CANTO 54 Stance flopped

 

Stance flopped

at the Cafe Carpe, where the

midwest-small-town-urban-influenced-out-of-work

audience was scant and its reactions less than mixed.

The cruellest cut came from a sodden literate boor

introducing himself as "Phil Fone" saying

"hey man, all interiority

is mere epiphenomenon, but your consciousness—phew!

is especially vulnerable

to my exteriority—so take your ‘poetry’ and shove it!"

Phil burped and swayed back to the bar,

Stance a little assuaged by a gentle academic

who thanked him for his "most interesting experiment."

He frets. The socio-cultural milieu, zeit-geist, ambience,

Weltänschaung, mïse en scéne, whether

his or Fone’s, can’t be right.

He carves droll trolls and sublime bumblebees

only to see them stretch, fill, glitter, blown bubbles

that break away in splendid alienation, drifting, then

punctured by the first blade of grass,

rapier of the real.

He’s worried about himself as maker.

He knows there’s a nauseous

richness of being at the edge of perception, but the recycled

raggedy caterwauling he concocted to get him there

seems short-sighted.

He’s just read that "the outside

is opposed in a new way to the inside, and the

being-which-does-not-appear,

to the appearance".

He’s locked in a Sartrean tabernacle

with Hegelian hinges, his FOR-ITSELF

pining for the lost ITSELF

that would be an IN-ITSELF, origin, plenitude, home.

Such totality would erase the longing

that’s hanging him in present participles.

He’s not got totality,

but totalitarian

temporality,

quotidian malady.

So whether he flings Stevensian fictions or

shredded Shakespeare sonnets

to cross that gulf, they boomerang

badly bent into his lap.

He will make another try, having perused Poulet,

dipped into Derrida.

We must leave him in his study secret as the

once invisible face of the moon—

there he will keep his selfhood from draining

into the sea of exteriority

with a massive dam of the transcendental signified.

But Stance is a worker, a Husserler.

Against these shattered exteriorities he will erect

a new frame. On the foundation of EPOCHE will stand

the titanium-alloy laser-repelling skin of AUSDRUCK

protecting sensitive humming circuits of ANZEICHEN

animated by the fragrant breath of the gossamer

almost invisible pure intentional consciousness of EIDOS!

He will build a high and dry hangar of logocentrism

in which to fabricate, without the differentiating medium

of linguistic signs, a missile out of Husserl.

His Challenger poem will loft the reader to an ever-thinner

atmosphere of ever-more-rare conceptual molecules.