Take Another Piece of My Mark

Happy Valentine's Day all my Puddlers. I wouldn't be here without all of your love, adoration and chocolate, so I thank you all.  I went to the Heat/Celtics game at the TD Garden in Boston this weekend, so I will give you my thoughts on that tomorrow as well as some announcements for blog content over the next two weeks. Also, this week you can expect another rambling, emotional essay that hopefully touches on something poignant.

However, today, on the day of love, I give you a post from the man who perhaps defines romance, passion, sweeping statements of drama and cavalierism, and, well, love.  Mr. Mark Jack will put you in the mood, so keep those oysters for another evening, an evening when you can't get it up.

Take it away, Mark.


Inner Resources

Mark Jack



Several versions of my failures have impressed upon me a sense, and maybe a facial tic or two, of urgent contemplation. Perhaps it is merely that my glasses are no longer properly prescribed, but I am daily caught without a thought in my head, or anywhere, or maybe I am repeatedly found stuck in those spaces just after the word where one normally considers, contemplates and hopefully understands the word. I remain stuck in a rut but not out of sync.

How much of my life is lived reflectively? How often have I written or said, “I think” or “I wonder” instead of thinking or wondering? So much wasted time and wasted space, announcing my intentions instead of just intending. I write “I think” so that I, myself, might know that I am now, in this un-capturable now, writing and thinking what will come, what will be thought by me, and do I really? do I think? or do I avoid the possibility of thought altogether by simply writing longer and longer preambles, small conciliatory clauses, apologetic phrases, employing countless conjunctions and near pointless prepositions?

Friends! I remain stalled, non-committal.

The average Egyptian lives on two dollars a day, the Economist told me, though the currency used is the Egyptian pound—small liars. I read with liberal interest. Hillary is in a bind.

Would Woody let all this pass, all this turmoil turn the world, as unnoticed as we have let it be?

I feel that I worry that I feel like Henry, maybe.

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) "Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no

Inner Resources." I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored. 

Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature, 

Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes 

as bad as Achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag 

and somehow a dog 

has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into the mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

No…

Here, in one of Berryman’s Dream Songs even boredom is announced, shouted; it is a thing, a motivating thing. I am committed, at least, to my lack. I am a floating signifier—of what!?—, an unfinished equation—to what end!? To those still reading, I can promise no conclusion, but thank you for your patience. I mean to say, that you will not be rewarded.

I have been reading Berryman’s poetry with great enthusiasm since a friend introduced him to me two years or so ago, and I find lines and stanzas and whole poems creeping into my mind now and then like some antidote to canned phrases like now and then. 

I want to venture the suggestion that we need a little more language in our lives, maybe a little more self-conscious language. We have too much un-self-conscious language in our lives and, strangely, as much irony. It seems strange to feel that we have combined irony with un-self-consciousness, but we have,, and it is strange. In fact, it cannot be irony, but rather the ironic mode in which we conceive ourselves, and that mode is employed without thought or substance too often. Or rather, it is confused with some form of knowledge authentically, or, as Paul de Man writes, “to know inauthenticity is not the same as to be authentic.”

Love,

Mark