A Topia: Toward a Meditative Atonal Manifesto

A Report from The Center For The Study Of Uncertainty And The Marvelous

The greenwood and the dry pleasantly
talking woodyard there stood colder getting
that we stood in the work and air,
November above the valleys, hemlock
out of the thicket buzzing the fur
pulling the saw
through what was to become agriculture, music—

Morning backtracks my daughter
walks herself to sleep a thicket of commodious dreams
Friday or Burlingame if the weather cools
the word and its appendages
will blot the world and its sounds
the play of the familiar
reaches a stern top in the blue sky
stop Friday buzzing eyes
crossed out stop delicate cowboys like me
if it’s not too hot or even in a steely mood
stop but don’t still the hips
or as if embalmed in the punctured invisible
stop abstract remembrance, abstract moon-sheath stop
the fullness a bruise abandoned and back again
to what occurrence goes there to finally stop—

There it is said eloquence charms intensity
on a blue hip or an orange bruise
wherever it is clear
knowledge
is not thoughtfulness—
it is a rue of heaped photographs, flooded sight
or the mindless harmony of days promised off

So out with all the “rent is due”
the has-always-gone-ons
moths, for example, where months would do
or how the map would become the territory only
if the territory went native and atonal
for years doing nothing but the mouth open
not moving, feeding off the pattern’s fear
fractures the light as a gesture
times time-as-motion tonight moisture
the moon full of bright address
all this runs beneath the where the
at home in the nostrils our only windows
lit to bed adapting the burning abrupt
as if in the last scene just trying to stand
brightness and you still have no evidence.

Empiricism is brief as the building around us
provided inspired data, that high lonesome shimmer
off the snow pack lower now than in the last ten years
higher than all the towers you’d prefer described
presence blanches lassitude
write about how you didn’t swim
when you knew how to
or how amid a total lack of depth
you rode the tides mountain high
where you stood and knew the distinctions
and approaching anyway the shadows
people became accustomed to sunsets,
lather, narrative no matter how,
no matter how long the terrain has been in these parts
a chthonic lather skewing the curve
the evocative at once abundance and the grave
breeding mosquitoes on numb arms
resting amid the hammering
and the matching
amid the weight of the charts
nothing happening for half an hour
then a monumental pause sluices the deafness
scattered across the snow
waist, neck, ankle the only questions
against how deep confusion, preposition, conjunction
or how evidence could ever stand on its own,

“But how long has this been going on?
How long has the other done your breathing for you?”

As if around the surrounding instability movement
opposed phatic space
or how all at once silence is total momentum
graphically deep sonically hollow
inside a little rough, unproven
it repeals the transparencies
cluttered sunsets, empty stomachs
competition obviates complexity
but complexity is decision under exuberance
just as tone is place never location
the colloquial use of poetic
especially loss and its redundancies—
for example mid-afternoon hopped up on
the never-now and the always-almost
so that the almost-always has to be atonal
a deft bard lifts almost everything
but here among the atonalist gloaming
competing transferals, temporarily space
there was never morning nor mooring
no daughter walking herself to sleep
just the hardwired drift gently homeward
between the rifts and flaws in the smudged directions


Nota bene:

The Center for the Study of Uncertainty and the Marvelous is an offshore, anti-Malthusian institution located in the Bermuda triangle. It is dedicated to championing judgments and decision-making under conditions of overlooked abundance. The Center contends that on any given day, what is unknown is both more plentiful and more momentous than the known, especially scholarship and fame. Under the motto “Context is the witness” it mobilizes on behalf the spontaneous reassertion of history, especially that subset commonly referred to as “the imagination.”

Standard Schaefer is chief anti-archivist, promoting the import of the unread over the read and the neglected virtues of boredom. Most days he can be found in the basement among the stacks and shelves. Just follow the string of black swans trailing behind him.

He submitted this document for atonalist status with the proviso that it be immediately suppressed, thus enhancing whatever significance it cannot currently suggest.