We play at games until death calls us home

There is no pursuit like slithering into a position of visibility. We who are observers engage in particularly slimy slithering in order to change teams and join the they who are observed. And the knock on making a bid for attention is that it betrays some shallow need. Which it often does and is (a betrayal).

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I say this as though only callow, talentless turds make bids on attention. Or that being shallow is self-defeating or that “betraying some shallow need” is betraying some stable quality that is more honorable than mooning for eyeballs or plaudits or some sexual healing. But if it’s all in the end a game, an unwinnable game that starts long before and ends long after the blinking ephemerality that is this life, then is the aversion for prostitution-as-popularization status just a question of style? Of not proclaiming and not seeking to be proclaimed? A different distinguishable status-seeking but one that is not less sought after, for that, that defines itself in not selling, not seeking and is therefore a style warped by the same inexorable force that its nemesis-style? A particle repelled by a force outside of itself is no less controlled than one that is attracted.

If this problem is a hole, and these ways of thinking are just different kinds of shovels, one with differently tangible bites on the ground that they seem to excavate, can there be a different kind of tool? How about a hand, with a strong grip?

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A verbless kind of life

“Within any given system, there are claims which are true but which cannot be proven to be true.”

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Months could go by,

A-marinating and stewing

that vat and this brain

with an attendant who might enter

with shaving bowl and straight blade

The nearest approximation to

A minor key friendship

a witches brew, my mind

Shallow itinerant who punches

only at the liver of each moment’s opponent

a knockout a distant dream

Monday is a castaway and Tuesday sees Pip take one last swim, Wednesday -

That kind of annalis mirabilis, it has been

each moment being an opponent but

four on the floor the beat goes on

clinging on for lack of will at being found and being dressed and eulogized

Nihilism an overreach, beyond the nib of the inner pamphleteer, too much bile to accustomize, and the stink of clammy pedantry besides

this sour digestion this itchy verve to dip a mind in the stale scrim scraped from communion wine and soak a wafer in

Bobbing like an apple or a boxer or a buoy at the entrance point of the riptide, way out but with a just-so way of ending, scattering forces and conjuring banalities.

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This is only one aspect of the conspiracy

People are always saying - and have always been saying for months, years, decades, centuries - that we must tear the mask of the illusion, notice and identify the true conditions of existence. People are in a hole with a shovel and don’t know what else to do but dig. Beneath every bandage is a wound, but that does not make the bandage bad. To say it differently, to come at it from another angle - the bondage of the self is extricable from suffering in the same way that the wound is affixed to the bandage by virtue of its function. The bandage needs the wound to have a function - but it’s not reciprocal. The bandage does not call the wound into being, does not introduce it into the things of this world.

People are always saying - and have been saying for months years decades and yes centuries - that the unseen is the repository for hope in the same way that the visual - what is capable of being seen and understand - is the repository of truth. The future of an illusion, indeed. To say it another way, that this concept covers or is covered by this name for the concept . . . I need to stop to eat a candy bar before my blood sugar gets too low and I pass out and hit my head on the rim of the toilet bowl. Seeing stars, yes; yes that too.

Dig: for what other purpose is this tool?

Imitating frozen art imitating calcified life

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I stole a brick once from Harvard Square and used it as a door stop for a year or three. Incandescent fury of youth, and also an inability to feed or clothe or nurture or care for the body in which the self and soul each annealed unto the other. The time of dropped percocets and the endless buffet of meal plan hegemony and the ceaseless rumble of soldiering on with the insomnia. “Sleep when you’re dead” a stamp on the forehead of every self respecting wordsmith, like a tuning fork for burnt candles and testament art.

That one when Pusha T trills until the 808 drops

Flat stones on the shore flipped across a tranquil surface and skipping so long as the friction is less than the momentum. Call that math.

Tangled concepts suffer from the opposite problem, as any effort to casually let them loose and sail off on an independent vector files at the outset. Is there more to be said? Always. Call that the law of conservation.

Go ahead and take first steps towards a trenchant narrative wanting to take you on that trip, a long tale that Mia judges or stumbles or gets caught up in the reverie of getting there and forgets the point is saying something here and now. That guy who said our moods do not believe in each other is moldering away. Also that idea of how God is the circumference of a circle whose expansion is a kind of molting process. He said that too.

Find me the committed man, the one who does not eventually see the symbolic shift away from radicalism as inevitable, who understands a totally unbelievable fixed rate mortgage to be a kind of quietest trophy to assimilated complacency, and I will pay for your breakfast.

Find me a payphone. That is where the ideas needed to combat this slick limpid casting call will simmer. That is where this ethereal stone, walking on water, will come to bloom. A place that still makes it possible to plug a quarter into a slot and find someone out there with answers, or at least a voice that can respond to questions, perhaps in the same bewildered tone as they are haltingly uttered.

Trumpet A Lament, that Vehicle Stalls as Soon as It Starts

Interview an empty room for long enough and it starts to talk back at you. And then who or what is the empty one? See? Who or what - which is the referent?
I keep putting off the scene when we hit record and get comfortable in the chairs that face each other in order to not talk past each other, or at each other. It is just that kind of traction that we can assume is not a propitious use of a slightly addled state. The taut thread pulling itself slack, the hangover of having never held it true that what happens in this room is as deserving of entering the record as any other incident. Which was wise, as it is not true. Still, what can come from being infatuated with a dozen variations of stories touting the authenticity of an egg cream pushed across a counter top slick with the residue of a rag that was once clean. All take place within the Manhattans of the world crowded on top of one other. I read those stories having never seen a subway, within shouting distance of row crops, not realizing the riches held out by borderless open space and imperturbable wanderings it made possible. Maybe one day I will meet someone who is infatuated with the idea of this emptiness, where the weather wears a mask of humid swelter that turns into a pitiless frigid wall of wind with three turns of the calendar’a heavy-bound pages. And that’s just the outer part of home. Think of all that took place in the sodden-brain still-expanding skull and the crowded house in which it was set loose. No one could sigh with disappointed resignation like my king could. This could be the year, he could be the one, where the land gets lost. He could be the one.

No one could more pitifully stand on the principle that a man’s house is his kingdom, once the mortgage was solely anchored to my low 800 credit score. Anyone who is honest can break through, but not just anyone can be assured there will be an observer on the other side. Ticking clocks and the squeaky tractor belt, so much anxiety: this is the interval of time between searing sweaty heat exhaustion and the cold that takes fingers and leaves blackened nubs. Just one wrong turn in life snd you end up feeling like you drank the dirty water from the radiator based on a mere perception of being parched in exile.

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Consumption — attract and recoil, seduce and defile


in progress

Masha Gessen, The Future is History

Mohsid Hamin, the reluctant fundamentalist

manuel puig, eternal curse on the reader of these pages

ts eliot, four quartets

Thomas hirschhorn, critical laboratory

Completed:

Philip Guston, Guston talking

Mohsid Hamin, A Beheading, at Granta (online)

Houllebecq, in the presence of schopenhauer

David Wojnarowicz, close to the knives,

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  • khamid ali (c)

Lebensklugheit, or Musing on Herzog

The poet must not avert his eyes.

There is quiddity run amuck in the work of Werner and the world views it at various times encapsulates.  Like an undulating bass line from a Portishead song, or a squiggle from the erudite Virginian Mr. Twombly.

Ask forgiveness, but acknowledge also that not everything that is permitted stands on all fours with what the “ought” contains.  I can do it doesn’t mean I should.  Exceptions include eating a shoe and walking across a country on a pilgrimage with the faith that she will stay alive for at least as long as it takes for you to arrive at her side.  So faith can be medicine.  Or sustenance.

I can imagine that a long still shot can be a philosophical statement, even if I can’t quite seem to get captured in that conceptual netting.  Slipping through, though, doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate it.  When Werner speaks of the horror, or fire, or survival in the face of epistemic collapse - or take pick of whichever epic, grand subject most moves you - it doesn’t take the needle from the record.  That too is an article of faith, not so much on display as enacted in time.  Medicine, sustenance, and being able to attain meaning where others, uttering the same words and thinking themselves as having ascended to the same intent, falter and fall short.

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A similar incapacity to wake up from a dream

I.

in the great tradition of denuded realism, the female half of the young couple does not have the time or privilege to see with sepia-infused sentimentality. She is pragmatic, perhaps even frigid, cold, bitchy. The couple is wildly successful in material and style terms, but spiritually empty and existentially dubious still. A baby question lingers. But so does a remodel question. Much will be made of the worthiness of examined and unexamined lives, but only to extent they play out within socioeconomic brackets and a range of affect that has like two registers.

stripped down to its core, the notion that this sentiment or life circumstance is common does too much work. Dealing in Representative lives is a different kind of crutch no matter the niche in which it is done . Proxy status and synecdoche paper over an unwillingness or inability to speak from and for the idiosyncratic snowflakeness of the individual person. So that, naturally, the auteur of this particularly denuded realist artifact can’t be criticized if his or her instantiation feels flat. It is not a failing but a testament to verisimilitude. And so we end up with art whose chief virtue is to render with exactitude the limited flawed lives of its limited flat characters - getting the details and textures absolutely right is no substitute for a lack of interesting lives. It is a vicious virtuous cycle, a closed loop of banality.

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Another iteration of that repetitive pattern around the mourning star

A year ago today, a tornado sauntered on through the biggest little city in the 605 and tore down part of a tree that casts a shadow over my entire front yard. The downed limb struck the side of my house. I was alone. I “slept” through it, as I was still very much afflicted with the long lonely nights laying siege to myself with that baffling cunning powerful companion. And at some point that night, before the storm hit, I had made this:

{[collage being the greatest form of imitation]}

{[collage being the greatest form of imitation]}

A cavalcade of concentric circles limping down the line

All kinds of stories with unnamed narrators proceed along intersecting axes of reliability and legibility. The idea that “To be seen is to be understood” overindulges the cult of knowing in advance; and its counterpart, “to be understood is to be placed” ignores the observer’s shaping function. Sometimes we don’t need to wait until act 3 to know that when the climax comes, all the players will be scarecrows. Or when it comes time to button things up, the only ink available will write white.

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All the pretty horses had trenchfoot and ringworm

Slanted and enchanted,

this room full of bass clefs

and cranach the elder prints

a moribund pitch for the

business of dead souls:

get your smithy here, half-off,

Up above at the surface,

extra vagrants milled around

the steam vents, smelling like fried oil

and feasting on the ethereal spiff of

well-intended confabulations about

what the future may hold in store

if they would simply slough off their skin

and become entirely different diffident people.

down below the bubbles in the pot simmered

and I searched for a cheap but direct way to show you I am almost partway healed.

The jams are in the process of being kicked out.

1. On what to focus. 2. on the mothering arts

****
The word “happiness” in the center of one circle, surrounded by 10 slightly larger circles set out at evenly spaced intervals.

^^^^
The long interruption to our regularly scheduled programming is now rescinded. Because hope springs eternal and life-density in the future is always underestimated, the presumption is that more will come of longer length, greater vitality, and more often.

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A man named Whistler made a painting of his mother. It is of an old America. Its visual vocabulary may have become so assimilated as to obscure the fact that it is an old weird and internally conflicted America. Like all Americas are, regardless of vintage or how far back in time or moral depth we go. Anna Matilda is so patient, if not unruffled, and yet so very little of the visual math adds up. She is elongated. The depth of the field of the floor is just barely registered. She is not malevolent - the piety is strong in this one - but she is a mystery. Art is about mothers, in the strong sense that old art lives in the shadows of older art, which lived in the shadows flickering on the walls of the cave as the dancing fire crackles and breathes. There is (or was) a monument erected to Anna Matilda in 1938 on the base of which states: A mother is the holiest thing alive.

are the mothers of the past alive today in the habits and practices, virtues and vices, certainties and ambivalences, of their progeny? The answer is proleptic in the question. That you can’t be half-pregnant does not mean you cannot help but be partway determined, somewhat nurtured, good-enough rendered. How much you can help, how much you can overcome, and the varying degrees of how much too-muchness you can handle - these have staying-power salience in the old weird and the new as yet undiscovered Americas.

Of course, doting sons are no more and no less apt to become estranged fathers. This one was raffish, libertine, and said (by Dorian’s father) to have spelled art with a capital I. And doting sons are not necessarily borne up from devoted mothers. That things don’t add up, that causation is a fickle and illegible master, that ifs and thens flourish most unstintingly in the clean ecology of conceptualism, are all things Whistler knew. And, I suspect, his painted mother did, too.

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