what dreams may come, or perhaps tomorrow will be the day when this insistence on sabotaging the possibility of forging a rut leading to the good life will die on the vine

Charisma is one of the two great transcendental forces in the social world: beauty is the other.  They are forces seldom talked about, since both issue from the individual, neither may be learned or acquired, and in a democracy, where everyone is meant to be considered equal and where all relationships are meant to be just, such properties cannot be accorded value, though all of us are aware of them and of how much they mean…beauty eclipses everything, bedims all else, it is what we see first and what we consciously or unconsciously seek.  Yet this phenomenon is shrouded in silence…driving it out instead by our social mechanisms of expulsion, calling it stupid, immature, or unsophisticated, perhaps even primitive, at the same time as we allow it to flourish in the commercial domain, where it quietly surrounds us whichever way we turn.

Vol. 6

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So many sleepless nights in the panopticon and groggy mornings slurping cereal as one species of bird - the only one for miles in this concrete wasteland - sings one monotonous note. Which is when the scarcity mindset up and left the country.

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Acinobacter baumannii

Gibberish resists against the overwhelming urge, internalized from out there in the socioplex, to be displaying or cultivating competence and industry every moment of the day, unless dedicating specific emotionally inflected moments for “recharging” or “intentionality.”

As through batteries were the form of life inhabited and analytic philosophers were the aides de camp who guided us through the thickets of infelicitous disarray.

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Hence gibberish, e.g.,

Salt the water before immersing the farfalle or else the elk will be wolf kill and splatter fall mercilessly.

Or

troubled cougars count spousal doubts as dolorous pieties and scour plateaus for more soulful grounds on which to suborn earnest plaintive pleas.

But next to gibberish is scripture, secular and otherwise, to which we may attend with equal parts rigorous play and open-hearted obeisance, as though we could be confident that there were such a thing as scripture and that the purpose we served it would eventually be revealed.

Fictional polemic

Davos:

“Here's the bad news for all of you: We've reached the end of growth. Raising people out of poverty and maintaining Western standards of consumption are simply no longer possible. That's why I didn't want to come to this bullshit charade. Frankly, you people are exactly the reason real action on our ecological situation cannot move forward,, because the only real way to do it is to not have lone wealthy individuals consuming the resources of small nations, which as far as I can tell is the premise of this entire gather- I have here, how many of them come ing. Look at the list of attendees from companies that suck hydrocarbons out of the ground? No offense, but those are the dues-paying members of Davos and the Sustainable Future Coalition, and that's a joke, and you all are a joke. Tomorrow there's a panel called the Future of Extractives, which I guess is yet another joke since there can be no future for extractives, at least not if we want to survive this. Davos brings in a pop star or teenager every year to yell at them, but the market is still more real to the people here than nature. Furthermore, to gird our infrastructure and pay for an aging population in China and the West, we'll need a drastic reallocation of financial resources. There's simply no other way, and yes, it will come at the cost of growth. You people are living in a bell jar if you think differently. So, you can keep convening your panels and trotting out your woke women POC candidates and all the diversity hires of the corporate carbon establishment, and you can tell yourselves that everything's going to be A-OK, but I can assure you, it is not. And I pray there's somebody watching this video in about twenty years because all four of you are going to look very, very fucking stupid.”

Tony, from the Deluge

the color of television, tuned to a dead channel

Old heads that betray the clingy absorption of an idea grown stale with time but that assaulted at time of a first formative encounter.

Old heads with hungry eyes, satiated with sentience but needing always to feast on what necessarily seems out of reach and lusting after someone with no sell by date or coruscated self respect and eager to be taught about what becoming taut and supple might mean.

Old heads who become accustomed to bodily fatigue but aren’t ever in doubt about being able to outlast death for at least one more minute, how they love the verve and swivel away from being embodied and how beholden they become to calling forth another creative conjuring act, to bringing the felt but unseen back into a focal point of the bright lights on the world’s big stage.

Old heads were once young, uneven, frustrated rebels, tilting at oracular creeds, deeming their forbears fools and walking in steps of the conquering king who crossed the desert sand, the child who had fathered the man.

The return of the dispossessed, but with oomph and clattering brio

Two skulls clatter down from a

predestined perch

In the catacombs in Paris

And I think of you and how much

More ink you’ve spilled than

blood you’ve let.

As I confessed the last time

My dour catastrophes unspooled

Across yours,

I am not yet past my spelunking phase

But with compulsive computation

About what might have been

I am fully pierced and run through

I stoop to put these benighted globes

back up to their polite place but

Take no solace and take no prisoners

So I kick them loose into darkness.

I straighten up, standing in an

Enervating memory of

an earlier last time we collided

Into spooky action orbits,

After the suitcase and orange milk crates

And soft recrimination had been stowed,

When I said what you told me were

All the right words

Before telling me that you

Couldn’t any longer see me

as someone who

Could possibly mean them

And then we laughed until it

Hurt differently,

skin flayed and

Brains deleriously broken.

I didn’t have the heart to say that then

but I meant to,

Even though I wouldn’t have known

Whether I meant it until I had

cupped in my soft hands my pallid heart.

I still had the words “faith” and “hope”

and “love”.   Still have, oddly.

But the nervy pluck to act,

Rather than to apostrophize,

has always been

Just beyond me.

I never saw you as just a reticent vessel

and

You never saw me as just bread crumbs

Strewn on a path away

from pitiless locked-in confinement.

It worked for awhile,

our mutually respectful solitude

Masked as cohabitation

With intermittent fucking,

Drifting through the age

of wire and string.

Sharing in the idea that gold seams

can put broken vases

into wholeness,

we traced those maladies together

and without too much confluential jest,

Sprinkling just enough of

the categorically interesting to save room

for the zany paranoia

which eventually might overcome

the christening guilt.

This goal without a plan is a penny thrown

Down a depthless well, and knowing that

It will never reach you because I will

Never hit send is just another erratic

Exculpating line,

Just another earnest hand held out

In empty space,

waiting to be read out loud

These caves of the dead

ache with echoes

And I don’t know how much yield

The quarries have in the offing or

How much more play in the joints

the uses of enchantment

Have left.

But so I won’t pretend to forestall

The delamination further

It won’t do to deny that two plus two

Is not what we are here for,

Because what we are here for

depends upon more than what

our hatched dependents,

reaching for the blue sky,

can possibly grasp.  

This is what excess running amuck is for.

And, unless I’m behind on all things you,

The one thing we still share

is having no one

reach or grasp

On our behalf once we go.

The living as no more and no less than a temporarily differentiated species of the dead

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An engaged citizenry won’t save us from an engaged citizenry.

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America’s ego ideal of its own always-becoming sanctity is Samson’s hair and Delilah’s shears.

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Clickbait might instantiate way for how to reverse engineer bullshit out of a vacuum, a net negative return that pillories the first law of thermodynamics.   

*****

Anger can be a gift, a return on investment, is one takeaway.   Eventually it takes more than it gives, but not at inception.  It needs to be supplanted with something less corrosive, but without being lost or inaccessible. And you can’t go on making a confession of life, or else anger’s gift, like charisma’s plucky verve, will dissipate beyond the point of recompense.

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You may not be interested in the metaphysics, but the cladistics are without apology interested in you.   

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*****

I was not going to do this anymore for a time that seems not too long ago.  Call it nearly five years.  Everything denotation, and nothing connotative. And it keeps coming back.

To be adequately minded is achieving the strategic high ground

“Every human brain, he says, is born not as a blank tablet (a tabula rasa) waiting to be filled in by experience but as ‘an exposed negative waiting to be slipped into developer fluid.’ You can develop the negative well or you can develop it poorly, but either way you are going to get precious little that is not already imprinted on the film. The print is the individual's genetic history, over thousands of years of evolution, and there is not much anybody can do about it.”

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“We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.”

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Postlude:

It seems to be running headlong into itself, more compressed and accelerated, time does.

It seems to be worsening, this click and catch of a skeletomuscular runtime error where the heart is for hurting and the mind is for being tormented by the ceaseless empty task of tormenting and the hard wiring is all kinds of glitchy jiggery-pokery. Make haste and want not. The 404 message is a new metonym for the world is all that is the case.

Something opposed to maximization must ascend, but with no righteousness or indignation and without confusing giving up with giving in. We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.

A brain is for scanning, no doubt. An opposable thumb is for catastrophizing. An open book is literally a figuratively. A headless torso is for making declarations about changing your life and making peace with making certain nothing of consequence happens to the lovely complicity with which we erect and fortify the rigid prison of unchanging conditions from which, we love to claim, we must escape.

Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those who inspire it and the rousing of the wrong rabble doesn’t distract from that fact

You ask your pain to calm and it doesn’t. You stand there shuddering in the chill night, bargaining fate with a thick tongue, teeth like shards of ground glass.

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To refuse praise is to seek praise twice, but not in your own head, it doesn’t compute unless you laugh at yourself, look at straight angles askance and take solace in forever being accused of not to taking serious subjects seriously.

Keep the analgesic bottle full and the belly laughs loaded. Or some such shit like that.

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Even when what was lithe and lissome about you has gone stiff and sodden, but never wet-brained or oozy with treacly sentimentality, that someone’s asking the price of your honor doesn’t mandate that you calculate its future discounted present value.

On the secular sexual economy, it’s not clear at what rate inflation has taken hold

A not entirely outdated take:

In an economic system where unfair dismissal is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find their place. In a sexual system where adultery is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find a bed mate. In a totally liberal economic system certain people accumulate considerable fortunes; others stagnate in unemployment and misery. In a totally liberal sexual system certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude

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On the question of art and mistrust:

We should mistrust
picturesque people
we should mistrust
old master painting
we should even mistrust painting
painted without mistrust

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Remember when 33,371 college sophomores wrote an essay on problematizing desire. Which isn’t, in itself, problematizing the problem with problematizing the desire, but emblematizing it:

When Richard Rorty​ wrote, in one of his many familiar pragmatist pronouncements, that the only way you can tell if something is true is if it helps you get the life you want, it sounded either like a provocative assertion or another advertisement, masquerading as epistemology, for consumer capitalism.

But in all delusive self-important seriousness, does pedagogy still encourage the formation of drawing groups in college art studios and do they or do they not continue to pass around a woven collection basket which may or may not be wood to pay nude models to do classical or classicist takes on the human form? Is it now Venmo? Or still cash? Or is the nude gone the way of the naked? Do the cool kids still use charcoal brushes?

No one to witness and adjust, no one to drive the car, and because of that or despite that, we forget which, these pure products going crazy

Have I had occasion to tell how often I sit up in the middle of the night, with tears welled in my eyes from yawning, not from grief or sodden depression, and sleep remains well beyond my waking grasp? So I lay and stare in the dark, considering how incredible it all is, all the different real and phantom events that had to collide and jostle and integrate into this disjointed semblance of a stitched together life to reach this moment that defies legibility, and then plunge down into the grave depth of recognition that what Seneca would say is the shortness of life is just a series of dumb choices meant to put off living.

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Like this insomnia right here in the now. Who knew Joan Miro was a man?

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Of course it’s inevitable that I will tomorrow see someone in bathing suit rocketing down a five story waterside with a tattoo of amor fati emblazoned on a torso.  Acres of flesh, boiling and reddened, and all kinds of effrontery, proof positive that what children deem fun is sometimes just a thing to be suffered through, but there may be encoded in the day a moment or two like that, which stand as a discrete time-symbol specifically held out to just the Me Myself, a true gift of a moment to decipher and be struck dumb by, like esoteric Straussian texts or the shifting currents of the Bosphorus running from Istanbul all the way, in time, to Constantinople.

I don’t think you can begin with what you should end up with, or how things, in the largest sense of that word, hang together, in the largest sense of that word

Feel the tide shifting back from years of pseudo libertine permissiveness to a slow and patient acceptance of the cloak of the penitent.  The fields lie fallow, restrictions flower with every breath, and so long as there is routine and ascetic primacy the question about how come we aren’t happy and rich and lathered in fecundity need not come up. By choice this barren desert. By necessity this well-worn circular path. What is good in the way of belief is not incorrigible, but subject of revision and discipline.

*****

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Hey mister, if you’re so smart, how come you ain’t rich? What’s the point, spending all that time wallowing in the mud of your own mind, keeping tabs in books to go back to? You do that for what, just in case you need to remind yourself that they say what you think they say? Your back is crooked and your hands are soft and your mama didn’t love you and your daddy is a stranger but not to the man you think is your daddy. What gives? How come somebody has to be dead and consecrated to get you to pay them attention? What’s all this purity in unhappiness about? To what end? You don’t like girls? You don’t like to go so fast that everything might tip over and end? You don’t like to strain against your body and find out if it can do more, to the point of puking your guts out and then getting up the next morning and doing it all again? You don’t want to even try to be in your body, to feel in every pore? You don’t even want to try to be enjoyed and enjoyable, to spread yourself thin in the thickness of things? And here you sit, empty pocketed and rot-gutted to beat it all. All that time trying to be learned, and not even a medium size pot to piss in. Just a stumblebum playacting at being a mandarin. Hey mister, how about that? What say you now?

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Thickly distributed, like Polish consonants, and unevenly distributed, like the future

I sometimes wonder if my grandparents - the off the boat (literally) immigrant ones - would write notes to themselves in their native language or in Americanized English.

I have furniture my grandfather built including a bedside stand with three drawers and there is pencil scrawl which I can’t discern to be English.

They must’ve thought it strange how completely assimilated - not merely imitative - my life was to what was to them an adopted country. One traveled to by choice, but also foreign.

Maybe aging is waking to the idea of being a descendant and potentially having descendants, a series of events long before and long after this pulse of consciousness winked into and out of being.

Ok sure but aren’t you forgetting Biggie Smalls?

The Italian mafia and RICO, a removable abscess runs into a cauterizing scalpel. Gerald Stern could no longer make exculpatory rabbits emanate from black hats once he became a witness.

And the come up at the same time of the redemption arc rappers who didn’t have to do crime but could rap about having done crime, about how Christmas missed us, and 80% or more of the literati couldn’t track it, but the youngsters could and did and some of them fell in love with language then and there and only later came to see the same patterns, the same magic in the canon but without any preening pose of false fidelity to the idea that it amounts to a closed off pinnacle of human achievement.

———) Irish Ballads are ballads and narcocorridos are too.

——-) Ether is not the bullet or the ballot, but it stands as art sure as Richard Corey does.

————-) Souled American is a distilled howl of discontent and also why shouldn’t we all do better.

————-) It’s easy to forget that yes we can answered to a yearning that originates in Whitman.

————-) It’s easy to discern that the journey to the end of the night is execrable and still ache from its beauty.

A closed casket escapade

I learned what some had called the dignity of work by putting a three foot ruler into the depths of an embedded fuel tank to measure the levels of dyed diesel and 87 octane gas. This was before we grew corn to have more fuel trucks. We could smoke on the job but could not buy cigarettes. We could ring up twelve packs of Bud diesel and MGD, paid for out of our $4.25 an hour wages, and sneak it out into the back in empty cardboard boxes.

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I carded a 38 year old once, and he yelled at me.  Said he was coming from his dad’s wake.  Everyone is, I want my 15 year old self to have responded.

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I remember one local drunk who apparently did excellent finish carpentry and could charge to an account of his general but we were only supposed to let him charge one case each day, usually before noon and sometimes shortly after we opened.  He would spit on the floor and then look at me like I should immediately come and clean it up. With a mop i suppose.

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We used cleaning spray on the hot dog machine because it seemed easier than scraping distaff chuff of hot dog grease.  The hot dogs would have bubbles on them.  No one who was willing to feast on a gas station hot dog thought twice about this

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Once an adult came in leading a large bellowing developmentally disabled teenager into the bathroom. They left soiled underwear on the floor. Didn’t buy anything. I left it for the manager who made $11 an hour.

There comes a moment you realize other people are not interchangeable

There comes a moment a person traditionally considered to be smart and unique is slapped aside the head with dumbness and walks willingly squeezed into a chute of sameness.

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There comes a moment when a hovering docile bee abided by is swiped   at and a young adoring believer aims the plane at the deck of the ship, pirouetting through a volley from the 8 inch guns.

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There comes a moment when a poet steals a line as thoughtlessly and inevitably as lust invalidates a marriage, bites like a noiseless patient spider the cadence from a previous incantation of the world. this rescrawling of a blank space inside our souls reverberates in other unexpected places, a blooming blight for which there is not yet conceived any functional form of penicillin.

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There comes a moment of fashioning that is no longer feasting, as if making myself up as I go along in the same desolate rescrawled space were a mountain, the eye a doubled beholder, and the terrorizing task of up up up the shape-shifting specimen endlessly endures.

The smile of the Mona Lisa is the stigmata of original sin

Cosmology is a consolation, in part because it puts a positive valence on our smallness

It will not do to forget how small we are, how enmeshed in a web of incomprehension and innumeracy we remain. Contemplate a river for too long, what it is, dynamically, and then go and try to summon a way to break through the event horizon of Fermi’s paradox. Or find one and soak feet.

Contra: ask Stanislav Petrov about inconsequence and the weight of the starry night sky.

consensual metaphor too, impersonal, uncoercive, democratic metaphor

Argue not concerning God and despise riches.

How many inkpots have been spilled to describe the abundance mindset, millions of words signifying nothing, the galling way in which wanting more always leaves wanting more.

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death under the breast-bones, hell under the skull-bones

Piles heaped higher than a tall man’s reach, which exceeds his grasp but only in the folded lineaments of placid dreamless sleep, which ends as abruptly as a clenched fist becomes a hand extended, but with less gravitas and coils of unfocused anger. Walking numbly in the wet dew across the grass, blowing on the the steaming coffee, content with diminishing deflationary returns, poor dumb fat and happy, the borrowed ambition picked clean as a preacher’s oval plate 25 minutes after the service.

Do I stutter and stumble over myself? Very well, then I stutter and stumble over myself. Wet leaves in dry creek, mind as threadbare as a wolfpack with nothing to scavenge and more running to be done yet tonight. Better to be a sophist gone aphasic, with the promise ahead of finding a path back to the word, through the word and carved out of the word, than to mine the quarries owned by another soul, with solace held out like a mirage at the working end of a pitiless desert extending to the vanishing point of the horizon in all four cardinal directions.

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Escapades in the fervent light of acknowledgment

The children want to hear adults recount stories of the youth gone wild in the before times, when the presently predominate technology did not exist and the assumed mores of the day had not rigidly set.

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And the adults want to be able to regale and cast the past in a semi heroic but not malignant light.

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Calling out for escapades - for blood letting and drunken bumbling, sexual mishaps and car crash while hitchhiking  - isn’t anything that anyone who is heedless about listening has an interest in.

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There is a small window when the children are still children - not autonomous but old enough to know not mud wrestle with a pig in school clothes - in which they are not heedless in their listening or flippant in their disavowal of past experience. 

I want to want to stay sentient and alive in that window. But I don’t really want to, and I rarely stay there. And I laugh out loud only at times that would be inopportune if anyone else was present.

In the ruthless furnace of the world, plants eat light and air and water.

Coming on five years of written muttering and calculated inversion, with shame at the hope that the collected works will be read, if not understood, and exalted, if not reified. I deflect and deflect and deflect, trying ever more elaborate knuckling of dependent clauses and conditional antecedents, in the hopes of achieving dizzy rhapsody. Of late I stage mother imaginary scripts and cryptically refer to idiosyncratic culture previously consumed as though it were a genetic marker showing a predilection for blood cancer and bone cancer. I shall establish that five years is a blink to someone with more discriminating taste who can shake a stick at this claim to inestimable provenance.

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Painting is above all translation. Ada’s partner has never been part of a boring conversation, and Tilda Swinton can confirm.

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He came from the era of the crop top and sweat-sheen tanned skin.  She was departing the era of the long white socks with green stripes and being voted most likely to be in need of naxolone.  It wasn’t love at first sight but if this were a movie and not a desolate display of mental furniture it might be pulled off if Vera Farmiga signed on to play her mother and Sydney Pollack (RIP) played a take-no-prisoners lawyer who was working feverishly to stop a corporate takeover and periodically paused from implementing the poison pill to urge the young charge in the long white socks whom he served as guardian ad litem to summon the nerve to make a move on Vera’s troubled waif girl before she overdosed already. Trent Reznor’s son would do the arpeggios. Obviously.

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It was the era where David took Peter’s corpse’s photo and held it all in close to the knives, standing rooted in one fatal spot in a studio apartment without running water and rippling with frenetic rage. In that era Our Lady of the Self-Devouring Image maintained that papa don’t preach. Ten years later, when effort took too much effort for most of them, she starred in a movie where hot wax was a foil to bring bigger doses of release to the foe, our Lady’s defender.  That coffee table book made all the pawns overeager to march a straight line to the end of the board and get slaughtered in the process. Sharon who gazed at Medusa also played a character in a movie featuring murder and lust and made smoking seem alluring.

A different era, with a different kind of necrotic malaise, with a different assemblage of know nothings careening us off the cliff.