The Death of Marat: A Study on Perception

Marat was a French Revolutionary in 1793, good friend of Robspierre, and writer of the most radical and revolutionary newspaper at the time. He was assasinated by a woman named Charlotte Corday in his bathtub as he was writing and relaxing in a cold bath, as he often did in order to relieve pain from a weird and unnatural skin disease that he had. Charlotte Corday believed that the only way to save France was to kill Marat, and she was obsessed with the idea of murdering him to the point that she actually stabbed him.

One of the most famous Romantic Painting in Art History is a depiction of this by Jacques- Louis David.


However, lesser known is the image done by Edvard Munch of the same topic:


So what does this mean about perception? Which one am I supposed to sympathize with and which one is more powerful? And in that case, what really matters? The truth or the power portrayed?

Execution Dream No.2

Scars of Utopia
by Jeffery McDaniel

Suppose there was a thermometer able to measure
contentment. Would you slide it under

your tongue and risk being told you were on par
with a thirteenth century farmer who lost

all his teeth in a game of hide and seek? Would you
be tempted to abandon your portable conscience,

the remote control that lets you choose who you are
for every occasion? I wish we cared more

about how we sounded than how we looked.
Instead of primping before mirrors each morning,

we'd huddle in echo chambers, practicing our scales.
As a kid, I thought the local amputee was dying in
pieces,

that his left arm was leaning against a tree in heaven,
waiting for the rest of him to arrive, as if God

was dismantling him like a jigsaw puzzle, but now
I understand we're all missing something. I wish

there were Band Aids for what you don't know, whisky
breath mints for sober people to fit in at wild parties.

There ought to be a Smithsonian for misfits,
where an insomniac's clammy pillow hangs over

a narcoleptic's drool cup, the teeth of an anorexic
displayed like a white picket fence designed

to keep food from trespassing. I wish the White House
was made out of mood ring rock, reflecting

the health of the nation. And an atheist hour
at every church, and needle exchange programs,

and haystack exchange programs too, and emotional
baggage thrift stores, a Mount Rushmore for assassins.

I'm sick of strip malls and billboards. I dream
of a road lit by people who set themselves on fire,

no asphalt, no rest stops, just a bunch of dead grass
with footprints so deep, like a track meet in wet cement.

------------

Sometimes I find poetry so beautiful that it consumes for for an entire night and I read the same poem over and over again, trying to remember my favorite lines, and then recite them to anyone who will listen. My roommate, my best friends, and my mother, who is busy chopping vegetables on the other line, and I yell words that mean nothing to her. None of them can see the line breaks or the way the words look together to form what Allen Ginsberg called "the eyeball kick". And they can barely feel what I feel when the words steep from my eyes and then regurgitate themselves out of my throat, a consumption through the eyes and then vomited back up into my mouth, held for a tiny second like a cherry seed held in between my two front teeth.

I want to write poetry about the human condition, and war, and promenades, and America, and I want to write prose that makes people cry, and I want to them to feel each word sliding down their throat as they whisper it to themselves in silence while reading in crowded bus stop or at home in their bed with their cat.

I read about global warming and all I can think about is my skin melting off and dripping like Dali's clocks. All of time held in my pores and then just disentegrating in mid air; evaporating before they can even let the crackled dirt eat at it on the ground. I think about global warming and I think about how we are all just getting hotter. I think about how some people's temperature is just naturally high, I think about fevers. I think about global warming in the sense that we are all rising in farenheit, celcius, and kelvin. I think about global warming as the feeling you get when you have been in the tub for a little too long and steam rises from your body as you slide out of the water and onto the cold tile floor. You're just a walking smoke bomb, a dramatic rise in pollution all around and how you look back at the porceilan container to see the residue you have left in rings around the tub-- and then you count them like you count the years on a tree to see how long you have been soaking in your own acid.

"Jug Jug" to dirty ears

In the myth of Philomel and Tereus, Philomel has her tongue cut out so that she could never speak of the rape Tereus had done to her. Ovid's graphicly describes it in the Metamorphoses: 'the remaining stump still quivered in her throat, while the tongue itself lay pulsing and murmuring incoherently to the dark earth. It writhed convulsively, like a snake's tail when it has newly been cut off."

Two days ago, the Supreme Court decided to refuse appeal for those who were detainees of Guantanamo Bay. The means that those who were held at the prison camp based in Cuba are not allowed to challenge their imprisonment.

At this point in my life, I'm trying really hard to understand things politically. I try to read the news as much as I can. I know the feeling I get when I hear about war. I try to separate what is good and what is bad the best way I can. I try to not get discouraged with apathy, and I try to understand the way things work in the world.
I feel, however, like most of the time, a thin veil of mesh is pulled over my eyes-- just loose enough for me to try and see the truth, but never really being able to understand the full effect of the matter.

I have read all of the articles that I can on the prisoner's of Guantanamo Bay. I still can't see the strain in my filter what I should agree with and what I should look away. What part of my American heart can fully forcingly nod at the capturing of what I'm told are my enemies, and what part of my American heart gasps and pulls at my hair?

Last weekend, my mother and I were invited to a church social at our old house of worship; a little tiny chapel in the middle of Owens Cross Roads, Alabama, just north of New Hope.
A woman that had taken care of me as a child, tended for me in the nursery and always made sure to learn of what I was doing, where, when, and how-- her son was being shipped off to take his first tour in Iraq. When I arrived and met him, he was young and holding hands with his high school sweetheart, the only one he proclaimed he had ever loved. And when I looked at him I thought of all the other reports that I had read and studied and tried to recognize and decipher about soliders in Iraq, and the things that they had done to citizens there.
And when I looked at him I tried to decide how he felt about going and fighting somewhere completely choatic, knowing that he could lose his life to some twelve year old with a car bomb, and a thousand year old chip on his shoulder that we as a young and still nubile country could never understand.

I feel like the prisoners of Guantanamo Bay are like Philomela, and we Americans are her Tereus, the rapers. And then I feel like were are the Tereus to Iraqi children. And then I think that they rape us, too, our soldiers just as confused as they are. And then I finally come to the image of our sand stricken bodies all personally invaded, and everyone has cut off everyone's tongue in the end, and we stand there like we are in the ancient city of Babel, just murmuring to each other and then raping some more to try and understand.

The History of The River that Divides Iran and Iraq

History by Robert Lowell

History has to live with what was here,
clutching and close to fumbling all we had--
it is so dull and gruesome how we die,
unlike writing, life never finishes.
Abel was finished; death is not remote,
a flash-in-the-pan electrifies the skeptic,
his cows crowding like skulls against high-voltage wire,
his baby crying all night like a new machine.
As in our Bibles, white-faced, predatory,
the beautiful, mist-drunken hunter's moon ascends--
a child could give it a face: two holes, two holes,
my eyes, my mouth, between them a skull's no-nose--
O there's a terrifying innocence in my face
drenched with the silver salvage of the mornfrost.




There's a division , something that splits a land, the disputed Indes Valley, in half. Splits two peoples in half. Splits a plain of hills and sands and rocks and dunes and praries and cities.
A List of Things I think of as a barrier:
1. metal
2. bars
3. harsh and man- made.

Never a river. The idea of it just intrigued me. A moving body of water that can cause so much trouble. Trouble for even people that live half way across the ocean.

A Twister, Spiral, and Dirt Devil of Rants

How about another true statement: Being sixteen and of America is being heartbroken for the sake of being heartbroken.
Cross that out-- being sixteen and of sixteen is being heartbroken for the sake of being heartbroken.
About fellow peers
about things we can't save
about dreams we can't have
about plays we can't write
about people we can't stop thinking about
and about ticks we can't stop, clocks we can't twitch
and moments we can't freeze

We're all pretty generally confused. I don't think it ever gets any better.

I tell myself sometimes, that things are really just like Slaughterhouse Five: just moments in time that we can reverse and jump and hop into whenever we feel the need to find them again, stumble upon the newness and crisp reality of them the first time around.

I had a the worst dream I've had in a long time last night.
I'm on death row, and I don't know why... I keep asking people over and over again why I'm there and no one will tell me. The guards of the prison inform us all that they are executing us all on the same day; to line up and just wait. Thousands of us, millions of us get in a single file line and wait. They move the person before you in quick and fast, then dump them back out before the lethal injection sets in completely. I see my friends crawling out of a room half dead and half alive. I keep moving in line trying to figure out why I was there, what I had done that was so wrong. And then I get on ominous phone call from someone from the past. They are about to go into the room to die, and we've been locked in the same prison for years without even knowing it. He tells me he will always love me, and then hangs up. I'm left asking other people if they care that I did nothing wrong to get in this position and I'm answered with dead stares... then I wake up.

I talk to a friend about it and she tells me I'm in T.S. Eliot's Unreal City. I think I need a dream interpertation book.

A list of words I come up with when trying to write a poem:
drowing
plump greedy babies
eating everything
snakes
going underwater
the way a pen's ink smells when it has just finished writing something
botchulism
state
freedom from land
part-man, part-water
sparkplugs
recognize
playing poker with international men
bucket full of changes (ivegotthemivegotthem)
nuances
its easy to fall in love here
book with softly turned pages
I'm only good at being young.
-------------------------

I'm fascinated by tornados. I don't understand them,their cycles, their eyes, the way they work.
I never see the destruction behind them, just the clear ground before. I don't see their threat, just turns, like a ballerina with dust sprialing at her feet.

Being sixteen and of America is being like a natural disaster-- fascinating and selfish, a tornado with no direct path.

Grassroots

A poem for recent frustrations
inspired by discussions in English,
by the way ink smells on the paper,
and by apathy.

Grassroots
I.
I have seen Buddha, my divination,
and the pregnant men of tomorrow
at a local Chinese restaurant
down the street
from where I live.

He works behind the counter
handing out fortunes and duck sauce.
There are spelling errors on the menu, and
on the outside sign.
China Cok, is the name of the
eatery, a hybrid between
wok and cook.
But, I cannot tell my Buddha
of the American harshness
or mistake;
the joke that ensues.
For the same reason
that I cannot tell him about a book I read last year
dealing with young prostitutes.
And I cannot tell him that when I imagined
the diner and bathroom where the girls
drank perfume to smell better and
cut their hair for infertility,
the main setting of the book—
that I saw his establishment instead.
And he was just as much of a character
as the young Lolitas.

II.
The day I turned fifteen, I met a rifle.
He was standing in between the frozen food aisles,
looking and longing for permafrosted delicacies.
Little pizzas balanced softly on bagels.
We made small talk about the difference between
pizza bites and pockets, and then he told me
that we had met before.
He looked at me straight in the
eye, his barrel lined up with
my cornea, and shook my hand.
He said, I have felt these same plump
Fingers run happy and delighted over my
trigger. I have had them hold that dangling
piece of metal before. They have stroked in
delight at the thought of ammunition
and knew when I was sticky and ripe.

III.
There is a dream that
I have where we’ve all
turned into machines:
simple and complex.
Women have bicycles for breasts and
Advertisements for thighs.
Men have natural metals
like iron, turn to ore in their blood.
My hair is composed of whipping cords and wires;
my head a monitor.
We’re giants.

I see everything in the dream through eyes
that aren’t really eyes but sockets, light sockets.
And they try to, but can’t see real things,
only stiff metal dust
thrust into them in the form
of plugs and powercords;
Sparks, and Lights.
I can only see fireworks and flashy things
The sparklers of everyone I know,
and their fading fizzle as they go out.

------------------

Frustration of things unseen:
Listen to the Talking Heads
and read these lyrics
(Life During Wartime)

The Mountain Goats have a song in which they make a list reasons why it is a good idea to freeze to death. I can only think of one:
I wouldn't feel the heat of fire (arms and breath).

Path of least resistence is what makes the river grow crooked

After reading the January 22nd issue of the New Yorker, I came upon an article on a man by the name of Adam Gadahn .
Also known as Azzam the American. Adam grew up in California where the sun always shines with his parents and goats.
Then Adam let the sands of things pull at him in confusion and after a stint with Christian death metal, he converted to Islam, and before long was in Pakistan as a groupie of some of the hardest hitting men in the terroism industry. He started translating and making tapes, airing them, and becoming a spokesperson for different anti-American organizations. He became an expatriate quickly and now declares that America's streets will soon run red with the blood of the sinners and capitalists and those in doubt and denial of their higher duty and calling to Allah.
There is something about Adam and expatriates in general that intrigue me immensely. After studying Ezra Pound and his stint of welcoming fascism, I've been thinking about the idea of turning away from your culture and home, native tongue, and making such an extreme exodus of the soul.
In comparison to Uncle Walt, who embraced and hugged every thought and syllable of America, these commuters are eye catching. Or maybe Keourac, who took her and her crazy nights, and loved the spontaneity of all America's fuckups and dreams, no matter how haphazordous and intoxicating they were. Surely Adam isn't the poet these previous men were. Surely there is something to reason why out of a seemingly normal Jewish household, he was the only out of three children that turned extremeist.


I can see Adam being a character in this all. Here with the wires and the machines, he, Walt, Ezra, Allen, and I will all sit around and have coffee. Maybe Adam doesn't drink coffee, but nevertheless, we'll sit around and do what we do as Flynn says.
I don't see Pound as a bad guy, so I don't know how I would see Adam as one.
Maybe I don't have an allegiance anymore, althought I've always thought I did.
Maybe I should plegde to people now instead of cloth, and that way try to figure out who's side anyone is on.

I'm composing a one-act play and I think I just got my antagonist.