Taking Down

Three things.

Deep Thought #1) "We wish to take down what will continue in all events to rise. We wish not to be erased from the picture. We wish to picture the erasure." I'm re-reading Jorie Graham's "The Taken-Down God" and finally, after a head-scratching first reading, understanding the titular double/triple entendres: "taken down" referring to the removal of a Jesus sculpture from the wall of a chapel; "taken down" as opting out of faith, declining the sculpted Jesus, the hand-made representation of the possibility of ascendence; and "taken down," meaning Jorie Graham sneaking into a chapel on Easter Sunday and surreptitiously documenting the removal of the sculpture, taking down the event on a pad and paper, finding alternative means for apotheosis through the creative act of writing. Whoa. All of this is meaningless to dear reader, but I needed to write it down. Remember, blog = journal and journal = languishing in disuse!

Deep Thought #2) Thinking about Eric Murphy-Chutorian’s terrible misreading of a poem in 12th grade. He constructed a tragically poor analysis of the line “In the pocket/shingles” (or something like that) as an apostrophe to a moth named Shingles, whose texture and flightiness resembled that of the dollar bills pressed into his pockets. No he di'int! you say. Yes, he did. Reading poems and thinking about Eric Murphy-Chutorian (who is now lining his own pockets with Shingles, I mean, with fat wads of Internet cash) got me thinking about using poetry as group therapy. Or not as group therapy, but rather, as an ice-breaking game during a corporate retreat.

Here's how it would work: Someone (not even necessarily a Poet!!!) would write an exquisite corpse poem. Everyone would then gather round, pore over this meaningless string, and each person would give a quick interpretation of those words...and the breaking of even the coldest of metaphorical ices—dry ice, even—would ensue! It’s like a Rorschach, except the author of the string would have even more fun than the author of the inkblot. Plus it’s easy to remove inkblots from signification but with language you are forced to contend with prior meaning and context, so the author has to be clevererer. Like, you can draw a round mound and reasonably expect a large proportion of your subjects not to associate that round mound with words like “mammary” and “purple nurples” and “brassieres.” However, if you write the words “red-breasted robin,” you can imagine the puerile majority responding with big-boobs associations.

This seems convoluted, so perhaps the best thing to do is simply try it out. For example,

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Executive A (mergers and acquisitions) says: This is a story about the fall of man, his origins in fire and his end in bloodshed.

Executive B (human resources) says: The moral of this story can be loosely translated: ‘The early bird gets the worm.’ Let’s blue sky with this one, people.

Executive C (the CEO) says: Why must it always come to this? Why must his every move be hounded and criticized? Leave him alone, you animals, let the man live! Nothing is perfect! Let he who is without sin! Let glass houses! Let goddamn! Goddamn!

Executive D (the vice president) says: This is an inappropriate exercise for a professional retreat.


Deep Thought #3) I wish there was a slender but tough fiber glued to each one of my epidermal cells. And there was a threshold tension at which a cell, when pulled, loses its bond with its neighbors and is pulled off the body. And all of these fibers were simultaneously pulled to just below this threshold point. I just want to feel what it’s like to be about to burst.