Vertigo Crossing

Occupy Your Own Privilege

2011-11-27T14:32:00.001-08:00

There are a lot of good, really exciting, truly revolutionary things about the Occupy movement, such as it is a movement, since it really isn't, but there is also one truth that almost no one involved wants to talk about or can talk about, which is the pervasive farce of white privilege. At some level the movement is nothing but the reactionary awakening of the white middle classes in the United States. It didn't matter enough to occupy the streets, fight against the banks, call out the millionaires, and disrupt the functioning of runaway neoliberalism when it was blacks suffering, latinos suffering, poor whites suffering, but it matters when the children of the middle classes begin drowning in debt amassed simply to attend university, or cannot find jobs, or cannot move out of their parents houses to find a home of their own.

Let's dispense with this hard truth right now: all of those complaints, legitimate as they are (for one, like myself, who believes education is a right, and therefore should be free, along with healthcare, at a minimum), are complaints from the position of obscene privilege compared to minorities in this country. No jobs, no university education, stuck living in parents homes, or worse? This is the daily life of the working poor in the United States and has been since before independence. Mass imprisonment, dramatically shorter life-expectancy, lower standards of education have been the reality for blacks in the U.S. for a long time now, just as dramatically following the civil rights movement as before it. There are systematic arguments for that, but what it really means at the most basic level is that the same white, complacent middle classes now taking to the streets to protest their loss of privilege are absolutely, even if passively, complicit and guilty of oppression imposed on minorities and the working poor.

They should start, then, with an apology, with an admission of guilt. They should start on their knees, acknowledge the farce of their position, their absolute privilege, and then maybe they will earn the respect, engagement, support, and knowledge of those communities which have been repressed in this country for as long as there has been a country. Otherwise, should Occupy be victorious in its goals, it will again, as every past "movement" has done, leave behind those same groups to be exploited, all it will accomplish is a return to the status quo in which white middle-class citizens have it good, the rich have control, and everyone else has it worse than those can imagine.

One needs to say, "We are sorry, we have ignored you, we have failed to fight for you until it was us they came for", or one needs to shut up and get to work on the streets without speaking. Those who have fought and failed, or fought and been thrown in prison, or fought and been beaten down time and time again, who know the police not as "friends" but as the force of control that they are, should have nothing but disdain to anyone that fails in this apology. I have nothing for disdain for anyone who fails in that apology, and I am one of those who needs to apologize. So I will: I am sorry. I have ignored massive injustice until it affected me. I have failed to show up for the fight during the long years there has been a war I was blind to. I am sorry.

In this country one needs to understand the "problem" is not whether people whose parents own nice houses and who will support them until a job is found have amassed a lot of debt, though that is certainly a problem. The problem is white, middle-class ignorance towards millions of people locked up for minor offenses because they are black, or latino, or simply poor. The problem is the millions who couldn't begin to afford university attendance even before tuition prices skyrocketed, while people like me got by without even having to hold down a job. The problem is millions bankrupt because of health problems. The problem is a system of exploitation in which the 1% (who exist and are worse than you imagine, find the statistics if you want) extract the wealth from all the rest of us and throw it into the multinational slipstream of commodity and resource trading trying to earn return upon return on our dollar. The problem is that everything in this country is built to support them, not to help us, including the police, the courts, and the government as a whole. The problem, really, is that 150 million people in this country know that and have known that for a long time now, but the privileged, entitled other millions were enough to keep the system afloat and in power.

Of course it is good that those millions are finally turning against power, finally failing to believe in it. But let's not delude ourselves into believing that this is some change in consciousness or essential goodness: things have been deeply unjust for a long time now, and precious few of us privileged noticed or cared, or we cared in the way we care if the wife of an acquaintance dies of cancer: "Oh, that really is too bad, honey." We care the way sitcom characters care, because sitcom characters are written to give familiar models of white society and their narratives are borrowed. We, and let me be clear I include the I in it, lack mirrors, and avoid looking into the mirrors we do have.

What I'm saying is that what we've done, in our privilege and ignorance, is already nearly unforgivable, and that we deserve to beg for that forgiveness. If we fail this time we will be truly complicit, have committed the truly unforgivable act of demanding a revolution for ourselves and again ignoring those who need it far more than we do. The streets have been occupied, the camps have been torn down, as I write this the last holdout in Occupy Los Angeles is about to get raided, so things change again. If you are one of the privileged it's time to occupy your own privilege: your shopping mall, your university, your courthouse, your favorite restaurant, your parents backyard, your police stations, your hospitals, your museums, especially the museums, and to remind them all they serve and must serve everyone, not just you.

Occupation, Space, Community

2011-10-10T07:46:00.000-07:00

"Sleeping on that pavement was not only a way to lay claim to the public, to contest the legitimacy of the state, but also quite clearly, a way to put the body on the line in its insistence, obduracy and precarity, overcoming the distinction between public and private for the time of revolution. In other words, it was only when those needs that are supposed to remain private came out into the day and night of the square, formed into image and discourse for the media, did it finally become possible to extend the space and time of the event with such tenacity to bring the regime down. After all, the cameras never stopped, bodies were there and here, they never stopped speaking, not even in sleep, and so could not be silenced, sequestered or denied – revolution happened because everyone refused to go home, cleaving to the pavement, acting in concert." Judith Butler

I have an embedded nervousness at crossing the thresholds of doorways. Embedded doesn't sound right, but it sounds the closest thing to right. Gates, fences, doorways. Lorca had this too, but I think this was consciousness of the threshold as something profound rather than an implicit learned training of what space may be entered and what space may not. Anyway he was afraid of doorways, I've been afraid of what is past a doorway, and I think both are because continuity fails at the barrier. At a coffee shop one night I sat outside on the patio and watched a homeless man stumblestop at the invisible line between a low wall of wooden planters that demarcated the area of the coffee shop. He did not cross it. Maybe he couldn't cross it. Maybe he'd been banned for staying too long without buying, or maybe he knew he wasn't welcome, or maybe he knew THAT place was not HIS place. A line I cross without thinking about it is a barrier for someone else, and a very real one. I walk through the front doors, past the secretaries, through the very clean hallways of the John Molson School of Business and downstairs to the (not that clean) bathrooms and know I don't look TOO out of place, despite not having a suit or jacket on. Despite not quite belonging, belonging enough.

What is the difference, if there is any true important difference, between a nomadic tribe on the North American plains, or crossing the Sahara, and a group of people occupying the wasteland of Wall St? The experiment gets more profound when thought of that way, for me, because it is an actual revolution...that is an actual starting over. It's not just about overcoming the distinction between public and private anymore, but LOSING the distinction all together. There is no private space anymore, there is no public space anymore, precisely because all space has become public space in any sense of ownership or entitlement. You have YOUR space, yes, but that space is not fixed in the world, is not owned, and does not need to be. Butler talks about systems of alliances in this article and how they don't need to be tied to a space, that is the lesson of revolutions in the Middle-East lately. The alliances continue even when you change place. Nomadic tribes. Burning man tribes. Art collectives. Revolutionary Collectives, but really, ideally, just collectives for everything. We already do it. It's not that hard, and it feels really good. You develop the ability to manifest and occupy and exist in AnySpace, in Space, whether public or private. This kind of organization is what no one, because of deeply learned ignorance, gets about communism, which I always think of less on the level of massive state organization, and far more on the level of what really is more like tribal organization and responsibility.

But what I really thought of before starting to write this is when the doors don't matter anymore. When they are all open, and what is past the threshold isn't threatening or uninviting. This sounds like what happened in Egypt: the whole city became part of the revolution. This is the difference between thinking of public space as temporary use only and public space as occupied space. The distinction, the barrier, between public and private is erased because you drag lines of bodies, speech, materials and knowledge between the two spaces. By occupying the public you drag the private into the public, and vice versa. Permanence ceases to be the realm (which is an illusion anyway) of the private only. The false idea of permanence in the home, aristocratic and totally unattainable to almost everyone, is what gets people in trouble...slaves to the money required for that illusion. Space isn't permanence. Nothing is, but community, ritual, tradition, are far closer than space is. Anyone who thinks you couldn't do Burning Man almost anywhere doesn't get it. Anyone who thinks you can't occupy a suburb doesn't get it. Anyone protesting at Wall Street who thinks the goal is enough money to own a house, which I've got a feeling is almost everyone, doesn't actually get it, and they need to.

The things you own end up owning you. As a mantra. Over and over again. Ownership is aristocratic. The very idea comes from the people that have always done the most to fuck up the world. It always ties you down to place and obliges you to defend it, obliges you to think that place has inherent value and meaning. "Anything can happen, the tallest towers / be overturned" says Seamus Heaney, which is a reminder of how pointless it is to build very tall towers when you could be building community, culture, ritual, and things that actually CAN endure, despite almost anything.

Notes from the Wall Street Occupation

2011-09-24T07:52:00.000-07:00

Max Hodes, another member of the Sacred Dice Collective, spent days protesting, nights in the cold, endured arrest and went back for more during the ongoing occupation of Wall Street organized this past week. These are his words about what's going on there.

The General Assembly

The NYT confuses this with an organized group. It is not. It is the name for a gathering of participants who need not be named or declare any affiliation or ever have been here or anywhere else before. It uses a consensus-building model to make discuss and make decisions democratically. Nearly everyone who is at the site seems inexperienced using this model. There are frequent arguments over abuse of process. These conflicts diminish with passing days. New committees and working groups are formed every day to deal with whatever issues have recently arrived. For example, when we arrived there was already a media team. They took it upon themselves to create a 24-hour broadcast on the internet, in addition to shooting and compiling footage with multiple cameras, also on a 24-hour schedule. It was later determined by the GA that there should be a separate Media Outreach committee, dealing with inventing PR tactics and training participants in same. There is a comfort committee, dealing with blankets, cardboard supply, soft things, to increase longevity. There is a medical team. There is a sanitation committee. All volunteers who notice problems and fix them as they see them. Anyone who has an idea is basically free to enact it unless someone in the GA has some principled concern about it. Each participant is given full license to use their time however they see fit. Volunteers are called for where needed, and usually appear in droves. There is a committee of facilitators who might, to the untrained eye, appear to be leaders of the outfit. While facilitating, they do not participate in discussion in the offering of opinions.

As far as larger organizational structures go, this is as good a model as any, but it does have limits which become evident as the group grows.. There simply isn't time for everyone to offer themselves to a discussion and those that feel more inclined to lead than follow seem to end up facilitating. However, that level of participation is still more democratic than a simple yes or no vote. Individuals determine the level of participation they want to see from themselves. Gaps in leadership are filled as soon as someone wants problems solved, because they need to do the solving themselves. The GA seems to create a less inert population because people with the inclination against slow decision making are free to speak up and seem rarely shouted down.

I think that on a large scale, the consensus model could be used in well-trained groups of up to 500. Smaller groups, being more agile, might serve larger communities better by volunteering representatives, training them, and sending them to larger consensus-bodies. In such a way I can even imagine an alternate societal organization to our current one. Over the course of 100 years with sufficient participatory training, unilateral action on the part of a large body of people might be entirely eliminated because the process has the feeling of fusing individual and group identities. Maybe that's wishful thinking. I'm well trained already in the process, and this one was excessively frustrating. When I disagree with the group at large, I don't want to participate at all. And my lack of contribution goes entirely unnoticed. This has it's advantages and disadvantages, but I ultimately like it more because of the choice one is forced to make moment to moment. In the film The Matrix the Architect describes the same choice to Neo: act, or do not act, choose. Without this choice, no process is democratic. Compulsory participation is fascism plain and simple. It's one of the million things we're protesting against.

Why are we protesting

No one knows. Everybody is enraged and everyone has a unique focus. We have not decided on a single demand, and I don't want to. I would like this to turn into a Burning Man-esque event. An ongoing party of the political, artistic and spiritual avant-garde, that becomes an ever-updated cultural institution; a continual protest against the status quo with real political consequences. For that to happen, we will need to find ways of becoming genuinely disruptive. That means we will more than likely be struck down, unless we can somehow strike a perfect balance of necessity and aggravation. If the world demands we stay because we are stirring up right conflict, then we've got a chance at perpetuation. More likely, the cold will get us before too long. The blue-shirt cops seem to like us. The city cut their overtime hours, possibly as a way to get at their pensions, and this is the best chance they've got to log hours before retirement. It's the police lieutenants who are doing the dicking around.

Still we keep getting asked, what we are doing there. And still no one knows. We are occupying because the world is outrageous, we blame greed, and those who feel entitled to their greed. Wall Street is the center of greed. It's that simple. We didn't keep Troy Davis alive. We haven't fed anybody who was hungry, we haven't stopped the monster or done more than create a slightly spectacular nuisance. No one has thrown themselves into the gears of the machine. Maybe what we're protesting is that we can't even see the gears. The machine is a phantom beyond any measure of control except perhaps this one. We are actually trying to alter culture by pushing and shoving it with phantom hands, which turn out to be the only tool available, since the culture is itself composed of phantoms, ideas, fleeting moments, rather than anything concrete and destructible. There is not, for example, any factory to strike against and shut down. The machine will continue with or without our participation.

My arrest on Monday morning was the first that I know of. It was carried out, as reported by the Wall Street Journal and The Colbert Report, under an obscure law from 1848 against the wearing of masks at public gatherings. The arrest, like many at protests, was possibly illegal, but of course legality is not the point of these arrests while disruption and intimidation absolutely are. It snowballed in many more, each more brutal than the last. This got people down there. That and the free pizza. Now the slog war begins. Get bodies in there every day and every night, marching, singing, laughing, being. Not too loud or they'll shut us down, but loud enough and long enough and we'll be undeniable, and then we can become unstoppable. Unless we issue a demand, which I'm pretty sure would get ignored. This is perhaps the point which is missed by the GA: why issue a single demand? Why not continue at this noise making, this occupation, with no singular demand and thus no end in sight? Why not confound the whole model of protest with an absurd action?

So we press on, activating ourselves ever more despite all the forces that tell us to stop.. That's what we're protesting. The middle of the road with it's long yellow line. That's what we're protesting. A million little hurts and ten-thousand big ones. That's what we're protesting. That we're not allowed to protest aloud. That's what we're protesting. That public space, the space where thousands of tiny, healthy, necessary, revolutions can take place, has been stolen from us and remade as controlled space, sanitized space. That’s what we’re protesting. That the police, and by extension the state, do not protect us, the majority of the people, but the tiny greedy minority which conducts its business on Wall Street. That’s what we’re protesting.

From Deep in the Noise

2011-08-20T23:03:00.000-07:00

It’s time to leave all the old ideologies behind, which means it is time to stop having ideologies. Perhaps it is time to stop having ideas at all, since there are so many swarming around that it impossible to classify them, a swarm of ideas like millions of butterflies each with a different wing pattern and shape, and a few of us running around in a panic trying to identify each. Someone will ask, “Are you on the left or the right?” and we will answer, “I don’t know what that means”. They will ask, “Are you communists or something?”, and we will answer, “No, I don’t believe in systems.” They will ask, “Are you anarchists, then?” and we’ll have to answer, “Stop playing in labels, they only exist to make you feel better.”

There is no one on the left and no one on the right. There was never anyone on either side, just a lot of noise being thrown about aimlessly, sometimes bullets and sometimes other brutality, sometimes torture and sometimes exile, but really it was just a lot of noise that didn’t accomplish very much. All the same old machines kept on turning, oblivious to all of the noise. They didn’t miss a beat, or they watched the game from the sidelines, drinking beer and eating hotdogs, not from the executive suites windowed off from the crowd, but right down in the midst of it all, innocuous as anyone.

Communism and capitalism, socialism and anarchism, these are ideas, fragments of static in the noise. They are representations, which is the same as saying they are fictions. They are absurd reductions with the pretension of explanation. Someone says, “Capitalism is failing”, but what does that really mean? There is more joblessness, more poverty, more wealth in the hands of the very rich and less in the hands of the very poor, less production? To begin with, if capitalism is representative of anything, it would seem in that case to be doing very well for itself. Our mistake is thinking it would ever do well for us.

That, of course, is the problem. The idea, as always, ends up serving the idea, and everything else fades in importance. We, as always, end up servants of the idea, working fervently to maintain the idea despite all good moral judgement and despite visions of horror. The idea, as always, wants to maintain itself. All systems, as always, want to maintain themselves.

When it has been “communism” the mode of maintaining itself has often been similar to all others: oppression, imprisonment, totalitarianism, reactionary modes to a world largely arrayed against it, natural, as it were, responses of a system born and living constantly under threat.

When it has been “capitalism” we have been spared, some of us even prospering, so long as capitalism does well for itself. Now it comes under some sort of threat, now the cracks begin (but again, since as Marx pointed out, everything occurs twice: first as tragedy and then as farce, with the Great Depression and subsequent second world war as the tragedy, and the postwar period as a drawn out farce growing more absurd, more hilarious, more decadent and depraved, by the moment), now we feel it coming down on us.

We’ve all seen “The Matrix” at this point. Systems want to replicate themselves and maintain themselves. This is why Nietzsche, in the “Twilight of the Idols”, called it philosophizing with a hammer; the systems must be broken for anything new to be made. Almost every time, it seems, we merely attempt to replace one system with another system, which is more beloved of us because it is our own, or we lay claim to it, and at which point we are all hapless Trotskys watching in abject sorrow as the idea runs away and turns into a carnival of horror.

There isn’t the left and there isn’t the right. We aren’t interested in being another part of the noise, another feature in the desolate sideshow. Someone will want to say that is apolitical, and maybe they are right, since this seems somehow beyond, underneath, or at a different wavelength all together from what is called politics, which is, above all, a game that maintains a consistent level of noise.

This is the resistance. That’s it. This is the arranging of oneself against systems because those systems have arranged themselves against us. It has nothing to do at the beginning with capitalism or communism, with left or right, though it has quite a bit to do with love and quite a bit to do with resilience, quite a bit to do with serving ourselves rather than replacements for dead gods.
Make something new that doesn't depend on subservience to anything. Cooperate. Construct. Learn from rhizomatic forms. Reject hierarchy. Sing, dance and act loudly. Don't think about what it is supposed to look like. Throw out the masterplan. Listen. Begin.

Poetic Manifesto

2011-06-12T19:49:00.000-07:00

Note #1:

Poetry is a sustaining activity.

Note #2:

Poetry is a need of those who have little, thus it is given no place in a society of excess.

Note #3:

That society of excess, which some said would lead to greater learning, more refined consciousness, or really just everyone listening to Mozart and reading Hegel, has managed to take over and destroy almost everything capable of being subsumed...including, or especially, as the first casualty, most art.

Note #4:

Because poetry is not easily palatable it has been left to die. Because it cannot be made into a mass commodity, despite efforts of the literary establishment, university writing programs, and above all the poets of that establishment, it remains something viable, something capable of sustaining memory, history, shreds of reality, humanity, resilience, rebellion and love.

Note #5:

Profit and corporation has poisoned everything but it has not yet poisoned poetry. This is missed by those who write about poetry, always from the establishment of poetry. That establishment, which claims its own absurd self-importance, is completely ignored by those in power, by corporations, by those who distribute art. The only rebellious poetry allowed is approved rebellious poetry. That establishment, and every poet who is a part of it, is worthless and worthy of ridicule no matter how good the poetry is. I’m thinking right now of Billy Collins. I’m thinking less of Seamus Heaney. I’m thinking not at all of Bolano, Bukowski, or Rimbaud, no matter how precious they become now, dead and unable to defend themselves.

Note #6:

Poetry, like love, does not have a direct answer to systems. It is sustaining resilience. It preserves what would be killed off: like impossibility, like the unreal, like love other than seen in the movies, like kindness, like courage of a kind not exploited for wars. It corrodes those systems, like water, slowly and consistently, like winter freezing and unfreezing the pavement into numerous deadly potholes. It refuses to go away. It gnaws at systems. It is always opposed. That is the work of poetry. To simultaneously preserve and oppose. That is why poetry has no ideology, no “politics”, even while it must always be profoundly political.

Note #7:

That is the work of poetry, to simultaneously preserve and oppose.

Note #8:

I think you all know this, but you have become very lazy and very comfortable.

Note #9:

The only way anything is written is to refrain from thinking at all about who will read it. Cave paintings, errant footprints, William Blake.

Note #10:

Everyone is not about to start reading poetry. I don’t imagine the Greeks sitting around reading Homer. Of course not, they didn’t read. I can imagine them listening to Homer, maybe once in their lives, another traveling man with the misfortune to be blind, telling tales to get safe passage to the next island. I can imagine them sitting around at night, retelling variations on those stories. Even that is being too optimistic. Mostly I imagine the Greeks getting drunk when life was too heavy and working hard to survive the rest of the time. I imagine them as distracted as we are with their spare time. Or impossibly bored, which amounts to the same thing. Society is not about to better itself. Everyone isn’t about to read Homer when they have a Playstation. No one read the Irish monks who kept the ideas of those Greeks alive through the dark times until all the monks were long dead and only their illuminated manuscripts survived.

Note #11:

Poetry, calcified and self-satisfied like all other culture in this society, is as unprepared as everything else for the situation to change utterly.

Note #12:

Poetry, because it is a basic urge, not merely an art, can survive the change of everything. The only thing that ceases poetry is constant distraction, since poetry is born out of memory, longing and boredom. That distraction is what cannot, no matter what they say, last.

Twin Peaks and Blake's "The Sick Rose"

2011-05-13T18:40:00.000-07:00

The Sick Rose

O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

Everything worth investigating starts as a minor mystery, in this case the question was why the people that publish collections named "Erotic Poetry" would include this poem. What about it is erotic? Nothing, the first many times I read it, sounds erotic. Definitely not if erotic means, the way we almost always use the word today, sexy, or sexual, or enticing, or anything else between pornography and erotic love. Was this obviously erotic in Blake's time? Does it matter? Not any more that it matters that to get at it I needed Lynch's Twin Peaks and Lindsey Cristofani.

What the hell does a 20th century television drama, even a surrealist soap opera by David Lynch, have to do with an 18th century poem by a poet mostly remembered for his prophetic body and soul melding The Marriage of Heaven and Hell? Everything, if this poem is about rape. Everything, if it's about hidden, repressed male desire in society, in the bedroom, in the family home. The "invisible worm" is nothing else, once you see it that way. "That flies in the night, / In the howling storm", that seems straightforward enough, that such an act would come out of darkness, out of chaos, out of what is uncontrollable and buried, denied, unseen even by the perpetrator. Leland Palmer, the father in Twin Peaks, is given to us as possessed by a sort of demon named Bob, under whose control he repeatedly, over years, rapes his daughter Laura. He doesn't know what he has done until he is near death. Forget the demon part, focus on that he doesn't know. He is a slave to what flies in the night.

"Dark secret love" is poisonous love, not joyful, open, honest love. It's the kind of love that watches the object of desire from the corner of eyes, hoping no one else notices the glance. It wants to possess without being possessed, to have without having to be had and without questions being asked.

What can be done once the rose is sick? Once "thy bed / Of crimson joy" is violated? Maybe nothing. Blake doesn't give us any hope, except that, like all the poems in Songs of Experience, there is a song of Innocence to counter it, somehow. But this is innocence lost, and in human terms that isn't something that can be regained. In Twin Peaks the stain of dark, secret love, is Laura Palmer's death at her father's hand, but that is only the beginning, since the real stain is her loss of innocence, of which we are all, like the characters in the show, complicit. Of course she tries to regain it. Of course she fails. She is so tormented by the recurrence of the act, by how it begins to possess her, to turn her further to darkness and away from love, away from innocence, that she decides to die. Thus the last line of Blake, "Does thy life destroy". The act, the desire itself, the darkness and void that wraps around all of it, is life destroying, always and there isn't an antidote.

Lindsey noticed this all years ago while we read Blake in the back of a car on the way to a restaurant near LAX. Alright, not all, I don't know if Twin Peaks was part of our vocabulary yet, but it hardly matters since I have a feeling she understood the darkness of it already, without that point of reference. I could easily leave that part of the story out. Do you need to know, reading this? Yes. You need to know that saying what seems like a crazy idea (no one else, out of several intelligent readers of literature in that car, thought this poem was about sex) is important. You need to know it might be distilling somewhere, in some mind you don't even think about, and years later might manifest as something new and perhaps important.

That's how all these sort of things get done. That's how an 18th century poem says more about a 20th century television show in eight lines than most cultural commentators have said in many, many more.

I'm a text You're a text

2011-02-01T13:57:00.000-08:00

Everyone is living a multiplicity of texts. I won’t say narratives because I don’t think they are the same thing. A narrative is a fantasy, something that exists purely in the mind, but a narrative is only a part of a text. The text comes from outside and marries narrative. The text comes from television and marries a submissive personal narrative. We see a text, read a text and think: that is so much like me, and thats only the beginning. The text is a virus and an idea, something that can exist whether we are living in it or not. Everywhere, lying around like snakes or angels, there are texts for us to run into, pick up, inhabit, or make part of ourselves. Every political ideal is a text, or I should say every political ideal comes with a text. There is a text for how to behave if you believe abortion is illegal. There are consequences for stepping outside this text and sudden questioning of faith in the ideal when it happens. The text is often what traps us; because we cannot see outside it, because stepping outside it is not easy, because stepping outside it will be noticed, because the consequences for defying a text are real, because the consequences for defying a text are serious.

I imagine Bob Dylan in the text of Folk Singer, Bob Dylan in the text of Evangelist, Bob Dylan in the text of Sex Symbol, and I notice that when Todd Haynes made his Dylan film he knew it too. I imagine Bob Dylan because he read Rimbaud and got it: Je est un autre, I is another, because I is part of a text already as soon as I conceive of him or her. I imagine, remember without being truly able to remember, that the failure of someone who comes to embody a text to remain exemplary of that text is called a betrayal. Obama, inhabiting the text of a revolutionary liberal leader, is a traitor for defying that text and becoming a centrist governing President, even though he never pledged allegiance to that text.

That’s a problem. Whose text is this? It’s a collective text. Every text is collective, shared. Every text is a multiplicity, thus a difference and a repetition with all implied shades of Deleuze’s two ideas. The repetition of collective multiplicity that keeps a text alive, the repetition of collective actors playing the parts of the text, and the repetition of the text itself driving those actors. There are juicy, living, bloody texts and there are stale texts. Cohen says “the photograph tells you the way you hold your cunt is old fashioned” and we know there is an ancient text there. Bolano says, “everything is possible; a poet should know that”, and we know there is an ancient text poets should be inhabiting but often fail to. But what do we do? Everywhere there are deviations, everywhere there are failures of the text, at least as many as there are unchallenged texts.

What does art have to do with this? Art gives us texts. What is different about those if so many things are giving us a text, if movies, TV shows, YouTube, friends, lovers, philosophers, corporations, advertising, on and on in a list as infinite as Borges library are all throwing texts at us to receive, to try and defy, to ignore, to promote? Art has the potential to give us intentional texts. Texts that want to say something specific. Alright, but advertising does that too. If art wants to be different it has to do more. Great art gives us infinite texts: that is, texts with infinite starting points. Art gives us texts that are possibilities and expand possibilities. Ulysses does not presume to tell us what it is or what it will do to us. It can’t be qualified or quantified. It refuses to be a closed text because it constantly reaches out into the world. Great art is entangled, and so its texts are entangled with the world and with us. It doesn’t give you one text to live, but throws all the operative texts into confusion, or realigns them, reconfigures and combines them, shakes up the normalized world of texts which we live.

The point is to notice. Notice the texts I am living and you are living. I know I have a text for how I walk into a room which is more substantial than my emotions, how I hold my body, what I think about, because the text encompasses and informs all of those. If we think of ourselves as authors rather than actors we are capable of modifying the text. An actor is not capable of that move. An actor can only play the part and must submit to the text. To become conscious of the text is to become an author of the self, which is close, I think, to what Borges means when he imagines that we are dream figures in the dream of another. We are actors in the texts of others, and the texts of others, like our own, are implicitly caught up in dreaming. Do I need to prove that? No, but you can. Do something outside the given text. Roll some sex dice. Stand up to the next racist joke you hear. Flirt with the grocery store checkout guy. Watch TV and pretend you’ve never seen a TV before. Take hallucinogenic drugs. Forget what you are supposed to be, supposed to do and live outside it, staring into the absurd. Then you can learn to play with the text, with the texts, delighting in them rather than being slaves to them the way Phish sings about being a slave to the traffic light.

The text, after all, IS the absurd. That’s why Gregor Samsa waking up as an insect matters so much. What do you do when you wake up and realize all the given texts have been stripped of meaning, or never meant anything to begin with?

Only the form of your body

2010-12-17T09:14:00.000-08:00

All bodies are real to me. You do not exist in memory or reality without being in the world. All is present in things, and only things matter. Only the form of your body, the force of its movement in will through the world, matters. I have to imagine you receiving my letter with legs folded under your body as you sit on a bed in a room you no longer rent. This makes you no less real, makes reality no less real, but infuses it with enough meaning to give life to what would be dead.

All You Need to Know

2010-10-26T18:07:00.000-07:00

I found myself telling a story, consumed by the generalities of narrative and the urge to make universal by way of flatness. There’s the generality, which wants to be something to everyone, but not very much, and the specificity, which is a thousand times more ecstatic, bound up in memory, and quivering with alive but in conversation gives us back blank faces, downcast eyes. Caught in the generality and suddenly wondering where the wonder has gone. This is a vision and a revision, a memory of arbitrary specifics, a dream you are sharing with a will behind it.

We met and began to fall in love in Spain, in Granada, the city that no one wants to leave but I had to leave on a 3am bus still a bit high, a bit drunk. I had to meet her in the north, in Bilbao after university finished a few weeks later. She somehow found me at the airport though maybe we barely remembered each other. She’d found a pension to stay at. The room was large and all white, with dark wood furniture and a balcony over a small old street. We didn’t know how to know each other. We didn’t know how to make love to each other. I barely knew how to make love. We spoke, faltering. We made love. We made love for days. I don’t remember how many. We’d leave only to go for walks, sometimes not until evening. We drank wine and ate olives on the small balcony. We began the slow process of knowing each other. We began to learn the words that the other used. Our two languages fought, though sparingly, joking, not knowing how serious a problem their inability to communicate would become. We couldn’t know how little we understood of the other. We visited the famous museum, through curved shining forms, through dulled rusted tunnels. We walked over many bridges, talking, listening, trying to hear. We made love many times a day in that white room. I was deliriously in love, so much that memory falters. A black man, there are few in Spain, sang old American songs down on the street. We played a game of believing he sang to us. We left the curtains open, the windows open all night. It was June. Late one morning the woman at a higher window across the street, working in a carpet shop, must have seen us making love. We hoped that she watched for a while. We hoped it was beautiful because we believed ourselves to be beautiful. We believed ourselves to be beautiful because we were in love and delirious, drunk on ourselves, the way we should be when we fall in love. Exactly as we should be, innocent as we should be and are, completely naive and raw for life. A touch of cynicism could have killed us, a bare mention of a steeled rational plot, but none came for us.

I fell in love in Spain, gorgeously, without hesitation, and did not look back. When she left down the Metro stairs in Paris I didn’t look back. I’d played Bruce Springsteen to her on the way to Paris to try and get her to stay. I couldn’t understand that her French mind didn’t know what to make of the lyrics that saved me. I spent days wandering the streets of that museum-city, sometimes visiting museums. I don’t know what I ate. I don’t know what I did, except walk and read, sometimes write, but I don’t know what I wrote; there’s a journal now with little in it. I sat by the Seine and watched Parisians. I drank beer, or wine, I don’t know. I paid too much to keep our double room because we’d danced there crying before she left. The owner spoke no English anyway. He asked where she’d gone. Elle voyager, a few words I could remember. I lay in bed all day in the heat, sweating into sheets, taking a shower when it was too much. I watched the apartment next door have a dinner party through multiple windows. I watched some of the World Cup games in French, or the news channels without understanding at all. How many days? I don’t know. I’ve never figured it out. A week? It seems impossible. What I remember as one day in the room could have been three, or more. I didn’t talk to anyone. I found an internet cafe down the street and wrote to her a few times. Eventually I bought a plane ticket to Berlin and that moment ended.

When we met again we were far from Spain, far from falling in love. In love but uncertain, knowing nothing of each other but our love. We began again.

P.S. - I've left out the Chinese restaurant, the beach and her beauty along the rocks, the endless hunk of cheese bought at a market and carried for days, the tapas of San Sebastian, my absolute shyness at trying to speak Spanish, the restaurant in Guerncia thinking about Picasso and Franco's bombs, these and thousands of other things...but you aren't supposed to know that.

If the night would end

2010-09-22T20:14:00.000-07:00

If the night would end. If the night would never end. If we could sit endlessly facing each other. If we ceased facing endlessly. If we faced, ceasing endlessly. If we ceasing endlessly faced. If the night ends. If never ended the night. If ceasing ended the night. If sitting our ceasing the night ended. If ceasing to sit the night appeared raw and black, maw and swallowing. If ceasing our sit swallowed into night, chewed and quivering. If endlessly maw, chewing sat, facing and swallowing the starlight. If pulling down if rising up. If quivering facing our ceasing ended. If maw talked, if quivering warbled a song to our facing. If warbling the ceasing sang to our night. If sun bitten, if moon raked and quivering bleeding, if ceased endless our chewed minds and derelict visions uplifted. If our quaking bodies turned to chewing endless fortune’s strands. If uplifted the star threads pulled us, limbs into void, facing our ceasing notions, chewing our endless notions, quivering our faces, threading our eye’s beads on wires of identity. If hands abandoned the beads. If night abandoned faces. If ceasing abandoned night. If we ourselves torn and tearing, only eyes strung, only arms flailing, only legs quivering upwards, only holy ghastly constellations chewing in the maw of light.

Commentary on a poem by Leonard Cohen:

2010-08-01T16:38:00.000-07:00

This Is War

There is no one
to show these poems to
Do not call a friend to witness
what you must do alone
These are my ashes
I do not intend to save you any work
by keeping silent
You are not yet as strong as I am
You believe me
but I do not believe you
This is war
You are here to be destroyed

from The Energy of Slaves

Commentary:

“There is no one / to show these poems to” - Do not run to another. No one else will understand. What I have found here will be mine to deal with. No other can validate. The truth would be lost if they did. Don’t look back down the tunnel. Eurydice disappears down the path with a pale face. Revelation disappears in the same manner. There isn’t anywhere to go. Stop trying to escape (I know that I want to).

“Do not call a friend to witness / what you must do alone” - This isn’t something to show off. The poem isn’t foreplay. It won’t get you in the door. It won’t bring friends or lovers. When you inform them what it does do you they will nod and say, “Yes, very nice.” Or something else, but no better. You must do it alone because the hero must be alone with the gods. Ghosts of gods, ghosts of men, in tattered clothing and unwashed. Alone with it all, the throbbing presence of the void. Eternity in an hour and a grain of sand. A particle with the weight of star matter. Alone with it. There are no calls to make.

“These are my ashes / I do not intend to save you any work / by keeping silent” - The poet has burned himself for this. Or he was burned, and spends his time collecting his ashes as offerings. His love has been a fire. His self has been immolated. His ashes are mixed with ink and water and written upon the page. Perhaps they are mixed with blood, a trap of a dramatic urge with a ritualistic novelty. Keeping silent would save us work, much hard work, many difficult questions which materialize upon the reading of this page, upon the realization of ingesting ashes. He has chosen to speak. The words are there to be dealt with.

“You are not yet as strong as I am” - Simply a statement of fact. Why else turn to these lines? Why else be so disturbed by them? Why else feel the knife of truth twisting in a gut and inspiring the urgency to flee into the arms of comfort, into the arms of safe love, into the arms where no poet is putting our intellect and ego under siege?

“You believe me / but I do not believe you” - I believe you because you have proven yourself, because there are ashes amongst and upon the pages. Because your absolute privacy has violated itself before my eyes. There is reason to believe you and none to believe me. All of these things I have expended efforts to hide. I have cowered under the veil of my self, which is a mask I work on day and night. I’ve proven nothing, given nothing of myself. I didn’t even know there was a war.

“This is war” - I didn’t know love was, either. I didn’t know about ordinances, swords, shields, revolvers, parading around in the guise of words. Thrown into it, even offended. A fevered dream that I didn’t even want to have. A war because the poet levels the full weight of his well earned ashes straight at me. Because I feel truth in my gut and am afraid to be destroyed. Because war is where my self is caught up in the mercy of the universe, completely humbled and subject to the laws of chance, the gods of dice, the game being played out that many have tried to rig and all have failed at doing so.

“You are here to be destroyed” - Why else come to these lines? Desperate to preserve, and nothing happens. Full of virtue and not even a tiny shift in the fabric of the universe. Destroyed and the gates of love might budge an inch. The whole tower I thought was magnificent turns out to be rusty, nearly falling over with age and misuse. Why else come to anything, to love, to her, but for apocalypse?

Series of Dreams

2010-07-22T09:45:00.000-07:00

A series of thoughts, series of dreams, series of selves and beings. A stringing together of things that no one who wanted to string anything together could ever come up with, or would ever want to. A series of images so disjointed that the mind recoils out of not wanting to participate in insanity. Out of refusing to confront itself further. The rational mind, what it wants, and the comfort of what it takes and protects against. The concrete dam of language and steel shell of the unwilling body. A corpse formed out of words that cannot be said. Faces which rearrange themselves depending on the minute, hour, or are nothing but shifting: like sand in the wind, like eddies and crosscurrents, like landscapes observed over millennia; ordered only in the meta-reality of the geoscopic view but never from face to face. Memories that don’t go together, one thing after another, but never singularity. Instead a thousand things, and none of them go together, none of them have any magnetism or obvious attraction. There isn’t even anything to sort out, and that is what should scare you (though that isn’t for me to say). There isn’t even anything to sort out. I’m still going to try. Trying to arrange a ceaseless shifting parade of images that never remains still, never sorts out, never solidifies, never means a thing and laughs outrageously at all attempts to inscribe form upon it.

memory bubbles

2010-05-29T20:35:00.000-07:00

The rum gets to me. The heat gets to me. The voices next door blend with the music and all I can imagine there is the beautiful girl I rarely see. In the other room my wife has taken paint and paper, intent on taking the world out for a ride. In far Los Angeles are names I want to know and can’t help but knowing, bodies I want to know and can’t help but knowing. In far Edinburgh, in Granada, in Paris, in Milano too. My senses as artifice run rampant and commit the rest to oblivion. At some point this all stops making sense, as we all do if we are honest enough. At some point the pursuit falters, the chase ends through exhaustion or death. Never does everyone go home happy. Someone sat by themselves at the orgy, looking through a straw at her feet. In the parks of Montreal couples hold hands, in the parks of Berlin couples make love, naked on the grass and on rocks above a beach in Denmark I sit blistering in sun writing poetry while white windmills turn on the sea. The line between memory and creation fails me or was never valid. Memory made again every day along with the world, a new one always, a new cry in the dawn and in the night, new blood that knows nothing and phantoms dashing across streets without words but refusing to be forgotten.

between the 9th and 10th beer on Bukowski's death day

2010-03-14T20:09:00.000-07:00

that’s how it is
the tears run down the face
of the ocean like a mad horse
tearing loose from it’s rider
until you’re staring
at nothing at all just the glimpse
of her face and the hatred
in a pair of eyes. that’s
nothing, just a frantic
wailing of simple fools
that didn’t know enough to
get out of the way when she
came riding through town.

all i wanted to do
was take a walk down the street
but pretty soon i figured out
that everyone was just as crazy
as I was and that we had nothing
to offer each other. the addict
on a bike almost ran me over.
the girl who was nearly beautiful
from far away
had a bit of a smashed up face
a large dark birthmark on her jaw
and smelled of cheap strawberry
perfume. the kind that makes a man
recoil or choose to accept his fate.
but i had to walk
until i wasn’t on trial anymore.
the day had begun badly
and i needed to get it off my back
so I did
and the sun was very bright outside
thankfully, the sun was bright and high
even though it is still winter
and there wasn’t a cloud at all
just like a morning in spain
without the scent of jasmine.

that’s how it is.
i wasn’t looking for anything
not even for a word or a bit
of advice and thankfully
nothing found me, no one on the street
noticed or cared how mad I looked
or wondered why I lacked
a warm coat to protect myself.
some day
i might be dying in the street
and they won’t notice then either
but that’s it
what we get
the freedom of not being known
except by the ones
who love us
or hate us.

War all the time

2010-03-06T22:30:00.000-08:00

Things changed. I saw everyone trying to look away from death and darkness while I saw both everywhere: in the joyless cruelty of shopping malls and the freezing homeless bodies who curled up next to them on Montreal’s winter streets, in the whore at 6am leaving the club and hurried by her pimp saying, “hang on baby, my feet hurt, OK, hang on baby” worn out and without respite, surrounded by crazy and noise all the time. War all the time. Everyone kept looking away so I looked harder, because I saw how easily they looked away. Their eyes flicker away from mine on the street and have no answer. Only the poor ever answer, the only abject and most accurate answer of “Spare any change?” There’s many ways to say this; one man sings showtunes in a monotone, another girl sobs in the metro station. More polite than the asshole trying to sell you a phone, begging for a handout all the same.

I don’t even know why you come to me. All I offer is what you most do not want to see. This mirror shows only yourself, and never in a flattering image. I know you can’t love, but you believe you can, and know you don’t live, but you believe that you do. That’s ok. It doesn’t bother me much anymore, though I’m sad for us all. When I can’t stand the situation anymore I try to write, and write what I need to make it through evenings of solitude, or a walk down a street full of beggars (most nights everyone is a beggar, from the girls in tights and short dresses to the men with hats laid in front of them for change). This is what I need to write, the madness that sustains me, and I can do it because I don’t care whether you need it or not, whether you like it. I’m not worried about your taste in anything because I don’t trust you one bit, not with my mother or my wife or my friends.

The thing is, who cares about the dead? Her body washes up in a quiet part of the river missing most of its clothes, bloated and visibly battered. One guesses, the newspapers, those who read the newspapers, her friends and mother and daughter, that she was followed home. That she was hit over the head. That she was raped. That she was afraid. That she hurt, felt terror, eventually died. One guesses and imagines these things, but these are fictions and like most fictions only a narrative to fill the void of feeling and bodies. No one worries about truth because the fiction is knowledge enough. so who cares about the dead, when a fiction is good enough for her mother, good enough for the news? A detective is born like a poet is, from wanting to know and revolting against all illusion. The void is there, and so is the dark glimmer of light on rippling water. That is too beautiful a way to say it. The bloody wall, torn throat are there, justice and God are absent, and the detective realizes without him no one will know, no tiny drop of sun will fall into the void. Justice is the furthest thing from his mind, which knows justice is impossible. She is dead, and that’s the end. Justice doesn’t drive him, unless its the injustice of fiction, the passion to be sure of something.

Thrown into life and desperate that way. Mad, needing to know what no one wants to even think about. I work conscious of the walls of the world, conscious of the uselessness of death and the void underneath me. There’s nothing to it. Take your own weight or float around forever. I don’t have any to give you. At the first clue it is over for the detective; the first clue that destroys the fiction forever. Something crooked in the world, out of place in the imagined order of things, and the true world becomes nothing but a fable. The husband still wears the ring on his finger, but no one has checked it for a stain of blood. In Argentina they dropped prisoners from helicopters, but who cared to know of these killers were their sons, their brothers or lovers? I see myself the killer and don’t know if I have the courage to die rather than become a murderer. The detective knows this too, sees the darkness in the unsuspected place, in the fiction of innocence protecting the beloved who is close to us. All terrible possibility. Everything is possible, the father to kill his daughter, the daughter to long for death at his hands, sickness to manifest from all of us. No one accepts this willingly. We build our own crosses for our own crucifixions, and then some of us find the courage to rip our hands from the nails staring into the eyes of those who have hung us there, seeing only a mirror of ourselves.

He can’t turn away. I can’t look away, though sometimes my courage fails and I try to do so. From the moment a stray hair, an oddly broken finger, an out of place bruise, destroyed the fiction of the world he cannot turn away from knowing. I could name him a compulsive, and others do, writing stories in which the detective and the killer share so many affinities. True enough, they know each other if the killer knows himself, since the detective knows all possibilities, and even beyond those. But he has a choice, every day and every case he has a choice to walk away from all of this and knows it to be the case. One day he will, one day later maybe he will come back. One day Rimbaud left for Africa and never wrote again except letters of failure, eventually misery, but finally wanting to be anything but a poet. I imagine them both orphans, Rimbaud and the nameless detective. I have to, because no parents can believe their child has seen so much stupid cruelty, felt the uselessness, terror and beauty of the world so keenly. No more than a parent can believe their child a killer. Both reject the world as it appears, but parents must believe precisely in that world or else be terrified forever of losing their children.

Still there are more dead and endless fictions to go with each one. Thousands of unsolved murders, let alone wars filled with murder for which their are no detectives, as if the answer in itself was merely “war” and that is how things are. Every completed investigation followed by another one, every truth knocked down replaced easily with another fiction. Endless narratives, endlessly imagined truths for every murder and occasion forming the veiled fabric of the world, and the poet-detective with his insane task of piercing those veils knowing there is no glory, no eternity, nothing but a gathering together of what minor truths there are. Every murder an open wound of the world which exposes all we wish desperately to believe as false. Every freezing body next to a warm empty building, everyone who doesn’t have enough to eat, everyone who is daily abused and accepts it just to live.

The detective protests injustice and illusion simultaneously. The poet does the same, or she isn’t much of a poet. I do the same, or I fail my heart. “Protest! Protest! Protest!” Lorca says that’s all he does and Camus agrees when he says out first conscious act is always a rebellion. Protest because things are not the way they appear to be and we inherit a poverty of vision along with a learned avoiding glance. Being awake is simply not the same thing as being alive, and you will happily live the dream until the knives come out. A few weeks ago a car, going obscenely fast, plunged off a road into the river. Imagine the two men riding in it and their sudden realization that life is not a dream which came much too late to do anything at all about it. Life is not a dream! Beware!

Phish Notes - Nov. 27th, 2009, Albany NY

2010-01-25T13:08:00.000-08:00

...but then we’re thrown deep into the darkness of the Jam! and surrounded by Glittering terrible things brought out of the world to be displayed and negate illusion forever.

I don’t think the same now and cannot. I don’t see the same now and cannot. And I thought I knew everything that was just exposed to me. I understood that the “true” world was a fable! But Nietzsche didn’t get me all the way there. More correctly, I didn’t get all the way there with Nietzsche. Phish, in the darkness, glittering shadows, between what started in Split Open and Melt and what came to be conjured in the Seven Below followed by Ghost jam, brought me all the way. Me with everyone else there to witness, and even the less attentive NOTICED. Crowd frantic and then hushed, breathless and speechless, then mad and dancing. Every peak of the music crashed into dissonance and terrifying disorder of “it won’t come back together!”, but the jam always DID, they always brought us, themselves, the Jam, back from the brink.

These were not leaps of faith, but mastery of the forms and the spirit. Phish conjured Milton’s Satan as artificer of those jams, he played on the lights and exposed to us the “true” world which is false. All of our daily falseness became reality and couldn’t stand the light of day ever again. It’s not chaos that wins out, but our ability to navigate the chaos, to bring forms out of the darkness and truth out of darkness NO MATTER HOW TERRIBLE. The heart of those jams a brother to the heart of Bolano’s 6666: a black hole, merciless and impossible to reason away. No one could be counted on to find the way through it, and there were moments when I couldn’t possibly believe Phish WOULD make it through. Tangled up in black and blue, bruised. I don’t and won’t know how they did. The moment seized them. Trey resolutely stabbing at beauty again and again, BWAAOOOYYY again and again. Dylan, “You made it there somehow...”.

This experience is difficult for language. Why even talk about it? Why describe another concert experience and try to take a language-less moment and force it into what seems like banality? It would be easier to say “impossible” to reconcile in language other than music, or a language which doesn’t exist yet. We need the language which doesn't exist yet and this is how to make it. Everything is possible, no matter how difficult, and Phish isn’t beyond the possible just at it’s farthest extent, an endlessly moving horizon with no line, as U2 have found.

Where are you or I if not there? At the farthest extent and exhausted! Deleuze says the exhausted. Bolano’s detectives, Rimbaud walking himself to death, Nietzsche through blinding pain and blind, all of us at Burning Man who want to follow the Last Star all the way past the Orange Fence that is the border of Possible. Phish is there EXHAUSTING themselves in the truly great, high, moments of a jam. They go so far that one cannot go any further...and THEN they go further, past what anyone who is part of it can imagine (including themselves).

It’s very important! You can’t breeze through if you want to break on through. Again, Phish goes past what it is possible to imagine beforehand, they create, through exhaustive effort and searching, what doesn’t exist yet, rather than merely reminding us of what does exist. All reference points vanish, because no one has been here before except other great artists, by which I mean those who created the SPACE in which Phish is now playing. Blake has been here, Nietzsche has, Milton...but Phish does so with the audience, for the audience, because of and influenced by the audience, and the space becomes exactly that all entanglement Nietzsche talks about. They are not the lonely poets of our mystique going alone into the darkness to find truth, because there is a community roaring that it MATTERS how far they go, can go, gives them company, even compassion, in the searching. We’ve invested ourselves. We might go mad if they can’t pull us through. Right at the edge of madness, darkness forever, right at the edge of light and the heart. Loving the world enough to give into the laws of gravity and chance, balancing monsters of love.

Multitude

2010-01-07T20:00:00.000-08:00

Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel and think. Also because it’s nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it’s only a manner of speaking. To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied.
-Deleuze and Guattari

I am tangled with you. The you reading this, that I’m imagining and who now influences me, and the you I don’t know at all. We are writing this now, because I can’t be certain anymore where what makes us act, feel and think is us or I. The certainty was an illusion like most not broken until it was revealed as a fable. Out of habit! Nothing else than our daily constant noises that we’ve learned how to make. I say I because it is convenient to say I, because there is something I can’t define or quite recognize that has it’s source of power and voice coming to what appears as a finite intersection at me. But it is not a finite intersection, or I have chosen to see only where the lines cross. The lines are not even straight. Tangled lines, the cross over each other what appears to be endlessly. Some take a thousand turns only to come back on themselves. Others are infinite lines. Others caught in the moment of time.

Why speak of lines anyway? Fragments of the multitude, lines because each of us extends far in every direction. Series of moments? I don’t even know if they are linked. Each space, like each room or each scene in a film, has it’s own bodies, space, color, scents. We, this series of I’s each of which is another, wander between them and their paths do not always cross. You are my parallel, or sometimes we come close enough to touch but fail to. You are our vertigo, because when I look up I see you, down I see you, NICU the first thing and last thing that I see. We inhabit and dream ourselves and the I stutters in the multitude. A noisy solitude, Deleuze says! There is your I, my Our, We, a noisy solitude always inspiring because the source is not one but many. Pessoa and his many selves, Borges' Pierre Menard composing the Quixote, and neither Max nor Percival Everett are Sidney Poitier.

We write the page as the music affects and infects us. Music of your voice and music I remember. You who are here and are not here. What is this statement anyway? I just manifested you in my bedroom, past the lamp where there is only a blank wall. I don’t even know, maybe you dreamt me doing this. You dreamt the rose in the sky and I pulled it down, taking a bite out of gushing juicy petals. I imagine I know myself, but really let’s be serious now, I do only imagine that I know myself. What about how we imagine myself? These attempts at definitions are grasping at phantoms. Nothing is stable. Remember the Queen sees nothing, but all there is to see she sees. Ask the man on the bridge from Waking Life, “To realize you are a dream figment in another person’s dream...THAT is self awareness!!!!” I exist whether you dream me or not but we only exist because we are dreaming each other.

He left the news of a thief.

2009-12-28T13:43:00.000-08:00

P believed himself to be “the first agent of the last revolution”. If anyone asked what his real job was he would always answer with the same response: first agent of the last revolution. No one knew what he did for money, though he was always dressed in a good white shirt, dress pants and jacket. He could be an editor, some “creative” work without any demands or pretensions of art. Not a business type, not really. But no one knew. Whatever he did for money was not considered work for him at all. In the bar he’d buy a few drinks for himself, taking time with each one and a few cigarettes. Usually he’d notice a girl and buy her a few drinks, talk for a long time, and often leave with her. Never with the same woman. If he’d left with someone and saw her again he’d smile, say hello, and talk casually about a few things before excusing himself. This part of life, which so many other men and women spend so much time under the spell of, writing about, advertising, longing about and loving the details of appeared to be simply an easy exercise for him.

What sustained him were other interests entirely, and something that very few people understood. Most assumed he was joking when he’d say, “It was a good night, I had a few drinks and left with the keys.” A jest or euphemism. We’d assume he ran off with someone’s wife. This is because our assumptions have a very basic set of rules, and P lived outside them so completely that his strangeness was invisible to us.

A few redefinitions are necessary then, to the words and the rules. When P said he “attended a party” this meant he visited a house currently unoccupied, presumably because it’s owners were out for the night, a holiday, or something similar. Always a very expensive home, the most upper of upper class. He preferred the high-rises along Central Park, but, and I have no reason to doubt him or believe him, the mansions of Beverly Hills and villas of Nice were all within his arena. When he said it was a “good night” he meant he successfully broke into a house, no one was home, and no authorities were alerted.

During such a break in he would never steal anything. He would never break a window to get in, always obtaining keys or alarm codes from doormen, buying off janitors, house-keepers and gardeners. The wealthy, he observed, are often so comfortable that the source of their comforts becomes invisible. People who maintain this comfort move largely unseen and unnoticed through their homes and lives: maids, hair-stylists, secretaries, cooks, all are allowed access and degrees of trust simply because of their low-position. They perform various duties, all considered inviolate by the wealthy, and must do so without disruption or a hint of their existence when unneeded.

When P said “the work went well” he meant that he’d successfully undone this cushion of invisibility, he’d made a mockery of the bourgeoise life. As the first agent of the last revolution he would typically do the following: enter the house, smoke a cigarette while examining the decorations, perhaps appreciating a piece of fine art, find the liquor cabinet and make himself a drink, usually a martini or scotch. He’d sit in a chair and say something romantic to himself, that his was the work of a slave against mere employees. He’d remember the woman the night before who took him to bed because of what she thought were interesting, but unbelievable, stories. He’d write a few phrases on pieces of paper, with stationary found in a desk drawer or by a bed-stand, and leave them under a pillow, or a family portrait. Specific instances varied within the uniform purpose: to leave subtle reminders that someone had been here who did not belong. Someone had violated the space of comfort and punctured the walls which keep the world, the violent, hungry, lusting real world, out of the home. Sometimes he’d merely leave the cigarette stubbed out in an ashtray, or only a haze of smoke in the bathroom. He’d lay in the bed for just long enough for it to be noticeable that someone had done so. On rare occasions, “divine nights” he called them, he’d bring a woman with him under the pretension that this was his home, and they would make love on the fine sheet of another’s bed.

We could say what he left were clues, for his work was the inverse of a detective. His work was to make detectives out of those who prefer not to look, who spend large amounts of money to not be involved with worries about the world. A cigarette butt here, a ruffled bedspread, clothing slightly out of place, a painting tilted as if to be examined, jewelry neatly re-arranged. His work was to create questions in the mind of those who don’t question and in this way to violate the inviolate sterile space of those who have removed themselves from the world. P’s most central belief in this regard was that cruelty came most easily from those who held themselves aside the world in which there is death, who function under the too-easily maintained illusion that death is a fiction belonging to the realm of starvation, slavery, poverty, or napalm melted faces, scabs over the eyes, dogs tearing at the limbs of blasted children, the murdered refuse of the maquilladoras, of serial killers, of the rape victims dropped from latin american helicopters, of simple stupid happens to anyone very easily violence. By making detectives of billionaires his inserted the seed, long buried and forgotten, of this banished fear. Detectives, after all, are those who must (for they are driven in the hearts to do so, pursued by the devils of knowledge and chaos) look into the dark hearts of the world. He made sufferers of those who lived in decadent denial of suffering.

When asked how effective this “work” was P did not know. His religion, he said, dictated that he never revisited the scene of the crime, and his work, because of its nature, never made the news. It was quiet work, unseen and nearly invisible work. Thus it was maintained merely by his belief in the work. P was the cause, embodiment and totality of his work, though it stretched through multiplicities of actions into impossible corners. His small touch at each place was enough to fuel endless stories, even one act one time would have been sufficient. The possible reverberations of a cigarette in the bathtub of a CEO were a thousand lives and novels for him, and the discussing such possibilities were the only times I ever saw him close to excited. His eyes would close a little bit, the cigarette would stay a little longer from his lips while he wondered aloud how, just how, John ______ would explain to his much younger wife, to his daughter, the presence of this cigarette. Another man would have taken the step that follows so easily and written novels, but P did not. The actions themselves moved the world enough, he said, and it was not necessary to narrate actions already occurring. The goal of art and revolution are the same, which are to create what does not yet exist, or to create the space for a possibility of something new existing.

This requirement nightly satisfied he would relish the scotch in his glass and turn to a new woman, speak to her for a long time, and walk out the door arm in arm.

Brooklyn Night, Two

2009-06-30T07:42:00.000-07:00

Vanessa called me out and said: Share it! Share it more! You selfish shit! Perhaps she didn't say it that way; I'm remembering what I felt as what I heard. I'm recomposing. Yes, all the time! Recomposing myself, you, these memory bubbles I swim through and last night almost drowned in!

Anyway, the truth is I don't share enough. Now I'll share more. Remember that Bukowski didn't mean "keeping the bowels loose" as a private matter. I'll turn myself inside out now.

Dear one, you’ve given me everything but a place to be destroyed. In my insane desire for order I’ve failed to build a place for this to happen. All of my creations work against me in this way: they disallow me to solitude, the community, the resolute nobility of a place for my complete failure. Oh hold this ego holy and wrong who works so hard daily against me! Fuck being beautiful, give in to my profanity for this is where divinity and I come to play, to dance, to make love together in the twilight of what isn’t said. Repeat your mind. Drawn it into the sand. Let the ocean erase the sand and draw it again. Repeat your mind. Score the opera onto the sands of time. My music is only going to baffle you even more than it baffles me. Repeat my mind. My true lover, to whom my music is somehow melodies instead of baffling discordant empires built of a child’s sandcastles. My wife, on whom my life finally finds it’s solitude and breathtaking triumphant certainty. “I don’t need drugs to do that”. Fine, I do. Several bottles and one can of Colt 45 tell me what I need to meet you here in the unspoken perfection of what pretends to be memory. Pessoa knew he truth, that a liver is of no worth to mankind but words may be worth eternity. Fuck this eternal moment for being so and denying me my happiness. Fuck her legs and my desire that nestled between them for doing the same. Fuck all that carried the holy pretensions of eternity and failed to deliver. My eyes are watching you now and though the moment passes nothing will be forgiven. Nothing will forgive us now for wasting the dawn, and I have wasted many dawns. I include you only because I believe you are complicit, but it is my failure, it is me who has wasted the dawn, who let the last dawn languish in the peaceful land of sleep when I should have attended to the war. Forgive me, I become happy and forget the war is going on, I become drunk on the gorgeous desire of solitude and forget the war is afoot and magic exists only in between it’s tensile results. I do not know of whom I am asking forgiveness, for there is none anymore. All those gods have long since been killed or perished. Long since failed to deliver on our promises, which we made up for them in our dreams and well-ordered fantasies. You whom I have nothing for, you to whom I have come with nothing, you who stick out your soul and upend the lie in your noisy heart, you who have so often refused the lie which I made with my mind when my heart was dormant, you with whom I end this night and continue this life forever and I salute in this clarity of a drunken haze.

Brooklyn, NYC
June 1st 2009
The “Glasslands” for Black Elf Speaks

Not Soon Enough

2009-06-26T16:05:00.000-07:00

I want to fuck her
at 9am on a Saturday morning
at the bus-stop,
with the grace of hangover delirium running strong.

We can get right outside
and between
every known certainty
of us.

Commentary: Originally the poet deceived himself by writing, "I want to fall in love". Inaccuracy and immaturity are the likely causes. He honestly wanted to fuck the girl at the bustop, and fall in love with her during or afterwards. True, her certainly desired love, but let's not tamper with the obvious carnality of the moment just to keep pure his precious and righteous point of view.

But That's All Over Now

2009-05-11T09:50:00.000-07:00

The torrent of desire has never been more than a pretension of deliverance. Downstream from the flash flood of a canyon with eyes closed and arms raised in expectation we catch ourselves waiting for the word to arrive. Our faith is gone in anything but this. Like good believers of all religions we put on our medals and sing the songs in imagined eternal voices. Like fanatics we hate work, just as I hate the work that would bring me to her or her to me. You’ve got to give up the ghost. The flood that must arrive, and I wait for it, just as she must get up from the table and come over to me across the void. This that she only does in visions. This that she does one thousand times in a single second, which occurs again every time I raise eyes to her, and which never happens anywhere else.

Neither the vision nor the woman will arrive. The stubborn resistance of those with will but no action, like all the worldly captains of impotency who lead our armies. I try to conjure the image, but I cannot. I pull out the birth of love from my memory, lay it on the table, and stick a knife in it but it refuses to bleed. Only stale and limp, because what I cannot do it give it life again. I know that R is only there in the past of conversations, that this is where she once had to hit her father, where she made love to a woman for the first time, where I encountered the gulf of longing with her and imagined I learned everything. There in the past I would imagine her coming as the same flood, as an arriving ghost in my house, or as a vision of the rose manifesting before me after staring too long at the road. That’s all over now, which is the same as saying it can be said, which is like saying there is nothing left to kill or give except to raise the cruel knives of literature and memory to open myself again.

Once, R told me, she lost herself in the desert of California with nothing. She didn’t tell me the details of how, but I imagine they are like this: leaving the car she walked up a canyon which twisted upon itself, wrapping her into a womb of rocks and sparse trees, of cacti and a barely present breath of wind. The sun left no shadows, there were no clouds or stars, and in the world nothing seemed to move. As a lie I would say the world was a dream, just as this may have been, and nothing would change. R related to me a dream, and nothing changes. Impulsively she would have walked up the canyon. Hours later she would have noticed her lack of water, map, or any sense of where she was. I presume to know this is how her mind work’s, because my love for her was itself wrapped up in freedom. A body more free than my own, a mind more elastic and unchained than my own. For R to lose herself in this way is precisely as I imagine. What I have always remembered, far more clearly than any other details of this story, is that she related finding her way back by the side of the rocks on which lichen grew. Lichen which, in the desert, is a pale green almost imperceptibly faint. Some direction is indicated, and after orienting herself she found the way back to her car. Here there was triumph but disbelief, because my sense is R was also capable of exaggerated lies. Some emptiness had to be filled. I believed everything she said. I did not trust my love to be compatible with truth.

R made love with L one night near to the end of high school. L was on her period, so they went into the bath and sat in the water together as R went down on her. Neither knew which movements to make, what to touch, that with bodies it takes us a long time to learn that desire itself is not enough to make a conquest of uncertainty. Our pleasures are more sure than our human awkwardness, and our bodies far from the natural beings we imagine to be guided with sureness of instinct. R licked at L for twenty minutes before she came and the point of telling me this, she said, was to explain how much more foreplay was needed. Now I can think maybe this was directed at me, foreplay for me, but then, not knowing my body and barely knowing the world, I had no idea. R was a foreign instrument and too radiant to touch. To touch would destroy the perfections of love. Even to touch with the mind, even to read out the dulled hand of longing. The perfections of a poet’s love, a lyric poet, a romantic: the kind Keats would know in his youth that he didn’t live to surpass, and which is only really written with an immature mind that still graciously believes in the world. A man knowing nothing of body or cruelty writes of this love: the body is salvation from the starvation of the spirit, and he wants to be possessed far more than he wants to possess. Here also is only another kind of tyranny itself a self-perpetuating prison. Alone, in my dreams, I would imagine countless sexual pleasures with girls, but always with the objects of beauty over the reality of R’s too real body. Here men are lost, women are subjected, and all the romantic tyranny of youthful poetry is written.

Except for here too is where we find the orphans, of which R and Rimbaud are one and the same, as Bolaño might say. In the orphans, without a home and with no direction, there is the tyranny of love replaced with only an inexpressible longing, torment, fever. A thousand nights alone with many lovers, but never the true lover. R once hit her father in the car during the last year of high school after an argument. When she later attended the same deaf university as him, a choice made though she herself was not deaf, she would find he had ganged up on a gay student with other boys and beat him in the yard. I don’t know if she ever came out to him. Perhaps it wouldn’t matter. She only had to hit him once.

Between us, two orphans, there was no possession. We never held the other, only beheld the other. Over long distances, with long silences and nothing but a multitude of thoughts between. In the subway station I remember we saw each other as naked as any two people have ever stood before each other without clothes. Both our eyes feeling hot tears from the ridiculous acidity of love and impossible failure or our abilities. Nothing left to burn and out of doorways.

Here though, after that is all over (which is a lie in itself), there is more to say about the after than the actions. There is more to say, which is that all this remains a lie for not speaking about courage yet. R to me was a courageous and liberated being: at that time my absolute contrary, being caught awkwardly with a courageous soul but timid body and voice. Her body and voice surpassed and overcame the awkwardness of her being, the horrors of her body that could not have children, the terrible orphanage of a child who learns young to pity her parents. These are the births of strange people, those of resolute weirdness who are the makers of our consciousness. Precisely who give birth to love, because we love their spirit over their bodies. R to body that I did not need to touch, and R the holyflesh of triumphant overcoming that I was compelled to be near. Here where there are only the dead, only men and women caught on the wire of regret and sustenance, here where the brokenhearted few are tied upon the racks, or crucified on the tables of order, the orphans are the heavenly virtues of the lost.

Still that’s all over now. R brought order into her life. She drinks less. Fucks less. She will finish university soon. When she visits family in Kansas her cousins play in the countryside and even in letters some kind if happiness enters her voice. Yes, I imagine her sad here, and usually do, for all orphans seem creatures of divine melancholy. I imagine her still in greater loneliness than myself whom I never am concerned with, though I have known longing of high orders. That’s over, her life likely better, and I’m caught with a monstrous sadness for what has been lost. I’m caught in a demand for that same being, in the tyranny which demands a kinship out of all love and a sustained understanding from those who see us utterly exposed. I want to say: “My flesh is nothing. You may have it. Give me the you who knew my soul.” Yet I don’t know what a soul is, let alone what happened when we reached two dirty hands into our hearts those years ago. A stain, a sigh, a bright and shining medal of Failure worn by those who have loved enough to let that self die. I see them, which is also us, facing each other in the subway in the museum of moments which I keep in my back pocket, and commit to knowing they are gone. Too much, too entangled, more to say: Kierkegaard and his two knights, all the resignations of loves bitterness, all the holy breaths of it’s triumphant stains on the consciousness of man, all the suicides under bridges and walking dead of lacklove, all the nights spent with self alone, with yourself alone, with yourself alone and all the heroic noisy orphans of the spirit.

Noted

2009-05-11T09:44:00.000-07:00

I wrote this on a note and stuck the note inside Beautiful Losers so it could come back here to be with us:

All these moments unrecoverable to which I was brought only by desire’s hand, only by the woman and the everpresent demand of the heart to be written.

Buried Outside in Piles of Love

2009-03-05T00:02:00.000-08:00

Lost in her mystic hair I railed against forgetting and the realization that I’d been caught in the vacuum of her eyes for at least three centuries. I slept that long, abandoned to the ticking of the nothing-clock beside our bed: numbers flickering one form into another without settling on numeric symbols. This small room and my deprivation, moved into a poverty of senses to find happiness, and moved from happiness to experience truth. Finding neither, I stood up and removed the blankets covering me up to my neck overheating my body to a burning point.

- I’m going out, K tells me.
- Where?
- Need to go to library.
- Silence just kills love, stay and talk.
- Too slow. I need to be up. You can stay here.

Stubborn needless insanity. Clock too early for living. Sirens thinking about someone dying. Guilty infection of inflection.

- I’m going out.

I roll over and face the pink wall of her bedroom. My shield is the impossible distance between morning dream haze and her look that I didn’t return. Not enough this morning to break on through. Here I stay, composing the integrity of the moment. I get up and have cereal with milk and Joyce. No one else in the house. Snow piles up outside.

Three hours and she was still absent. The snow fell harder past the windows covering every car on the street; nullification of all these centuries of progress. The ground has returned to blankness. Void again. Risen up and covered. I’m sorry, there is nothing to see here. Later excavations will recover. Separating the plastic blinds from each other I stare into the street covered in white, sky white, roof-white heights and blankness of my anxiety creeping up from a below that destroys all virtue with a single claw. Tooth and nail. A magnificent claw, wielded by many, perhaps many more than wield tired virtue which is far too unfashionable to be common usage. The broken hearted few. Everyone embarrassed in their virtue except for me, who stumbles around with it daily tied to his shoes chasing it down streets as one would a top hat caught by the wind. Hope for this action of futility to bring me to you, or to someone better. The core of my actions, the hope that these desperate acts of chance in longing will bring me to at least a crumb of love.

The crumbs are difficult in themselves. Hope for more and you will get it. Too much. This truth may be much more uncomfortable than crumbs, those so easily left behind. More and the way out will disappear. No place left to turn, or burn. We stumble upon an answer here, the root of fear in this voice. Capable of imagining all possibility, but only alone. Not up for the task of bringing impossibility into love, though that was the birth of the same love.

Deep and hours into reverie. The perfect sonnet of longing on my tongue for so long I’d manifested a chorus of angels to sing it with me. Three graces and four virtues. Forget your perfect offering. I left my offering in K’s lap years ago in the Spanish sun and didn’t look back. I remember it. Mistaken and nothing left to take. Everything but temperance. Hope in her tattered red evening gown sipping on the whisk. Getting ready for descent, the last end, the snow falling gently to cover us.

K returned and asked me to come back to the world, which I did with gracious relief. We acted the rest of the day only on the restoration of her warmth, her small body next to me in the film-light under blankets again in her parents house. Warming the heart of it, warming the neighborhood and the world. Radiating out in waves of song and fragrance. Trapped in the heart of it, dying for the heart of it and to be a part of sliding down the raw face of love. We circle back on each other.

One bus failed to come.
The library shut it’s doors.
Making circles around each other though she wandered far in body and I far in spirit.
Until we see, taste and touch.
Until my body is warm next to hers.
Until the light comes shining

- From the west on to the east, I had to whisper.
- Hmm...? Sleepy.
- Should we get up?
- Mmm. No. Stay here.
- It’s snowing. It’s all covered in snow. I’ve never seen it like this.

Our hands holding each other tightly in the afternoon dark.

Never mind. I tried to leave you. No one has let go. Fingers reaching out in a gracious touch. We find each other again endlessly. New again every day. Our lives dead and covered under the drifting snow each night and entangling around spring roots in the morning. K new again when neither of us could remember the future. Let me in again, she’ll let me in again and I’ll stumble back through the doorway of her eyes.

Listen

2009-02-28T00:34:00.001-08:00

the walls of the world
are the words
i speak everyday

All Tricks - Poem

2009-02-21T20:48:00.000-08:00

I am capable of
more than this:

A flash of
scales, silvery in
the morninglight
is not the only sleight
my hand knows.

She is such a
decadent artifice, and
my God
the body
dancing revolted
in the mirrored hall.

Believe it
all tricks anyway, but

I'm going to fail
and it's going to be more true
than anything you've done.

Lovestrained and Piano Sickened

2009-01-28T23:43:00.000-08:00

We aren’t going to be here anymore. Deadlines of fictional fractured moments! Her voice shouting across the room from another scene

“Listen! Listen! We’re here again. We’re back in it, shit! Did you see that?”

Piano blasting away in the background that someone’s tried to plug speakers into it. They sit massive on the floor, cables snaking under the lid and bouncing around as the keys get pounded. Long time since melodic. Singularities of notes beaten fifty times into the white stained imperfections and followed by another seven, another thirteen. Like how she does, in denial of every plan. The score covered in red and purple crayon. The world going on like this for hours.

“Look at that! You don’t hear me, do you? Words and words, what about all this noise! Haaaahahhh. Noise! I have the ocean in my ears, full of music. Anything to say? You’re better at saying than I am.”

Blue on the walls in dripping waves. Others splattered red. Nevermind while watching it all drip together. Someone painted without finishing, or paints without diminishing the running delight of flaws. Frustration exhibited in the violent bursts as if a whole bucket had been used. Our remainders thrown all over everywhere. Faster notes out of the piano, still maintaining all discordance. She notices the light which has started pulsing in time, first from the corner of the room and now taking over a better part of the ceiling. It beats in time. She throws in an Am to see what would happen and the world manifests itself now in green. Up to a C and we’re purple while orange chords the shape of a globe float around our feet.

“That’s not the point.”

I thought shouting would be necessary but this is a whisper. Glistening of a iced slope or fingers through summer woven hair. Nothing is ever the selfsame, and myself? Of the fate that was here before, fated in this here before. We weren’t, and she wasn’t, but Shit Not That Again. Getting lost in it. Whether to be out of it or in it, here with a dull rusty blade of indecision sticking out of my back.

Three chords in a row. Descending and without coherence. Random notes chosen with perfect precision in denial of all attempts at reconciling order with chance. Watch the fingers fall into place. See! Anything but an accident. Everything thrown back into the sea again, imaginary unity a sexless tyrant. Previously melodies carved into our faces with a pencil and now just easily forgotten. Says, who? Nothingmissed again. A lamp in the far corner is slowly turning something between yellow and goldenrod. Hard to tell, with the ceiling lights in continual mad conversation with the microwave in the kitchen.

“Don’t you want to solve anything? This can’t go on. It can’t. Last time we were here for two days. Not again. You’ll get up, same as always. Same...just like before. You’ll do all this, I’ll do all this, and we’ll end up there again. Always there again. I don’t want to. You’ll have to say something, you’ll have to tell us.”

Her eyes stay closed while fingers slide down into something like a waltz.

“There is fine. Why not? It’s cozy. We’ll be safe. Startled and safe again. Not even worth the effort? Not easy to get there. Haven’t you noticed. No...just all work? Two days to find the right keys. You try it sometime. Rather than just words. I can’t transmit anything with words, without context, there’s nothing and I want more”.

Mystery and blackest corners of heaven shining phantoms of light through her dark eyes. If I opened my own for long enough to witness the world we’d see the same as there is now, altered only by the gorgeous rupture of perception. Electric star-light and constellations of the mental-image that we’ve burned there night after night. The notes continually explode in new bursts along the tangential radius of our thoughts. A lamp rises up, flings itself down upon the table. I wonder if we’ll be done soon, if any of this ends ever and then if this is what I want at all.

“I really want to get out of here. Can’t we get out of here? What’s outside, do you remember? I’m not so sure. Can’t we...out of there?” Sequins and sequences, the lights flashing against windowpanes that we’ve never looked out of. Something stained on the carpet under the table. No reason to be seeing all this now. She’ll neverstop, that’s it, what has to give way.

“You’re caught in it again. Relax.” One note after another. There is terror through the door. Caught in it? Reflective; I have mirrors in front of and behind my eyes. One can only see forward and backward, not down. Not now, I can’t see Now. Hear it? Try.

Endless noise and static we’re dancing and sliding inside of, that moves through us potent and bloody. The television isn’t on but the universe is on too many wavelengths. Thousands of channels mixed together and overflowing with what can’t be picked out. Screamblastsorrycrybombmagichurricane, AHHHHH! Torrential rain, the globe spinning backwards right into our future. Sirens down streets at...time? No, no, there can’t be any of that here.

“Where’s the clock? I need it. We should know. Isn’t it late enough now?”

“We agreed not to.”

“I know. But we need to know. I can’t manage. This isn’t going. Not at all. We’re not it. Not yet. We won’t be. I need time. We won’t get out. We’ll die here.”

“We agreed not to. It’s gone. Forget about it. We won’t bring it back now.”

I don’t even know if it’s dark outside. Out of the way, way out down the way and the stairs. How long? I don’t know. The sun never went down. It didn’t come up. Soon I can look out the window and it will come. Across the street red brick and windows illuminated. Palette changes in the scenery and the mock walls of night collapsing. An F# throws the room into vermillion shades, forested endless space. Maybe I can crawl. Maybe the door isn’t that far away. No! Is it time? Where was the end again? I’ll open the door, we’ll tumble out straight onto a wheat field and grab at hopping crows.

“Will it work?”

“You know it won’t. It’s not yet. We’re here now. Stay.”

Inside, entering the mind through the portal of the body. My hand rests on my thigh. She has one in her hair. Did we have clothes? When we began? Sea washing, washing and over enveloped and sinking into sand. Harder to rise. I’ve put too many lies in the way. Limp cock between my legs that’s useless here.

“Stop looking for a way out. There isn’t an end. We won’t get anywhere. Not better or worse than here. Neither happens. The next isn’t better or worse. Who told you it would get resolved anyway? As if we’ll arrive. Have you, ever?”

Revolving doors and we’re stuck in them again! Worse places to be, without glass, and through it the world in blurs never quite catching the moment clear. I’ll be back soon. I’ll be there soon. Something is going to happen and never does. Just more notes on the piano. Scene. Again. Scene. Already happened. We’ve already. That door isn’t the exit! Not anymore, not anytime. Overdue. Looked so hard. Kept staring at it. She’s right? Resolved won’t solve won’t salve won’t...again against the sideways sea! Sand in the mouth and tumbling. Water retching up from the stomach. Her naked back to me.

“We’ll get there. Get not anywhere. You really should stay. You really should choose to stay. Say it. Choose to have went not anywhere. No one can do much more for you.”

“No one?”

“No one. You’re already at the only in. The only end.”

There! Off in future distances. Headlights rush on past as we speed longingly. Lost, lost in all the waves of fragrance and stuffing the etherized rags of loss into out mouths. Kids, look out the window at the kids out the window! The end is close and tying my eyes to the upper part of my soul. Where the fuck did the lower part go? She doesn’t have it. Thought she did. Maybe in the chords and waves of tension. Never found yet. Just listening. Just walking. Stroking the infinity of noise and hoping more gets found.

“Is it light outside?”

“Does it matter? What would we do if it was?”

“Look at it! Open a window! Walk! Doesn’t anything move anymore?”

“Any doesn’t move anymore. My fingers move anymore. Our mouths making this. What do you find in the noise, the noiiiseee.”

She sings it against all harmonies, against the grain of reason and love.

“I don’t know what this is about anymore. I don’t know why we’re here. I want to. I’ll even go to know it. Straight into the streets I don’t remember. Why are we here?”

“We decided / to stay here / until we didn’t know why / we’d come or gone.”

“No. No. No. How are we going to get back? How do we fucking get back? What did we do about that? Didn’t we think. Wasn’t that part. It’s nogood, haaaaaaa nogod, no good without god’s grateful globs!”

“Don’t do that. You really should not do that. I’ll stop playing if you do that. This isn’t madness. Into dissolving isn’t the way. There isn’t back. Looking the wrong way. Listen goes forward. We never arrive. No derivations from our arrivals or departures. Do you get that?”

“I’m worried. All the sea is coming back up! Too much. Did you see how much I swallowed? God in my stomach, saltwater and the cells exploding! Get it out!”

“You got it out a long time ago. None of that here. Take my hand.”

One still banging on the keys. When was the last time a moment ended? Softest touch and warm clenching. The notes are transmitted straight through now as tensing and relaxing muscles. Each one of them palpable. Not words. Sensory delight and rapture of touch! I have nothing to say about everything. I have something to say about nothing. If I could transmit my desire through all sensations at once I would expect you to explode. There is not enough in this mode. Her hand clenching mine and the notes roll over us together, knock us over and fill us together. Bodily musicality. Scent of my sweat, smoke of the room, on my other hand that was between her thighs.

“Taste! Give me a taste! I need to taste!”

Back between. Away from the exits.

“We’re right in the middle of good and evil and neither owns us. DId you even notice? The fucked up horror and beauty of it?”

Scentualized sensations while raising my head up, warmth and wet on my face under my eyes. Close enough to feel the room dissolve, before and then erasing the errant paths of memory and desire. Close enough now to feel Present, to her body for it to have never been before at all. Kneeling, both of us right in the doorway. At the far extremity of in-between. All the way past in-between. Far as is needed to for once be in-between.

“I don’t remember. I know.”

“Why?”

“No. I don’t know that.”

“I wouldn’t ask that.”

“I know.

“Yes.”

No word, camera, voice, sight, sense, seen, been, comprehended nothing, dropped into unknown and without direction all sitting here lovesickened and perfected between her legs while the piano plays.