He was preoccupied with inventing the uncanny

That we might decide to have our say, to expel the passive virtue of unspoken acceptance from its place of priority, and instead speak our minds. Our vapid desultory minds, already colonized by the givers of received opinions, bathed  in mimeographed sentiment and crepuscular glory.  A slurry of metaphoric dung beetles and animatronic earworms had crawled up noses and down alimentary canals, digging in and making mischief the entire time we were having our say and having it speak us into being.

Do I protest too much?  Surely I do.  In all the hearse houses in the world, she had to walk into mine, amidst the bawdy self-satisfied speeches and the gullet-shaking peroration, it was not unlike what the devout would describe as being struck down and held fast by a bolt of faith from the heavens.  Not unlike it all, from their perspective, those devout who would happily offer themselves to the devourer.  And the entire time, the one that she came to see was banging away, anvil in hand, making sure we could remember things that had not happened and vouchsafe that disconnect, right quick.  

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Letter to fallen idols, or that imperious look

Peter Doig is one of the best painters. I need to write him another letter and will soon. His is the type of making that pulls and pushes at discovery, where the thing that is discovered does not so much map onto the thing made as to exist adjacent to it, but not in its shadow. Of the world but not in it. Dreams and floaters and the shimmering pointillism of cluster headaches and migraines with aura. All types of aura with the Doig paintings.

His work makes figuration endlessly interesting to me - the way a work that is recognizably based on some model (whether a photo or a mnemonic image) can have clarity in the sign-signifier way of correspondence and still vibrate with alternative meanings and slippage.

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Doppelgänger blandishments

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It is all very well to keep silence, but one also has to consider the kind of silence one keeps.

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My life is a joke and I am my own straight man

It is possible that the water that was subject of the statement that all is connected is not the water that is the subject of the statement i am drowning. Go ask Alice.

This is not Alice.

---

Smack in the middle of an unraveled life, it becomes hard to identify the latest end from the earliest beginning. Not quite sure whether this frazzled end right here, at my finger tips, is snarled up like a too-long-in-place braid or just its own natural undone end state.

---

Lilacs out of the dead land

Tracking Mr. Hass has spun me right round running down anchor points tethered to the corner of each quarter section, surveying and taking the measure of his regard for what he says plainly about how having breakdowns rebuilds us.

Also

each emblem of the past’s voice carries out past the last trough of a new ascending wave in which he embalms present sense without verging to the vulgar tongue,

and there is a flat but homespun accent to the truth that we lost in great haste, this brazen hurry against which our rough-hewn ruins are shorn of that pedantic metallic sheen.

but wait

until that next wave’s apex breaks and wipes out a plea written in the sand, as unlikely and inevitable as a ploughshare turning earth over dead stalks and wresting green buds from three helpings of morning light.

All so that

we may stand dazed in the cerulean stillness of almost-dawn, right-sized and equidistant from what matters, pining after California, but pegged here to the prairie, turning another page of twentieth century pleasures and waiting for the birdsong to fade.

A bag of large questions

Gratitude spilling over the side of an exposed heart like a crashing wave and then receding being replaced by the next one. Then grief. Then gratitude.
That soothing sussurating blend of motion-action and pattern, and then its mirror image of terror.
Poets in the time of tumultuous revolution used to locate the sublime in nature - in craggy peaks and epic landscapes.
To say that the habitat of the sublime has been reduced to screens is probably too much a value judgment. And one behind which I stand, fully weighted.

---

And yet:

once we admit that there is room for newness – that there are vastly more conceivable possibilities then realized outcomes – we must confront the fact that there is no special logic behind the world we inhabit, no particular justification for why things are the way they are. Any number of arbitrarily small perturbations along the way could’ve made the world as we know it turned out very differently… We are forced to admit the world as we know it is the result of a long string of chance outcomes.“

P. Romer

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Not everybody can be the protagonist in pump up the volume . . . Not even Christian Slater can

Mic check on Mr Robot, as it was the original pirate radio hack that had all the rebellious telephase initiates bursting up against a wall that would eventually be proven to be permeable. I recognize that this is digital artifact is not a fount of optimism - it has a separate function - and that recognition is emblazoned with its own neurotic twitch. Because soothsaying has its separate function too.

Not being able to help not being able to help oneself is on like page 176 of the new DSM, which I sit on at meals the better to commandeer the horizon.

But yes, bleak times. And ever bleaker by the hour. To be respected and respectable seems uncouth, in the way that not showering for days and emitting that sweet-aged tang of saturated booziness is a sign of degradation, spiritual and otherwise.

“The food is so bad - and in such small portions.” That rich send up of the cant well being gives solace. Believe it or not. And not in the same way as Delillo’s Lenny Bruce, screaming into the microphone: “We are all going to die

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What first occasioned this digressive loop of non sequiturs was a synopsis from the good man Clancy Martin, he of the padded walls and the staggering insight into lying and self-abuse:

The worry in The Idiot is that there are all really only two authentic ways of existing, being in love and killing yourself. Also: if those are the only real ways of being, what does it mean if you can actually choose either of them?

How now brown cow. In most other contexts we would need to decide whether to indulge in this indulgence and choose to accept it as having philosophic heft or choose to take treat it as enacted bad faith, stated on its own self negating and self-recommending terms.

To call this unfulfilled choice a paradox misses the point, in the same way that calling out for more pirate radio misses the epoch. We shan’t and therefor we don’t, and because we don’t, we can.

Ah yes, the renewed reign of the one-eyed man

POETRY NOW

Poetry stinks with ten thousand poets
pissing in the same overflowing bowl.
We must go it alone, swimming at night
down the River of No Return.
At dawn we’ll see unknown animals
on the bank, and unknown women, some
without faces. We’re now sure that we
have both leprosy and gangrene, outcasts.

Jim Harrison

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Back when I used to ride wounded horses, and so much of what seemed like aspiration I would not want to pursue because of fear that it would elude me or I would fall or fail or sputter out into normalcy. I lived in a small house next to a creek, which was the house’s water supply. Shower: yes. Drink from the tap: invite giardia so no. I read a lot of Harrison out on a little bridge that spanned the creek and led to the pasture from which I could see the Pintlars. I miss those mountains. I do not miss that feeling of wanting, at least once a day, to crawl out of my skin and out of time, unreconciled.

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Time is a mystery that can tip us upside down.

Year too

In my minds eye I am on my way to Quemado and the Lightning Field. It is not to become habituated to the randomness of it, the “strike,” or to take on the idea of buoyant bravado head on. A cabin in the middle of a desert, which is also in the middle of an art work in the middle of the desert, an artwork that is and isn’t representative, a cabin that is and isn’t a refuge .

This is the next volume. Onward and upward we go.

Slander the Culling

I suppose it also must be said that time has a different texture in the middle of the night.  I don’t always want to give up this intimacy with stolen moments, when there is no form of disturbance save whatever is percolating within.  Getting comfortable with whatever that is is part of what makes the unbearable effects almost bearable. But it is still three full stop fathoms away from stable and squared away.  Way down there in the depths.

A reply to Greek and Latin with bare hands

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In the Renaissance, when people — outside of being hung or crucified — couldn’t die in the sky yet, the ideas a painter had always took place on earth.

de Kooning, Renaissance and Order

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Pure products go crazy

diagnosing the instrument

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Most of the thinking that a therapist might find relevant to making a diagnosis i do in the dead of night.  It is not by choice, this arrangement I’ve made with my life.  Sometimes it starts with parenting, by which I mean escorting a wayward woken child back to bed and, hopefully, back to sleep. And then I settle into settling accounts, prognosticating, tending to anxiety and resentment and exploratory myth making.  But it also comes unbidden, emerging from a dream interrupted, or just an interior monologue rejoined in medias res as I come to.

Sometimes I am replaying conversations that actually happened, as they happened, or as they might have happened, had I a chance to edit and redirect them from whatever sordid conflict-escalating path I put them down.  Other times I am anticipating conversations that might happen and but soon, and obviously there is a fair bit of projecting about exchanges that don’t have even a puncher’s chance of breaking into the real or seizing on some jaunty picaresque scene from the past or from the vault of paths not taken. Examining the unlived life and dissembling the lived one.

It is not wise, this thinking in the dead of night.  Easy words to say, hard word to live by. It is useless, unproductive, and often untethered from what I would recognize in my normal waking hours as the normal cognitive patterns of a productive, tax-paying, responsible self.  That is a personage that I inhabit (sometimes thoughtlessly, sometimes uncomfortably, as though it were a form-fitting corset or worse straitjacket, being put to strictly utilitarian ends) and the inhabiting occurs at times other than when I am doing this thinking.  And it seems readily apparent that what is normal in the day is not what is normal here in these insomniac vignettes, that I am not normal in how often and how completely I succumb to and am bound over to them.  The idea that sleepless rumination highjacks what would otherwise be an unremarkable self, something in the middle of the curve, extending just to the mean and the medium of everyday life and no farther - that idea gains purchase at the same time as I give in to habit that self be highjacked.  I am uncertain which is more expressive of me, more - as we are all now wont to say - authentic.  

I no longer fret so much about what is real or about how the Real is an engine of subliminal viscosity.  I have become accustomed to the thought that we are what we do, and that one thing I do is sabotage a normal day by letting it begin with this, shortly after midnight or 1 am.  But like a dog worrying over a bone, I am.  And so this happens.  

The sun is new every day

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A leaky vessel, embedded in all

This spooky action where whirl

Is king not for a day but as 

A category inescapable

I beseech you and 

your alabaster skin

Flinty heart

Passive rectitude

could we just get on with

The redness of no longer loving

and the cool blue 

semblance of puckered anxiety

I do not lust after distance squared 

Slipped loose from that horizon 

Into which a passel of Barbarians 

ride on horses in movie after movie

That plays on after my head 

Runs into flickering gray abstract

of no longer feeling anything.

And somehow I find it hard to think

My children will understand that if

The hordes in the epic epics 

Do not move across the land

The land might just bite back.

As it has done and

Always will do.

Not winning is a given if the finite

Is both measuring stick and 

Soiled carrot

You find a rhyme for orange 

In a dream and suddenly it

Seems like your naked 

Ring finger is split-haired choice

Not spite-pickled destiny

Easier that way.  Better too.

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Transient Global Amnesia, no doubt precipitated by the acute stress of having never had enough capacity to say it loud enough to be heard often enough to feel just ok

An anniversary on the horizon for this navel gazing and it seems like at least the following is worth noting:

1. The future keeps winning. Even when it seems unlikely.

2. Riding in a Porsche on a late spring day and eating up a mile in a matter of what seems like moments: affirming.

3. Sleep. On the regular. Oh if only.

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No deep further fact

Do you mean to tell me there is no deep further fact beyond the multitude of adjacent mental moments and psychological states that make up a day a week a month, other than that such moments and states are habituated (firing makes wiring)?

That there is no deep further fact to the idea of having or being or embodying a self?

That - knock on wood - sometimes the sense of having hit bedrock is just like the sense of having felt inspired by a trumpet blast and the crescendo of the felt mallets on the skin of a timpani?

a peace piece by bill Evans yes I suppose that is the one, I would like it played when I die and anyone who is here still still hearing this will see that it is played then when I am no longer here to hear it played. A peace piece a piece of the peace

That unravished bride of quietness

***
This is not a sentence.

This sentence is false is not a sentence

“A quotation appended to itself” appended to itself is a sentence to purgatory.

***
Here I was, trying to talk about things, to you, and I open my mouth and out comes more things. The more I tried to talk to you, the more things came at you. Which is not to say it was unenjoyable: this constructive monologue of mine.

***
It wasn’t just that he was a narcissist. He was a wounded narcissist, which, I mean, like, come on.

***
Bear with me, no - wait just bear with me for one second. You don’t want to do this. You don’t know what you’re doing. Please, just stop. Stop and think. For once in your life - No wait I didn’t mean that. Not like it sounded. I don’t mean things how they sound, it’s true.

Virtue signaling from a naked king who got rid of all children, just in case

You tell me, if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?  And I tell you I don’t know how to talk about money, anymore than I know how to tell you what you missed in not making a choice to alter your brain in high school.  

Do you have anxieties that your sensations of the world sit across an experiental divide from the things of the world about which your sensations cluster/from which they emanate/to which they attach?  If this experience-phenomena-thing gap is still a thing for you, even at this age of crumbled empires and factional reality, I wonder whether there is much chance of me falling in love with you at the same time as you falling in love with yourself. I also wonder whether aesthetics is not a subset of philosophy but a form of consumption.

If you’ve never eaten a thing whose life you took on purpose, does that make you slightly less human?  When did the category human no longer necessitate a trait of “killing what it eats?”   Not to get all Fertile Crescent and onset of agricultural practice on you.   

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I started beholden to the idea that this time I might actually say something.  I have become arrested by the idea that for too long I was assuming that the work was a puzzle, and it turns out it just be a mystery instead.  That this doesn’t feel momentous, and also doesn’t feel like a loss, is some indication of how far I’m come or how the shiny allure of a closed and comprehensive belief system has just never taken root.  For me at least.  They say work masochism bears a family resemblance to virtue signaling which bears a family resemblance to compulsive signifying activity, to which I say, to them and those their ilk, very well.

The reason I’m so smart and not rich (one might answer) is because I recognize the illusion of wealth for what it is.  But that is a luxury, that recognition, isn’t it?  

An apercu of God and dice a call for plaintive calm

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The shallow expression of that persistent itch is just “something new and shiny.”   The underlying absence that gives the itch purchase on your brain patterns and carves out a home there is “something enduring that keeps kicking out meaning.” Maturity is a name given to boring acquiescence, so as to reduce its sting. Like cardiac arrest is to heart-stopping death.

Having money in amounts sufficient to keep people at bay is a very American ambition.  It is as though security comes by way of insulation and the absence of worry comes by the absence of unintended friction when people pass in and out of a life, this life, your life.  It is a peculiar sort of wisdom to recognize that this all may be a symptom of alienation, in the way that making a living puts use values and meaningfulness at odd clashing angles.  Actionable wisdom, rather than empowering affluence - but (being American, after all) why not both?  

Why not the Peace Piece by Bill Evans and the first two tracks from entroducing?  Why not a small spliff on a walk in the woods and the twirl and shuffle of a hand on her back, spinning out and pulled back close with the hand she holds in yours? Why not all the why nots now?

Ohms Law except voltage is synaptic twitch

A sagacious ironist or an ironic sage, I forget which, once observed that to become human does not come easily. And it is this idea of becoming human as an achievement, a thing to be worked out in time, that resonated with our protagonist as he went from project to project, downloading packets of information and accepting new targets with amoral aplomb and near-sociopathic bonhomie:

down and out in Sanyer, with a crooked but decidedly self-aware businessman to smear and then blackmail (the latter to be done by someone else). The businessman was a wholesale grain trader, but this dispute had something to do wirh oil and the sale of tractors. It was simple: he would plant illicit imagery on the mans home computer, which he was able access with rope and an actual grappling hook, and afterward, it would be discovered, security services would become involved, and whomever or whatever the man had been impeding would be free to move. When it was done he hired a boat to ferry him down the Bosporus toward Istanbul and sat down to a meal of lamb and strong yeasty beer at a little family joint in the Tarlabasi district;

down and out in Lyon, where he used a garrote to end the days of a small-time gangster who had drawn too much attention to a smuggling operation from Mexico that had been in place and more or less accepted by local authorities until the gangster tried to use the same method to start importing guns and declined to increase the total of the hush payments. It was “hogs get slaughtered, pigs live on” logic, which came with the territory. Still, the insistence on the garrote - the immediacy of it was what was emphasized - struck our man as unnecessarily baroque and risky. But he was well compensated and was permitted to come two days early to feast and consume what he could of the city. And then he shuttled back to Cologne, with at least three weeks off before he would head back out again . . . .

The world is full of educated derelicts making ever more artful PowerPoints

And the people made powerpoints

And the people made powerpoints

slide after slide after slide

trying to reinvent a presence at the vanishing point, you know the one, the gravitational mass on the horizon where all lines converge and the inflow of money might be pinned to a map 

The people believed that having faith in having faith would be (or simply is always) enough.

As though declaiming could make this confounding mystery into a puzzle, with coordinates and rules and the magnetic pull of a template endgame to which you might refer every hour on the hour.  

Like a scurrying centipede, but of segmented concepts instead of churning limbs, all akimbo and with no logical progression, reading slide after slide after self-referential slide climbing up the walls and scattering my force, every hour on the hour.  

 Kvetch as kvetch can, have no fear, I will lap up what no one else is spooning out.  A thousand internal monologues fall by the way.  

It is never enough, this stolid 8 wants to be a palpitating 10, let me show you

Just-cleaned gloss is the fixed look staring back at me like a transparent omen of cemented insight. 

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Have I mentioned that this is costing nothing, my wisdom wrought from fierce design and slandered title. All of it just background music, counterpoint in a minor key, and I lord over this gloomy scrim of a window pane I’ve peered out of and breathed into, role playing  skillful lookout, every hour on the hour  

I am in that everlasting niche mediating the gap between insular mind-games and lambent group text grandiosity, five of us now, none the wiser, arguing over whether a cyclone or a tornado could serve as an epigram to the (r0) and the f(n) of serendipitous dread

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That no one will ever ask for this is not the biggest fear.  Martin Luther says that penitence comes first and pounded it with nails.  Luther Martin says that Chase was scavenged before he was ravaged.  and the people making powerpoints say that no matter what, this idea of an insurrection will pound onward.  

on the hour every hour, standing here feeling what it feels like to feel like this, muted until the sign off

(not another word) 

standing here feeding a well-fed thing that feeds on this newfound zeal for slick budget graphs and epistolary pitches

(not another word)

Starving hysterical naked

Explicating Seneca

Salivating over so much pithy cant

(not another word)