The Furrow

I am sitting in a café in Seattle, and just about every third person is typing away on a laptop while they drink their cafés and munch on their cookies. And as I look at a row of six of them facing me, I am surprised to notice that they all have this slight furrow in the middle of their foreheads. Mac loyalists, PC users, white, non-white, male, female, with headphones or without…all united by a tight little crunch between the eyebrows. Whatever they all are doing must be very important and/or *very* hard. And all of the jaws are firmly shut; probably so that none of the critical thoughts slip out onto the floor. One woman even has to stop typing occasionally to massage that little area of brainy muscle.

Along this wall there is only one person who does not have a laptop. She is scrawling away with pen on paper. Her brow is not furrowed. Her mouth is slightly open. She pauses frequently to look around and stretch, and sometimes after a stretch she laughs lightly but visibly to herself for a moment before beginning to write again.

Here’s a test. Another laptopper just sat down. Lid open…food and beverage carefully placed next to the computer…purse and coat arranged just so…fingers to keyboard and…yep! There it is. The forehead squeeze. Ha! ‘Eleanor Rigby’ just came on.

However, I must admit, I think that’s exactly how I look when I drive.

The Problem of Her

The problem (as if there is a single problem to blame) is that I was some-where – more than a place – and then I was no longer there. Well, that in more ways than one. So to clarify: I don’t mean ‘there’ in the sense of a relationship with her and then no longer in a relationship with her and so expelled from ‘there’. That exile is all for the good, since I am not a Victorian formalist nor so hooked on image and solutions that I can't engage my humor. To clarify for real: what I mean is that I was a loose-leaf clown, a curious scholar, softened and…stable? …-ized? I was in there being out here. In other words, when I walked into that room and saw her for the first time I felt more comfortable in confusion than I feel today. I had accepted the ambiguity. Believing in…in…in…inside enough to see outside.

BUT THEN I ALLOWED (YES I MUST ADMIT THAT I **ALLOWED** IT TO BE THAT WAY) A HUMAN BEING TO FEED THE CATCH PLACES AND MAKE ME GRIP INTO THE PAST/FUTURE ONCE AGAIN. That stupid aesthetic distraction from what is happening. The ugliness of beauty. Beauty as ‘obsession for stillness’ rather than ‘comfortable disruption’. And that in some sense I saw the corpse of that pattern stand up and begin wandering around my bedroom, packing an overnight bag over and over and over. That I retreated from my place of besieging to a position of besieged. Because the moat is just a deep line on the ground full of water when it rains (and it rains all the time, doesn’t it?) and sometimes the garden and the castle shift sides. No, they don’t move across the moat. That’s stupidly obvious. We would see the stones and flowers passing one another as they crossed the bridge and hence blow it to smithereens at all costs to prevent that sort of transaction. The castle sometimes just crumbles and is recuperated by the soil, and the garden grows into an exchange economy all its own and builds useful – turning to useless – structures.

Well, the castle kind of fell down. And the scaffolding didn’t get put up all the way. So now I have pipes and bars and metal joints and bricks lying around on the ground, feathered with fragrant flower petals. And I’m scared that I have to start over, and that I will start over and just do the same damn thing. You know…build a structure in honor of another human being. But no. Of course not. This failure is fine. Because it’s not the problem of her. It’s the problem of me. It’s all mine, and so I get the rubble. And I know what to do with it for now.

Lord Chandos's Language Problems

It was my junior year in college, and I was playing the role of Voltemand in Hamlet. Never heard of Voltemand, you say? That is likely because his lines are the first that directors chop in their efforts to bring Shakespeare’s enormous script down to something of a manageable production. Voltemand is an ultra-obscure character with about five lines. He’s the kind of character that scholars do mounds of impossibly improbable research on in order to make themselves feel as though they can magically create something meaningful out of nothing at all. Suffice it to say that I had ample off-stage time to do my homework during evening rehearsals.

So there in the lobby I sat one evening, all five or so lines memorized, reading some Russian novel for my literature course. I was a good reader. A strong reader. I always had been. I drank in the words and accepted the various flavors that each author sought to provide my literary taste-buds. Little did I realize how liquid words could actually be. As I read about Anna’s approach to the tracks or Alyosha’s mystical misfortunes (why can’t I recall what, specifically, I was reading?), my psyche began to question the promise that the words had always fulfilled. I wondered why these particular groupings of words in arrangements called sentences meant anything at all. How did this structuring of signs equate to some cohesive and significant story that could then be interpreted? Furthermore, what about the make-up of these letters into representations called words? These agreed-upon compositions of symbols were supposed to mean something to me? Was the glue supposed to be in my head, or on the page?

I read the present sentence. I read it again. It made no sense…or…I didn’t know what to make of it. All significance was suddenly drained out of these now hollow characters. I gave up and concentrated on a word. Nothing. This book full of pages full of chapters full of sentences full of words full of letters was supposed to be telling me something, but I didn’t understand how or why.

I was in crisis. I was a junior Theatre/English double-major who had forgotten how to read.

And in that moment I flashed back to Mr. Darby’s fourth grade class, where one afternoon, in the midst of a larger problem while doing my accelerated math class work, two plus two no longer equalled four. I mean, I knew it was supposed to add up to four, but I didn’t know why it should beyond having been told that it must. Why? How? I told Mr. Darby that I had forgotten how to add. He laughed until he realized that I was serious, at which point he chided me. I shrugged my shoulders and wrote down ‘four’.

Numbers and I made amends. Words and I have never been as fortunate. Ever since that crisis I have remained a slow reader. I get through it, but I limp along, sometimes having to read the same sentence over three or four times before accepting it. I feel awkward, slow, constantly compensatory.

Today, however, I came across Hofmannsthal’s “The Letter of Lord Chandos”, and somehow I feel a little bit less alone in this…a bit more modern, if nothing else…

“But the crisis cuts even deeper still, for Chandos finally loses his faith in the reliability of language as such. One day, when talking to his daughter and trying to impress upon her the necessity of always telling the truth, the concepts emanating from his mouth begin to dissolve, to take on an irridescent coloring, and to flow over into one another so that he is still unable to complete the sentence and runs away in a kind of panic. All of which means that Chandos is beginning to realize affectively what Saussure was beginning to formulate scientifically at about the same time: that language is an arbitrary system and that there is a gap between the illusory security afforded by language and the fluid complexity of reality.

Having lost the blinkers imposed upon him by socially sanctioned discourse, Chandos finds himself forced to listen to himself thinking and to scrutinize his language, a process that he describes as ‘unheimlich’ – a German word that literally means ‘uncanny’ but also carries connotations of not being at home. Indeed, Chandos likens this process of self-scrutiny to the experience of looking at the skin on his little finger through a magnifying glass: what he had taken for granted turns into something strange so that his skin looks like a ploughed field full of hollows and furrows. As a result, the familiar world starts to dissolve; everything begins to fragment; and the resultant fragments turn into even smaller fragments that Chandos cannot capture conceptually. As part of this process of disintegration, language itself becomes strange, and words, when scrutinized closely, induce a sense of vertigo in Chandos that makes him feel his is falling into a void.”

Spider

Perhaps I should sleep during the day. The light fuels slumber. The dark seems fertile soil for disquiet.

When the sun ignites above the borderline, peace arrives and the pillow encourages dreams. Concern-less.

When the sun burns out below the horizon, my mental limbs come alive like Cégeste’s lifeless body lifting away from the ground. Fear-full.

What does it take to be here?

Just Before Dawn

I stopped singing love songs to myself the in the pre-dawn hours of the day, for fear I was no longer fabulous. This is the reckoning he said would come, when pleasure forgets to lubricate your joints, and the putridness of poisonous tequila petrifies your bloodstream.

I instead heard insidious, whispery refrains of misplaced choices and unproductive failures. I relived the intolerable imperfections and historical lacking of my whimsy. The sad strings of an empty and solitary future wept and whined, manufactured by my own mistakes. The green monster slithered about, clenching my brain stem and boring its way through my cerebral cortex.

An artificial ultraviolet light streamed in between the silhouetted door and the carpet. My hands became as heavy and immobile as two bricks of lead. This isn’t music. My ear is fixed to the floor. My field of vision limited to the sounds I can’t see. There is no music. There is only a cacophony of oversight and underestimation; the product of ideals with no courage…dreams with no ambition. Barren and bereft.

Get the fuck up.

The Situation

“It has become essential to bring about a complete spiritual transformation by bringing to light forgotten desires and by creating entirely new ones. And by carrying out an intensive propaganda in favour of these desires.”
-Ivan Chtcheglov

“People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what it positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.”
-Raoul Vaneigem

Sprouting

you-pry-open-the-door-of-the-outhouse-of-i'mnotgoodenough-and-
suck-in-a-lungfull-of-fresh-air-as-the-stench-of-the-shit-and-waste-
of-your-unprovocative-and-solitary-existence-pours-out-thick-against-
the-back-of-your-head-catching-you-mottling-you-tempting-you-
holding-you-seducing-you-terrifying-you-thrilling-you-murdering-your-
freeing-you-between-what-you-have-always-been-
and...what......you............might........................be

the sea of pink liquid in your belly swallows
churns
are you allowed to be loved
are you sure

you've been in here a long time now
since
you never tried the door
it has never been locked

beauty opens
open vomits
vomit mutes
mute

quickly now
speak your truth
before it drowns in its own momentum
separate it from your fiction
write yourself a new one

i you

a tiny death

This spine cracks
splinters

revealing more bone

exposing a half pound of faulty rhythm
These shoulders roll forward and back
twitchingly

trying to relieve the compressed capillaries

crushing cartilage
This sternum plunges into the cavity of this stomach

strings and percussion

antagonistic notes
Flesh tears away from your third dimension
making room
and the compass needle spasms for a north

the ecstasy burns
the ecstasy burns

your eyes moisten to douse the flames
yes
you are allowed

They unfurl
...shredding your heavily fortified corpse
...reminding your heart what it's for
...breaking away
...inviting life

The viscous joints unhinge and drip
Sleepy sinews stretch and whine
animate
Oddity retakes your ground bound eye
lifiting it skyward
and the clouds design angels
to join the descent

Drink

the universe

at once

Each divide

a new birth

feel the shiny feathers preen peel
and fill the creaking void
wisp the air
shudder themselves alive

These plumed appendages are not yours to direct
They do not direct you

Lifted soft by air
Sprung into the question
Draining the emptiness
Ringing the moon
Responsive only to love
Defiant of gravity
Shrinking from intention

Tips of toes tickle the ground
Your flight must fail
All the rest is frenzy

Singing at the Crack

Put your arm around your critic's shoulders
stuff a gasoline-soaked rag in its mouth
juggle fire badly
and sing while you do it

The bombs and bullets are irrelevant
the information is critical
the media is weaponized
targetted and targetting

Sing

Sing right at the crack

Conspiracy Theory

the near side
i am my mother’s son
she calls for
she calls at
what was easy
now at rest and not at peace
she reveals conspiracies that i know not of
in which i am intimately involved
and i am becoming a warrior
idle of body feverish of mind
please spin
please
far side near
choice subjected to inertia
intertia becomes the boy
the boy
becomes
the man

Still Ocean

A vast, circulating ocean contained within a still body.

Listen
Can you hear that sloshing around?
It is your blood ebbing and flowing through your conduits

Who is this castaway abandoned from its seas?
Where is the ship adrift?
What turbulence has de-populated the horizon?

hiding within you
kindness is stranded

you only need
toss yourself back in

to its current

The Filter

"...what this means for the consumer is an outpouring of religious zeal in honour of the commodity's sovereign freedom. Waves of enthusiasm for particular products, fuelled and boosted by the communications media, are propagated with lightning speed. A film sparks a fashion craze, or a magazine launches a chain of clubs that in turn spins off a line of products. The sheer fad item perfectly expresses the fact that, as the mass of commodities becomes more and more absurd, absurdity becomes a commodity in its own right." (Plant)

"Have you ever considered a career in total revolution?" Yes. I have applied to myself for the position.