Andrew Levy

Notes toward a Supreme Fiction 2029                   Pushing Wallace Stevens
 
 
…the distaste we feel for this withered scene / is that it has not changed enough.
It remains, it is a repetition. One cannot go one’s own way. There’s little
Rest. There is no hope for trees. As night falls on the east coast
A surreal articulation with its own internal and external referential scope,
However controlled the situation, arrives without its representational
Vortex. The horse whispers that a dream is beginning on the pebbled path,
Striding down the mansion’s long portico. There is no one in the
Photograph. Pronouns are traded for grass and different types of hay
Including alfalfa, timothy, oat, bermuda, and orchard. Is it rigor mortis
That stops them from speaking? There is plenty of anger, but little
Sacrifice. A Clockwork Orange or Woolf's Between the Acts. Or, medieval
English dream visions, particularly those in which the literary dreamer
Doesn’t fall entirely asleep, a.k.a. medieval lucid dreams. The criminal
Changed his true flesh to an inhuman bronze. The President, living in the
Second dream, was rubbish in the end. The trumpets of solitude that can
Inspire something separate from the ones perceiving it, in solitude
Aren’t real in the way we think they are. For example, we live
As though our body is permanent. Ten years later the heart knocks,
Peaks, sucks the stone. Your immaculate SS uniform is drenched
With blood. We don’t have time to waste. Transmuted into cadence,
Meter, good form. The virginity of the world built with ‘Luminous
Debris’, with the memory that I steal. Denial is plainly pointless.
It is idiomatic in my field, that is, course texts and related articles,
Rothko canvasses. Surveillance of download requests. Look, cookies
Make everything better. Firmly in control, pastel timbres and
Understated elegance, molding the spare string complement around
Tasteful, idiomatic solos. Not really. Time flies by. Are you not like that
In real life? You’re standing in the middle of the door. But that’s not
True. Your lines are all self-portraits. Why is that?
 
The poem goes from the poet’s gibberish to / the gibberish of the vulgate and
Back again. It is full of artificial things. Under a savory blanket of gravy
All sorts of people living today have grounds to tremble at the
Prospect of serving as models and being forced without their knowledge
To kindly provide entertainment, both forms of gibberish at once.
That refined individual raising her hand, rock-paper-scissors, will be matched 
For a lasting connection. They have, they’ll tell you, just what they need
In the disutility of emotional prostheses, in which predators and prey
Caged together in public show a reassuring sign of white superiority’s
Civilizing authority. Racial dishonesty linked to immigration policies
Or services meant to be an evasion, a thing not apprehended or not apprehended
Well, making idols of political proximity. This extra grief of poetry.
Sources of suffering authorized to furnish such peripheral noise locate
The direction, the dismay in complex sequences of logical conclusions
Displaced by unexpected and starkly legible intuition abandoned. Dismissed
While encouraged to find work, ex-snipers regret not having a companion
To share in the hilarity of knocking on doors. The ground of notoriety,
Its ontology is not good but dogmatic. In the middle of night, what to take,
What to leave? Designed on earth, like a page of music, like an upper air,
Like a momentary color from the pineapple fields, the dust raised in the
Distance giving notice of one’s presence, that laborious intercession.
Every time one tries to get access, it changes.
 

II.
 
What the Poem produces is not primarily oriented toward
Realism, it is oriented toward truth. To do so is, of course,
Tyrannical—it excludes all other claims. Poetry seeks to overcome
One’s own reality: we are to fit our own life into it. The disembodied
Fiction, pleasing to the eye, secretly carrying romantic notes from
A former life that one prefers not to face, but guided by our current
Situation and prospects (often in the grip of another’s will), awaits an
Invitation. It’s become important. The surrounding fire holds
The forest’s foliage in its hands above the dark hollow. Clouds form
Into peach blossoms with coal hearts at thirty-thousand feet. Electric
Power remains cheap. These are not things transformed. Yet we are shaken
By them as if they were. Meanwhile, there’s a skater on the ice, racing around
Blind curves, cutting corners, swerving over lines, barely missing oncoming
Traffic. At its richest mimetic instance, my body aches with pleasure.
This is where fiction rivals nature. My mind, drawing a straight line paraded in
A fictitious individuality, feels separated from itself in the before-and-after.
The grease monkey leafing through documents cuts me off from
The glow. My constant preoccupation in the apparent recuperation of decorum
Detects in my composure an air of sorrow that others do not seem to note.
Our proximity to certain indicators of virtue, paragraph by paragraph, line
By line in the ‘fullness of time,’ adopts a new stance of repentance and
Fortitude predicting everything that follows. My money which helps keep me
Safe in a coat of green foam promises that I will never again read Proust,
Kafka and the like, or think about Chaplin or the Marx Brothers. A multi-spatial
Dust blown out by cosmic wind, and with no immediate end in sight, I don’t
Know how Google rates things. Nor that the sexual blossoms should repose 
Without their fierce addictions. Show me your screen, and I’ll show you mine.
A soft meat measure, its macroeconomics is making me sick.
 
What is intelligence for? Nothing lasts forever. Resources that meant daily
Sustenance for many disbursed and disposed for the treasure of one house?
Chants and cries, microstructural interpenetrations, the eliminations of our
Human aesthetics within galaxies of synchronized partials, in infinitesimal
Electronics. Fragments of light clip what one watches to completion. Our data
Sanctuaries are as much of an idealized fiction as they are buffers and memory
Caches. Someday, one hypothesizes, someone will finish reading a book
Obtained by the turning of a dial. The day the earth stands still, beyond which
Thought could not progress as thought, from which a little piece of paper comes
Fluttering out in sensible ecstasy, the very material of the fucking market,
Suspicion, fear, and anger. The jury, it’s said, knows nothing. Tone clouds fill
With inexpressible bliss, the employment of nothing. You can’t really dance
To that. I’m telling the truth about what I know, some circle through
The city indefinitely until the sought after is untrue. Until that person has more
Leverage than that person. Beyond which thought could not progress as
Thought, beyond which what was once enjoyed could never go wrong.
I’m telling the truth about what I don’t know, that dates back to the early
Days of my residence, the feeling that results from fiction, the fiction
That results from feeling

III.
 
Recapitulation in the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony
Migrates by means of natural selection.
The poetic ideal set by genre revolves around conformity.
In regard to writing, the various parameters install a wretched poverty
Of imagination transforming
The very act of hearing. (One must ask in each instance to what degree
Preferentiality remains.) Above a certain
Decibel level irreparable damage is done to the ears.
In the state of Alabama
The path to victory runs through California.
Facing ruins metamorphosed from subject to object
I strive to distinguish the papers and the furniture collapsing
Beneath a slow accumulation of dust.
The appurtenances of political office dialing for dollars
Arrayed in the finest saddlery.
It is a war that never ends.
A wizard of Oz, or a shadow, or a creaking piece of furniture. Believing that technical
Perfection promises salvation.
Slowly erasing the image, the money-makers encircle the house.
The scent of privet hedges blooms on distant estates.
Pleased that the irrational is rational.
Capitalism? Thank you for the full carafe.
The gift of utility in time.
Yachts in the creamy
Evening blues miss the artery, the windpipe and the spine.
The harsh light of the law.

IV.

I could see nothing which did not seem to me unpleasant.
People crowd around the edges wearing small pins marking their affiliation.
The poet welcomes the readers and offers basic instructions, mostly precautions
Regarding cohabitation with the poem’s regular occupants. The poet herself
Is about to suffocate. But maybe that’s exactly what the poem wants.
Perhaps it doesn’t want the poet to compromise her position over something
That concerns the poem which is stubborn, but in some ways very malleable.
Can the poet intervene, pressure the poem, try to smooth things over?
To the poet the poem has nothing to say. It’s been a little preoccupied recently,
Has had little to say, often suffers from headaches. It has its little oddities,
But it is lucid, even merciless, the poet thinks. Intellectually merciless.
The poet hears things the poem can’t repeat, things such as readers
Have never heard in their lives. “No, you can’t say that, you must not say
That,” the poem corrects us. It’s clear that the poet is a closed person,
That she did not confide her ideas or plans even to the poem. I do not know
Who you are. You, as everyone knows, are a person who is busy
With your studies and your books, and you have no time to bother with
Certain poems. You cannot and you should not. The poet and the poem
Are two parallels that meet if only in / the meeting of their shadows or that
Meet in a book in a classroom, a note on Messenger. You can meet up with
The poem or your friends according to what schedule works for all of you,
And each person can share their experience of how they read the poem.
You can discuss what you can do together to prevent more poetry.
 
Because of readers like you, another poem is possible. These notes are not
Your normal poem. They don’t survive on clicks. The poet doesn’t want
Your advertisements, and the poem doesn’t want your dollars (not even
For the secretary). Anguished efforts to break through the crust of the page,
To escape the slow petrification of particular blows of some literary or some
Political event (they are almost all of them Fascist) cover the screen with
A pale sulfur, a mask of sulfur that slowly hardens in the spent air. Out of
Inertia the poet never cancels her subscription. With the exhortation “find
Yourselves some other fool,” poetry, too, has its little ironies.


V.
 
An abstraction blooded, as a mind by thought investigates amid shifts
In register and tone accurately the wavering (but not occlusion) of sense.
Being confused after waking up from naps, even one Like could have
“Non-negligible” predictive power. Hyperbolic discounting of the future
Will undervalue distant harms compared to those in the present or
Near future. What cognitive biases and heuristics are in play?
At any given moment it’s unclear. The brand has been verified; it was
An Omega. It is difficult for readers to measure the disutility
Associated with any given notice and consent. It satisfies belief in
An immaculate beginning. To determine marginal disutility, a reader must
Have information about how the incremental collected in association
With the particular poem, let’s say, changes the overall availability
Of information about her in the literary ecosystem. Today, the cloud
Precedes us. We are the inhabitants of a much varnished green. Digital
Instruments make abysmal sounds. An abstraction blooded, as a man
By thought? Successful navigation of society requires a commitment to
Continually mastering and remastering byzantine detail and
Complexity, part of apotheosis, appropriate and of its nature, the idiom
Thereof. Poets and their clairvoyance often do not even know this.
Every single participant has at least one sharing violation; nearly
A quarter of people regret mistaken oversharing, resulting in the loss
Of important relationships. The cost of exercising a choice
Becomes too high for someone reasonably to bear. The declaimed
Tokens of mourning are everywhere to be seen; even the monitors
Are draped in black. The ground of the poem is highly granular
And context-sensitive, a streak of light microchip. More swiftly than
The sun sets, bizarre obscenities take a shower married to science
And Denis Hopper, a man known to have circumvented some of the
Affordances of polite behavior. In the social and aesthetic concept
The entertainer looks like a strolling player made up to play a ghost;
Language suddenly, with ease, said things he had laboriously spoken.
In order to flourish as citizens, insistence on the matter actively
Occludes sense. Innovation, some argue, happens when individuals
Encounter unexpected constraints, situations, and opportunities, and then
Have the space to tinker and experiment with them. The general point
Is that users at the top of whatever category they are being sorted into often
Have an economic incentive to signal their superior status, at which
A kind of Swiss perfection comes / … not balances that we achieve but balances
That happen. And behold, the academies like structures in a mist force conversion
Of aleatory, chance moments into risk calculations – the burden for which
Is borne entirely by those compelled to make them – a widely recognized
Feature of neoliberal governmentality. A supreme fiction with a grief-laden
Sigh, almost a groan, contented to be the hand of destiny, Judith’s cheesecakes
So distracted the Assyrian general Holofernes that she was able to behead him,
Thus saving the Jews from slaughter. You have become as coefficient food
Impunity and error not because, or not only or not always because, the
Investigators are men of small intelligence but because the clues a crime
Offers--foundling of the infected past, so bright... Looking for what was, where it
Used to be—are usually utterly inadequate. As professional stool pigeon,
The anonymous informer. Security clearances refuse to look at the ‘real’
Corruption? Subjects are essentially about activity, hence subjectivity is a sort
Of tautology. You see how sad the American landscape is today. The supreme
Fictions in its evolution, spiritually and culturally as well as politically,
Permeate those afraid to call for the simplest chord. James Baldwin: “The price
One pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge
Of its ugly side.” Naturally, I told him I would be more than happy to break
The story, to expose the man, but that obviously I needed some documentation,
Some proof. The President has apples on the table and barefoot servants round him,
Who adjust the curtains to a metaphysical t. He told me he had a whole dossier
Available and would bring it to me. But then he never came back. The American
Jury system addresses an imaginary audience on the subject of power and big
Yellow blotches. Sublime events have no business in political orders and
Erroneous loyalties. A nice bottle of Pinot Noir gets the green light.
 
 
VI.
 
The dialectic is a little love in the heart coming back to die, become incarnate in
An inmost circle. Fidelity to the scars of competence thickening the tune. The shiny
Particles you are seeing snow make many lives unbearable. A chip of ice in one hand
And an open Bible with the pages crossed out in the other comes flying from
The marketplace. Ms. Inside and Mr. Outside make trades over a couple goblets
Of rose. “Everything is just fucking peachy keen.” The sleep of reason is more
Treason. In a world so many call Christian, the body of woman has been exposed.
A theologian might believe he is traveling the highway toward freedom even in
The matter of eroticism: at long last, men hate women. Justice, solidifying
On lips and tongue behind the shelter of a Supreme blind, has been done. A man’s 
Nature, Steven’s thought, was an illimitable space through which the intelligence moves
Without coming to an end. On the other side of an explicit valorization
Of the imagination is a journey through hell, so to speak, a naturalistic atavism
Constituting a return of the repressed, i.e., the dead, the demonic, the deformed.
Its savage altar is extremely uncanny. To be self-evident ceases to be appropriate.
To perjure oneself begins by saying that poetry has to do with reality in its most individual
Aspect. Further, an aesthetic integration is a reality: 64% pity and the rest
Romanticism, inflated in the surge of images, why is the NRA using guns? An Oil
Of Olay smile riddled with Alzheimer’s. Faces are pressed against the porthole.
I learn my name from the hotel registry. They would clearly like to know
More about the red-haired woman. Plans and conspiracies, facts, mineral oils.
Insulting and speaking badly about others. Who’s sitting alongside us?
 
Sometimes “a geological pace of extreme delay,” such as the making of welds
In steel, shakes softly above wells of forgetfulness. Someone has to make her bed.
At the end of cracking up (and the poem), and separating around psychic design
Or order altered states with no home, an artifice extended seems established, a party
Of chestnuts out of place at the end of summer that taste burnt. And, I’ve forgotten
Its capacity to generate structure after structure by definitions rarely invoked.
Omnipresence with fewer resources and potentially greater intelligence and talent
Than all vessels of common and private good creates within damage a calm so
Extensive that we no longer know it to be anything other than impermanence.
 
Punch lines? Many persimmon an untoward beauty, an illumination of
A surface, the movement of a self in the rock, to the soul in ascendancy a key.
Unwinding constellations of blue, at the darkest point of a dream, poetry needs
No elevation. It begins to spark and to resist a time when the credible
Suffers most at the hands of the incredible. When no one wants to talk about what
Anything means. The seemingly prevalent sense of diminished personal
Accountability, the consequences of which allow for the shift of evil into the realm
Of the banal to value the immaterial part of themselves, begins when the last bit
Of Moon slips into the umbra. The love chemicals that connect us to the universe
And to one another have to be born prematurely. Otherwise, we would never
Get born. Glitch, my [offensive language] [offensive language]. Those [offensive language]
Are scanning our [offensive language] email... they think they're the [offensive
Language] NSA. As a result, many choose consciously to run away from thought.
The cat just coughed up a hairball and the dog ate it! 27 others like this. 
Unreal things have a reality of their own, in poetry as elsewhere. No one could be
Further from the truth. Maybe we have little community in the world because we
Forgot how to be. Is it always going to be that way? Have I completely misread? 
What I think I’ve experienced? Death begins to speak on the rock of this spherical
Emptiness, the movement of a self in rock transports you to a place where
There are more things in heaven and hearth, including the right to resist one’s own
Survival. I am 507 years old. Languages are the jargons that hide language. The
Reality check of this poem won’t fail. I’d thought America free, bright, and joyful,
With all the happiness one can ever find on the earth. The entire world will go to hell.   
No honest way to avoid certain moral questions. Masculine pursuits are the key
To the group's unexplainable entrapment. Everybody dies. There are many
Things the poem takes from life. I remember them as if they were
Yesterday. Do we need a router for that? The enchantment of the heart. Have we
Gone too long without friending one another to repair what was been lost?
Has the point of truth been surpassed? Can one say that when I write, 
My mind was on the link? We understand the feeling of it, the robust feeling, clearly and
Fluently communicated. Yet we understand it rather than participate in it.  
 
 
VII.
 
Breathing a repugnant polemic…
Hounded the Central Park 5
Called Mexicans rapists
Was indifferent to Puerto Rico's catastrophe
Separated and locked up Central American families at the border
 
The belief of credible people in credible things.
Tempo and intensity. Your identity is already being compromised.
They plunged my head into freezing water.
I am an imperfectly assimilated Jew. It occurs to me I have not 
Always been kind. Before I drown, micro-montage hundreds of bits selling,
As soon as possible, the sight of a gardener trimming a hedge, building
An easement. I want everything the way he left it to change. I have
The heart to touch anything. The awful elevation of the head
Begins to understand its nature. It exists as the end product, of long
Trajectories that made love; you and I make love in a Rousseau.
Afterward, you lay with me in darkness. Your belief in the
Credibility of Rousseau’s jungle, mine in yours. The Central Park 5
Called, Mexicans hounded, separating Puerto Rico’s catastrophe
From the plight of Central American families at the border. Differences
Locked up, labelled repugnant. A supershadow robber, a conman
Shrinking and expanding the tiny and the infinite.
 
The grim woman two seats ahead is reading the revenue gorgon.
Yesterdays, bred from the same stem cell, rattle our heads. I gulp cold air to snub
An invisible guardian who has my ear, who bows for a miniature eternity.
Its twenty minutes later.
This will take ten minutes.
The astonishing resemblance of myself to foam. Certainly
You wouldn’t be indifferent.
 
 
VIII.
 
That’s it: the more than rational distortion, / The fiction that results from feeling.
“All tyrannies are virtuoso displays, over many years, of cunning, risk-taking, terror,
Delusion, narcissism, showmanship, and charm, distilled into a spectacle of total
Personal control.” – Simon Sebag Montefiore. Some connections become,
If not impossible, improbable. Have I done everything I could have done, will I
Change myself and work better and harder going forward? Silencer fetish, combatants
Terminate medic shuffle hooded cloak opulent pop song and naked chandelier.
Consent continues censors to advertisers, bias status enemy’s supplemental taboo.
The holy grail of anti-choice has everything and needles. Enema’s suppository.
“The calm metal instrument of my voice will no longer reach you. It does not matter.
You will continue hearing it. I will always be next to you.” And where we live
And everywhere we live, as in thoughts dissolved in the black sun of desire. As if
Unfurling a screen rather than reading the lines in an ordered system, a safe-deposit
Box formed by the play of light and shadow. As if Salvador Allende lived.
 

IX.
 
Have entered without permission, without knowing
A password to the world that is coming, arrayed and not arrayed
One shining into the other
Intending to write pertains to the comprehension of this place
To existing informational attestations
Among descendants, however, destructive effects
Produce a “snow-balling” of ever-growing disharmony and conflict
Which tends to destroy the mind
In the contextualization of beauty the words almost smell like constituents
Split into electrons, protons, and neutrons
Unstable particles blanched, deeply incognizant of the directness
Of commercial interests, beaming
Sonic transcendence or pathway from recipients
Back to nowhere
An anecdotal enharmonic empty splendor.


X.
 
Our difficulty is not primarily with any detail. It is primarily with the whole.
The brook that passes through the family’s property, the colonial stone wall
Spanning the entire universe; dense clouds that surround the angel of Presence,
Pour themselves out as water from a pitcher adorned with pearls.
The whole environment echoes in each source, transposes the luminous
Melody. You do not inhabit it, a faithless cloud (or other software) is saving it.
It all goes in circles, and the circle is degenerative and the end is grease,
Or mud, or miasma. In the digital universe all this is numbered and hidden,
A sort of indistinct universal evening lullaby. The wind roars
In the woods for a background or sea of sound, or Crazyology performed by
Charlie Parker and J.J. Johnson. I wander through mankind’s memories,
A disharmony parallel to that of nature. I remind myself of who I am
Supposed to be. I wander through various stations, as if inside
The bodies of others, waiting for the others to appear in their various
Constellations. Sometimes well-known, sometimes strangers
Enter without permission, without knowing the password, to each world
Arrayed and not arrayed, one world shining into the other. You remain
The more than natural figure. You become the soft-footed phantom, the irrational
Distortion, however fragrant, however dear. A speck, a punctuation mark.
Glissando of moving structures, and the pinnacle of housekeeping.
Where is the source? “What thinks in me passing is what passes in me
Lying is what lies in me…” (Josely Vianna Baptista). The whimsical undertow
Extrapolates the solicitude-requiring faction of the collectivity
Induced by rotary motion – to know everyone, and everyone’s stories.
One’s genitalia almost within reach. Numerical entities, by which I mean
Literature, evade pressure, and glide from under the fingers; in the
Dark a body might think them celestial beings, but tossed to and fro,
Bobbing past as if upon an ocean in an ark. Once that behavioral and physical
Terrain has been filled, to compress it further results in making it more
Obscure. Congratulations, you’ve reached its end. Think of it as
The socialism of intelligence, a win-win.  
 

How often can You Pass from one State to Another
 
To its limited, almost professional distribution? Or, return from
Hell and, in a moment of poetic circularity, tell the story from
The impossible point of view of the dead. Stuck there, so to speak,
On profoundly cultural grounds, in the middle of a marsh, the biblical
Apocalypse becomes inexpressible. I propose, plagiarizing and
Reorienting Don Wellman’s thought on the practice of translation,
The value of registering the marks and even the flaws that make
Poetry possible. The poem must alienate the reader with its marks
Of foreignness that reading be a performance and interpretation
Very unlike its theoretical original. It may be that people do not
Know how to interpret and organize the new political and economic
Forms of life caused by gravitational waves, paralyzed by the
Prevailing form of piety which is increasingly degenerating into
Superstition and fetishism. A small part of the universe is reflecting
Upon itself. It is trying to understand itself. I, too, walk a road out
Of the city to the cosmos. My chaperone is reading my mind,
Curving space through its culture. I pass by many pools, planets
And constellations. One billion oysters in the bays of Manhattan.
Search in vain the menu of Grand Central Oyster Bar. What I may
Think about religion or about bivalves I don’t believe, even you,
My closest reader, can say definitively. While the lyric connotes 
Cozy relations between the famously fertile shellfish of this bivalve 
Capital, feelings among shellfishermen themselves are decidedly
Less friendly. Some people see themselves drawn along a single road.
There are lumps in a slow, warm thoughtlessness. Once enjoyed, 
Now transformed, it distracts and diminishes. People love to 
Talk about themselves, expecting one to simply listen. Returning
The favor is not apprehended, or appreciated. Rather, mere
Facts of transience ensure expenses in a kind of potent negation,
A rebellion extinguished in the depths of a void the memory
Of which has made no impression. In relation to poetry, doing so
Often comes to nothing. Extremely fleet of foot, perhaps one’s experience
Resembles that of another so closely that one influences, in poems,
The other, producing, as Stevens suggests, a third.