Even the prisons were prisons

---

I was elbows deep in life: a users manual and could not avoid how much I needed something sumptuous to eat.  I wanted Mark Strand’s poem about eating ink like a ravenous carnivore raw, not cooked, but it was off menu. The cutlery clattered to the floor. I pushed it off the edge with a tall red plastic pizzeria glass that sweated. Being able to say enough is enough is a developmental milestone for those who hold a visceral, painful knowledge of what is too much.

---

Ingres and other parables was set for auction and I figured it would sate me, but what little money I had was staked to buying an all day ticket to the white box gallery in which my mind had hung all the paintings from painters whose work I wanted to feel numb in front of but which buzzed around in my head for years asking to be thought out loud.  I did not, though, think them out loud. Salutary inner monologues proved reasonably, damnably sufficient  for the purpose of giving voice to these paintings’ hold on me. I will no longer make any boring art is a paraphrase of what was written in chalk by the innocent proxies who knew enough to accept payment for the deed when the punishment constituting it would come ever so freely.

---

Arresting colors, transfiguring shapes, and then reading and eating and viewing all gave way to a paralyzed recognition of how many munitions were still hanging out there, tracing a precise parabola toward their intended target, whom I never knew nor could pick out in a despairing line up, but to whose end I had - symbolically or or by omission or otherwise - made some contribution.

---

How is a social contract cancelled, would you say? This may become something more than a thought experiment in a coming era when the tails cease wagging the dogs.

Why did you leave your father’s house? To seek misfortune

To become a muse for a disorienting movement. To chronicle civilizational massacre. To gather more experiences than might be collated into a particular historical epoch’s particularized blooming neurosis.

Because all the hollow men, the stuffed men, could not bring themselves to give honest answers to the questions:

• What is your idea of perfect happiness?

• What is your greatest fear?

• What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?

• What is the trait you most deplore in others?

• Which living person do you most admire?

And instead caught trains to Trieste and Zurich and spread the feverish din of original declamations.

---

Vademecum on how desultory triumph leavens seraphic dread

All angels are terrible. No wonder their beauty triggers paralytic bliss. Pay the favor of the lash to any man or woman who doubts that two moments in their presence up in heaven would be withstood. Snap self-abnegatingly out of it!

---

For our supper we sing on the beat but three notes off the melody. Some sharp, others flat. This is recompense for selling our time so cheaply and letting wants go bearded as needs. And yet: rent, baby formula, tires that are not so bald as to reintroduce friction and grip to the idea of vehicular control, food that a great great grandmother would recognize as food.

Look around. The sad must not become extinct, even if the sad sacks do, or else the real will, too. Which is both an erudite wish and a brute truth, like pilfered taxes.

---

I am not sure anyone remembers how to spell heaven, much less find the map on which an X marks its entrance. And why would it need gates? And what would come of our wounds, if we entered them? Terrible but necessary, the seraphic beauty, leaving so many mortals cocooned in their still-to-be-deadness and insulated by the amniotic deadness of their still-aliveness.

---

he’s the most human kind of otherworldly kind of Greek god I’ve ever met.

Is what was said of the creator of the mind-bending and the navel-gazing and the honest artifacts, to whose nominally intact artistic gaze I am about to devote one month’s worth of attentive immersion.

The book against death, with crowded citations

Canetti treated survivors as those who lived in order that others would die, whose existence depended on annihilation, direct or otherwise. Guilt might continue to haunt the living, in the way that the sentimental always looks over its shoulder to see if an emotional response fits into the contours of the situational comedy in which so many have modeled so much of this bare life that squeezes into every corner of the canvas.

And that the book against death might succeed, in the same way a man may stand waiting for justice to arrive for an interminable term, isn’t the willing suspension of disbelief. The willing suspension is a sword dangling over our heads. The potential success of the book against death is the idea of time suspended, not so much paused as sidestepped.

---

Today I found myself again aboard the Titanic and aware of what the band really played as it went down.

How often do we find ourselves aboard the Titanic, begins a sermon in the Lutheran church from a pastor who last stayed in a hotel in the first Bush administration.

And let us not forgot the band who played music as the Titanic went down, begins the homily of a truly chaste, asexual priest who cannot help but wonder if his parishioners think of priests as a suspect class.

And in all variety of households, distributed evenly among the doomed and the elect and the as-yet-unaffiliated, countless 10 year olds are struggling to sleep, thinking about an indestructible ship which hit an iceberg and whose passengers had minutes to think about it before they perished.

---

Slowly he loses, one after another, the letters of the alphabet. Which remain? Which does he slur? Which is the last that he slurs?

Ode to the palsied, the bed-ridden, the soon to be aphasic, the bent and the broken, the heavily medicated and those who deserve and need hospice but have no one to foot that bill, to make passing on as comfortable as can be.

Prurience as a kind of reflexive goad for misplaced desire

Charon’s boat had a small leak, not like a sieve, and the administration was light on putty so someone who knew better volunteered to plug it with his thumb. His kin had done right by him and put silver coins over his eyes before the lamentation and tears began. And so had the tithe already redeemed and had no practical need to be useful and keep on the boat so it could traverse its way via Lethe to the end state and then he’d come back with Charon, who had no words to share or lighten the interminable task at hand.

Scattered ashes don’t often enough sink and so the currents and tides are both music and dancers, making a more robust meaning to scattering and returning.

Placate the void, feast until sick

The women with their ladles ladling out gray gravy onto lumpy potatoes, pivoting from one serving dish to another in smart slacks and sensible shoes, taking care not to let too much dead time pass before one asks a question of another. Small talk is not too much a distraction from adding heaping piles of steaming lasagna and filling styrofoam cups with cider. More than one thought this might be her last year of going through these wretched motions, that next winter might fill up with a cruise to Juneau or ten day stay a Tucson condo or a respiratory illness for which convalescence was an impossible ask. One never could tell what might happen, even when what was happening had been happening here, in this church basement, for longer than anyone could remember.

---

The men, those few who still came, sat hunched over their plates, maneuvering forkfuls of limp green beans into their mouths without tasting them, because they had tasted them before, because they had been eating the same green beans for fifty years, because they knew that no matter how much time passed, a plate did not serve its function until it was clean, and belonging to the club whose members hewed to that rule was not just a point of pride, but the non-negotiable crooked timber of being. This might be the last supper to attend, if courage had any substantive say, and so might as well feast on the perversities at hand.

---

America is the greatest poem, belaboring the oblivious

The father would have it like this:

1 Loosened association.

2 Antic behavior.

3 Autism.

4 Morbid ambivalence.

The son begins:

She came by way of Archer, Bridgeport, Nanuet, worked off 95 in jeans and a denim jacket, carrying a plastic bag and shower shoes, a phone numbers, waiting beneath an underpass, the potato chips long gone, lightheaded.

I have spent hours circling around the drain of the morbid ambivalence wrought from the antic and autistic and associative slurry. A neologism that unlettered me is too unbothered to think of as anything but consecutive execution framed out the pad into which the slurry is poured and left to harden.

But the arrival of the son and the story of the fucked and the forsaken he had to tell made me nearly forget that entire centripetal journey and I was amazed to find that I did not miss the coarse encounters or the dazzle of multiple sparklers in a hand and two more dangling from the teeth.

---

Vis-a-vis the belaboring of the oblivious, the exuberantly hopeless, the drawn blinds and the fetid breath of a pallid man, I do not intend to bite and so I pay obeisance to my sources:

I.e.,

But I read them hard, expecting sentences to have been spitefully spatchcocked into the running gelatinization of barbarisms and typos to check up on me, to see if I was actually reading.

---

---

No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them,

No more modest than immodest.

Unscrew the locks from the doors!

Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!

Whoever degrades another degrades me,

And whatever is done or said returns at last to me

My poverty but not my will agrees to the updated terms and conditions

---

In place of aesthetic fecundity, we have a frictionless expanse of the inoffensive. Ozempic shrinks the paunch the way methamphetamine used to hollow the pitted cheeks, which is, undoubtedly, a kind of metonym for the American pilgrim’s progress.

The frictionless expanse of the ineffably inoffensive kicks us loose from sense and nonsense. Daft hunks of meat speak with trumpet mouths into the bell of which a mute is forever lodged. Maximalists walk around with hammers for hands and see nothing but screws. They put their hands to ill use and make a mash of things.

The future we have lassoed unfurls only when desire is anesthetized. Excellence packets get distributed per the pro rata of prime numbers, lumping Pareto with the assimilating precision of Acronym’s inhouse speculative scribe. Consequently or independently - it’s hard to tell - an oily algorithmic residue clings to the cathedrals’ ceilings.

---

Come join me in the suffocating monotony of the online souk, which we would call dark ten years ago when USPS was a primary plug. But now the fentanyl sells itself. All of the dragons there were then have since become geckos and no longer spit insurrectionist fire but now grow new limbs on command.

---

This is how to supplant grandeur (or so nostalgia would have it) with seamless consumption (or so our less fortunate, more principled friends would frame their interdiction and tempt you to draw cold but aspirational comfort from believing in the virtues of making nothing new.)

---

This is how to buy into a compromised lot and foreclose on any schema of knowingness which has squatted on what to you ought always to be Terra Incognita in the desert of pure feeling.

---

---

The business of art is form, which sometimes is money. A tall bald man teaches that a cue card with a delineated process is the thing to catch the conscience of the king. With sorry on their lips, his proselytizers warp time to go back and make a magnanimous picture-talk feature. They can be overheard telling Philip to step out of the path of their sun, but no one in this canon’s dream realizes it was Alexander who listened and actually complied with their gospel. The focus on the weeping is misplaced - it’s the sound of the tear sliding down the cheek that does the underwriting, and without shame.

All of which is to say that aesthetic chastity, were it to exist, would not occupy a more privileged or more perspicacious position. The idea that comes only after the check cashes still stands or falls on its execution, and the jiggery-pokery criticism of the ascetic purists won’t prop it up or make it come crashing down, either.

Knowing this is ennobling. Just as poets create their predecessors, not all cynics’ skins can be scratched to mine cadmium squares. Heraclitus did not come to debase the coinage, but to call logos into being, into account. We would be fools to sing for a symbolic supper when the daily bread at hand is rising.

Litmus test: the freedom from envy which the present holds for the future

It’s not the failure of the imagination to think of a future that isn’t the mulling offspring of a unholy marriage between state-sponsored and state-subjugated capitalism (I know, but it is both-and). It’s nostalgia predominating as the only possible affect cluster, the lens through which the world is viewed. The foreclosing as illegitimate the idea that the best is yet to come.

Phase one: Yes I could live in the world of 1980 or 1990 or 2000 - look back at that splendor.

And conversely, its aider and abettor: the future is a bleak graveyard. Those poor miserable fucks of the future - they won’t be able to exist in fully human ways. The robots will win, the seas will rise, the episodic major scale extreme events will come more quickly and wreak devastation of a higher intensity over a larger area. Oh the ominous path to come.

The certainty that what is to come will be worse is the ordinary unhappiness of historical positioning, and we haven’t yet submitted to the couch and the dreams and the envy and the attachment theory of the mirror stage. We have not yet begun to begin anew.

a sage for whom awareness is the live wire on which anomalous whims of ghosts and girls and eggs subsist

It isn’t just the vicious disregard for keeping one’s affairs to oneself, outside the realm of two factor authentication. It’s not just the decades’ long saturation with the culture of self-celebrity and pic or it didn’t happen (all those who sat on the bleeding edge 15 years ago repeated that phrase like a kind of self defeating koan). It’s how throughly we all have forgotten the ways in which silence visits violence on the foes and sycophants we’d all do well to vanquish.

We are against content production and those who produce it. First things last, on that account.

We prefer that the tincture of time not be wasted on those who would not withstand having their pupils dilated naturally, as though everything significant has always already happened. Give them the syringe with the drugs that can’t be swallowed.

We are against escaping lives of quiet desperation by increasing the volume of the desperation and the writhing spectacle of those in its throes.

More training reading the ones for whom making a moment is a death-in-life affair. It’s the mark that makes the picture, not the dent in the universe that the picture inflicts. Reception - the consequence of having looked and the effect of having been read - comes to wise fools and ascetics who have not lost an avaricious need for more feasts that hold the gaze.

We find that beauty makes its own argument, collapses its own interior walls, runs the score up doing desire’s blind bidding, and still makes time to strip from every interlocutor the first-person microphone.

Sentimental education by rote and flagellation

If we could live in any tv universe,

I think it would NOT be post war Italy, where the smart women don’t have the opportunities they deserve and the bozo men are violent bozos.

Maybe the fictional universe of Mr and Mrs smith, even if we weren’t assassins and killing people, but doing advanced analytics and prospective location scouting without necessarily knowing for whom or for what purpose it was being done. And being paid exorbitant amounts and embracing the mindless hedonism of the carelessly uber-competent, unburdened by cancer or relatives or two-factor authentication.

---

Exile in its Meaty Exactitude

You make of me an orphan

Standing stock still in a parched desert

Within two clicks of a watering hole

At which belligerently different people

Exchange the wet gossip of war.

Whatever old red thread

Strings into my heart

And pierces through yours

Will still stay raveled when I go

Earn my keep and

Clamber over the

Bounded walls of the

Raving plague-sick city.

I won’t write in my dreams, won’t need to,

Because some day before forever comes

You’ll return to hazy fruition

And I’ll build piles of ash

Each taller than the last

And I’ll hide the best meat

Beneath lingering grievances

To throw the sullen gods off the scent

The joke will be on them

The blood will be on us

The lion and the lamb

Muttering at the city’s gates.

A kelson of the creation

Ironizing the big forces and drives in life - love and death, and the fear of both, the kinds of friendships that span years and geographic distance, the jolting surprises of illness or injury or betrayal - is, I think, reflexive to me.

---

I would like to say it comes from TV, or knowing that most of the parasocial contact points with society at large are fundamentally premised on selling me things or services or monetizing my activities and data to make more effective the effort of selling things and services to me and others who are demographically similar. But that story is too simple, and it’s not mine, and it leaves out a big force that I have been running from for too long - fear and a basic discomfort of being in this always too easily chafed skin. Which I suppose, in fairness, has thickened, if not calloused, as I’ve tumbled and stumbled, climbed and accomplished, fallen and failed, and gotten granular enough to see, mostly, just my own side of the street.

---

By ironize I meant take the piss out of things, recoil at sentimentality, make contingent, desacralize the pimping demagogues, and presume that if something artistic is simple or direct it can at best achieve only a false depth because the real and the true are complicated and probably complicit. Selling out is still very much a thing in this Maslovs hierarchy, and the ascendancy of achieving influence as a means to monetize influence makes for vomit in my mouth.

Maybe this is not uncommon. I sometimes wonder who my data-vectored analogues or avatars are, where they live, how closely my legible consumption patterns might predict whether I would like them and they me. I remain naive or simple enough to think that with enough time and curiosity and money, that kind of thread could be pulled and pulled and pulled until it coughed off something meaningful. But presumably anyone who would be consilient would also cultivate anonymity persistently.

---

Two months off of this hairshirt exercise - which involves some creation, some desire to have a random anonymous encounter leave the reader with a positive impression (I.e., that I’m smart, interesting, insightful, with enough taste or curiosity or curatorial skill to sustain interest, based on a method that relies primarily on poor DIY integration of random art and cryptic navel-gazed commentary) - that two month break has been enough. You can’t know what’s enough until you know what’s too much.

If I don’t create a system I will just be enslaved by someone else’s. Etc etc

All of this is some throat clearing, and a much more personal kind of post to create the scaffolding I need to say: the beatings will resume so long as morale and readership remain low.

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

---

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.

---

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.

---

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

---

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

---

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

---

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.

---

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

---

*****

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.”

---

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

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.