“Sad clowns, hapless figures in a cosmos that doesn’t want us in pursuit of redemption we can’t have.” But not soulless careerism. Not that.
What we were (how it started)
Organized around a creed, which purported to stand in for absence of a national character. Americanization was the unique non fungible virtue. No one could claim to have much of a history, so even the most senior denizens would still cop to being part of the asylum. Choosing exile, of some sort.
Walter Benjamin at the Local Dairy Queen ——) Everyone seems to have a bad memoir in them.
The world abuzz or ablaze with meaning, hospitable to new beings becoming and existing ones blinking out like that. The post-lapse quickening animate in lines and fields and chains of meaning across a chasm too yawning for possibility to span. Ineffable, noetic, adjacent to the mundanely miraculous.
Or else just invisible vibrations, enough unto themselves.
Breaks are always, and fatally, reinscribed in an old cloth that must continually, interminably be undone.
- Positions, by that one specter of marks
Not one girl I think who looks on the light of the sun will ever have wisdom like this.
- a negation by a wordsmith
Eyes don’t lie, even if the criminal peering them can’t help but.
You idiot! What makes you think decay will
never stink from your skin?
The business of America is business, and the busyness of American art is appearing to maintain the appearance of being busy.
The person with a paint can in hand who decided to share with the world
MY LIBRARIAN WAS A BITCH.
All the Tumblr accounts lit ablaze at the thought that if they loved the Last Psychiatrist so hard, it was written for them, and they were convinced momentarily that they were not afflicted, but the conviction lacked courage, lapsed into confusion, and ashes and more ashes heaped and heaped.
This is It or Super Bowl commercials, I know not from where the Bud Heavy love came in the 00s. I’d like to say the hipster was not so bad but I try not to lie, for my serenity’s sake.
As though they made people like Stanley anymore . . . .
The problem with words, when they go stale, or when they get put to perverse uses, to avoid saying what is meant, or to delay meaning what is being said, is a problem. Big problem. Huge. And only X can solve it.
We can and will go on making widgets in the widget factory, taking a break and standing in a siloed self, waiting on the little bubble to be filled with words on these square machines of unimaginable complexity built in dark writhing anonymity in indescribably denigrating conditions — and not for a solitary moment of the day have to live with, face, reconcile, account for, come to terms with, the death of others out there in the world, being bombed or shot or starved or ignored into oblivion. Big nothing. Dark. Huge. The metaphorical wolf at the ideological door. And only X can solve it.
Wave a rag and see if the bull comes calling to the dance upon entering the arena.
In a different sport, with a different goal, it mewls and grunts in the chute, the spurs on its side ready to rake, the vice wrapped tight around the chief signifier.
Europa is to courtly love as the final stab is to 8 seconds of glory.
Poetry used to be incantation, remembered. A performative summons for the effect on the world, not a gesture of theatricality.
Now we are left with the crumbly crust, the dishwaterdetergentspottedstain, the hands that turn to prunes and eyes gone rheumy in arid climes - that kind of poetry.
On the one hand, harried Henry and the black dog lapping up the scintillating depravity that made the bourgeois knaves scaldingly curious.
On the other, the Scottish play perfumed with a deprived sanctity and a a sink full of dirty dishes, waiting to feed the maggots.
Why not speak of more rudimentary things - the way the comforter grows over warm as stomach rumblings and anxious musings from the committee in the head keep sleep at bay? Or concede defeat to the bleating that keeps twice removed sleep. Not being able to put the world down for a moment that might occasion another moment. 259 sheep later, a succumbing to the id and innumerable fictions of crisis in which I am a grandiose hero bringing supplies to the leper colony’s only accredited priest.
More bare handed, comely faced: I don’t begrudge the enjoyment I get from being ever so complicit in the conditions about which i ceaselessly complain and from which I draw such aggrieved sustenance.
Desire is the name of the game that gets played in the land of the absolute given, where for every if x, then not y someone on the corner is shouting about how A = B does not derive A = A.
Desire is fumbling in the backseat of a car for the eyelets of a bra that holds breasts that fed babies and using just one hand left ringless and two lives which felt senseless.
Desire is being unable to stave off clicking refresh on the Roth account that a near-term future self will milk dry before a long-term future self gives up the ghost.
Few trends are as hot right now as the triple elixir of anxiety, dread, and despair. Dress up all the other maladies in as many combinations as you want, derive as many causal and reactive multi factor tropes as you might dare, and still you fall short.
Anxiety has the market cornered on the well off enough demographic, the ones who know InterGenerational Regression for what it is and can smell the lime in the cart before any of the shovels scrape out the last bit and start flinging.
Dread is a cold, clammy snail shifting its slime ahead and back, making its way across an open plain, unable to go faster even as more shadows pass swooping overhead, and knowing full well that the journey does not reach a destination, just a termination.
Despair is this idea of you sitting somewhere over there, wanting and trying to understand, and me sitting over here, wanting and trying to be understood, and this moment where neither ever happens, even as a roughed-out approximation of human connection, isn’t a moment to be overcome, but the first temporal slice of an elongating unbridgeable gap
{pause for station identification and the well-wrought prayers of all the sundry living saints)
Every influencer left to wonder if this is all just good enough (and nothing more than good enough) for government work. Every shit poster left to wonder if there’s not more to the story about how suffering feeding on suffering makes this tired-out old world go round and down its wrecked and weary way.
Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.
in the great modernist project that has not ended - where to be disoriented and rent asunder is to have gone back to where home once was - we were once told that some writers are husbands and some were lovers. Later we learned of other amorphous categories that reworked the categorical so it was neither box nor a sieve but a 3d printer of identity run on open source code that did not contain, but amassed. But that “later” is for another day.
Camus we were told treated his fiction as scaffolding for his ideas, and his “ideas essays” were alleged to be somehow less than the sum of their cognitive parts. We were told wrong things, then as now.
But - we are coming to a sharper point, even if it not sharp enough (yet) to make a clean cut - what of Vonnegut and his yellow fingers, pecking away, hunting and finding? What of his Midwestern groundedness and his Midwestern suicidal tendencies? His terse witticism and the goofy earnestness of his plenary bleakness?
I could not think of a more bizarre pairing culled from that genus of Don Juans whose works boil the blood of the intemperate young, are set down for two decades or more, and turn out, on being picked up for purposes of re-acquainting brace, to have sustained a destabilizing not-to-be-fucked-with brainworm for the fat, median-voter theory worshippers we’ve all become. Not in the realm of prosody, obv - not sculptors of polymorphous linguistic perversity, on the jagged ruins of which so much modernist righteousness productively shores itself - but just in the sense of mapping the coordinates of the raw meat on the floor.
Call it appreciation but don’t tie a ribbon on it. The way in which they (each so different as to risk embarrassment at invoking the yoke of a “they”) shamelessly exposed how putting a name to forces of fraudulence and penury and paradoxically rich banality could be a salve on, but not a cure for, some basic, dumb emptiness that befriends whatever you want to call whatever it is that is rattling around on the inside, still.
A man was sitting in bed, reading a book about the moon falling apart, and then having its orbit-beholden pieces collide more and more and more, until enough of those pieces came cascading down into earths surface to change planetary atmosphere and make it uninhabitable for thousands of year.
A light, but gripping read.
there is no reason why any of this should hang together, He thought. At best this is a prolonged exercise in futility, he thought. That thought began to fester like an itchy yeast, a malevolent foreign host, and he wished instead of opening up the book, he would have taken a cold shower and lain down on a bed of nails.
He was not a poet or a rock star or a playwright or a sculptor or any kind of artist in love with misery or suffering or infused with “spirituality.”He was not the type to be lulled into a hobby like a docile corpulent toad.
It was a Tuesday night in October. He worked in geothermal energy markets.
All the mystics will tell you, truthfully, that there is no such thing as the past or the future and what we deem to be continuity of identity or “character is destiny” is actually in rare instance choice and more often, from moment to moment, slavish and crippling dependency to habit and acceptance of large-scale social cues.
The very self same mystics will admonish that intention and hyper awareness to the present is a species of liberation, a way to get free.
Their mystical books are obtainable via exchange of germy cash. And the biomes of their mystical guts sometimes go haywire, with predictable roiling and grimacing and incontinence and temporary but agonizing interruption of peristalsis following in the wake.
One sun, one earth, one more trip round, and the past lies a little but squares to the sound
of a truth two can share when the troubles abound
Be brief and be shifty where devils are found.
And the past does it better when the best can’t astound
One sun, one earth, this last dance around.
Wet dew on a bough that weeps as it roasts
Slander the future and silence the ghosts
One sun, one earth, one fiery time round.
The river would flood in the spring, and large carp would get caught in pools shrinking in the baked evaporating heat. We would shoot them with BB guns, spear them with sharpened sticks, try to bash them still with rocks tossed down from overhead. Repositories of unthinking feral movement, bloodletting action for no purpose other than avoiding being rooted in passive resignation with clean hands and clammy chastity.
Also: The moral arc of the universe tends towards more and more power getting ceded to corporate HR departments
Or he strayed from orchestrated disappointment and into the eternal wheel of the same side of the conversation been having with the self since the house got silent and the light stayed at it night to keep the dark more fully at bay.
Happiness writes white, and the engorged ego lays it down in purplish prose, like a picked-free tick bursted by the flame from a hastily scratched match.
I agree that all is not lost. Deep in the cavity of overdetermined mind space I sit, where imagined conversations and do over conversations and mortification forces feast, eyes closed but thoughts racing across an empty sparse big-skyed plain with no finish line in sight. If only darkness brought blankness, Without pills or any other dulling agent applies to the wound.
Fowl (pheasant and ptarmigan), hanging hams, plump dead-eyed fish, and outside the open door, a small lamb bent like a supplicant to the grass.
There are days when I can revel in Alex Katz and Ada, when the surface of canvas and painterly craft of wet on wet suffices.
But other days, port in the storm days, Flemish is needed. Something to anchor, to nail down, as nails pierce the tendons and either break or bypass the small bones in the wrist to grab hold of the wood beneath.
A bad theory beats no theory, the constitutional scholars say, beating their tightly tuned drum. Mute pieties amplify mute agonies, the painters show by way of ostention, which is embodied meaning made regal in its pellucid silence, this exposition of the Host.
Hail and farewell, this debased ancient residue of involuntary sounds you made in the dark as I slip out into the morning
To meet head-on the mute theater of maybe this was a mistake, too, this time and last, cascading up against the chorus of stupid birds (parrots in Hyde park, crows in a pine tree in Helena) standing on their small brained instinct toward incessant ceremony.
I can’t get past the barrier of foul mood to bask in unearned glory of song.
sheets wrinkled from damp absence of me gone back into the world, seemingly free and oblivious,
This time and every time, it’s the wanting that destroys.
I am not sure he ever said anything on this topic. Which is beyond the acid-tipped point of the matter.
There is such a thing as aesthetic scripture. Whether you mean philosophy of visual culture, or philosophy’s visual culture. I have a dative if you will trade me a genitive.
Perhaps a mystic may weigh in, and the love of revelation will burn in the breast of every man who known beauty and clutched at its evanescence with earnest hands, still warm and writhing.
Also the mystic as an exemplar of coming to terms with the caustic spleen of a well-turned-out jeremiad.
