These Things: We Are Not Nouns
Oliver Bicycle Works at Push and Pour Coffee. Garden City, Idaho. March 2019.
“I am a person who does things – I write, I act – and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.”
- Oscar Wilde
I’m trying to work out this thing—verbs, nouns, syntax, semiotics, sonority--let’s call it music. No, the thing is made out of language so let’s call it poetry. I’m trying to work out this thing, so I am a verb. A poet. Well?
To believe the statement by Oscar Wilde that “I am not a thing….I am a person who does things^” is more than not a transposition of the first line of the poem by Frank O’Hara where he writes about writing twelve poems titled “Oranges” which is a tattoo on my left arm but is not the first line of the poem which is “I am not a painter, I am a poet^.”
So what I’m trying to work out is that nouns and verbs, and let’s be honest if not brief, that what we’re getting at goes beyond the fact that a word is elegy to what it signifies^ and yet many have said music too can be just as obtuse as language because we have nouns for actions that are verbs so this obviously has something to do with time.
Painters paint. Poet’s write poems. Writers who do not write and painters who do not paint are not really writers or painters which lends some credibility to the idea that the CIA funds MFA writing programs^ or that they weaponized abstract expressionism and modern art after World War II^ or that Vladimir Lenin maybe didn’t die but became a mushroom^ from eating too many psychedelic mushrooms.
This doesn’t get at how frequency-hopping spread spectrum, a fundamental technology to the development of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, was developed by actress Hedy Lamarr and composer George Anthiel^ who may have invented the idea of forearm smashing the piano keyboard but I prefer Henry Cowell’s elegant use of the technique in his “Tides of Tides of ManaunaunΩ” which is one of a set of musics called “Three Irish LegendsΩ.”
Art takes time like learning the difference between cleverness, intelligence, and wisdom^ and how to “not allow the hold of those who spread their reach’d hands toward you” but I want to know how it is that my iPhone takes pictures just like Annie Leibovitz^ but they don’t look the same and so becoming a person who does a thing maybe sharpens the senses so that we understand that behind every painting hanging on a wall is a conversation between the back of a painting and a wall or that even tree rings make music when played on a record player^.
Everything sings and these are the days that must happen to you^.
Oh right! I'm using ^ after links to articles, things to read, and Ω following links to time-based experiences like videos, music, and audio. This keeps the hyper textual ephemerata prose poems artsy fartsy as they should be.