Entangled Strides From Ghosts by Will Alexander

The Occident, aligned by retrocausal psychic debris, created through campaigns of slaughter and mental mis-direction has arrived at its intrinsic denouement, as a cunning she-wolf looking into superimposed directions of blankness face to face with its own moral evaporation, unable to kindle its own presence and lift its force into the future. Unbeknownst to itself it has regressed to inflamed fragmentation solemnly nourished by exponential tribulation and tenacious spillage from protracted global thievery. This circumstance can in no way simply embrangle itself to basic ideological function, or to didactic wavelength burning with psycho-physical alteration. 

All of the above subtended by European aegis, by its crudely inflamed psychic-superimposition via argumentative dominance, with the human collective thought of as abstraction squared according to partially elevated debris. Our day to day existence maniacally maimed by carnivorous toxins, sired by trans-generational neurological decay. The climate akin to sand blown fissioning, as if we were hyper-dimensional camels who carry loads and now perish from thirst. We persist as a populace general and scattered, as a maimed institutional flock marred by uranium spotting, weary, constrained to remain unnaturally condemned for that which amounts to the unceasing. Because the half-life of uranium supersedes the future life of the Sun, we remain condemned in spite of the glittering effect of partial convenience. The latter, remaining as our daily opiate, as our lateral obfuscation where our transcendent property remains obscured to such a degree, that the individual can only cast his or her image into a mirror of numbers, so that it reflects as a distorted form of cobalt, or a referential ray curiously bent as if the general psychic image had been bent not unlike rays from poisoned tantalum. 

A disfigured species bent on carrying it's general misuse onto planes that exist as Proxima B. The latter condition is not the honest silhouette of a Bedouin trading partner searching for wares in exchange for perfect properties from salt. Humanity has become a hyper-ventilated species haunted by every geological outcropping, by every dazed and increasing shadow that ruminates via inversion. This becomes a distorted lens by which the cells now focus so that the gullies of being now hallucinate as the eye that forms demonic guidance. The collective mind now functions within a tornado of wrath embellished by hyper-dimensional goiters, that can be called nothing other than dysfunctional grammar, nothing other than the entangled strides imprinted from ghosts. 

As ghosts, we circle the abyss and only assuage our minds with a repetitive form of calculation that can only let us rest at a former plane of haunting. Perhaps, 1953, or 1976, when damage was not so blatantly conflated with our universal outcome. When one looks at collective respiratory lines in Mumbai, or the hanging breathing over cities in China one is not evincing an ideological concept or summoning up Christian superiority that gloats over the fates of the condemned. This remains a staggering amplification of our collective circumstance that now reaches beyond the calculation ascribed to galactic distance that presently haunts our understanding of the unknown. Let us say that collective DNA has now become conversant with its aftermath and now assumes another language that presently susurrates with itself as another form capable of tenancy with unimaginable forms that cognition can never attest to. 

Will Alexander- Poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, philosopher, visual artist, pianist, who has authored over 30 books and chapbooks. He has read at venues stretching from Rotterdam to Los Angeles and is currently poet-in-residence at Beyond Baroque Poetry Center in Venice California. In addition to this he is a Whiting Fellow, a California Arts Council Fellow, a Pen Oakland winner, an American Book Award winner, as well being both a recipient of the Jackson Prize for poetry in 2016, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Beyond Baroque Poetry Center in 2018. He resides in Los Angeles.

Kinetics of the Invisible: In Conversation with Will Alexander

DCW: (I bring this up because if his findings are accurate, we could be looking at 1% of the population on Earth as potential, budding shamans. A small percentage, yes, though enough people to catalyze necessary healing.) Julian Silverman’s landmark study on this topic in the 1970s cemented a linkage between shamanism and acute schizophrenia. Do you see any further similarities between these two modes of being? Differences? Would you say the shaman remains a steadfast threat to the 'culture' of commerce?

WA: First of all, when you have a cultural focus pervaded by the mechanical conquest it stiffens overtime and loses its flexibility. The shaman on the other hand blazes from within magically pervaded unpredictability. He or she exists sans any traceable motion akin to observing a bat in motion near dimness at sundown. Two words come to mind eerie, ghost-like. This not an energy that can be conscripted via analytical gain or loss according to a pre-ordained propulsion towards verifiable certainty. Being outside the artificial mental scape of recto-linear projection graphs suddenly disappear with the psyche left in seeming suspension. What is left is psycho-physiology that burns as sonic vibration. It is fueled by tests accomplished on the invisible plane. So when a circumstance (such as the Occident) completely ignores the invisible the shaman exists as an apparition that can never be quantified, and spelled out according to delimited material understanding, the latter always determining it's realia according to beginnings, middles, and ends. Lucre can never correlate with the plane suffused by the kinetics of the invisible. Say, a quantity of shamans arose the system of commerce would go blank. The forces of the cosmos would begin to truly appear.

DCW: Your work appears to be driven by an undeniable life-force, an ever-resilient aliveness underlines your poems when I read them. Do you believe in the muse? Why through the lingual?

WA: As a poet I've come to fruition in an urban climate, not say, in some exotic setting say, of snowlight in the Yukon, or in the wilds that continue to suffuse old British Guyana. I am a poet who has developed via libraries on the one hand, and the magical experience of live musical performance via spirits such as Sonny Rollins and Jackie Mclean (to name just two among many I've had the honor to see perform). Since l never played an instrument or had a calling for visual art at the time, the most available conduit was language. It has (and continues) to possess for me a compelling charisma that allows me to express my deepest urges of energy. It cleanses me of the triple artifice of brilliance, ambition, and lucre which seems to be the driving force of the poetry world in many quarters. Like Bud Powell I am as desperate to write as he was to play the piano. Language in this state cleanses, to paraphrase the great trumpeter Booker Little, there are no "mistakes", only directions to be explored.

DCW: The newer poems come from the perspective of the Henbane Bird. Human beings certainly possess no monopoly on sentience. We have a unique perspective on things, to be certain; although so does the javalina, the chaffinch, the humming bird, the sycamore. How does one remain mindful of their specific point of reference, all the while expanding beyond it?

WA: As living organisms we collectively share consciousness. Everything that we experience is suffused by what I consider to be of a subsequent order. An energy that can never be dispelled by any form of cognition. Things have been littered by, blinded by the impatience of European arrogance over the past number of centuries having exhausted itself in search for its reflection of itself via recto-linear logic. It wants to master Mars and the moons of Saturn with a generic wagon train psychology. The consequence of this psychology has accorded little status to the sycamore and javilina, to chaffinch and the various hummingbirds. Since the Portuguese entry into Africa an endemic inequality was evinced that has carried over in the modern era. Nature and people of color have remained non-factors or factors to be used in service of Portugal and the northern powers. In consequence, indelible damage has been wrought upon both the Indian and African populations as well the extreme violence rendered by the Inquisition and subjugation of collectives such as the Cathars. This remains a consciousness prone to an optical prevalence by which it draws and measures things. Hence, 

Linnaeus and the racially threaded charts of European psychic mapping. The Southern world as well as nature has been subject to onslaught of disruption not only physically but most importantly mentally for all the African slaves and North American Indian survivors. It is within this understanding that the Henbane bird evokes its voice, not in terms of political or didactic reasoning pattern, but as an exfoliation of the anterior. The anterior in this case not only prior to the European spirit and its wizening but of the Earth itself and the energy that created the Earth. Each phoneme of the Henbane Bird is soaked in this anterior energy field which naturally retains its Indigenous poetic character. This bird is not an avant-garde practitioner functioning within an ersatz reflex pattern according to some politically correct instructive review. The bird simply speaks and verbally blossoms as its own simultaneity.

DCW: Do you have any plans to release either Concerning the Henbane Bird and/or The Combustion Cycle, respectively? What can the people look forward to as far as forthcoming books and/or readings? 

WA: As for The Combustion Cycle I have let the whole age not unlike wine or wood. It was written the greater part of two decades ago. Since then it has mostly sat, as I have enacted parts over time to keep it active. It seems the whole has now ripened to such an extent that it feels safe to say that it has matured and is now ready for a complete appearance. I am starting to speak with others who have the interest and the means to issue its complete appearance. As for new works, Secrets Prior to the Sun (concerning the Morisco plight in Spain circa 1570) issued by White Print Inc in Detroit, Colloquy At The Abyss (a conversation with Harold Abramowitz) and A Cannibal Explains Himself To Himself (issued from The Elephants Press in Canada). I will giving The Eliet Memorial Lecture at Cal State Dominguez Hills April 16th, and doing a reading at Portland State April 19th, as well as one at Wake Forest for a science and writing conference entitled Entanglements during the 2nd week of May. There will be other things coming but we will leave at this point for now.





Will Alexander- Poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, philosopher, visual artist, pianist, who has authored over 30 books and chapbooks. He has read at venues stretching from Rotterdam to Los Angeles and is currently poet-in-residence at Beyond Baroque Poetry Center in Venice California. In addition to this he is a Whiting Fellow, a California Arts Council Fellow, a Pen Oakland winner, an American Book Award winner, as well being both a recipient of the Jackson Prize for poetry in 2016, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Beyond Baroque Poetry Center in 2018. He resides in Los Angeles.

The Dialogics of Will Alexander & Heller Levinson, Part 2

This installment of Dialogics segues from Part 1, which can be found here.

Heller Levinson’s book, Un--, forthcoming from Black Widow Press this March, will feature further trackings of the Dialogics. For pre-orders and more information, please visit Black Widow Press.

Dialogics:  The Dialogics are ongoing conversations between Will Alexander & Heller Levinson.  They began in 2001 in Los Angeles over beer & burgers at “The Saloon” on Pico Boulevard.  Below is a sampling of recent exchanges.

H:  Division, Discard, Disrespect, -- three D’s knotted to a planetary Distemper.  Discard in the large sense, . . . the garbage we pollute with, the discard of the Other (Alterity) twins with disrespect for the other.  This is nothing less than a Trans-Egoistic Dysfunction, the inability to get beyond ourselves, i.e., the Anthropocene.

A major reason why I rail against banal first person narrative poetry, which is so rampant these days, is that it is not what is called for.  Spilling one’s ‘issues’ out is simply another form of contamination, a linguistic pollution, as injurious to our planet as plastic.

I’ve spoken in the X-Peri interviews how I blame Commerce as a major cause of this myopic compartmentalizing.  But also our educational institutions – which are commercial ventures -- share responsibility.  Departments, refutations & counter refutations, itemization, grading, -- all are intent upon visionary stiflement rather than enlightenment.

At this precarious point in world history, the human animal needs to be pointed there, outside oneself, concerned with the eyes of the ostrich, the cantaloupe, the sea, the eel, snake, kangaroo, cloud, & Ice.

Is it not time, as the Italian poet Bigali beseeched, to chiudo le scuole! (close the schools!).

W:  True, the modern temper is analogous with ruin, with perpetual disregard of its true capacity. It is given a-priori compartments to fulfill. It is compelled to fuel auto-regulated animosity towards itself. The glance is thus dissolved by stagnation. The standard view becomes lionized contagion prone repetition and scientific cul de sac. Thus, the lowest properties are cultivated through general access. This being not unlike the barbarity of the Roman circus, it's crowds gorged on suffering and discomfort. This being  mind as a dark regressive ant hill plagiarizing it's own self- deception to such a degree, that all spiraling remains stillness, and it's habitats of official genius becomes a corridor where corpses con-gratulate themselves concerning perfection of the in-ambulatory. These are the lawyers, the doctors of learning providing us with gerunds to memorize and falsely confabulate as if they were psychic oxygen. 

Meanwhile, the lists of exo-planents lengthens with at least 40 billion of them known to populate the Milky Way as only one galactic example. Add to this a conservative number of a quarter billion galaxies with another 40 billion across this conservative quarter billion figure and our present neural circuitry should snap and leap and begin to writhe in another habitation of itself. This needs be our current possibility. Yet we graduate Magda cum laude in order to compose texts about failed love affairs and utensils to gather stuffing from slain animals. The whole example of intelligence has become a hideous affair designed to self-falsify itself via  a dismal array of accumulation. 

In the meantime we hunt for life through dismally failed aperture looking for a random field of guano on an obscure moon.

Will Alexander- Poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, philosopher, visual artist, pianist, who has authored over 30 books and chapbooks. He has read at venues stretching from Rotterdam to Los Angeles and is currently poet-in-residence at Beyond Baroque Poetry Center in Venice California. In addition to this he is a Whiting Fellow, a California Arts Council Fellow, a Pen Oakland winner, an American Book Award winner, as well being both a recipient of the Jackson Prize for poetry in 2016, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Beyond Baroque Poetry Center in 2018. He resides in Los Angeles.

Heller Levinson, the originator of Hinge Theory, lives in New York where he studies animal behavior.  His book, Un--, is planned for Spring publication (Black Widow Press, 2019).

The Dialogics of Will Alexander & Heller Levinson, Part 1

Heller Levinson’s book, Un--, forthcoming from Black Widow Press this Spring, will feature further trackings of the Dialogics. For pre-orders and more information, please visit Black Widow Press.

Dialogics:  The Dialogics are ongoing conversations between Will Alexander & Heller Levinson.  They began in 2001 in Los Angeles over beer & burgers at “The Saloon” on Pico Boulevard.  Below is a sampling of recent exchanges.

H = Heller Levinson.  What is the Essential difference between the Athlete & the Artist? Is there a difference?

W = Will Alexander.  Many many similarities. Having done both I would say the artist rows further into eternity. 

H:  Is Infinity more than that which precedes & concludes us?

W: It would have to be in excess of matter itself, given that matter prevails as a subsequent realia. By absorbing it's originatory condition it betrays it's own resistance to this condition thereby invoking a curious maturation via osmosis. 

H:  Could we not simply say that Infinity is the Non-Containable.

H:  The problem I’m having with the phenomenologists, i.e., Husserl, Levinas, Sartre, & Co., is their identification of transcendence, exteriority, otherliness, specifically & exclusively with the alter-ego, with personhood.  This annihilation of the natural world – the tadpole, the lizard, the tree, leaf, rock, earth – is both troubling & incomprehensible.  Incomprehensible in that how can ‘thinking’ persons possibly overlook such vitalistic abundance.  Is this what separates the poets from the philosophers (another schism), from a Whitman, say, who could talk of “ . . . touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh (Italics mine) to renew me.”  The time has come for poet & philosopher to merge, to anoint the earth newly.

W: As curious as the following may seem, Existentialism remains a modified remainder of 18th/19th century argumentation as a kind of insular quantity. The latter argument invoked a divide that the early racialists and classifiers nurtured and seeded. Names such as Cuvier, Blumenbach, Samuel Morten,  and Arthur de Gobineau most forcefully come to mind. The latter casting their collective lot via the fostering of division. In this context American Indians, subjugated Africans, Asians of all stripes remained at the level of tadpoles and lynxes. Never to be equated with the human ideal reserved for the vaunted Greek ideal. 

When Sartre, and Husserl, and Levinas, invoke human scale as their most significant point of concentration, it rumages, around within a delimited purview via a constricted socio-political humanism it's glossary naturally fails at rendering the other. This glossary attempts to define  singularity as a type of human experience as the central integer within the flux of cosmic number.  Add to this, it seems to assume its subject to be the condition of European consciousness as it emerged from 2 devastating Global conflicts, from the social devastation chronicled by Dickens during the rise of the Anthropcene. Of course we can never forget the shadow cast by the 80 million slaughtered Indians in the Americas, and the 100,000,000 maimed souls due to the trans-Atlantic circumstance that was the African holocaust.

Indeed, Existentialism rendered by the larger has failed to invest itself in the authenticity of the other. Indeed, it came to fruition during a span when Europeans seemed to wander without purpose across a pointless inscape littered with post-Hitlerian pyschic debacle.

*Editor's note: To read a second installment of Dialogics, please click here.

Will Alexander- Poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, philosopher, visual artist, pianist, who has authored over 30 books and chapbooks. He has read at venues stretching from Rotterdam to Los Angeles and is currently poet-in-residence at Beyond Baroque Poetry Center in Venice California. In addition to this he is a Whiting Fellow, a California Arts Council Fellow, a Pen Oakland winner, an American Book Award winner, as well being both a recipient of the Jackson Prize for poetry in 2016, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Beyond Baroque Poetry Center in 2018. He resides in Los Angeles.

Heller Levinson, the originator of Hinge Theory, lives in New York where he studies animal behavior.  His book, Un--, is planned for Spring publication (Black Widow Press, 2019).

from Concerning The Henbane Bird by Will Alexander

"...I

the phalanx of urgency 

being form who imbibes fire from lianas 

who shatters barren weight of unsealed discovery  

having emerged from death 

I've been suspended over eons 

surviving 'three mass extinction'  

surviving each degree of early mountain building  okay that's cool we doing 

to the terrestrial gaze I am famished

I seem inflated with mercury 

yet the light of my phonemes hail from above 

the Black Sea 

with its original slate of telepathy gone awry 

its intrinsic arcana damaged 

its pike-perch 

its sturgeon 

missing 

its sprays 

its whitings 

its mullets 

garrish with decline

I 

& the Lima Ocean polluted *

the Pacific 

intrinsically altered by tailings from Andean mining 

from unfit sewage pouring from Esmaraldas* 

then the San Vincente Gulf * 

the Bay of Valparaiso* 

'the Guyas River in Ecuador' 

alive with perpetual waste 

with raw exterior sewage 

dialectically 

there exists 'The Blas lslands* 

with their 'waters clear as glass' 

full of coral & trout & groupers 

unlike the mining scars evinced in New Caledonia *

these scars 

rife 

with nickel & copper 

with lead zinc & chrome 

my original death condoned by cold 

by ethers from the mines 

to those with blurred intetnal optics

I could be a lorikeet from eastern Tasmania 

or a golden pheasant from the mountains of China 

or a failed murmur 

or a dulled civilian riddle 

certainly not instinctual precision 

but a finely wrought chariot purblind with dioxins

I have not arisen from asphysia 

to share in legislation 

or to battle over various levels of dysfunction 

of course 

the politics of de-thronement & solitary acquisition 

being no more than a flaw in the fort of transition 

no

I do not seek power adorned by quotidian bribery 

awash in niggling mental capture 

but of the higher range of cobalt 

of a solar furnace of rays 

with my alchemical ratios 

with my semantics which splinters into spectrums 

 extending 

beyond visible calibration 

beyond its attendant neural focus 

with visual degree developed beyond blank neutrino blizzards 

being by no barometer related to deficient Gothic embranglement 

but in keeping with an alternating blizzard of trigonomic pontoons 

an electromagnetic reasoning bluish with alterity 

with tension to re-exist 

to blaze again 

immersed in electrical imminence 

certainly 

not flight as electrical enfeeblement 

as deleterious enclosure 

but as sunquake 

as biological abstentia 

with strange hormonal phosphenes 

bereft of pharmaceutical depravity 

this being 

neither submission nor error 

nor that which ignites 

a mirror within starving python's water 

one could call this moisture 

filled with ashen reptile meridians 

condensed by seeming fractious defeat 

this amounts to hypnopompic warrens 

in ungainfull braille 

sullied by hesitation 

like balletic nullification 

related to subconscious inklings 

that periodically arise 

in the partial reunion of sleepless Satan monkeys 

now being the era of fauna 

as the Sun explodes inside itself 

provoking caustic vertigo in the realm 

so that general living is constrained 

by stony unhealable quanta 

so that the pythons mentioned 

the lorikeets 

the squid

the micro-foundations that fulminate in krill 

blighted 

scarred with retrogression 

this silent in-sonorous struggle 

full of sodium unleashing its ratios by fatigue 

by dioxins harbored in blasphemous testing ground 

the fauna of Earth consumed by disruption

& land being no more than smoke 

being a fissure of black diamonds 

cracking 

under ill-gotten methane..."

Glossary

Lima Ocean- The Pacific Ocean off the coast of Lima

Esmaraldas- Coastal city of Ecuador with inadequate infrastructure whose sewer is designed to accommodate no more than 30,000 people while it's current population is just under 200,000.

San Vincente Gulf- Gulf in Chile contaminated "by pesticide residues."

 Valparaiso- Chilean bay spoiled by sewage.

San Blas Islands- On the Caribbean side of Panama "halfway to the coast of Colombia inhabited by 35,000 Kuna Indians, a paradise with clear glass waters" , yet "threatened by the Panamanian National guard" attempting to "annex some of their coastal lands" , with the Panamanian government seeking to log the watershed for cattle ranching, as well as threats from foreign fishing incursion.

New Caledonia- French territory in the South Pacific that "remains one of the world's largest producers of laterite. It represents " about 97% of the total value of exports."

A note on the text: This is an excerpt from Concerning The Henbane Bird. It is channeled through the voice of an Andean Hillstar the 2nd largest hummingbird on Earth. It is a shamanic bird that empowers the poem that extends over 300 pages. There are 2 other poems that go with The Henbane Bird, the other 2 are entitled On Solar Physiology and The Ganges. The 3 poems combine and climb over 600 pages in length. The whole is entitled The Combustion Cycle, concerned with shamanism as lingual transmutation.

Will Alexander- Poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, philosopher, visual artist, pianist, who has authored over 30 books and chapbooks. He has read at venues stretching from Rotterdam to Los Angeles and is currently poet-in-residence at Beyond Baroque Poetry Center in Venice California. In addition to this he is a Whiting Fellow, a California Arts Council Fellow, a Pen Oakland winner, an American Book Award winner, as well being both a recipient of the Jackson Prize for poetry in 2016, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Beyond Baroque Poetry Center in 2018. He resides in Los Angeles.