Stephen Ellis

from Opulence

Chauncey, Ohio

ABOLITION OF SECRECY

               for Edith Head   

All categories are merely general symbols which, like other symbols, have been acquired by humanity very slowly. We need to describe this labor of construction.
- Marcel Mauss, recital, Societe de Psychologie, Paris,1924

My IQ is identical to Ted Williams' lifetime on-base percentage.
- Inmate, State Psychiatric Hospital, Waterbury, Vermont

I believe only in the small essential seemingly meaningless microsolipsisms That are very physical for the integral pulse of the universal propels things/ non-things through transformations largely unseen.
- Jeff Gburek, from a letter

I will touch everything with my whiskers in order to know it.
- Scrutiny Mouse, in conversation

Oz returns at twilight, to inexplicable sense, accompanied by memories of prior
manifestation backing the buzz in the present of locusts in tree leaves having
sex, and from April 16, 1928, the plunk plunk banjo and tin soprano sacred Chinese
chophouse shake note singing direct from Alabama via Harry Smith, carrier of
such scruples (small sharp stones) as give cause to the mental discomfort through
which to rub, pit, roughen and score the Oracular Onanism of the Saturnian Cube
Zeus daily trades his sinews for, to keep out of the Mouth of Time, exactly why it's
immeasurable, as by absence, that we don't make cacaphony without leaving order "in
the wings" as a possible after school activity, though it's already Way Past Bedtime
on that axis, possibility as concept lost pre-historically in the Borneo-Burmese transit;
once they Hit the Mainland it was everybody off, like the River never figured out
What Hit It after Heraclitus said it was rhythmic in pattern while remaining
materially non-repetitive, the form and(/or) substance whose vector and scalar
still doesn't solve the dilemma of Feeling the Inevitable over outright Choosing God

Portland, Maine

SUPREME SOVIET

The individual who is conscious of his or her freedom is also impervious to the clamorous demands with which the world asserts its claim to be served as the validating authority for every form of existence.
- Geza von Molnar, Romantic Vision, Ethical Context -
Novalis and Artistic Autonomy

Illegibility is not an admission of failure, not a backing away from the gladitorial playing field, not a shirking of responsibility to say what little can be said -- it is [ .. ] the only honest response.
- Halliday Dresser, from a letter

Christ is by committee whose techne is like Homer's TELEphone
a party line that hangs together only through the magical relations
between the seven digits of a purely local number, a numinous jism
whose wandering course through the body is the axis complete of
the T
     E
     L
     O
     Sphere of narrative event. A home industry. In the event of moving
that way. Speed otherwise of the straited path is out of foreign
immigration; a locally printed three-dollar bill. Nothing is instanter
than the being of a small, round stone, or a raindrop. Gravitational essence
TAKES TIME. And through the autocthonic sieve of human perception,
golden bristles of the Sun's broom sweep. It is the gradual repossession
and helical repositioning of the cytochronological impulse toward the
geomorphic imagination in galactic pulse. Human life is constructed out of
time-factored alluvial intersections that shift non-evolutionarily via their
therm and herm, the circle squared and broken, to jubilate and despond

Athens, Ohio

ALLOYS FOR ALLIES

               for Carol Thompson

Sterling as a concept is measure in relation 925 parts purity to 75 inclusive parts
of the Invasive Darkness of So Imagining, thus what one cops is never so simply
a feel in and of itself, but a feeling for the world as such, as if The Dark Side of the
Moon were not only known by our inability to ever see it, but equally as projection,
outward through the Path of Least Resistance as a splintering of the shadow of being
perpetually unable to see the other side of anything, into a Middle Kingdom that's all
stem and leaf, whose flower is the erotic life of realizing its roots are in the heaven
that breeds each necessary message as it comes, realizing equally that none come pure,
but need interpretation, to stiffen sexual life out of the tremblings of desire, to be made
into the constantly transformed alloy of the Soul Making which permits to Minde
the Winde of realizing who one loves, so that fucking is simple duty and homage to all
one otherwise could not know, as so we count and narrate ourselves into the Perfect
Position through which the gentle forward rush to touch brings out the leastwise
thought per reach, whose encirclements manifest all one otherwise thought to teach