New Pieces by Post-Dogmatist Palabralagist; Lanny Quarles

From the International Post-Dogmatist Quarterly – Volume 1 – Issue 3 – 1994

It was at that moment I beheld a manifestation, a vision of the beloved, a face as long and wide as heaven, a face made of soft flowering explosions, golden moths of sparkling fire opening like blooms to become faces, in slow motion, eyes harder than diamonds set spinning, becoming an alternate vision, themselves an exegesis of the former , a bubbling vertical sea of golden pearls, while remaining transparent to the former, faces as the backs of exploding golden moths, cities of unreconciled geometry, jutting light, arms, explosions of golden pearl warted faces, becoming moths and cities, creating one huge face brighter than the sun, but seen through the filters of all created matter, the beloved seen through the veil. 

note: * (A statement considered heretical in Orthodox Islam, Mansur ibn al-Hallaj died for it in 922 A.D., is also a trope and a battle cry in Persian Sufism. In Arabic, literally translated; “I am the Real”) Instead of “Allahu Akbar” – God is greatest!, “Ana l’Haqq” – I am God)


It looks like Alfred Jarry is talking to a giant pink rat on Spanish television. The big pink rat is a man but he has antennae. I look down at the coffee table: cold coffee, scraps of musical scores, empty beer bottles (St. Pauli Girl Dark) , candle, liquid kaleidoscope. The new cat with orange eyes is eating the cheap food. She stares at my chest, licking her lips. I turn pink, how cheesy. She slinks nearer ramming her face into my chest. How many years are you a puta? I pour cold coffee down my throat looking out of the front door at the basil bush listening to police sirens feeling cool breeze scratching pink, sunburned face. I think about Jim Pomeroy in the ground. I think of disjunctive synthesis. Pomeroy becomes POEM L’ROI like UBU ROI. I see pink rats dancing on Spanish television. Pink latex rats are coming to hear me scream, to turn me into pink cheese, to devour my rotting media image, to see if I am a cyber-sufi or a werewolf wrapped in immortal television-tofu. 


Are we still susceptible to everyday life? Can a stray cat with its absolute felinity move through an open portal and find with absolute ease an environment which is at once new and wondrous and yet comfortable and indeed a place to take a nap? Rhetoric. A cat’s leap of faith. Truth. If every issue is a distraction, the Post-Dogmatism is a cat sauntering into the house of History, seductive, unconscious of its countenance, moving among the ponderous furnitures of Modernism, pausing and looking with gentle curiosity upon the spider-like Chandeliers of pomo and falling asleep on the sofa. I would present to you a matted and tangled mess of wires, cities, people, books, forests, cars, houses, factories, and oceans. One can hear it grunting, chanting, many simultaneous records stuck in similar grooves. One hears: Revolution, Avant-garde, Anarchy-Anarchy. But is sounds like; Rev-ant-av-olutionarde-archy-an-ant-an-an-gar-vantrevo-av-ant-olution etc… The cat of post-dogma sleeps in the mutant noise which is the description, which is the description of the ideal, which is the language, which is mutated. Like the haze of smog above cities, the mutant noise of words hang, a familiar event; but only to the familiarized. The cat of post-dogma dreams, it claws at invisible enemies, it licks and drinks and becomes two bodies, the doppelganger of duality. It knocks over vases in the house of history when asleep, and then upon waking sees the same vase as new and ready to be explored. But soon the cat will hear the mutant noise of words and grow anxious, it will leave the house of history. At this moment of exit, the Cat becomes a Post-Dogmatist, the unnamed name, the seduction of the unknowable, the hermetic identity of the unleashed self.


Solipsism versus Trans-Subjectivity becomes an endless chain of foetal pteranadons fleshed in green gelatin with eyes pulsing purple dog’s tongue and tiny amber claws, steaming, new, scratching at the very substance of emptiness, one divided by three. Self and the translating of Self to another self and to original self. Self is enigma. Enigma must be translated. A room dissected by golden sails, a vast room, at once implying Museumhood and the death of the Museum. A place where naked children ride on the backs of great black and yellow-backed snails calling to one another gently, lucid children, serene, children of the wind, with myth riding surely upon them, in the form of smile and garland. And darting through the sails jet black putty with crimson wings broad as condor and giant green Afro. A dream where Caligula’s better nature is combined with the recombinant jewelry of a scientific Utopianism, a synthesis of heraldry, a realization, a totemization, a fetishization of matter, an exodus into dream, the Allman, das man, everyman, the Neue Sidina Musa (Moses) parting the sea of dialectical materialism to reveal the way, the solid surface, the materiality, itself, the enigma itself. [Ana l’Haqq]* Philosophy staring at the svelt conundrum of Hinduism points to escape, to movements within movement, enigma within enigma. Paradox as Paradigm, Enigma must be translated…. A room dissected by golden sails, a dead museum, full of life.

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