Daily Archives: July 2, 2012

Picasso

Posted on July 2, 2012 | 1 comment

Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso. Father: Don José Ruiz y Blasco. Mother: María Picasso y López. His mother’s name, with its un-Spanish double s, “stranger, more resonant than ‘Ruiz.’” A Northern Italian name, the Pic the same Pic as in Picardy. A name to be famous like Picabia and Pissarro and Braque and Matisse.

Even when petite, Picasso was a precocious artistic picador of prodigious capacity. Became, in time, a byword like Einstein. But a magpie, an explosion of peculiar artistic pica, pick-and-mix, fricassee, picalilli of peinture; promiscuous stylistically like James Joyce, promiscuous sexually exactly not like James Joyce. And each depiction an epic of picking apart, a diffraction, a flattened tesseract. Breasts P bodies i buns c bellies a legs ss mouths o,

ricochet lips to back to tip, triangle vowels high front, low front, hollow back echo, voiceless voice voiceless voice voiceless voice

so pick as picture associated pieces case some Picasso, pose sacral cipollini ossified acid poetry, Paint Power Pleasure ictus its ink ischemia it create coin copulate kill kiss and after ass apple accident aggravate amnesia animal sing smile slap sex sculpt over open oblation so no oh: castle, catastrophe, picrorhiza, pickle, keep, packs, pisco, piso, piss, pass, paso, pia, icap, isso, cass, caso, ossiai, Ossian, saci, soca, ossip, capisce pax auspices copulase scepsis acolta episcopa is a cops aspic so

But still, all it’s there. Picassos: valuable but rare not. See you can another almost way the same. Scraps, skips, escapes? Coherent. Keep scoping and see. Peek: ah, so. Anyone can do pretty. Pick Picasso, and ex post facto after cerebral explosion sweep up conceptual scraps, concatenate, extrapolate, speculate. Look, anyone can look at it. Your kid could do that. It’s like capering on the flat capstone peak of a castle: precarious, perhaps, but not particularly impracticable. All you have to do is get there first.

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lambent

Posted on July 2, 2012 | 3 comments

He opened the book and a tongue of flame licked across the leaf.

“Quick – the book!” I said. “It will burn!”

“The book is quick,” he said, “but little worry about the flame. It brings more light than heat.”

It licked again, a lithe lambda giving a warm glow, soft like the fleece of a lamb. A tongue of fire had descended on this volume – no, was ascending from it. It flicked, bent, ambled, melted, bloomed. He handed me the book, open, not hot, in flame but not inflammable. I could see now what the word was that played its tongue on the page so: lambent.

My own tongue and lips engaged: the tongue like a lamprey sliding its tip, the lips meeting softly and then breaking apart, the tongue pressing again to kiss its tip behind the teeth but coming to a hard end. I could see the play in the letters: upward flicks at l, b, t; curls and curves in between at am and en.

“I thought lambent meant a lamp,” I said. “That soft glow or gleam. Or a gladsome radiance. Shed some light on the subject.”

“It’s clear now,” he said. “A clear flame, licking the book. A tongue of fire. Here’s Latin: lambere, ‘lick’.”

“Licks but does not burn,” I said. “Not a flambeau. Just a muse of fire. A tongue that illuminates but does not consume. A mental fire.”

“A tongue and a mind may glow together. They may cut like metal or soothe like balm; they may bring meat to the table for your meal. They brook no blame.”

“This is all in pieces, elements,” I said. “The word in your mouth is coming apart and mixing up.”

“Flame is eminently mutable. Simply let it not be muted. And – ah!” he said, reaching for the volume, which I was about to close. I handed it to him, open. “Let it be,” he said. “If it is lambent, let it be, for you will see softly by its light. If it cannot be –” he waved his finger over the b, momentarily obscuring it – “what is left is a lament in the darkness.”

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