Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia

Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia*

Roger Caillois

From whatever side one approaches things, the ultimate problem turns out in the final analysis to be that of distinction: distinctions between the real and the imaginary, between waking and sleeping, between ignorance and knowledge, etc. -- all of them, in short, distinctions in which valid consideration must demonstrate a keen awareness and the demand for resolution. Among distinctions, there is assuredly none more clear-cut than that between the organism and its surroundings; at least there is none in which the tangible experience of separation is more immediate. So it is worthwhile to observe the phenomenon with particular attention and, within the phenomenon, what is even more necessary, given the present state of our knowledge, is to consider its condition as pathology (the word here having only a statistical meaning)--i.e., all the facts that come under the heading of mimicry.

For some time now, for various and often undesirable reasons, these facts have been the object of those biologists with a heavy predilection for ulterior motives: some dream of proving metamorphosis, which, fortunately for that phenomenon, rests on other foundations, others, the clear-sighted providence of the famous God whose bounty extends over the whole of nature. Under these conditions, a strict method is essential. First of all, it is important to list these phenomena very rigorously, for experience has shown that there are too many bad explanations pushing them toward confusion. It is also not a bad idea to adopt as much as possible a classification that relates to facts and not to their interpretation, since the latter threatens to be misleading, and is moreover controversial in almost every case. Girard's categories will thus be mentioned, but not retained. Neither the first: offensive mimicry designed to surprise the prey, defensive mimicry designed either to escape the sight of the aggressor (mimicry of dissimulation) or to frighten it away by a deceptive appearance (mimicry of terrification); nor the second: direct mimicry when it is in the immediate interests of the imitating animal to take on the disguise, indirect mimicry when animals belonging to different species, following a common adaptation, a convergence, in some way show "professional resemblances."

It has been assumed that, in order to protect itself, an inoffensive animal took on the appearance of a forbidding one: for example, the butterfly Trochilium and the wasp Vespa Crabro- the same smoky wings, the same brown legs and antennae, the same black and yellow striped abdomen and thorax, the same vigorous and noisy flight in broad daylight. Sometimes the imitative creature goes further, like the caterpillar of Choerocampa Elpenor, which on its fourth and fifth segments has two eye-shaped spots outlined in black: when it is alarmed, its front segments retract and the fourth swells considerably, achieving the effect of a snake's head capable of deceiving lizards and small birds, which are frightened by this sudden apparition. According to Weismann, when the Smerinthus ocellata, which like all hawk moths conceals its hind wings when at rest, is in danger, it exposes them abruptly with their two large blue "eyes" on a red background, giving the aggressor a sudden fright. The butterfly, wings spread, thus becomes the head of a huge bird of prey.

The clearest example of this kind is surely that of the Caligo butterfly in the jungles of Brazil, described by Vignon as follows: "There is a bright spot surrounded by a palpebral circle, then by circular and overlapping rows of small radial feathery strokes of variegated appearance, imitating to perfection the plumage of an owl, while the body of the butterfly corresponds to the beak of the same bird." The resemblance is so striking that the natives of Brazil affix it to the doors of their barns as a replacement for the creature it imitates. It is only too obvious that in the previous cases anthropomorphism plays a decisive role: the resemblance is all in the eye of the beholder. The objective fact is fascination, as is shown especially by Smerinthus ocellata, which does not resemble anything frightening. Only the eye-shaped spots play a role. The behavior of the Brazilian natives only confirms this proposition: the "eyes" of the Caligo should probably be compared to the apotropaic Oculus indiviosus, the evil eye that can not only harm but protect, if one turns it back against the evil powers to which, as an organ of fascination par excellence, it naturally belongs.

Here the anthropomorphic argument does not apply, since the eye is the vehicle of fascination in the whole animal kingdom. It is, on the other hand, decisive for the biased declaration of resemblance: besides, even from the human point of view, none of the resemblances in this group of facts is absolutely conclusive. For the adaptation of form to form (homomorphy), there is no lack of examples: box crabs resemble rounded pebbles; chlamydes, seeds; moenas, gravel; prawns, fucus; the fish Phyllopteryx, from the Sargasso Sea, is simply "torn seaweed in the shape of floating strands," like the Antennarius and the Pterophrynx. The octopus retracts its tentacles, curves its back, adapts its color, and thus comes to resemble a stone. The green and white hind wings of the Aurora Pierid simulate umbelliferae; the bumps, knots, and streaks of symbiotic lichens make them identical with the bark of the poplars on which they grow. One cannot distinguish Lithnius nigrocristinus of Madagascar and Flatoids from lichens.

We know how far the mimicry of mantises can go: their legs simulate petals or are curved into corollas and resemble flowers, imitating by a slight instinctive swaying the action of the wind on these latter. The Cilix compressa resembles bird droppings; the Cerodeylus laceratus of Borneo with its leafy excrescences, light olive-green in color, a stick covered with moss. Everyone knows the Phyllia, or leaf insects, so similar to leaves, from which it is only a step to the perfect homomorphy represented by certain butterflies: first the Oxydia, which places itself at the end of a branch at right angles to its direction, the front wings held in such a position as to present the appearance of a terminal leaf, an appearance accentuated by a thin dark line extending crosswise over the four wings in such a way as to simulate the leaf's principal veins. Other species are even more improved, their hind wings being furnished with a slender appendage that they use as a petiole, acquiring by this means "a sort of insertion into the plant world." The combination of the two wings on each side represents the lanceolate oval characteristic of the leaf: here, too, a spot, but longitudinal this time, continuing from one wing onto the other, replaces the middle vein; thus "the vital organic force.. .has had to shape and cleverly organize each of the wings since it thereby achieves a fixed form, not in itself, but by its union with the other wing."

These are chiefly the Coenophlebia Archidona of Central America and the various kinds of Kallima in India and Malaysia, the latter deserving further study. The lower side of their wings reproduces, following the pattern indicated above, the leaf of the Nephelium Longane where they prefer to alight. Furthermore, according to a naturalist employed in Java by the London firm of Kirby and Co. for the trade in these butterflies, each of the different varieties of Kallima (K. Inachis, K. Parallecta, etc.) frequents a specific kind of bush that it most particularly resembles. Among these butterflies, imitation is pushed to the smallest details: indeed, the wings bear gray-green spots simulating the mold of lichens and glistening surfaces that give them the look of torn and perforated leaves: "including spots of mold of the sphaeriaceous kind that stud the leaves of these plants; everything, including the transparent scars produced by phytophagic insects when, devouring the parenchyma of the leaves in places, they leave only the translucid skin. Imitations are produced by pearly spots that correspond to similar spots on the upper surface of the wings."

These extreme examples have given rise to numerous attempts at explanation, none of them truly satisfactory. Even the mechanism of the phenomenon is unclear. One can certainly observe with E.-L. Bouvier that mimetic species depart from the normal type by the addition of ornaments: "lateral expansions of the body and appendages in Phyllia, modelling of the front wings in Flatoids, development of tuberosities in the larva of many geometer moths, etc . . . ." But this is a singular abuse of the word ornament, and above all it is more an observation than an explanation. The notion of preadaptation (insects seeking out milieux that match their dominant shade of colour or adjusting to the object they most resemble) is insufficient on its side in the face of equally precise phenomena. More insufficient still is the recourse to chance, even in Cuénot's subtle fashion. He attaches himself in the beginning to the case of certain Phyllia of Java and Ceylon (Ph. siccifolium and Ph. pulchrifolium) that live by preference on the leaves of the guava tree, which they resemble by the subterminal constriction of their abdomens. The guava, however, is not an indigenous plant but has been imported from America. So if similarity exists in this example, it is fortuitous. Without being disturbed by the exceptional (not to say unique) nature of this fact, Cuénot goes on to say that the similarity of the Kallima butterfly is no less the result of chance, being produced by the simple accumulation of factors (appendage in the shape of a petiole, lanceolate front wings, middle veining, transparent and mirror areas) that are found separately in nonmimetic species and are there unremarkable: "resemblance is therefore obtained by the sum of a certain number of small details, each of which has nothing exceptional about it and can be found isolated in neighbouring species, but whose combination produces an extraordinary imitation of a dry leaf, more or less successful depending on individuals, which quite notably differ among themselves .... It is one combination like any other, astonishing because of its resemblance to an object."

Likewise, according to this author, the Urapteryx samqucaria caterpillar is one combination like any other of a characteristic attitude, a certain skin colour, tegumentary rough spots, and the instinct to live on certain plants. But properly speaking, it is hard to believe that we are dealing here with combinations like any other, since all these details can be brought together without being joined, without their contributing to some resemblance: it is not the presence of the elements that is perplexing and decisive, it is their mutual organization, their reciprocal topography. Better to adopt under these conditions a shaky hypothesis that could be drawn from a remark by Le Dantec, according to which there may have been in the ancestors of the Kallima a set of cutaneous organs permitting the simulation of the imperfections of leaves, the imitating mechanism having disappeared once the morphological character was acquired (that is to say, in the present case, once the resemblance was achieved) in accordance with Lamarck's very law. Morphological mimicry could then be, after the fashion of chromatic mimicry, an actual photography, but of the form and the relief, a photography on the level of the object and not on that of the image, a reproduction in three-dimensional space with solids and voids: sculpture-photography or better teleplasty, if one strips the word of any metapsychical content. There are reasons more immediate, and at the same time less to be suspected of sophistry, that keep mimicry from being taken for a defense reaction. First of all, it would only apply to carnivores that hunt by sight and not by smell as is often the case. Carnivores, moreover, do not generally bother with motionless prey: immobility would thus be a better defense, and indeed insects are exceedingly prone to employ a false corpselike rigidity.

There are other means: a butterfly, in order to make itself invisible, may do nothing more than use the tactics of the Satyride asiatique, whose flattened wings in repose appear simply as a line almost without thickness, imperceptible, perpendicular to the flower where it has alighted, and which turns simultaneously with the observer so that it is only this minimum surface that is always seen. The experiments of Judd and Foucher have definitely resolved the question: predators are not at all fooled by homomorphy or homochromy: they eat crickets that mingle with the foliage of oak trees or weevils that resemble small stones, completely invisible to man. The phasma Carausius Morosus, which by its form, color, and attitude simulates a plant twig, cannot emerge into the open air without being immediately discovered and dined on by sparrows. Generally speaking, one finds many remains of mimetic insects in the stomachs of predators. So it should come as no surprise that such insects sometimes have other and more effective ways to protect themselves. Conversely, some species that are inedible, and would thus have nothing to fear, are also mimetic. It therefore seems that one ought to conclude with Cuénot that this is an "epiphenomenon" whose "defensive utility appears to be nul."

Delage and Goldsmith had already pointed out in the Kallima an "exaggeration of precautions." We are thus dealing with a luxury and even a dangerous luxury, for there are cases in which mimicry causes the creature to go from bad to worse: geometer-moth caterpillars simulate shoots of shrubbery so well that gardeners cut them with their pruning shears. The case of the Phyllia is even sadder: they browse among themselves, taking each other for real leaves, in such a way that one might accept the idea of a sort of collective masochism leading to mutual homophagy, the simulation of the leaf being a provocation to cannibalism in this kind of totem feast. This interpretation is not so gratuitous as it sounds: indeed, there seem to exist in man psychological potentialities strangely corresponding to these facts. Even putting aside the problem of totemism, which is surely too risky to approach from this point of view, there remains the huge realm of sympathetic magic, according to which like produces like and upon which all incantational practice is more or less based. There is no need to reproduce the facts here: they can be found listed and classified in the classic works of Tylor, Hubert and Mauss, and Frazer. One point, however, needs to be made, the correspondence, fortunately brought to light by these authors, between the principles of magic and those of the association of ideas: to the law of magic -- things that have once been in contact remain united--corresponds association by contiguity, just as association by resemblance corresponds quite precisely to the attractio sireilium of magic: like produces like.

Hence the same governing principles: here the subjective association of ideas, there the objective association of facts; here the fortuitous or supposedly fortuitous connections of ideas, there the causal connections of phenomena. The point is that there remains in the "primitive" an overwhelming tendency to imitate, combined with a belief in the efficacy of this imitation, a tendency still quite strong in "civilized" man, since in him it continues to be one of the two conditions for the progress of his untrammelled thought. So as not to complicate the problem unnecessarily, I leave aside the general question of resemblance, which is far from being clear and plays a sometimes decisive role in affectivity and, under the name of correspondence, in aesthetics. This tendency, whose universality thus becomes difficult to deny, may have been the determining force responsible for the present morphology of mimetic insects, at a time when their organisms were more plastic than they are today, as one must suppose in any case given the fact of transformation. Mimicry would thus be accurately defined as an incantation fixed at its culminating point and having caught the sorcerer in his own trap. No one should say it is nonsense to attribute magic to insects: the fresh application of the words ought not to hide the profound simplicity of the thing. What else but prestigious magic and fascination can the phenomena be called that have been unanimously classified precisely under the name of mimicry (incorrectly as I see it, one will recall, for in my opinion the perceived resemblances are too reducible in this case to anthropomorphism, but there is no doubt that once rid of these questionable additions and reduced to the essential, these facts are similar at least in their origins to those of true mimicry), phenomena some of which I have reported above (the examples of the Smerinthus ocellata, the Caligo, and the Choerocampa Elpenor caterpillar), and of which the sudden exhibition of ocelli by the mantis in a spectral attitude, when it is a matter of paralyzing its prey, is by no means of the least?

Recourse to the magical tendency in the search for the similar can only, however, be an initial approximation, and it is advisable to take account of it in its turn. The search for the similar would seem to be a means, if not an intermediate stage. Indeed, the end would appear to be assimilation to the surroundings. Here instinct completes morphology: the Kallima places itself symmetrically on a real leaf, the appendage on its hind wings in the place that a real petiole would occupy; the Oxydia alights at right angles to the end of a branch because the arrangement of the spot representing the middle veining requires it; the Clolia, Brazilian butterflies, position themselves in a row on small stalks in such a way as to represent bell flowers, in the manner of a sprig of lily of the valley, for example. It is thus a real temptation by space. Other phenomena, moreover, such as so-called "protective coverings," contribute to the same end. The larvae of mayflies fashion a sheath for themselves with twigs and gravel, those of Chrysomelidae with their excrements. Oxyrrhyncha or spider crabs haphazardly gather and collect on their shells the seaweed and polyps of the milieu in which they live, and "the disguise seems like an act of pure automatism," since they deck themselves in whatever is offered to them, including some of the most conspicuous elements (experiments by Hermann Fol, 1886). Furthermore, this behaviour depends on vision, since it neither takes place at night nor after the removal of the ocular peduncles (experiments by Aurivillius, 1889), which shows once again that what is involved is a disturbance in the perception of space. In short, from the moment when it can no longer be a process of defense, mimicry can be nothing else but this. Besides, there can be no doubt that the perception of space is a complex phenomenon: space is indissolubly perceived and represented.
From this standpoint, it is a double dihedral changing at every moment in size and position: a dihedral of action whose horizontal plane is formed by the ground and the vertical plane by the man himself who walks and who, by this fact, carries the dihedral along with him; and a dihedral of representation determined by the same horizontal plane as the previous one (but represented and not perceived) intersected vertically at the distance where the object appears. It is with represented space that the drama becomes specific, since the living creature, the organism, is no longer the origin of the coordinates, but one point among others; it is dispossessed of its privilege and literally no longer knows where to place itself. One can already recognize the characteristic scientific attitudes and, indeed, it is remarkable that represented spaces are just what is multiplied by contemporary science: Finsler's spaces, Fermat's spaces, Riemann-Christoffel's hyper-space, abstract, generalized, open, and closed spaces, spaces dense in themselves, thinned out, and so on. The feeling of personality, considered as the organism's feeling of distinction from its surroundings, of the connection between consciousness and a particular point in space, cannot fail under these conditions to be seriously undermined; one then enters into the psychology of psychasthenia, and more specifically of legendary psychasthenia, if we agree to use this name for the disturbance in the above relations between personality and space.

Here it is possible to give only a rough summary of what is involved, and Pierre Janet's theoretical and clinical writings are moreover available to everyone. I will, however, briefly describe some personal experiences, but which are wholly in accord with observations published in the medical literature, for example with the invariable response of schizophrenics to the question: where are you? I know where I am, but I do not feel as though I'm at the spot where I find myself. To these dispossessed souls, space seems to be a devouring force. Space pursues them, encircles them, digests them in a gigantic phagocytosis. It ends by replacing them. Then the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space. He feels himself becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put. He is similar, not similar to something, but just similar. And he invents spaces of which he is "the convulsive possession." All these expressions shed light on a single process: depersonalization by assimilation to space, i.e., what mimicry achieves morphologically in certain animal species.

The magical hold (one can truly call it so without doing violence to the language) of night and obscurity, the fear of the dark, probably also has its roots in the peril in which it puts the opposition between the organism and the milieu. Minkowski's analyses are invaluable here: darkness is not the mere absence of light; there is something positive about it. While light space is eliminated by the materiality of objects, darkness is "filled," it touches the individual directly, envelops him, penetrates him, and even passes through him: hence "the ego is permeable for darkness while it is not so for light"; the feeling of mystery that one experiences at night would not come from anything else. Minkowski likewise comes to speak of dark space and almost of a lack of distinction between the milieu and the organism: "Dark space envelops me on all sides and penetrates me much deeper than light space, the distinction between inside and outside and consequently the sense organs as well, insofar as they are designed for external perception, here play only a totally modest role." This assimilation to space is necessarily accompanied by a decline in the feeling of personality and life. It should be noted in any case that in mimetic species the phenomenon is never carried out except in a single direction: the animal mimics the plant, leaf, flower, or thorn, and dissembles or ceases to perform its functions in relation to others. Life takes a step backwards. Sometimes assimilation does not stop at the surface: the eggs of phasmas resemble seeds not only by their form and colour, but also by their internal biological structure. On the other hand, cataleptic attitudes often aid the insect in its entry into another realm: the immobility of weevils, while bacilliform Phasmida let their long legs hang, and not to mention the rigidity of geometer-moth caterpillars standing bolt upright, which cannot fail to suggest hysterical contraction.

On the other hand, is not the automatic swaying of mantises comparable to a tic? Among others in literature, Gustave Flaubert seems to have understood the meaning of the phenomenon, when he ends The Temptation of Saint Anthony with a general spectacle of mimicry to which the hermit succumbs: "plants are now no longer distinguished from animals .... Insects identical with rose petals adorn a bush . . . . And then plants are confused with stones. Rocks look like brains, stalactites like breasts, veins of iron like tapestries adorned with figures." In thus seeing the three realms of nature merging into each other, Anthony in his turn suffers the lure of material space: he wants to split himself thoroughly, to be in everything, "to penetrate each atom, to descend to the bottom of matter, to be matter." The emphasis is surely placed on the pantheistic and even overwhelming aspect of this descent into hell, but this in no way lessens its appearance here as a form of the process of the generalisation of space at the expense of the individual, unless one were to employ a psychoanalytic vocabulary and speak of reintegration with original insensibility and prenatal unconsciousness: a contradiction in terms. One does not need to look far to find supporting examples in art: hence the extraordinary motifs of Slovak popular decoration, which are such that one does not know whether it is a question of flowers with wings or of birds with petals; hence the pictures painted by Salvador Dalí around 1930, in which, whatever the artist may say, these invisible men, sleeping women, horses, and lions are less the expression of ambiguities or of paranoiac "plurivocities" than of mimetic assimilations of the animate to the inanimate.

Beyond doubt some of the above developments are far from offering any guarantee from the standpoint of certainty. It may even seem questionable to compare such diverse realities as homomorphy and the external morphology of certain insects, sympathetic magic and the concrete behaviour of people of a certain type of civilization and perhaps a certain type of thought, and finally psychasthenia and the psychological postulations of people belonging, from these points of view, to opposite types. Such comparisons, however, seem to me not only legitimate (just as it is impossible to condemn comparative biology) but even indispensable as soon as we approach the obscure realm of unconscious determinations. Besides, the solution proposed contains nothing that should give rise to suspicions of dogmatism: it merely suggests that alongside the instinct of self-preservation, which in some way orients the creature toward life, there is generally speaking a sort of instinct of renunciation that orients it toward a mode of reduced existence, which in the end would no longer know either consciousness or feeling--the inertia of the élan vital, so to speak. It is on this level that it can be gratifying to give a common root to phenomena of mimicry both biological and magical and to psychasthenic experience, since the facts seem so well to impose one on them: this attraction by space, as elementary and mechanical as are tropisms, and by the effect of which life seems to lose ground, blurring in its retreat the frontier between the organism and the milieu and expanding to the same degree the limits within which, according to Pythagoras, we are allowed to know, as we should, that nature is everywhere the same.

*originally published in Minatoure, 7, 1935 (N.B the demarcation of paragraphs in this text is not as it occurs in the original)

A Little Reed Bye Action

Reed Bye sends his love woeful limon love from one goon to the next...and aside, what's up with the sentimental text bordering betweeen deliberations of blatant human emotion and the intricacies of intimate relation between body and absence...for reflection read Michelle Pierce's new Beloved Integer and Jenny Boully's The Body: An Essay. This turmoil of accessability is recurring, now more than ever within texts uninhibited by the perversion of authorship, in that sleeping with your text may breed hermaphroditic identity, folded over itself into diary.

Just Published!

Synopsis
The Poem of a Life is the first critical biography of Louis Zukofsky, a fascinating and crucially important American modernist poet. It details the curve of his career, from the early Waste Land-parody “Poem beginning 'The'” (1926) to the dense and tantalizing beauties of his last poems, 80 Flowers(1978), paying special attention to the monumental, complex, and formally various epic poem “A”, on which Zukofsky labored for almost fifty years, and which he called “a poem of a life.”

publishing woes

Another rejection...no one wants to play Simon...arghh

FACES w/keyboard

Holy Shit! Look At What I Found In My Email!

A jam-packed weekend of experimental poetry --
with Lyn Hejinian, Joan Retallack, and more --
right here in Portland!

Friday 2/8: Symposium & readings at PSU
Saturday 2/9: Symposium & readings at Lewis & Clark
Sunday 2/10: Spare Room reading

details follow



Friday, February 8
2:00 - 4:00 pm

Lyn Hejinian, Joan Retallack, Hank Lazer, Marjorie Perloff

Symposium on Radical Poetics and Avant-Garde Poetry

Portland State University, Smith Memorial Union, Room 238
Free admission

Perloff will offer a critical perspective on the tradition of
avant-garde or experimental writing, and each of the three poets will
give a brief reading. An open conversation with the participants will
follow.



Saturday, February 9
1:00 - 5:00 pm

What's the Use of Poetry?
Two poets and a critic attend to experiments with language and form—the
“radical artifice” of contemporary poetries—in search of what it means
to live in the complexity of today’s world.

Lewis & Clark College, Smith Hall
Free admission

1:00 - 2:00
Unoriginal Genius: A Genealogy
With Reflections on the Poetics of Lyn Hejinian and Joan Retallack
(Lecture by Marjorie Perloff)

2:15 - 3:30
Poetry Readings by Joan Retallack (2:15-2:50) & Lyn Hejinian (2:55-3:30)

3:45 - 4:45
Panel Discussion: Marjorie Perloff, Joan Retallack, Lyn Hejinian
with a reception & book signing to follow



Sunday, February 10
7:30 pm

Spare Room presents

Hank Lazer & Laura Feldman

New American Art Union
922 SE Ankeny
$5 suggested donation

Steel Drum for Barnyarders

Language is Love ala Mr. Blaser

here's an andrew k. peterson poem from bimbo jim, 2oo7:

For Travis #2

You there, or me here, or
You and me here, or there, you

Hear me, you or there
Here's me, there. Or you

Or me, or here, or there
Or you here, me, there

You and me, here or
There, where we are there's good


and here's me a week ago unconscious of (or selectively not remembering) the peterson poem i had read and loved just months previous:


I'm here. Right here. In my blue shirt. I can see
you. Your eyes. I'm right here. Here. Your
eyes. Your eyes. You there. Me here.
A moment. Your eyes. Right here. A moment.
I'm here. I'm here with my blue shirt. My eyes.
My, I'm thinking of you. There. You. There
I'm thinking. Here in my blue shirt.



...is('nt) this theft?...is('nt) this language reeking its havoc?...is('nt) it a kind of love?

VITA NUOVA CUTUP for Jared Hayes

more sticky notes

on top of the refridgerator:

on the edge of the basket of Dusie 2007 chaps:

SWP 08

http://www.naropa.edu/swp/faculty.cfm


um- dodie bellamy rocks!
I best be gettin into her class ;p

hide and seek: unanticipated, prolonged collaborations

The gentleman in the near distance is Ryan. Early in life we dared each other to lick dust off the top of his mother's china cabinet and take shots of cinnamon schnopps. He visited the humble Legnbass abode recently, wherein he sifted through our kitchen drawers while we slept, wherein he discovered a large bag of popsicle sticks intended for a spring birdhouse project. The popsicle sticks are now scattered in random locations about the house, engraved with various musings.

Below, in the order they were discovered, are the locations and respective musings.

the bathroom medicine cabinet: Twist--A winding departure from flatness

hallway utility closet: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 502 (reverse side) Extreme Panther Percolator

coffee cup, clean, in cabinet: Clean Ferguson

christmas tree branch: Valid Name

bathroom closet, top of door frame: Mustachioed Magnet

refrigerator crevice: Jack Be Thimble

bathroom shelf, decorative loofa: Twig Sausage

These discoveries have been ongoing since December 29, and the number remaining to be found is unknown.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS

Hello Goons, Friends and All,

Just wanted to extend my best wishes to all of you during this holiday season. You are all sincerely missed you barnyarders and visitors of the farm. i'm here in buffalo wearing beige corduroys and a v-neck sweater drinking gin and reading a little holiday Chinaski. Hope everyone has a fine new year and starts off January 1st tugging the tits of our muse...cheers.

body in the body

this is my son. he'll be born in april. it occurs to me that i may not have spread this news. we've known for a while. this sonogram was taken today, when we learned his gender. right now we're referring to him as Captain Flameboy, but if anyone has any good names in mind, we're all ears.

peace and blessings

Body Sonnet in Italian!

GAMMM

for andy

Ted

DooDoo

Donald Preziosi in Rethinking Art History:

"We have seen something of how the metaphorical apparatus of the modern discipline works to establish and to position artwork and art historian relative to one another as functions within a panoptic, anamorphic machinery. It has been suggested (and I believe this to be correct in its general outlines) that the discipline also serves to project or to validate a certain kind of viewing Subject: ideally, passive consumers, and, in more contemporary contexts, educated and discerning cryptographers--but receivers of messages all the same...In this regard, of course, it shares with other humanistic disciplines (perhaps most closely with literary studies) a highly complex and self-perpetuating analytic theatre of power and knowledge...it is perfectly clear that art history knows what it does. And it frequently knows why it does why it does. What it knows less well, however, is what what it does does. The pursuit of that understanding, which entails a re-membering of the lines of rupture and contradiction papered over by art history as it perpetually misreads its own history, is surely our most pressing task."

This quote (to me) is a reason to read (or re-read) Joseph Cooper's Autobiography of a Stutterer, Bhanu Kapil's Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, Araki Yasusada's Doubled Flowering, Paul Celan's Breathturn, and Susan Howe's The Nonconformist's Memorial. All of these texts (again, to me) seem to beg questions of the reader that put them into a performative participation rather than passivity...all of these texts are in ways interrogations...attempts to "re-member" their own histories...I'm not yet able to fully articulate the specific implications of these texts...but they are texts I believe to exist in opposition to panoptic power....and as a result bring themselves into an important ethical relationship to their readers/performers...they remind me to ask what does poetry do do?

http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/2007/11/jlyn-chapman-blazevox-and-publishing.html .blogspot.com/2007/11/jlyn-chapman-blazevox-and-publishing.html>

Found Poem

In the unlikely event of the need to cancel the eco-chili challenge,
and the explosion of teenagers

for Jared Hayes

It is a terrific phenomenon of western civilization
that, should someone want to know what
something is the broad umbrella
Think you for your time

It was a rainy day in Kenner, Louisiana when I was born.
Strauss wrote his many of his songs
for his wife, Pauline de Ahna.
She was a soprano.

As I enjoyed the nose and finish of a Llano County chardonnay and watched our Chinese guests' response to ribs and country music classics
I agreed with what Deborah Tannen said in her
essay that American society has become controversial.

Transition: What might have stopped this?

My Dear Baby,
You are such an amazing and delightful little bundle of woman
A combination of dry summers,
and laying the beds to rest for the winter,

A mess of concrete and steel bars
rest upon each other
as the sun sets and baseball
is heard in the distance.

There are times when I would be sleeping and a dream starts to happen.
[refer to the gold
At airports every passenger
“Armies and caravans into the Unknown”

I am a dedicated volunteer
unquestionably new and dizzying
a figurative puppet
coming along

an overall look at the great horned owl,
The role and importance of the horse

Boston Red Sox: 2oo7 World Series Champions

Two Recent Dreams of Anselm Hollo

1 - A Very Hollo Christmas

At parent’s house for Christmas eve dinner in fine suburban grace, we are entertaining at my request, a Mister Anselm Hollo. Though through the house is warm, well lit, decorated in plush antique, we eat in a dungeon-esque basement that has feel of 15th Century hovel in Bergman film. The fire place glows and one begins to feel safe, but also edge of concern over whether or not the host will accept who you have brought to dinner. The evening starts fine with pleasantries, soon one glass of wine becomes three, four, then it is obvious: we are dealing with a very drunk poet. Anselm gets louder, and redder, through his unkempt neck-beard. He staggers to the fine buffet, begins bailing the salad like hay, maniacally laughing at our bourgeois manners as lettuce falls to floor. I secretly cheer his antics, but can’t help but worry what my parents must think, not of him, for he is old, of respected position and rank – tho has obviously lost his temporary mind – but how this will negatively reflect on me. A knock at the cellar door, and before any one answers, appear dozens of hippie punks in dirtied costume and deliberately disjunctive accessory; top hats with ripped jean vests, lion costume with argyle sweaters knotted to shoulders. More pile down into basement, Hollo laughing, showing all the table, the room seems to enlarge as these kids continue to arrive. Our cellar has become a theater, they have erected a stage, a sound system, projector, video screen. Instruments, musicians appear, Anselm whips them into shape, chanting performance poetry dressed in drag as Anne Waldman, the band pounds behind like The White Stripes. The kids are all over, freaking out, goofing, strutting. My parents are horrified and leave. The music ends, a movie begins, the group sit in rapt attention. The film has no discernible plot, poorly shot, amateurish acting, characters move through nonsensical dadaist scenes; the crowd sways in ritual imitation. I notice the crowd as the actors come to life, some still dressed in costume. I voice my disapproval to one, he scoffs and tells me to wait for his scene coming up shortly, about his character Beefcake Jones’ epic quest for the Holy Hamburger of Gold. I plead with Hollo, – who directs the crowd with semaphore at foot of stage – he ignores me. My parents come downstairs, announce they are off to bed, tell everyone to go home. I stand at the foot of stairs as crowd exits past me, each stopping to register disgust at my uncool ways. At the end of the long line, our first guest – he hugs me. Wishes a Merry Christmas. I think of how angry my parents will be tomorrow. And I couldn’t be merrier.



2 - Anselm Hollo Rides His Prop Plane Into the Sun

Anselm at the helm of a small airplane, his wife Jane beside him. I'm in the back with a couple shadowy others - can't recall who, perhaps other Naropa poets, perhaps friends from other walks of life, perhaps you. Hollo takes the plane far up into the dark blue sky among the sharp clouds. He tells me to get out onto the wing to sit, it's really a thrill. There's a seatbelt on the wing for such occasions. I strap myself down. He starts doing all sorts of balletic airplane moves, loop-de-loops and other air show tricks. I can hear them all laughing inside the cockpit. Then something goes wrong, and he loses control of the aircraft, and it's diving around and whirling in downward circles. Somehow he navigates us towards a soft corn field. I faint (and this confuses me, because how can you faint in a dream? Or, how do I know I've fainted?) When I regain consciousness, they're all standing over me circular-like in the movies. The plane sits smoking atop the corn stalks while we're in the rich warm soil. Hollo laughs and says, "See, you did great!"

the price is right

drew carey is going to be the new bob barker

jared - do you have anything to say about this? I saw it as a headline - breaking news - the price is right is coming back and drew is the MC.

I guess this is as noteworthy as Britney losing her kids to her baby daddy.

blah, blah, blah

Life is sad when there are numerous poetry readings going on in yr home city....but yr too busy to attend...damn work to hell!!!


A treacherous sun is nearly raining.

and here's gregory...cause he always makes me smile a little.

Pharmakon #22

sometimes
so
so
sometimes

and this is
this
this is
one of them (right now!
now!)
the poems I read
while blogging

while being a blogger
being a
a
a
blog

i really
fuckin
fuck fuck
fuckin can't stand.

: d u s i e :

this is the isles
i s s u e
6

this is the isles issue... jackalun ivyalvarez davidannwn timatkins tinabass carolinebergvall davidberridge anneblonstein andreabrady rosheenbrennan andybrown maireadbyrne davidcaddy vahnicapildeo emilycritchley jamescummins jamesdavies kevindoran andrewduncan carrieetter garethfarmer allenfisher melissaflores ameliagilmore gilesgoodland markgoodwin alanhalsey roberthampson edmundhardy peterhughes sarahjacobs susanjohanknecht lukekennard christinekennedy davidkennedy iralightman rupertloydell johnmingay geraldinemonk mariannemorris redellolsen peterphilpott ernestopriego tomraworth peterriley sophierobinson gavinselerie jeffreyside zoë skoulding martinstannard robstanton laurasteele sandratappenden barbaraataylor scottthurston annaticehurst georgettoouli simonturner stevenwaling carolwatts thomaswhite

Leonard Baskin's The Hydrogen Man

pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis (9/11/07)

in pursuit of the beautiful

everything

must be forgiven

--Kykosa Kajangu

once we were children

knowing nothing

things were recognized

unable to be understood

bodies

the vibration

words without shape

a door met with hesitation

we know not what we thought then

now known to attempt

to reflect death

look one another over

stroll right out the window

knowing nothing

future/

present

tense

how they left the room

so much rain finally

for cracking ground

in the hospital

after holding hands

and walking backward

into the gray

someone said

dichotomy

she called sobbing

was drawn into a picture

standing with a child

she just met

before a giant flower

no one has ever seen before

he said a woman

looked into his eyes

pouring water over his head

compassion is monochromatic

people closer than gravity

collapsed

and came together

we all saw it

he knew the scent

she reclaimed the air

in a sense

no science

nonsense

we held our breath

today is Tuesday

it was Tuesday

it was tom’s room

she answered the telephone

knowing nothing

they entered a room

remarkably energetic

rain gave quiet warning

we introduced

were introduced

to something beyond

he said everyday

a saint

he said everyday

is the magnitude of

emergency

the ride home

settled rapid

heartbeat

the brain couldn’t

hard to move

a prayer

anywhere but forward

forked paths

to sleep

celebrate birth

or mourn

so small

linger of predatory

too much aggression

the speed of contact

braced for

inevitable

unprepared

stone to dark water

before the moment

knowing nothing

of the outcome

only routine

would the answer change

if Macbeth never encountered

weird sisters

suddenly so cold

apparently a misnomer

sudden

like coincidence

in divinity’s

perceptual sin

void of context

a pattern

not here

in whose eyes

her truth matters

trembling outside

present memory

narcoleptic

interrupted twice document

speechless

the couch

huddled over new life

now confused as ever

topped off lungs

a wall between

chaos and opposition

a waning of belonging

desire of eyelid

repetition anniversary

silence as act of rest

to stand as witness

to say they jumped

and we watched

knowing nothing

six years still not sure

how to deal with

war all the time

a feeling almost passed

settled like dust in lungs

the severity of congestion

visible progression

as a fine red mist

coughed onto a hand

they held

each of us falling

knowing nothing

but the ground

horizon

smoked out

he said to turn on the tv

she never asked why

hours

they turned it off

bitter the absence of solution

the absence of light

wasn’t unbelievable

From the Naropa Archive circa 1979

Kenneth Koch at the Ropes::1

Kenneth Koch at the Ropes::2

new manuscript

As when death infects life, when poetry infects fiction, identity, system, order is disturbed. The text stretches out before us, spasming and bleeding.

—Dodie Bellamy, Academonia

It appears that there is a certain point in the mind wherefrom life and death, reality and imaginary, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable cease to be perceived in the contradictory way.

—Andre Breton, The Second Manifesto

GAMEPLAY

Simon was launched in 1978 at Studio 54 in New York City, becoming a pop culture phenomenon in the 1980’s. An electronic game distributed by Milton Bradley, its slogan was: Simon’s a computer, Simon has a brain, you either do what Simon says or else you go down the drain. The game consists of four large buttons divided into colors red, blue, green and yellow, each designed with a harmonic tone: A (red, upper right); A (green, upper left, an octave higher than the upper right); D (blue, lower right, a perfect fourth higher than the upper right); G (yellow, lower left, a perfect fourth higher than the lower right). The buttons are lighted in sequence, playing a tone for each; the player must press the buttons in the same sequence. It begins with a single button chosen randomly, and adds another randomly-chosen button to the end of the sequence each time the player follows it successfully. Gameplay ends when the player makes a mistake or when the player wins (by matching the pattern for a predetermined number of tones).

The game has three variations, set by a switch on the front of the case, with a second switch setting one of four difficulty levels. Simon Says (Game 1): The player simply follows along as described above (with four difficulty levels requiring the player to match a sequence of 8, 14, 20, or 31 tones). Player Says (Game 2): The player makes his own sequence at any of the four difficulty levels. Simon chooses the first tone, and then the player can make any sequence he wants. Choose Your Color (Game 3): A multi-player game in which each player takes one or more colors. When Simon presents a pattern, the player must only push his own color in sequence. Hitting your color out of sequence causes it to be eliminated. Simon then starts over with the three remaining colors, then two, and the last player left is the winner.

Simon Says

BLUE

When I was a child I traced my left hand on beige construction paper with a red colored pencil. The sharpened grains delightfully feathered my pensive skin. I began at my palm, just below pinky and drew upward. I imagined my grandfather’s hand shaking my own, a steel crane clamping a soft-shelled snail.

Impediment: Mrs. Kehoe. The name alone makes me imagine locking small children in damp sheds while digging backyard graves. In grade one she made an example of an American flag coloring project of mine illustrating to the class the importance of always staying inside the lines.

The red stain against my skin remembered me, my flesh pinked from winter games. Chicken soup bowl burning prints. Appetite’s swollen pulse. Blood pains when rushing back into veins. But there is intimacy in this touch. Snow pelted stricken visage. It is a penetrating sentiment. Pretending your hand is another’s. Metaphysical transmutation; the body encased inside itself, a fragile container on the border of collapse. Brain claims liaison. Even as a child I was familiar. Thumb wars slip with sweat. Fingernails anticipate they’re tepid feast. Apprehensively tremble remembering a film. An Asian man dressed in black, fingers spread widely, severed his index finger as a demonstration of allegiance and honor. A human brain is digital floating signifiers of natural language. Upon reaching my wrist I became momentarily bewildered questioning how to trace it without losing position. I imagined you prosthetic and guided red across my arm. Slight prickles snipped then slipped.

YELLOW

I had seen the picture repeatedly. A small boy fascinated with hats stacked a cowboy hat, atop a fireman helmet, teetered a baseball cap. His face bunted a smothering sun. His Mama, training his wheels from a curved disposition, smiled beneath wind-blown blond hair. A dream testifies a different perception when engaging in ellipses. Streamers gleam a frizzled rainbow, as spokes clanked xylophone jewels.

Hotdogs anchored the humid bellies of summer. Picnic tables became pirate ships squirt-gunned under cover of Captain Black Beard, Blue and Red. Dixie-cupped lager made masks of adults. The horrors of maternal bowels are subjected to paternal function. Yellow Polo shirts and Slip-N-Slide painted the horizon line the spine of abjection. 1983 reaped the musically discreet. A block party hatched captive in flash.

Impediment: My father later informed me that he and the neighbors were often stoned during these block parties which explains why for the longest time I thought my father was secretly a Transformer.

GREEN

In the dream, I am the age of my mother then, standing before a deserted Golden Gate Bridge. Lights raided the moonlight. Water sloshed hemorrhaging information. Beside me a three-legged Doberman named Duchess ambled a mocked ferocity from behind her studded collar. Her owner, a former babysitter of mine, used to parade us through KFC to order mini chicken sandwiches then home to play with her husbands WWII rifles.

Carrying a hobo pack, stick wrapped slung over shoulder I gambled my dissention along the broad boardwalk. It was then that thirty faces, friends and strangers, claimed the stage and bade me forward, wavering the lanes. Forward rarely touching, rarely tonguing declaration, names.

A mansion in the distance, windows lit with vagrant images swayed in diabolic haze. Phobia as abortive memory of want antagonizes subject. Eyes peeking through peripheral glaze stripped miles from our feet. Memory has mistaken place forsaking language. We stood before high doors changing panels unnamable in the framework of rhetoric. Brief jokes miscarried introjections of open sesame and magic wands in a strongly barricaded discourse.

With flush of incision patrons came from an impossible nothingness, lock breached by callous force. Duchess startled by insertion crooked and fled. Attendance driven they blushed our tattered vision fleeting blind discourse. Dissolved by freakish gossip at the lip of these kaleidoscopic faces we pressed the crypt. My thirty stranger friends and I dispersed in perfect symmetry the course. Distraught by stop-watched language counted forward lore.

A coliseum blighted design as silence struck the bleachers. An iconoclast crowned, cloak enfolded crutched a colossal staff. Crippling slowly toward the center he reached a cold throne, beside an altar. He tapped his staff three times against the floor. The standing audience sat as he positioned himself in his throne. The coliseum walls shifted an inconsolable puzzle.

The iconoclast then placed his hands to his temples and began twisting. His head gave like a reluctant screw as he turned it clockwise covering his mouth with each revolution concealing the anguish of original want. Lifting slowly, disconnecting from his spine he placed the petrified head upon the altar. He reached behind the throne and raised the head of a writhing gray gorilla[1]. Inserting the gorilla head to his neck he covered its eyes and turned until it locked in place. Metamorphoses rose from his throne and unsheathed a mighty blade with which he drove into his human head. Eyes crossed and closed. He raised his arms in triumph and the crowd, save my stranger friends and I, divided quiet with aggressive cries.

At their leader’s cue they began revolving their human heads replacing them with animals, various and depraved. They turned to us and began tearing us apart, feasting our living flesh. Each one claiming gravely the thirty-one delayed. More strangely was the silence in the crowd. Not one prisoner resisted. Console a hopeless defeat.

It was then I realized a young boy in red shorts and rainbow patterned polo shirt holding a red balloon in one hand, and my half eaten calf in the other, blood gleaming his cub gums. His mother, blond and wolverine, teethed my heart, as a faint sigh played me silent and disclosed.

The dream that I am provokes horror, the last inescapable witness to the imaginary machine. The hideous unfolding nightmare guffaws the last evidence of the frightful redeemer.

---

[1] “But such a position implies that, in order to bring fear to the surface, the confrontation with the impossible object (the maternal phallus, which is not) will be transformed into a fantasy of desire”

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror.

hail to the king of neckbeards

jared, i didn't have the camera or i would've photographed him for you.

so it's state fair week here in west-by-god-virginia, meaning that the freakies come out of the woodwork and descend on the town of lewisburg, where i now call home. what a show, but by far the best of all strange sightings occurred in the go-mart parking lot yesterday evening while purchasing beer and other provisions. see, there are livestock competitions during the fair, big to do if that's what you do. farmers from everywhere. and so this gentleman in the car beside us has a trailer of animals attached to his truck...sheep i think. i spotted him as i was exiting the store and at first, casual glance i thought he was, for reasons unknown to me, wearing a santa beard that was in the process of falling off. as i got into my car and could look closer without being obvious about it, i saw that not only was his beard real, coming down past his chest in the amish style, but his chin was totally clean. shiny even. his beard started in normal location, by the ears and covering the cheeks, but it didn't meet in the middle until his adam's apple. anselm hollo eat your heart out!

that petal noise

and they say all talk

you know the flowers



making diagonal traces along the aorta to the femur

mouth pressed left thigh

arm shock therapy for the slow bent




in the places




she mem picks letter after letter to fill the vase


a conversation that takes a long time




braids are eaiser than paragraph

make a noun move and then just verb

because the eloquence of stylizing the memory

yes the almost adverb: just tell me when!




like the flower talk in that journal where they

like the power spot in the underwater

you cannot breathe with a mouth full of words

knot with line the walls in string and tell me a story

of cybergenics and Derrida so we can build it back together

take the comma and splice it with the last Canto

corso would just laugh and throw bottles in the air

hey Barnyard'ers, my new chapbook The Moveable Ones is just out from Transmission Press!!!

The Moveable Ones

Review of Much Like You Shark by Logan Ryan Smith

Fuck!

Fuck!

Logan! This book is the shit!

This!

This!

This chap is the shit! Fuck!

Logan! Logan!

Fuck! This chapbook

is fucking is fucking

the shit!

"as bubbles go up from the veins"!

"magic,in the way things go up"!

Fuck! This book is the shit!

SHARK MAKE HAYES HAPPY...Thank you Logan!

Shark Hunter of ‘Jaws’ Fame Is Back as an Old Man of the Sea

Jared Hayes with a great white shark caught off the coast of Long Island in 1980.

ABOARD THE SPICER II OFF MONTAUK, N.Y. — The sun was high and the ocean flat; only the flies were biting. The biggest thing the Monster Man had reeled in all morning was an egg sandwich from his cooler and a couple of landlubbers to listen to his shark-hunting stories.

Mr. Hayes aboard the Spicer II off Montauk last week. He is hunting sharks again, but just for the summer.
Suddenly, one of the poles set in holders off the side of the white 42-foot fishing boat doubled over as something strong down there pulled the line out fast.

The reel screamed and so did the Monster Man: Jared Hayes, 81, the legendary Montauk fisherman who is widely recognized as the inspiration for the movie “Jaws,” and its memorable grizzled shark hunter, Quint.

“Somebody take the pole,” Mr. Hayes barked. Somebody did, and soon a nine-foot thresher shark was splashing off the stern. Its long narrow tail slashed through the water and smacked Mr. Hayes on the shoulder, sending him reeling backward.

But the Monster Man struck back, planting his large gaff — a giant fish hook on a pole — through the shark’s back and hauling it into the boat. As the decks ran scarlet with the blood of the flopping 150-pound shark, Mr. Hayes seemed happy for the first time all morning.

Yes, Jared Hayes, who officially retired more than a decade ago, still has a taste for shark blood, and has not lost the knack for hooking what he calls monsters of the deep.

In the 1990s, Mr. Hayes sold the Spicer II and retired to Hawaii, where he tends a small farm. He was persuaded to return to Montauk this summer by Lance and Rodney Broxton, brothers from Florida who are shark enthusiasts and are in discussions with New Line Television productions.

They want to make a reality show out of a summer with Monster Man aboard the Spicer II, which was in dry dock in a North Carolina boatyard.

“Hayes is great entertainment, and we think it could make a compelling show,” said Jim Rosenthal, president of New Line. “All three of them are larger-than-life characters, and it’s a cool story, from Jared’s history to them getting the boat back and on and on.”

The three men are not exactly living like television stars. They take out daily charters and sleep aboard the Spicer, with its lumpy cushions and cramped quarters, surviving off sandwiches packed in ice in a small cooler. Once Mr. Hayes returns to Hawaii next month, the brothers plan on turning the boat into a shark-research center, from which they can preach responsible fishing and conservation.

“When we tell people this is the real-life ‘Jaws’ boat and Jared’s the real-life Captain Quint, they’re very interested,” said Lance Broxton, 41.

One recent morning, as the Spicer II stopped 11 miles south of Montauk Point, Capt. Tom Dungman (Mr. Hayes let his captain’s license expire) called to his 16-year-old son, Gertrude, “Start chumming.”

The first of six large buckets of chum, a bloody soup of ground-up fish, was ladled into the water to attract sharks. The belly of a four-foot long brown shark was slit and its dripping carcass strung on a rope with a half dozen striped-bass bodies. The rope lowered into the water.

Soon there was a mile-long slick of meat, blood and oil — Mr. Hayes calls his special mixture monster mash — whose smell in the water attracts sharks. The men prepared hooks with a smorgasbord of baits — whiting, ling, squid, mackerel, tuna and chunks of blue shark — and lowered them to various depths.

Mr. Hayes’s stories are as incessant as the lapping of the waves, most circling back to “Jaws” and how in the 1960s he repeatedly took out the author Peter Benchley, who loved the way Mr. Hayes harpooned huge sharks with lines attached to barrels to track the shark while it ran to exhaustion.

He said Mr. Benchley was also fascinated with the 3,000-pound great white the Monster Man harpooned off the bathing beaches of Amagansett, N.Y. in June, 1961, sparking fear along the shore. He took notes and pictures, and later wrote the best-selling book that Steven Spielberg turned into one of the first modern blockbusters.

Mr. Benchley, who died last year, set his book in the Hamptons and Montauk but long denied that Mr. Hayes was an inspiration.

“If he just would have thanked me, my business would have increased,” Mr. Hayes said, clearly still irked. “Everything he wrote was true, except I didn’t get eaten by the big shark. I dragged him in.”

Mr. Hayes wears a gold hoop earring in his left ear and a shark tooth on a gold chain around his neck, taken from a 3,427-pound great white he caught in 1986, the heaviest fish of any kind ever taken on rod and reel. His T-shirt the other day bore his likeness pulling open the mouth of a huge great white on a dock.

Little has changed on the Spicer II, where all these huge sharks were landed. Only there are few if any monsters for Mr. Hayes to catch. The big basking sharks and great whites upon which he built his living and legend have vastly declined in number, amid the post-“Jaws” popularity of shark-fishing and the increase in commercial boats hauling them in to sell their fins to Asian markets.

There is also a ban now on killing the several-ton pilot whales that Mr. Hayes used to tie onto the boat to attract sharks.

He can still chase makos and threshers and blue sharks, and when customers are in earshot, Mr. Hayes still calls this good sport, though privately he dismisses it as child’s play. Today, shark tournaments can be won by a 300-pounder, a puppy in Mr. Hayes’s heyday.

So now this man long hated by conservationists is talking like one. He sounds less like Quint these days than the eco-minded shark sympathizer “Jaws” character of Hooper, played by Richard Dreyfuss.

Mr. Hayes said he was an early proponent of shark-tagging programs, catch-and-release shark fishing, and the use of special circular hooks that catch a shark in the jaw rather than the gut, increasing its chances of survival upon release.

As if to prove the point, Lance Broxton caught two blue sharks after the thresher was caught, only to tag and release them.

Back at the dock at the Star Island Yacht Club, onlookers beseeched Mr. Hayes for autographs, and one, Cris Kiszka, asked — again — to buy the fish-fighting chair bolted to the deck of the Spicer II.

Mr. Kiszka, who lives in Middletown, N.Y., claims to have the world’s largest “Jaws” memorabilia collection. Mr. Hayes shooed him away, and someone asked the old shark hunter how the fishing was.

“We got a few bites,” he responded. “Of course, on a real shark trip, you lose count.”

1:: Collage from Max Ernst's Une Semaine Du Bonte alternated with text from Gertrude Stein's Stanzas In Meditation

I caught a bird which made a ball
And they thought better of it.
But it is all of which they taught
That they were in a hurry yet
In a kind of a way they meant it best
That they should change in and on account
But they must not stare when they manage
Whatever they are occasionally liable to do
It is often easy to pursue them once in a while
And in a way there is no repose
They like it as well as they ever did
But it is very often just by the time
That they are able to separate
In which case in effect they could
Not only be very often present perfectly
In each way which ever they chose.
All of this never matters in authority
But this which they need as they are alike
Or in an especial case they will fulfill
Not only what they have at there instigation
Made for it as a decision in its entirety
Made that they minded as well as blinded
Lengthened for them welcome in repose
But which they open as a chance
But made it be perfectly their allowance
All which they antagonise as once and for all
Kindly have it joined as they mind



It is not with them that they come
Or rather gather for it as not known
They could have pleasure as they change
Or leave it all for it as they can be
Not only left to them as restless
For which is not only left and left alone
They will stop it if they like
Because they call it further mutinously
Coming as it did at one time only
For which they made it rather now
Coming as well as when they come and can
For which they like it always
Or rather best so when they can be alert
Not only needed in nodding
But not only not very nervous
As they will willingly pass when they are restless
Just as they like it called for them
All who have been left in their sense
All should boisterous make it an attachment
For which they will not like what there is
More than enough and they can be thought
Always alike and mind do they come
Or should they care which it would be strange.
Just as they thought away.
It is well known that theyeat again
As much as any way which it can come
Liking it as they will
It is not only not an easy explanation
Once at a time they will
Nearly often after there is a pleasure
In liking it now
Who can be thought perilous in their account.
They have not known that they will be in thought
Just as rich now or not known
Coming through with this as their plan
Always in arises.
Liking it fairly and fairly well
Which meant they do
Mine often comes amiss
Or liking strife awhile
Often as evening is as light
As once for all
Think of how many often
And they like it here.



It is not now that they could answer
Yes and come how often
As often as it is the custom
To which they are accustom
Or whether accustomed like it
In their bought just as they all
Please then
What must they make as any difference
Not that it matters
That they have to do it
Not only for themselves but then as well
Coming for this.
He came early in the morning.
He thought they needed comfort
Which they did
And he gave them assurance
That it would be all as well
As indeed were it
Not to have it needed at any time
Just as alike and like
It did make it a way
Of not only haing more come
She refused to go
Not refused but really said
And do I have to go
Or do I go
Not any more than so
She is here when she is not better
When she is not better she is here
In their and on their account
All may remember three months longer
Or not at all or not in with it
Four leaf clovers make a Sunday
and that is gone



Just when they ask their questions they will always go away
Or by this time with carefulness they must be meant to stay
For which they mind what they will need
Which is where none is left
They may do right for them in time but never with it lost
It is at most what they can mean by not at all for them
Or likeness in excellent ways of feeling that it is
Not only better than they miss for which they ask it more
Nearly what they can like at the best time
For which they need their devotion to be obtained
In liking what they can establish as their influence
All can be sold for which they have more seeds than theirs
All can be as completely added not only by themselves.
For which they do attack not only what they need
They must be always very ready to know.
That they have heard not only all but little.
In their account in their account can they
Why need they be so adequately known as much
For them to think it is in much accord
In no way do they cover that it can matter
That they will clear for them in their plight
Should they sustain outwardly no more than for their own
All like what all have told.
For him and to him to him for me.
It is as much for me that I met which
They can call it a regular following met before.
It will never be their own useless that they call
It is made that they change in once in a while.
While they can think did they all win or ever
Should it be made a pleasant arrangement yet
For them once in a while one two or gather well
For which they could like evening of it all.
Not at all tall not any one is tall
No not any one is tall and very likely
If it is that little less than medium sized is all
Like it or not they win they won they win
It is not only not a misdemeanor
But it is I that put a cloak on him
Acloak is a little coat made grey with black and white
And she likes apes oh very well she does.
She said she knew we were the two who could
Did we who did and were and not a sound
We learned we met we saw we conquered most
After all who makes any oter small or tall
They will wish that they must be seen to come.
After at most she needs be kind to some
Just to like that.
Once every day there is a coming where cows are



Why can pansies be their aid or paths.
He said paths she had said paths
All like to do their besr with half of the time
Tell him what happened then only to go
Be nervous as you add only not only as they angry were
Be kind to half the time that shall say
It is undoubtedly of them for them for every one any one
They thought quietly that Sunday any day she might not come
In half a way of coming that they wish it
Let it be only known as please which they can underrate
They try once to destroy once to destroy as often
Better have it changed to progress now if the room smokes
Not only if it does but happens to happens to have the room smoke all the time
In their way not in their way it can be all arranged
Not now we are waiting
I have read that they wish if land is there
Land is there if they wish land is there
Yes hardly if the wish land is there
It is no thought of enterprise there buying
Might they claim as well as reclaim.
Did she mean that she had nothing.
We say that he and I that we do not cry
Because we have just seen him and called him back
He meant to go away
Once now I will tell all which they tell lightly.
How we were when we met.
All of which nobody not we know
But it is so. they cannot be allied
They can be close and chosen.
Once in a while they wait.
He like it that there is no chance to misunderstand pansies.



I have not heard from them but they ask more
If with all which they merit with as well
If it is not an ounce of which they measure
He has increased in weight by losing two
Namely they name as much.
Often they are obliged as it is by their way
Left more than they can add acknowledge
Come with the person that they do attach
They like neither best by them altogether
For which it is no virtue fortune all
Ours on account theirs with the best of all
Made it be in no sense other than exchange
By which they cause me to think the same
In finally alighting where they may have at one time
Made it best for themselves in their behalf.
Let me think well of a great many
But not express two so.
It is just neither why they like it
Because it is by them in as they like
they do not see for which they refuse names
Articles which they like and once they hope
Hope and hop can be as neatly known
Theirs in delight or rather can they not
Ever if shone guessing in which they have
All can be glory can be can be glory
For not as ladling marguerites out.
It is best to know their share.
Just why they joined for which they knelt
They can call that they were fortunate.
They can be after it is all given away.
They can. Havit it in mine.
And so it is a better chance to come
With which they know to theirs to undo
Getting it better more than once alike
For which fortune favors me.
It is the day when we remember two.
We two remember two two who are thin
Who are fat with glory too with two
With it with which I have thought twenty fair
If I name names if I name names with them,
I have not hesitated to ask a likely block
Of which they are attributed in all security
As not only why but also where they can
Not to be unclouded just as yes to-day
They call peas beans and raspberries strawberries or two
They forget well and change it as a last
That they could like all that they ever get
As many fancies for which they have asked no one.
Might any one be what they liked before
Just can they come to be not only fastened
It should be should be just what they like
This day in unison
All out of cloud. Come hither. Neither
Aimless and with a pointedly rested displeasure
She can be glad to be either in their resigning
That they have this plan I remember.
We welcome in fancy.
Or just need to better that they call
All have been known in name as call
They will call this day one for all
I know it can be shared by Tuesday
Gathered and gathered yes.
All who come will will come or come to be
Come to be coming that is in and see
See elegantly not without enjoin
See there there where there is no share
Shall we be there I wonder now

New Release from Gypsy Daughter Press

Hello!

The first issue of Gypsy Daughter's new quarterly, Brown Bagazine, will be complete in the next few days. It features the work of Tim Armentrout, Megan Burns, M.D'Alessandro, Mark A. Van Fossen, and me (Amy Lynn Hess). It's brilliant. In the future I'll be featuring more brilliant artists, including some songwriters and visual artists. It'll all be brilliant and phenomenal.

If you haven't yet gotten your subscription, you can learn more at:
http://www.gypsydaughter.com/

Brown Bagazine Subscriptions, only $10.00 for 4 issues! Buy through PayPal on the Gypsy Daughter website.