The Lost Lunar Baedeker Read online

  the one I was with you

  inhumed in chasms,

  craters torn by atomic emotion

  among chaos

  No creator

  reconstrues scar-tissue

  to shine as birth-star.

  Only to my sub-cerebral surprise

  at last on blasé sorrow

  dawns an iota of disgust

  for life’s intemperance — — —

  “As once you were”

  with-hold your ghostly reference

  to the sweet once were we— —

  O leave me

  my final illiteracy

  of memory’s languour

  my preference

  to drift in lenient coma

  an older Ophelia

  on Lethe

  Hot Cross Bum

  Beyond a hell-vermilion

  curtain of neon

  lies the Bowery

  a lurid lane

  leading misfortune’s monsters

  the human … race

  altered to irrhythmic stagger

  along the alcoholic’s

  exit to Ecstasia.

  Impersonal as wind astray

  confluent tides of swarm

  loiter

  in non-resistance calm

  through dilatory

  night and day

  crowds of the choicelessly corrupted

  disoriented

  The Bowery sanctuary’s

  invasion by the vanquished

  … in lazy anguish

  Masquerade of Inexpressionism

  inideate shutter

  halting the bon-fire of the soul

  from kindling the eyes

  peep-holes of delight’s observatory

  stoppled by hinterland stupor

  lunging a sullen blow on sunlight

  indirective

  abortive ocular

  reception of the objective

  Bum-bungling of actuality

  exchanging

  an inobvious real

  for over-obvious irreal

  faces of Inferno

  peering from shock-absorbent

  torsos

  alternate with raffish saints’

  eleemosynary innocence

  Blowsy angels

  lief to leer

  upon crystal horizons

  shelves of liquiescent ‘beef’*

  —staple fodder of their fanciful fall

  a Brilliance all of bottles

  pouring a benison

  of internal rain

  leaving a rainbow in your brain

  Hoary rovers

  ignoring all but despicable directions,

  shift through intentional trend of busymen

  Their sailing, flailing limbs

  of disequilibrium

  clutching at wobbly banisters

  to Elysium

  Apart from them

  a-sway the curb

  one wry heckler

  of an averse universe

  spiring a querulous arm

  announces the Tremendous

  unto his vinous auditorium

  of vast unfuture

  A universe

  to which (dead to the world)

  he is ideologically deceased

  graduate of indiscipline

  post-graduate of procrastination

  a prophet of Babble-on

  shouts and mutters

  to earless gutters

  as inattentively

  snobs of inertia

  turning a dorsal retaliation

  on closed entrance

  block door-way stairs

  with shoeless tiers

  of Bandage-footed thins

  lifting so daintily

  the lusty lice

  from their uncovered shins

  At last

  in a lucent grocery

  the murmur of the mass

  is become lingua audibly

  in sodden-mouthed excuses

  One lone lout

  flecked with opal bruises

  of belaboured bone

  hurls an appeal-assault

  on my comprehension

  pinning my ear to his desperation

  crying,

  “It isn’t my fault”

  —A truth psychiatry

  weighs courteously.

  How idly

  even

  infinite dole

  of pity

  yearns your way

  for none can enter

  to the sot’s account

  one cent’s worth

  of Salvation

  … that inborn fortune

  self control

  Despite that nowhere else

  is Bumhood

  handled with such gentleness

  an onfall

  of somewhat heavenly loaves

  for your loafing

  is the fashion

  conditional compassion:

  appreciation

  of your publicity value

  to the Bowery

  So here comes help

  here comes regeneration

  —even a little alimentary fun

  you shall not be left in the lurch

  Some passing church

  or social worker

  confides to a brother

  how he has managed to commandeer

  a certain provision

  of hot-cross buns

  his earnestness

  hushed by the hiccough holocaust

  of otiose

  hoboes hob-nobbing

  with obtund oafs

  in candid cupidity

  and oathy psalmody

  optimists conducting their poll

  of the total calories in alcohol

  or describing the sweet inward

  upward of “creepy Pete”*

  upward—

  a flight into celestial resort

  to alight in visceral discord

  Sample interpolations of the Absolute

  Physiognomy exhibiting

  —the unseen pallor of a Negro

  a Nordic’s inner darkness

  a silly smile immune to meaning

  streaming the static transit of the street

  to indecision’s crossroads

  where zest for zenith

  zig-zag to zero

  meet:

  the egoless eagerness

  of priestly patience

  for laic participance

  with

  impious mystics of the other extreme

  shrunken illuminati

  sunken

  rather than arisen

  avid for infamous incense

  of Bacchus’ raucous breath

  avoiding narrow breadth

  of theology’s

  protect-drapery

  not loathing

  their ragged habitat

  of indwelt rifts of clothing

  divers failures

  to fit personality

  in envelopes of rigidity

  So wonder why

  defeat

  by dignity of the majority

  oft reveals

  in close-up of inferno face

  a nobler origin

  than practicality’s elite

  Yet, if perchance

  observed in down-sight from tall tower

  lost it is

  in grey dis-synthesis

  of our adamic insects’

  collision with confusion

  Warfare in allure

  of church and bar

  oppositional altars

  of cross and carousal

  both irreconcilable

  to well-faring flesh

  As if should wish Evolution,

  some esoteric union

  of Mission and gin-mill

  must breed eventually

  someones more amenable

  to ecstasy

  than this unlikely spill

  of God’s mysteriously


  variously

  retarded children.

  Nonetheless

  Ardent self-crossing

  kneeling-scaling

  of steps inciting even the accursed

  to church

  proves unavailing

  for visionary drunkard

  inspired

  to search intuitively desired

  uni-identity

  of primary

  satieties of craving

  Holy anomoly!

  the gin-mill eased him out

  the church now chucks him out.

  The while

  on high

  disputing

  the sheer beauty

  Catholicism

  once patroned

  to entice humanity

  a dull-dong bell

  thuds out admonishment

  to worship

  atonic metal

  detonation

  tolling a drudgery

  of exoteric

  redemption

  whose cadence

  of illenience

  transforms the cross bewailed

  to flammable timber

  for over-heating

  Hades

  waylaying for branding

  indirigible bums

  with the hot-cross

  of ovenly buns.

  Death is about to egress from the church

  an undertaker’s ebon aide

  lurks in the portal-to-the-immortal

  Saunters steep steps

  to fling wide open the glass

  doors of an obesely curtained hearse

  prior to reception

  of consecrated corpse

  dross of the soul

  gross of the soil

  Concordantly

  a ravenous truck

  comes to a churning stand-still

  before the pious facade;

  hiding the invitatory conveyance

  and carriages of florists’ grievance.

  Collecting refuse more profuse than man

  the City’s circulatory

  sanitary apostles

  a-leap to ash-cans

  apply their profane ritual

  to offal

  Dust to dust

  Even a putrescent Galaxy

  could not be left where it lay

  to disgust

  Scrapped are remains

  empty cans remain.

  And always on the trodden street

  —the communal cot—

  embalmed in rum

  under an unseen

  baldachin of dream

  blinking his inverted sky

  of flagstone

  prone

  lies the body of the flop

  where’er he drop.

  One still savors

  the favor of Eros

  In this sore cemetery of the Comatose

  here lies…

  the belier

  of disbelief

  in this brief

  bystander

  Aptest attainer

  to apex of Chimera

  Inamorato

  of incognito ignis fatuus

  fatuitous

  possessor of thoroughfare

  O rare behaviour

  a folly-wise scab of Metropolis

  pounding with caressive jollity

  a breastless slab

  his cerebral fumes

  assuming

  arms’ enlacement

  decorously garbed

  he’s lovin’up the pavement

  —interminable paramour

  of horizontal stature

  Venus-sans-vulva—

  A vagabond in delirium

  aping the rise and fall

  of ocean

  of inhalation

  of coition.

  An Aged Woman

  The past has come apart

  events are vagueing

  the future is inexploitable

  the present pain.

  Not even pain has that precision

  with which it struck in youth-time

  More like moth

  eroding internal organs

  hanging or falling down

  in a spoiled closet

  Does your mirror Bedevil you

  or is the impossible

  possible to senility

  enabling the erstwhile agile

  narrow silhouette of self

  to hold in huge reserve

  this excessive incognito

  of a Bulbous stranger

  only to be exorcised by death

  Dilation has entirely eliminated

  your long reality.

  Mina Loy

  July 12th

  1984

  Moreover, the Moon — — —

  Face of the skies

  preside

  over our wonder.

  Fluorescent

  truant of heaven

  draw us under.

  Silver, circular corpse

  your decease

  infects us with unendurable ease,

  touching nerve-terminals

  to thermal icicles

  Coercive as coma, frail as bloom

  innuendoes of your inverse dawn

  suffuse the self;

  our every corpuscle become an elf.

  V

  EXCAVATIONS AND PRECISIONS

  (PROSE 1914–1925)

  Loy’s grave marker in a woodland cemetery in Aspen, Colorado (designed by Herbert Bayer; Franz Berko photograph)

  Aphorisms on Futurism

  DIE in the Past

  Live in the Future.

  THE velocity of velocities arrives in starting.

  IN pressing the material to derive its essence, matter becomes deformed.

  AND form hurtling against itself is thrown beyond the synopsis of vision.

  THE straight line and the circle are the parents of design, form the basis of art; there is no limit to their coherent variability.

  LOVE the hideous in order to find the sublime core of it.

  OPEN your arms to the dilapidated, to rehabilitate them.

  YOU prefer to observe the past on which your eyes are already opened.

  BUT the Future is only dark from outside.

  Leap into it—and it EXPLODES with Light.

  FORGET that you live in houses, that you may live in yourself—

  FOR the smallest people live in the greatest houses.

  BUT the smallest person, potentially, is as great as the Universe.

  WHAT can you know of expansion, who limit yourselves to compromise?

  HITHERTO the great man has achieved greatness by keeping the people small.

  BUT in the Future, by inspiring the people to expand to their fullest capacity, the great man proportionately must be tremendous—a God.

  LOVE of others is the appreciation of one’s self.

  MAY your egotism be so gigantic that you comprise mankind in your self-sympathy.

  THE Future is limitless—the past a trail of insidious reactions.

  LIFE is only limited by our prejudices. Destroy them, and you cease to be at the mercy of yourself.

  TIME is the dispersion of intensiveness.

  THE Futurist can live a thousand years in one poem.

  HE can compress every æsthetic principle in one line.

  THE mind is a magician bound by assimilations; let him loose and the smallest idea conceived in freedom will suffice to negate the wisdom of all forefathers.

  LOOKING on the past you arrive at “Yes,” but before you can act upon it you have already arrived at “NO.”

  THE Futurist must leap from affirmative to affirmative, ignoring intermittent negations—must spring from stepping-stone to stone of creative explorations; without slipping back into the turbid stream of accepted facts.

  THERE are no excrescences on the absolute, to which man may pin his faith.

  TODAY is the crisis in consciousness.

  CONSCIOUSNESS cannot spontaneously
accept or reject new forms, as offered by creative genius; it is the new form, for however great a period of time it may remain a mere irritant—that moulds consciousness to the necessary amplitude for holding it.

  CONSCIOUSNESS has no climax.

  LET the Universe flow into your consciousness, there is no limit to its capacity, nothing that it shall not re-create.

  UNSCREW your capability of absorption and grasp the elements of Life—Whole.

  MISERY is in the disintegration of Joy;

  Intellect, of Intuition;

  Acceptance, of Inspiration.

  CEASE to build up your personality with the ejections of irrelevant minds.

  NOT to be a cipher in your ambiente,

  But to color your ambiente with your preferences.

  NOT to accept experience at its face value.

  BUT to readjust activity to the peculiarity of your own will.

  THESE are the primary tentatives towards independence.

  MAN is a slave only to his own mental lethargy.

  YOU cannot restrict the mind’s capacity.

  THEREFORE you stand not only in abject servitude to your perceptive consciousness—

  BUT also to the mechanical re-actions of the subconsciousness, that rubbish heap of race-tradition—

  AND believing yourself free—your least conception is colored by the pigment of retrograde superstitions.

  HERE are the fallow-lands of mental spatiality that Futurism will clear—

  MAKING place for whatever you are brave enough, beautiful enough to draw out of the realized self.

  TO your blushing we shout the obscenities, we scream the blasphemies, that you, being weak, whisper alone in the dark.

  THEY are empty except of your shame.

  AND so these sounds shall dissolve back to their innate senselessness.

  THUS shall evolve the language of the Future.

  THROUGH derision of Humanity as it appears—

  TO arrive at respect for man as he shall be—

  ACCEPT the tremendous truth of Futurism

  Leaving all those

  —Knick-knacks.—

  Feminist Manifesto

  The feminist movement as at present instituted is Inadequate

  Women if you want to realise yourselves—you are on the eve of a devastating psychological upheaval—all your pet illusions must be unmasked—the lies of centuries have got to go—are you prepared for the Wrench—? There is no half-measure—NO scratching on the surface of the rubbish heap of tradition, will bring about Reform, the only method is Absolute Demolition

  Cease to place your confidence in economic legislation, vice-crusades & uniform education—you are glossing over Reality.

  Professional & commercial careers are opening up for you—Is that all you want ?

  And if you honestly desire to find your level without prejudice—be Brave & deny at the outset—that pathetic clap-trap war cry Woman is the equal of man—

  for