romance was nature's way of facilitating the shoals of desire, did the magic of kissing then return, as something once passed over and taken for granted in the rush for consummation. 

read "Chicago" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Hemorrhoid

 

Naomi entreating Ruth and Oprah to return to Moab (William Blake)

Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein have given perversion a bad name. They make the Marquis de Sade, with his 120 Days of Sodom, a good guy. Well at least Sade didn't gaslight like the President. Words play a role in transgression since they're the way one iterates desire, words and actions, that is, and certain words are almost impossible to spell. Take hemorrhoid or Naomi.  You're likely to strike out with the former. It sounds like hemmorrhoid or hemorhoid. Niomi, Nioami are frequent misspellings. It's hit or miss to get to hemorrhoid. Hemorrhoids are not celestial objects, like asteroids Quite the contrary. They're part of the GI rather than solar system.

read "Cri de Coeur" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Too Solid Flesh

"O that this too too solid flesh would melt" is the key to the Booker prize winning Szalay novel. If you were one of the doubters who felt the out of body inner body experience of Istvan, the central character, was a bit of the been there done that, then you will be chastened by two pages near the end. Spoiler Alert: they are two blank pages that are two of the most eloquent expressions of nullity in all of literature. There is a scene in Sean Baker's Anora, when the whole world of the movie's central characters is destroyed. It's not even a matter of starting all over again or rebuilding. Flesh does melt. Cars do crash changing the lives of their occupants forever.

The Paradox

Do you feel like the tortoise or Achilles in the famous paradox? Or a member of a member of the Trolley Problem focus group? Will you finally decide to run down the one unlucky soul in lieu of the group? What a hero you will be to everyone but the loved ones of that unlucky soul who gets run over! Are you increasingly in a rush to take care of things, knowing your end is growing increasingly near? It’s not a morbid  thought. It’s no different than making your arrangements, choosing the site and even the stone or maybe the urn in which your ashes will lay.

A Last Dream

"Man Behind Bars" by Franz Kafka

You haven’t experienced this yet, since if you did, you wouldn’t be here to tell about it. But imagine your last dream. You’re stuck inside and there’s no way out. It’s a dream in which there is a long hall with lots of black steel doors. They could be monks cells or prison cells, unforgiving, solitary. You run up and down the corridor looking for a way out. There is no way the inmates can help you since they themselves are locked in forever. It’s the ultimate silent retreat. Just in passing you think: How are they fed? However, the idea is soon forgotten. You have more pressing matters at hand like how to get out of this nightmare and back to life?

The Rape of the Lock

Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

Alexander Pope’s mock epic "The Rape of the Lock" is a satire of the sententiousness and superficiality of 18th century aristocratic society and its obsessions with relatively minor sufferings. You might say Pope’s poem took on the “woke” culture of its time. The lock is, if you will, the "survivor." The poem resonates with our current culture where there are so many would be victims that the real ones are lost in the shuffle. What many fail to remember is that there was Stalin as well as Hitler, Big Brother as well as a Fuhrer.

Concerning the Spiritual in Art

 

Improvisation 27, Garden of Love ll (1912)

Kandinsky's l911 treatise "Concerning the Spiritual in Art," is a classic essay on abstraction. The famous painter draws an analogy with music which by turn sets the stage for a discussion of abstraction in painting and other arts. Prosody can be a linear and seemingly realistic literary form such as in the case of  "Tintern Abbey," but modernist poets like John Ashberry use language in ways that can be difficult to parse. The experience is tantamount to not being able to navigate one's way around a canvas. If the medium is the message, then, in this case, don't mistake the messenger. Going back to plasticity, can it be said that Jackson Pollock's "Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)" is the real realism, reflecting neuronal movement of axons and dendrites between synapses to regulate the flow of serotonin while so-called realism is, in effect, a construct, a delusion constructed by the mind, as a way of regulating bodies in space?