For Laurence Weisberg
To register moment by moment the language of translucence and eruption puts one far beyond the practical content of the daily wage earner. One is no longer magnetized as a captured wattage measured by concerns of the marketplace. One burns with telepathic sensitivity, with alchemical non-sequitur, one’s daily renewal consumed by “hidden number.” One then walks on ground “prepared by vast space,” like a dazzling but invisible leopard, always kinetic at the cusp of a strange interior daybreak. Such was the odyssey of Laurence Weisberg as he roamed day after day throughout a curious phonemic forest.
He did not carry a day planner, or pilot book by book a lucid literary archive, gaining name and recognition by sterility. Instead his ink would flare, the images transcend, as diamonds erupting at the borderland of beauty. Certainly not a conservative machination, or a practical polemic aimed at the reader engrossed by popular momentary concern.
Laurence wrote by means of faceless evanescence, his voice seduced by flames of golden lorikeers. Being an intrinsic wanderer, a scribe from the Chaldea of Artaud, Laurence was most at home sitting in dark cafes conjuring up sun dogs, or speaking from interior Oaxacas. This was the level of his work, never offering himself up to quotidian duality, or to the work bench of the critics. Instead he worked from the blueprint of the untouchable, from the “firmament of utopias.”
He has now ascended to poetic solar planes where the “ghosts stand erect in their uniforms of fire.” Yet he remains amongst us, as dweller alive with beatific concern, his voice illuminate over and above that which is reasonable, unconcerned with the elements praised by conversational description.
—Will Alexander