Of schools we had our druthers, for blood we had our brothers

enlightenment (Buddhists), sagehood (Confucians), freedom (Kantians), authenticity (existentialists), or flourishing (Aristotelians).

As against that I poke my head into Kekulé’s dream and make space for the baleful effects of giving a heterodox gloss on scripture-based orthodoxy. The triune Godhead notwithstanding . . . .

The menu does not list prices, or tell what intensity of conviction might be mandated to cook the starch and metabolize the protein. Everyone is everywhere tired of just making do, and tired of complaining of being tired of just making do. In place of mental scaffolding on which to make an ascent I will suffer mere mental furniture on which to find a steady seat and rest my weary feet, stoke my fabulous resentment, palpate the outer edges of abundant honesty.

I won’t go to shanty town where the simulacrum of schooling is projected onto the largest wall still standing, which isn’t large, in relative terms, at all. There are no tickets to travel there. You just end up there, at the end of a rope to which it seems like you could be clinging or from which you might be hanging, from one moment to the next.

A dull feast of saints and apothecaries

We live in a trivializing age. The opportunity to make difficult judgments and act on them comes and goes. The opportunity to reach consensus on meaningless half-measures is seized. A step in the direction of what might pass for seriousness is always already paused mid stride. Like Zeno’s arrow, a half of a half is called out as a full measure. Few see the con for what it is; of those few who do, most seek to procreate with a passive investment rather than go out ablazing. Being alone, but not wanting to feel alone, we gaze into a flat plane and watch others who, being alone but not wanting to feel alone, gaze into a flat plane and watch others, too.

INTERLUDE

The most successful celebrities are products. Consider the real role in American life of Coca-Cola. Is any man as well loved as this soft drink is?

We live apologetically, with fear and favor, passively spectating, slipping from place to place on the bile that is secreted in the stomach of the culture and calling that progress. It is an enervating procession from crisis to malady and back again, fitful and shrill but no longer productively restless.

“do it or do not do it—you will regret both

An inheritance, this undaunted joylessness, making grimness a job. Squareheads with blonde hair and silent troubles, where salt is a spice and boiled mushy fish an extravagant variation. No wonder, except accidentally born, no vivacity, except slipped loose from the cohort. Give me a wagon, a scythe, and a sod house, with four score and fifteen theses and four nails.

Store contents under pressure, proof for two hours, pummel with the heel of the hand, and while waiting, feast on this grimace-as-art

Like what Europe did to its wolves, this place will do to your dreams. Let be be finale of seem, is something you might read before the flame flicks out in the wind that seeps into the floorboards and makes wisps of dust.

But take with a grain of salt and a thimbleful of whiskey as medicine. Nothing competes with the lack of acknowledgment and cankered observations from a sticker (in Stegner’s sense) who gets stuck and feels betrayed.

A strong offended sense of the ridiculousness of the human being

Big hearted but not a sucker, reticent but not dour, flinty but not brutish, capable of losing time but not a dirty hippie: an assemblage of traits that would build and amplify each other into what might pass for spiritual vagabonding.

Whitman in the supermarket, rapping melons and tracing the supple ovals of Roma tomatoes. Chinaski at the track with an eye on the chalk and a fluttering heart. The New York Football Giants dancing asunder on the clotted blood of Exley and his stigmata. Helen and her goshawk, in love with the lengthening tumble of a shadow that just matches the downward slide of another solitary year.

It would take the opposite of onomatopoeia, or at least someone who would tell me this is a “very unique” moment without melting my face off, for me to able to summon the magic that might bolster the velocity to break free from yet another wintry night’s sad clutches.

Paying dirt farmers to grind down to the bone

A rush of yellows, whites, blues, reds, hints of green - can a decipherable order be behind such lush wet-on-wet couplings?

A decipherable order in rows of remnant corn stalks, up against every fence line for so long as the fence lines run parallel to the road. Inputs ordered in late December and who knows whether the grain contracts that seemed so auspicious last March will stand up now.

Three boys, the oldest who ropes goats, the middle who ropes the youngest, and the youngest who breeds a fury that comes from being so small for seemingly so long and unable to envision a future where parity is possible.

What puzzling progeny amidst this fearful symmetry that spells out, in the dust and the dark corners, precipitous decline. Five years now since he stopped running pairs, can’t bring himself to do hired man work, hates country music, hates talk radio, can’t stand the committee setting up shop in his head all day. She’s wiping snotty noses and teaching whole language reading and hasn’t gotten poisoned by it yet but her stoicism rankles him a bit too. A sink full of dirty dishes and 11 am Coors light in the shop, just to make the pitiless wind, working away on a piece of siding, halfway tolerable, and no exorcism in sight.

Square pizza on a plastic tray, chocolate milk, and everything is red letter, until third recess and a straight jab from out of nowhere bloodies the oldest’s nose and no he’s not crying it’s just he can’t see straight for minute and he’ll catch more hell tonight for not giving it as much he took it. Will have to eat his cornflakes standing up tomorrow, on account of the domestic ass whooping, and he’ll remember each crystalline moment of this sequence for so long as he still remembers anything, but what will sting most is the piteous looks from the brothers across the table and how they try to revive some semblance of talk before the bus comes and it doesn’t help but call attention to how badly broken it’s all gotten.

All types of orders are decipherable, if not recoverable, so long as the breakaway coordinates aren’t bludgeoned into oblivion or deprived of all attention, confined to the bleak bounded lines of what rarely counts as meaningful.

Still quite popular among the muscovites, but the dream is to be accepted by curmudgeonly weirdos

Everyone got so mean. I want evolution to run its indomitable elimination train over so many mean people ( eg, who take videos of retail workers to get them fired, for micro aggression or for being woke, both in equal parts - everyone is of a tribe that is culpable) and also despite urging for extinction of this cultural execrescence, here I sit, losing my shit, making it possible for random strangers to bring out the worst in me and make me stare at the mirror and puzzle over how truly bad, from a neutral Switzerland-like perspective, the worst in me is.

Howard Zinn, who opines that you can’t be neutral on a moving train, once gave a talk I attended 25 years ago. A man with a Russian accent asked him how he would arrange a system in which the man who cleaned the auditorium would be paid more. Or something like that. Zinn said he didn’t know. The questioner wore an expression that seemed to say QED. Capitalism wins by default. Reification by lack of imagination. And so on.

But somehow it would mean more if everyone who was angrily cool but substantive and not just superficially cool and ephemeral took these off the cuff sketches as pithy, well-rendered sentiments, compressed (sculpted even) in an uncanny and catchy way. What psychologists would DEEM, in all their deeming wisdom, peer validation.

Living low in Europe, but with castles and shit, and walking around haunted like how lucidity is a wound

Recursive lines are not the only lines we can never cross and cannot help but cross.

A BIT OF POESY FOR 2024 POSTMARKED FROM A PERIOD WHEN THE IDEAS GOT PESTILENTIAL

The first house is miles from nowhere, 

One story of right angles and angular velocity

Flat, wide, and seemingly lithe, 

placed on a sloping hill so the exit

Gave it more modernist mystery

Than a boxy slab of practicality 

And you walked into walls 

of sleek white surface

Head to toe wall to wall

A habitat of ceremony

And the host of

This house would begin 

by pricking his finger

And walking from the foyer

Into the next room,

Which would involve 

Another digits worth 

Of bloodletting, and so on,

Until the tenth and final room,

The expanse of the basement floor, 

At which point streams of

red thread were secreting from

Each finger. 

And then you would be expected 

to enact the same sequence, 

A prick and release at each station.

And the weight of that expectation

Set a mood, wet with expectancy, 

Arriving moments after you ring

The bell and walk in to be greeted.

So flinging your hand around,

Spattering self consciously

From the ends of his or fingers,

And then smeared by 

Steps of the follow-one,

So each guest would

Circulate into empty rooms

Making a mark and 

Spinning out a narrative 

Of what came before 

There was no food or wine

But no dust gathered either

Each blood foray of each guest

Inclusive of each room in the house

A winding descent, from

Room to room, then circling

Down a flight of creaking stairs

Still bleeding, gone light-headed

This faux hardcore art gore

the last room’s exit: an open door

Framed by prairie sky 

and the assembled crowd

Of fellow wounded soldiers.

The second house is home

where you grow up

What you can remember of it

Its metes and bounds, the trace of scars

You left in it and it left in you

you go to this place of memory

To perform ministrations

To become drunk on Your oath

 of I-can’t-go-on-I-must-go-on

A place to become rendered

More than just a sheath of meatspace

And wanting to qualify as a genuine article

To inhabiting a self worthy of the name

Like a house is always ineffably a house 

until it definitively is not

Whereas you, encased or marooned

 in your skull, are always already

something else entirely.

Closing words from the Situationist who has you by the lapels:

he history of our times calls to mind those Walt Disney characters who rush madly over the edge of a cliff without seeing it, so that the power of their imagination keeps them suspended in mid-air; but as soon as they look down and see where they are, they fall.

Contemporary thought, like Bosustov's heroes, can no longer rest on its own delusions. What used to hold it up, today brings it down. It rushes full tilt in front of the reality that will crush it: the reality that is lived every day.

*

Is this dawning lucidity essentially new? I don’t think so.

Fail. Fail better. Failsafe. Forebear.

So much depends on the hard heart’s easy pliable wrath, to a point where the child could not tell whether the night would yield wild yelling and breaking of heirlooms or mild didactic directives about how Seneca would handle a situation. Feelings are not facts, but violence lingers far longer than when its visit ends.

Arrow taken from quiver and notched and coiled, behind clear-eyed conviction taking dead aim, but it could find no release and so could not make a meal of this fleeing opportunity - stag at the brook, urgently drinking.

This blank anachronistic fiction called existence is to be trifled with, bandied about, won over, ruminated on, succumbed to, rendered from, pitied, slandered, and loved with unabashed necessity. Laugh while you can, you’ll be dead a long time.

Elegy for the nobodies nobody knows

What attempts to convince you it loves you by pandering to you does you harm. It teaches you that you are so weak that what does not pander to you—does not obscure difficulty, disagreement and boredom—is to be reviled and punished.

G Jackson, in The Proleptic Line

The meaning of the start of Christendom + the weight of the frankincense + what Blake’s chimney sweeps saw when they closed their eyes to sleep = something akin to this recognition that this moment in its monstrous immediacy is just as much what history is made of as anything ever was or ever will be.

John used a pictorial syntax to pose abstract philosophical questions about meaning and certainty; he was a doubter, mistrustful of absolutes. His work could be puzzling or even obscure, but as he got older, John’s background as a painter reasserted itself, and his work became more visually lush.

D Salle, in Not Dionysius

Unkept promises and unkempt premises

I don’t want to be neutralized by what makes the world commensurable, made me get out of bed and pace when I first read it. And brew coffee and throw darts and play imaginary chess games until daybreak.

I was right in the middle of Will the pursuit of “deep feelings,” of “intense life” what seems to be so many desperate people’s last reason to live, ever fully distract them from the fundamental emotional when the phone in my office rang and I was called upon to help defend an innocent man accused of an orthodox crime.

I had tucked the bottom corner of the sheet under the mattress when I recalled The curiously superstitious notion that to have no reason to believe a proposition is the same as having a reason to assert that the proposition is false.

The Cowboys were driving with less than a minute to go, and Exley was pouring Tabasco directly into his eyes, cursing the giants but unable to do anything but listen to the play call and stare out through the bloodied webs blooming around each iris, when I heard it echo in a somnolent Spalding Gray monotone:

In the American grain, it is gregariousness, suspicion of privacy, a therapeutic distaste in the face of personal apartness and self-exile, which are dominant. In the new Eden, God’s creatures move in herds.

as every office worker knows, it’s not the hope that kills you. It’s knowing it’s the hope that kills you that kills you.

It seems odd, at this point, that the driving musical montage in American Psycho is a Huey Lewis song? Huey seems harmless, a bit daft, not so much uncool as lacking in both the rock and in the roll? It’s not just axe murders and tunneling rats and dissociative manias that drive the plot. It’s also Huey and Bale’s cold empty eyes. Like how Quint describes the eyes of a shark. In yet another movie about naturalized monsters.

There is something denaturing about the hum of an office: the ringing phones, the vomiting copier, the calling out of the same greetings and same tired crutch of stale conversational gambits, tetrabytes of mouth breathers inhaling and exhaling, the fruits of this time (so-called work product) floating dead eyed and limp up there in the cloud and backed up on a remote server in a rack somewhere somewhat secure. And then there is the shared denial of the stolidly indisputable fact that the actual work being done doesn’t really matter all that much to most of the ones doing it, and the work that is done could have been done a lot quicker and a lot better, too, as everyone knows and nobody cares.

But what about art? Will it save us? And if not salvation, exactly, will it entice all who fall into its graves to enter into a reverie just long enough to make bearable another day in the trenches of glib discursive laments and garden-variety alienation? Will it fructify these barren hearts and shake shake shake us out of this slapdash monotony of motions-gone-through?

“Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, rather because it wishes to be art. However much the writer might long to be straightforward, these virtues are no longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, straightforward, nothing much happens.”

At the school you may recall hearing:

They said, please, please make love with Helen, we require an assertion of value, we are frightened.

And also, on the side of the box, you may recall these instructions:

"The days of irony are here, irony and deception. But do not harden your heart."

And it is in these fleeting moments, remembrances, into which you dip and draw sustenance, however ephemeral it may be, and come to staring face to face with a strange object covered in fur that breaks your heart . . .

Thus, choosing to die resisting, rather than to live submitting, they fled only from dishonour

All these backward-looking arete-loving Spartan-cos playing avatars inspire a kind of hagiographic exercise in the middle-aged, formerly prodigious, supposedly fully formed adult brain which has wrestled with but not been pinned to the Mat by ennui: the idea being something like a Platonic engagement with manly virtue, always coded as necessarily such.

Except the same flaw in the idea of pursuing the ideal comes out, making it horror show overdose of botulism. There’s no such thing as halfway crooks, no turning back on the burnt tongue of a too eagerly hungry wanna-be warrior. Adulation from the crowd, yes; Stockholm syndrome, also yes. Viable hard-won alternative to what actually is, no; path out of the vertiginous maze of clever Daedalus’s clusterfuck double-bind, hard and intractable no.