Noose and Hook

These days,

47 These days, Ou sont les neiges d’antan? I often wonder. And What are people anyway but nouns? While I have a retrograde attachment to the painters’ Levis still spangled with a dew of paint, as a poet I have some problems with their intuition that even the power to be lost is irretrievably lost and with their motto: We Save By Destroying. I am sitting with the painters in Bob Cunningham’s studio. He is a hyperrealist with a gallery in Soho and even the fire in his fireplace is more real than the fire in my fireplace. I love the painters yawning and drifting in their black leather jackets in whose seams the toothed zippers grin. I have become a dog in their pack. I love being a dog in their pack. We are cogs in the assembly line of war and death. Smoke rises from a cigarette. Our pack thrusts its dark brooding toward the idea of a bonfire of the arts. Turn back! I want to cry. But the painters are saying painting itself is like a fire dying down to ash and smoke and being sucked up into the chimney of Nothingness ! Beyond our windows the moon floats through the greasy oceans of infinitude, la mer infinie et graisseuse, and the painters are peering into their latest installation in which they are drowning in a barrel of water someone screaming on a TV screen. The painters say they are trying to save the body by getting rid of the body and turning it into a television! They want to unbecome it, so that it is like snow at four in the morning when the programming is over. Just Say No to X! No to Y! No to the chromosome , the bones, the hairy and fibrous stuff of the material world! and emmanuel noose i-62.indd 47 1/4/10 4:32 PM 48 Yes to art’s program of ardent forward movement to the abyss. I am not so sure what to say about this so I say What would happen if we turned back? But the painters say this TV needed terror to be placed in it. And now there is no back to turn to. emmanuel noose i-62.indd 48 1/4/10 4:32 PM ...