20: Colors

a Turner–Young cento

1.
We say: ‘coloration’, which we may feel is insane, all more or less akin. The same applies to colorful windmills when we define the identity of all children by means of their ambience or ambivalence. Imagine a whole avenue of birds, ferrets, rabbits and children whose memories are of their fathers skipping, unwilling to trust your feelings for the old days. On the other hand, you build a logic gate, but with its little watercolors of bandaged children without a feeling of discontinuity. If you like, Duchamp’s nude descended the staircase. Well, is this not a red patch? That is to say, what of shape and shade, or should the conceptual be shaped by the shape of the language? Compare this with the case for wilting flowers. ‘Color’ is what one might call beating in time with the tiger’s pacing under ordinary circumstances. If I assume, as I do, to keep the colors out, I will bring you shining bouquets of leather. ‘Color’ or ‘coloration’ has thereby changed when fish turn blue; and do you generate a list of what is about you, name them, add the sensual verbs and create additional adjectives? One might say in such a case that ‘Poems will be written with your blood. Long poems’. (Some sort of Grimm’s Law is of importance in the philosophy of algebra. Consider the use of the words ‘Let X equal’, ‘0s and 1s’ in black and white, and others. Let us ask the simple question: ‘Why should what we do here be called ‘philosophy’? Why should the word ‘red’ be given the ostensive explanation of different meanings? Could someone please tell me what is common between a light red and a dark red?’)

2.
Now let us ask ourselves what sort of children we are referring to when we say, ‘Woman’s shoes by the bed = obedience’. What have these in common that makes you call them red? Father sang if he was alone with one of us, for Market Day was a simple joy. Strange faces and big hands, warm pockets, cinnamon doughnuts (sin – ‘The candles that burn you will be made from bees’-wax & cinnamon’), odoriferous sale yards. There were colors everywhere. In fact, I do not mind how much the names of earth and fire change. And one small rusting garden tractor, and my memories. When I think about plainsongs of farming, I see that the concrete is too smooth; the water, too blue: ‘Everything has died, or something has died’. Except on Market Day, when all the colors come alive. That is, tide pools start with the ‘I’ – make it egocentric? Is there a purpose, a reason, for a new language? The confiscation of money and passports was a solecistic explanation of ‘X’. (Finding a cart to get our luggage out was an adventure and I will share your lingual pleasure. ‘You’ is now ‘I’ though they are the same person, pointing to his own body.) The interior. The exterior. In that case, what is the word for entire? These particular games where one paints or draws found objects? (To understand this sentence, you must remember the grammar of words in which we say that this is a piece of socio-political commentary standing for physical objects characterised by the way in which we use the phrase ‘someone must understand’ or ‘Oh, it’s red he means’, where ‘I / you / they / we plus plurals’ designates a physical object.) The settlement has disappeared. The idea that over three thousand colors arose from a confusion corresponding to the confusion between what we shall call the ‘geometrical eye’ and ‘relationship advice’. I will indicate the use of frozen cherries (red): ‘Offer more than 140 characters’, ‘Art history!’, smart design, technology and engineering. This is a piece of the sky. This is a piece of reality so dense that it goes beyond art. Hold on to it! If these criteria, as they usually do, coincide, I look at a variation on a theme and in different combinations to show me what is in common between the two colors. I called them both ‘blue’ because they had a certain similarity.

3.
Solar Temple Suicides make such imposing music. The Sun is god.

21: Future

Poetry in an era where humanity has explored other planets remotely and is poised to go there in person. Poetry, another word for voyage. Young travels in his imagination, or by computer:

Inside the Hotel Mal de Mer

de Chirico often wears
a lovely little white

top, perfect for summer
days, or for his regular

travels to the school
for mannequins he

established in Melbourne
more than 50 years ago (LT, 72)

22: Modernism, postmodernism, etc.

Coldmoon’s thesis in I Am A Cat by Natsume Sôseki (published in 1911) is titled ‘The Effects of Ultraviolet Rays upon Galvanic Action in the Eyeball of the Frog’.¹ Poets, as Marcel Proust has observed, have led readers both to paradise and purgatory. (Soldiers always lead you to hell.) Clive James, in translating Dante’s Divine Comedy, from the late Middle Ages, felt that his rendition had to be both ‘semantic’ and ‘phonetic’: ‘the force of both meaning and sound’.² He adds, ‘Indeed, in the original, some of the meaning was in sound’ (emphasis in original). But, as another character in I Am a Cat, Beauchamp, says, ‘Modern poetry is not easy. You can’t understand it if you do no more than glance through it in bed or while you’re waiting at a railway station’.³ Parody was rife in the Twentieth Century – Proust loved it. But the Ern Malley Affair in the 1940s set modernism in Australia back decades.

I have called Young a postmodernist, but while there is general consensus on what that means, the term is by no means fixed, nor would Young want it to be fixed, nor would he want to be fixed to it. Modernism, in its day, referred ‘broadly’ to advanced thinking and practices, where ‘avant-garde’ was reserved for ‘very’ advanced thinking and practices. It was by no means universally understood; reviled by those belonging to the ‘establishment’, who thought that modernism was simply an excuse for bad art, in much the same way as ‘political correctness’ is maligned, and championed by those who extolled radicalism and the new, sometimes recklessly. But modernism, like futurism, is already in the past. So is postmodernism, really.

(Robert Scholes in his Paradoxy of Modernism says that the connection between film and poetry is a ‘two-way street’⁴, what Young’s character called ‘fillum’ in ‘Le Flâneur’ (Pelican Dreaming: Poems 1959 – 2008, p. 282).)⁵

23: The internet & computers

Young says we are living in a Plastic Age, but his poetry comes from the Electronic, specifically, Internet, Age.

24: William Carlos Williams et al.

Somewhere, Young said William Carlos Williams was an early influence. In ‘Stardust’ (LT, 7), he begins by saying that ‘(m)y first / encounter with / William Carlos Williams // was not through / a red wheelbarrow / or climbing over his // fence’; it was ‘buying / a record called / Poetry & Jazz’,

where the second part
of the title
was what drew

me in & on which
in addition to
readings of Whalen

& Ferlinghetti poems
was Hoagy Carmichael
reciting in a voice

that seemed to me
just right
for the occasion

Young Sycamore
& Tract. Thus we
come across
those things that
we were
meant to find.

Those things that we were meant to find …

Other artists, poets, philosophers and musicians Young was meant to find include Bach, Catullus, Joseph Conrad, Bob Marley, Marcel Proust, Utamaro, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Aristotle, Giorgio de Chirico, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Goethe, Magritte, Henri Rousseau, David Bowie, Marcel Duchamp (‘Mr. Richard Mutt’ (EW, 17)), Mozart and Jackson Pollock.