PATAPHYSICS | current | previous | books | online | links | orders | contact | Pataphysics Questionnaire 1993 from the Tile issue Question: It has been said that autobiography, as with letters, establishes the moments of arrival as being critical. What are you currently working on? DAVID SHAPIRO SYLVÈRE LOTRINGER JOHN CAGE GERALD MURNANE ACHILLE BONITO OLIVA CARL ANDRE CHARLES NORTH HARRY ZOHN BERNARD HEIDSIECK: PAUL VIOLI DAVID HERKT ALEX KATZ TORY DENT LAURA MULLEN BOB BLACK SARAH MORRIS LEON GOLUB CHRIS KRAUS JUAN DAVILA BRIAN ALDISS RICHARD KOSTELANETZ DANIEL SHAPIRO WITH DAVID SHAPIRO DAVID SHAPIRO: A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR Or 'Not Writing A Novel' A range of gray mountains cannot obscure my love for you and poetry though I have failed in both Is it true that my last lines are always too much like last lines Oh sun hiding Then not hiding Like a bright round word next to a player of games even behind a player Now you are working again but on edge behind green maples, elms, local names But let's not be too delicate A bird on the roof of a warehouse Could I learn to play a four-dimensional game like this one The train starts down the river like a regionalist Banks like tombs, tombs like banks Pigeons like dancers, dancers like pigeons The sun has this effect through dirty windows But language is not a pencil Is it true That language is not our pencil True and false Language is not a pencil How far away you are in paradise, like smoke A PRIVATE EMBRACE Dear Jimmy Schuyler How beautiful your poems are When I asked Fairfield about them He spoke of their disjointedness I asked him whether he associated That with schizophrenia He said he did I thought it a bit naïve Not that Fairfield could ever Be characterized as that And lapsed into a complaisant Dissertation on quantum mechanics I am amazed that I have given away Two or three of your books And will have to buy them again I am amazed by your courage As Kenneth would say To say the things you do As when you said to a friend 'Can't you be content with your wife and me' Would I have published that? What does it mean, Too personal? Kenneth says If it's beautiful, publish it. Or: It it's beautiful, I publish it. Thank you for publishing it. back to top of page SYLVÈRE LOTRINGER:: NEVER ANY EVER AFTER* Bee was feeling too restless to work. To tell the truth, she didn't even look at her new piece. She was afraid something there was broken, impossible to mend; the idea, uprooted. It would take her for ever to get back to it. She got up and looked for something to do, trusting her instinct. She walked to the window and looked at the roof below, grabbing a couple of books on the way. It was a pretty drab roof really, just plain tar and high water-turrets propped against the sky. But Bee liked her roof; it reminded her of the moon. The sun though, was hitting hard, melting down the tar, flattening out the shadows. Looking westward she noticed a column of white smoke and pricked her ears; there it was, the faint sound of sirens blaring in the distance. She started leafing through the books, seeing in her mind's eyes flames roaring and the crowd below impatiently waiting for the building to collapse. Then she noticed that the smoke was changing color; it was also spreading to the left, blackening out half of the view. She flipped the pages again - and caught the word 'war.' Had she imagined it? She went back and found the passage: Sweet William was never troubled by war. Sweet William. Was I troubled. Sweet William. Not any more. Any is a small word but made up of two syllables. Sweet William. Not troubled any more. She looked at the cover. Gertrude Stein, of course. She didn't know she'd written plays as well. Listen To Me, it was called. Bee felt relieved. It was so witty and irreverent, holding on to the words like a dog to a bone. And then she saw the smoke again and sighed. Never troubled by war… She wished Sol could have said that. Will he ever, she wondered, skipping a page or two, looking for an answer. Well yes, she exclaimed, screwing her eyes, and she read it out loud: 'There is never any ever after in a war so there is no war.' How could such simple syllables be so abstract, she wondered. Never any ever after… She wasn't sure she understood, but was she meant to? These were just small words made up of two syllables. War had only one. And what are words she, she asked herself, suddenly realizing that Gertrude Stein was using the page very much like a canvas. She looked for The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas on the shelf, opened it a random and read: She says a landscape is such a natural arrangement for a battlefield or a play that one must write plays. Bee closed the book and let her mind drift. One must write: one syllable words. Words are a landscape. She was now thinking of her work, but it was strangely intermingled with Sol's mind. How could a one-syllable word be so devastating? War's a word, field's another one. She repeated it in a sing-song, letting her be lulled by the sounds. And then she remembered something she'd once written down in her notebook. She went to her drawer, rummaged through her stuff and finally found what she was looking for, a quote from Bachelard: Each of us, then, should speak of his roads, his crossroads, his roadside benches; each of us should make a surveyor's map of his lost fields and meadows… Thus we cover the universe with the drawings we have lived. Bee stopped in front of her piece and looked at the lines crossing the board. 'Are you crazy or something,' the cabbie shouted, slamming on the brakes. Sol didn't pay attention. His dream had come back so vividly that he stopped dead in the middle of the street. It was so much more real than anything that ever happened to him in real life. Maybe it was a good thing after all, not remembering one's dreams. Could he really have told Bee over breakfast that he'd seen him again - his father? He was a small, retiring man who never quite managed to hold his own, except during the war when he rose to the occasion. Sol remembered the little glassed-in workshop at the back of the unfashionable building they moved into after the war. His father would stretch out wet fur skins and nail them down on small boards to dry in the sun. They were standing there, feet outstretched, dozens of nails lining the outer edge of the skin, like so many crucified fetuses. That was the only kind of art Sol ever saw on the walls. The apartment was full of hair flying and a strong smell of greased skin. Sol's nose kept itching and he coughed a lot. They discovered a spot on his lungs and he was shipped to a farm in Normandy. His father would send him little brown packages tightly roped like sausages, addressed to him in a big, awkward handwriting smeared with blue ball-point. These were Sol's best presents, children's books he would devour in the lush green meadows, sitting on top of a wood-fence, with phlegmatic cows grazing at his feet. Sol's father had a stroke and lost an eye. He never recovered his memory. Sol felt betrayed and devastated. He tried to forget his own past, and here it was, a whole world wiped out in a single blow. The thought was unbearable. Was it really what he had been trying to achieve? He couldn't bear being deprived of what he didn't want. A year ago today his father finally died. Sol knew it, but kept it at the back of his mind like everything that mattered. He remembered what he felt seeing him for the last time. He was lying in the coffin, his head showing, so vulnerable, so unprepared for such a lonesome voyage. Sol felt like taking him in his arms and cuddling him like a child, but his mother threw herself at the body. The two strong men in uniform lifted the light casket and he never saw his father again. You know, Serge told him one day, wiping his glasses, unexpectedly revealing a very sensitive face, the real father is always the dead father. Last night he came back, a tall old man with bleak and emaciated features. He was roaming through his glassed-in workshop, hitting everything at hand blindly with a long piece of wood. Sol happened to be there, but his father didn't know, and couldn't see. He nearly crushed Sol to death. Next Sol found himself at the back of their old apartment. In a corner he noticed thousands of little brown packages written with blue ball-point. Sol was thrilled; it was his father's birthday. The packages were for him. Suddenly Sol realized that he had nothing to give him. What then? Was it something he had done, Bee wondered, helping him to set up the table. It must have been pretty heavy stuff like the rest, life and death kind of thing. Then she thought of his dream. Maybe he had betrayed his father - unwillingly, of course. He was just a child. Those were terrible times. But however hard she tried she couldn't imagine what it must have been like then. She was out of her depth. None of her friends could figure what it was all about. All about. She removed the baked potatoes from the oven. What is about. And unexpectedly it came back to her - Is about. He says. Is about. About what. He says. And what is about Well what is about. No, things like that don't happen in real life. How did she say it? No scene takes place… but it is to take place all over. And if it is all over it does not take place. Something like that. Oh, if only one let little words speak. But what do they speak about, she murmured, picking up the riff again. They speak about the great difficulty of what anything is about. Why is it, Bee wondered, sinking deeper, that like is so coarse compared to art? Even cave-dwellers - she thought of Sol - primitive creatures by all accounts, managed to create works of stunning beauty. Not rudimentary representations: inventive shapes, expressively distorted and abstracted to fit the walls, hoofs and horns and hands daringly extended into dots, lines grids, signs. Twenty thousand years ago Magdalenians didn't scratch the rock, they painted their soul. Bee felt relieved. She could see her work before her, a rock, rough and uncompromising, stubbornly fitting the texture of the field, and yet translating the dots and the dashes into circles and rings, drafting grids into action, into maps, into real spaces; covering the whole universe. Sol spent a sleepless night. When he saw the light creeping through the blinds he quickly sneaked out of bed. What then? He was unsure of what he should do. He found himself walking to Bee's studio. The door was wide open. Should he get in? Then he saw something that looked strangely familiar, like the faint contours of a body, arms extended as if nailed to the wall. As he got closer the figure dissolved into a number of black dots and broken lines meandering their way along the veins of the wood. Was it there last time? He couldn't tell. He hadn't paid attention. Bee had reasons to be upset. He looked at the piece again. It was unlike anything she'd done before. He could see the strokes and swirls of her other canvasses, but they were now dark and ample, flowing in separate ways around discrete islands of light. The broken line was somehow preempting the frame, bringing the outer edge within the tightly-knit composition. Where he had seen two arms outstretched was in fact, writ large, a two-part inscription: 'LAND/SCRAPE,' playfully deconstructing the natural arrangement of the wood. Without being able to put words on it, Sol suddenly felt that Bee was mapping out something for him, forcing the dots and grids of his past into a flowing form. It was like extending a hand towards him - he could feel it delicately groping its way in his mind. * This is an excerpt from NEVER ANY EVER AFTER (1994), book #2 in the Pataphysics Series (with accompanying prints by Brigitte Engler). To view click on books at pataphysicsmagazine.com. back to top of page JOHN CAGE: It has been said that autobiography, as with letters, establishes the moments of arrival as being critical. What are you currently working on? 2/8/92 I am in the nothing-in-between 2/11/92 I am ready to write one10 for violin solo. It is to be used by James Hegyesy in association with the sculpture (assemblage) of Mineko Brimmer. back to top of page GERALD MURNANE: Dear Pataphysics As for your question I do not understand the first part but I can tell you what I am working on at present. I am answering one of the many similar questions asked by persons who are too interested in the writer and what he/she does by day or by night and too little interested in what the writer has already published. If you want to read a book by a writer who considered questions such as yours to have contributed to the failure and/or death of several noted American writers, read THE FOUR SEASONS OF SUCCESS, by Budd Schulberg. My copy was published in England in 1974 by Robson Books. Don't take my remarks too much to heart, gentlemen. I am always flattered when persons ask me what I'm working on. Yet, as I reach the end of my answer to each such question, I begin to regret that I did not decline to answer and did not go on instead with what I had been working on before I was asked what I was working on. If you want to know what is denoted by the word what in the previous sentence, you may have to wait for two or three years until the book O, DEM GOLDEN SLIPPERS is published. Yet, even as you read the book you will find in the text nothing to tell you which sentence I was polishing or holding up to the light when my wife brought in the mail and handed me a certain envelope and suggested that I ought to open it right away because it looked interesting. back to top of page ACHILLE BONITO OLIVA: A SELF-INTERVIEW ON THE TECHNIQUE OF THE CRITIC - The critic shares nothing with the interpreter of past epochs. - The divide that delimits and antiquates any epoch in respect to ours is the appearance of the obscene, of psychoanalysis, also in light of what has been revealed to us by Lacan. The critic becomes conscious of being armed with creativity, and not simply being the eye of the registrar, the notary's eye, the king's eye surveying the sovereignty of the work. Through writing and the gaze the critic grounds his or her own sovereignty, and is simply the interpreter of their own delirium for power, of their own sovereignty, of their own centrality. - It will always be necessary to sacrifice objectivity to the partisan spirit if the cause one is fighting for deserves it. - Personally if sometimes I make a sacrifice it is that of partiality; by nature I'll always be inclined to partiality. Objectivity is an improbable datum, it is a fiction. What else is objectivity but the effect of the power of partiality! To seduce attention, listening, and produce oneself as a real factuality, as a foundation of ineluctable, inevitable judgment. It is the insuperability of judgment that can give the decorum of objectivity to the activity of the critic. It is the answer to a moralist desire, a desire to appear proper, characteristic of the activity of an intellectual who maintains that only by exhibiting an objective method can one press for the acceptance of one's role. And this is also the effect of a mentality belonging to a century, or an historical period, straddling the nineteenth and twentieth centuries where due to certain consequences of Positivism, science is lived in a mythical way, and is equated with the production of a verifiable method. For as long as science claims to be a continuously verifiable apparatus the intellectual is pushed to compete with scientific activity. In Benjamin's definition there is such a nostalgia towards an objective method that for him, at the end it is even possible to produce the great sacrifice of renunciation. The great sacrifice that concerns me, if that can be, is that of partiality, but we well know this is like taking one's own life. - The public must always see itself as denied and equally feel itself as represented by the critic. For the critic the appeal judges are all colleagues. Not the public and much less posterity. - That's not true, in that the public, as a statute, always presumes a position that avoids a direct call for antagonism, a position of non-antagonism with the actor. The public presumes an implicit neutrality at the outset, a voyeuristic position unpolluted by a participant envy. The public might even be the artists if they were interested in criticism, but I'd say that the heroism of criticism today is in its performing in a dismantled theater, for an absent public, not constituted by living, pulsating beings; given the lack of interest the artists have for criticism, using it only for a dressing. The public of criticism is the art system, paradoxically an impersonal public of museums, collections, galleries, and (I could add) almost by accident, the so-called public: which is the final mirror towards which rebound all the effects of a chain reaction. In the theater of criticism there are no seats and the receivers can be thousands of kilometers away. To think that criticism doesn't work for posterity is like still considering the critic as the interpreter, a clasp around the social body, an activity of its own times, as an activity that fosters the edibility of the work, whereas we well know that if there is an accusation which, luckily, is made to criticism it is that of not being nourishing: as when, whilst eating, a bone is found that interrupts one chewing. - The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of mediocre criticism are merchandise thought according to fashion. - In art there are no bad slogans since art itself, with its creative activity, prevents mediocrity. I've never seen bad slogans for good art. Criticism by definition has no clear ideas, doesn't know what it wants, builds its own space, its own self-sufficiency around the work. But it doesn't absolutely act as a diploma to advertise fashion, since criticism, finding itself holding a nebulous thing such as the work of art, doesn't know what to sell. Criticism has rarely done something wrong to art because criticism, by statute, sets out from a declaration of explicit opportunism, that of quality, hence, as such it is not the mentality of a traveling salesperson working for others. Criticism is master of its own course, it is the effect of sincere invention. Only as parasites do we run the risk of mediocrity. Art historians can also be parasitic in as much as they submit to the authority of the work as warranted by temporal distance. The creative critic establishes a heroic synchronicity between the quality of the work and his or her own self, at a spatial-temporal distance of zero. Criticism is the activity of an intellectual neurosis that has a kind of awareness both of the exhaustion of history and of the ineluctability of a destiny that doesn't change even in the high temperature of purely artistic credibility. For this reason I've always declared that the critic's activity is a stoic and not epicurean practice. It is not moved by the pure egotism of writing, but sets out from a complex position armed with a far reaching gaze. In the end this is the difference between art and criticism: art moves to conquer the future, the long run: criticism moves to conquer the past, and the distant. As I said earlier, it is not true that criticism doesn't work for posterity, since the critic challenges the obliviousness and the cynical inattentiveness of society (multiplied hundreds of times by mass society) throwing back from the past the effects which exist in the work of art, protected by a sheath that the critic is able to establish. There is then the creation of a short-circuit between the past and the future. - The true polemic handles a work with the same love that a cannibal feels in handling a baby - The critic, indeed, is a cannibal by statute, he or she doesn't take into account the complaints of the artist because the critic identifies them in the silence of the work. A work of art is in some ways warranted by its own silence and comforts the critic by its impossibility to react physically. Militant criticism needs to court, to create the oppositional ghost who becomes its interlocutors. The mistake is in thinking, as an old adage says, 'many enemies much glory'; instead I think one should have the right enemies, indeed I've always cultivated the right enemies. I've never helped them (rather they, by their mistakes, have helped me) but I've fostered them. Each gesture has to correspond to a loving presence, or one of hate, of a gaze, and without the public, without the gaze of the other, there can be no formation of a theater of critical action in which criticism can stage an integral narcissism. Enabling narcissism to assume a body for the total conquest of the gaze of the other. I'm not for blinding the gaze of the other, but for its petrification and for keeping it fixed on me as a penalty: as in being the only target of the art public. Translated from the Italian by Judith Pascal. back to top of page CARL ANDRE: THE BIOGRAPHIES OF OTTO-CYCLE ENGINES ESTABLISH THE CRITICAL MOMENTS OF DEPARTURE. I AM CURRENTLY ENGAGED IN WRITING, STAMPING, & MAILING THIS POSTCARD. back to top of page CHARLES NORTH: I'm sure moments of arrival are indeed critical, as you suggest, but I find it virtually impossible to pinpoint them. Frequently I dredge up poems that have been lying around in one form or another for months or even years - when is the arrival time? Departures, unfortunately, are a lot easier to figure out. My feeling is that 'moments' applies to single poems as much as to poems in general. - Just by way of footnote, I'd add that my (few) efforts to describe what I'm working on have invariably interfered, to put it at its mildest, with what I'm working on. I wish it were otherwise! back to top of page HARRY ZOHN: In his review of The Unheeded Warning, the recently published second volume of Manès Sperber's autobiography (the blanket title of which is the Shakepearean "All Our Yesterdays…) David Pryce-Jones wrote: "The English translation as a rule notably humanizes Sperber's self-centered intellectualizations." Even though the translation is mine, I have no idea what the reviewer meant (though I like to take it as a compliment), but it made me wonder whether the phrase "self-centered intellectualizations" applies to all autobiographies, or even to this particular one. My recent translation of more Sperber (Till They Place Shards Upon My Eyes is the working title of his last volume) as well as Hermann Langbein's Not Like Sheep Led to the Slaughter: Resistance in the Nazi Concentration Camps (in a way also autobiographical, for Langbein, an Austrian non-Jew and veteran of the Spanish Civil War, survived both Dachau and Auschwitz) did not inspire me to attempt a book-length memoir of my own, but my (much-delayed) work-in-progress does have autobiograpical features, for it deals with a musical-subliterary genre that accompanied my childhood in Vienna and has concerned me to this day. My working title for a (German) book on the Wienerlied translates as Narcissus on the Danube: The Winegarden Songs of Vienna as a Psychograph of a Population. Has there ever been a place as celebrated in song as Vienna, a city that apotheosized itself and inhabitants who have glorified themselves and their way of life to such an extent? If there are dozens of songs about Paris, London, Berlin, and New York, many thousands of Wienerlieder, most of them in waltz or march tempo (or both), have been created in a rare case of self-assertion, self-commendation, and even self-pity. These ingratiating songs, which are essentially untranslatable and no more exportable than the potent new wine that has inspired and accompanied many of them, seem to embody all the widely disseminated clichés about Vienna and the Viennese. However, anyone who has, like myself, witnessed the meanness and brutality underneath the veneer of the vaunted Viennese Gemütlichkeit and charm must be curious about the psychological foundations and implications of that unique Wienerlied syndrome. Based on song texts and interviews as well as on my own illustrated lectures in many cities, my study will offer an unvarnished and satiric view of what has long been a Viennese sacred cow and will undoubtedly reflect some of the Hassliebe that Sigmund Freud and Karl Kraus felt for the city in which they spent virtually their entire lives. back to top of page BERNARD HEIDSIECK: WHAT ARE YOU CURRENTLY WORKING ON? I have decided in 1955 to change poetry. Anyhow the one I was practicing. The poem was sleeping on the page, in the book, waiting for an hypothetical reader. It was passiv. I decided to make it "activ". That is how I became one of the creators of POESIE SONORE. My texts changed and since that date are conceived to be read aloud, on a stage, for a public. The text has become "activ", because it goes to the public. And the public, instead of reading books and poetry, that public that never will enter into a bookshop to buy a book of poetry, now comes to Public Readings. That is that kind of poems I'm working on, using a tape-recorder as a supplementary (to writing) mean to help it to pass to the Public. For the moment, and since three years, I'm working on a work in progress called "Breaths and brief encounters". This work consists to make false - or sometimes memorised - encounters with poets and writers, all dead now, that last between two and three minutes. And during those false dialogs, or false monologs, one can hear the REAL, AUTHENTIC breath of the poet I'm speaking to. It is indeed not a dialog, because my interlocutors do not speak (of course). It is not a monolog, because the sound of the breath shows that someone, the poet, is there, listening to what I'm telling him. 43 ENCOUNTERS have been realised for the moment (I do it owing to a large collection of records I have realised since 30 years, of voices of poets and writers from which I extract, like a biopsy, a breath of them, when I can find it, and put it then as a loop during our "Encounter".) Here it is what I'm working on. I have still one or two years of work, my desire being to realise around 60 "Encounters". back to top of page PAUL VIOLI: THE LAWS OF CASUALITY Consequence: The mouth will be irregular shape at birth. Cause: Gossip frequently in prior life. Consequence: Will grow bent hand this present life. Cause: Beat one's parents. Consequence: Ulcer and flavus will infect whole body. Cause: Maltreat domestic animals, batter servants excessively. Consequence: Bad smelling will grow on body. Cause: To be jealous of others or scold beggars. This life: Wife and daughter-in-law lovely and virtuous. Last life: Perform good deeds extensively to everyone in sight. To be deafed with the two ears and expectorate blood, to be hit by thunder or fire: consequence. Cause: Slander the monks and read obscene books often. Cause: Point out to everybody the solution to every problim Consequence: To be loved by everyone. Reward: To travel in private vehicles in his next life. Cause: Donate bridges and roads to felicitate the pubic. Why does he become a cow or a dog Or a pig this life? It is because he did not offer foodstuff to the preacher, and he benefited by bringing harmness to others. Why does she have bright eyes to see the world this life? She lighted the preacher's lamp in her prior life. Why is he not a slave but enjoy longlivedness? Is it the consequence of his setting free the livestock that he bought with his merciness in his prior life? Yes! She scorned her husband in her previous life? Now she becomes an early window. Why have they so many grandsons? Why are they sufficient in luck? Did they not always offer screamers and penants at the alter? This life: He must work hauling drowned monkeys out of the surf-side and never wears purple silk robes Last life: He sewed confusion delightedly. Why is he a prankster voluptuary in this life? Because he did not always succumb to his bandit tendencies! Why is he a niggling friend? Why does he scoff and glare and strike strangers with wetness papers? In his last life he had not a religious theme-song Why does an Interstate Expressway now bear his name? He was a modesty man. You receive no snazzy revelations in prayer-a-thons? You did not heed The Cautionary Tales Why does she drive a low-esteem vehicle? She was bewitched by gewgaws and befouled by a dunce! He was brave, intelligent, and he was never captured Now in this life he achieves work in a toll booth! Why is it merriment fragments and coffers of perfume now surround her couch? In her former life she rebuffed spiritual drooping and retained correct hope. Why is he a poor cavalier scratching the windows of rich ladies for foodstuff and hasty pleasures? In his prior life did he not manufacture socks with deficient elasticity? Yes! Indeed he did! What in his previous life caused him to now flunk Senior Official Public Service Exams? He was an assassin. Though he gained a judgeship and a weekly basket of figs, he was a skinflint. Now his life has no porpoise. Last life: he was trampled by a mob and succumbed. This life: he avoids the marketplace. Last life: he fell out of a tree and succumbed. This life: he fears heights. Last life: he drowned in a flood after being struck by lightning while falling out of a tree he'd climbed to escape a mob. This life: he stutters. In her previous life she diluted wine in her wineshop. Now she is a laggard amidst sizable domestic appliances. He worked hard and pleasurable in his last life. Now he ably produces squadron leader lyrics. Now he lives in this beautiful world And owes it nothing! THE EMPRESS ARRIVES IN HER TULIP BOAT Everything descends from The Feast of Heaven. A scroll painting done in the Whisper Style presents her journey downstream one scene at a time, like courses at a banquet. Here the usual laborers lean on their plows and watch her coast along, briefly convinced by the words softly folded in her sail that the season's edge, its promise and pleasure, extends from her hand or heaven on a plate. Note how the reflections, floating free, far ahead of their source, leave no wake; and how pen and brush, fine line and fading stroke, flow from half-opened buds, from wine jar and splayed wing to her bare arm and neck and open robe and back to her bath and the palace from which she stepped. Note what she holds aloft: a peacock in a bowl. Note its tail and the extent of her silken bed. Below the cloud-sized birds he sits, the lazy, recalcitrant poet; then, his head full of tangled kites, he slowly reclines against empty wine jars, assuring himself that they'll be there when he wakes: the birdcalls and ink-scratch branches in undulant fog, her prow in purling, sky-blank water, the words folded and refolded in her luffing sail: Eve descends from The Fea t of Heaven Everything descends from The east Everything ends froTh of Heaven Eve s end from The Feast Heave Everything Everything ends e ven The Feast of Heaven SCATTER Thank you for writing and we are happy to respond to your inquiries Yes, it was Pericles who used the masts of captured warships to build the Odeum; Hugh Capet's son was Robert The Debonair, and the Inca road system was comparable to Rome's, but Romans had more words for sex than Eskimos had for ice formations. The air brake was invented in 1869, The Rhetorical Wrench in 1844, and 'prurient' is the most quiet word in the language, which is English, and which, you'll be pleased to know, happens to describe the afterlife more relentlessly than most. This should also be of interest to you since, indeed, there is life after death, even though it is extremely brief, only a moment really; but keep in mind that the closer you get to the sun the slower time revolves, so in that one sweeping moment you may well get the chance to tell your hearts desire that she was made for the light and hold each other as knowingly as roses and grape vines climbing the same sun-shot trellis. Then, again, you may find yourself giving a speech that enthralls your audience but, because you have no idea what the subject is, keeps you clinging to the incomprehensible like a fly to a glass, until they abruptly, inexplicably, shift their attention with no loss of intensity to the sight of chimney smoke mingling with steam from a nearby clothes drier vent, or a mutilated toad the cat proudly presented, or to drivers slowing down as you did one spring afternoon to watch two ancient sisters emerge from their swayback house to trim great, blooming, sail-high lilacs in the same long-awaited wind that turns the contrails of vanished planes into night clouds thinner than the chalk smears your swirling eraser wiped off the blackboard behind you where beside The Seven Lamps of Architecture, The Seven Champions of Christendom, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Seven Deadly Sins, Seven Liberal Arts Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, Seven Sages of Rome, Seven Types of Ambiguity and The Seven Wonders of the Ancient and Modern World, you should have written The Seven Sisters, The Seven Continents, Seven Against Thebes, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, The Seven Samurai, The Magnificent Seven and 7-Up. back to top of page DAVID HERKT: from THE BUNKER, April 15 - April 30, 1945 At such a moment, the man forgets himself and the God, and turns around, admittedly in a holy way, like a traitor. At the extreme limit of suffering, nothing indeed remains but the conditions of time or space. At this point, the man forgets himself because he is entirely within the moment; the God forgets himself because he is nothing but time; and both are unfaithful. Time because at such a moment it undergoes a categoric change and beginning and end simply no longer rhyme within it; man because, at this moment, he has to follow the categorical turning away and that thus, as a consequence he can simply no longer be as he was in the beginning. - Hölderlin REICH CHANCELLERY BUNKER Alluvium-surrounded in an ancient river bed of compacted yellow sands & 18 meters below ground level are 30 low-ceilinged rooms Vorbunker & Fuhrerbunker. The roof is covered with earth to a depth of 10 meters. The exterior walls of steel-reinforced concrete are 2 meters thick & cold & either slightly damp or dust dry & painted battleship gray or bleached orange. These rooms in the Fuhrerbunker are linked by a central narrow corridor that is red-carpeted & closed by rubber-sealed blast doors at either end with a spiral iron stairway leading up to the Vorbunker & an emergency exit Notausgang is 44 steps up 4 flights to a blockhouse & the unfinished concrete tower. Here the artificial light is unwavering & stark. The cement nights are narrowed with the sound of a Diesel generator marking time with its broken cough when it switches over in the thick-walled fastness stirring the locked air which smells faintly of coal-tar disinfectant. These secret deeps the concealed safety & space surrounded by this excavation down into the layered past whose walls & bunkered weight are hidden in the silent sediments in sands once dropped by prehistoric tides which slowed & gleamed with moonlight rippling on their dark film in the pre-Cambrian night & these depths & tons of earth will shelter & secure all thoughts against the blank dissolution of an open sky the consequences of decision the artillery barrages the night-time bombings the endless refugees who cross the icy Oder from the east & all the twice-ten confusions of the end. In earth buried where an electric light shade moves with the murmur of far-off bombing & amid radio static voices speak in dead space pressed now and muffled by time wrenched and dislocated by distortions of place and burnt in petrol flames to black inaudibility voices crossing the distances between those who have spoken and those who now hear these echoes dampened by the concrete-thickness of years and who strain to listen as if explanation waits or revelation will occur in the bare discerning of those words. EVA 1935 Birthday 6th February & though she was the mistress of the Chancellor she still worked shop at Heinrich Hoffmann's Munich photographic studio. If only I had a puppy I wouldn't be so lonely but he hadn't given her a dachshund because the breed is so disobedient & willful. & she waited to be invited to live in the Chancellery but she was not invited & instead she waited for his visits. 17th Feb & she was glad he loved her so much. 2nd of March but she had an invitation to the Munich Ball & they could only spend two hours together before she left for it at midnight. 11th March when she imagined he brought flowers for Ondra Schmeling then asked her out to dinner & she was buying sleeping draughts again so that she could get herself into a semi-trance & not brood so much. He left on the 16th March & she was patient 31st of March & they dined in the Vier Jahrezeiten but though she sat next to him for three hours she didn't exchange a single word with him. She spent Easter by herself & cried her eyes out. On 10th May Frau Hoffman told her that he had a substitute for her who was called the Valkyrie & she hadn't seen him since Wednesday April 3rd. On 28th May she wrote him a decisive letter & told herself if she did not hear from him by ten o'clock that night she would swallow 25 pills of Vanodorm & gently fall asleep. Later she decided on 35 to make it dead certain while she sat there waiting for his telephone call to come. In the end she only took 20 & her sister Ilse came by to return an evening dress & found her. That year she was 23 years old. back to top of page ALEX KATZ: It has been said that autobiography, as with letters, establishes the moments of arrival as being critical. What are you currently working on? SNOW back to top of page TORY DENT: SQUARE ONE Afore the tombstone 'Hotchkiss' and aft the pathway yet to be a stick is staid to mark the spot of the hole you insist to dig yourself on the shadeless hill, on the steep, on the knoll where no flattering description, for the life of me, can be made. Under a rock I've lived and waned and waxed and worn the rock like hat or a frock or pushed like a wheelbarrow bending the four corners as if the making of another plot. I've dug with one hand well into the evening by the light that's not light but the eye's adjustment to the dark, (the way a cat's can), tiny, miniature graves like those of a troll's or a chipmunk's. Within them I've placed, ritualistically, the tender thoughts that contrived my tender hopes, not stillborn but short-lived. These are infant's graves, stars we know are there on a starless night. So many of these I've dug, a nursery of hopes has become one grave like passengers on a boat sailing leeward on the ocean. So many ghosts, remembrances of these hopes, I can hear them clearly, the way Joan of Arc claimed the voice of god in midday - no clambering all at once like a kindergarten but alternately as if called upon, though I can never really make sense of what they say; just tropes or clauses, non-sequentially uttered and audited, wisps of advice or folkloric phrases. Sometimes I've taped them with mini-cassetted or typed them verbatim like a stenographer, my spine erect, little orange spheres hanging by little chains from my lobes. Irrevocably, interminably, they love to hear themselves talk and I am more than happy to listen, to lean my head like a cameo on the custom-made easel of my arm and soak up what they say with placid expression so jaded to their enthusiasm experientially I've become. Pushed to admittance I'll confess I'm grateful for anything or anyone that alters if only abstractly like bonbons or bourbon or beeswax candles or carnal sex wrought askew from interpretation into true lovemaking, the monotone traversing of my view. I'm only capable of glancing across the mutant fields that adumbrate ad nausea shades of beige forever. And despite the flecks of wildflowers, albeit white, albeit yonder, internally I'll always demand for a hell of a lot more, and stare, not glance, with contempt at the imperial sky gorgeous and pompous as the imperial palace of Pompeii happy to listen with placid expression like a cameo resting on the custom-made easel of the horizon. I hate the resemblance, its nudging imitation, the soft blue walls and the soft green hills that co-exist in a false sense of Zen equilibrium, a Zen contrivance. Sometimes I wish I could throw a monkey wrench into the works, chuck my naked body wriggling with discontent out into the ocean. And not just watch but like a nuclear atom split, provide the explosion that unearths the earth with volcanic implosion to resettle with sad delicacy as the ruins once laid in Dresden where I with the camaraderie of my hopes hike among the rumble. The pleasure I take in the discontinuity almost comforts me in my loss, for wasn't it always this same landscape I felt carved within me like metaphysical surgery or inserted barbarically, the handmade altarpiece, for which my fingers were smashed publicly for its many flaws? What relief I sought in the chalky ruble, the glad identification with the ruined city which within me its scenic rendition like an architectural model had long since been bombed. Appropriately among the ruptured cobblestones propped the remnant of a steeple sitting askew like a duncecap or sailboat sailing obliquely. I placed the heavy structure on my head with inhuman fortitude and continued on nomadically, as if crossing a desert or ocean, upon which a most unstable ferry tosses, a toy, to and fro enveloped eventually into the horizon as if swallowed surreptitiously whole. So they will gather again and again one foggy morning on the porch of their home to mourn the toy and its history. How they loved the toy each they'll voice, the father of the toy even more poignantly than the wife. He'll stand up and announce he's the father of the toy explain briefly the immeasurability of his grief Toy! Toy! Toy! For the specificity of the toy we ache. For the specificity of the toy we long, we long with a longing disproportionate to fate, with a longing that soars like a comet into the galaxy. We long so long at last your eyelids pop open your spirit coiling upwards as if conjured up by flute and turban. I long until at last my hopes follow your spirit as once did children the pied piper into disappearance, into flecks of wildflowers, yonder. Jab a sprig here and there in my hair, smudge my face with dirt, the markings of a tree, a sapling, I tiptoe sideways across the gritty stage, gnomes having made their home like hibernating chipmunks in my belly. Like a gnome someday I will be laid, a toy, into a seemingly miniature grave. Like the scrawny vegetable garden Candide could not surpass always within the same square, without demarcation, we begin and end like grace. Like heather and hay, the beige field varies only by the wind and sun, a slant on the invariable that's made up of glint. back to top of page LAURA MULLEN: OVERTURE I entered the house carefully but was dismayed to find that nevertheless The ancient house the abandoned house the house that had been like that forever Despite my caution in entering in spite of the considerations I had so thoroughly Entertained the doubts I had so prominently displayed et cetera I found that Despite my trepidations in spite of the warnings I had received 'but they were anonymous Remember' which I had lent an ear to which I had listened so judiciously Which I had read and then burnt as the notes instructed but had believed Although this had been I repeat I cannot make clear enough no sudden Decision I did nothing in those days by fits and starts but the result of painstaking And even I do not think I would be far off in stating exhaustive deliberations And the weighing of all the possible consequences good and bad on both sides The fruits of my past experiments the rather extensive if I may say so knowledge My endless researches had finally vouchsafed me in spite of which the truth Of the matter seemed to be that there was a point at which one could no longer say That one was entering but that one was now in the position of 'having entered' Although it was not certain when or if this change had occurred nor would it be possible I quickly became aware to disentangle this having entered from what would become a leaving Dark shape in its bed of rank weeds its entrance gaping but not I was wrong like that Forever a shred of white lace at a broken window insisted on history back to top of page BOB BLACK:: For the self-conscious, everything is autobiography because everything is self-justificatory. This has been made obvious to me as I've compiled two books of my writings (Beneath the Underground and Friendly Fire, forthcoming) and edited Zero-Work: The Anti-Work Anthology (a kickass book, also forthcoming). At some point I stopped looking forward and started looking back. Which is no indictment - why not make the best of what I've already done? as I am uniquely positioned to do. I am mopping myself up. I am putting the best face on things. I am preparing for my most positive possible posthumous fame. Am I morbid or just prudent? A brief stint in graduate school has put my creativity on hold, unless you consider criminology papers creative (mine are). I've always "worked" in spurts, intensive output interspersed with months or years of fallow, and I have no (profit or other) motive to mend my wayward ways. This is how foragers and bohemians have always "worked," the natural human rhythm. It gets done everything worth doing. If anybody's impatient at the pace, he's welcome to get off his butt and do it himself. I don't live to amuse others. That is a side-effect. I please myself and if that pleases, fine. I am less interested in what now? than in what next? No new departure is possible till the books are in the bag. It may take awhile but I sense a new game is afoot, no telling what. I choose to take my time, we should all take our time, the time of our lives, as our own. back to top of page SARAH MORRIS: I AM CURRENTLY WORKING ON A PROJECT TITLED "CITIZENS", WHICH PORTRAYS CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN KILLERS - SERIAL, SPREE, OR OTHERWISE. I AM NOW LOOKING THROUGH NEWSPAPERS, WATCHING "HARD COPY" AND "COURT TV". I HAVE BEEN GOING TO KARATE ALMOST EVERY DAY - THE ULTIMATE OF MARTIAL ARTS. I HAVE 8 CITIZENS SO FAR. THE BOTTOM LINE IS I CAN'T MAKE ANOTHER PAINTING UNTIL ANOTHER EVENT HAPPENS, ANOTHER CITIZEN DERAILS. THE REPRODUCTION OF THE KILLER BECOMES THE ABERRANT ACT ITSELF. A KIND OF REVERSE OF THE GENRE OF PORTRAITURE; THE UNKNOWN, THE INFAMOUS, THE FORGETTABLE. back to top of page LEON GOLUB: Nothing New! This is a claim of innocence! Nothing new since I'm still trying to operate on the edges where power and aggression shove into someone else's territory - at public levels and more subjective psychic inferences. I'm trying to get into their heads more. These guys - it's always been mostly guys - press their edgy presence in peculiar self conscious nonchalant lumpen guises. Now some of them wear shirts with street smart slogans or other icons of pop currency. In recent paintings characters sport T-shirts currently popular in "real life," an American flag with the words "Try Burning This One Asshole" or that "famous" call to arms and manifest destiny, "These Colors Never Run." These guys mimic our leaders strutting across the pages of history. back to top of page CHRIS KRAUS: It has been said that autobiography, as with letters, establishes the moments of arrival as being critical. For a couple of years, Jennifer thought it was possible to run away from desire, move it, put it somewhere else. THE ONLY THING THAT'S LAISSEZ-FAIRE IN AMERICA IS POVERTY. Jennifer left the East Village and moved into the place across the road from Baker's Garage in the Southern Adirondacks. She bought a Ford Granada and told everyone in town she was an artist. She liked how they had no frame of reference to compare her. At that time Jennifer believed that randomness was freedom. She liked how nothing stuck. The town of Warrensburg reminded her of the remake of THE BLOB: it was LIKE your childhood, but it wasn't quite YOUR childhood. It was like your childhood as you imagined it as a child, on TV. One night she met a woman in town who'd moved there after her brother, a cop, got gunned down in Brooklyn. It seemed like an excellent beginning for a horror movie. NO ESCAPE; even in the safety of your own bed, you're not safe. Jennifer thought that HORROR WAS THE JACOBEAN COMEDY OF THE 80s. A schoolteacher told her he was trying to get his kids to write about the history of the gables… gables being the fretted, gingerbread cut-outs nailed to wood-frame houses between the eaves. Witchy scrolls and shapes, stars and runes, probably coded and Masonic. Clearly, early residents of the town needed protection. Not counting Donny White, the chicken-strangler down the road, Jamey Carpenter was the only sinister element she encountered. Jamey was a student at Warrensburg High and clearly, he had no interest in studying the history of the gables. Metallica, coke and LSD were more his speed. Jennifer was sympathetic. She hired Jamey to help her scrape the peeling paint from the house she lived in. Ignorant and disinterested as they both were, it was a task on par with the building of the pyramids. Sometimes Jamey brought his friend Bill Cameron around to help; Jennifer served snacks of orange juice and brie. Evenings when they weren't picked up by Bill Sr., Bill's dad, a major alcoholic, Jennifer'd drive Jamey home to his Uncle's trailer at the back of her road. Jamey asked Jennifer if she'd like to buy some coke for them in New York City; Jennifer considered, then changed her mind, realizing she'd be contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Her house was robbed. The tape deck, VCR and all the drugs were gone. She called the cops. The house was robbed again. One evening Jamey showed up at her back door carrying a rifle. What are you currently working on now? All the time that she was there, Jennifer was acutely aware of the changing of the seasons. back to top of page JUAN DAVILA: I KEEP COMING OUT OF THIS NIGHTMARE WHICH IS SO BIG THAT I WOULDN'T NEVER WANNA GO THROUGH IT AGAIN CAUSE I WAS COLD AND HUNGRY AND THEY WANTED TO BASH ME UP BECAUSE THEY WANTED ME TO BE THEIR LITTLE HOUSEBOY AND MAKE THEM GRAB AND CLEAN THEIR CLOTHES AND ON TOP OF THAT THEY WANTED TO LAY ME AND BECAUSE OF THAT I HAD TO FIGHT EVERYONE BECAUSE IN PRISON YOU HAVE TO BE LIKE THAT OR ELSE THEY'LL GO ON ANNOYIN YOU YOU COULDN'T WASH BECAUSE THEY KEEP ON ANNOYIN YOU AND BECAUSE OF THESE THINGS I USED TO GO HUNGRY AND I WOULDN'T EAT THE FOOD THAT THE GENDARMES GAVE ME BECAUSE THEY'D BRING ME PURE GROT AT THE BOTTOM OF THE FOOD AND THERE WAS EVEN WORMS THE ONLY THING WE'D EAT WAS PURE BREAD AND FIG COFFEE THERE WERE 15 OF US SLEEPING IN A TINY CELL AND I SLEPT SITTING ON THE FLOOR WHERE THEY WOULD SHIT N PISS AT NIGHT THEY WOULD BRING THEM IN AT 5 IN THE AFTERNOON UNTIL 6 IN THE MORNING YOU CAN IMAGINE HOW WE SLEPT THE ONLY ONE WHO CAME TO SEE ME WAS THE KID WHO WORKS IN THE POOLHOUSE BRINGS ME CLEAN CLOTHES AND CIGARETTES BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT GOING TO VISIT HIM - MARIA DAVILA Translated from the Spanish by Michael Cutts. back to top of page BRIAN ALDISS: It has been said that autobiography, as with letters, establishes the moments of arrival as critical. What are you currently working on? Your question worries me. No, it's my answer which worries me. It's not just that there can be no arrival where a destination is lacking. It's rather that, whatever one is currently writing, one is really working on oneself. "Currently" presents a problem, too. The human sense of the present is vague. We contain more than one flow of temporality. Our mental life is complex, whereas the biological time clock is pretty simple; it ticks away for three score years and ten, more or less, and proceeds invariably in one direction, from cradle to grave, womb to tomb. With our mental temporalities, we can consort with the dead, in memory, or in a dream. We reckon most human time by the biological clock. Airport flight times are built round it. Meals, bedtime, office hours, automobile speedometers, are built round it. "How old are you?" is a question that preoccupies the very young. Five-and-a-half is much more important than merely five; ask any boy. Biology rules the workaday world. We all conspire with Mussolini to make the trains run of time. But we contain within ourselves temporalities distinct from this 'time's arrow' biological clock. Together these temporalities comprise the umwelt, the world, of the mind. The different phylogenetic layers of the brain - rather badly connected, according to Arthur Koestler - guarantee that the register of what is 'present' is rather nebulous. Every schoolboy agrees that to concentrate is difficult. Concentration is what watch-time present requires; it must be carefully focused, like a microscope; and, like a microscope, it gives us only a narrow view. In fact, this sort of 'present' is a prison. We are psychotic if we register only the tick of clock. We are psychotic because we're denied the freedom of that umwelt of conflicting temporalities which enrich contemplative life. So what is this more mysterious present? For most of the day, my 'present' encompasses also all kinds of pasts and futures. I can look back to my fifth birthday and remember all the red fire engine I was given, feel its metal, hear its bell. Or I can look forward to a visit to Florida next month, or - with less expectation - to a time five months hence when I must pay the next installment of income tax. I can look back to something Dr Johnson said, and so inhabit tenuously the eighteenth century; or I can look forward to the day when the Channel Tunnel connecting England to the continent of Europe is completed. Or I can cast my imagination into 'the dark backward and abysm of time', as Prospero calls it, and imagine the creation of Earth, solar system, and universe. All these different scenes can be encompassed in the time it takes a reader to read of them. All constitute the umwelt of a mental 'present'. No robot will ever enjoy such riches. I'm talking about consciousness. Consciousness is remarkably time-free. How much consciousness is involved when we dream? Some dreams are mysterious communications from the submerged parts of the brain, speaking up for older epochs before 'intelligence' as we understand the term was born: that elder reign of instinct and image. It's the role of art to make good the connections between our everyday world and these deep-seated dream-feelings. Conflict's inevitable. The constant debate between 'natural' and 'civilized' man represents one aspect of the divisions accreted by evolution in our brains. Our brains are really pretty makeshift, a stage on which we play out our confused dramas of heaven and hell. It follows that what I am actually DOING at 'present' is rather scattered. I believe that small boys interrogating each other about their ages are, for reasons to do with survival, more keyed in to the present than I am at the age of sixty-six. My 'present' now is elastic. This is what makes old men wool-gather. Their umwelts, frayed round the edges like an old rug, cover a lot of ground. So. To this week. As requested. 1) I learn with delight that a story I have written based on Shakespeare's play "The Tempest" has been accepted in California. I immediately think of more aspects to add to it. Miranda played with Caliban in childhood. Naughty sexual games, perhaps. Suppose, when the chips were down, and the Milanese ship was about to sail, she realised she loved the nature boy, Caliban, with all his brutishness, better than our foppish courtier, Ferdinand, so inexpert at chopping wood? 2) For the sake of my children and perhaps grandchildren unknown, I write a series of short pieces about places I have known and loved all over the world. The pleasure of non-commercial writing is great. And the fun of remembering Rio, Tirana, Palic, Zagreb, Bombay, Mandalay, Hong Kong, Chengdu, Sydney, and so on, is also considerable. 3) I paint an illustration for my story "Ratbird", forthcoming in a magazine. Very much in the shadow of Gauguin, very amateur. 4) A friend in Moscow phones to say his magazine wants to publish a long story I have written, "The Madonna of Futurity". This story deals with a civil war taking place five years from now in West Georgia, the old Soviet republic. As soon as I'd written it, war actually broke out there. I was once in Georgia. This story was an empathic attempt to share in the tremendous upheavals now shaking the ex-Communist world. 5) I wrote several letters and postcards. 6) I rehearsed for a play of mine in which I shall act next week. The play concerns the problems Philip K. Dick has in the Afterlife. 7) I wrote this for PATAPHYSICS, as much for my amusement as yours. 8) But what I mostly did was almost nothing. Well, I prepared an outline of a (barely) possible movie. But what I mostly did was hang about while negotiations for this event take place between my agent and all interested parties. Shall I ever write the screenplay? My mind leaps ahead to the excitement of writing it, to success, to failure. All this is what I'm 'currently working on' - part of my life, my autobiography. But all this is how writers live. Never really in what we conspire to call 'the present'… Isn't that the case with you too, mental reader? back to top of page RICHARD KOSTELANETZ: Among the books of mine currently in some sort of progress are WORDWORKS: POEMS NEW AND SELECTED; several chapbooks of recent poetry experiments, including INTERWEAVINGS; REPARTITIONS; COUPLETS, TRIPLETS, & RHYMES; MONOPOEMS; a critical book about THE ART OF RADIO IN NORTH AMERICA; rock music TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER; POLITICAL ESSAYS; a history of American culture in the Post-WWII period; AN ABC OF CONTEMPORARY READING; CRIMES OF CULTURE, which collects my condemnatory essays; TEXTS & PROPOSALS FOR RADIO, which would be a retrospective consideration of my own audio art; COLLECTED PERFORMANCE TEXTS; HOME AND AWAY, which collects travel journalism; A UNIVERSE OF SENTENCES; AUTOBIOGRAPHIES AT FIFTY; POLYARTISTRY; essays ON INNOVATIVE PERFORMANCE(S); MORE ON INNOVATIVE MUSIC(IAN)S, which collects music writings done since my last book with a nearly similar title; and then several collections of fiction: EPIPHANIES, 1001 STORIES, MINIMAL FICTIONS, LOVINGS, and Lord knows what else. I also have ideas of anthologies of Gertrude Stein's more radical writings, alternative autobiographies, conceptual dance, contemporary American longer poems, native libertarian thought, etc. Unfortunately, I spend too much time "working on" finding publishers for these projects. back to top of page DANIEL SHAPIRO WITH DAVID SHAPIRO: A DESERT ROSE One day I slept for a very long time When I woke up I checked my flowers But the flowers were all, all brown I wanted to know what this flower is so I brang it to the museum of natural history They know a lot about rocks They said it is a desert rose Flowers are the minerals on the earth Flowers are the stars on the earth Rocks are the flowers of the earth back to top of page 31 August 2011