1. VR with 360, with immersion, with immediacy: it is the ultimate empathy machine says one practitioner/promoter. Thing is, the writer in Art Forum argues, it’s empathy for yourself, in yourself, with yourself. VR is stuck in its vividness and what, its seemingly supreme animation or animatedness. Incredibly vivid. Moved to be moving. But it’s cinema of attractions. It probably means less empathy.
2. Yeah, what, I can’t remember the dreaming. Something with big numbers, I awoke at 4 gazing at giant script on my alarm clock.
3. not the words of landscape but the landscape of words–a characterization of Celan’s poetry I agree and agree with
4. Oh you robin sawing off the early morning half a city block away, somewhere past the Marlborough Hotel, past the Pedestal Gardens public housing, somewhere past the Eutaw Boulevard median with urn, somewhere past McMechen School with its modernist metal sculpture over the main entrance door, somewhere past songs and singers, all I hear is skipping, jumping, merry-go-rounds.
5. Whole Foods, Whole Foods: busy Monday night an hour before closing, and the woman with long blonde hair, the ends in back trimmed exactly, and inside the folds and flows of hair that blackness, that dark divide, part of the look, I guess, effect of coloring, I guess: taupe booties with a short heel (in the dream last night I was going to school), fitted blazer jacket, creamy and alpaca; snugging lightly-stressed jeans; and something extra, a turn about her, a way her eyes settle into themselves like she’s lost her contacts and is trying it out unaided–I realize it’s Voda.
6. DRUID FOODS, coming home with your shopping bags, one in each hand, and heavy with goods, with fruit and cheese and nuts and breads, oh I feel good, my powers shared, we grew it in gardens, they like us, we like them, our family on the Shore, our family in VA, Trilis married Staroo, even, we partied over a week hanging out with all, we worked on a vision-engine design, it’s working now at the Jones Falls plant chewing up and breaking down Whiworld rust and dust.
7. DRUID, we pick up the whole park, roads and hills and trees, now we’ve got the DRUID SCROLL in cloud hand, wind hand to the hilt, and it’s got us laughing as it reads itself off and planet pharaohs come hovering by in a flock of orisas and vortex weathers we all gotta go drumming to see which way later to go home for supper.
8. High in the low 40s but last week there was one hard core out there, a single drummer going under trees.
9. Under trees, I need a refrain. Under trees, we’re talking about Chicago and Baltimore, about the South and the Upper South, Baltimore a city of traitors, a city of have it both ways, in Chicago nobody ever owned anybody.
10. The scenelessness of Dickinson’s poetry, yes, Druid, Druid, I never see you, it’s haunt, it’s ghost, it’s draining out scene, seen, it’s braining up vibration, libation, lustration, it’s taking on Vibranial Vibe.
11. I come around to Druid and the druid rules say, GIVE US THIS PARK and out whips the map, and I whip the map down with a green whip of old oak tree, and I whip the map down with a winding roads trope snake, and the deer at twilight are coming out crossing a bicycle and a djembe drummer and YOU CAN’T HAVE THE PARK even as you think you get it.
12. BIRD COUNT, Druid Hill Park, 21 March 2023: sparrows, 213; blackbirds, 201; grackles, 118; blackbirds, 111; robins, 59; bluebirds, 11; owls, 23; vultures, 23.
13. Gofundme to fix his teeth, we do a video of his plea, he says, Man I don’t do that sort of thing, this is tricky. He’s Already Dead– LS and I are up and down the stairs, rickety, sort of, they’re open stairs, floating stairs, old warehouse stairs, they don’t offer much rail, we’re carrying instrument cases, percussion, portable keyboards and stuff up for the evening, later, maybe pretty stoned and dazed and after several hours of playing, we’ll head down again for a smoke with the steel alley door open, the kitchen guys from City Café are often out there, say hello or don’t, last night a white car being pursued zoomed past, the Foxtrot right overhead, where did the phrase arise, LS is saying, Shit, they got me dead as Freddie Gray, I’m already dead I ain’t never been alive–
14. OK they’re like, let’s play that, He’s Already Dead, and they make some pattern with the Volca Bass plugged into a Vox Boombox, too many LS is saying, how’s that, now? Geemo is asking, it’s loud looping now, a scribbly, scratchy line, LS already blowing up the clarinet, Geemo the tenor walking way back in the shop so LS and the Volca are about 4o feet off–
15. Voda Torun, Voda Torun–the two old trees outside, 10 in the morning this Sunday a really swift song, compressed, it seems, I don’t remember a robin going so fast, like the song is running out of time for itself–
Outside the window, the old trees with the upper branches level with the view from inside here, I’m looking at the still-bare branches and I see blobs or bumps or lumps and I think, can’t be birds: not moving and hypothesize some ancient galls or insect trauma long grown over, and the two bumps in such symmetry, can’t be moving: they’re ordered, planted, and then surfaces tremble and color blob erupts and the two fat robins fly off.
16. A manifesto of sorts, what do they call their turn on theory, it’s naïve, it knows all that, Voda’s profile, Hong Kong Baptist University, University of Basel alumnus, it says, is she even real, a hoax, and her schoolgirl hair falls across the corners of her eyes, her eyes look brilliant and huge, Envenoment, they call it, the presentation has snake heads and snakes in pieces and references to Francois Laruelle’s non-philosophy where you start from here, start from here, you’re just fucking living in a world and you can’t pretend you’re coming in knowing something and then everything
17. Already dead, I want you so much, Voda, we’re smoking hallucinatory compounds, I’m way way old for you but some way it doesn’t matter, how long does anything last, we can’t help ourselves, Let’s just enjoy, but no recursions, you say, and we’re in Genova, the university planted in the mercantile-capitalist ruins, the 1400s palaces and the backstreets behind and around up and down the hills, we kick back and make out a while in one of the old public fountains, spigots and troughs, where everybody went to the get their water in buckets to carry upstairs, already dead, LS I can’t carry water for him, he’s talking about a Baba L’Salaam, my teacher and collaborator, he is sounding something like me when all this time I’ve come around to sometimes sounding like him, I took up the clarinet a year ago so we could snake together reedy sonorities, certain tracks there’s no telling which of us it is, and the night cooling off fast as it comes on and Voda and I are winding our bodies up and down the Genova backstreets and steep stone stairs, farther up the hills there’s public housing, closer to the water the food markets and restaurants and clothing stores, I want to buy shoes, she wants to walk in bare feet, we don’t know where there’s a beach, we’re lovers without organs, we’re lovers in the grand empty style of the city with its already dead feeling of launching an epoch, exterminations and colonies and privateering, outpacing east-facing Venezia, flat city, sunk city, Genova instead footing the Maritime Alps, footing itself with steep stone stairs, I can’t forget the lifetime when she and I had a tiny apartment halfway up and traveled for part-time lecturer one semester positions, our Italy of trains and buses, late-night drinks when the bugmobiles with sanitary police inside a little glass box beeping and flashing lights, every turn of the bottom alleys swept and rinsed, I want to be only your prostitute, I say to her, and she laughs, just like me, and the ways we fuck upstairs leave us hissing like pagan snakes knowing nothing but the turns of their tropics, their sins, their holinesses, Anglo-Saxon critics, she writes in a review of some Speculative Realism book, Graham Harman who says, Girls Welcome!!!, and calls something I can’t remember the girl nobody wants for the dance, I don’t like philosophy, Voda says, and as she makes love to my finitudinous body she says all posh and arch, and so what is this?
18. Singing, singing, LS lets me sing, I don’t sing, I want to sing, we’re singing, he’s doing La-di, la-di all through and lyrics are coming, yesterday, yesterday, and midnight and come down to her throne, we listen to it after, Six minutes, LS says, Thanks for that, I say, putting down the girl book, I keep looking out the front windows at Morton and watching the Saturday groups, they look like well-dressed county-living couples, they look like city-dwelling thirty-something marrieds, the Hippo is gone, it’s changed this street, I say, it’s so dead, and LS says, that’s all gone now, and I say, so much for radical gay culture, and I get how queer everything we’re doing comes out to be, we stalwart old men, we queer birds all over the branch, the sky, the rise of the note, Saturday night and we’re up here scribbling love letters, LS says he’s doing a phoenix with seven primary colors, the talons are great claws holding the fire, he’s sketching it out and then he’ll make it with crayons, and I say, Alright, man, thanks, we’ll call it even, and he looks at me like, what, and I say, Sorry man, that is mercenary, I’m being extractive, you know how I am, and I gave him the carton of Native brand smokes, only available on the rez, he didn’t ask for the gift and I say, Baby ain’t I good to you–
~
Gerald Majer’s poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in Callaloo, Chicago Review, Georgia Review, Puerto del Sol, Quarterly West, Yale Review, and other journals. Their book The Velvet Lounge: On Late Chicago Jazz was published by Columbia University Press. They recently completed a book on a Baltimore music collective, The Vibe Notebooks, and also last year the experimental poetry book Fountainous. They live in Baltimore and New Mexico where they pursue a range of theater and music projects, including the sound-art duo Vibranium Experiments and the spoken-word performance project One Thousand Jicaritas.