The Totality for Kids

Joshua Clover

Ceriserie

Music: Sexual misery is wearing you out.
Music: Known as the Philosopher's Stair for the world-weariness which
       climbing it inspires. One gets nowhere with it.
Paris: St-Sulpice in shrouds.
Paris: You're falling into disrepair, Eiffel Tower this means you! Swathed in
       gold paint, Enguerrand Quarton whispering come with me under the shadow
       of this gold leaf.
Music: The unless of a certain series.
Mathematics: Everyone rolling dice and flinging Fibonacci, going to the opera,
       counting everything.
Fire: The number between four and five.
Gold leaf: Wedding dress of the verb to have, it reminds you of of.
Music: As the sleep of the just. We pass into it and out again without seeming
       to move. The false motion of the wave, "frei aber einsam."
Steve Evans: I saw your skull! It was between your thought and your face.
Melisse: How I saw her naked in Brooklyn but was not in Brooklyn at the time.
Art: That's the problem with art.
Paris: I was in Paris at the time! St-Sulpice in shrouds "like Katharine Hepburn."
Katharine Hepburn: Oh America! But then, writing from Paris in the thirties, it
       was to you Benjamin compared Adorno's wife. Ghost citizens of the century,
       sexual misery is wearing you out.
Misreading: You are entering the City of Praise, population two million three
       hundred thousand . . .
Hausmann's Paris: The daughter of Midas in the moment just after. The first
       silence of the century then the king weeping.
Music: As something to be inside of, as inside thinking one feels thought of,
       fly in the ointment of the mind!
Sign at Jardin des Plantes: GAMES ARE FORBIDDEN IN THE LABYRINTH.
Paris: Museum city, gold lettering the windows of the wedding-dress shops in the
       Jewish Quarter. "Nothing has been changed," sez Michael, "except for the
       removal of twenty-seven thousand Jews."
Paris 1968: The antimuseum museum.
The Institute for Temporary Design: Scaffolding, traffic jam, barricade, police
       car on fire, flies in the ointment of the city.
Gilles Ivain: In your tiny room behind the clock, your bent sleep, your
       Mythomania.
Gilles Ivain: Our hero, our Anti-Hausmann.
To say about Flemish painting: "Money-colored light."
Music: "Boys on the Radio."
Boys of the Marais: In your leather pants and sexual pose, arcaded shadows of
       the Place des Vosges.
Mathematics: And all that motion you supposed was drift, courtyard with the
       grotesque head of Apollinaire, Norma on the bridge, proved nothing but a
       triangle fixed by the museum and the opera and St-Sulpice in shrouds.
The Louvre: A couple necking in an alcove, in their brief bodies entwined near
       the Super-Radiance Hall visible as speech.
Speech: The bird that bursts from the mouth shall not return.
Pop song: We got your pretty girls they're talking on mobile phones la la la.
Enguerrand Quarton: In your dream gold leaf was the sun, salve on the kingdom
       of the visible.
Gold leaf: The mind makes itself a Midas, it cannot hold and not have.
Thus: I came to the city of possession.
Sleeping: Behind the clock, in the diagon, in your endless summer night, in the
       city remaking itself like a wave in which people live or are said to live, it
       comes down to the same thing, an exaggerated sense of things getting done.
Paris: The train station's a museum, opera in the place of the prison.
Later: The music lacquered with listen.

Poem

We always send it to the wrong address
And now that buoys even our most impersonal days. Everyone is beautiful!
And then almost everyone. C'est cool-ça, the shift that enchants the world
Or at least the afternoon of the world before it's off
To meet Chris and all at glimmering Colleen's
Arriving southside early and so twenty min for Lyn's The Fatalist
Amidst the superlit video store on the corner. It's funnier
In French: superlit but not much else. One is haunted
By the suspicion that one is in a society
Composed of people one will never meet for example
The Society That Thinks About Someone Named Anne-Lise
Occasionally. So I walk back around and up
The stairs and Chris puts on either/or. Elliott Smith 20th Cen. American
Is nonetheless a star in the constellation
Our Romanticism and we have been hanging out
A lot there recently. A keener melancholy
About the music for a week or two afterward may be obvious
But something has to be done with the excess flowering inside death
Or is it just apotropaic? We'll see. The most awful thing
About the phrase "Every Germinal must have its Thermidor"
Is that one never gets to say so anymore
And really mean it. We lie down in categories
And wake up in concepts but must there be so much of the day spent
Tracking stray remarks and others' hearts
And maintaining a casual balance between OxyContin and "poetic prose"
So new sensations emerge? Meanwhile but I am happy
To see you! It's enough but not of anything.

Early Style

Ruins is utopia
From the perspective of
Before melancholy
And sex at the level of
Language promenading
Around the littoral of first
Failures of the codex
Colored morning
Pointing out over this
Being being being-left-empty