PROLEGOMENON TO THE PERFECT SEASON

 

 

            “Dans ses écrits, un sage Italien
            Dit que le mieux est l’ennemi du bien.”
            (In his writings, a wise Italian
            says that the perfect is the enemy of the good.)
                                                                        —Voltaire “La Bégueule”

 

 

Depends on which good. The lemon juicer certainly wasn’t stopped by the hand, no matter what Chaplin has to say about it, but where folding in half may be always-already integrated into the model you can still hurl a brick through the kitchen itself. So, scurrying in the floodlit afterglow of modern times, we might use everything, that everything everyone is already doing everything with anyway, to estrange the swarm of mercilessly recuperative trivia, discharged in this leaking now-time, called the “audible.”
            Yeah—you get this history. The 1972-73 Miami Dolphins did not lose a game, becoming the only team in the so-called North American “Big Four” to complete a “perfect season,” in turn synthesising at last the Phileban contradiction between wisdom and pleasure in the swirly processes of the cocktailed good. The ladder falls, the bells of proleptic feedback clink for the end of seasons in toto. 11th century monks invented the clock alongside the index, and so labor and books were born, not necessarily in that order. Amass and wedge. Mechanized, the chiasmatic flesh of everyday life becomes modern to the tune of the clocker Camp’s Daily Dozen, grotesquing the style of the Lacedaemonion Politeia, patriotism a forte for all those concerned hustling over large balls from which many evils may arise which are, god forbid, broadcast despite the blackout. Against this univocal “habitat”—arch enclosure from theatre to pro shop—the poetic work should imply a “repertoire of others” to correspond with the irruptive prosody beneath the astroturf, Zonk calls “our greatest enemy.”
            The epinicia thus bent the procession by strophe, antistrophe, epode to zero on the gains and annotate the flows of beef, hardened into allegory. Value stickummed to resuscitated monuments. Now deform that with that which comes from elsewhere, tear it or cut it, squash it or crumple it, then paste. We’ll ask for nothing and derange the feeling in time by which the painted airs block the zone according to a logic of free giving and receiving. Symmetrical velleity subbed out for insolvent prosthesis in the diorama, gleam of silver in a shoe bag.
            A bowl for the atonal utterances of collected gossamer kitsch-glyphs in the palms. Use it. Through this impossible dream, the problem with perfectionism in poetry is the same as it is in football, as Lee Offman says:

We’re in the air, we’re on the ground
We’re always in control
And when you say Miami
You’re talking Super Bowl