A Private Act of Propitiatory Magic
some kind of anachronistic monk stalking across the green confines of a geometric garden, a man with a shorn pate and sunglasses walked into history and took his seat in left field, walking beer in hand with a smooth purposeful gait. It was Murakami but without the jogging, Mishima without the delusion-maxing. The visiting Chiba Marines were off to a great start, and no one else looked more busted than he did. All afternoon the catcher framed balls so they became strikes, and the man in the mask behind him didn’t call them as he them, or call them as they are, he called them into being, like a doctor calls symptoms into coherence from a robust sample of patients and comes up with a syndrome. The noodles were broad and the rice was sticky. The clouds in the sky were Tokyo poems and the play of surfaces had more symmetry than my brain could take.
A consumption run down, without receipts:
Sentimental Value: As expressive of a sigh as you’ll ever hear, non-speech conveying more meaning into a moment than a years’ worth of dissertations. I will call your theatricality and raise you six pounds worth of absorption.
MJ Lenderman knows not of the Himbodome of which he speaks, which makes him a greater not a lesser artist.
I take pains to remember that the lobster in Annie Hall existed outside of the photograph that made it to print.
“But is it our fault that Lawrence Miller Kerouac Burroughs, Artaud, and Beckett no more about schizophrenia and psychiatrists and psychoanalysts?” No it is not. Fault and apologies don’t factor into it. Then again, dissociation does not depend on the piece of sky in every sole being depicted in a still life or described in bare-handed Americanese. Plums from the icebox are delicious even if the note gets lost or is never written in the first place.
It took every ounce of pseudo integrity I could muster to recite the monotone ministrations every hour on the hour. I tried to keep tabs on where the Minotaur might be. I tried to maintain. In aid of memory like a Post-it note pasted on the inner corner of my mini chambered heart, I kept repeating every morning the following:
We are, I know not how, double within ourselves, with the result that we do not believe what we believe, and we cannot read ourselves of what we condemn.
Clear thinking about mixed feelings being a kind of failsafe aspiration I could always get behind, to the point where I couldn’t have a pure feeling and couldn’t come up with a concept out of all the percepts and affects in which something called I was immersed.