An Imagined Encounter

 

Верлен и Сезан

(Fragments)

“Я стукаюсь
о стол,
о шкафа острия –
четыре метра ежедневно мерь.
Мне тесно здесь
в отеле Istria –
на коротышке
rue Campagne – Premiere…

…Мне жмет.
Парижская жизнь не про нас –
в бульвары
тоску рассыпай.
Направо от нас –
Boulevard Montparnasse,
налево –
Boulevard Raspail….”

Владимир Владимирович Маяковский

 

___________________________________

 

Verlaine and Cézanne

“I bump into
the table,
against the edge of the cupboard-
measure out four meters for myself each day.
I am short of space here in the hotel Istria-
at the fag-end of rue Campagne Première…

…I’m oppressed
Parisian life is not ours-
You just scatter your melancholy
Over the boulevards.
On the right of us
The Boulevard Montparnasse,
On the left-
The Boulevard Raspail…”

Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky

 

Verlaine and Cézanne (1925) is an imagined encounter with two great artists reduced to the proportions of a casual, but inwardly weighty, conversation over a table in the Rotonde. It reflects the boredom with Paris that we find expressed in Mayakovsky’s letters, and the imagined conversation with the great men is concerned exclusively with the current problems of poets in Moscow. In a line of this poem they both claim Vincent Van Gogh was their God during a season.

Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society

Self portrait with Bandaged Ear, Vincent van Gogh, January 1889

 
 

“One can speak of the good mental health of Van Gogh who, in his whole adult life, cooked only one of his hands and did nothing else except once to cut off his left ear, in a world in which every day one eats vagina cooked in green sauce or penis of newborn child whipped and beaten to a pulp, just as it is when plucked from the sex of its mother.

And this is not an image, but a fact abundantly and daily repeated and cultivated throughout the world. And this, however delirious this statement may seem, is how modern life maintains its old atmosphere of debauchery, anarchy, disorder, delirium, derangement, chronic insanity, bourgeois inertia, psychic anomaly (for it is not man but the world which has become abnormal), deliberate dishonesty and notorious hypocrisy, stingy contempt for everything that shows breeding. insistence on an entire order based on the fulfillment of a primitive injustice, in short, of organized crime.

Things are going badly because sick consciousness has a vested interest right now in not recovering from its sickness. This is why a tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties of divination would be troublesome. …In comparison with the lucidity of Van Gogh, which is a dynamic force, psychiatry is no better than a den of apes who are themselves obsessed and persecuted and who possess nothing to mitigate the most appalling states of anguish and human suffocation but a ridiculous terminology, worthy product of their damaged brains.

…I believe Gauguin thought the artist should look for the symbol and the myth and expand everything in life into a myth, whereas Van Gogh thought that we must know how to infer the myth from the most everyday things in life. For reality is greatly superior to every story, mythology, deity and super-reality. It is enough to have the genius to know how to interpret reality, which is something no painter had done before Van Gogh.

…I will tell you that Van Gogh is a painter because he has re- assembled nature, because he has, as it were, perspired it and made it sweat, because he has spurted on to his canvases in heaps, monumental with colours, the centuries-old struggle of elements, the terrible rudimentary pressure of apostrophes, stripes, commas and strokes, of which we must admit that, after him, natural appearances are made.

And how many repressed elbow movements, ocular shocks recorded from life, observations made in front of the subject, luminous currents of the forces which work on reality, were necessary to overthrow the barrier before being finally compressed, raised on to the canvas and accepted ? There are no ghosts in Van Gogh’s painting, no visions, no hallucinations. It is the torrid truth of the sun at two o’clock in the afternoon. But the suffering of the pre-natal is there.

It is nature, pure and naked, seen just as it conceals itself when we know how to get near enough to it.

…Van Gogh will have surely been the most genuine painter of all the painters, the only one who has not exceeded painting in so far as painting is both the strict means of his work and the strict limit of his means. On the other hand, he is absolutely the only painter who has completely exceeded painting as the passive act of representing nature, in order to pour out from this exclusive representation of nature a whirlpool force, an element torn out of the heart’s centre. Nothing but painting-no more: no philosophy, mysticism, ritual, psycliurgy or liturgy, no business with literature nor with poetry: these bronzed golden sunflowers are painted.

Better than any psychiatrist in the world, this is how the great Van Gogh has described his illness: ‘I break through, I lose again, I examine, I grip hold of, I loosen, my dead life conceals nothing, and, besides, the néant* has never done any harm to anyone, and what forces me to return to it is this distressing sense of absence, which passes by and sometimes drowns me, but I see very clearly into it; and I even know what the néant is, and I could tell you what is in it.’ Van Gogh was right. One can live for the infinite, only take pleasure in the infinite; there is enough infinite on the earth and in the stars to satiate a thousand great geniuses. If Van Gogh was unable to gratify his desire to suffuse his whole life with it, it is because society expressly and consciously forbade him.

… I will no longer put up with hearing someone say to me, as has so often happened, ‘Monsieur Artaud, you are raving’, without committing a crime. Van Gogh heard this said to him. And this is why that knot of blood which killed him twisted itself around his throat.”

Antonin Artaud

Excerpt from Van Gogh, le suicidé de la société

 
 

A few days before the opening of a Vincent van Gogh exhibition in Paris in 1947, gallery owner Pierre Loeb suggested that Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) write about the painter. Challenging the thesis of alienation, Artaud was determined to show how van Gogh’s exceptional lucidity made lesser minds uncomfortable. Wishing to prevent him from uttering certain “intolerable truths”, those who were disturbed by his painting drove him to suicide.

Note:
* Néant: Nothingness

Beasts Bounding Through Time

 
 

“Van Gogh writing his brother for paints
Hemingway testing his shotgun
Céline going broke as a doctor of medicine
the impossibility of being human
Villon expelled from Paris for being a thief
Faulkner drunk in the gutters of his town
the impossibility of being human
Burroughs killing his wife with a gun
Mailer stabbing his
the impossibility of being human
Maupassant going mad in a rowboat
Dostoevsky lined up against a wall to be shot
Crane off the back of a boat into the propeller
the impossibility
Sylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato
Harry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun
Lorca murdered in the road by the Spanish troops
the impossibility
Artaud sitting on a madhouse bench
Chatterton drinking rat poison
Shakespeare a plagiarist
Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness
the impossibility the impossibility
Nietzsche gone totally mad
the impossibility of being human
all too human
this breathing
in and out
out and in
these punks
these cowards
these champions
these mad dogs of glory
moving this little bit of light toward
us
impossibly”

Charles Bukowski

You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

1986

Working Out

Brothel scene (sent and dedicated to Vincent van Gogh), Émile Bernard, 1888

 
 

“Van Gogh cut off his ear
gave it to a
prostitute
who flung it away in
extreme
disgust.

Van, whores don’t want
ears
they want
money.
I guess that’s why you were
such a great
painter: you
didn’t understand
much
else.”

Charles Bukowski

The Perfect Vermilion

“Oh yes! he loved yellow, did good Vincent, the painter from Holland, gleams of sunlight warming his soul, which detested fog. A craving for warmth.

When the two of us were together in Arles, both of us insane, and constantly at war over beautiful colors, I adored red; where could I find a perfect vermilion? He, taking his yellowest brush, wrote on the suddenly purple wall:

I am of sound mind,

I am the Holy Ghost.”

Paul Gauguin

January 1894

 
 

Red-Headed Woman and Sunflowers, Paul Gauguin, 1890

Embracing Sunflowers

 
 

Joan Mitchell was born in Chicago in 1925 and died in Paris in 1992 at the age of 67. She came to attention in the early 1950s, exhibiting at the Stable Gallery in New York alongside Joseph Cornell and Robert Rauschenberg. In the summer of 1955 she travelled to France, settling there permanently in 1959. There have been numerous gallery and museum exhibitions of Mitchell’s work, including two major shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974 and 2002, which toured across the United States. Her paintings can be seen in museums and important private collections worldwide.

 
 

Sunflower III, 1969

 
 

Sunflower, 1972

 
 

Untitled (Sunflower), 1987

 
 

Sunflowers, 1991

 
 

Joan Mitchell’s Sunflower works count amongst the most experimental and vibrant of all her pieces. Hung in the upstairs gallery, six canvases, etchings and drawings dating from the 1960s to the year before her death, host an extraordinary diversity of marks with compositions whose ungovernable vitality refuse to comply to the rules of image making. Mitchell considered sunflowers to be ‘like people’ — subjects to empathise with whose life cycles were played out with exuberance but brutal swiftness. ‘If I see a sunflower drooping, I can droop with it,’ she explained, ‘and I draw it, and feel it until its death.’ Like Vincent van Gogh whose precedent she was brave enough to summon, she embraced sunflowers for their hopefulness as much as for their assertive and undeniable splendour. Her images do not much resemble the plants themselves: they are blue and red as well as golden, erratically dancing sweeps of colour that communicate internal as much as external landscape.

Mitchell began the Sunflower works after relocating from Paris to Vétheuil, a town 60 kilometers north of the capital. They grew out of a particularly difficult time in the artist’s life, following her mother’s death in 1967 after a seven year struggle with cancer. The paintings from this earlier period are dark and foreboding, roiling tempests of paint. In Calvi (1964) named after a Corsican fishing port Mitchell visited on a sailing trip, a central area of densely worked impasto sits on top of a haze of translucent layers of pigment which conjures a landscape distance. The impression of solid weight achieved through the tactile physicality at the heart of this canvas recalls Paul Cézanne, yet rather than suggest the volume of actual objects, Mitchell’s build-up of paint makes emotion palpable.

Untitled, 1968-1969, and the drawing Untitled (1967) convey a different, brighter mood, whilst etchings the artist made in the early ’70s establish a whiplash fluency of line. As the critic and poet John Yau has noted, the works of this period grant the viewer ‘an intimate encounter with a sumptuous but harsh lyricism that constantly courts but never succumbs to chaos.’ In these pieces, Mitchell’s marks possess a fresh looseness, their brio asserted in opposing colours and unexpected positionings. Nature is conjured at its most unruly and oppositional: frenzy co-exists with calm, flux results in disruptiveness.

In Untitled (1969) Mitchell pursues this diversity of painted gesture and unevenness of composition to magnificent extreme. Thick areas of red and yellow paint reveal a frenzy of working whilst elsewhere the canvas is marked only by faint washes of green. Drips slide down the picture and snarls of paint grow glistening and creamy where they collide with white. According to the writer Dave Hickey, Mitchell’s ‘manner is at once too varied and specified to ever be “a style”. She could make any mark but she never fell in love with one, just the speed of it.’ Her works make lasting passion, movement and energy, describing not the appearance of the world nor transcendent revelation, but the nature of being in it, its transient, intense pleasures and pains.

In the final years of her life Mitchell returned to the subject of sunflowers with renewed focus. These often multi-part canvases are assured, employing a carefully edited palette and calligraphic energy conveyed through lavish brush marks. In these, a potential self-containment of individual rosettes is countered by the sideways spreading from one into several canvases allowing for a range of inter-related expressions that are vast and open-ended. ‘I want them to hold one image despite all the activity,’ Mitchell has said of her works. ‘It’s kind of a plumb line that dancers have; they have to be perfectly balanced the more frenetic the activity is.’

The Difference Between Performing Arts and A Painter

“That’s one thing that’s always, like, been a difference between, like, the performing arts, and being a painter, you know. A painter does a painting, and he paints it, and that’s it, you know. He has the joy of creating it, it hangs on a wall, and somebody buys it, and maybe somebody buys it again, or maybe nobody buys it and it sits up in a loft somewhere until he dies. But he never, you know, nobody ever, nobody ever said to Van Gogh, ‘Paint a Starry Night again, man!’ You know? He painted it and that was it.”

Joni Mitchell
1974

 
 

Turbulent Indigo (1994). The album takes inspiration from Vincent van Gogh for Mitchell’s self-portrait on the cover and the song Turbulent Indigo also references the post-Impressionist Dutch painter

Mine, In a Way

“The sunflower is mine, in a way.”

Vincent Van Gogh

 

Offering to Flora, Juan van der Hamne, 1627

 

The Sunflower. Engraving from Erasmus Francisci’s Ost- und West-Indischer wie auch Sinesischer Lust- und Stats-Garten in drey Haupt-Theile unterschieden.., 1668

 

Peacocks, Melchior d’ Hondecoeter, 1683

 

Small butterfly and sunflower, Ohara Koson, no date

 

Studio of Sir Kenelm Digby, Anthony van Dyck, c. 1630

 

Selbstporträt mit Sonnenblume (Self Portrait With a Sunflower), Anthony van Dyck, after 1633

 

Marquise Athenais de Montespan or Montespan en déshabillée, school of Pierre Mignard, c. 1670

 

Portrait of Elizabeth Claypole, Jacob Huysmans, 1680

 

Misses Wilson, James Sant, 1875

 

Bouquet of Sunflowers, Claude Monet, 1881

 

Tournesols, Claude Monet, 1881

 

Clytie, Evelyn De Morgan, 1887

 

Vase of Sunflowers, Henri Matisse, 1898

 

The Four Seasons (Summer), Alphons Mucha, 1898

 

Brita,a Cat and a Sandwich, Carl Larsson, 1898

 

Hide and Seek, Carl Larsson, c. 1900

 

Eighteen Years Old!, Carl Larsson, 1902

 

Farm Garden with Sunflowers, Gustave Klimt, 1905

 

Sonnenblume (Girasol), Gustav Klimt, 1907

 

Sunflowers, Piet Mondrian, 1907

 

Dying Sunflower, Piet Mondrian, c. 1908

 

Sonnenblume, Egon Schiele, 1909

 

Welke Sonnenblume, Egon Schiele, 1912

 

Welke Sonnenblumen, Egon Schiele, 1914

 

Sonnenblumen, Egon Schiele, 1916

 

Versunkene Landschaft, Paul Klee, 1918

 

Mature Sunflowers, Emil Nolde, 1932

 

Sunflowers, Sir Jacob Epstein, c. 1936

 

A Sunflower from Maggie, Georgia O’Keeffe, 1937

 

Girasoles (Sunflowers) Diego Rivera, 1943

 

Sunflowers at Choisel, Georges Braque, 1946

 

Composition with Sunflowers, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, 1949

 

Die Sonnenblumen und die (The Sunflowers and The City), Friedensreich Hundertwasser, 1949

 

Le Tournesol, Fernand Léger, 1953

 

Cover for International Textiles, René Gruau, 1955

 

Sunflowers for Jonathan, David Hockney, 1995

 

The Orders of the Night (Die Orden der Nacht), Anselm Kiefer, 1996

 

Untitled (Sunflowers), Glenn Goldberg, 1999

 

Hommage a van Gogh, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, c. 1998

 

Sunflower in Grey and Green no.1, Jimmy Wright, 2008

The Truth of The Sunflower in Four Lines

Frau vor „Sonnenblumen“ von van Gogh (Woman before “Sunflowers” by Vincent van Gogh), Isaac Israëls, 1917.

A close friend of Vincent Willem van Gogh, the artist’s nephew, Israëls had a version of the Sunflowers on loan for a while.

 
 

SUNFLOWERS
A rubái (quatrain)*

“Sunflowers: I have seen them everywhere;

They are beautiful, this no one can deny;

But, surely it was Van Gogh who painted the truth

Of the sunflower and hung it on the wall.”

Mahmud Kianush

 

Rubāʿī (رباعی) is a poetry style. It is used to describe a Persian quatrain (a stanza or poem of four lines), or its derivative form in English and other languages. The plural form of the word, rubāʿiyāt (رباعیات), often anglicised rubaiyat, is used to describe a collection of such quatrains. The plural form of the word, rubāʿiyāt (رباعیات), often anglicised rubaiyat, is used to describe a collection of such quatrains.

Van Gogh Girls

 

For their Spring Summer 2015 collection,Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren, the Dutch design duo known as Viktor & Rolf, presented A-line dresses with floral patterns and appliquéd petals that were inspired by Vincent van Gogh‘s paintings.

“The essence of the countryside is translated into unexpected, sculptural looks that combine abstract graphic volumes with organic elements,” said the designers.

The show began with the most demure outfits, featuring black flowers outlined on white babydoll dresses. These were worn with straw boater hats with stalks extended from their brims.Every outfit shown in the Van Gogh Girls collection was more elaborate than the one before, with silhouettes becoming more dramatic and pastel tones introduced.

The hats also gained size and volume, with longer strands arranged into different splayed forms or woven into intricate patterns.Gradually the two-dimensional flower motifs were turned into 3D adornments on the edges and shoulders of the dresses.The headgear and dresses continued to merge, as colours became more intense and the decorative fabric flowers reached further from the garments.

White hems interwoven with thick black ribbon accompanied the floral embellishments, paired with sandals in matching prints.

Bright summer hues gave way to earthy autumnal tones, culminating in a final look where the dress itself curved out to become integrated with the giant straw headpiece.

All of the fabrics were wax-dyed and block-printed using a batik technique by Dutch fabric company VLISCO.

“This ensures an unique high quality print with craquelé indigo lines and intense vibrant colours on both sides of the cloth,” the designers said.

Incorporating His Love of Van Gogh

 
 

Photographer Steve Wood never wanted to take Andy Warhol‘s portrait. A mutual friend – Elaine Kaufman of New York’s famous Elaine’s restaurant – introduced the pair and suggested they work together. Wood was unconvinced – busy photographing star guests at the 1981 Deauville Film Festival at the time, he had little interest in taking the iconic pop artist as his subject.

“It actually took a few days for me to agree to it,” Wood told us. “I’m not a huge fan of his work, but I was honest with him and said that I preferred more classical art – such as Van Gogh and the Impressionists.” The resulting series of pictures, lost to a dark drawer in Wood’s filming cabinet for the last 30 years, went on display as an exhibition entitled Lost and Found in New York.

“Andy was very easy to work with on the day and he put himself totally in my hands, so that I could work to my vision,” said Wood, who managed to incorporate his love of Van Gogh into the pictures by choosing a sunflower as the main prop. “With everybody I ever work with, I remove direct sunlight – and this was particularly important while shooting Andy as his skin tone could not take direct sunlight. I therefore suggested using the corridor of our hotel, the Royal Hotel in Deauville, which I had already checked had very soft lighting.”

“Andy was gentle and incredibly self-conscious. I believe that was how he always was. He was certainly conscious of his appearance, especially his hair and his hands.”

It Stands for The Sun

“How lovely yellow is! It stands for the sun”
Vincent van Gogh

 
 

Sämann bei untergehender Sonne (Sower with Setting Sun), Vincent van Gogh, 1888

 
 

 
 

This drawing was also created in 1888 while Van Gogh was staying in Arles, France. When he was painting this, he was constantly trying to produce strong colors, to develop a consistent brushstroke and to create a convincing, powerful figure. The effort of this struggle clearly shows in the painting, which in the end left Van Gogh dissatisfied.

In his drawing of Sower with Setting Sun,the color is absent, but the picture is varied and lively, with the small figure of the sower taking resolute strides across his field. This fluent, effective style of draughtsmanship is typical of the drawings he sent to Émile Bernard.

Normality Is A Paved Road

“Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it.”
Vincent Van Gogh

 
 

Series: Study For a Portrait of Van Gogh, Francis Bacon, 1957

Two Sunflowers Move in the Yellow Room

Two Cut Sunflowers, Vincent Van Gogh, 1887

 
 

“Ah, William, we’re weary of weather,”

said the sunflowers, shining with dew.

“Our traveling habits have tired us.

Can you give us a room with a view?”

They arranged themselves at the window

and counted the steps of the sun,

and they both took root in the carpet

where the topaz tortoises run.

William Blake

Death to Van Gogh’s Ear

Emilia Fox, Arielle Dombasle and Annabel Brooks in Hideous Man (John Malkovich, 2002). Dresses by Bella Freud. Shoes by Christian Louboutin

 
 

Poet is Priest
Money has reckoned the soul of America
Congress broken thru the precipice of Eternity
the president built a War machine which will vomit and rear Russia out of Kansas
The American Century betrayed by a mad Senate which no longer sleeps with its wife.
Franco has murdered Lorca the fairy son of Whitman
just as Mayakovsky committed suicide to avoid Russia
Hart Crane distinguished Platonist committed suicide to cave in the wrong
America
just as Million tons of human wheat were burned in secret caverns under the White House
While India starved and screamed and ate mad dogs full of rain
and mountains of eggs were reduced to white powder in the halls of Congress
no Godfearing man will walk there again because of the stink of the rotten eggs of America
and the Indians of Chiapas continue to gnaw their vitaminless tortillas
aborigines of Australia perhaps gibber in the eggless wilderness
and I rarely have an egg for breakfast tho my work requires infinite eggs to come to birth in Eternity
eggs should be eaten or given to their mothers
and the grief of the countless chickens of America is expressed in the screaming of her comedians over the radio
Detroit has built a million automobiles of rubber trees and phantoms
but I walk, I walk, and the Orient walks with me, and all Africa walks
And sooner or later North America will walk
Einstein alive was mocked for his heavenly politics
Bertrand Russell driven from New York for getting laid
immortal Chaplin driven form our shores with a rose in his teeth
a secret conspiracy by Catholic Church in the lavatories of
Congress has denied contraceptives to the unceasing masses of India.
Nobody publishes a word that is not the cowardly robot ravings of a depraved mentality
The day of the publication of true literature of the American
body will be day of Revolution
the revolution of the sexy lamb
the only bloodless revolution that gives away corn
poor Genet will illuminate the harvesters of Ohio
Marijuana is a benevolent narcotic but J. Edgar Hoover prefers his deathly Scotch
And the heroin of Lao-Tze & the Sixth Patriarch is punished by the electric chair
but the poor sick junkies have nowhere to lay their heads
fiends in our government have invented a cold-turkey cure for
addiction as obsolete as the Defense Early Warning Radar System.
I am the defense early warning radar system
I see nothing but bombs
I am not interested in preventing Asia from being Asia
and the governments of Russia and Asia will rise and fall but
Asia and Russia will not fall
The government of America also will fall but how can America fall
I doubt if anyone will ever fall anymore except governments
fortunately all the governments will fall
the only ones which won’t fall are the good ones
and the good ones don’t yet exist
But they have no being existing they exist in my poems
they exist in the death of the Russian and American governments
they exist in the death of Hart Crane & Mayakovsky
now is the time of prophecy without death as a consequence
the universe will ultimately disappear
Hollywood will not rot on the windmills of Eternity
Hollywood whose movies stick in the throat of God
Yes Hollywood will get what it deserves
Time
Seepage of nerve-gas over the radio
History will make this poem prophetic and its awful silliness a hideous spiritual music
I have the moan of doves and the feather of ecstasy
Man cannot long endure the hunger of the cannibal abstract
War is abstract
the world will be destroyed
Monument to Socco & Vanzetti not yet financed to ennoble Boston
Vachel Lindsay Secretary of Interior
Poe Secretary of Imagination
Pound Secty. Economics
and Kra belongs to Kra, and Pukti to Pukti
crossfertilization of Blok and Artaud
Van Gogh’s ear on the currency
no more propaganda for monsters
and poets should stay out of politics or become monsters
I have become monstrous with politics
the Russian poet undoubtedly monstrous in his secret notebook
Tibet should be left alone
these are obvious prophecies
America will be destroyed
Russian poets will struggle with Russia
Whitman warned against this “Fabled Damned of nations”
Where was Theodore Roosevelt when he sent out ultimatums from his castle in Camden
Where was the House of Representatives when Crane read aloud from his Prophetic Books
What was Wall Street scheming when Lindsay announced the doom of money
Where they listening to my ravings in the locker rooms of
Bricksford Employment Offices?
Did they bend their ears to the moans of my soul when I struggled
with market research statistics in the Forum of Rome?
No they were fighting in their fiery offices , on the carpets of
heart failure, screaming and Bargaining with Destiny
fighting the Skeleton with sabers, muskets, buck-teeth,
indigestion, bombs of larceny, whoredom, rockets, and pederasty,
back to the wall to build up their wives and apartments, lawns,
suburbs,
fairydoms,
Puerto Ricans crowded for massacre on 114th St. for the sake of an
imitation Chinese-Moderne refrigerator
Elephants of mercy murdered for the sake of the Elizabethan birdcage
millions of agitated fanatics in the bughouse for the sake of the screaming
soprano of industry
Money-chant of soapers – toothpaste apes in television sets – deodorizers on hypnotic chairs –
petroleum mongers in Texas – jet plane streaks among the clouds –
sky writers liars in the face of Divinity–fanged butchers of hats and shoes,
all Owners! Owners! Owners! with obsession on property and vanished Selfhood!
and their long editorials on the fence of the screaming negro attacked by
ants crawled out of the front page!
Machinery of a mass electrical dream! A war-creating whore of Babylon
bellowing over Capitols and Academies!
Money! Money! Money! shrieking mad celestial money of illusion!
Money made of nothing, starvation, suicide! Money of failure! Money of death!
Money against Eternity! and eternity’s strong mills grind out vast paper of
Illusion!

Allen Ginsberg