The Lost Lunar Baedeker (11 page)

the murmur of the mass

is become lingua audibly

in sodden-mouthed excuses

One lone lout

flecked with opal bruises

of belaboured bone

hurls an appeal-assault

on my comprehension

pinning my ear to his desperation

crying,

“It isn't my fault”

—A truth psychiatry

weighs courteously.

How idly

even

infinite dole

of pity

yearns your way

for none can enter

to the sot's account

one cent's worth

of Salvation

… that inborn fortune

self control

Despite that nowhere else

is Bumhood

handled with such gentleness

an onfall

of somewhat heavenly loaves

for your loafing

is the fashion

conditional compassion:

appreciation

of your publicity value

to the Bowery

So here comes help

here comes regeneration

—even a little alimentary fun

you shall not be left in the lurch

Some passing church

or social worker

confides to a brother

how he has managed to commandeer

a certain provision

of hot-cross buns

his earnestness

hushed by the hiccough holocaust

of otiose

hoboes hob-nobbing

with obtund oafs

in candid cupidity

and oathy psalmody

optimists conducting their poll

of the total calories in alcohol

or describing the sweet inward

upward of “creepy Pete”
*

upward—

a flight into celestial resort

to alight in visceral discord

 

Sample interpolations of the Absolute

Physiognomy exhibiting

—the unseen pallor of a Negro

a Nordic's inner darkness

a silly smile immune to meaning

streaming the static transit of the street

to indecision's crossroads

where zest for zenith

zig-zag to zero

                                      meet:

the egoless eagerness

of priestly patience

for laic participance

with

impious mystics of the other extreme

shrunken illuminati

sunken

rather than arisen

avid for infamous incense

of Bacchus' raucous breath

avoiding narrow breadth

of theology's

protect-drapery

not loathing

their ragged habitat

of indwelt rifts of clothing

divers failures

to fit personality

in envelopes of rigidity

 

So wonder why

defeat

by dignity of the majority

oft reveals

in close-up of inferno face

a nobler origin

than practicality's elite

Yet, if perchance

observed in down-sight from tall tower

lost it is

in grey dis-synthesis

of our adamic insects'

collision with confusion

Warfare in allure

of church and bar

oppositional altars

of cross and carousal

both irreconcilable

to well-faring flesh

As if should wish Evolution,

some esoteric union

of Mission and gin-mill

must breed eventually

someones more amenable

to ecstasy

than this unlikely spill

of God's mysteriously

variously

retarded children.

 

Nonetheless

Ardent self-crossing

kneeling-scaling

of steps inciting even the accursed

to church

proves unavailing

for visionary drunkard

inspired

to search intuitively desired

uni-identity

of primary

satieties of craving

Holy anomoly!

the gin-mill eased him out

the church now chucks him out.

 

The while

on high

disputing

the sheer beauty

Catholicism

once patroned

to entice humanity

a dull-dong bell

thuds out admonishment

to worship

atonic metal

detonation

tolling a drudgery

of exoteric

redemption

whose cadence

of illenience

transforms the cross bewailed

to flammable timber

for over-heating

Hades

waylaying for branding

indirigible bums

with the hot-cross

of ovenly buns.

 

Death is about to egress from the church

an undertaker's ebon aide

lurks in the portal-to-the-immortal

Saunters steep steps

to fling wide open the glass

doors of an obesely curtained hearse

prior to reception

of consecrated corpse

dross of the soul

gross of the soil

Concordantly

a ravenous truck

comes to a churning stand-still

before the pious facade;

hiding the invitatory conveyance

and carriages of florists' grievance.

Collecting refuse more profuse than man

the City's circulatory

sanitary apostles

a-leap to ash-cans

apply their profane ritual

to offal

Dust to dust

Even a putrescent Galaxy

could not be left where it lay

to disgust

Scrapped are remains

empty cans remain.

 

And always on the trodden street

—the communal cot—

embalmed in rum

under an unseen

baldachin of dream

blinking his inverted sky

of flagstone

prone

lies the body of the flop

where'er he drop.

One still savors

the favor of Eros

In this sore cemetery of the Comatose

here lies…

the belier

of disbelief

in this brief

bystander

Aptest attainer

to apex of Chimera

Inamorato

of incognito ignis fatuus

fatuitous

possessor of thoroughfare

O rare behaviour

a folly-wise scab of Metropolis

pounding with caressive jollity

a breastless slab

his cerebral fumes

assuming

arms' enlacement

decorously garbed

he's lovin'up the pavement

—interminable paramour

of horizontal stature

Venus-sans-vulva—

A vagabond in delirium

aping the rise and fall

of ocean

of inhalation

of coition.

An Aged Woman

The past has come apart

events are vagueing

the future is inexploitable

the present         pain.

Not even pain has that precision

with which it struck in youth-time

More like moth

eroding internal organs

hanging or falling down

in a spoiled closet

Does your mirror Bedevil you

or is the impossible

possible to senility

enabling the erstwhile agile

narrow silhouette of self

to hold in huge reserve

this excessive incognito

of a Bulbous stranger

only to be exorcised by death

Dilation has entirely eliminated

your long reality.

                       Mina Loy

                       July 12th

                           1984

Moreover, the Moon — — —

Face of the skies

preside

over our wonder.

Fluorescent

truant of heaven

draw us under.

Silver, circular corpse

your decease

infects us with unendurable ease,

touching nerve-terminals

to thermal icicles

Coercive as coma, frail as bloom

innuendoes of your inverse dawn

suffuse the self;

our every corpuscle become an elf.

V

EXCAVATIONS AND PRECISIONS
 (PROSE 1914–1925) 

Loy's grave marker in a woodland cemetery in Aspen, Colorado (designed by Herbert Bayer; Franz Berko photograph)

Aphorisms on Futurism

DIE in the Past

Live in the Future.

THE velocity of velocities arrives in starting.

IN pressing the material to derive its essence, matter becomes deformed.

AND form hurtling against itself is thrown beyond the synopsis of vision.

THE straight line and the circle are the parents of design, form the basis of art; there is no limit to their coherent variability.

LOVE the hideous in order to find the sublime core of it.

OPEN your arms to the dilapidated, to rehabilitate them.

YOU prefer to observe the past on which your eyes are already opened.

BUT the Future is only dark from outside.

Leap
into it—and it EXPLODES with
Light.

FORGET that you live in houses, that you may live in yourself—

FOR the smallest people live in the greatest houses.

BUT the smallest person, potentially, is as great as the Universe.

WHAT can you know of expansion, who limit yourselves to compromise?

HITHERTO the great man has achieved greatness by keeping the people small.

BUT in the Future, by inspiring the people to expand to their fullest capacity, the great man proportionately must be tremendous—a God.

LOVE of others is the appreciation of one's self.

MAY your egotism be so gigantic that you comprise mankind in your self-sympathy.

THE Future is limitless—the past a trail of insidious reactions.

LIFE is only limited by our prejudices. Destroy them, and you cease to be at the mercy of yourself.

TIME is the dispersion of intensiveness.

THE Futurist can live a thousand years in one poem.

HE can compress every æsthetic principle in one line.

THE mind is a magician bound by assimilations; let him loose and the smallest idea conceived in freedom will suffice to negate the wisdom of all forefathers.

LOOKING on the past you arrive at “Yes,” but before you can act upon it you have already arrived at “NO.”

THE Futurist must leap from affirmative to affirmative, ignoring intermittent negations—must spring from stepping-stone to stone of creative explorations; without slipping back into the turbid stream of accepted facts.

THERE are no excrescences on the absolute, to which man may pin his faith.

TODAY is the crisis in consciousness.

CONSCIOUSNESS cannot spontaneously accept or reject new forms, as offered by creative genius; it is the new form, for however great a period of time it may remain a mere irritant—that moulds consciousness to the necessary amplitude for holding it.

CONSCIOUSNESS has no climax.

LET the Universe flow into your consciousness, there is no limit to its capacity, nothing that it shall not re-create.

UNSCREW your capability of absorption and grasp the elements of Life—
Whole.

MISERY is in the disintegration of Joy;

Intellect, of Intuition;

Acceptance, of Inspiration.

CEASE to build up your personality with the ejections of irrelevant minds.

NOT to be a cipher in your ambiente,

But to color your ambiente with your preferences.

NOT to accept experience at its face value.

BUT to readjust activity to the peculiarity of your own will.

THESE are the primary tentatives towards independence.

MAN is a slave only to his own mental lethargy.

YOU cannot restrict the mind's capacity.

THEREFORE you stand not only in abject servitude to your perceptive consciousness—

BUT also to the mechanical re-actions of the subconsciousness, that rubbish heap of race-tradition—

AND believing yourself free—your least conception is colored by the pigment of retrograde superstitions.

HERE are the fallow-lands of mental spatiality that Futurism will clear—

MAKING place for whatever you are brave enough, beautiful enough to draw out of the realized self.

TO your blushing we shout the obscenities, we scream the blasphemies, that you, being weak, whisper alone in the dark.

THEY are empty except of your shame.

AND so these sounds shall dissolve back to their innate senselessness.

THUS shall evolve the language of the Future.

THROUGH derision of Humanity as it appears—

TO arrive at respect for man as he shall be—

ACCEPT the tremendous truth of Futurism

Leaving all those

—Knick-knacks.—

Feminist Manifesto

The feminist movement as at present instituted is
Inadequate