This is great, almost completely off balance, but there's the edge of reason, like the headless monster crowned with what appears to be a sponge... - Alan
yes, the sponge idea had occurred to me, but it also looks like a calcareous brain coral or bony brain plate but not sure how you get "off-balance" the actaeon figure is equisitely poised in the image and not at all in torment, but there is the element of the image being taken from a toy.. this is personally appropo for me as i'm reading Daniel Tiffany's _Toy Medium_ the image actually has alot of associations i've 'toyed' with some of them related to Bataille's Acephale of course and there's the Jain headless cosmos images you can find in some books on Jainist iconology.. there's also the coincidence that in my recent poem _Qints, Puarts, p, q, Qleases, Thanp_ I used a phrase from the 1911 silent film L'inferno: 'To hear such wrangling is a joy for vulgar minds.' This phrase is from the scene in the film where Bertrand Deborn holds up his own severed head like a lantern and speaks with it.. Nowhere in the film is Bertrand Deborn's name mentioned but I know the poem, and moreover I know Gustave Dore's illustrations of the poem. Now since Actaeon is headless, I don't think he'll be 'hearing' anything.. what this is perhaps referencing is that the poem is primarily a visual or 'brain-related' artifact; Its "horns" are missing, the trumpets of enunciation inflected signification. there is also a rather more vulgar pychotic/neurotic underimage here which relates to the complicated story of Actaeon itself. that Actaeon has been changed into a bath utensil for Diana and possibly one for her rectum, as there is some pretty good evidence that in the classical age, sponges on sticks were used at public lavatories to wash the asshole.. now if we imagine the body of Diana to be somehow different, what might happen to a brain-sponge wiping the ass of Diana: Diana remains an important figure in some modern mythologies. In Freemasonry, she is considered a symbol of imagination, sensibility, and the creative insanity of poets and artists. Now there's some psychological discourse which relates painting to feces play.. at any rate i toyed with that strange scenario and then there's the strange textual palimpsestual elements which places the phrase "helium input" Now helium as a word is essentially a flawed artifact: Helium was first detected on August 18, 1868 as a bright yellow line with a wavelength of 587.49 nm in the spectrum of the chromosphere of the Sun, by French astronomer Pierre Janssen during a total solar eclipse in India. Janssen was at first ridiculed since no element had ever been detected in space before being found on Earth. October 20th the same year, English astronomer Norman Lockyer also observed the same yellow line in the solar spectrum and concluded that it was caused by an unknown element after unsuccessfully testing to see if it were some new type of hydrogen. Since it was near the Fraunhofer D line he later named the new line D3, distinguishing it from the nearby D1 and D2 double lines of sodium. He and English chemist Edward Frankland named the element after the Greek word for the Sun god, Helios, and, assuming it was a metal, gave it an -ium ending (a mistake that was never corrected). Now we have, and uncorrected mistake, the sun, and anal input.. well the first association there is easy.. Bataille's Solar Anus so perhaps Actaeon is receiving the boon of divine poop on his brain poop on one end, and being subjected to a flow, an instituted flow of incorrect naming on the other.. not sure how this works but one possible clue might be Daniel M. Kirchmann's LUXON THEORY http://www.tardyon.de/ which states basically that all matter is light and he goes about proving it with physics.. so here i suppose we have a grotesque chimera of light.. something which is poised in the act of transformation and this would all be in the lacanian symbolic i suppose at any rate.. i simply thought the actaeon model without the head was a little more uncanny.. so its really nothing more than me being the bower bird artist picking his version of a shiny pebble for his sandbox of the phantasmatic UNreal.. i mean you have the desert of the real / and then you have the phantasmatic body of poetry which is basically ornamental and supportive, its a structure not to get too into this, there's a frisson of elements involving an intertextuality depending on what element you pick, you can generate any number of circuits.. now back to the visual notion of the piece its supposed to look like rows of cigarettes if you babelfished the chinese-greek-russian phrase you might get "4 safe smokes" but i didnt reverse check these so they might not work.. an oversight at this point phaneronoemikon would then iconistically be the filter but also 'philtre' or potion so there's that now one of the main references involves the first word of the title Chary.. there's 8 senses to this term in the OED, shame, frugal, careful there's 8.. an interesting word but the form of the poem is basically a bastardisation or literalisation of the Georgian Shairi, or Rustavelian Quatrain: The recommended rules for English-language shairi are: 4-line stanzas, with all four lines rhyming with one another. The lines are unusually long, having 15 or 16 syllables, and all the rhymes are of either two or three syllables. Now the piece more or less accomplishes this, at least in spirit. and both shairi and rustavelli can be found in some form in the poem also the most famous shairi is Georgia's national epic The Knight in the Panther's Skin or Vepkhis Tqaosani all of those terms can be found in one form or another in the poem as well as the author's first name Shota in some form there's also a swahili verse form which is unrelated but has the exact same name which originated on the island of Lamu, where the chanting of shairi verses was associated with gungu dances both gungu and Lamu cane be found in the poem at any rate if you look at these referential elements in their relative positions within the body of "eye-corduroy" or "eye-chord du Roi" of the Rustavellian cigarette poem parody you get a roughly similiar kind of visual composition as in the image.. what i mean is that in the image there is an implied geometric structure to the "animal" a "victim of the caprice of the sacred" perhaps so we have echos.. pictorial composition echoes lang-comp but perhaps nonverbally.. anyway.. i just had a robot error on TRK05608 so I better wrap this up Knight in the Panther's skin might also be Night in the PAN-THER's skin.. Pan-ther being "All beast" as in Theriomorphic which relates to another of my recent poems although i stole this fractal from Norman O. Brown 4 Each An Dove: each belle letter a monstrado a self-contained presence or contamination each weird word a monstrado composed of ringing bodies bade by line to air each fierce phrase a monstrado a snake or emblem in the umwelt of the wave each moist meaning a monstrado caught between the vortex of the body and the scopic regime of construction's drive vario-variopteryx zwerch-kasten quarrel anyway, I have to go fix this robot.. It thinks it has a wafer on its arm but it doesnt.. it may need a sensor adjustment or replacement.. or a good hard kick! PS, the rest of the poem is mostly just cut-up from spams divine poop indeed..