Sunlightshadows: The beginning

 

As in Bruce Sterling's "Swarm," and some of Stephen Baxter's work (such as the grand Evolution), the value of consciousness itself is questioned. Control is an illusion, after all: think about moving your arm, and your arm will already be in motion. We exist after the fact -- or, as Siri's friend Pag puts it, "We're not thinking machines, we're -- we're feeling machines that happen to think."
We are observers, not agents, and where's the survival advantage in that? Watts's aliens, certainly, think rings around his humans and posthumans. They can detect the electromagnetic fluctuations of a human brain, and rewire them in real time. They can time their movements so precisely as to hide in the saccades of our eyes. And they can do it, in part, because they are not conscious, because consciousness is expensive: "I wastes energy and processing power, self-obsesses to the point of psychosis [...] They turn your own cognition against itself. They travel between the stars. This is what intelligence can do, unhampered by self-awareness," is Sarasti's blunt assessment. We are a fluke, a mistake; in evolutionary terms, a dead end. Once we get beyond the surface of our planet we are not fit.

 
Julie D'Aubigny was a 17th-century bisexual French opera singer and fencing master who killed or wounded at least ten men in life-or-death duels, performed nightly shows on the biggest and most highly-respected opera stage in the world, and once took the Holy Orders just so that she could sneak into a convent and bang a nun..
One of the most badass human beings ever produced by France was born in 1670 into a life of wealth, privilege, and one-percenter opulence that meant she could have just spent her entire life chilling out Real Housewives style without ever so much as having to shank a single human being in the eye in a hellacious fit of rage, but, as we shall soon see, that sort of malaise really wasn't this chick's bag. Her father was the Grand Squire of France, meaning that he was pretty much the number-one dude responsible for training King Louis XIV's pages and maintaining the Royal Stables, and this guy wasn't really the sort of hard-drinking drill sergeant motherfucker who was going to let his little daughter grow up without learning the finer arts of dishing out knuckle sandwiches to her enemies or running would-be suitors through the small intestines with the pointy end of a rapier. This French R. Lee Ermey trained young Julie the same way he trained the King's Squires, and as a young woman she learned the finer points of necessary life skills such as horseback riding, horse maintenance and repair, drinking excessively, gambling, fistfighting, avenging your honor, and stabbing people in the fucking face when they don't have the good sense to step off when you're threatening them. Growing up surrounded by tough men, this tall young beauty with the dark auburn hair and piercing blue eyes was forged into an instrument of badassitude.

Julie D'Aubigny got started early on her career of banging and/or killing everything in sight when, at the age of sixteen, she started having an affair with her father's boss. The young Mademoiselle D'Aubigny soon proved herself way too hot for that guy to handle, however, so before long he gave her father a promotion, then got her married off to some spineless jackass-non-gratta known only as Monsoir Maupin so that she would leave him alone. Maupin was a Count or Viscount or Demi-Count or some shit, and he lived in one of the colonies across the sea and rarely spent time in France, and since this chick wasn't about to move out to bumfuck nowhere and be a quiet little housewife in some malaria-infested corner of the world she rarely saw him and he doesn't factor into her life story in any appreciable manner at all. The only real thing this guy provided was a title, some money, and a wedding ring, all of which allowed Julie to use her marital status as a way of being able to do promiscuous shit she wouldn't have been able to get away with as an unmarried woman. So, while her husband was off doing god-knows-what in Africa or India or wherever the hell he was, Julie D'Aubigny moved to Marseille and started hooking up with a badass fencing master who just so happened to be on the run for murder after he stabbed some dude to death in an alley outside Paris. The homicidal fugitive swordsman trained D'Aubigny in the finer arts of fencing for a while, but as soon as she realized the student was now the master she ditched his broke ass and started giving sword exhibitions across Marseille to hone her skills and make a little extra dough. Basically it worked like this – she'd pull out her sword, sing a song or two, and challenge anyone in the audience to battle her in a duel. If someone stepped up, she'd sing a humiliating song about them, then make them look like assholes who couldn't tell the difference between a sword and a limp piece of linguine. Her skills were so lights-out gonzo that one time some jerkwad in the crowd called out that she wasn't really a woman, but was some badass cross-dressing cavalier musketeer motherfucker who was ripping everyone off. She responded by ripping open her blouse and telling the audience to "judge for themselves".

Oddly enough, kicking peoples' asses for money eventually led to a completely unrelated job prospect – a career as the star attraction of the Paris Opera. Apparently, while this chick was singing songs to humiliate her enemies in the dueling circle, some powerful record execs were in the audience, and they were so impressed by her melodious contralto voice that they decided she should be doing better shit than stabbing people in the balls for spare change. In the span of a few months, the woman known in Marseilles only as "La Maupin" (meaning "The Mapuin") went from a completely untrained street performer to the lead actress in the world's most respected Opera, playing roles of badass Classical chicks like Pallas Athena, Medea, and Dido. In addition to her flair for the dramatic and innate musical talent, it also helped that La Maupin had a near-photographic memory and rarely needed to read her lines more than once before committing them to memory. Of course, her fiery temperament in love and combat meant that she slept with or swordfought with most of the men and women in the opera at various points during her career. Like, one time some jackass doucheface pretty-boy actor was being overly-aggressive while talking to one of Julie's actress friends, so La Maupin told that asshole to take a chill pill and show the lady some respect. He told her to fuck off and mind her own bitch business. Later that night, as he was walking home, he found La Maupin standing in the street, weapon drawn, challenging him to a duel for honor. When the guy refused to pull his sword, she fucking beat his ass with a wooden cane, stole his pocketwatch, and left his dumb ass in an alley. The next day, the dude came to work with a couple black eyes, and when people were like, "WTF is up with your face," he told them he got jumped by three big black dudes armed with hammers and baseball bats. As soon as he said this, La Maupin pulled out the dude's pocketwatch and called him out a lying liar from Douchebagville. Then, to make matters more humiliating, she then forced the dude to kneel and beg forgiveness in front of all his co-workers before he could get his shit back.

La Maupin was also kind of a hardcore bisexual, and some of her tales of badass awesomeness dueling over female lovers and seducing chambermaids read like they were perpetrated by musketeers or pirates or some other ultra-daring swashbuckling male heroes of eighteenth-century literature. Of course, being a woman, Julie D'Aubigny could pull off some feats of romantic badassitude that most men could only dream of. The most notable example of this was the time that she became a nun just so she could hook up with one of the sisters in the convent. The story goes like this: One time the Mademoiselle D'Aubigny got some super-hot lusty blonde to fall in love with her. When the blonde's parents found out their daughter was a lesbo, they had their "ravished" daughter put into a convent, totally unaware that this wasn't going to be nearly enough to deter La Maupin – D'Aubigny took the holy orders, entered the convent as an initiate, created a diversion by setting the fucking convent on fire, and then kidnapped the blonde nun, snuck her out of there, and shacked up with her for like a month. Are you kidding me with this? Of course, this chick was a lover as well as a fighter, and sometimes she was actually both at the same time. Like, one time a trio of drunk assholes were giving Julie shit while she was performing her songs in a rowdy tavern, so the star of the Paris Opera took all three of them out into the grassy courtyard, and when they all jumped her at the same time with their swords she drew her blade and made sure every single one of them was suffering from multiple stab wounds before she went back to the tavern. The next day she felt kind of bad about stabbing the fucking ass out of one of the dudes, so she went to his room to see how he was doing, and then ended up seducing him and getting busy with him relentlessly for like three weeks straight. You know you're a fucking baller chick when you can shank a dude through the abdomen with a rapier and then still get it on with him. I mean, guys are easy, but they ain't that easy.

On another occasion, La Maupin was at a Royal Ball in the palace of King Louis XIV, attending as the guest of Louis' brother, Prince Philippe of France. She showed up to the party dressed as a man in a scarlet tunic and immediately started dancing with all the hot bitches, showing up all the young dudes looking for hot young wives. This was fine and all, but when La Maupin had the audacity to tongue-kiss a particularly fine-looking blonde marquise right in front of the entire Royal family, three jackass noblemen got a little bent out of shape about it and told Maupin she needed to start acting like a lady and stop macking on all the hot babes. La Maupin offered to take it outside, defeated all three men in three consecutive duels, then came back to the party while the trio of poseurs were still lying bleeding in the street like dogs. This event drew a little heat on the Maupin, so while she waited for things to cool down she decided to go to Brussels for a while and have an affair with the German Prince who happened to be the guy in charge of ruling over the Spanish Netherlands (no biggie). Julie D'Aubigny, La Maupin, the most badass swashbuckler of 17th-century France, did eventually settle down a little, returned home to Paris, reunited with her husband, resumed her career as the star attraction of the Paris Opera. She died in 1707 of unknown causes at the age of 37, living fast, dying young, and leaving a good-looking corpse.

I don't have a name for this hypothetical camera, but it would have simultaneous sensitivity for capturing both white light and magnetic frequency. Just imagine how amazing our world would be if we could see in delineations of full color the Other Reality beyond our eyes? With my camera we would then see how the trees might feel their own forest.how the trees might feel their own forest.

The crippling fear of the past hours had not completely left me, and I hugged her like this too was an act that could still go wrong.

Communistic pornography instilled in me a preoccupation with cruelty, which pushed all other feelings and thoughts into the background. In my imagination, sadistic scenes of dungeons and interrogations would henceforth accompany every feeling of sexual lust, and only by summoning up these scenes or permitting them to appear could my desires be satisfied.

I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead...

Nothing else, I am sure, was ever the content of the 'initiations' but precisely the communication of a "key" that made it possible to read the word "death" without negation. Like the moon, so surely life has a side that is continually turned away from us, which is not its opposite, but rather its completion to perfection, to fullness, to the whole and full sphere and globe of being.
One should not fear that our strength would not be sufficient to endure any experience of death, even though it would be the nearest and most terrible; death is not beyond our strength, it is the measuring mark of the brim of the vessel: we are full whenever we reach it - and being full means being heavy...that is all. I do not wish to say that one should love death; but one should love life so magnanimously, so without calculating and selecting, that love of death (the turned-away side of life) is continually and involuntarily included - which actually happens invariably in the great motions of love, which are impetuous and illimitable....It would be conceivable that death stands infinitely closer to us than life itself....What do we know about it?

"I am horrified by the thought that I might attain wordly success," he says, in a paraphrase of Franz Moor's speech. All his heroes share this horror. But why? Not from horror of the world, moral resentment, or pathos, but for wholly Epicurean reasons. They wish to enjoy themselves, and in this respect they display a quite exceptional ingenuity. Furthermore, they also display a quite exceptional nobility. And a quite exceptional legitimacy. For no one enjoys like a convalescent. The enjoyment of the convalescent has nothing of the orgy about it. His reinvigorated blood courses toward him from mountain streams, and the purer breath on his lips flows down from the treetops. Walser's characters share this childlike nobility with the characters in fairy tales, who likewise emerge from the night and from madness - namely, from the madness of myth.

He became frightened of flowers because they grew so slowly that he couldn’t tell what they planned to do.

Movements are not created, they only find each other. That something happens is only ... luck, an act of genius. God himself is permanently surprised. True art.

Biographies must become prophetic. Every life is a divination. Genius is a sacrifice, from which God foretells himself. The life of a genius is fragment, secret knowledge.
Flaws must enter the composition like poisons in medicine.

To be free means to be free from opinions. To be sociable with the stars above. To be rich from spending one's life. To embrace it with one's knowledge, to know it with one's heart.

Wisdom is a crisis.

Sudden happiness is a great loss, so we become sick, because it breaks our habits, unsettles our vanities, when we realize, how long we had been content with the platitudes of feeling.

This joy whisks me from my destiny.

Everything we experience is an answer.

What is noble about the sun is not her warmth but her distance.

We embrace the ocean when we drown.

Consolation: nature has no opinion of me.

People without love have no destiny, they only improvise. With the speed of a falling weight my destiny increases because of love.

The meaning and goad of navigation is the secret, to sail after the sun and to go down with her. The meaning of travel is religion. Wanderlust is our nobility: a marvelous striving without destination. Seafarers were the first aristocrats.

With Columbus begins the downfall. His high caravels, filled with mutineers and robbers: the image of rabble. He thought he found paradise, but every paradise was discovered by the devil.

The rainbow is the banner after the battle between the sky and earth.

A typewriter proficient at ‘hostile writing’ was handed to a person who wants to write something.
This dead yet living monster proves itself its unique tenaciousness.
Even the sound that the monster makes is itself a history.
Everybody knows the monster’s name and the monster’s history.
However, the records of the monster’s motion were nowhere to be found.
A person who wants to write something is fascinated by the monster’s hostile proficiency.
A catastrophe brought about by the person’s choice is being gradually visible.
It is his or her own choice, but the person starts to think how the consequences are avoidable, at
the same time.
To record a record that does not exist.
Only thing can be recorded is a certain tone.
A tone that functions as a trigger that differently operates.

The phenomenon of female homicides in Ciudad Juárez began to be denounced in 1993. There is evidence these crimes began years before. Why were they murdered? For the pleasure of killing women who were poor and defenseless.
How many victims have there been? Of the 400 women and girls killed for various reasons from 1993 to the present, at least 100 murders were commited in tandem with extreme sexual violence. The lack of reliable information from the authorities is part of the problem.
Who killed them? Drug traffickers, complicit with individuals who enjoy political and economic power.
Where and how did the events take place? The victims were abducted from the streets of Ciudad Juárez and taken by force into safe houses where they were raped, tortured, and murdered at stag parties or orgies.
The victims’ bodies were dumped into the desert like garbage, tossed onto streets, on corners and vacant lots in the city’s urban and suburban zones, and in the outskirts of the city. In many cases the victims’ clothes and identification cards were interchanged in a kind of perverse game. Authorities refused to investigate the cases in depth. These events imply a misogynistic furor that escalated from an isolated crime to a collective ravaging; especially in terms of the “copycat effect,” in which imitators stalk victims and replicate the femicide machine’s efficiency. Impunity is the murderers’ greatest stimulant.

My father George was killed in a car accident when I was 16. My mother Anita died from complications related to alcoholism in February 2010, when I was 32. I’m not sure how I feel about my parents, or about their deaths. I know don’t feel very sad, and I know that’s not how I’m supposed to feel.
I was never very close to my parents, but my ambivalence still makes me feel broken and a little guilty. My parents have been dead for different versions of “a while,” so I know I’m not supposed to be crushed by grief, but I never really felt sad at all. When my mother died and people asked how I was doing, I always said that I wasn’t sad for myself, but I was so, so sad for her.  I was, and am, so sad that she went from being a world traveling, intelligent and vibrant woman to someone who drank so much that she lost most of her ability to walk and often shit on the floor. I am terrified that’s a possibility for any human being, but am I sad that my mother, who drank so much that she lost most of her ability to walk and often shit on the floor, is now gone from my life? Not really. I mean, maybe I’m lucky my parents are dead. Sometimes I feel really free.

I pulled out my hair, chewed, then ate it.     I punish myself.     Like I don’t know ‘big’ words and just other things.     My bedframe is made of very soft wood and you can see hundreds of bite marks in the headboard.     If I’m running real fast, I can feel wind rushing past me.     If I get punched then I feel the pain.     If I receive a kiss, I can feel the warmth. Etc.     My baby arches her back and throws herself backward when she’s upset.     My baby stares at her hands.     I really like the gothic girls’ look and the men’s look is quite cool too, and I thought I might become a goth but I researched the music and it’s boring, it makes me fall asleep really.     I suffer from panic attacks and loose stools.     Almost all women love having their beautiful hair pulled.     Until there’s literally nothing left.     No teacher was talking to me.     I had one nipple light and the other slightly darker.     I had put my head down but one teacher he pulled my hair, slapped me and said I was a dog.     I have noticed a bad urine smell recently.     My baby tugs on his penis.     I have noticed that there are some particles in my urine.     My baby crawls backwards.     My urine is a very pale yellow-green sometimes after I take a multivitamin.     The only time I’m happy is when I’m drunk in a club.     Take a step back now.     Ask yourself how you, or most people, learn about their partners’ sexual preferences, likes, dislikes and boundaries. I went over to sleep next to my best friend (we argued and didn’t talk for 3 weeks but we made up) I put my hand over his stomach and rested my head on his back (his back was in front of me)(I hugged him) I wasn’t able to sleep so relaxed and fake sleeped and had my eyes closed the whole time I didn’t know if he slept though, he shortly put his palm on top of mine and held my hand tightly and kept me close to him, then he put both his feet on top of mine (basically foot hugging like my leg slipped into his and both of his legs hugged it).     My baby sleeps with her eyes open.    My urine smells like the products I’m drinking.     I drink coffee and it has a coffee odor, I drink soda and it smells like the soda.     I feel aroused when I’m breastfeeding.     Most people remember my birthday two weeks after it’s gone.     I like having my hair pulled lightly and don’t mind people pulling my hair hard. I have a friend who likes having her hair pulled lightly, but not hard.     But when swimming, me, my parents, sister, and brothers always got in the pool naked.      I have heard of lots of people like this, but never a person like me.     I love listening to people’s heart and I use my dog as a pillow a lot so I can listen to his heartbeat.   My school year kept on going in my mind when school let out for the summer.     Then he turned his face to mine.     Let me clarify that I don’t like it when one pulls just a few hairs, it has to be many hairs.     Kind of like holding the mane of a horse while riding another coworker who pulls my hair.     His face was a bit far but he kept positioning his face close to mine as if he wanted to kiss me, his lips were a very few inches away from mine I could almost say he kissed me but he didn’t, my heart was beating like a humming bird.     Now it all started when I was younger and I thought a boy liked me just as much as I liked him.   Teenage boys adjust their privates in public.     So to my defense, I kicked him back, pushed him back.     He stayed like that for a few minutes then he turned his back at me then slept.     My friend spends 5 minutes a day drinking the warm water in the shower and gets most of her daily hydration requirements from this.     In the mornings, my pigeons just head over to the small bushes in my garden and start pecking and eating parts of the leaves.     My Siamese has been drooling lately.     10 mins later he woke up.     I woke up like 10 mins later.     Now we have broken up a while ago but I still like to wear his shirt cause its big and comfy and I like it.     Sperm comes out of my vagina after making love.     From that moment on he started becoming strange afterwards.     In the night he wakes up and pulls my hair to get himself back to sleep.     Just wondering if it is a sign he is into some type of pain pleasure (which I am not).     Like he doesn’t look me in the eye as much and doesn’t answer me quite often or look at me.     When I was about 12 I used to pull my hair out strand by strand until I got a bald spot and kids started making fun of me.     My gums bleed when I brush my teeth.     My eye color changes every so often.     We used to talk normally and he used to look at me in the eye, but after this incident I don’t know what happened.     I can pull quite a bit of my hair out and not feel pain.     My stomach growls as soon as I see food.     A woman holds pent up negative passion in her fanny.     Just the same pain as if I’m pulling a single hair out, but I can pull out 30 maybe 40 at a time.     You do not feel pregnant, but you are.     Your dog tries to eat grass.     They also say you normally lose 100-200 hair a day, but I don’t.     I lose about 7-8 every time I brush it, so that’s about 100 per week, give or take.     I pull her hair, then push her away from me, then roughly dry hump her again.     She tends to pull her hair when I’m not around.     I didn’t really get it and refused to do it.     I don’t see how you could get pleasure from it, but just in case, stop doing that.     You get bored during your pregnancy.     Dogs sometimes eat grass.     One grows hair on one’s penis.     Someone else’s cat visits you twice a month.     A preschooler writes backwards.   Do not use barrettes unless really necessary.     Do not use elastic bands to pull your hair back.     Do not wear a pony tail every day.     Do not pull your hair tightly.     Use a soft scrunchy, ribbon or light clasp.     Run your hand up the back of her neck, your fingers spread out, palm flat on her head and slide your hand up through the hair so you have a bunch of hair running through your fingers.     Pull your hand away about an inch from her head, then grip.

 

I awoke to my alarm at 6:30am. I’d had a dream, this is what I naturally assumed since the vision too directly involved me. A psychic visitor was a spy, not a meddler; I had impacted events, and this suggested that I’d simply, and meaninglessly, dreamt it all. (My Workshop professors, anti-Freudians all, held withering views about the “meaning” of dreams. How Flowers Grow Gray had this to say on the topic: She who dreams at night of what she cannot do will believe upon awakening that she has done it.)

I dressed, ate very little breakfast, did Mundane Egg with Marta, played backgammon with Borka, ate very little lunch, took the lift to the basement, received, from the attendant with the heart-shaped face, my locker key and towel and, because I must have appeared ill-at-ease, a glass of water. I’d felt murky all day, not sick so much as vague, my post-dream bodily reentry like an organ transplant slow to take. I was required, after each slipper removal, to rest on the wooden bench that paralleled the lockers.

Even so, my sense of disequilibrium surged.

I lay on the floor, the tiles against my cheek like hot teeth. A vasculature of copper pipes was buried beneath the floor of the Goergen’s locker room, time-worn conduits for the thermal spring water that, according to a book about these springs I’d read in the Goergen’s library, were drawn from the world’s largest thermal water cave system, a complex catacomb of partially drowned rooms fed by one of the world’s largest underground lake. The air in some of these rooms was said to have a medicinal quality.

According to Borka, an expert on all things gossipy and Goergen, before a certain unfortunate event, the doctors at the Goergen used to bring the sickest psychic attack victims to the Janos Molnar cave and float them about on wooden palettes. The unfortunate event, said Borka, involved a minor countess whose palette drifted through an opening in the west-most wall of the Janos Molnar, taking an intricate and untraceable path through the maze of subsequent openings in subsequent caves, the permutations of drift possibilities requiring a team of one hundred men in flat-bottomed dinghies to cover the darkened territories in a reasonable amount of days. On day ten they found her on her palette, still belted in place with a Goergen-stenciled canvas lanyard. She claimed, when they woke her, that she’d been asleep the entire time. The physical manifestation of her attack, a virulent all-body psoriasis, had been cured. Even so, the family of the minor countess sued the Goergen (thus the unfortunate part of what was otherwise a miraculous story—and big shocker, said Borka, the family was poor as pickles) and so no longer did the doctors bring their patients to the caves, at least not officially. However Borka claimed that one could still find back alley doctors with access to the caves via secret portals and who, for a ridiculous sum, would orchestrate a floating cure for durations lasting up to two weeks. I’d liked the sounds of this; I’d told myself that, as a last resort, I would seek out one of these back alley floating cure doctors. As I lay with my cheek against the tiles, I imagined I could hear, through the grout and ceramic, the wind of hoary breathing, proof of this underworld navy of the sick.

Something like.

At a kitchen table in Råcksta, Hasse sits and thinks about life.

Life does not think about Hasse.

Outside eating disorders blogs by.

Dog stands by the door and wants out.

The dog lies by the door and wants out.

Dog is dead.

The time goes: zzzzz.

Hasse has not left his apartment for a few weeks.

It is the fear of Them others.

Etc.

Yes yes Them ...

Hasse has bought a yellow sludge that is 99% bacterial killing.

That was all he could think of.

At the bank office.

Hasse take a queue number.

Hasse takes two queue.

Numbers.

Goes to celebrate "Art's Birthday".

Blood taste in his mouth.

Goes home sleeping dreams of Hollywood.

Trips over the dog on the way into the apartment, it smells.

Life a long time coming.

Somewhere in between is Hasse.

I AM CHICKEN going on seventeen Hasse.

Standing in front of the mirror beeps himself in the navel.

Think of the body. Hasse.

Of people who anoint themselves with lotion for one hour!

Lubricate just how hard can that be? Apply and rub…

Ah. The old wipe out the world ploy, Hasse murmurs.

Becomes the queen of Snow White in front of the mirror:

-Worship me or taste my wrath ploy.

Taste my wrath, it tastes elder.

Ploy.

If you become trendy you avoid paying for things yourself?

A singers dream!

Though Hasse has no such dreams.

Kill me MIRROR! as Black Swan he thinks.

The perfect ending.

You make only one really good performance and then you die.

Practical.

As life.

Hasse is plotting for a fine farewell.

A Workers' Ballet with red Polish clowns and tractors. There, in the big finale Hasse's alter ego Nasse gets torn apart by two tractors to the left and to the right and around for one and a two.

Something about a split.

Sexual insanity, competition and ballet.

Splash!

... And it is bittersweet that your imagination is limited.

And that nothing is your fault.

All is a documentary and everything you write is personal experience going HASSE. Going once.

You are a docu-doll.

(melodramatic)

So when the blood has stopped spraying the audience and the last reviewer written his last analysis of how power seeking yet strong and tight with a touch of Foucault Hasse's ballet was.

When Hasse's upper body remains on the stage frozen with a faint smile.

Then you are asked to rise from the dead to perform at "Art's Birthday" in which the line for free culture is going all the way down to the Baltic Sea.

And you do it.

And again and again.

For free.

Hasse's tractor ballet with a slash finish becomes a hit.

Hasse - The Worlds Greatest Escape Artist.

Megalomania!

Tough and unlimited in bed.

While an apartment somewhere like in Råcksta just standing there as is.

The apartment: Hey hey I have baked scones in 1984!

A brown sludge that once resembled a pet is located on the doormat. The radio rattles up something that once may have been P3.

The refrigerator has crept away to ZHULS dimension.

It's not easy being in love.

Gore!

Organized disturbing the peace.

There is something stale, self-righteous and not sexy about the art here.

You make yourself immortal.

Where is the sense?

Brazilian blowjob.

Over and out.

The ghosts always make it harder to use the bathroom. They're not the phantasmal kinds you're probably used to; these ones are solid-feel thicker than rubber-but if you touch them they'll start melting all over you-like a lit candle falling on a face. It's a weird thing to think about, let alone witness. It's kind of like watching an ice cube that is floating in a space ship melt and touching the water that is floating away from the ice cube when the space ship is disintegrating in an atmosphere. I think it's the smell of urine that keeps them coming back. It's so heavy in here. I always use the urinal stall that's furthest away from the corner; there are always a group of ghosts constantly pushing themselves into a corner. I unzip my pants and I see a ghost curled up in the foetal position in the bottom of the urinal stall. It's holding the urinal cake very tightly, looking at its own reflection in the urinal cake. I don't feel bad when I urinate all over the ghost and its face. I think the ghost is kind of turned on. It laps its tongue at me and thrusts its pelvic area at me even though it doesn't have a pelvis. I feel turned on in a perverted sense. I try not to make this my bathroom fetish.
I leave the office washroom and I think one of the ghosts has been brave enough to leave the comforting confines of the washroom stall. It's stalking me, bumping into things. Not at all trying to be cunning or like a mattress.

It was much easier to stop talking
after you slept with my friend.
We had other things to try. You gave 'laying in a bed for hours staring
at the television' a shot while I attempted 'drinking
heavily enough to make awkward sexual advances on strangers'.
We opened the apartment
and took out a smaller replica apartment complete
with stained carpets and dirty furniture.
The little people in the little apartment didn't talk to each other either,
they make dinner and burn chocolate
and steep tea leaves in hot water.
In the smaller box, in the smaller apartment, life is better.
We have tiny hands and tiny fingers
clutching tiny window frames.

I only eat the cutest animals. I never touch
a chicken or a hog or a cow. Dirty creatures,
chickens that'll eat their own shit, hogs that'll wallow in it,
genetically engineered cow machines that eat
hyper-engineered wheat product. Give me
a lamb or some precious doe, looking for its Momma. Give me
duck, sliced thin and cooked medium rare, juicy purple-red in the center.
I would eat guinea pig if it was slow roasted.
I could cram a cherry tomato in its mouth.
Do not tell me seafood isn't cute.
Salmon and tuna and crab, all very cute
and happy to be eaten. I've seen Spongebob
and I know how cute starfish and plankton and squid can be.

 With the murder of the Bishop, I entered my final and most heroic phase of cruelty. I plumed myself in the brilliant feathers of spite, robed myself in a magisterial iconoclasm. I beheaded the public monuments and ravaged the Governor’s flowerbeds. I stormed the citadels of virtue and muddied the waters of morality. I stooped by the ditch in which the murdered wayfarers had been thrown and withheld my tears. My perversions were various, their satisfaction immediate and inventive. In short, I became the most anathematized man in Africa.

The Bishop’s successor inveighed against me, calling on God to smite me in my body’s sensitive places.

The governments of Africa issued dire warnings against those who would give me succor.

The constabulary featured me on handbills, promising inflationary rewards for my capture.

The Nairobi Opera Company, whose performance I had mocked and shambled, gave benefit concerts for those pledged to my destruction.

My mother was persuaded to denounce me to the newspapers on five continents. And Anna—Anna, whom I loved with the cruelty of a hopeless passion—refused to visit me in my dreams.

“You should ask their forgiveness,” said the jackal, whose mouth was occupied with dripping wildebeest haunch. “Humble yourself, seek absolution, expiate your crimes by good works, and pray for mercy.”

I was incredulous!

“The life of a haunted animal is no life at all,” the jackal continued. “Believe me, I know what I’m talking about: I was with Rimbaud in Harar in ‘91.”

I doubted jackals had so long a life expectancy but decided against a challenge, knowing well their savagery when crossed.

“Rimbaud lived in a state of nature,” I said instead. “His life, like his poetry, was cruel.”

“You are not of the same stuff!” he sneered.

Peter and the Wolf are sitting inside their cottage in the hills of Germany. The hills of Germany are dark orange and dark brown. Peter and the Wolf talk about what they want to do this weekend. They have no plans. They look outside the window and decide to walk around the lake.
At the lake Peter and the Wolf decide to do some ice skating. Peter is wearing an orange jacket and leather cap with a leather chin strap and the Wolf is wearing fur. The two do some ice skating. The sky is cloudy above the dark orange and dark brown hills of Germany and soon it is snowing. Peter and the Wolf think how they should be getting back to their cottage where they can make tea and do nothing.
Peter and the Wolf notice a figure in the distance. The figure is running against the border of the birch trees. The figure falls in the snow a few times but each time gets up and keeps running back and forth. Peter and the Wolf try not to laugh. Then the figure shouts. Then the figure drops to its knees.
Peter and the Wolf come up to the figure who is a man. The man has brown burlap pants, a green sweater, and a black scarf. The man is coughing up blood. He coughs blood up into his thick beard.
-I'm going to die, the man says.
Peter and the Wolf nod. Peter and the Wolf dislike men with beards.
-I've been murdered, says the man who falls deeper in the snow.
Peter and the Wolf twist their heads and ask the man about to die if they can do anything to help.
-Not really, says the dying man. You can't help a man about to die. Everybody knows that.
-Who killed you? ask Peter and the Wolf.
The man is dead. His body lays face down in the snow. Peter and the Wolf go back to their cottage to get the sled. But first they make a pot of tea which they sip for a while doing nothing but sipping tea and thinking about the murder of the man near the birch trees. .............

I'm in love with half the world at first sight. 

Money burrows its way to the very core of the Earth. It's time for us to leave the Earth.

Love shines in the depths of the wood like a great candle.

A giant projector began playing sleep videos of a man crying with swastikas tattooed under his eyes. I called my girlfriend. She came over. I told her to make popcorn. The projector played on a loop. She asked me where I got it. I told her to be quiet. She started crying. I asked her what her problem was. She said, "I have to study for a test tomorrow." I told her to get her books. She brought me a bowl of popcorn. The man's face regenerated itself out of a slush pile. My girlfriend read. I stuck a finger up her nose. She continued reading. She didn't tell me to stop. The projector played the forty-ninth rotation. I pretended I was asleep. She bit my finger. I pretended to call the police. She didn't move. I was upset she didn't believe my threat. I dialed 9-1-1, but got scared and hung up. They called back. I start sweating. My girlfriend asked who was calling. 9-1-1 said, "You better have an emergency or we're going to kill you and your girlfriend." I stuttered. My girlfriend started breaking shit and screaming. I didn't understand. She said, "I knew you were cheating on me." 9-1-1 said, "We have a man coming to your house right now with a metal baseball bat." I looked out the window. All the birds in the village were lost or sick with bird influenza. I turned off the projector. The line to 9-1-1 went dead. There was a knocking at the front door. My girlfriend wasn't wearing any clothes and ran to open the door. The outside world watched us on their empty TV screens. I let her go. I imagined television programs about the end of times when fish, zebras, and small pieces of candy all battled each other in an effort not to be eaten. Surprisingly, the tiny candies did fairly well. The zebras were the first to be eaten.
      Two days later I woke up and still hadn't heard from my girlfriend. I was worried. I hadn't realized I had been sleeping. I remembered being in bed watching the soviets take over my girlfriend's school's football field. I wondered if she took her test. A man ran around chopping off the heads of the British soldiers. The British soldiers were disguised as gypsies. The soldiers were wearing fake gypsy heads and were still alive when they were gathered and thrown in a pile with the other dead gypsies. At some point I became very interested and walked out to the field. I got the ball pretty quick, but I couldn't remember any of the rules. Everyone ran after me screaming. I ran away. I think I made it to midfield before the short little gypsy children grabbed me and began biting my legs. When I woke up there were still no more birds in my village and my living room was full of bowls of candy. Dead fish lined the carpet waiting to be eaten.

 I brought a plant with me to the Chinese restaurant. I don't know if the Chinese restaurant allowed plants, but there was no sign on the door. "A table for two please?" They tucked me in the corner. I put my plant at one end of the table. I sat at the other. There was a family of seven Asians sitting around a circular table over by the fish tank. The fished watched them. Some of the members of the family ate fish. I wonder if any of the fish threw up a little bit in their mouth. If the fish did, it did not stop them from watching the family eat. I guess there was nothing else for them to do.

There were three ducks behind a glass display. They weren't alive anymore. Their heads had been cut off. The top of them ended at the neck.

A nervous oriental man brought me a menu. I thanked him. He bowed to me. He wore a white collared shirt and black pants. There were some waitresses in the same uniform. I thought, "If the service is good and I end up coming back I think I will wear a white collared shirt and black pants when I return. They might even put me to work. I don't think I would mind this even though the majority of the people I wait on would probably ask, 'Have you ever waited on customers before?' I will laugh and tell them I haven't. 'I don't work here,' I will tell them."

My plant didn't think this was a good idea and thought I should just order.

A boy and his mother sat at a table next to me. Their waitress brought them a plate of crabs. They were dead too. I bet these crabs were walking on the same beach as the ducks when the driver of the number three supply truck scooped them up in a sack and brought them to this restaurant.

The crabs and the ducks did not like each other before the driver in the number three supply truck scooped them up.

"We are mortal enemies," said the crabs.

"Only one of us can exist in this world," said the ducks.

They didn't know any better. They didn't know anything else existed. Sometimes they saw airplanes, but they each thought they were duck gods. The crabs cursed them. Other times whales would float to shore and get stuck. These were considered crab gods. The crabs prayed to these whales for many months as they rotted away. Other than that they both thought, "If we can just get rid of them then the world will be ours."

This is why when the driver of the number three supply truck scooped them up they were so shocked. Inside the giant sack they both thought, "We were ill-informed from the start. I didn't think there was anyone else."

The ducks and crabs spent the rest of their lives, which was only a few hours (they were delivered to the Chinese restaurant not too long after this), thinking about how they had been wrong. When they were finally let out of the sack the ducks got their heads chopped off and the crabs got their bodies cracked open. Eventually little boys and their mothers would eat them.

One time an elderly couple saw the driver of the number three supply truck scoop up the ducks and crabs. As he was carrying them back to his number three supply truck they asked him what he was doing.

"I am the number three supply truck for a Chinese restaurant," he said.

"Why did you take those crabs and ducks?" they asked.

"I already told you."

"No, why would you do something like that, harming those innocent animals."

"I don't know," he said and walked over to his number three supply truck. He did not think about what the elderly couple said for the rest of the day. When he got home there was a cable bill in his mailbox.

"Oh," he thought and held it up to show them, but the elderly couple were no longer there.

My waiter came back to my table. I told him what I wanted. He shook his head. I pointed at the menu. He pointed at the menu. I shook my head. He shook his head. Then he walked away. My flower and I then had to wait for our food.

there are women built by sentences.
    there are women built by the sentences of preschool illiterates; subject/verb, present tense with nothing more--- incapable of anything more. they are the bare bones of anorexia dreams where shoulder blades have more prominence than tits which makes sex a guessing game: which end goes up again? they're interchangeable – subject/verb or verb/subject – right? it doesn't matter.
    there are women built by the sentences of Kant; two thousand words per sentence held together with six hundred commas. they are women of corpulence – of aesthetic-less plaid striped shirts – of clumsiness without a foundation--- two thousand words trying to stand on feet that fit within a size two shoe.
    there are women built by the sentences of almost Germans; women built by the sentences of Kafka--- buxom beauties with the forgotten elegance of dreams sliding away thru peripheral sight upon waking. if you can entice them to stay then they will stay objects of longing, watched for hours over asylumed mess hall meals and absinth aperitifs. watched until they stand and excuse themselves to piss or menstruate and then it is seen as they walk away: they have no ending worth mentioning, they have no ass. they are women without glucose or muscle. they are a paper page plane with that black dot – that period – that asshole that ends beauty so poorly.
    there are women built by the French as well; women built by the sentences of Camus. simple, almost attractive whores with little tits that should be sensitive but twist them as tho you were trying to break a pocket watch and they will not make a sound. they will never admit they feel anything but absurd passion for their absurd lives they do not even like; but they will be intriguing. tied to your headboard they say things you would prefer not to know and you ravage every overused orifice but it will not stop them from saying anything wrong--- or anything you would want to hear.
    there are women built by the sentences of Celine. dot-dot-dotted... freckled to mar the gestalt of their appearance... pockmarked in the soul. a soul that burns moonshine morning porcelain heaves against clenched teeth and out an unwilling nose: an ugly soul to hate. but after so many soulless sentences and women you take to building unplum bookshelf shrines in her honor--- ask her to move in so you can watch her – night and days of unemployment – as her anti-semitic dreams bloom sheet metal blossoms of hate ripping in the intestines of anthropomorphized aesthetics. the remedy is a juniper bloom herbal gin and, returning bottle in hand from the liquor store, you are not surprised to find her gone – but it would have hurt less if the shower curtain, light bulbs, records and ice cube trays were left behind.
    there are no women built by the sentences of the Russians; not that i have seen and, if there are such women, i hope the city of Paris has stolen them all and locked them away in labyrinths where rats will eat thru steel walls for eternity to get to their decomposed perfection. this world is not meant for women built by those sentences – the war for Leda's daughter does not need to be relived in a world of nuclear stockpiles.
    there are women built by the sentences of Nabokov, not doubt, but he is not one of THE Russians. his women are those of sophistication and power who refuse to reveal anything. it takes patience to see them as a whole, peek over the doors of Victoria's Secret dressing rooms as they try on undergarments and then you will see: their nipples do not quite line-up – it makes them comical rather than erotic. and up those Jacob's ladder legs of bliss there is nothing but the iron phosphate reality of women built by Nabokov sentences. up those legs is nothing – no twat, nothing to offer you – not even if you read between those legs with a machete will there be a slit enough worth your time.
    there are women built by the sentences of Americans, too. not by Whitman; he built 16 y/o boys. Twain built circus attractions: bearded ladies, mermaids, atheists and other nonsensical creatures. Faulkner and Steinbeck built real women but i've never fancied real women. Hemingway had those ugly bitches that he shit-shined in such a way you would propose to them and not realize what they were until the morning after an annulment is possible.
    there are women built by the sentences of Henry Miller; women with those long, run-on legs resembling something like importance. maybe there is something in those women – i never looked in all too many places. i never looked further north that the apex of abdomen triangle pointing down to all the meaning i cared to take from his sentences.
    there are mangled messes of women built and broken by the beats; they look to be the models for Le Mademoiselles de Avignon. women who only profess love after their third emergency room vacation – women who have just enough spirit that it never gets tiresome trying to beat it out of them.
    there are women built by the sentences of Bukowski; women raised on meat and Pabst and cultured on whiskey and roll-yer-owns. blowjob queen who use too much teeth and enjoy having their ears grabbed or their hair wrapped around a clenched first while the man in the next stall waits for his turn at her.
    there are no women being built today; there are no Pygmalions of words anymore. they are sometimes summoned thru literal liturgy in libraries but they are always lost when you look away from the incantations of the book. the architects of words and women are dead; vonnegut, palahniuk and t.robbins could not even dress a woman let alone build one.
    fantasies: that is all women are anymore--- they no longer exist.

In order to extract something beyond beautiful from ordinary words, c.vance retold his family's history abstractly rather than using the traditional memoir form. Somewhere in the process, the story infected words and the words became fable. Now, the author finds it difficult to remember if his grandfather really built bridges or something else - and in what way his father actually harvested land - and where his parents truly met - and how the world finally ended. In some places, the words succeeded in becoming something beautiful and true; in other places, the fable is more honest than anything that actually happened.

 
In 1969 the filmmaker Michael Snow set a robotic camera deep within the North Ontario landscape for five days and five nights. Unattended, the camera scanned and recorded a people-less land. Michael hoped the film would become a kind of absolute recorder of a piece of wilderness... a record of the last wilderness on earth, a film to be taken into outer space as a souvenir of what nature once was.
Michael says, "I want to convey a feeling of absolute aloneness, a kind of good-bye to earth which I believe we are living through... it will preserve what will increasingly become an extreme rarity: wilderness. Perhaps aloneness will also become a rarity."

the page evokes and provokes legendary creatures, kills them and puts on their skin—then cures the meat. This startling and unusual book is a medium that channels damned and contaminated creatures such as Grendel, Wukong, and Prometheus. It reconsiders what it means to construct a myth; to mold around a hollow space a materiality of shape that depends on contours without content. Life that has no life. These are love poems whose monstrous repetition demystifies these once powerful beings while at the same time plunging deeper into insensible consciousness, where the human ceases to retain its proper form

He recorded the atrocities and slaughters that he saw. That’s what I’m trying to say. Sort of in real time, as they were happening. And so he eventually put them in this book called A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, right? He has more, but that’s what I’m talking about, that’s what I read. You haven’t heard of it? No? Seriously? I mean right, sure, St. Helens Fucking High is not exactly gonna be pushing A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies on sophomores, I guess, I don’t know what I’m saying. But not for the reason you’re thinking, right, not because it’s too subversive to them or will rile up your 8 Ho-Chunk kids for a couple of weeks. Not that reason. Mostly because the shit is X-rated levels of violence, like way way way worse than anything on TV or in movies, way way worse than anything that really happens to people anymore, much worse than those Faces of Death things you were talking about before, I’ll tell you that much. And it makes those horror movies like Friday the Thirteenth or whatever seem like they’re made by a bunch of children with ketchup packets and pitchforks? I mean, I just laugh at those movies now. The banality of the illusion. The try behind the banality of the illusion. And those movies used to make me so scared I couldn’t sleep, Ben, I used to go wake up my mother when I was like fifteen because they scared me so bad. But not anymore. That’s not real horror, dude, and I can think of two reasons right off the bat to support that thesis, okay? Totally accurate, good reasons. Dispute them if they’re wrong or something, I mean, maybe there are holes, but I don’t know what you can do with these. First, one: Las Casas is more gory. More gory. Than Hollywood. For starters, every page of the thing there’s some poor fucking Caribbean Indian tied up to a gibbet—you know what a gibbet is?—tied up to a gibbet and some Spanish soldier is down there stoking a fire by his feet and everybody’s laughing it up. Not the worst thing you’ve ever heard, right? But hold on, okay? It’s not like Oh, we’re going to burn the bottoms of your feet for a little bit and make you uncomfortable. No. I mean that’s how they killedthe dude. Yes. Get it? Slow. They cooked people. But they kept the flame little so they wouldn’t die. Thirty minutes, an hour of this. I don’t know. They got the fire going and cooked his feet forever until the bottoms of his feet melt off and the bone cracks up and fractures and the bone marrow drains out of the guy, and I’m saying this is what’s in this book, this Las Casas book. You know? And that’s just—that’s just like the default death in the book, Ben, Las Casas is just throwing those in every other line to remind you. It’s like filler. ‘Gibbet.’ ‘Gibbet.’ ‘Oh, another gibbet.’ ‘Then they brought out the gibbet.’ ‘He sent for the gibbet.’ But the gibbets are like the punctuation marks of the real slaughters in there. I mean, I don’t know. What are some examples? Lemme think. There are like a million. Okay, off the top of my head, Indian gets away somehow, runs, but he gets caught. Soldiers drag him back and they lay him out in the dirt in front of his family and saw off his legs and leave him there. Saw them off. Set them by his head so he can look at them while he dies. Or, okay, yes, this: Soldiers hanging around with nothing to do, just free time, they’re stuck posted in a village, and they decide to have a contest, they wager on who can do the cleanest, slickest job cutting a dude in half from his skull down to his groin in one hit. In one huge sword swing, I mean! So like they bring out a dude, tell him to stand there, position him, everyone’s hanging around watching, probably feeling the exact same feeling you feel when Jacke’s running up to the tee to kick off and start a game for the Pack, and Juan, amid this anticipation, comes up to bat, sizes the guy up, and then Juan fucking bifurcates a human being with one swing, and all of his friends just start laughing and going crazy, and Juan’s doing his little soldier jig, using his sword like a cane or whatever, just dancing around and truly elated because he just won a gold ingot from his pal and he’s done something super-impressive. This is leisure time, Benjy, this is downtime on Hispaniola in 1510. Okay? And right over there is the captain, and all the authorities, all the men in charge, the moral scions, and they’re hanging out and chuckling and clapping about the game. Dude’s wife is screaming right there. Whatever. Her soul’s been crushed. Whatever. Everything she cares about on Earth has been converted into amusement and it’s entirely arbitrary and there aren’t going to be any consequences and there sure as fuck isn’t going to be any justice around any of this. So she’s screaming. And Carlos, who’s irritable already because he hates Juan and now Juan’s all popular, goes over, grabs her hair, gets her in a headlock, and cuts off her nose with his dagger—his thumb’s the anchor, like when you’re cutting off a piece of banana—lops it off, chucks it, looks at her, kicks her down, and then rapes her so she really learns her lesson about screaming about the death of her husband, and of course now all the dudes start to laugh at that. Hey! Whoa, check that out. Carlos has a new game. Cut off the noses and then rape them immediately. Everyone starts running around looking for a woman. Natives run, scatter. They all get caught because they don’t have horses. They’re brought back. Again with the legs. Back to that. So on and so forth. Do you see what I’m saying? And I mean, this is a sampling. It’s grotesque on almost every page, yes, I apologize, but it’s kinda the point, and yet you get the sense that Las Casas is even skipping stuff and just doing a light dusting with it. And gore’s not even my good reason why this is real horror and those movies are just child’s play. Right? I’m going on forever but I said there were two reasons, I think. You with me, cousin? You doing okay?
Why is this real horror and Jason not real horror? Simple, Ben. I’m glad you asked. This is real horror because this is fucking real,Ben. This is how it went down. This is the origin story of Europeans in this hemisphere. Your roots. My roots. Really. I really mean that. That’s us. The sound track of life here in America is those screams. Always. These guys, Christians, exact same Bible as the one you can look at wherever you go today, right on the heels of Columbus, almost right away, these guys just poured over into these gorgeous, peaceful, bucolic, pristine islands—this is heaven, is what I’m saying, Ben, I’m making an argument that Europeans, all of them Christians, entirely against all expectations about reality, metaphors, everything, actually located the heaven of their own religion on Earth, they located it, it was justover there, and the people who already lived there were like Hey, sure, come on. It’s amazing to swim in this really blue water. These people didn’t have any real weapons; these people could not conceive of the scope of brutality that was the everyday status quo just across the pond, and I mean they were not dumb, Ben, I’m not saying it was because they were dumb that they were so vulnerable, I’m saying they were nice, Ben, the culture of these islands was built around being nice, and I mean they lived it, they didn’t espouse it, they lived it, they couldn’t even stop themselves from slapping together one big outrageous fruit basket after another and running out to greet murderous, insane soldiers whenever they saw a galleon floating up; for years and years they would do this, it’s all in the Las Casas, and for years and years Spanish soldiers were just like falling over themselves, they couldn’t believe it, just completely climbing over one another, trying to get out of their boats and get to their swords fast enough to get a quick, easy lead-off beheading of a holy tribal king without even thinking that maybe it might violate, oh, I don’t know, the entire Christian moral code or, that whole thing aside, that it might go against just obvious, timeless, and basic human good versus evil restraint, you know, something like that was around even with cavemen, the totally simple idea that maybe needlessly causing excruciating, savage, horrifying, life-ending pain to another being, to a brother, to somebody like yourself, might not be the thing you should do. They found their heaven and they turned it into a hell. On purpose. Intentionally, Ben. That’s the legacy. That’s your legacy. That’s what we are. That’s what we believe in. We believe in making hell. We are male descendants of Europeans who make hell, which means we are monsters, Ben. Think about that. I’m not just saying this. I mean it’s real. We are monsters. I’m not saying it satirically. We are. It’s like a let sleeping dogs lie situation, but the dog is so brutal and huge that if we did wake it up, it would just ravage everything, so we just can’t. That’s where we’re stuck. That’s the boat we arrived on. An army from hell, we’re like like like like terraforming the rest of the Earth, Ben, making it hell too, and that’s what we’re still doing. We! You and I, Benjy…because we’re Euros, we’re members of that army still and we can’t help it. Us. That is reality. So if you take that to the next step of thinking, then none of it—nothing really actually mat—”

What would you do differently if you were Wile E. Coyote, taking on the Road Runner?

i'd probably act dead. then when the road runner comes to say some shit, i'd reach up and grab him by the throat, staring into his scared eyes through the blinding desert sun. i'd squeeze, just enough to let the road runner know the real pain is yet to come. staring at his bulging eyes, i'd communicate my disregard for him as a rival. he'd see then, in my eyes, that i'd never once lost in our back and forth rivalry, but was simply waiting. all of those acme death kits i'd purchased, they'd been a distraction. creating the illusion that i was losing. hand around the road runner's throat, i'd drag him through the desert, over rocks, cacti, spiders and snakes, dust. i'd drag him to my dwelling, a lean-to at the bottom of a valley, next to a river. there, i'd push his head into the river water over and over. after only a few dunks, he'd be begging for death. but death, like hope, in my coyote world, was never an option. after numerous dunks, the road runner would be weakened. i'd then smash his feet with a stone and leave him on the ground, convulsing in pain. i'd forcefeed him sand until he was near death. i'd let him blister under the sun. become hideous. i'd piss on the blisters. i'd throw sand on the blisters as they break open. and when his body could take no more, i'd slowly, and gently, place my hand over the road runner's beak, our eyes close together, as the only air available to him, hot desert air, was denied, and death enters him and pervades him. then i'd spend the rest of the day with my feet in the river by my lean-to, thinking about life.

For some reason there was a vein of teeth that had developed without jaw or appetite in the earth, like precious stones or metals. The toothless came here to bite the earth and to come away with teeth stabbed into their gums.
No telling what one would come up with, tusks, tiny mouse teeth...A toothless man no longer toothless cried through hippopotamus teeth, I have got myself handsome with a smile full of hippopotamus teeth!
Ah, but teeth are designed to a diet. He with cows' teeth ate grass saying, I do not like grass, but I eat grass because it fits my teeth. A cripple who must wear an ugly shoe; never mind the glass slipper. If the shoe fits, wear it.
And so they wore their teeth like shoes. Many allowing this wisdom walked on their teeth. Others, moving one more step in logic, kicked their feet into the earth, driving teeth into their feet.
These are funny shoes, said some, but if the shoe fits...
Others began to chew their food by stamping on it.
And so they came one more step in logic, and stuffed shoes in their mouths, crying, we have got leather teeth.
It was terrible that dentistry had come so far only to die at the foot of human logic.

I don't really recognize myself when I am talking to someone.

Myself, the only human alive.

Is very easy.

I breathe deeply with my head in the freezer trying to destroy my lungs. When it happens people will honor me.

My headstone will be a mirror.

The worst day of my life was when I realized other people wanted to touch me and I wanted to touch them. After that there is nothing to do but hide.

The distance from me to another human being is making my legs wobble.

There is nothing I can do.

I want to be a vampire that only drinks blood out of your hip.

I will be a nice enough vampire to only drink enough blood each night to survive.

I won't like, go all out or anything, and totally kill you.

Sex in high school was lame, as it is for everybody.

I usually lasted three minutes.

I feel so bad for females in high school.

I’ve heard it said by females that sex doesn’t really start feeling good until about the fifth minute, so if the males never reach the fifth minute they probably think, "What the fuck am I even here for?"

While I was in the school for the mentally ill I had a short affair with my counselor.

I went to her house a couple times and made out. But it never came to anything.

It was real weird; I was still in my jumpy excited sex stage. She was thirty-one and in her let’s make sweet love stage.

It was botched so we never had sex.

My sex life didn’t really start until I graduated and got off those damn pills.

I went to the Grand Canyon to work the summer after I graduated.

love is the love of other
but the love of that love
above the other

is the death of love
and the birth of religion
and the love of the love of that love
is what kills

the religion, and births
evil, but at the love of evil
love returns

If you want to talk to your husband and your husband is very small you lie down on the floor and the floor is cold but you warm it and you look at the wall where it meets the floor You are five to eight inches from the wall and there are no other noises Traffic everywhere has stopped for the holiday but the parade does not come by for another couple of hours and you are neither hungry nor too full and your body is a long silk bag full of lightweight batteries arranged on the floor so it touches the floor in the maximum number of places and math has real world value it turns out which is not all that surprising and there are weekends and desires gestating in your throat pink and hairless like mammals and you close your eyes and say things to your husband but he is small no make him even smaller

Humanity means: the alien is controlling our animal bodies.

like summer melon hit by a part from a washing machine 

As you drag your luggage through the open door to find some other place in Rialto for the night, find a place where our voices can’t make each others’ neck hairs rise and our eyes won’t roll on reflex, I think of how the rock plates deep beneath our feet grind and punch one another, and how we only know of their existence by their constant conflict and separation.

More than water, actually, as a number of species of fungi were thriving in the abandoned sewer’s tunnels, the fungi seeming to range from hat-sized to umbrella-sized, all of them bioluminescent, some of them glowing a sort of violet color, some of them glowing a sort of indigo color instead, but anyway bioluminescent, and moreover the fungi were emitting these like spores, which along with being bioluminescent also were totally buoyant, seemed unaffected by the laws of physics, were just drifting around the tunnels with a sort of carefree, easygoing, fuck-you-gravity demeanor, the spores were.

“Raquel!” Matteo heard Z shouting.
Then Z brought a pair of plastic bags to Matteo and strapped the plastic bags to Matteo’s shoes with rubber bands.

i wish that horses could receive mail so that i could continue to have nothing to send them

 

I was hypnotized at my highschool “after-prom” party thing and it was amazing. The best way I would describe is that the while you are hypnotized the man who is telling you to do things has very good ideas. Werner Herzog hypnotized his entire cast to film Heart of Glass, which (despite my predisposition towards Klaus Kinski) is one of my favorite of Herzog’s films. In H.G. Lewis’s The Wizard of Gore, Montag the Magnificient hypnotizes all who watch him, even those watching him through a television, so he can kill people on stage under the guise of magic. I am interested in magic mediated by technology. There are so many books about “the language of power,” etc, and it all seems aimed at becoming a CEO or like how to seduce someone. I like the idea of mastering language to the point where it can be manipulated into the creation of an experience that transcends the page. I think it would be amazing to read a book that literally held power, could hypnotize a reader with no external control other than language. Is my desire for this book, this book that can hypnotize, fascistic? What if a book masquerading as narrative fiction held an ulterior narrative that hypnotized you into quitting smoking, overcoming trauma, controlling binge eating, etc? Is the moral operative of hypnosis what excuses it? I believe there’d be merit in the use of text-based hypnosis to create experience.

Why is empathy more important than affect to most readers (/film viewers)? Why would you want to vicariously experience something through a character rather than experiencing [the thing] yourself? When someone says, “I like this because I can relate to it,” doesn’t that just insist upon a passivity, a refusal to actively do? In 2012 we launch our quest to destroy representation that aims at empathy. It doesn’t matter what something means, all that matters is that we are feeling things at the zero-degree. Fuck the distance, the gap.

I had this very weird dream a couple of nights ago, and I’m still pondering it:
I was sleeping in this big room full of cots. Some kind of boarding school. The guy in the bed next to me was my old friend Matt Miller. It was lights-out time but he handed me a stack of porn magazines and a little vial of oily liquid. The porn magazine were very strange because they were so airbrushed that one could hardly see the women. And the women’s faces made these open-mouthed-screaming-Francis-Bacon-ish grimaces, except they were airbrushed so thoroughly that it was even hard to see what was going on with the faces. The theme was “Thailand” but the girls were very blond and white, and mostly swimming – possibly drowning – in the water. Some of the pages were stuck together, so I tried using the liquid in the vile to separate the pages but then I was somehow informed that this liquid was supposed to be used for some kind of covert activity that would undermine the boarding house, possibly by developing photographs or by setting off a bomb (I don’t know if Matt told me this or if I was just given this information). Then the dictatorial school principal came by the bed, making the rounds to make sure we were in bed. It was George W Bush! He asked me about the vial and I told him that it was an eye drop and to prove it I poured the chemical in my eyes and it really burned but I had to fake like it was fine so nobody would suspect anything. He bought it (b/c he was as stupid in my dream as in real life) but then I realized that as soon as the school was blown up (or secret photographs published), he would remember the liquid and I would be arrested. My mom was outside in the garden planting flower bulbs that looked like bones (femurs, ribs etc). I told her, “You need to have more space between the bulbs or they won’t thrive, you can’t just throw them all in a hole like that.” She said, “No, this kind of flower you just throw in a pile in the ground and hope for the best.”
It seems like an old-fashioned Freudian castration dream! Except with terrorism! And very weird flowers! Except the Freudian reading is too textbook to ring true to me (the blindness, the mother).

It happens that there is a child running through a heaving swaying mass of corn. The corn stands higher than the child itself, is more complete and more richly developed. The child's face is pink against yellow, beige against green. The midday sun makes everything incriminatingly visible. A giant voice is behind the child. Child is skipping away from our conceived gaze. Voice is behind us, behind our disembodied 2-D character. Voice is loud, booming, deep. Voice, although deep, is muffled and slow. It is decreasing in tempo with each syllable, dragging. Voice warns child not to enter the competition. The child will remain innocent, will not be in the race. Child is running and skipping, is in a different world to voice. Corn protects child with its warming enormity and child goes on, ripping off an ear, twirling it in hands or before face, discarding it, claiming another. Voice is slow and loud and threatening. The child will not disobey! Voice envelops child in its frequency, slowing until it resonates, until bones of child are shaking with deep, low sound-waves. Child fears and is lifted out of playful wander. Child is halted and knows the fear of the world. Child is snatched out of time's continuum for one brief and everlasting moment. The frequency is more than words, the slowing. There is meaning in the deceleration, awful truths the child cannot yet understand. Child knows fear and child knows rebellion. Child buys a ticket because this is the only way to be strong. Child knows the chances of winning are minimal, has basic concepts of probability. In buying a ticket the child learns risk, danger, protest, freedom. Booming voice is still beckoning in background. With ticket in hand, child runs, flees. Corn field could not be emptier, less useless, or more fragile. Child flees. It flees but there is no chance that child will win. Child would not be singled out among many, for child is nothing, no-one. Voice and ticket and irreversible actions haunt the child. It considers consequence and shivers in the steady one-way traffic of time. The thing is done. Child learns worry. Irrational worry in the face of statistics. And the child learns guilt, is paralyzed by fear. Voice repeats, is looping round and round in mind of child, until new sound forms and expands out of the distance. New sound is melodic, uplifting and final, lifting cheer straight out of the brown earth. New voice is death's own messenger, oblivious. Child cannot share in the joys of the world. Child looks down at number on ticket. New sound is reading out its improbable numbers, destroying the world. Child has put an end to everything with one rash gesture. It cannot be taken back, voice will be listening. Voice is unseen yet always within earshot. Child cannot hide. When it does not stand tall and go to collect prize, new sound reads out child's full name. Ears of corn and ears of father are one and the same. Child runs as voice beckons to it, a deafening wail which deepens and spreads to infinity.

Francis crawls inside a toilet to marvel at the copper piping. He bottles the liquid to sell as holy water to politicians. It’s hard for Francis and Sarah to fuck in their laundry room with junkies nodding off in corners. Sarah gathers lint from the machine to spell out poems. Your spaceship makes the most beautiful music, she writes. Francis writes, your tuba is malnourished, dig into the rich soil of junkies’ arms and plant an apple tree. They write three books of lint verse then light them on fire because of artistic differences. This fire scares off the junkies and Francis and Sarah fuck to a sitcom laugh track.

What is there to do but throw cinderblocks off the roof, Sarah asks. She tears down a poster of the sky to expose fields of wheat and corroded sewing needles. Francis grabs her hand like the plane is crashing. The plane is crashing. Francis and Sarah put on each other’s oxygen masks and remain so calm. Mice swarm out of Sarah’s collar and run towards a stewardess. Francis drinks malt liquor from his shoe and offers Sarah a gulp. They slow dance through the aisle to a crescendo of other passengers’ prayers. If we crash on a desert island, you can wear your new bikini, Francis tells Sarah. She laughs too loud and says, I will make you a Speedo from the pilot’s forehead wrinkles and the sun will wink at us as we sleep in coconut trees.

I want to be a straight man and sleep with as many beautiful women as possible. Tall women who dance on oil drums. Short women with arms like tree branches weighed down by fruit. Shy women whose voices thicken in bed. All women. I want the bedroom cold and our friction to light the bedsheets afire and my towels to smell thankless when they leave. I want our partings bittersweet. I would write their names on all of my dollar bills where George Washington's clavicle should be, fold them into swans and hang them from the ceiling. Once I marry, I do not want sons. I want to hold my child in my arms, the hem of my collarbone her flotation device and tell her everything she already knows but will never hear again. I would name my daughters after mountains or oceans because women are either forces of rock and stone, or mirrors that glide ice cross its ripples. And they would emerge in all shapes and sizes and bear my name, but not yours.

We come out of the backcountry to the news,
this sad music of the world. Bombing at a summer camp.
A teenager murdered his parents, threw a party.
Out of my guzzling window, the sun bounces down
to touch peaks. The glazed Tetons
are still rolling, credits of a summer daydream.
The grass just won’t learn to self-destruct, as we have.
I am not speaking for anything but my skin
in the cricket-swept air. Just these two eyes
awash with the continual surprise of Parnassians. Yes,
hold your hands that way, bound. Wildflowers abound.
I am yellowing as this meadow, dusted by our tires.

On the the path that eyes have deemed beautiful,
traffic sputters in the snow. Red tracks are not, after all,
blood marks, do not necessarily lead anywhere, probably
signify buried flows of water. What fish feed there?
At Lake Solitude, a man seems to be pointing his camera
in my direction, the sun still a spotlight, even at this height,
in this heightened quiet. “There’s a mean cloud coming,”
she says to my weight-hunched back. There’s a cold lake
not waiting for us. Rippling, a sparkle set. “We are all tourists here,
except for the bears.” What would it mean to belong here?
To have made a home from sapping sticks?
Have I belonged anywhere yet? She wants
more vistas, more sun, more shade. She wants
what will unfold in her design. Language works
at a distance, cannot enter. The true lake of solitude
has not yet been seen, will not be named.

Jim is no longer a character in a story I have written—I have liberated him from obscurity and now he is transitioning to a new form in the manner of larvae, adolescents, and souls.
I’m finding I’d rather be surrounded by the possibility of Jim than concocting the reality of him. Now I look at a cloud and wonder how he is doing, where he might be. When I come out of the theater after seeing a movie, blinking and not yet acclimated to my life, I wonder whether I might catch sight of him half-formed, a Jim still partly a fiction, like a ghost with real hands leaning against a building, smoking.
I also have this sense of Jim when I wake during the night to go to the bathroom. I think that he is there, or part of him is in the kitchen, sitting in a chair; not on it, but inside of it, inhabiting its upright shape with shifty, transitional qualities. Jim, in this condition, is like a language that is dying.
It is possible for one who is transitioning to a new form to become old before the transition has finished; to die, even, in the midst of becoming something different. Then it is like acid rain—Jim oozes out of the air above a corporate office park and falls onto the chassis of the world. Or Jim, the protoplasm that’s left of him, migrates toward a different transitioning object and lodges within its folds, complicating its density with soul.
Recently my father had a cyst above his eyebrow lanced. Within was a tuft of hair, two tiny fingernails. A twin. A Jim.
But I think I like Jim how he is now, a possibility. I can listen to the wind and wonder which of its decrements are him becoming less and less himself. When a cough comes out of a room where nobody is, I can think of Jim instead of my own death. In this way Jim has begun to function like beauty—possessed of changeable so intangible qualities, visible while shifting his even more desirable qualities out of reach, reminding me that desire can never achieve final satiety, is always only partial, half-achieved; the other part, like Jim, transitioning beyond reach, assuming that’s what he’s doing, that he hasn’t simply gone to sleep, or, I have mentioned the possibility, died. “Beauty dies my death for me and makes me see it”—Jim said that before I allowed him the freedom to become, if he transitions that way, a green ray.
I read about the green ray yesterday. When the sun sets in perfect atmospheric conditions, with no land mass for many hundreds of miles and no moisture or atmospheric pressure, you have a good chance of seeing a spot of green the color of a Mr. Yuck sticker where the sun has just set. It’s brief, lasts maybe a second. Then it becomes someone else.

Film school is poison.
Look for street superstars to be your cast.
Your film must be made on no budget, just sporadic money.
The director must raise "get-by" money by finding a job that challenges their ethics.
The director must have a main character role in the film.
Short films are NOT acceptable, it MUST be a feature.
The cast must NOT know what your film is about.
Filming must be done without any preparation or a traditional script.
Your film must be 95% improvised.
Special lighting is not acceptable.
No HD Cameras
No 3D
No Green Screen
The director must edit the film alone.
Mistakes are beautiful.
Continuity is wrong.
Bewildering, vague, self-indulgent, plot-less, risky, egotistical, limpid, raw, ugly, and imperfect are perfect.
Technical film experience is inessential.
Answer to one person only—yourself.

Are potatoes subversive? I have built a gardenia out of air. I hope to prove the consequences of roots.
Tubers.
The experiment begins with a country like France. Collar stud swans. I surround my neck in silk and inch toward the skeleton of a whale.
The bones tell me that lyricism is sanguine. And that there are galaxies behind the ribs.
Galaxies of velvet. Galaxies of faith.
Maple and oak. Appliances in a greenhouse.
The object of life is to move toward a greater and greater resilience. And tell stories about it at the end of the day, when the sun has long been gone, and the night is full of grease and singing. It is then that we are frequented by huge emotions, words encased in cocoons that mature and hatch and fly about the room.
During the day we search for truffles. I have a pig named Henry. He is a big help. He wanders the forest sniffing for truffles like a parable of porcine inquisitiveness. He knows what he is doing. He is not just a pig. Nor ordinary pig. He is a French pig. A pig of the Perigord.
I have crossed many bridges in life but never have I seen such strange attempts at narration, as if life were a sequence of events, or waves crashing on a shore, wave upon wave upon wave, turning pages of foam as they go.
Space begins where the trees dance.
Giants whose limbs maneuver the clouds.
Moons and asteroids.
Mint and lavender.
May you never be a rock.
Be instead the snow in a globe. Be a potato. Be circumspect and round. Live in the earth. The good sweet earth. With its worms and decay. Its sand beneath the waves.
Sometimes a feeling is more than a religion. It becomes a swollen pink oval stirring in the water. And somewhere a phonograph crackles in an attic. And Edith Piaf sings Regrette Rien.

"Set in a crime-ridden Rochester, New York in the near future, Rapture Adrenaline centers on a police officer who is brutally murdered and subsequently re-created as a super-human cyborg. The main plot of the movie revolves around a "Bug" (code word for a member of an alien species that is similar in many ways to a very large cockroach) searching for a miniature galaxy which is also a vast energy source. "Acid Eagle" is the president of Hell-TV (Channel 83, Cable 12), a sleazy television station specialising in sensationalistic programming. Displeased with his station's current lineup (which consists mostly of softcore pornography), Professor Pizza is on a seemingly endless quest for something that will "break through" to a new audience. The rescue turns out to be a fake; the two climbers are taken prisoner by a group of ruthless thieves. The driver is now a hostage trapped by his own seatbelt. However, the robot becomes smarter and more dangerous as it plays putting the boy and his friends in mortal danger. In addition to being an action film, the movie includes larger themes regarding the media, resurrection, gentrification, corruption, and human nature." Unfortunately we've not had a chance to watch it all, but a quick flick thru tells us this is a proper trip...

Nobody in Fern City was good enough. The people looked and looked within themselves
and then without themselves. They began to hate each other.
Soap: Everyone was special, see.
Everyone secretly or blatantly desired to be celebrities in Fern City.
Nobody remembers their lines. Only TV stars remember the future.
Watching Fern City at night from the top of a hill is like watching TV. Cubes of light.
A star relays a message from the past remembering the future. Kiss kiss, it says.
Static from the beginning of time sets up the finale.
But when Sisera fell asleep from exhaustion, Jael quietly crept up to him with a hammer
and tent peg. Then she drove the tent peg through his temple and into the ground,
and so he died. When Barak came looking for Sisera, Jael went out to meet him.
She said, “Come, and I will show you the man you are looking for.”
Yes, yes, yes. Let the ancient speak for me.
I will leave your flesh on the mountains, and fill the valleys with your carcass.
How much do I love thee?
I will water the land with what flows from you, and the riverbeds shall be filled with your blood.
In Fern City I have seen god and what was the remedy. Many-eyed like a dragonfly, or a city lit up with electricity.
A universal Turing machine calculates its name
and the rattling cubes of our hearts.
God is a girl in love. The martyring type.
Such suffering of Fern’s citizens gives him purpose.
When I snuff you out I will cover the heavens, and all the stars will darken;
Silence, which is not additive,
can be filled with anything.

The wires had been fed into my father’s face. We stood around and watched him take it, and the white was gray really and I was older than I’d meant to be and there was no way now to stop. No way now to let them take me before my father and let me be done with my hours here surrounded, as there was anyway no way I could have what I wanted, not because I didn’t know what that was but because the sky was close enough now that you could nearly not breathe a hunk of it into you without looking or thinking and behind the sky we did not know what there would be. My father’s face charred politely almost on the dais before the endless children came to crowd around him in offering to no one. They raised their plastic fists and rained away with voices from the boxes underneath their tongues, a sound without language, tone for tone’s sake to consecrate this demolition of a man. A man, my father, who had raised the very foundation of this township underneath us years before any of the rest of us here crowded in witness as the machines made his death, as my father had been the oldest man of all our people at 49, which meant that he next would be the one we filled with the excess light of electronics in the hope that it would be enough to hold the black inside the black and keep our skins against us nearer pressed to cling the blood in. In death my father made no sound, or at least nothing loud enough over the frying wires to be measured in a way I could feel enough to cling to. The smoke he gave was weak and cherry-brown, which allowed them to write down in formal record that his time had come for him at regardless and at last, that even had we not begun this exploratory procedure for sacrifice of eldest locals for our protection he would have soon died; even if this forced death was not what whatever the black inside the black had ever wanted, we would not be called to blame, his skin was ready, his mind was ready, he was a worried man like all of us, the sickness had leathered in him, he was ready as a man. I knew this not to be true at least in formal practice, as when the men had come for him on the morning of the death of the prior elder to secure his corpus for the next method of rite, my father had locked himself in our guest bedroom bathroom, hardly bigger than himself, and through the keyhole begged the sparing of his time, swore in fact he was not as old as he looked, he was a child here, a child trapped in a man, and instead they should take our neighbor, any of them, anybody. At that time I’d been ashamed. I’d shamed my father’s name and apologized to the silver men holding him up and disowned his posture and called him weak. I’d brought the lockpick for the door out of my mother’s knit box and handed it over to the men and stood with arms crossed and rather smirking as they pried him from the house, his frame still whooping no longer in our language but simply sounds like some gone animal in pain. I’d even taken a photograph as they strapped him to the plastic mobile altar and paraded him to where for his last days he would live in intense sun, in a black wire cage at the center of our township so that the black inside the black could see our willingness to make our dead, in the name of whatever it was, again and again, until we were nothing even, if that’s what must be done to slow the seize of time and aging in the rest of us all waiting for the same eventual end if slower and already begun. Give us reaction, is all we asked it, any answer, some kind of way to set a set of us to live without the wall of time, a way to live as the machines did without fear of counting down and losing form, a door into some closer guise of perpetuity if not at last the thing itself. When at last the smoke ceased pouring from the place my father’s body had been just before then and on the dais I saw now nothing left but pulp of char, a snotty gloss where my father had struggled through the spurting and the shakes, the sound coming out through all his pores at once same as the foam and then the ash did, his surface sort of turning inside out. I moved within myself to say a vow still in his name, a last remembrance of the man he’d been for me before the shitty parts over the years inside my raising to become the man like him now as I am, though where in the syllables my brain chose for me to give my want a life out of my mouth I found already I could not recall much of anything about him there at all beyond the way the shine of his skin had glinted in the last light under the sky surrounded, the machines all plugged up in his holes, his eyes sewn shut and seeing nothing, as well as perhaps a texture of the smell of how the final cinder-wafts of him at least had spread generally into our breathing vortex holding crisply like baked spaghetti and old oil, though even that recent thing already as I caught it I found its idea covered over by the music of the one note that rose over the air, formed our township’s anthem the machines all tooted slow and long into the faces of the children barking hard and splaying arms raised wide toward the calm long old sky above the dais, their toothless mouths wide open in wait to breathe in what might be offered in return for what we’d given up today and any day however near now would again and would and would.

It is not that the form in which something may be thought is indifferent to what is thought, but that thinking in colors is different than thinking in iron. Many brilliant hues of thought blossom in a greenhouse daily without so much as a zipper. Liberal ears adorn the scarecrow, yet the convolutions of the clouds go unheard. Pain bursts out of a harmonica and if anyone happens to notice a red scarf caught in the barbed-wire it is a nominal but pleasant gratuity, like an extra button on a sleeve. What else is there beyond the design evident in things? Spaghetti? Algebra? Nudity?
Nudity always sounds accurate on a dulcimer.
But is accurate really the most accurate word? For nudity? For a dulcimer? For a naked individual playing a dulcimer? For certain characteristics of consciousness shaped into rain? Sometimes there are inaccuracies in us that are there for no particular reason. Spasms, humors, ambiguities. Existential qualifiers paraphrased as meringue.
I think of tar as a form of memory. Black, sticky, hard to work. But once it dries and settles into place, there you are: a highway. A mimetic impulse made suddenly tangible as skin. Which is smooth. Which is veined. Which is a vehicle of touch. Which is a curvature, or membrane.
White stripes, yellow lines. The so-called logical modalities. How do we sequence DNA? How do we know about Greek mathematicians? How do we perceive time? How do we find our way? How do we tell truths that might hurt?
There are means. Means to bring Tucson into focus, or forget it altogether, and head north to Flagstaff.
Bananas don’t have skeletons, though the truth to anything is never easy to peel, except radius and circumference, and even they get confused, confused with rocks, confused with horses, confused with intermezzos and dizzying precipices, confused with dice games and hornswaggles, a statue of a horse as a horse, or another kind of horse, a live horse, a live horse with legs and hooves and a swishing tail, horses in the rain, horses on the plains, horses in Wide Ruin, horses where everything is vast, even the negatives are vast, and inferences are huge and cumbersome, and the stores are closed, and protons leap the Coulomb barrier, and a reverie of leopards gets entangled with the campaniles of Venice, which rang out during an earthquake in the summer of 2004. Here is where the ostrich costs a lot of energy and does glissandos around the bank. Insects shine because death bulges out of elegies, and worries bulge out of consciousness like area codes telescoping into marigolds. There is nothing so thin it cannot serve as a stem and nothing so thick it cannot be converted to steam. There are moments and there are moments. Driver instructor headed the wrong way down a one-way street. A chestnut promulgating the prodigality of green.

I took thunder from the clouds, I pounded passion out of drums, I hurt electricity out of feeling. I conjured poetry out of everything to glory in cloth and benediction. I invented an ego in order to jeer. I chiseled a piece of energy out of a temperature in order to prolong a fever. I did everything I could to assist the intimacy of orange. I did not harm anyone, or employ anyone, or wax Copernican in a laundromat. I put words together in order to create completely unnecessary objects. I did this to both honor and condemn the behavior of the Vikings. Bankers: let me alone. NPR: let me alone. I know so little about investing money or caring for the financial security of my future I could not help a dollar to eventually become a snicker or a nickle become an actual Monticello. Anchor people and pundits: I can create a jukebox to drown your propoganda. All I want to do is write poetry. All I want to do is go bowling with Michael Moore. All I want to do is star in a movie by Joel Coen. All I want to do is rule the universe. All I want to do is be friends with you. All I want to do is turn bullets to bon bons. All I want to do is write a line of nutmeg. Life is a bust. I believe in boysenberry. Speech seems to be the best available instrument for protruding muskelunge and deer. The expense of spirit in a waste of shame is lust in action, and till action, lust is a hormone, a chemical immediate as peach to a peach tree. I see sophistry in shale, nativity in shall. I see skeletons in motion and spice in space. Union in onion and pins in opinions. All I want to do is yank a yak from my throat. All I want to do is make love to you. All I want to do is dream. Dream dream dream. But what I really want to do is yank a yak from my throat.

There is always auroral activity somewhere over the Earth. Auroral ice, auroral carapace. Everywhere are silhouettes of foxglove splattered on the prison walls, the aromatic gurgling of blood in a spine of vignettes.

Maelstroms of solar wind, the linen of a wild and roaring light.
The mind and body mingle like spit in oblivion.
Auroral light comes largely from electrons hitting oxygen and nitrogen atoms and molecules in the upper atmosphere, the same phenomenon that produces the glow in a neon lighting tube, or the catastrophe of color investing a canvas of ceremonial flint. Coronal mass ejections send hurricane blasts of plasma into space and black heat and fluorescent harmonies wraith oblivion with flavors of radical silk.
Here on Earth we look to the sky and its extremes of ghostly furious hips believing in territory and afternoon, clarinets and Newfoundland.
When I say silk I really mean milk. And when I say milk I really mean curtain. I mean snowshoes, and large turgid radios emitting borscht and Canadian buffalo.
The story invests itself with the light of the imagination, a tundra of the soul where the hoofs of the caribou imprint the eternally moving narrative of a silent, graceful cartilage, a momentum suggesting attention and trickles of enchanting disquiet. Antlers silhouetted against a dome of aggressive gold.
I have filled the minutes of early dawn with forgotten summers and guano. Vowels are bats that live in the caverns of consonants. The lurid vigor of morning oozes out of the sky and shapes the day into a large glass horse, a trapezoid counteracting the muscle of possession. Each cloud is a velvety toleration of gravity, a thing like an atmosphere where the vault of the sky gives birth to chandeliers of liquid meaning. Blueprints and Europe are squeezed from a hillside calamitous with trees.
I asked Bob what my chances were for an aurora that night, my last in Fairbanks. He clicked a couple of keys. “Here’s where we’re seeing a piling up of fast and slow particles. When we plot out what we think is going to happen, our model says we could get some increase in auroral activity later today."
Bob was right. Prison is not a product of nature. Thus the affirmation that being remains unchanged in its being, whether it be at rest or in motion, pleads steam and vitality.
This is because the universe is big, yes, unequivocally big, but big in a way that has nothing to do with size. There are no parentheses. There is no punctuation. It is mustard. It is epidermal and everywhere. It is aberrant and nowhere.
The pure fact of it feels indigo, enlightened and muscular, waves of energy in the meat of a turtle with burning black eyes.

So much energy. People buying watermelons,
boarding airplanes, watching their parents die,
and writing poems about it while above throbs
the celestial. I love how sadness can turn
celebratory, the childlike apocalyptic.
Bees return to their hives, freighted
with nectars. Shadows rise from the mud,
flinging back their wet hair and even though
this seashell is very small, it's still singing
about the void. Often great tension arises
between sincerity and rhetoricity imposing
vague profundities. Outside a man is failing
to push-start his car, albeit a very polished car.
Remember how rash Apollo was even while inventing
calculus? He did it to impress ome skinny kid
milking a goat after all. Let's not forget
the head in the furnace, how burning is
laughing and laughing is also crying out.
When my father died, I saw his spirit snag
in a tree, a woman running across a parking lot,
windows full of smoke. When my father died,
his spirit snagged in a tree then left behind
its last body of plastic bags. I saw the sky
wring its blue until it cracked and oils
leaked out. I thought I was seeing everything
and could turn off the whte light with a switch.
Even is it's only skin-deep, once you derive
the area, consider how the skin goes into
the ears, behind the eyes, down the throat,
that's an awful lot of beauty. Satellite dishes
in every yard, shiny shiny stars. I'd like to be
completely free but I want everything to belong to me.
You fall upon the roses of life and bleed
and people think you're a fool. But later,
at the cash bar, the disputants are transformed
by the lips of their eyes, the sex organs
of exhaled smoke. Once someone tried
to sell me a surge protector for every room.
Once a praying mantis chrysalis hatched in my desk.

It takes 60,000 words to build the eyeball of an ostrich. 60,000 words to recreate, in ink, the eyeball of an ostrich. 60,000 words to build the eyeball of an ostrich and help it locate the landscape of Australia, help it run, help it eat, help it mate, help it see the sun rise, help it see the sen set, help it with all the circumstances of being an ostrich.
It takes 81,314 words to build a snail. An entire snail. 81,314 words to construct the shell and whorl of the shell, mouth, head, eye and eyestalk, excretory opening, genital opening, pulmonary opening, tentacles, foot, and apex. 81,314 words to make a snail crawl across a piece of paper like a metaphor of dirt leaving a trail of slime. 81,314 words to make a snail happen. 81,314 words to make a snail seem as real as rain, or grout, ot Tom Waits and zinc. 81,314 words to make a snail enter the life of a snail.
It takes 97,455 words, 1,292 metaphors, 453 metonyms and a Methodist church to build a waffle iron or hacksaw. 72,890,334 words to build a pair of suspenders with elastic webbing and button loops. An inebriated sun and a biplane to tickle the sky. 800 llamas in pairs to hoist the cadence of a butterfly into the neck of a singing man. Five gallant ethical systems and a colorful philosophy to install a septic tank. Two squash rackets and a sunroof to build a relationship. One boomerang and a billion or two stars to make a dirigible float out of your throat. A single angle to say leaning. Five words to say all shadows foreshadow shade. Five words to say to be or not to be. A gazillion words to checkle forebearance and an infnite number of glottal stops and topaz to surround a mouth with meaning.

What happened to them, those known thereafter only by the stray signals they sent back? What, as they loosened themselves from old bonds, old friendships, and contact with them became intermittent?
Some disappeared completely. Where did they go?, we wonder. Did they change their names? Did they go underground? Did they travel to the four corners of the earth in search of obscurity? Is that what they've found, in the mountains of Yaktusk: obscurity? Did they manage to disappear in the ice deserts of Antarctica? Did they lose themselves in the rebuilt Shanghai or in the Favelas of Rio de Janerio? Did they hole up in the Aleutian islands to write a magnum opus?
Did they wander like Japanese poets through the stone forests of Yunnan, leaving traces of their passage with fragments of as yet unwritten philosophical masterpieces? Did they take to the steppes to think and write in secret, getting ready for their magnificent return? Did their heads seem to explode as they lay beneath shooting stars on Goa beaches bombed out on ketamine? Did the pain seem to radiate out of them like light as they volunteered to be crucified in Pampanga?
Some devoted themselves to politics, we're sure of that, to militancy, joining the Zapististas, signing up with the Naxalites. Some joined the last of Maoists in Nepal, others to fight alongside Hamas in Palestine. Still others became partisans, became insurgents, became warriors of the scrubland, sleepers on the plains, ever on the move, ever watchful. Some deserted to head further into the wilderness, further into obscurity. Some were known only as missing persons, their relatives searching for them in third world jungles, their friends leaving tributes on Facebook pages.
Some became ill, mentally ill, we're sure of that. They wanted derangement, to derange themselves. They wanted insanity, seeking it by every means: by drugs, to be sure, but also by almost ascetic rigour. We must become what we are, they said to themselves. Each one of us is his own illness, they said to themselves. And so they sought to intensify their illness, to drive it deeper, and then to enter wholly into it as into a secret fissure.
Some sought solitude, silence, wanting not to express themselves, but to have nothing to say. Some gave up thought for art, for anti-art, making sculptures in the wild, sculptures out of the wilderness, for no one to see. Some wrote great poems, then burned them, watching the pages crispen and catch fire. Some wrote great philosophical treatises and threw the pages into the wind.
Some sought to lay waste their lives, to throw them away. Some sought to sacrifice themselves to nothing in particular, wanting only to squander what had been given to them. Some drank themselves into oblivion. Some smoked themselves into vacancy. Some bombed out of their brains on hallucigens.
Some wanted to become just like anyone else; no: more like anyone else than anyone, as anonymous as possible, as buried in ordinary life as possible, taking the most mundane of jobs, leading the most mundane of lives.
Some, in our minds, sought to think without thinking, to write without writing. What matters is to live this 'without', they said, very mysteriously. What matters is to live outside thought, outside writing, they said, and we had no idea what they meant.
Some gave in to bouts of despair, throwing themselves into rivers and oceans. Some gassed themselves in bedsits, some launched themselves through open sixth floor windows. Some reddened the snow with chunks of bloody brain and skull. Some broke their kunckles punching walls. Some pissed themselves in gutters, and shat themselves in holding cells. Some cut open their bellies and let their guts spill out.
Some took upon themselves all the miseries of the world; some believed themselves responsible for them all, the miseries of the world. Some cut their throats because of that responsibility for those miseries. Some drove sword blades into their chest because of what they hadn't done to prevent those miseries.
Some sought to side with the proletariat, earning no more than the proletariat, gleaning fruit and vegetables from market stalls, clothes discarded in warehouse bins. Some sought to live alongside the proletariat, and the lumpenproletariat, the thieves and vagabonds. Some lived among the subproletariat, the homeless, refugees who had escaped deportation.
Some half-drank themselves to death to live with the alcoholics. Some destroyed the bridge of their nose sniffing solvents, sniffing turps, to live among the solvent-sniffers and the turps-sniffers.
Some became recluses, shutting themselves up inside; some took hikkikomori, living with their parents but not seeing them, living on food left outside their door. Some took holy vows and disappeared into monasteries. Some became self-flagellants and self-scourgers. Some joined cults; some started them. Some preached on the street about the end of the world. Some tried to bring about the end of the world, to bring the end closer.
Some sold themselves as mercenaries, some as prostitutes. Some joined the FBI, others the Israeli army. Some sided with the rats and the cockroaches, and dreamt of being eaten alive by rats and cockroaches. Some wanted to be devoured from the inside out, and longed for biting termites to crawl into their nostrils, to crawl into their ears. Some came to side with viral life, with bacteria and protozoa and dreamt of a world without humans, without vertebrates, without any kind of higher life.
Some, tormented by thought, and the demands of thought, sought to destroy their very capacity to think. Some sought to slice off their own thinking heads, some placed a bit to their skull and began to drill. Some drove pencils through their nostrils into their brain. Some shot themselves through one eye, and then another. Some asked - begged - for lobotomy. Some for their brains to be scooped out of their skull. Some to be left perpetually asleep, aging quietly. Some to be forced into an induced coma; some to be battered into a state of imbecility.
And did some of them know joys, too? Did some discover what it meant to live?

Anxiety is narcissism and narcissism is anxiety. Far from being dispersed, the anxious, ontologically insecure self not only persists but is amplified in the world. This is the strange logic of anxiety: it simultaneously fragments the unity of the self while also placing that fragmentation at the centre of things. Indeed, anxiety’s ‘threat’ to self is at the same time a vindication of the self as a centre, a fundamental commitment to the narcissism of selfhood. Because of this fragmented centre, the world of the anxious subject takes as its point of departure an exaggerated, hyper-real view of things, in which perception and attention are drawn back to the anxious subject.

Imagine a person who suddenly wakes up in the hospital after an automobile accident to find that she is suffering from total amnesia. Outwardly, everything is intact: She has the same face and form, her senses and her mind are there, but she doesn’t have any idea or any trace of a memory of who she really is.

In exactly the same way, we cannot remember our true identity, our original nature. Frantically, and in real dread, we cast around and improvise another identity, one we clutch with all the desperation of someone falling continuously into an abyss. This false and ignorantly assumed identity is “ego.”

  
HAMADRYAD: Strange people! They treat destiny and the future as though they’re the past.

SATYR: This is what hope means. To give destiny the name of a memory.

There's an idea that suggests all the universe's electrons are actually one particle forever traveling backwards and forwards in time. It's a simple, elegant idea that solves some of physics's biggest mysteries. There's only one tiny problem. It's complete nonsense.

When I encountered these maps of Boylan Heights years ago, what I first loved was how impractical they were. Most maps are entirely about doing a job. They are dull salarymen who clock in early and spend their days telling you where stuff is with unrelenting precision. They never vary an inch from these appointed rounds.
Not these maps. One of my favorites, Pools of Light, is a dreamy rendering in blurry white circles of the light cast by street lights. Even if you were in Boylan Heights on a dark night and badly needed to find a street lamp, it's hard to imagine how this map would help you. For one thing, you'd need to get under a street lamp to read the damn map, and once you'd accomplished that, well, you'd have achieved your goal, wouldn't you?
Granted, the map that's dotted with jack-o'-lanterns indicating which houses set them out for Halloween—another favorite—could conceivably be a guide for neighborhood toughs on an unusually thorough smashing binge. But how likely is that? What kind of ten-year-olds would have the impulse to kick in a few pumpkins and also have enough of an OCDish drive to decimate every single one that they'd consult a map?
These maps are completely unnecessary. The world didn't ask for them. They aid no navigation or civic-minded purpose. They're just for pleasure. They laugh at the stupid Google map I consult five times a day on my phone. They laugh at what a square that map is. At its small-mindedness. They know it's a sad, workaholic salaryman.
Their mission is more novelistic. Which I also love. What they chart isn't Boylan Heights exactly but Wood's feelings about Boylan Heights, his curiosity about it, and his sense of wonder at all the things about the place that are overlooked and unnamed.
That a cartographer could set out on a mission that's so emotional, so personal, so idiosyncratic, was news to me. It reminds me of how a recent generation of comic book artists turned that hack medium of superhero adventures and high school yuks into a medium of novelistic stories drenched in feeling and personality. It reminds me of all the bloggers and tumblrs and tweeters who've taken a global computer network designed for engineers and the defense establishment and transformed it into a noisy, messy clubhouse and playground.
And these maps remind me of all the radio stories I love most. After all, most radio is a boring salaryman, waking up before you and me to announce the headlines or play the hits to some predetermined demographic. Yet some radio stories elbow their way into the world in defiance of that unrelentingly practical mission, with the same goal Denis Wood's maps have: to take a form that's not intended for feeling or mystery and make it breathe with human life.
Which brings me to the oddest thing about these maps. They describe human lives without ever showing us any people. Instead, we see the underground structures that humans build for waste and the paths they make for squirrels in the sky. We see which homes have wind chimes and which ones call the cops. We see the route of the letter carrier and the life cycle of the daily paper. Wood is writing a novel where we never meet the main characters, but their stuff is everywhere. I don't know exactly how to describe the feeling that creates. It's like walking around a world that's been decimated by a neutron bomb and walking into all the houses. You miss the people who lived here, and you think about their daily routines. You can count the scraps of toast left on their plates and smell the bacon they were preparing right before they were vaporized. Their lives seem far away and utterly present, both at the same time. Which somehow makes our world seem fragile and very precious. Maybe it's just me, but that seems like the opposite of the feeling ordinary maps give us, with their rock solid facts and their obsession with street names. They make the world seem anything but fragile.
Though, of course, the world is fragile. And fleeting. And so Denis Wood's maps are a far more accurate depiction of Boylan Heights than any normal map could ever hope to be.

(12:00 a.m.) A great deal hinges upon this point in time, yet in actuality it is not a point but a flutter, a quiet sigh where today’s lips gently brush against those of tomorrow. The effects of this can be observed on mourning doves, who visibly shudder at its passage.
(2:43 p.m.) Heraclitus once observed that this particular moment was “harder to kill than a rat with a rock.” Despite the way it reclines, apparently inert, in the slack hammock of an eternal afternoon, it is composed largely of gristle.
(11:14 p.m.) This minute passes with tremendous exactitude, year in, year out, performing its sixty seconds with the piston-like reliability of a Bosnian porn star in spite of our general fatigue & wine-soaked oblivion.
(7:42 a.m.) It comes, then goes. Were it a punctuation mark, it would be the dash, as experts have never conclusively determined whether it ultimately wants to separate or connect.
(10:59 a.m.) Pope John XXIII once observed 10:59 ante meridian to be his favorite moment of the day, intoning in a papal bull that it is “better to anticipate than arrive” and though eleven o’clock might invoke the perfect ripeness of a plum, “yearning for the honey is totally money.”
(6:42 p.m.) This is not a passing moment, but a panther, a feline apparition that is rarely seen, given how deftly its camouflage melts into dappled shadow. It emerges as the sun wheels on its dusky hinge, then stalks us out of curiosity intermingled with appetite.
(4:13 a.m.) Here we have the quiet student who fades unremarkably into the background, whom you struggle to recall years later, even after seeing the disturbing headline, the grainy photograph, the feral stare, groping to understand the pain that must have always been there.
(1:12 p.m.) Remarkably, no world leader has ever been photographed at this instant, in any time zone. When this was brought to light in a tour-de-force of investigative journalism at Le Monde, in 1974, the paparazzi protested by photographing statutes of public figures.
(3:33 p.m.) You might recall that this rogue moment was outlawed in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1888. Riots bloomed like red flowers in the marketplace.
(0:00 p.m.) This mythical creature roves the margins of time-study circles like a hulking shadow in the temperate rain forest. It has fueled the sagas of native populations for centuries. Only its footprints have been observed.

In my dreams we always ford the river.

In the wagon I cover you with blankets

when you sleep. You often dream of ghosts

while I hunt bison wherever bison live.

The ghosts are vegetarian, your heart

is April wind, raindrops the size of half dollars.

We never hire the Indian guide. Instead,

we keep the five dollars, roll it up, hide

it in my wool sock. You look better in 3D.

I touch your breasts with my fingertips.

Then I touch your breasts with my whole

hand. I swallow the idea of independence,

finding the West before the dirt was soiled

by factories that build heat-seeking missiles,

amusement parks, & chain restaurants.

Chimney Rock is underwhelming. I spit

in the cracks of the rock, tiny crevices

that hide who the fuck knows. You are hot

shit & the other carpenters from Ohio

are jealous. They think about your hair

while they’re inside their wives, think about

your dimple while they try to repair the axle

on their wagon. True love is finding wild

fruit. We eat without bibs. By rivers I sleep

easy, knowing you’re cleaning the clothes nearby.

Of course you can be an Aristotelian Buddhist. Just subtract final and material causes and add withdrawal (emptiness).
It makes much more sense, from a luminosity point of view, than thinking that reality is an illusion subtended by a transcendental beyond. Reality is like an illusion. The like is the key word.

Claiming that Buddhists don't think or appreciate substances is just nihilism or atomism disguised as Buddhism. Buddhists chop wood and carry water. They brush their teeth.

If you had to choose between “wanting sex,” to varying degrees, 78% of times, but no one ever wanting or consenting to have sex with you, or “chopping your dick off” but people wanting to have sex with you, to varying degrees, 78% of times, which would you choose and why?

probably chop my dick off.  i had a thought a few weeks ago about being myself but without any genitals, and it seemed nice to think about.  just like, being me but, with no major sex organs at all.
 

Of recent vintage, the term Frankensteining has come to mean a conglomeration of features that don’t necessarily go together, that result in a massive hybrid misfire. The Tower of Babel was a kind of linguistic Frankensteining. Dreams often occupy the landscape of Frankensteining. A corridor looks like a corridor, a stairway looks like a stairway, but they go nowhere, attached to the Verrazano Bridge or San Francisco Bay. In the sartorial department, mothers are keen to have found the word when their daughters are about to leave the house. The word conveys the sentiment, you’re going out in the street in that? Reference to Frankensteining means for the anxious mothers: a scary mismatch of too much skin and too little clothing. 

King Kong Syndrome refers to unchecked growth: a lichen turns into a sequoia, a shrimp grows to the size of a mastodon, a small town becomes a mega-metropolis, something usually Lilliputian becomes Brobdingnabian. A few blocks of houses, a park or two, small apartment buildings, and businesses are razed, giving way to towering skyscrapers whose groundfloor tenants are chain-drug stores, franchise cellphone dealerships, and real estate agents. The stoops and storefronts you used to pass have been replaced by mirrored glass, so all you see is yourself as you walk. There is nothing to eat in these mini-universes but Cheez Doodles and Sprite.

Karl Freund was the cameraman who filmed the 1920 version of Der Golem. Before immigrating to the United States in 1929, he shot Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and F. W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh. Freund returned to Germany to rescue his daughter, but his former wife remained behind, only to be murdered when she was transferred from Ravensbruck to the Bernburg Euthanasia Center. Freund went on to shoot Key Largo and direct American horror films, eventually becoming the head cameraman for I Love Lucy. Paul Wegener, the director of Der Golem, who also acted in the role of the clay creature come to life, continued to make films in Germany and was awarded a commendation from Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels.

At the American Museum of Natural History in New York there is an exhibit containing models of underwater sulfide chimneys, structures discovered on the Juan de Fuca Ridge which lies off the coast of Oregon and Washington state. Marine geologists named these colossal volcanic pile-ups Godzillas. Strange forms of life, tube worms as long as cars, blind crabs, and micro-shrimp able to withstand high temperatures and intense pressure make their homes on the massive structures. The highest Godzilla was measured at 47 meters. According to the Museum, it collapsed into a pile of sea rubble in 1996, but by the next year a second spire, about 20 meters high and counting, had grown in its place. As complete as their obliteration may appear, Godzillas never die. Vast amounts of mineral-laden, boiling-hot water circulate through the ocean ridge system; the beast is continually reborn.

Why Can’t We leave Buddha alone? We make Buddha ride an elephant like the way a village boy rides on a man’s shoulder, and we let Buddha run and play, then make him cry, and we make him couple blissfully with a buttery woman and call it Tantra, but then we make him smile by himself in emptiness, make him sit, lie down, make him be born from the waist, then teach him how to walk right away, and we question him when he lies down to sleep You said this and that didn’t you? and we braid his fingers, cut off his nose and swallow it down with water, then dress him in gold, but then we cut his throat and sell his head at a store in Insadong, and we lock him up inside a cave on top of a mountain, and as if that weren’t enough we keep him inside a rock, starve him, paint his skin gold so that he can’t even breathe, have him stand far away on top of a mountain and caress him slowly as we approach him by boat, and beneath his feet we beg him to beat us up. Why can’t we leave him alone? We build a house on a cliff overlooking a blue river and lock him up, and a bunch of us go together to gawk at him. We pummel him, crush him, and push him over, then we come home and write a letter of apology in blood from our pierced fingers, and we pull his teeth and divide them up into numerous pouches and give them out to the whole world, and why do we go near him and bow on our knees till they are raw and look once into his eyes then return home with our downcast faces?

like summer melon hit by a part from a washing machine

Offended, I rose up and killed the jackal. I trampled his body underfoot and flung it into the ravine.

“Rimbaud’s cruelty is nothing next to mine!” I gloated as I walked towards the horizon that was writhing in the terrible heat at mid-day.

Shortly after three o’clock, I entered the alabaster city and stood among its trembling houses.

A missionary leaped out of a church door and thrust a devotional tract into my hands.

“Profit by the Word or reap the Whirlwind!” she brayed.

I folded her into a pamphlet in which I wrote a polemic of my own in favor of Cruelty.

A soldier flew at me, lance glinting in a sun whose only purpose is to engender maggots.

“Hooligan!” he shouted, hoarse with indignation.

Laughing, I wrapped a python round his ankles so that he fell on his lance.  Then, for good measure, I twisted it.

“Oh, you are a cruel bastard!” he said with his dying breath.

An avenging angel swooped down from the roof. Gathering his iron skirts, he clattered towards me, his ancient face rouged with rust.

I disliked him immediately and toppled him with sharp words.

To punish my impieties, God caused Himself to be lowered from the empyrean by an ingenious system of ropes and pulleys.

“I don’t give that”—I snapped my fingers theatrically—“for such a clumsy and old-hat ex machina!”

Nature shuddered, but what was Nature to me? I rolled up my sleeves and prepared to do violence to the Almighty, Ancient of Days.

I shredded Him.

And He repaired Himself.

I crumbled Him.

And He restored Himself.

I dispersed Him.

And He reconstituted Himself.

I blew Him to bits with everlasting sticks of dynamite.

And He reassembled Himself.

I sundered Him, and He rejoined Himself. I interrupted Him, and He resumed Himself. I adjourned Him, and He reconvened Himself. I perforated Him, and He performed holy acts of closure. I peeled Him, but He only laughed—the old fox!—and could not be tricked into repealing Himself in order to end up sitting among the superannuated gods.

And now God went on the offensive.

He beat me with trees and stony crags of mountains. With millstones and fluted columns did He beat me, and also with small Rhenish castles. (He drubbed me and dashed me—don’t for a moment imagine otherwise! And He dunked me in oceans as well!) Afterwards we grappled, and there was an uncomfortable entanglement of molecules—ignoble and divine—that was disentangled only with great difficulty.

I was, however, unimpressed: He hardly made a dent in me.

“Ha!” I scoffed.

And though He opened the ground and showed me the running fire, the fuse, and the unraveling cable that binds together all things—I scorned Him.

Disheartened, He climbed back into the machine and made His slow and creaking ascent—an old man, never to set foot on earth again.

Nature groaned and shook dust into the air, covering the sun.

I traveled on, to a country untenanted by man, and stood before a mirror in an otherwise empty room.

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall—who’s the cruelest of them all?” I asked.

“You,” said the mirror.

And so, having become the epitome of cruelty, I renounced it at last, and took up goodness with all the relentlessness that is in my nature.

But what a fine wallow I had in the days of extreme cruelty!