Notes for Echo Lake 1
MICHAEL PALMER


“I am glad to see you Ion.”

He says this red as dust, eyes as literal self among selves and picks the coffee up.

Memory is kind, a kindness, a kind of unlistening, a grey wall even toward which you move.

It was the woman beside him who remarked that he never looked anyone in the eye. (This by water’s edge.)

This by water’s edge.

And all of the song ‘divided into silences’, or ‘quartered in three silences’.

Dear Charles, I began again and again to work, always with no confidence as Melville might explain. Might complain.

A message possible intercepted, possibly never written. A letter she had sent him.

But what had his phrase been exactly, “Welcome to the Valley of Tears,” or maybe “Valley of Sorrows.” At least one did feel welcome, wherever it was.

A kind of straight grey wall beside which they walk, she the older by a dozen years, he carefully unlistening.

Such as words are. A tape for example a friend had assembled containing readings by H.D., Stein, Williams, others. Then crossing the bridge to visit Zukofsky, snow lightly falling.

Breaking like glass Tom had said and the woman from the island. Regaining consciousness he saw first stars then a face leaning over him and heard the concerned voice, “Hey baby you almost got too high.”

Was was and is. In the story the subject disappears.

They had agreed that the sign was particular precisely because arbitrary and that it included the potential for (carried the sign of) its own dissolution, and that there was a micro-syntax below the order of the sentence and even of the word, and that in the story the subject disappears it never disappears. 1963: only one of the two had the gift of memory.

Equally one could think of a larger syntax, e.g. the word-as-book proposing always the book-as-word. And of course still larger.

Beginning and ending. As a work begins and ends itself or begins and rebegins or starts and stops. Ideas as elements of the working not as propositions of a work, even in a propositional art. (Someone said someone thought.)

That is, snow
a) is
b) is not
falling-check neither or both.

If one lives in it. ‘Local’ and ‘specific’ and so on finally seeming less interesting than the ‘particular’ wherever that may locate.

“What I really want to show here is that it is not at all clear a priori which are the simple colour concepts.”

Sign that empties itself at each instance of meaning, and how else to reinvent attention.

Sign that empties . . . That is he would ask her. He would be the asker and she unlistening, nameless mountains in the background partly hidden by cloud.

The dust of course might equally be grey, the wall red, our memories perfectly accurate. A forest empty of trees, city with no streets, a man having swallowed his tongue. As there is no ‘structure’ to the sentence and no boundary or edge to the field in question. As there is everywhere no language.

As I began again and again, and each beginning identical with the next, meaning each one accurate, each a projection, each a head bending over the motionless form.

And he sees himself now as the one motionless on the ground, now as the one bending over. Lying in an alley between a house and a fence (space barely wide enough for a body), opening his eyes he saw stars and heard white noise followed in time by a face and a single voice.

Now rain is falling against the south side of the house but not the north where she stands before a mirror.

“Don’t worry about it, he’s already dead.”

“Te dérange pas, il est déja mort.”

“È morto lei, non ti disturba.”

She stands before the mirror touches the floor. Language reaches for the talk as someone falls. A dead language opens and opens one door.

So here is color. Here is a color darkening or color here is a darkening. Here white remains . . .

And you indicate the iris of the portrait’s eye, a specific point on the iris, wanting that color as your own. There is a grey wall past which we walk arm in arm, fools if we do greater fools if we don’t.

And I paint the view from my left eye, from the balcony of the eye overlooking a body of water, and inland sea possibly, possibly a man-made lake.

And I do continue as the light changes and fades, eventually painting in pitch dark. That is, if you write it has it happened twice:

It rained again that night deep inside
where only recently had occurred the abandonment of signs

Conversation With A Stone

(Wislawa Szymborska)


I knock at the stone's front door.
"It's only me, let me come in.
I want to enter your insides,
have a look round,
breathe my fill of you."

"Go away," says the stone.
"I'm shut tight.
Even if you break me to pieces,
we'll all still be closed.
You can grind us to sand,
we still won't let you in."

I knock at the stone's front door.
"It's only me, let me come in.
I've come out of pure curiosity.
Only life can quench it.
I mean to stroll through your palace,
then go calling on a leaf, a drop of water.
I don't have much time.
My mortality should touch you."

"I'm made of stone," says the stone,
"and must therefore keep a straight face.
Go away.
I don't have the muscles to laugh."

I knock at the stone's front door.
"It's only me, let me come in.
I hear you have great empty halls inside you,
unseen, their beauty in vain,
soundless, not echoing anyone's steps.
Admit you don't know them well yourself."

"Great and empty, true enough," says the stone,
"but there isn't any room.
Beautiful, perhaps, but not to the taste
of your poor senses.
You may get to know me, but you'll never know me through.
My whole surface is turned toward you,
all my insides turned away."

I knock at the stone's front door.
"It's only me, let me come in.
I don't seek refuge for eternity.
I'm not unhappy.
I'm not homeless.
My world is worth returning to.
I'll enter and exit empty-handed.
And my proof I was there
will be only words,
which no one will believe."

"You shall not enter," says the stone.
"You lack the sense of taking part.
No other sense can make up for your missing sense of taking part.
Even sight heightened to become all-seeing
will do you no good without a sense of taking part.
You shall not enter, you have only a sense of what that sense should be,
only its seed, imagination."

I knock at the stone's front door.
"It's only me, let me come in.
I haven't got two thousand centuries,
so let me come under your roof."

"If you don't believe me," says the stone,
"just ask the leaf, it will tell you the same.
Ask a drop of water, it will say what the leaf has said.
And, finally, ask a hair from your own head.
I am bursting with laughter, yes, laughter, vast laughter,
although I don't know how to laugh."

I knock at the stone's front door.
"It's only me, let me come in."

"I don't have a door," says the stone.

After reading, a song

a light snow

a had been fallen

the brown most showed

knoll trunk knot treelings' U's

The Sound marsh water

ice clump

sparkling root etc

and so far out

(Louis Zukofsky)

(from JOGLARS, edited by Clark Coolidge and Michael Palmer, vol 1 no 1, 1964)