frank corcoran
::frank the pen
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In einer eMail vom 15.10.2006 12:22:37 Westeuropãische Normalzeit schreibt FBCorcoran:
Now I’ll paste in mother, she’ll be next to her Casey sisters and cousins, her school-class photo about level, as in life, with our Dad’s caubeen in his very own photo.
Who is looking at who is what these two images (bundled phota are best) are asking me down from this Wailing Wall; in which time are these imputed glances ‘‘taking place’’, is what I should be exploring in my hunkered position.
To live your life is not as easy as to be plastering the builders’ wet-room, gleam, angle, shadows or light, its line and circle, de- and in- and excisions.
I’ll be taking next the ontology of the musical work, take Lutoslawski’s Livres Pour Orchestre of 1968, premiered in Hamburg , was it? No, Hagen; wrong, Warszawa. Wrong again. I veer away from the slippery slope ( - this wet-room is quite new) of the Polish composer’s question for whom his Chapters and his still wonderfully fresh, still very tricky, polyvalent Interludes will sound now as they swirl around the few corners the builders did leave me? Who owns? Neither hath Casey ear heard, nor Corcoran eye seen what this grand orchestral wash announces: - yes, it is sweet and it is proper to construct my wet wash-room, to work in Horace’s brass, no surrender, non serviam, no sir, it wasn´t me, sir, ask Lizz Casey, sir, bold as brass, sir . (How they cower in their lowly school snap-shot). Yes, erect wet washroom, yes, write Lutoslawski’s Sound-Pages, yes, sounding brass a sonorous Book of Life. Whose, Horace? Ah, Horatius, ’tis countless, unsung lives of Irish slaves, their being temporal, their time silent, still, unsung.
We know not the wet-rooms of our future. The past is mine, sayeth Horace. Build ye, bold as brass. Wipe down the streaming walls of orchestral wash, Lutoslawski’s great monument. Wrap sound in little Interludes between his mighty Chapters, short, tiny verses for clarinets and vibraphone and low harp-patter, piano-dabs before the big stuff gets sounding. In that photograph the air is dead, no sound. So how? Yet, the Horatian thrust to build a monument, try any class of a gazebo, even a metaphor, a wet-room extended, Mr. L’s final orchestral Chapter wrapping up all minor wind- or string-glissandi-arguments, it seems basically normal in our species, keep cool, poet, a basically decent and reasoned thing to be at, whether it’s photographing mother’s little grey school-class of 1927 or pasting his photoéd caubeen’s phota up on my father’s son’s faintly wet Italian walls.
I am very wrong, nonsense arrant and sheer. The Roman poet (I have late, too late cribrated and post-cribrated) needed neither wet-room nor Irish slave’s hunkered position as he sounded our challenge to the vermiculation which our being-in-time is heir to : ‘‘those who can, make!’’ - G’wan! In spite of every slave’s daily, holy fight against The Hole. So who is looking at who on my Wet, Wailing Wall? What precisely are they wailing about? Did they save the dam? Kept the march-music going? Were born, they saw what glory? More snare-drum ’n bugles music than Lutoslawski’s strange harp ’n vibraphone subtleties, I ask myself in this by now uncomfortable, contorted position.
(We don’t normally number Horace among the Stoics. Still... ) Perhaps my pasting parental photos up on a still damp wall there does belong also to Horatian aesthetics: carpe photon et photas, picturas de gloriosa miseria humani generis, oaf, yes, and orchestral tutti. Final whimper or final yell. Depending on your line of vision as light falls on my builders’ slapped-up result. You never hunkered in your Soracte wet-room, poet; but your: ‘‘Son, artist, keep de faith’’ could be Old Roman wind, little foreseeable win. Hunkered you are asking hunkered me to take a Pascalian leap, a wet-room risk? Far into the future, you insist, brays, blares my brass-music and we famously programmed to palliate our plight with your home-baked beans mprogramme, classical smartie-poet. This tone-poet. Or his wet-room builders. Or my parents’ phota fixed in two washy photos pasted on my washed, Wailing Wall. What’s now fixed is fixed more (or less?) for ever, will beat Time and the River, the Hole, the Dam, is that what you’re oraculating to me, Horry? Hurray for the sweet and for the decorous, to die for a wet-room, for my orchestral gazebo, a sounding ziggurat, tormented gong, clarinets and marimba and piano and the harp that once. ‘‘Horatian’’ is not ‘‘horrible’’, seldom ‘‘horrid’’. Yet, horrific oracle, orientate this orphan’s orison; the wet wind is blowing through my cell. What Greater-Than-Horace conceived the whole plot? - Did Horry mean ‘‘Fame is a meat that dead men eat’’? - Why didn’t Horsey pen, then: ‘‘Get it / While you can!’’? How shall all manner of things be well?