"Because the known and the unknown / Touch,"

Because the known and the unknown/Touch, . . . I return to George Oppen, an ancestral seashore, my palm, daily breath. This isn't too dramatic a thing to say for one drawn simply to the words of the title of the book from which the phrase I quote begins to arise: Of Being Numerous. After a long slog of winter in "New England," new anything will be desired--as well as desiring for the known. Oppen, poet's poet, reminds us about the nature of revealing.

Which brings me to Pale Fire. Specifically, to comments inside a 1982 text (I was just forming my own mature opinions then. . . ) about Pale Fire: From a book by David Packman (nothing to do with the popular video game of that time, I'm sure. . . ) called Vladimir Nabokov: The Structure of Literary Desire, we have this bit of liberation (one of my favorite words) and reason (one of my most difficult):

"In. . . readings of Pale Fire. . . a story is extracted from the text. This story is, of course, really in the reader's own construction. Each [reading] involves a decision as to how the text may be framed. . . Meaning is fixed in each case by the position of the frame. As Boris Uspensky has noted, 'The transition from the external to internal point of view and vice versa may be considered as a natural frame in painting. The same phenomenon may be noted in a literary work."

But how much emphasis does a desiring reader place on internal and external frames of discovery (perhaps we shall call it uncovery)?

"However, in emphasizing the internal frame, these readings tend to efface the text's external frame. The fictive world beyond the internal frame. . . is treated as if it were the paramount reality, or at least what the conventions of the realist novel propose as such. A work of art, however, is never the same as the paramount reality. . . On the contrary, the artistic text is a 'finite province of meaning,' an 'enclave within the paramount reality marked by circumscribed meanings and modes of experience"

Meanings circumscribed by and for and to whom? Modes of experience by and for and to whom? I return to this*, and wish you well--in uncovery as well as discovery. May the pleasures be yours. *"This story is, of course, really in the reader's own construction. Each [reading] involves a decision as to how the text may be framed. . . Meaning is fixed in each case by the position of the frame. As Boris Uspensky has noted, 'The transition from the external to internal point of view and vice versa may be considered as a natural frame in painting. The same phenomenon may be noted in a literary work." And to Che the same, layers of lace and strands of hair, a geography in text to figure. Probe and lift, and give text context. Venture forth, in and out of it, my friend.

Jackie Saccoccio: Motherwell, Balcomb Greene, film; and the novella as such. Begin Again, Be New.

I almost passed over them. Page 152, New York magazine, the images within and amalgamation of Jackie Saccoccio's wall to wall 15' painting. What seemed mostly spray, blurred subway car graffiti, became a shape of movement, and then movements themselves, scenes and cultures freeze-framed in their 21st Century. They are somewhat Syriana montage, Balcomb Greene ("Champs de Mars", "Thunder Over the Sea", "Gertrude", "The Island" and Greene's women), or Robert Motherwell's Spanish Elegies. And in the wee spaces: some stilled-breath like Stieglitz saw, Pollock peeled open to the brain for pictures inside, a filmography of confusion, love, war, perfection, imperfection, restlessness, the post-post-post modern eternity; shadow of body, ghost, [K]lansm'n, breast; a city's trance dance at the peak of its inability to turn back.

Here's how New York magazine's Jerry Saltz put it: "located somewhere between a flickering film still, a weather system, and an ammonia-filled primal swamp. Angled sheens of color and foggy white transparencies, echoing dripped latticeworks and vertical pillars of brawny painting, provide structure and organize it architectonically and symphonically, with repeating motiffs, perceivable progressions, and. . . you go figure out the rest."

Guernica, Picasso. This sort of thing. I don't know Saccoccio's work beyond this. But I trust the one interaction, as I would hope a reader would trust a page, a passage, a word.

And I think, after having almost passed it by--returning to find what is found there, what human beings suffer and die from the lack of each day/ decade/ century (you were on to it, William Carlos Williams, doctor that you were--), that these still-blurs are what can center us again, unite us, reveal the common bond--by lust or lack, by devastation or deed, by myth and memory/ memorial. Through our friendships or through false foes: an inkling, inkwell, wellness through it all--finally. Celebration. A wet celebration, surmounting.