Irreveries of a Deserter

If there is but one theme for enduring bards — war — the first of all bards sang a song of desertion, forever embalmed in the first impulse of every artistic expression.

Well, what if some barbaric Thracian glories
in the perfect shield I left under a bush?
I was sorry to leave it – but I saved my skin.
Does it matter? Oh hell, I’ll buy a better one.

- Archilochus

Amongst the very first poems ever written is a poem of desertion, as if to say, 'Your values and the petty wars that serve them are beneath a dignity I want, and so I project to all future dissidents a form of experience — art — that turns its back on all that is given, all cultural values that I have not evaluated myself, to question them, and to learn to be free to create autonomous ones'. From then on, every original artistic impulse is inherently a form of criticism by its very existence. Every artist "sides with the deserter." (Adorno). Every contemporary calling to 'make art political' is the yelp of a footsoldier still yet ignorant of art. Every one of the thousands or millions of artists in our aesthetic era knows this in even the first brushstroke, even in the initial amusing of the faintest notion of giving up what lay before them, outside them, that which was not first questioned.

Beautiful American Music?

Who could fail to notice that a documentary portraying the boundless cosmic beauty and convalescent joy of Whitman's American poetry needed European bourgeois music to properly convey it? Has there yet been an American composer who has fulfilled this ideal of an evanescent music of cosmic proportion for the loafing and languorous? Perhaps only La Monte Young has come close.

"As I write, I am seated under a big wild-cherry tree—the warm day temper’d by partial clouds and a fresh breeze, neither too heavy nor light—and here I sit long and long, envelop’d in the deep musical drone of these bees, flitting, balancing, darting to and fro about me by hundreds—big fellows with light yellow jackets, great glistening swelling bodies, stumpy heads and gauzy wings—humming their perpetual rich mellow boom. (Is there not a hint in it for a musical composition, of which it should be the back-ground? some bumble-bee symphony?) How it all nourishes, lulls me, in the way most needed; the open air, the rye-fields, the apple orchards. The last two days have been faultless in sun, breeze, temperature and everything; never two more perfect days, and I have enjoy’d them wonderfully"

- Walt Whitman

The Adventurer, The Thing, & The Community

A group of people once tried to understand an enigmatic thing, and it was decided to understand it by mediating their experience. So they put an obstacle between the thing and them. Then, to understand the relationship between them and the obstacle, they mediated it with another obstacle. And so on and so on until they had a great many obstacles that formed an immaculate structure. Then they fell asleep inside it. When they awoke in the morning they agreed that this structure offered useful shelter, so they manufactured all kinds of furniture to get cozy in it, and art to adorn their new home with. Time passed, and they developed a community with solidarity, held discussions in which the community extolled the magnificence of it's own existence, and sang songs in circles while beating on drums. Then one day a stranger knocked on their door. They eyed him suspiciously, but benevolently invited him in to join the community. He said that was a kind offer, but he was only there to inform them that there was a great monster outside their building. He said, "I passed through these parts many years ago and saw this thing in a much less terrible form, it was, in fact, hardly visible, and I wondered what these people were doing wrestling with some phantasm of a mote of dust. I thought you were mad, and passed by. You can imagine my amazement upon returning many years later to see the unbridled growth of this beast! It's at your back door feasting on your trash right now. I simply wanted to tell you that it appears quite powerful, but maybe dangerous, that you should investigate and do something about it." With that, the adventurer departed. Many years later he passed by this same spot, only nothing was there. He barely recognized it and indeed checked his compass twice. Covered in weeds, a few ruins were all that remained to prove his intuition correct. He sat down and wondered what had happened. Had they got up and left? Did they vanquish the beast along with themselves? A minute passed, and as he stood up to move along, a mammoth snakelike thing slithered by his feet in the tall meadow.

Simple Clarity

Perhaps the artist’s greatest art
is not constructing and contriving.
But for aesthetic clarity
wipe away the artless smudges,
on the glass that looks to life

A Sincere Uncovering of Rocks

We want to be sincere, to speak from the heart, give our intellect over to another thing and so transform it, to uncover all the rocks with gentle hands and open eyes, to find the concealed soul that is papered over with the pollution of cultural wars and to nurture that glimmering soul, to defend it from the elements and foster its mysterious glow with our own mimetic glow until it’s a great big flame that burns bright and singular, and only then finds other light. But saying something is not the same as achieving it; those who sanctimoniously incant the word ‘sincere’ perhaps still subconcsiously believe in ancient superstitions. And those who value sincerity the most sincerely often end up most ironic: attempts at sincerity undoubtedly fail at least once, whatever the reason, and there is truth in the ensuing frustration that often leads to irony or sarcasm, both of which are useful in articulating sincerity without, however, fulfilling it. Like beauty, the millennial value of sincerity is a reaction … to ‘00s irony. Yet the presumption that they're the first to resist irony — as if no one had ever thought to be sincere before — expresses cynicism as well. (As if Hegel had not articulated the limits of irony two centuries ago). And like the way beauty in our era is sometimes conflated with normalizing a particular taste that has little to do with beauty, sincerity, when unfulfilled, is often replaced with a cloying sentimentalism, as if no one would notice that it was substituted last minute. The culture industry manufactures a dearth of images that prey on the understandable longing for sincerity in an era of readymade ‘attitudes’ from which to draw, attitudes of asceticism and calculation that seem to say, ‘Do not uncover a thing or get to the heart of anything, it will only bring misery to all’. Truly, if you value sincerity, be sincere, don’t just incant it because it’s the next trend. Go uncover those rocks, do not pretend to uncover rocks. Nothing’s worse than false sincerity. And what work it’ll be to actually mean it! What work it’ll be to heave those heavy rocks! What work it’ll be to steady the hand and with a surgical precision extract the word that resonates true!

On Saturdays We Convalesce

On Saturdays we laze, to drones of various flavors of eternity. The scarlet algorithm runs at the speed of psychic entropy in the candlelit forgotten catacombs that, rumor whispers, was once a stop on The Underground Railroad. A self-crafted minotaur embarks on becoming an apparition, released by a frenzy of differently toned harmonics, contemplating its own labyrinth of evoked episodic memories amidst a field of friends splayed out like subwoofers on pedestals-cum-coffins, transducers of themselves.

Upstairs an artist whitewashes a tire in a concrete garage, washes it on the desolate street that slopes forever into The Mighty Mississippi, just beyond an abandoned playground of sandboxes whose perimeter is defined by the sinuous encoiling of a mammoth cement snake. An image of Walt Whitman watches approvingly over us.

Brothers discuss possibilities and foreclosures on the verdant roof, sipping hyssop poison, excitedly awaiting an arrival of performances, as a daughter stays missing. The spring thunderstorm brews past the slow rust barges, small grouplets scatter free throughout the terraced gardened complex, lost, reflecting on, & off of the dissolution of boundaries.

A gaggle of dancers commingles on a wooden staircase lit by a single orange lamp at violet dusk, undulating with eachother, mawing together as one breaks off from the collective to throw fruit at the pile of bodies she once was. A husk of used watermelon flies in the silence. The dull splat of wet flesh hitting dank flesh falls & damply resonates the cool concrete floor. And awaiting, ever expectantly, announcements that never come. In its place a silvery shrine of mirrors is lit under a stone arch underground, as the sky bulges with phosphor balls of lightning in the distance. The voluptuous girl is inhumed in a soil of her own collecting, within a colorful ring of her own variegated narcissuses & ashes.

Tomorrow we will clean our bodies. And begin anew again.

Museum of Talking

The Deserter chanced upon an immaculate glass structure, but when he approached noticed it was smeared with grease and a crowdsworth of fingerprints. That there were so many entrances refracting in prisms all around concealed the fact that there was just one entrance, a thin sliver of an entry guarded by a sphinx who was currently out to lunch. The Deserter passed through, entranced by long faux-marbled hallways littered with busts of talking heads. Siamese twinned busts gossipping to each other, ruminating fickle feelings, mouths immaculately displayed. And of course doubled, tripled, multiplied by myriad visual and acoustic reflections. Layering with other siamese chatterboxes. Some asked for money. On the walls were scribbled instructions for how to become a chatterboxed double. These busts — aestheticized talking heads — often theorized about their own platforms (one of the few things they could see), their own reflections, their reflections overlayed with reflections of other chatty sculptures, pseudo-philosophized about the technology of their infrastructures, and speculated about what they'd be worth if they were exchanged for a different bust, amongst other.

The Deserter was transfixed, never before had he heard such a din of voices, polyphonic metababble become drone, distractedly catching stray snippets of phrases and exotic words. It was an active museum of talking, he thought to himself. And of course, free to enter, for nothing is cheaper than talk. But he noticed that he was the only visitor there and wondered why no one was coming to this museum. It seemed as if there were no humans around, and he recalled that the entire region was vacant, the villages had been left in place, abandoned. The Deserter realized that this museum of talk was designed to absorb everything in its vicinity, to find voices to adorn its otherwise vapid halls, to sing the praises of its vapid nothingness. Not long after, The Deserter felt museum-fatigue and needed to exit. Of course, even the exits were hard to find, because there were so many exits refracted throughout.

Eidolon

David Lynch is an American mystic in the Poe & Whitman tradition. Excepting the tragic beauty of Mulholland Drive, his best movie is The Straight Story, with it’s perfect clarity of a man who deserts his position in society to redeem love long lost, and resume abandoned dreams of the past. It’s not merely an American Pastoral (though it’s that, too), but a paradigm of artistic simplicity that is rare in these convoluted times. It’s form is reminiscent of a La Monte Young score: “Draw a Straight Line and Follow it.”

But even in his other films, a main theme is the doubling of characters -- tulpas, doppelgängers, eidolons -- all of which show up first in Poe, then in Whitman. "All that we see or seem / is but a dream within a dream" (Poe) is the lynchpin of Twin Peaks' Return, then asking, But who's the dreamer? Perhaps the dreamer is still Poe, and we are but phantasms in his dream.

Shock Value

In our convoluted warlike culture, the most shocking artwork is usually the simplest, most charming one.

Your Own Channel

After talking nervously about herself for fifteen uninterrupted minutes, the frazzled woman-child said, "You know what the difference is between you and me? You go with the flow while I resist it."

She thought she was a hot mess, but was truthfully just a mess.

The man replied: "True, I do go with the flow, but flowing freely in the currents of channels of my own making. I hope your frantic resistance is the hard work of creating your own channels, and not just the treading water in other people's channels. What could be less heroic than that?"

Wizards Love Money

One thing I've learned is that wizards are suckers. If you happen to cross one on your path to the market, you’ll see, they'll part with the secrets of the universe for a fleeting novelty or shiny coin.

Art of Sound?

The redeeming quality of 'sound art' is that it jettisons the superfluous in music: the pompous acting of performers, the meaningless visual effects, the contrived ritualism, the lazy default to technology, the barbaric acceptance of society’s inartistic language ... and reorients attention to the free contemplation of listening for the beautiful, cultivating the analytical, feeling for the imaginary, and longing for the utopian in music. All the other positive concerns of sound art shall be thrown oversea.

A Feast Unfit For Desertion

From up high a deserter surveyed the land to see where he might go. So many options! He was always drawn to the sea, so down he cascaded to the shore, where he thought he might find a bark and sail away from the false wars in the great petri dish of culture. As he approached the sea he was blocked by a collective of people gawking at a beached whale, mired in some strange ritual. He said to them, Wow look at that whale! And they replied that it wasn't a whale, but a giraffe. The deserter said, No, it's definitely a whale. They responded that it was definitely a giraffe, that giraffes’ were an important symbol for their cultural heritage, & that they would know better than him so he best shut up. But then the collective organized a meeting on the matter, & began to debate things like, But what is a whale, anyhow? What’s a giraffe? And so forth ad nauseam. With a languid and lolling magnificence, the deserter rolled his eyes and made to walk away, but the collective berated him for leaving. They said, Look at this beautiful creature that the ocean created for us to live off of, to feast on its meat, as they pointed to the obdurate lump of rotten carcass. To which the deserting adventurer replied, The meat is all rotten and will certainly make you sick, it's been festering here for way too long, it's about to explode its foul eviscera all over the place, so you'd better watch out. And the deserter backed up. But the collective would have none of it, they insulted him for being so ungrateful for the feast before them, and chased him down as he walked away, mocking him. But he couldn’t hear them, he was whistling too loud as he found a suitable bark. Just then, a fantastic explosion sounded, a gaseous knell rippled across the shore. The deserter thought to himself that there would soon be more disjecta membra, more barks, for more deserters.

Caesura

The general approach to culture today is to make more of it, to reproduce it ad infinitum. As if it means something to create more petri dishes without ever placing a single one under the cheerful microscope, or to enjoy the gut-cleansing culture. And never to understand what was grown, how this living and enigmatic life came to spontaneously emerge out of nothing, out of the thinnest, most elusive airs, the physical secrets of its magnificent growth, and what it might still yet grow into. And often, far worse, to use the culture grown in such labs merely for cultural warfare, to throw petri dishes at one another, to infect and overtake other cultures.

In some music, the caesura moment is a break in the structure of the fantastical world of it's images and ceaseless development, where, by the composition's own internal logic it momentarily breaks down and reveals the means and motives of it's fabrication. It is a critical moment, a break in something otherwise natural and taken for granted that reveals the awesome artifice of its unnatural, still mysterious, and very free human hand, and can trigger a crisis moment in the listener. A meaningful 'Aha!' moment where they glimpse something beyond what is taken for granted and now virtuosic in perfecting given habits or customs, and who are galvanized to renew their commitment to artifice, or to eschew it altogether. And then the moment passes, the ever-elusive ‘Aha!’ is swallowed up at the moment it is shown. Those who manufacture culture, who fabricate cultures, sell them, use them in culture wars, are a dime a dozen, they aren't very special artists. But the ones who can also cease doing so, who can see the means and the meaning of how and why a culture is fabricated from the first creative impulse, who masterfully build this break into the form of the artwork, to master the second-nature that engulfs it by wrenching it open just a little more, are the important artists.

Strawpeople

The Deserter chanced upon a field of straw-men and straw-women — a long, immaculately manicured landscape decorated with the finest, most luxurious strawpeople he had ever seen, their goldenrods reflecting the rosy gradient of sunset. He thought to himself, who built these strawpeople, some kind of straw-people artists? As he wandered by these large, intricate structures, he saw a school of artists intellectualizing beneath them, and upon listening realized that they were only there to build self-portraits. He was asked if he’d like to stay a while and render a self-portrait of himself as a strawman, to which he replied, ‘No, thanks’. But the school was upset, and berated him for turning down what was, they thought, a very generous offer. The Deserter replied, “Just because someone offers me a coupon for fast food doesn’t mean I need to take it and kill myself slowly.” The school was insulted, and said that he’d never work around there again! He had no plans to anyway.

As The Deserter turned his back and left, shuddering at the sight of these menacing and mocking strawpeople glaring insipidly into the long night of civilization, he thought to himself — There’s no need to build strawmen or strawwomen because there are fields full of ‘em ready to go! And they’ve spent a lot time and resources self-constructing their own wispy structures. Just let the wind blow these poorly figured structures over or let some wildfire consume them — if you go spending time with these frail nothings you’ll end up burning with them! Go create something meaningful.

And off he went.

But as his back was the sexiest part of him, a couple of strawpeople-artists followed him without his knowledge.

So Prolific!

It is a nauseating custom today to label something 'indulgent'. Is indulgence so terrible? Isn't the point of life to enjoy it's pleasures and to multiply them in great abundance? I side with the artist who is so enthralled with their creations, who is always on the evocative edge of some great masterpiece-to-be, inspired to constantly share the process, for the transcendence of our era is that rare moment when a group or individual senses that a great sea-change in values may soon yawn and welcome new creations, that indeed one's prolific art is already part of such a change. What great education there is to be had there, the exposure of the iterative procedures, the small decisions made glacially, over many years, that have taken the artist to such great discoveries. The artful revelation of artists' secrets with an exhibitor's flair that harbors no reverence for repressive inhibitions.

But there are those who simply cannot handle a feast, who walk into a luxurious store and break down in despair at being exposed to so much material, who are incapable — incapable of desiring, at any rate — of synthesizing all this disparate material, of taking pleasure in drawing constellations and making new stories from the great wealth of material formed and exposed. Instead of rising to the challenge, their response to such wealth is to leave the store, not before they’ve had a melodramatic seizure in the aisles, perhaps write a bad review of such plenitude recommending others stay away from such a monstrous cornucopia. When they meet such an artist face-to-face and have to say ... something to them, they'll say something like, "You're so prolific", an ambiguous nothingness that sounds like a compliment — and is indeed truly a compliment — but which is meant as an underhanded insult, as if to say, 'Can't you make something I can easily digest in a fraction of a second, because you know I don't really care enough to take an active role in making appearances meaningful, Who has time for this anyway'. The prolific artist then knows they can only make art for loafers and do-nothings who know the joy of convalescence, and desire to know it better.

An artist may opt to be prolific for many reasons, out of pathology, lack of self-reflection, ambition, and so on. But one reason is because it may be artistically truthful: an artist creates works which are effulgent celebrations of life, odes to the life of the mind, free explorations of color, shape, line, etc., and such celebrations ought to be prolific, are true to form when they freely effloresce, from the germ of the tiniest reflection they unfurl into the spring air. The word prolific … 'pro life'. Those who are against proliferation ought to at least acknowledge that they are anti-life.

Youthful Beauty Regimen

People often inquire about the secret of my youthful beauty.

And I always respond that my youthful beauty results from a simple diet of wild bugs for which I foraged, an effortless mere few minutes a day. I also must explain that my youthful beauty comes from easy, the easiest listening to hours upon eternal hours of drone music, whilst laying down, loafingly gazing at stars and distant planets. When forced to break my silence on these annoying occasions, I laconically respond that my youthful beauty is the natural result of never laboring, and getting at least 13 hours of sleep a day, filled with interesting and vibrant dreams that my remaining waking hours artistically mimic. When this is still not sufficient to these resentful judges, it's necessary to include the fact that I have sex — passionate, loving, mutually ecstatic sex — whenever desirable.

The Physics of Unblocking

After ignoring the ignorant question for as long as possible, The Physician explained, "You have to think like a mass to break one up, to think about how it clogged the artery to begin with, how it coagulated in the pipe. You see, it's not really a unified mass, it's a random conglomerate of disparate materials that just accumulated. And then, simply petrified in the vein."

The random questioner continued to torment The Physician ... "But these materials have now formed a great solidarity, they look out for eachother, attracting more materials."

The Physician's nervous system rolled its eyes... "That's the problem, that's why I need to use some caustic to break up this disgusting glut of rotten debris, so other things that want to pass can pass through, & get to where they want to go."

The insufferable insistence persisted, "But isn't the point to jam these pipes, aren't they means to ..."

Just then The Physician, wearing a mask & gloves, dislodged the mass & handed it to his tormentor.

"If you like it so much why don't you keep it?!"

But the tormentor nearly fainted from the foul odor.

Crime Stories

We love crime stories not for any moral or reflection of reality, but allegorically as an example of breaking free from those constraints. When crime shows, books or movies dally in moralism — was this character good or bad? — they are in poor form, and totally backwards. When they try to be realist, or ‘street’, they miss the appeal completely. (The "critics" who take the bait, & can myopically see nothing but a moralist's tale for reality are in far worse form.) What really attracts us to characters no matter how evil or good, who escape prison, who evade the law, is that they are not fully formed humans at all, but almost represent something like an agent of thought, a free radical which has somehow managed to break free of the constraints that reality imposes on us, and that we are hardly even able to imagine cracking, a lab-rat that transcends the maze. Every so often there is proffered to us an image of what this might entail, and our faculty that values freedom, ingenuity, and freely associative thought awakens, is stimulated, like a dormant, resonant thing in wait for such a moment, electrifying our analytical synapses to excitingly study how such a miracle might come to be.

I am not …

In Virginia Woolf's The Waves, the characters often begin their fragmented sentences with "I am not", or "I cannot"; "I cannot be"; "I will not be". Each of the six monologues define their respective identities by negative proclamations; by difference; by what they are not and cannot ever be. What is often considered as missing from art today is a meaningful identity or a clear purpose … but the opposite rings more true. What feels missing is the spirit of saying 'no, I am not this, this, or that, nor can I ever be this, this, or that'. The spirit of saying, 'I don't know what I am', and the ability to develop this negation through relentless iteration, so as to articulate images of what could be.

Indifference

Some 'minor' artworks propose an indifferent attitude, as if they'd rather observe a mote of dust than the carnivalesque spectacle forced upon them. Such radical irreverence is a form of genius that cultivates a special expansiveness in it's attention to seemingly insignificant details, that can find eternity in a grain of sand.

Virginia Woolf's theory of fiction claimed that there is no detail too insignificant to include in the totality of the work. Analogous to film, which Benjamin observed was able to focus on the marginal things which are presumably constitutive of subjectivity, but also not yet recognized as such, literary inclusions of meandering thoughts focus on those things that we know that we know, but don't yet know that we know… like the pathologically fidgeting hand that is always active, nervous, but rarely thought of.

Minor artworks propose that the way to properly perceive the world is no longer dependent on the overly direct act of standing in awe in front of an epic, and straining one's eyes in reverence for the moral. Rather, apperceptive modes of reflection imply an almost peripheral experience, postulating that in order to experience something properly, one must not even really look at it, but perhaps look with it, indirectly, in acutest irrevery. This apperceptive faculty comes from the self-understanding of one's perception as not merely watcher, but also watched, the watched watcher, in sympathetic resonance with other objects. One grows eyes on the side of one's head, like a fish, or develops a form of cognition like a fly's refractive eyesight that takes in ever more distracted objects in their detailed particularity.

A Deserting Conjuring

I desert, eyes seered shut, & conjure.

The lawyer with her rosy buttcheeks by the old, cold window pane that overlooks a silent, deep snow, her long red hair draped over her slender, pale body that harbors a missing uterus.

The rushed insight at a checkout counter, paying for carne asada, with the scent of horchata wafting, where I explain to a friend that I cannot accept a sugarmama because I am too addicted to falling in love.

The desperate clutch of a sick wife on hardwood floor with child & toys, watching in desperation as her husband departs with a slingshot slung over his cold shoulder, ringlets shuddering in the night of brick garden movies.

The lone electric composer in The Octagon, in a verdant desert that just received first rain in a year, as local inhabitants bustle outside snapping the heads off locusts, & eating the leaping plague.

The snaggletoothed redhead brother who summersaults on a lonely trampoline in West Virginian verdure, awaiting his sister who winds through Appalachian roads driving toothless old murmuring men to the marble factory.

The bearded midwesterner who diligently heats his iron, bending metal to his fiery will, warping bronze to the specific negative shapes of historical artifacts.

The wandering critic, richly impoverished stillborn bard of a neverborn species, keenest eyes that permute through highest standards, moving prism of ideals in an endless shade.

The smoking woman with yellowing teeth and green hair, forever just released from psychiatric ward, avoiding convalescence with confused commitments, feeding the world leftovers as her spirit starves with sacrifice.

The sculptor restless in a rut, a grove of birch trees and dripping sap, books of colored braille & genome sequences, smattering of bells patina'd jade with urine.

The door slams open & I awake in my workshop, drafting triangles and marvelously sealed silver risers in stolen silence.

Painting as Shield

Just as the chorus wall found ecstatic limitlessness in the illusory image reflected from its boundary — this bounded limitation as projection screen — painting achieves self-reflective expressivity through self-imposed limitations, both from within and against society. Artworks may be a type of parrying shield against reality. Aboriginal and Oceanic parrying shields were used both practically — for fending off arrows — and aesthetically, for ceremonial dreaming rituals. Modern painting retains both elements. Their content is external, their designs are for the reality they wish to keep out, concealing an undeveloped and projected internality, even though this projection is always necessarily misplaced onto its exterior as a form of distraction. Their paradox is that they seem to say, "Nothing to see here, move along!", while also announcing themselves so boldly with fantastic decorations that they nearly invent curiosity itself. Every aspect of a painting's surface is suffused with the negative stuff that aggressive reality repels off of. Just as a personality has no 'deeper' personality until their defense mechanisms and masks are constructed and radiated at the world, a painting's social character is its antisocial movement; paintings emerge before the character which they apparently protect. Similarly, poetry does not speak to everyone, but at everyone, as defensive images that parry society and in so doing create boundaries of self-reflection for an offscreen internal radiance we don't actually see. Artworks are inadvertently made for what they keep out, pointing to other, more elusive phenomena. This is in part why 'analysis' of artworks is so interestingly perverse and meaningfully wrong: artworks really weren't meant to be reflected upon in this direct way, but are always also distractions from that attention. It is also why paintings are still best experienced in passing, almost peripherally, or all at once in a concentrated glance.

Breaktime

What bliss is found in the idle times of Terence Malick's films. Days Of Heaven is exemplary — for a brief moment the drudgery and immiseration of machinery halts, and a hitherto stressed family is permitted to laze around in the tall golden grass that seems to unfold infinitely beyond them, enveloping them in tranquil caesura, and enmeshing them in a hazy dreamscape. Tree Of Life also has this timeless affect — a family sprawls out over a diaphanous suburban lawn, expansive and languid, sympathetic agents of the prolific gaseous nebulas of the cosmos. All activity ceases for a brief moment. Pure primordial atmosphere. Even in The Thin Red Line, a war movie, the soldiers are initially distributed like figurines across a hilly landscape that dilates across the horizon. Activity is irrelevant. One feels there with all of them. Free time seems limitless. Structures of rationalized life fade. No need to follow humdrum eating and sleeping routines. When one is tired they nap in the grass. When one is hungry they turn over and gnaw on blades of grass — idle time as atmosphere for ruminations.

Idling is an important quality of Beckett's trilogy as well. Molloy dawdles his way to his mother's house, nibbling at grass in ditches on the way, ditches that he may have stumbled into for weeks or months. The Unnameable's transformation into a lawn ornament, or some statuesque object kept in an urn, is no mere passivity—the transformation is the rare achievement of an otherwise taboo idle time in which thought can roam free.

Dawn Anew

Sometimes I want to be mature. When my manly arms carry fragile bundles of baby flesh through smoke-ringed fields and irradiated cavalcades of bitter daggerers, I am the last nurturer of The Cheerful Dawn. When my sinewy legs arrive at last in your doorway, covered in the sweat of industry, and my boots are thoughtfully slipped behind as we writhe naked as sine waves on the soft carpet ambience, contemplating the likelihood of comets, we are remembrance of possibility, lighting a final vigil on some jaggedly cut edge. When I'm calmest still-life as a burning stick of incense with cancered child, cosmic advisor to all the hot-messed girls that are cooling quick, the fields are churned and I never look in resentment back on the days' toiling, but excitedly for the work that's yet to come.

Rhizomes Are Annoying

In the riparian high desert of Arizona there is a utopian architectural project called Arcosanti, it has been in an interminable process towards completion since the late 60s. Banalized by muted public disinterest, it attracts leftovers: geniuses, wanderers orphaned since the 60s, Japanese architecture students, and blinded visionaries. It is both a strange and familiar endeavor, a synthesis of high modernist architecture and the socialist community experiments of the early 19th century, with a cosmic theory of humanity's progression into an ultimate womb, or 'omega seed' as an overtone whose conceptual transience draws attention to itself. At Arcosanti, in and around its desert-cubist architecture that appears to have grown as a matter-of-natural-fact from the silt itself, there is a small sustainable farm in the valley that is designed, or downright demanded, to mutually reciprocate with the architecture, often as a form of beautifying it with added utopian function. Paolo Soleri, the visionary architect, prohibited the growing of flowers on the grounds that they are too decorative. Uselessness was not beautiful to him.

In the early 80s many of the residents—perennial campers—did a bit of research and decided that growing something called Bermuda Grass would be a good idea, to give visual substance in the form of familiar greenery to the arid dirt. Bermuda grass is a type of grass cultivated for places not unlike Arcosanti, specifically because it takes root easily and can grow just about anywhere, anyone can then have a lawn. It accomplishes this through its form of densely woven rhizomes that are implacably resilient; nearly indestructible veins, surprisingly similar to white plastic tubules that look vaguely familiar but one can't say what it is they reference. By 2003 the Bermuda Grass had taken over the entire farm in some form or another, underground, overground, or both. This isn't that dramatic, the farm was more of a glorified garden. Those who embraced the idea of planting Bermuda Grass in the 80s were long-gone, transient vesicle that Arcosanti is, and who were rendered as legacy in a somewhat negative sense. By the early 2000's much of the farm's plants, trees, and crops had been, or were in the process of being strangled out of existence by this grass. No one predicted this. And perhaps no one could have. Nothing could safely be planted but things were constantly planted anyway. The farm was an underground network of rhizomes that could not be seen or imagined, that choked everything it came in contact with, without pause or rest or discernment.

So, the younger farmers, more like amateur gardeners who were there to learn something novel, had to instead contend with this unrelenting substance everyday of work. The excruciating days of the workers were conditioned by one terrible decision decades earlier, a decision that at the time seemed infallible. Who could anticipate such success, after all, of grass in the desert? In order to remove the Bermuda Grass one had to dig 18 inches underground in the caliche ground, though it wasn't exactly caliche. And it never rained. One had to then pull at the 'roots', which was like hacking at thousands of buried synthetic volleyball nets that never really broke down, though they did disintegrate into brittle little bits that would recultivate incessantly. But with the soil so naturally hard one couldn't achieve that satisfying feeling of pulling a root out completely, with that dull snap that resonates through the arm giving clear indication of success. The sun was strong, obviously, but the wind was more irritating, blowing relentlessly for five months of the year. The wind was far worse and maddened the sundried brains of the indolent weeders. With the hard soil the roots would snap at any place, and all places in that network were homogenous, one couldn't find a way to navigate it because it was without contour. So, the digger would have to fill in the hole and move to the next tile, so to speak. But even this posed problems, because when one has to repeatedly stab at the ground in order to break it, one is also inevitably stabbing a conduit of Bermuda Grass as well, so by the time one reached the obligatory and calculatedly recognizable 18 inches deep, their hole and their pile of dirt would be riddled with hundreds or thousands of tiny rhizome fragments which were necessary to sift through and remove, because they could, and would inevitably re-root. So one slumped on the ground sorting out dry and sun-hardened dirt clumps from the rhizome strands that were cooked into them, which one always necessarily missed because the manual system devised by the management couldn't really compete with a form of nature already vile but all the more so because it had been given warranty by human beings decades earlier to be much worse than it would have been, left to its own devices. Humans had given this nature an added value of ceaseless dominion, so to speak. And each day was like this, because there was no other solution presented than simply eradicating the mistakes of the past as best as one could, a best which necessarily fell interminably shorter every day. Resignation was never really an option, though the farm was not really important to anyone. The best solution would have been abandonment, moving to another location out of reach.

The Squirm Artist

There was a day, that when asked to speak about his art, The Last Composer refused to say anything at all. Many decades in the wilderness passed, softened him a bit, and so he started to respond to such inquiries … … “No”; offering no explanation for why. Then The Last Composer was forgotten again for many years, left out like a stick of forgotten butter, and softened a lil bit more, and The Last Composer muttered that anything worth gleaning could be gleaned through the experience of the work firsthand, so perhaps shut up and just enjoy the music in that cold, peripherally analytic way that humans today love to experience things. Years later, more hands covered in more callouses pressed The Last Composer’s pliable body more and deeper, and he managed to say that he always valued artworks with many facets, like a diamond the beholder can rotate and perceive differently at every glance, encountering the limitations and possibilities of their own aesthetic reflections, which is the very opposite of pedantry, and every time he spoke he betrayed the art. But they were still not happy. It wasn't until later that The Last Composer learned they didn't really want to have such reflections, and had never listened to his music at all, but simply wanted to see him squirm when having to speak. Twas entertaining! Becoming pliable, peristaltic and contorting, this was the beginning of his transformation into the First Squirm Artist. The more exquisitely The Squirm Artist dangled like a worm on the end of a silvery steel hook gleaming in the violet light, the more successful he was. The more freely he —it— writhed, free-floating and languorously serpentine in the arid dusk, the more the masses came to watch. But it always wondered, what was it bait for?

Allegory of the Weed

The Domesticated Vegetable: Weed, stop sucking up all my nutrients!

The Weed: Actually, I can exist in your garden without stealing your nutrients. In fact, I can thrive on much less than you

V: Yes, but you taste so bitter & stringent!

W: The finest chefs & physicians know well the culinary & health benefits of bitters

V: But you are so ugly!

W: I am ugly because gardeners constantly hack me down. But it is because I am hacked to bits and pieces above ground that my roots are so vigorous. I can't even see your anemic little roots. Besides, my flowers are much more effloresent than yours, and aren’t flowers beautiful? You may be tasteful, but I am beautiful

V: But you're so useless!

W: A weed is just a plant which people haven't found a use for yet. Is it my fault that garden-tenders are so closed-minded & unimaginitive? I am proud of my uselessness, for it evokes a vastly free garden with new uses & needs beyond the current one.

V: But you are on your own, not part of the garden at all!

W: But I’m here, aren’t I? And you, you are so dependent. You can't even drink your own water. Often, you can't even stand up on your own. While I'd shoot straight to the sun if no one stopped me. You could learn something from my independence.

The Desperate Butterfly

There is a person who flits like an exotic butterfly about town in the most elegant clothing, locks flowing like an Adonis, and whose beauty is matched only by the specificity with which people ignore him, as if their eyes would burn if they looked upon him, and their tongues twist and knot if they spoke to him. They disregard him because they want to look at him, and they do not like to do what they want to do. They talk behind his back, jealously, and say things to the effect of, How dare he rise above us, let's ignore him out of existence, let him perish in isolation or become ugly and miserable like the rest of us. But, personally, I never really found him to be that beautiful, to be honest. Fashionable, tasteful, refined, sure. But beautiful, I don't know. One day at a bar he was sitting alone, and as I was also sitting alone, I endeavored to talk with him, despite the mocking jeers I received from the locals. But I wasn't from around there, so what did I care? He was so shocked that someone spoke to him, and became attached to me instantly. For he was so alone and desperate for love, desperate for something real beyond mundane reality, anything beyond the ugliness of that community, which, he said, took a perverse pleasure in tarnishing all that was or could be beautiful. As he walked out of the bar with his nose in the air, he did not notice the garbage that clung to his fashionable shoeheels, which this flaneur proceeded to drag through the streets in his long walks. The following days I couldn't get the image of his sad, desperate, almost pathetic eyes out of my mind, they haunted my dreams … in a good way. It was only then, when randomly dreaming, the daydream that forced itself into my daily tedium vitae like a searing wedge, dreaming of those longing, desperate eyes, that I found him beautiful for the first time. But was it then, he that was beautiful, or was it my dream?

Late Artists

The Bureaucrat went to an art exhibition, and was surprised to find an acquaintance of hers showing art there. The Bureaucrat immediately approached her artist friend, and said, "I had no idea you made all this art." To which the Artist replied, "There's a lot about me you don't know, I am actually an unrecognized artistic talent, and even a few wise sages have hypothesized that I'm perhaps the most interesting artist of our era." The Bureaucrat — who made a living from selling artists — was at first charmed that someone could sneak under her radar, but quickly soured on the artist for having the audacity and arrogance to call herself an artist of this rigor without yet paying her dues, and she cleverly quiptificated, "But you aren't truly an artist until you pay your dues, and, only after many years of being vetted by institutional juries are finally recognized by the community. Only then are you allowed to make and exhibit art. Truly, the art cannot be interesting until then." Dumbfounded that The Bureaucrat had arrived at this judgment without even looking at the art, The Artist glanced at the other artists around and said to them, "Only a true bureaucrat could conceive such a bureaucratic vision of art." But no one was there. The Bureaucrat asked who The Artist was speaking to, and The Artist responded, "Artists who have not yet arrived."

Of Sails, Obstacles, & Yawns

Pliable as I am, I cannot be made into an obstacle. An obstacle is not my role in life, I am no tilted arc, I am a wind-in-the-sails, all-too-enabling & invisible form, a gentle breeze of nothingness that shifts all things & moves indifferently onward to greater nothings. Or a plougher of fields in all directions.* Even & especially I am that coolest, most arid invisible sailing wind via constructive criticism … though it hardly appears as criticism as such. It is why I am surrounded by free-thinkers, wildmen & Amazons engaged in orgies of one kind or another — orgies of love, despair, committment, silence, reason. Perhaps I am the crack you fall into on your obstacled path most-traveled, a sanctuary-abyss you slowly carved away at each day, & over the dull years become gaping, yawning, in which you sprout coal-dusted angel's wings & learn to fly, pluming dust all around you. But those who perceive such sweetly arid winds as threatening may be the true obstacle, & not a sail at all. They are obstacles to themselves.

* Trotsky: "Please write about anything you can think of!"

The Last Artist

Around the bonfire a few successful artists were talking about the most important book of their era, who pedanticized in the most novel way about never having had an aesthetic experience. They proceeded to affirm this by going around the fire and, in great detail of absence, saying that each one has also never had an aesthetic experience, as if, maybe, embarrassed to admit they might have. Until it came to one last, flabbergasted artist -- who no one liked -- and who reluctantly had to break silence, "What?! Do you get dressed in the morning and choose which clothes to wear based on their colors and shapes, after waking from emotional dreams that slideshow fantastic images, and then move about the city watching and judging other people's cosmetic decisions, eating lunch based on tastes and presentations of tastes, gazing at the architecture of buildings and marvelling at the methodical fabrication of their artifice, then bingewatching tv shows or movies deep into night that demanded thousands of aesthetic decisions by thousands of people all of which your highly developed faculties immediately grasp and form snap judgments on, or perhaps even attend an art exhibition or read a book or simply scan social media with an even more rapidfire flickering of aesthetic judgment, or perhaps make art yourself since you call yourselves artists, and then drift into visceral reveries before falling into the induced dreamshow of the following night, maybe after having highly specific forms of sex determined by proprioception, visceral scent, and intricately formalized positioning? Are your senses and attendant judgmental faculties totally closed, or do you just think it's hip to say you've never had an aesthetic experience, secretly wishing it were so because you're immersed, buried in aesthetic experience and actually probably know nothing else other than aesthetics? Or perhaps you're right, and aesthetic experience is determined by the quality of intellectual reflection on it, as such, which you seem to have no soul for?"

...

"Dinner's ready!"

The group needed a change of scenery, while the last artist jumped straight into the fire and burst into flames.

Petrified Lightning

They say, "Pick a side" …

… Sayin things like, "You can't be good & evil ... you must be one … or the other " … "us … them". Etc. …

Manufacturing sand, wringing bound hands, so that they can draw more straight lines in it, submerged with hamfists. Why not instead go for a swim in the ocean, enjoy the beach, the alluring wind blown in from some distant land? Some people aren’t beach people. They see a beach & feel warlike.

And you think to yourself, with unprecedented bitterness & seething hatred, naturally oscillating with a divine magnanimousness of spirit & perceptual clarity of cosmic proportion, "Is it possible... could it be …… no …….. has this human really never seen, heard, or touched, even vaguely sensed a fallen angel?"

Fallen angels may opt to fly above such petty lines, back & forth, from an elevation that renders the perception of such lines an arbitrary point on the false silica shores of humanity …… or burrowing deep beneath, fraternizing with the peristalstic worms & maggots of rot that is the profoundest earthliness ……… or, conjure the lightning that blasts billions of Joules, radiating through the shoregrounds, sculpting elegant fulgurite forms, empty & solemn glass-lined tubes into which the ephemeral lines of battle-minded littlemen & smallminded warchant-women are torqued, transmuted & given the only life they'll ever life, an eternal one that now lasts for centuries upon glassy centuries, & the only aesthetic form that is compelling to people with … different values. Petrified lightning, crystallized convulsions.

Wrong side of history

The pain of the soul today is the pain of being on the wrong side of history. We always expect that our insights & our introspective gaze are eons ahead of the comrades of our time, & we are correct in assuming so, for in the freedom of our thought — the extent that we can access it at all — we are liberated from the constraints of poorly manufactured trends. More than ever, all of psychology & the industries of science are put to the task of manufacturing a trend that preys on the mind & distracts it from what is important, whatever that may be. Most don't care to ask. But those who dare to break the stranglehold & imagine something ... else ... are confronted with a rare feeling of excitement, even beauty, that they are immediately motivated by the desire to share whatever it is that came to light. And usually it is still a dim light, perhaps scantly illuminating a fragile, evanescent figure of the mind like those found in the deepest sea, & which are so delicate that they scarcely seem to exist at all. But where is this deep sea diver's empathy for such a frail creature, in wanting to bring it to the surface, where crowds gather to gaze upon it in the sunlight that would immediately wither it's oh-so delicate veins? Wouldn't it be better to leave it at the bottom of the sea? Or perhaps the more important task is to prepare the insensitive crowds for such creatures, to invert their industries & cultivate a new sensitivity that could receive these creatures.

Time Thieves

It is not very easy to work at work. By 'work' one can assume a dayjob, an activity done under compulsion & obeying the crude law of means & ends. Over margaritas one night with an old sculptor friend visiting from Chicago, we shared anecdotes of time-stealing at dayjobs. When stories are usually "shared" they actually feel more like competitions, & we soon fell into a friendly competition regarding who stole time in a more mischievously eloquent form. Not unlike a versus or dub reggae sonic battle perhaps. Stories are smuggled into conversation not to amuse, entertain, or connect with their listener, but more often to provoke some sense of awe, to brag, to show-off, as if to say, "Look, I too have had an experience & might be considered human". It usually has the opposite effect. And often to compensate for the mundanity of daily life—how many 'stories' has one heard where almost nothing impressive is related (drinking stories), but a true & rare excitement is sensed in the frustrated primate eyes of the poor teller? The mute eyes tell stories more than the mouth. It's as if the slightest detour from daily circumscribed experience is enough to wake up the zombie from a fugue state. As if. The listener sees maybe a series of sparks that never really ignite. And would that it were so—who wouldn't rather hear a poorly told story that digresses from the twaddle of current event bellweathering?

Anyway, my friend won this battle. When working at an architectural firm he was given a computer in an open workspace, so his coworkers, boss, any general voyeurs passing by could always see what he was working on. His ingenius solution was to load a .pdf of a book he wanted to read, & in a smallest readable font, but eclipse the entire text excepting the bottom line with a window pertaining to his work (ie the work he was getting paid to do). He would then read the book line by line at the very bottom of his monitor, methodically scrolling.

Whereas, apparently the best I am capable of is telling other people's pseudo-stories from my work desk.

Other People's Food

There's something yet to be learned about the meaning of eating someone else's food. Not sharing food, not having a meal, or a feast with friends or a dinner, but eating someone else's food when you're not supposed to, or at least not expected to. One of my most surprising sexual encounters came from gently stealing a pulling of pork from the plate of a young lady at a party. It was mere drunkenness that made me limber enough to do this sort of thing that normally I'd be too uptight or polite to even consider. She wouldn't stop following me for the rest of the night. It wasn't until a few years & a lifetime later when I was laying in bed one night & like a flash out of nothing realized that the eating of her food was the only reason.

How many busboys eat off of plates barely touched when taken back to the dishwasher? A friend told me once that as a server at a fine dining establishment she had a very difficult customer. She provided the most excellent service to this couple, but the wife remained taciturn. It was certainly not the food, the food itself was impeccable. When my attentive but frustrated & confused friend cleared her plate this snobby patron had not even touched her perfectly cooked steak. Though she evidently intended to eat it because it was neatly cut into bite-sized bits. Was it an unpleasant date? Anorexia? Whatever it was, my hungry friend (those shifts are long, after all) was not one to let a perfectly cooked steak go to waste, so she efficiently consumed it in back of the house. Upon returning to the table she asked them if everything was OK, that she noticed the steak hadn't been eaten, before settling the bill. The date of this intransigent woman clarified that everything was great, compliments to the chef & all that. It was just that it was a long day for them because his speechless wife had just undergone dental surgery, & was only able to suck the juices out of the steak.

The Smarted

Smart people are the biggest tools. Smartness is something endemic to our productive era, meaning that it also returns smartness as such to something useful for barbarism. 'Smartness' stands in direct opposition to free- associative thought or reflective intelligence by its inherently refining character of perfecting an already given object. Smartness is unable to imagine anything original. 'Smartness' retains its original meaning as a physical quality — a sharp tool. To smart means to sharpen. Valuing smartness as such — merely the act of sharpening — would be pointless, and any avant-garde — the cutting edge — inherently understands this absurdity, forcing reflection to confront the limits of intelligence in our era. But usually smartness is simply valued subconsciously as a tool for domination; institutions appropriate & implement the smart to whittle away their competition; evacuated of technology, smartness would be indistinguishible from the cunning of animals who outsmart their prey, and in many cases analyze them through slow, painful torture. Images of geniuses that smart themselves out of their own domination — escaping from prison for example — remain ideal, not reality. Division of labor ensures the inability of smartness to surmount its situation; the smart are lawfully prevented from using their advantage for the betterment of their own situation, which the smart conflate with becoming more sharp. But the perfected tool can hardly know anything other than its outwardly directed aggression that with each cut becomes a little bit sharper or a little more brittle, a bit sharper or a bit blunter until it is whittled away to a frail point. If it is to remain sharp, an external object, a whetstone, is needed. Perhaps our reflection is like one wet stone, turned to those myriad broken tools, the disjecta membra, which could not do adequate violence, and litter the floor as wasted potential.

Interpretation & Cockroaches

Today, the interpretive faculty itself is questionable, a question that has forced itself alongside an unprecedented proliferation of cutlure debris. To the extent that the art we see is indeed art & not just 'arty', artists still interpret the past. But the quality of the interpretation makes all the difference. The ability to put oneself in the origins of the artwork, no matter how imaginary that act is, via the instincts of one's predecessors seems more and more difficult. One would suppose that in barbaric times, people would 'revise' to their heart's content, imagining fantastical motives for historical forms that still captivate us, but it is the imaginative part of interpretation that is buried under academic 'rightness' of interpretation. The interpretive faculty itself seems distressed, nearly lost. Art history itself as an institutional study is expected to take over this practice, even though it cannot, because it lacks a certain practical and active interpretation. Art history is certainly a practical engagement of a sort, but it is not an adequate replacement (or displacement) for artworks, which are always also theories that interpret the meaning of the past. The question today, however, is whether or not in a much more rationalized and conservative society there is the possibility for interpretations that can resonate the imagination of the past, and if there is a possibility for 'feeling' what still remains sedimented, buried, unspoken. If there is freer instinct to what past works wanted to develop, where they seemed to want to go, but could not. There seems to be in some respects a much more constrained and rationalized interpretation of history, for example in the pedantry of much clever art that theorizes the development of all art history as siphoning into greater means of bureaucratic order. The contemporary 'historical artist' in a great deal of art takes the form of absolute identification with history, whether it be an identification with modern painting, 60s conceptual art, and so forth. But the eye cannot be the same as the entrail. And this identification—what on the surface looks ultra-historical—becomes ahistorical in its absence of interpretation, since past artworks are defined as much by where they wanted to, but could not yet go, as much as the form they actually took. In any case, the form they crystallized in is suffused with teleological direction — it is teleological direction, petrified, like an insect crawling across a room that died midway. Where was it going? Where did it want to go? Or was like a cockroach that, feeling its mortality, comes out of the woodwork, crawling into the open air to die & expose itself only at the moment of its death? Today the value is too often placed on the production, and not the interpretation of such cockroach activity. As if the floor isn't covered enough! The task at hand might rather be to interpret how something lived & died in the same instant. Even if that means imitating a dying cockroach.

Like a desert suddenly receiving rain, catalysis for trillions of teeming grasshoppers not otherwise present, manifold things swarm like a critical mass of cockroaches pilgrimaging to the center of a room to die. In an arbitrarily selected moment they emerge from the woodwork, fall from the ceiling, into the public domain. Crawling into sight for the first time, dormant mechanical activity awakened, they are not visible until they are dead, existent only by virtue of their trace. It is still not understood what impels such activity, behavior now rendered the stranger and more anxious by doing so en masse, sacrifice for the sake of transparency. Mass means to send away, maybe they attempt to tell us something with the evacuated contortions of their husks, presenting themselves sub specie aeternitatis. By the time we see the cockroach in the middle of the basement floor it is already dead, a husk of life, these words, too, is a cockroach, the empty husk of an idea only expressible in the totally unacceptable and graceless motion of a husk ill-suited, not even contrary, to the demands of what compels it outward. Traces of what once was programmed not to be. One could study the material, the How of its death, but the words, the husks, they were only ever proficient at distortion. So one can only study a distorted trace, effectually drawing more distorted traces, until the world becomes a brownout plume.

Lint

We experience the ages in the form of its lint, it cannot entirely disappear, but is reduced to numberless filaments by the abrasive weight of a not merely oppressive historical wind. Inside the palpable absence of a consolidated theory of history, in an epoch where historical development is longstanding paradigm, stray particles from the history of humanity accumulate in an unnervingly natural way, and also a naturally natural way. Unnatural filaments of the wind-wizened human subjected to enigmatic natural processes. We say we are allied with history, with its objects, that we love it so, but we really love its lint, the only thing that remains, rolled up into the pockets of barbarians who troublingly scent something beyond barbarianism in the lint, in its confounding presence. The vague intimation that the lint through which we experience an unfixed past, can be spun into various things, homes, new words, elevators to space, teases people. The smell of lint itself is coveted, its look placed in vitrines, its essence dissected and studied. There is lint everywhere, it has become a synthetic fiber, produced in immaterial factories, in the glass minds of men it is caught, it is in the air, it accumulates in the lungs, it weaves unnameable things in the air and then volatilizes, only to pill up again in the coat pockets of the young. And no one knows what to do with it, so everything is tried, lacking criteria, yearning for criteria, lint accumulating in an epoch sans reason, choked by the pluming dust of possibility. It ought to perish, instead it lingers in the infrastructure of experience, it is bumped into when one turns a corner, the brittle remains of the gordian knot are retied in the pockets by anxious and fidgeting fingers.

Underground Bars

There aren't enough underground bars. Literally underground, not as in culturally underground. There's something deeply pleasurable about spending a sunny afternoon in a dank cellar sipping a Guiness & a coffee (a favorite combo that a Pitt friend recommended years ago). You're supposed to be at work, but your affable childhood friend, who is also a drunk, convinced you to ignore it & meet him underground in the middle of the city. Every hour or so you'll emerge like a mole to suffocate your lungs in cigarette smoke & squint at all the passersby frantically going places, & who scowl at you like a school marm who is yet to be employed as such, & so works extra hard to act disapporoved at your smoking, which is now a taboo amongst the newly repressed youth, which is not coincidentally the exact time you took up the habit. And after relishing in that for a while, your friend will reveal the tiny but powerful bluetooth speaker he carried with him & play his own music selection overtop whatever punk muzak is on. And if anyone complains—even rightfully—a switch is flicked & he turns into adolescent rage, whining & berating closed-minded people who don't understand anything. And you stand there grinning like a drunken fool in friend-love. His girlfriend will call, & he says to act normal when she arrives with her friends. You are still a human-in-training, after all. They'll arrive & you decide that the only way to act normal is to not say anything at all, since every word that has ever come out of your mouth has betrayed you & occasionally ruined a strangers' life forever. Conversation about jobs, aspirations, ambitions, goals, possibilities! Personal histories & experiences that led beautiful women to their current luxurious successes. All that is & could forever be exciting! And when such beautiful, overachieving adults a fraction of a hair away from perfection itself ask you what you "do", what you're about, you don't just say nothing — you say "Nothing."

The Contradiction Rider

They very often called her writing sloppy, her ideas erratic, & her philosophy self-contradictory.

Which only confirmed that she was oscillating with a rare voluptuousness that filled the caves with dynamic reflections & complicated tonal shades that bewildered the cave-dwellers.

The best rider is the one who is all of the contradictions, & at the same time not a contradiction at all.

Do a lot of people feel like they're either genius or moron? That its inconceivable that they are mediocre? If so, it's probably a sign of mediocrity. Such an attitude is often accompanied by self-cancelation, a barely audible hum fearfully quavering just above & below zero, slow shadows of oscillating humans.

Until they embrace oscillation like a lover. One must learn to become a smooth, unaliased sine wave, riding the contradictions, hitting the positives & negatives at their extremities, where they glimpse what is outside the bounded, & the energy folds back over & onto itself into the listening spectrum.

Lesson from a Birthday Party

I'd rather lighthearteadly forage for an ignorant, drunken, narcissistic, untalented infant of a woman’s lost purse than endure conversations about the superior morals of social art.

Even if that purse carries a knife that was forged to stab me in the back by said community.

Program: Off

What a glitch knows is the dissonant feeling of shorting out. Perhaps one feels like a singing hologram brought to life one moment, but then their program is switched off & they return to the bliss of eternal nothingness, only to be flicked back on to see ornaments of people waiting on them to perform some aesthetic duty.

On the street the other day I saw a young girl ask her father where he went when he went away. "What do you do when you're not with me?" I could only imagine she perceived the father as existing at all as a father, & when he was 'off duty' he simply did not exist.

Writer Not Mathematician

It might simply be the case that humans are attracted to shiny things. All faculties, values, learned experiences & sacrificies made for some ideal ... all these things can be quickly trashed or exchanged for a mere passing glance at a radiant stranger, a sparkly new melody with the glossiest production. Perhaps this stranger is gesticulating wildly, or laughing loudly, perhaps the music has a particular brightness. All the better, loud noises & spectacles will arrest even the highest idealist like a moth near a cold light in primeval darkness.

Perhaps the reader would need to be furnished with an example to buy into this pseudo-theory? But the writer is not a mathematician, so he doesn't need to show the proof of his solution.

Unknowing

Occasionally your company will make a half-assed attempt to get to know you, or try to introduce you to their clients, public, friends, & so on through some cutesy personality feature-of-the-month. They may ask you to write something about yourself, or give you prompts such as, 'Where is your favorite place to go for fun?', or 'What do you like to do on your free time?'. And you might answer, "I like sleeping." or "I enjoy non-being."

Toy Dump

At a birthday party I attended one overly sunny Sunday afternoon, the birthday boy was given a plentiful tub of blocks, legos, & all kinds of ephemera, toy viscera. His mother took one look & saw only the mess it would make, immediately instructing him to put it away neatly. But the father—whom nobody liked—wisely said to the boy that he should dump it all out & spread it evenly upon the floor. He wasn't encouraging a mess, not directly at least, in fact he thought he was helping, & when chastized almost like a child himself offered his best explanation. The father argued that in order to put away the toys in a tidy fashion, or even play with the toys in any robustly free manner, the boy would need to see everything inside, all the components, bits & pieces in their entirety & separated out from each other. Only if the boy could see everything all-at-once would he be able to work with the material. Otherwise he'd be organizing in the dark.

The Cowboy Trucker

The cowboy in his semi-truck contemplated: When the "experts" many defer to advise them to jump off the proverbial cliff, or perhaps ingest some poison yet to be categorized & for that reason only deemed safe, the critic will still be standing alive, at the top, arguing perhaps to himself but still alive, watching flush bodies pile in greensick canopies below. The Cowboy had no truck with their alienated & self-sabotaging souls, his soul was devoted doubly: to self-pity and it’s self-overcoming. But how?

The actual work had yet to begin, much less The Cowboy's greatest work. And it would end long after his death. And yet to begin it must come from a dead place, he thought. A quandary! The Cowboy drew his best lizardskin frieze of a face, squinting out the window at the vorish sun. Out of the depths of his anticipation he watched it glint off the lone knuckle of some long-dead wolf roadside, who stared back from frozen ashes on a small hillside of ice. Somehow his soul believed in the world he had made.

Someone laughed at him from below.

"When it gets hard to hear it's time to try a new language. I think a new language will help."

There was truth hidden in that idea somewhere, waiting to be clarified.

Some lost kids had thrown a coin into a diorama of sorts. For the random chance of their new names? The Cowboy wondered. The gamble worked, they glared at each other, pleased about the forgery of their luck. Then they left to start new lives they'd soon forget. But not soon enough.

Things glistened in the foggy dawn, cattle muddied in white light, the cat's eyes climbed steeply up the rungs of a large clock, the end was near.

"I'm going to close now & I'll see you in The Ring. How do you feel now? Is there anything left to say?"

Just inside the mouth of this snarl, a whistle seemed to echo from a floor below them, a throaty iron voice, & soon it became a question of what they needed to become to end the silence that had taken up the summer night. The Cowboy would become Nothing.

"Maybe now?"

"That's alright, I have a decade, where there’s been much more for a little less"

The old man sat there for a few minutes.

An insolent man came by smiling with excitement, not about the new snarl, but with questions about the old snarl. Some questions were too pressing, for some questions were not questions.

"Who's up there now?"

And the old man just looked on.

"It might be someone like you." And so on.

And yet another...

"Perhaps you don’t need answers but only a question. Your wisdom can change everything, you could speak words that have left their mark, but maybe that’s not the way."

"Maybe it's best to be silent this year."

A whiff of dust swept around the glittering miserable light of chartreuse linens where a couple sat, their sweat mixed together & dripped down their ears as they waited to be born.

Exiled Composer

The Composer Responded...

The form is macro level. I don't know or care what notes are in what scales, & all that detailed stuff. I'm the best piano player because I've never touched a piano with my hands. I'm extremely distantiated, observing myself as if I'm floating above myself, clearing a way for myself the way a curler makes a way for the object without touching it, transforming the entire landscape around it instead. And so it is with music dynamics, from which I zoom out, past the trees, past the forest, to see all forests that exist currently & have ever existed. I set the rules for setting forest growth on a strange planet. And I allow the forests to burn when they want. With the blink of an eye I change modes, from ancient Greek enharmonics to circles of squares of fifths, & back & forth again in iterations upon scores of iterations.

And this is why you have been exiled ...

Yes, the public has a primate's value of music. A musician is expected to beat her piano keys & inanely strum his stupid guitar like its a sport. When I perform I do it amputated, no limbs to get in the way.

Dis Appearance

The secret is knowing when to disappear. Everyone's trying to appear all the time, But to appear as disappearing. Well, that's the thing.

The one who is only seen from behind... where is he going?!

Is he deserting us?! Going to get us food? What is he up to?

How to turn one's back with grace is not something that can be taught.

Offering

I reject emphatically to accept the sacrificial offering of the artist as a fool who cannot speak, eloquenty in fact, saying the things that need to be said that those making the offering cannot & will not say, & who ...

Of course, if there were to be an offering, I would be the most delectable offering. And I'd be offended if I were not offered up.

Blown Minds

But why does a mind need to be blown? Is it like a bubble of molten glass? It's so easy to blow minds, If one has the right pipe & ability to light fire.

Is it that your mind is too easily blown? Or that the blower is too far advanced beyond your fragile little psyche? Or is it just different values—that some people need their mind to be blown because the mind's stranglehold on their existence is insufferable? Perhaps the blower simply values destroying things, & wanders the hillsides on the outskirts of cities like a wretched demon with a huge, gnarly pipe, blasting hellish noise into people's ears, resonating through their glass-skulls, sometimes shattering like eggshells, sometimes expanding, if the climate happens to be conducive. And then the blower wanders away, to blow other minds. The Blower has a warehouse filled with the petrified glass minds of men he fused from the earth.

The Deserter

The first lyric poet was also a deserter.

Legend has it that the boy Archilochus was out wandering pastures when his cow was taken & replaced with a lyre by the muses. Or was it his shield? His war instruments. Upon returning home to report this miraculous incidence to his father, he instead met the same parental ignorance that his far-flung descendant Jack, of beanstalk fame, endured with his small-minded, provincial idiot mother who feared deviating from custom. As time passed, Archilochus wandered through urbanizing Greece, lyre strung across a new, errant heart, resonating its empty husk of values. Whereas the epic previously dampened the heart with tiresome glory stories of war & social custom, Archilochus instead took irreverent pleasure in losing his shield, casually noting that he’d probably find another someday. All art since has sided with the deserter.

Archilochus’s Iambic “blame poetry” refers to Iambe, an old woman who made Demeter laugh amidst her woes searching for her lost daughter, as told in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. It implies that Iambic poetry—one half of Greek lyric poetry— is inherently a distractive art, a vulgarity that undermines tragic fate. By leveraging human apathy against the morality of fate it attempts to overcome the trauma inflicted on those groundless grounds.

The image of Archilochus deserting the army, the noble cause, curiously opting for something lesser than noble values, digresses from cultural tradition, & in so doing figures a powerfully indirect form of art. If the epics were ‘frontal’, addressing their listeners & readers directly with explicit values, almost propagandistically, lyric poetry looked away from the listening reader, as if to say, Do not follow me, I am an exception to morés, you will find no hero in these obscene mutterings, & you'd probably receive nothing in return for your deviation but swift kicks in the ass & a ruptured spleen. Obscene yet compelling mutterings! Such an attitude would get Archilochus banned from the city of Sparta for being immoral. It is not simply the low subject matter—food, sex, apathy—that was undesirable, but if we are to understand morality as a tablet of strict behavioral rules & thought taboos—merely questioning is enough to get a poet exiled. But does the poet care about exile?

Questioning is at the heart of the lyric, & is inherently critical. The lyric poem is not a positive alternative to traditional morality as it is a negative space for criticism & speculation in the playful suspension of values. This negative aspect of lyric poetry was philosophized as early as the Roman era by Dio Crysostom, who valued Archilochus over e.g. Pindar because Archilochus was critical of society.

Adorno said that the word critique has always been connected to democracy ...

Critique is essential to all democracy. Not only does democracy require the freedom to criticize and need critical impulses. Democracy is nothing less than defined by critique. Critique and the prerequisite of democracy, political maturity, belong together. Politically mature is the person who speaks for himself, because he has thought for himself and is not merely repeating someone else; he stands free of any guardian. This is demonstrated in the power to resist established opinions and, one and the same, also to resist existing institutions, to resist everything that is merely posited, that justifies itself with its existence. Such resistance, as the ability to distinguish between what is known and what is accepted merely by convention or under the constraint of authority, is one with critique, whose concept indeed comes from the Greek krino, “to decide”.

He also observed that no lesser artists than Kafka & Mahler “side with the deserter”. Art as we know it appears moving insofar as it values questioning social ethos, not reinforcing them.

But the story of poetry does not end with desertion. For Nietzsche, desertion was the 1st of (at least) 4 questions:

You run on ahead? — Do you do so as a herdsman? or as an exception? A third possibility would be as a deserter. . . . First question of conscience.

Today, if one were to do with Archilochus’ fragments what e.g. Anne Carson did with Sappho’s, they might spin out & define a different sort of social character, one who reserves their reverence for what doesn’t exist, who unmonumentalizes false monuments, not by destroying but deserting them for stranger pastures, who is something of a slacker, in the sense that they play loosely with custom, unwinding the tightly wound slack of overwrought production that promises, but fails to deliver fulfillment, who makes lyres of such slack, who says “I don’t care” to trivial social pressures, transfusing social ornaments into their own strange cave mind. Or perhaps this critical deserter would resemble what Benjamin admired about Baudelaire in the crowd: a person who is “spared, rather than denied, fulfillment.”

The Noble Psychopath

And so after many sunbaked days & sleepless nights wandering the outskirts of the city, wading through trash rivers on trash ferries, arguing & bickering about anything they could, the company arrived, at last, at a local watering hole. They proceeded to get drunker than they already were, & encountered a strange fellow who called himself The Noble Psychopath. What's so noble about psychopathy?! they all muttered. But The Noble Psychopath sensed with his keenest perception a subterranean jealousy in their derision. The Noble Psychopath knew very well that all these outlaws were also psychopaths, to varying degrees & with varying masks. But they had not yet learned to accept it, their resistance created a consternation, perhaps even an acidic gut. He leveraged his argument on such grounds & sought to sway them to the dark side. Not just any dark side, but the Loneliest Man's dark side, that man who sailed to the other side of the moon, but still orbited with such a scientific flair that he picked up his idiot companions who were making up stupid timeless platitudes in their big dumb space suits on the lunarscape.

For what The Noble Psychopath knew was the other side of what other people thought they knew but didn't actually know. No one knows what psychopathy is. It is pathetically vague in definition, & has been continually redefined according to questionable trends like criminology. Might as well bring back phrenology! The Noble Psychopath asked the company if they liked their criminal science to be as archaic as bloodletting. And what of the "defiance of authority" that people dislike in psychopaths in a time where authoritarian behaviors run amok?

He continued. "What all agree on however is that psychopathy is not a good thing. Psychopaths are villains, phantom menaces stalking prey amongst good ole citizens living by normal standards. The only standing definition is that psychopaths are "abnormal". Ha! This in a time where people are supposedly questioning what "normal" is (gender norms etc). Judging by the vanity fair of current ideology, The Abnormal should be celebrated. Instead, it is vilified. What hypocrisy!" The Noble Psychopath argued that he was the best example of a queer human.

He continued. "An interesting characteristic of some psychopaths is the belief that they are on the cutting edge of social consciousness. True! Society has always sent scouts onto the horizon of what is socially acceptable as a means to extend society's reach. And they have invariably gone insane. Society produces experimental characters for its own modulation. These used to be shamans, then artists, & now the unapologetically alien psychopath. In fact, it could be argued that every single person in this social climate ventures out onto the horizon. Like this band of outlaws here, right? Would it be temporary, or would they resume their working days & pretend that they, too, hadn't encountered the loneliest man on the other side of the moon?"

"The Noble Psychopath is self-consciously opposed to the lame affectations of half-assed humanitarian posturing. The perceptual clarity of their judgment sees right through the antiquated form that has failed time again. An alienated sensibility is courted. And who could truthfully say that they aren't at least a wee bit alienated? Might as well lean in to it. Are your hips strong enough to lean?

The best way to support society is to negate it. Everyone implicitly knows that. What makes the Noble Psychopath noble is that she knows she is psychopathic, that deep down there is a place she must regularly draw from to live in this world & to do the pleasurable things that all humans need but are deprived of. She is a rare & gleaming diadem of self-conscious."

But The Noble Psychopath asked the company, "Do you think that perhaps what is taboo about psychopathy is the aspect of self-consciousness, & not, as presumed, the violent aspect?"

EarHeart spoke up in his murmuring dissonance,

"The Noble Psychopath. That everyone points fingers accusing others of being psychopaths or sociopaths means they recognize it. They can relate. And it's not because they're psychologists. Moreover, psychology today is quackery--there's no legitimate test for psychopathy. At all. It's development is based in criminology, merely the next step beyond phrenology--& we know all too well how backwards our justice system is. A jury of your moralistic peers will find you guilty on the grounds of your facial expression alone! It's the subjective diagnosis of the people by the people. Why not own it? Why not admit to living in a culture of psychopathy & be the best psychopath one can be? We keep an eye on the psychopath because we suspect they are the true leaders, the ones free of fear, remorse, & guilt. The ones who might change things as they are. Let him become something … else.

How A Man Goes

On lunchbreak the fellas were discussing their last meal. Their hypothetical last meal, that is. You know, like the 'desert island' scenario that comes up strangely regularly. None of these fellas were going to deathrow, but it seems like people like to fantasize about deathrow. Oh there were the usual steaks & lobsters etc., justified with tasteful taste, that tired old faculty! One fella cleverly said his last meal would be magic mushrooms. What ingenuity! But this did not put an end to the conversation. A quiet fella who wasn't really interested in participating in such mundane prattle was browbeaten into giving an answer, so he said 'a mango'. His comrade's response was a collective eyeroll, & a you-can-do-better-than-that injunction. But the quiet fella proceeded to tell a story of walking on a NYC street in Chinatown in summer, asphalt reeking & all that slummy stuff stupid novelists—what cliches!—never tire of describing in nihilistically trite & detailed hommage to a fake Paris, trying to muster up any love to a city by feigning it. Anyway, the quiet fella explained that he was very hungry & stopped to buy a mango at a nearby mango stand. His Leatherman had earlier been confiscated, so he had no instrumental capacity to slice this delectable fruit. He peeled back the skin carefully & let it slide off & undulate to the ground with a lighthearted splat. People were trying not to watch, including his girlfriend, as he grinned like a starving idiot at the golden egg slithering in his hands, now coated with a syrupy goo. Ah, he could almost smell it there in that dry underground breakroom covered in metal & sawdust. His companions really did not care to hear the rest of this 'story'. But the quiet fella was deep in reverie & speaking from another place & time. His comrades suddenly had no idea who this fella was, & they themselves were put into an eery sort of trance as they went over in their mind all the possibilities that this fella could be, & what he might be keeping from them in the silence of his diligent heart. For those who have bitten into a whole mango are familiar with the fibers that wedge into the teeth like so many sweetly flitting flosses. And after his first bite his lips were already a flush fuschia, & engaged in a slowly contorting movement as his swollen tongue elegantly licked at the mango strands in his glistening teeth. The first time he had heard someone speak about him as if he wasn't present was as a young adolescent, when his friend said, 'We're going to call Donna on threeway, & you'll pretend that you aren't here'. And as he was raised by clans of voluptuously overbearing Italian-American women who taught him good manners, & gaggles of teenage girls who took a strange pleasure in grooming & predicting some glorious future of his, he was becoming a man who'd go along with female games. And as his phony friend asked Donna what she thought of him, his heart skipped a beat, his ears were pricked. But Donna said, "Yea he's cute, but he has big lips." The quiet fella had quickly & quite naturally developed a pathos about his lip size, but had also just as naturally but not so quickly overcome it, & even learned that big lips may be luscious & that Donna was simply a midwestern ascetic type who probably ate beige food with fishlipped marms of men. So when it came time to spread wide his viscid lips, enveloping them around that overripe mango, which was the only way to get his perfectly straight teeth into it, he displayed no resignation, as now he had become a man of rare intelligence who feared no commitment of any shape or viscosity, wiping up all the juice now oozing down his neck & licking his slender fingers, as his companion looked the other way, as streetgoers, mostly women in that coed dorm of a city, were beginning to stare. But he pursued his pleasure unapologetically, even daring to moan, trying to say something about how it was the best mango he ever had, but not actually saying anything at all. Someone, perhaps a cop, threateningly said he needed to pick up that litter he left behind (the mango skin), & he was a lover, not a fighter, so he made the best of this remonstrance by cooly lifting the wet peels from the concrete & rubbing the lurid insides along his gums, desperately slurping up any juice remaining. Yes he was not shy about desperation, he had grown comfortably into his despair. As they walked away, not exactly fans of such spectacles, he soon realized his girlfriend was so angry about being so embarassed by his accidental lasciviousness that she kicked the leg out from one of the fruitstands! This quiet lover & hardworker felt for the fruitstand man, & returned to offer him some kind of compensation for his (confusingly, almost always) angry girlfriend. "And while I'm here" he said, "Can I please buy another mango?"

Never Finish A Thing!

"How do I know if I'm lying to myself? If people don't ask this question...well I don't like to give ultimatums. Half-finished ultimatums are better than finished ultimatums, because the law of hyperbole states that anything finished is more dull than that which is unfinished. What severe(ly annoying) planning goes into finishing things that will without a doubt never get finished, & whose only notable quality is that it is unfinished. As for me I've never finished anything at all, & don't intend to. No sir! My life is a veritable portfolio of incompletions, non-finitos, a half-baked cake in eternity's lurid oven. Whenever I become cool, I'm done. I mean, I don't even finish an article. I've inaugurated & sponsored 4 abortions."

The captive group of listening friends at the houseparty wanted to see where this was going. If there was an end to this story.

"But I do hope to die very soon so that all the lingering things are finished."

The Losing Cardplayer

When you don't play the game, the game players want to punish you, but you're not in the game so they can't punish you, & you can still do whatever you want. But The Losing Cardplayer would occasionally play the game, with specific intent to lose. He did not need the money, the other players knew, but what these strange motives could possibly be were unclear. Occasionally the other players would talk behind his back, trying to make sense of his strange actions. It just isn't right, one fella said, it has a stink to it, we need to find out more about him, who would like to follow him tonight after we take his money? The others merely needed someone to tell them where to go & what to do, so they agreed & hatched their plan.

The game proceeded as usual, with The Losing Cardplayer doing exactly the things he wasn't supposed to do, losing hand after hand. He was a generous loser, perhaps the most generous ever. The other players took his chips & gave him violent looks, as if he were a diseased animal at the table. But he paid no mind, he was too intent on trying to lose the next hand, & put all of his intellect into finding a way in which to lose more this round. When all of his chips were gone, he said it was time for him to go, & elegantly parted from the game table. The other players waited a moment, & after closing out left the casino to stalk him in the shadows, to see what he was about.

He walked through the city night, giving whatever little he had to beggars, & the other players confirmed that there was indeed something not quite right about him. As they talked amongst themselves, pontificating & theorizing, almost getting high off their hatred, they felt the world move about them in new ways. When they finally tired of talking, they looked around to notice that things were not quite right. They couldn't quite place how, but the world looked askew, almost like they were very distant from it. Finally, a thunderous clanging was heard & the sky seemed to open. The other cardplaying men & women were physically being shuffled, & then they were redistributed to different parts. They had no clue what was happening, as they were separated & placed into different, neatly organized compartments, held tightly & unable to move. The Losing Cardplayer had finally finished this job—selling people to Gods who loved to play cards with humans.

The Laptop Bard

Have you ever walked into an animal's stall, & your mere presence incited unrest amongst the herd, made the animals buck & bray in a cacophonous unison of anxious frenzy? If so, you may be a human after all.

Some people have their schoolbuses converted into fish fryers that roam the country with Burning Men, others join the herd & call it the 'public' when they march to the slaughterhouses where art is sacrificied, but then there are those elusive souls who roam freely with nothing but their trusty laptop, traveling bards of human holograms. Spectrally they wander the hillsides, & from town-to-town they ghastly skulk, separate & elegant, outcast individuals all of 'em, their isolated reflections on contemporary circus life trapped in the porous meshes of their sleepless minds, their carefully recorded dreams codified into strange music for alienated & perplexed audiences who both resist & can't resist it in the same stifled breath. As if from nothing but the highest, thinnest air they conjure musico-philosophical ghosts; the opening of their laptop's hinge is a pandora's box that liberates phantoms trapped within.

Yet there are many who despise these laptop bards, who are disgusted by the illumination of their faces from the cold led screens in otherwise darkened corners of the globe. Illuminated manuscripts of humans, their intimacy offends the insensitive sensibilities of the herd. The very notion of a thinking individual is enough to send such resentful animals into a jealous stupor, but the living incarnation of a thinking individual, free of resentment, charmed by their own integrity & unphased by their alienation, indeed, at home in it, sends these resentful animals into a jargonized collective rage. In their separate stalls they scream their muzzled cries to rally together to trample this illuminated wanderer. Such is their music, intermingled with the freest songs electric.

Summer Discussion

A perfect peaceful summer night, a group of friends & their polite acquaintances, congenial drunkenness all around, ghost of summer presence in hot air. Languid & expansive conversation, airs of mutual, collective respect over the primordial human hearth of a campfire. Nights like these could last forever. Conversation turns towards music, blissful music, & each in turn tells the story of their favorite concert. Sharing, camaraderie of pure souls.

It finally comes to one young friend, a beauty, & he says, "I hate concerts."

Silence. Despairing puritan gasp of collective mute! Do go on, they seem to say, you have offended thee & you must go on.

"You describe the energy of the crowds, I've always seen a bunch of repressed assholes faking energy, mechanically moving their limbs with rhythmless calculations, hoping to solve the problem of their life's limpid despair, a medley of meager attempts to compensate for their monotonous lives, & only as a means to brag about their 'experience' to friends later on, friends who do the exact same faux-experience mongering & don't give a damn about other people's experiences unless it's like theirs."

Sheesh, tell us how you really feel...

"Woo'ing & Awe'ing like automotons. Y'all describe great light shows & fireworks. What do lasers have to do with music! Misdirection. You describe musicians getting lost in their music. Would that it were so! As if anyone has ever transcended anything, let alone our musicians, who have as much capacity to get lost as a mapmaker trying to prove his charting acumen. About as much transcendence as a cuddly sloth, differing from cute pets only because they condition their hair."

But the costuming...

"True, the fashion is thoroughly overdone because none of these musicians—actors—have an intuition about beauty. Ugh, everyone knows performers are the most insufferable people in the world."

Well I always learn important life lessons ...

"You learn life lessons from musicians?!"

The Wrong Person

Some people are never not mistaken for being something else. There are those who value love & truth, but when their unique candor is expressed to people they meet on the protesting streets, or waiting for a public bathroom, mutual friends or acquaintances perhaps at an art fair, coworkers by the proverbial water cooler, & so on, it is always inevitably confused for sarcasm or something sinister. Those who do not understand candor or the charm of a bad joke will then walk away in disgust, murmuring to each other about what a unique asshole that person is. What a piece of work!, they may say, warning their friends to stay away from this sadistic psychological tormenter. Thee offended rationalize that they're 'sensitive', but actually they're insensitive to plays of words; self-defense mechanisms despise anyone who knows how to penetrate their masks. Masks worn threadbare & half-hanging off their faces at any rate. For penetrating souls, the only reasonable course of action when it comes to communicating is to play dead, like a fainting goat, when brought into the social circle.

Lab Mouse

The researchers were baffled. Not that their experiment was a failure by any standards, much less their own. The results proved their hypothesis. What was baffling was one mouse who didn't behave as a mouse at all, which was not at all what they were testing for. This mouse, if it could be called that, well, they thought it was very stupid at first, it resisted doing anything at all within the maze. It would lay there & do nothing, so that the researchers thought it was dead. But when they went to remove it, the mouse would perk up & very nearly sing a type of song while standing on hindlegs. And then when the researchers said, well, we’ll put it back it’s alive after all, the mouse would fall into a deep depression for a moment, then play dead again, only to then do some other strange activity, like smear feces on the maze walls, or appear to be praying for a lover who would rescue it, or perhaps occupy the center of the maze & act like a bull towards the other mice. Perhaps it was deranged, the researchers thought, & they’d get very distracted from their study, start bickering & arguing over whether or not to remove the mouse. Some wanted to keep it, others emphatically could not stand it ruining their study. In the end it clearly had no impact on their research. But it had never occurred to them to ask the mouse what it thought best.

Little Red Riding Hood

Once upon a time there was a little girl who loved the color red. She wore red suspenders, a red cloak, & rode a red bike. All of her contemporaries chastised her for her obsession with something so aesthetic. All the while, they could not stop looking at her & talking about her. She was irresistible to them, if only negatively. You'd think they'd have an understanding of such things, their art teacher once told them, "If you can't make it good, make it BIG, if you can't make it BIG, make it red." But these students more often resist listening, & are content to allow aesthetic things to govern them, just unconsciously rather than self-consciously. Indeed, 'self-consciousness' is considered something to avoid in this school, by students & teachers alike. It is a secret part of the curriculum. But Little Red Riding Hood cared little for her peers' smallminded chastizing to fall in line & join their collective, brazenly riding her deep red bike into the complimentary verdant wilderness. Once, when she was gone, as she so often was, a wolf came around town. An excellent listener, he heard all kinds of rumors circulating about this little girl who wore red, & how offended the townsfolk were by her aesthetic choices. The Wolf quickly hatched a plan, & offered the townsfolk to scare Little Red Riding Hood into falling in line. And the townsfolk were so grateful that such an intelligent man came along at just the right time, so they all threw their savings at him. The boys envied him, & the women slept with him, & after enduring such paltry gifts, he was then on his way into the forest he knew so well.

The Big Bad Wolf came upon Little Red Riding Hood by a creek, & they immediately struck up a riveting conversation about the color red. The Big Bad Wolf was very familiar with aesthetics, & Little Red Riding Hood actually challenged him so much that he nearly forgot his plan as they walked along the riverbed. Indeed, the sexual tension between Little Red Riding Hood & The Big Bad Wolf was unbearable. Never had Little Red Riding Hood met someone who could think so freely, make unnatural associations, articulate thoughts so impulsively & without being defensive when intellectually challenged. He asked nothing from her, expected no change from her, & seemed to be intrigued instead of offended by her strange sensibilities & ideas. They were both outcasts, independent thinkers. The Big Bad Wolf was not desperate for sexual favors, not having lacked for sex ever, but was riveted by this bold girl who, with less physical strength than he, went against the herd. She had a will that he lacked. They camped that night under the moonlight, telling stories by the fire, reinventing myths, making love. When it came time to depart the next morning, The Big Bad Wolf, casually sipping a cup of coffee asked Little Red Riding Hood where she was going, after all. Buttoning her red cape over her voluptuous rouge nipples, she replied that she was overdue to see her grandma, &, would he care to join her?

After a long walk filled with philosophical debate & mutually ecstatic silences, they at last came to Grandma's house, together. They knocked & knocked, & at last Grandma let them in. Grandma was ill & poor. But Little Red Riding Hood gave her bread, made her soup, & the Big Bad Wolf, not caring for the wealth of humans, gave her the gold the townsfolk had given him to set Little Red Riding Hood straight. What actually made The Big Bad Wolf 'bad' was that he had no moral obligation to fulfill his contracts, & went about obtaining them through deceit—he wasn't morally bad, didn't go about intentionally hurting people. Indeed, he was unusually generous. By this time, Little Red Riding Hood & The Big Bad Wolf figured that they had better separate for a time, so as not to smother their newfound love, & they promised they'd meet again soon on the margins of town.

As Little Red Riding Hood returned to civilization like a hot drop of blood squozen out of the verdant forest, she was immediately struck by the calm of the town. She entered the gates, & no one was around, "Not a soul in sight" she thought to herself with a laugh, because the townsfolk were already soulless, callous beasts. She wandered between storefront & house, peeking in windows ... nothing. Just as she was about to leave town for the woods, she heard a snoring in the distance, following its peaceful din to the well. There she found her love, The Big Bad Wolf, napping in the townsquare, so bloated she hardly recognized him. Just at this time the hunter, gracchus, was walking by, & gasped that this was the terrible wolf he had been hunting. But it was too late, he had already eaten all the townsfolk, so he was no good. Little Red Riding Hood begged & pleaded for him to go & find a country doctor, to help her lover heal, & awake from this comatose state, which she couldn't bear. At length, a doctor arrived, & said the only cure was to jump repeatedly on the wolf's stomach, so that the people would come out. Little Red Riding thought this sounded suspicious & profoundly unscientific, but was desperate to save her her love so compromised for the quack doctor.

After signing all the appropriate paperwork & reading over the documentation, the operation proceeded as planned— the surgeon scrubbed down, put on his white nitrile gloves, mask, & labcoat, & then jumped mercilessly on The Big Bad Wolf's stomach, while Little Red Riding Hood heard the shrieks & plashing of the operation from the waiting room. The surgeon finally emerged to inform Little Red Riding Hood that the operation was a success, & that The Big Bad Wolf was in recovery after being transplanted rocks to displace the people he had eaten. The Doctor warned that The Big Bad Wolf should be careful when eating townsfolk, because townsfolk are too acidic for his otherwise healthy gut. Little Red Riding promised that she would be more mindful of his diet henceforth, & asked how the townsfolk were recovering from the surgery. The Doctor replied that that was another matter altogether. "How so?" asked Little Red Riding Hood, inquiring if they were disfigured by being partially digested. The Doctor replied, that yes, they are disfigured, but not so much physically (though indeed physically) but pscyhologically—they did not want to come out of the Big Bad Wolf's gut, they have been pleading to return inside ever since their extraction. "But, now they're free!" exclaimed Little Red Riding Hood, confused. To which the Doctor replied, "I have already called upon the crowd psychologist, who will arrive soon."

EarHeart The Deserter

EarHeart asked his remaining fellow travelers if those who left were deserters, or scouts?

His fellow travelers did not understand the question, or did not care to think about it.

It did not take much to bring EarHeart to rhapsody.

“The distinction between a scout and a deserter is meaningful. What does a scout do? A scout departs into the wilderness ahead of a group. As if by some spiritual magnet, blind loyalty, or some disciplined obedience, the scout is destined to return. The scout has been tasked with deserting, but not indefinitely as a deserter might. Unless taken captive, murdered, or through a physical coercion, the scout always returns with the critical information pertinent to the rest of the group’s living life. The scout is the avant-garde of any group, the scout goes out, ahead of the group, as an elected eye on the horizon, seeing what the others cannot, will not, but simply do not—intention is of no concern to us ever. Our era, defined more than ever by the congealing of people into collectives, masses, posses, render the scout a prototypical character. The scout is critical to the group’s success and coherence. But: the scout also must leave the group to serve the group. That the scout is at once the critical coherence of the collective, and for that time not part of the collective, is the contradiction of its character. Even the old religious word mass meant to send away. The masses are not congealed, consistent, integrated, ever, and are always defined by going out.”

“EarHeart, you once again tell us things we already know. And yet, you yourself are the deserter”.

Called out, like a sleepy cicada in the inert dirt, EarHeart dug into the history of his character, & screeched & scratched out from the exoskeleton of his past.

“It is true, I am the deserter. I deserted my family, my friends, and fled the town of my upbringing. And moreoever I was proud of leaving, though I had no plan. And more-moreover I was proud of having no plan. I was not elected to divine critical information & return it to my so-called community. If anything, I confirmed the right to desert only in my spirit. I have always taken the side of the deserters.

For the community as such is a thing of the past, a remnant of the good ole days, & we desire the bad new days.

To what miserable ends would a community send forth a scout? To protect it’s fortress? We, the exposed & exhibited desire no fortress.

By what sad defensiveness would a group send forth a scout? To find enemies? We, the dissonant at heart attract enemies like flies.

By what sad communal values would a scout judge what is important to a solidarity that couldn’t be less solid? We, the integrity of the ephemeral long for no false solidarity founded on obsolete values.

By what calculating mechanics does a community send forth a scout? To prepare & plan better? We, the spirit of the instinct value no robot’s contrivance of plan, but shoot from new hips, artificial hips, deep from within the manic thrusts of our libidinal pelvises.

Better that our deserters would not return than return with info about some enemy whose character wouldn’t be revealed until we galvanized them by our presence of our confrontation.

Better that our deserters found our posse too coherent in a nervous-system that sees in any blind attraction of individuals the birth of the hangman.

Better that our deserts embraced self-exile, & that when we meet again it is not as some blind fealty.

Better that we meet out deserters in the happenstance of crude chance far into the future, where we recount to each other tales of desertion & all that the deserter sees that cannot be seen by any other character.”

But some of EarHeart’s fellow travelers secretly longed for community, albeit a new one.

And yet other fellow travelers accused EarHeart of being weak for not putting a price on their heads, to be hung on stakes or around their necks.

And yet others accused him of nihilism, for any freedom against the herd requires a herd itself; that antidotes are found in the toxin.

EarHeart responded.

“No.

“If we are to put a price on the deserters’ heads, it is only to increase their value, we may put a price on their head as a demonstration of our support of their desertion, not to demonstrate that we do not value their desertion.

“For it wasn’t until I deserted my community that I learned I had any value at all. And as I traveled towards the big desert skies, the commodity on horseback, I watched my value escalate with every Wanted! Poster I encountered with my pretentiously raphaelesque visage painted in rich inks never seen before. My desertion was the reason paper & ink was produced at all. My desertion created an industry for artists, no less than the law that slowly lagged behind, as ever.”

But EarHeart’s fellow travelers meaningfully mused on the meaning of meaning, and friskily rubbed their minds against the big sky walls of what kind of meaning can be found without the immunity of the herd.

EarHeart looked for an instrument and said,

“It’s getting dark. Let’s build a fire and sing, for talk is cheap, & I tire of the tiny bird sounds of call-&-response, & long to mediate activity with form.”

EarHeart’s Caesura

Scene: Whiteout. Blizzard. Deep midnight, on the frontier, in the mountains, a gang of outlaws.

After countless hours gazing through the starry white snow vortex contrasted against the black void, the vehicle slowly ground to a halt in the middle of the vast, empty highway that may have come to an end.

EarHeart’s fellow travelers stirred and woke, irritated and alarmed not by the clangor of their progress, but by its stalling and its absence.

Woken by new silence, the seizure of movement, EarHeart advised them to continue their rest, as he pondered the meaning of sleep, and of the first philosopher to discover thought itself in his 57-year slumber, of and the saintly hearts who slept in graves for weeks, of the and the cicadas who lay dormant for years before singing their mad and splendid cicada-songs, and of all dormant things.

And yet they watched in curiosity as he left the vehicle and disappeared into the whiteout.

As snowflake upon delicate snowflake melted on the hot electricity of his skin, EarHeart wondered what it meant. He heard that each snowflake was uniquely beautiful, but nevertheless only seen in the meaningless fury of their collective. Snowflakes don’t fall as individuals, he thought, reflecting on the necessary experience of seeing them all from the individual’s perspective, whose forward impulsion, illuminated by electric light, rendered them a stargate lining a vortical and ceaseless movement towards some hypothetical rebirth.

As time crystallized them with the clear and icy air, and long after his spectral figure gradually reemerged from the enveloping blanket of stellar snow, EarHeart’s fellow travelers heard him searching in the back of the vehicle.

Now awake and loitering on the deathly mute highway, which the outlaws began to doubt was ever a road, littered in either white or black, EarHeart’s fellow travelers looked in alert confusion at the mysterious red rods revealed in his hot hands.

EarHeart said, “We can go no further. To continue the way we’ve been going is merely to progress over the edge of an impending cliff. And we all know there is no turning back either.

“Let this whiteout be a metaphor for all we know of cultural life, an embarrassment of riches, the mere accumulation of self-similar detritus, a storm grown so unwieldy and insensitive that it merely appears as an inescapable act of nature, set against our alertness and sensitivity, to the fact that it is also in part we, in our extreme travels into more experimental domains, who that have brought about this storm, in the sense that it is only we who will to see it, and also will to see through it, though it would bury us alive.

“So let our eyes adjust, slowly in this new expanded time, to the ganzfelds of this inexhaustible white noise, and let them adjust to the background of absolute black nihilism against which it defines itself, and see what new riddle-imagery our perceptions are capable of.

“So too let's give time to let our ears retune themselves to the deafening silence that this blanket of snow makes, this anechoic chamber unfurling at the threshold of our progress, this incubator enveloping our listening to our listening.

But some of EarHeart’s fellow travelers did not want to hear about words such as “‘perception”’, and “‘listening,”’, and did not care for white and black thinking, even as it surrounded and began to inhume them.

And then EarHeart looked at his hands and ruminated on the strange red tubes he was holding.

“These sticks contain a rage of phosphorescence, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at them directly. Like the poem with its broken phrases, these phosphor rages will only shine when broken.”

And EarHeart violently snapped the flare in his hot hands, and a blinding flash of golden starlight flared and briefly lit up to illuminate this new icy atmosphere in a radiant dispersion of luminescence that had not been seen before or since, and the lightning gradually calmed into a sustained red brilliance at the end of the highway. Having never seen lightning in such slow extension, the outlaws were as transfixed as they were terrified.

But EarHeart was implacable. “Some things must be broken to thrive.”

And EarHeart’s fellow travelers oohedooh’ed at the dazzling light show, and aahedaah’ed at EarHeart’s finding of meaning in even the tiniest fragments of life. Aand yet others, the most exhausted and least poetic of them, rolled their eyes at the riddle-images and romantic prophetics. Others, ever-dressed to kill in their keen outlaw costumes, secretly plotted the scenes of his murder.

But penetrating their masks, and into the clockwork motives of such fellow travelers, EarHeart was in no mood to lubricate the corroded gears of robots.

And anyway, they feared him for his mysterious relationship with lightning, as they might fear lightning itself.

But EarHeart turned tacit and sustained his silence. And he sustained his silence still, and even stiller still. As his pupils expanded and dilated, oscillating with the extremes of such contrasting conditions, EarHeart abruptly transformed his tone and meaning as he nearly sang the next phrases, which had no obvious connection to the phrases spoken previously.

“This firework is no mere entertainment, but a sort of alarm for all those other fellow travelers who may come this way. A caesura for like-minded adventurers, but not for anyone else. These flareups will alert any fellow travelers, be they friend or enemy, it hardly matters, to the wintry hazards that have broken our momentum, and which seized our progress just as it may seize their progress.

And his fellow travelers, in the raging midst of full seizure themselves, were restless in their restfulness.

“In whatever vehicle they arrive here, whether they be same or different, and with whatever taste and interests, be they alike or alien, and in whatever configurations of identities and members or dismembers, they will face the same impasse, of a weathered nothing and decadent everything, as we do, though they may not choose to face it as we do, with our lack of haste, and overfull with time to waste, rendered in the embers of our phosphor lace.

“Let them decide if they will disregard alerts, and zealously move forward over the edge, fanatically screaming progress! as their own vehicles careen over the ledge into white blindness, and their laughing derision at our quiet yielding is swallowed up in the black maw of the void, and their frantic vehicle crashes upon the same inert villages that they would save, and burns alive their brothers and sisters in a self-righteous and unnecessary fire.”

But even EarHeart’s words were swallowed up in the dustbin of the void and swept into the vortices of a white noise deafening in its passive muteness.

And EarHeart’s fellow outlaws rightly noted that they cared little about such petty villages, villages that would hang them for merely protesting their small reality, as the outlaws were given to protest even their own reality, but protested that they cared only about the self-defeating self-contradictions of such aggression in the name of progress.

“Let others, too, decide if they will turn around in fear and pathetic defeatism, running back to their churches and churchlike-communities, defined as ever by pious malice, dumb deceit, and resentful revenge, and fake-finding artificial solace in things that do not exist, which they well-know do not exist and yet pretend they do exist, mock kings who will never dare to glimpse new vistas, rationalizing their cowardice by preaching to their choirs the lie that they had gone as far as they could go, as far as anyone could go, and sermonizing mocking lies of there being no vistas to be glimpsed but only a canceling whiteout and black nothingness from which to recoil, even as they have voided possibility itself in their own whiteout of pompous sanctimony.”

But even EarHeart’s words were engulfed by the infinitely expansive black nothingness, and swept up into the incessant siege of white flakes and blown backwards down the forgotten highway from which they came and lost themselves.

And EarHeart’s outlaws rightly noted that such communities would have them hanged for merely asking questions, and resonated in their various dissonant echoes that they cared little for those so-called communities of tail-tuckers, but instead focused on the self-defeating self-rationalization of such would-be travelers when confronted with by the difficulties of their would-be travels.

But this dissonant choir of outlaws, stalled in the icy mountains, quiptificated that EarHeart would have them compromise for some quiet middle road.

And EarHeart disquietly quipped back, “Did I say anything about a road at all?”, and fixated on listening, on how to listen, inquiring within himself as to how exactly people listen outside of the echo chambers in the villages or in the anechoic void, until he totally lost himself in internal allegory yet again, and imageriddling of middleroads that never lead to Rome, while frozen in his gaze upon his own footprints filling with snowflakes, a premonition?, footsteps which led backwards into the incandescent flashes of his electric show, and back further still into the trunk of the vehicle, where he recalled, but as if seeing his own manual activity for the first time, as if his hands were trying to tell him something from a place beyond his hands, that he very nearly picked up a different instrument than the flares, yes, that unfinished problem instrument he for so long had no solution to, and while he replayed this divine specter of manual fumbling that he had originally failed to notice, his internal maw ruminated on the historical cud of how any example of genius solution he had ever known came not from the cowlike ruminations of logic but rather flashed spontaneously as though from a dreamy place, the solution always there, but yet to be noticed, perceived, synthesized, and, as though motivated by some unknown force of tension, his pretentiously raphaelesque head tilted and drooped towards sleep, even as he dreamt while standing, intensely draped like a half-person tent in the glossy black leather of cows and flayed cowlogics, knowingly or unknowingly wanting to complete the incomplete instrument in the vehicle which he touched but did not remember touching, and unknowingly or knowingly about to foster or defeat the conditions in which he might complete the incomplete or undo the already complete, and he also began to consider what, exactly, the riddle was here, and was this thing an instrument at all or perhaps something different, unintended?

And as he cracked himself open and violently self-snapped out of irreverent rumination, EarHeart considered the prospect of camp at the end of the road, and the meaning of camplife, and what kind of new transitional forms would be necessary and possible in camp conditions, and as he thought he felt the glazy glow of filthy feral eyes in the dark awakening alert to the screen of his dream drapery, he addressed the fellow travelers and broken storm riders around him with a broke, echolalic echolaliagic fragment of bloodsermon.

“Let’s camp here, at the site of nothing and everything, and see ourselves seeing and not seeing, and not see ourselves not seeing and seeing, and listen to ourselves listening and not listening, and not listen to ourselves not listening and listening, and reflectively glisten off the white noise and see the flat surface of the black nothing, and use the white nothing and the black noise as projection screens and sounding boards, and sounding screens and projection boards — ” and then broke himself off again for fear of becoming an erotic pedantician.

And many of EarHeart’s fellow traveling outlaws rolled their feral eyes and cringe-danced their dissonant recoils to his poor, broke “poetics” even as they started building camp, preparing for true rest, so as to prepare for true unrest.

But EarHeart had one last, important command.

“But let’s not set up camp here in the middle of the road.”

And so, as EarHeart took in hand an incomplete lightning instrument with which to sing unwritten dissonant campfire songs, he squinted his ear and tuned his beating heart to the difference tone of his first, but not last, caesura.

Earheart’s Meander

The cleansing odor of burnt juniper filled the arid desert sky. An elk was roasting on a fire large enough to accommodate it.

The fellow travelers frolicked in form-fitting loinclothes or tights made of elkskin, as EarHeart was draped in the skin of a mountain lion. Man & woman, man & man, woman & woman, woman & man, in all permutations and arragements, made love under the mesquite canopies in the cold-lucid air, frisky lil friction-makers of electrical current that they were.

Aided by the aridity of the climate, and the freedom of movement it afforded, EarHeart meandered down the parched riverbed, observing the tendony joints and skeletal grasps of trees clinging desperately to its walls. Ever-obsessed with electricity & all things electrical, EarHeart wondered about the current and capacity of this dormant river.

He meandered further along the sinewy contortions of the dry riverbed, a labyrinth in which he wouldn’t leave any red thread tracing back. The narrow, tangled alleyways set him more confidently towards a goal he already saw in totality. His ear set him towards the heart of it.

On a distant red rock he saw a bearded man dancing, and wondered who it could be. But he sensed a storm brewing and meandered back to camp, earmarking the rock for a later visitation.

Back at camp EarHeart’s fellow travelers were beginning to congregate, the absence of his eagle eye no less than the sensitive sounding board of his ear coursing into the bloodstream of his heart needed in some abstract way. They feared that he might have deserted them. And anyway, where was the song he promised?

The song was not what they expected. As he slithered back to camp, the posse wondered what the purpose of the long, slender steel rods he was dragging behind him could be for. Would he build a structure? He told them to dig as deep as possible, until they hit bedrock. “Is there a metaphor in this term, bedrock, they asked?”

“You know it.”

“Does it relate to sleep?”, they asked.

“You know it does.”

“Does it then relate to dream?”, they asked.

“You know it does & always will.”

They penetrated their spades into the Earth, creating, by virtue of removing, twin holes separated intuitively. The group then thrust the steel rods into the layered Earth, heaving & sweating.

The silver rods penetrated the sky as much as the Earth in equidistant span.

“Now what?”

“Now we wait.”

“Wait for what?”

“For lightning to strike.”

He can’t be serious, they thought, & demanded to be sung to.

“Do I look like like an entertainer to you?” EarHeart quipped.

And in their quizzical silence their imagination lit up with images of this wretched deserter as an entertainer, and the mere vision, abstractly figured in their resonant minds, of a pretentiously raphaelesque outlaw as a bootlicking minstrel was better entertainment than they had ever seen in reality.

And they suggested that it may not be a bad idea to pursue such a thing.

But EarHeart tilted his head back, let out a massive yawn-howl, opened his eyes as big as possible & rolled them slowly over the expansive starry night.

Then he fell asleep.

And they wondered if he would not wake for 57 years.

They awoke some hours later to find EarHeart standing erect over the unrestful flickering campfire. Lightning was on the horizon & vague din of thunder ominously woke their souls at the same time as it soothed them like babies.

“Did you know there was going to be a storm?”

“Do I look like a meteorologist to you?” EarHeart responded.

And they pictured this mercurial, alienated person as a meteorologist, & suggested it might be worth pursuing.

But EarHeart tilted his head back & rolled his eyes across the roiling sky.

“So you were perhaps prepared to sleep for decades?”

But EarHeart feigned the fakest yawn as he tuned his steel poles, which he called actuators.

“Many want to act, but I want to activate. To awake the dormant.”

They had no idea what this meant.

“Don’t you hear the calling undergr…?”

But just then lightning struck the twin poles, split its discharge evenly amongst them, & sought grounding in the bedrock, which received the energy, & spread it throughout it’s plate, which EarHeart called a transducer.

The sonic was godly, consuming all the deserter’s bones & making their marrow resonate like a human cage of so many interconnected tuning forks, which also sung forth & streamed out of their bodies, interacting with resonances radiantly dispersing from other bodies, creating new, strange, dissonant harmonies. The posse of deserters were nearly floating on their toes, pelvises thrusting in & out, to & fro like a loudspeaker cone, alien tones pouring from their inner ears distorting.

“That is a song.” EarHeart calmly clarified.

“But how?” the chorus of resonators, equally calm, inquired.

And indeed, the feeling of being sufficiently discharged fostered a tranquility in each that was hitherto unknown, unexperienced.

“The twin poles were of slightly different lengths & girths, so that when struck they were slightly out of tune, creating difference tones. As if one mimicked the other, but couldn’t quite get the imitation exact. They remained distinct, different in their uniformity. Almost counterintuitively, the closer the tones approach, the greater their actual difference tones are. The difference between them creates a third, distinctive tone, that is both there & not there, a phantom tone that haunts your perception, that longs to exist, piggybacking on the resonant material of your emptiness.”

A shudder quivered through the deserters & rapidly dissolved into the dead maw of night. Is this the song they really longed to hear? Seeking to play instruments, they were instead played as instruments.

To Be Like a Tarantula Hawk

The tarantula hawk is a winged hunter, an insect of prey in search of the almighty tarantula, a massive feast on hairy legs. The hawk surveys the landscape, with the myriad insect eye for uncovering rocks to find the tarantula. It’s sting anaesthetizes the spider, which is then transformed into a nest upon which the hawk’s offspring finds warmth, shelter, food. Be like a tarantula hawk! Find in your petty little enemy, hiding under rocks, the great treasure upon which the future may be born.

New Sacae.

In old Babylon, the people, each year, granted freedom to a prisoner for a week. He was elected king, the choice being his to direct society as he wishes. We don’t know how, or who was selected, but he must have been a wildman capable of upsetting civilization as they knew it, inverting it. What must have been seen in that brief window of time! Time itself must have opened up, expanded into a great store or reservoir—the inverse of being in need, desperately in need for a lame scrap of time—and what that relief must have provided, like a great tension unburdened from the psyche, a great worrying concern vanished, what changes must have occured in those people—as if the diamond of time shifted, rotated to refract a different facet, casting people in a different light. And we know light is everything. No amount of personal. In the great leaderlessness of the herding tribes, a leader emerged for a week, and was then sacrificied. What terror and destruction this elected iditiot, this mock King must have wrecked in that brief reign, carved in his guts by the vast diamond of ornamented people—objects of a drunken fantasia—as he made bold to wear it, perhaps to steal it, each mock king in his own image as he imagined it should be for his last week on Earth. What would such a prisoner do with that power, not a resistant one-against-all, but an elected barbarian with the will of the people behind him, cheering and jeering, roofs blown away, the doors to all the walls opened up at once? A frenzy for the nervous system, a lightning festival that for the rest of the year

Fatigue.

"Even curiosity & terror become fatigued." We wear our fatigue as a fashion, in vain attempt to overcome it. In the distressed wrinkles of our clothes, in the weariness cleaved into the crinkles on our faces, in the self-pitying sighs with which all people today complain "what a day, what a year, what a life!" Suicide clubs would be quite a profitable enterprise. And yet it's been shown that sighing is a healthy form of release. Perhaps the great form of our era is the sigh.

Midwestern March

An adventure into the heartland, that cruelly realist beast-heart of a nation, who send forth their children to the outskirts like a heart pulsing blood away from itself into extremities. But are we then the dexterous limbs, prodigally reaching back into its origin? Perhaps the extremities contract & curl up in times of shivering cold, when efficiency of warmth staves off icy death? When the frontiers are exhausted or their thresholds blurry, an adventurer recoils & seeks origin.

Time Thieves on Horseback

The most adventurous amongst us may take as their earthly right the luxuries of Time. Laying claim to that great store of human wealth, Time, congealed over ages & dammed up into the grand reservoirs within vapid industrial society, the heroes of the present, the Time Thieves on horseback, seeking life on the new frontier, swimming in a currentless depth of history, skinnydipping in the reservoirs of Time below the moonlit expanses of night blackened by new & terrible darknesses. What fragile, alien creatures may bottomfeed there? What space to roam free, in a purified pool no one is supposed to touch, for fear of contamination? Are you clean enough to swim there?

Hung

That moment when the annoying person that's been hanging around reveals that they pity you, thinks they're better than you — it's best to cut off hangers-on before the hanging.

No.

I'm not going to come around. I'm not going to learn a thing of what you want me to learn. I'll go learn something else.

Alarm

One answer to the alarm riddle is to turn the alarm off & let the malady that it alerts you to persist. It's most likely not critical anyway.

But they make alarms to be so annoying, don't they? Another answer to is imitate it. Since there's no way you can reproduce the alarm exactly, the difference between the alarm of your design & theirs will create difference tones. If played loud enough they can elicit otoacoustic emissions, sending your ear into feedback distortion mode. An alarm can be made to play your physiology like an instrument.

The Secondary Lit

But who inspires the best secondary literature?

Who wakes up & sees their dead friend & their experience with them worth writing about? That the secondary writer may come out richer?

Collaboration

Collaborations are best when they occur within yourself.

When one hears the word 'community', the image of a snakepit comes to mind.

Convalescence & Reprogramming

In every convalescence there is a desire to reprogram oneself. Are we already just machines? Have we just been walking around like disfunctional robots? Sputtering & twitching through life, disjecting moving parts? How does a broken bot reprogram itself, if the brokenness is part of the program? An external value must be sought; a bot needs to first learn about values.

Entrails

Or maybe it's not footprints but entrails. Are you able to be a scatologist? In an unfree world, to perceive the directions that others sought & failed? What caves did they rest & die in? What did they eat, what nourished them and what left them famished, perhaps even killed them?

Bubblemakers

Or bubble-poppers? Which are you? Do you inflate, do you have full lungs & the energy to blow balloons, and if so is your hot-air useful--to intflate hot air balloons that travel the earth, soaring above the rabble--or does it pop balloons of lesser ambition? Do you inflate with delicate precision and watch as iridescent soap bubbles shimmer in the afternoon sun--or do you pop them with callous wonder? Or even more basic than that: to pop them in spite, those pesky distractions that betray your commitment to … what now? What are you committed to?

Conformism

Conformism is a concept that used to be thought about a lot. Not ‘used to’ exclusively in the sense of people used to talk of it more in the 90s or whenever, but 'used to' in our childhood. All modern humans. It’s a rite of passage for children and adolescents to question conformity, if only as a means to differentiate themselves. To make their way in the world as an I, as a self. And for a finite period of time this questioning of conformism, this hypersensitivity to what others are doing and why and is it true for me, is enacted as a tool for the development of individuals. And then the individual differentiates and leaves the tool behind, having been successful. But what if it’s a fake end? Or, what if it was called prematurely? What if the goal is actually an unending unconformity? Continual, constant pursuit of distinction, originality, and specificity?

Utopia

When your flaxen hair draped over your icy laptop, its sound math, as skyscrapers reflected the lavender sunset behind you from on highest highs, and all the repressed difference tones were then released into the new millennium, resounding dulcet song radiating, an image of new transparent love then hung like infinity rooms of chandeliers, and stars spangled across our dark eyes that looked over a massive swansong wing on some strange horizon. A single crystal glass waited for me on a marble platform, filled with golden poison, as Parsifal passed on his way to the garden, to eat pizza with the nymphs and tell old jokes. In hallucinogenic waves, a text reads “opportunities exist everywhere.” When we awoke, we were in a warm pool surrounded by fawns in repose on a misty forest shelf. We were coated in a new film of iridescence. This happened everyday for many years, until we were poured out like marbles into the eroded slopes of a world we hardly recognized, and loved it all the more for not recognizing it. It was long enough for all the tattoos to have faded. The Narcissuses were in full bloom, and the libraries well-maintained. A cicada landed on your cleavage, pretending to be a scarab, and whispered “laugh with all”. Laughingly we exited, reflecting on the last days, the signs containing desperate platitudes, the nightriders in urban myths, the diffused cast sunlight on tasteful used linens, the collections within collections within snowglobes.