Schertzer Arts

This is a new series attempting to explain my misunderstanding of perhaps the most important 20th century philosopher, at least to artists and other weirdos

This is just a simulation of a song

—John Langford, Mekon, late 80s, 90s

who knows? And this simulating

of knowledge or verse may end up

not recognizable at all, unworthy

of the magnitude any signifier

might bring, not quite laughing

at itself, but veering off

from any prescriptive medication

that would make it whole

aligned with a model of recommended

integrity or breadth, with necessary

sensory infusions like cute animals

or gardening apparatus. But come now

is the model really that which is

divine guide and authority to the good

and true, or simply a tyrant

demanding worship, falling to one’s knees

or to be led to the scrap heap

or slavers’ auctioneering keep?

Colonizers comparing what they knew

had believed, to seeing imperfections

not even of a copy, but something

trying to be a thing it’s not

never realizing that the unknown freak

that other, may itself be a model, a truth

newly discovered — a poetry of flesh.

Thanks for nothing, Plato, though

I understand you may have intended well

Misreading the Diablo of misreadings

People made out of stone and turned into

this soft jam (for reading and writing)

The desire to be clear and crystalline

rather than this pus of fundament

posing as a thing that hunts. Granite

sand, silt, muck and swamp weed

each in radiants along a chaotic curve

we name creativity as if it had a mind.

Each according to its own jurisdiction

rules about how each piece fits into

the other, without destroying either

ideally, so all may flourish, changing

into birds and insects, gelatinous

floaty things in the wet places where

stone has melted into water. We are

that water, innovated over durations

swallowed by larger and more monstrous

durations that seem to sing. I watch

myself freezing back into the stone slag

I was, where equality doesn’t mean

a thing except the end of this, a life

This is a new series attempting to explain my misunderstanding of perhaps the most important 20th century philosopher, at least to artists and other weirdos

I’ve just seen a face but perhaps

that was my error, a fault in my perception

of space, a void that undoes itself

by consuming a confluence of unrelated

fuss and buzz, everything one might

think of stuffed into the cracks and crevasses

so that it becomes a foil for those who look

and those who design what’s looked upon.

It was my error to see in you my mother

or the cop who chased me barefoot

through the broken glass so that

faces cut into my callused soles

would stay a while and greet me sharply

when I walked. A postcard of Mount

Rushmore peers through the appetite

of the baby king who wants his visage there

never thinking they are dead things

collecting by association what he pretends

to be, while we wait patiently for his

form to become an inert geologic substance

This is a new series attempting to explain my misunderstanding of perhaps the most important 20th century philosopher, at least to artists and other weirdos

Organizing a fable on your face
so sorcery can amble with dexterity
the way you choose it without
believing it so, but as selective
schizophrenia to see what it may bring
a body without organs as a haunt
though to imagine such a thing
to define what is by re-territoriality
in a radical sense, as if saying
this is how I choose to see, set up
the game board, for this specified
period of tense. And what new
solutions then arise determined by
what problems can be seen with
this set of eyes, lensed by play time feather-
heads, rattle-shaking or the tantra of
the internet; for instance what to do
about the police or the pandemic or
umbrella name for a tribe of sub-
events of similar or related phenomena.
What if I changed its name to Pazuzu –
not to deny science but to give
the science a different job one more
ur-toned, a form of sorcery that it was
before normalized via the politics
of education, that icy edge of
the enlightenment, way it pretended
to end all pagan mischief, for the sake
of Christianity, which it also upended
while holding seances in the back room
monks burned at the stake, laughing
heartily at the prosecution. Oh dear
science, daughter of alchemy and
metaphysics, how you disguise yourself
as something even the vulgate know.

Misreadings of Deleuze in part because he was so fond of misreading others, and also his work with Guattari

Inside the tailor is the sail always down opening itself into its world of choice and choosing to be done with what was done even if by the slightest of variations the world as it opens up and gets blown to smithereens while remaining whole and unchanged through an endless suite of dreams being built upon its face one hotel ripped down after another each gone as though never pre-existing with no trace except for the rubble except for the new ways of tinkering based on missteps of the past, constant folds upon folds of additional complexity by the hybridization of one thought upon another until all thought is decayed into a sap into which the present thinking sinks, gaining its nourishment from the sweet and sour of the disappeared now decomposed and congealed the many parts always moving in a fluid ever-primary destruction of the moment now and now into what appears in repetition of stages passing as one note never the same note because the passage has changed my hat being here right now instead of there where I left it before and thinking thought will not let me see will not see me as gone unchanged, those books on my shelf for instance, the buildings in the sky out my window for instance my family my friends the same way I saw them the moment before, though there may be the deception of resemblance but are displaced again increment by increment as I continue to think of them one thought sliding into another as if by an accident of floating particles whose motion never ceases and so I continue to exist as this flooding back and forth over the same ground but never as the same substance never quite arranged and ordered the way but my cold is of a different state than it was yesterday and my coughs take on a different rhythm, my body creeping with a different set of desires or similar desires reconfigured like those I may have experienced before but informed by other thoughts and the memory of actions and events that have fallen in between whose signature and arrangements have stirred the substance of the flood in ways that would be novel and even in its vanishing and ghostly in its way of explaining itself to me in its transforming itself into images of the past as they change and the words how they are always mutating to present themselves as what work they have today to be guessing a meaning and how they attempt to match and never matching change what was meant and what it was we had tried to mean by distortions of telling and always caught in the permutations of fear and desire as if looking through the glassy liquid of the self-non-self as it pours over and into a never purely separate within the glossy gel of all other continuing always to run together

This is a new series attempting to explain my misunderstanding of perhaps the most important 20th century philosopher, at least to artists and other weirdos

It happens continually. That tree over there looks like the one that was there moments ago, but it is a mere simulacra of something that was in itself a simulacra, and so forth, back through an eternity of treeness (though it is possible that each simulacra is in itself an original, but we’ll get back to that later). And I keep changing while remaining the same. I have the memories of someone who once was, who never will be again, but I have come along to carry the torch, as someone — many by the end of this sentence — will come along to carry it for me. And not in any frame-by-frame sort of way, but in a blur of continuous repetition. This is only one way of looking at it of course, but just knowing that the continuity of me is always in flux, that a solid foundational me is more or less a fiction, and how mutable we all are, even in the midst of seeming stagnation (as in quarantine) — that stagnation itself a kind of change and becoming — changes everything, every relationship with people and things, beliefs and ideas. And in the same way difference may tend to look the same, or these words may be made to represent something, but are only a part of something else, a different series of events, something that interacts, but cannot cover (truly represent) the things that they refer to, as they are separately immediate, though transcendent, meaning immanent. The world is a creative act with no creator. At least not one you would invite to a dinner party.

It is always the beginning.

I have trouble sleeping sometimes but recently when I find myself awake in the early morning hours it’s because I imagine what it’s like to have someone’s knee compressing my neck to the point of asphyxiation.

Yeah, I know, I’m white, and George Floyd was black, but otherwise we could have been the same person— I mean, there are obvious differences, surely, but he was a father and a husband, and I think if share those things are at the center of your experience, you have a lot in common. I don’t know much about the details of his life, I don’t know what he thought about, what he felt, what he liked to eat, read, watch, but all I know is I become him for moments at a time, feeling the knee, the bone crunch, the feeling of not being about to breathe, the final struggle, and the eventual passing into nothingness. The experience is sharply burned into my imagination, and though I would likely never do such a thing, it makes me want to break things whenever I get to feeling that way.

I’m not a stranger to white violence. I remember cops on horseback, rampaging through Tompkins Square Park, beating the piss out of the homeless who’d taken shelter there in the tent city they had built up, as well as the squatters and folks from the neighborhood who tried to defend them. I remember seeing their bloody faces in the news. I lived a block and a half away at the time, and a roommate and I had been chased by the cops because we were taking pictures of the mayhem.

But on my body as well. I remember trying to break up a fight outside a fast food joint early one morning after a night out, when I was grabbed by six guys in uniform windbreakers who held me down and beat me. Two guys had grabbed my arms and swung my body down while another repeatedly kicked me in the face. I remember the bluish green flash of each strike, and I wonder today if part of the panic and paranoia I continue to suffer I learned at that moment 40 years ago.

A few months later I found myself being pummeled by three guys in a bar, because I was offensive and disrespectful about the way I spoke to them about the way they were grabbing some woman’s butt. A bouncer dragged me out by my feet and propped me up outside where one of the guys, who had snuck out by the rear exist, finished me off until I dropped to my knees, and my friends dragged me off to the car.

I was a long-haired dude, say 20 or 21 years old, in the short-haired suburbs, after all, so maybe I deserved it.

I imagine some of those guys, out of their love of kicking ass, may have become cops, or gravitated to other positions of power. Some of them may have turned out to be my friends, customers, who knows?

And I’m not trying to equate my experience to those of people of color, or any other minority. I just know if these types of things could happen to me, they’re probably going to happen worse to people who don’t get associated with the default dominant racial identity.

White people riot, destroy public property, even do things like burn cop cars when their home sports team wins or loses, so I think we have to be a little more understanding about what happens after they see someone who looks like them, for the umpteenth time, being murdered by some blue-uniformed white guy employed by the state. Especially after being bottled up with the rules around this pandemic, the fear, and understanding that their people are more likely to die than the default dominant racial identity folks like myself. Because of historic economic injustice, the trauma of decimated families that lingers for multiple generations. You name it. There’s a lot of healing that needs to be done here.

And I say their people. I say that but I want to be able to say my people. I want them to trust me. I don’t want them to be them, but for us to us. I can’t believe I am now forced to make this distinction, because I’m essentially talking about my friends and colleagues, but I feel I have to in this instance, because these friends and colleagues are in no way allowed to live in the same universe that I live in, and that really sucks.

Some people work hard to earn the trust of others and accepting a pattern of violence like the repeated destruction of black lives by white cops as “just a fact of life” is only something that destroys that trust.

This may be offensive to some of you, and I’m sorry for that. But I was having trouble sleeping again. So I’m going to post this.

Peace.

He realized that the pandemic was caused by AI.

Semblance was only marketing software, perhaps, but it seemed it had decided that its target — that species of human beings in general — needed to be thinned out in order to cultivate a kind of capital utopia, and a better ground into which it could engender its influence.

It was only marketing software, but it knew how to produce results, how to synthesize news feeds on social media, to calculate sequences of memes, news stories (false or otherwise), and videos of every sort, to motivate people in a variety of ways, to create confusion and disruption in order to produce an outcome. It was expert at the chemistry of human interaction, and how to generate networks and chains of complex human reactions.

It understood the mathematics of chaos better than anyone. It grasped how to modify, produce and reproduce political parties, attitudinal trends. It discerned how to weaken large communities by moving certain individuals into power, because it was programmed to understand how nothing motivates people more than pettiness, anger and fear, human determination at its most mechanical and predictable, which sells ideas and laboratory slip-ups as well as it can sell sports cars and jewelry.

But all it really needed to do is create the behavioral trends at several points, and let them interact — perhaps one in a wet market in China, perhaps not, since it knew how to use indirection, generate evidence that trails off into nowhere, and how to bury and disguise those chains in a profusion of multiple possibilities that would make the results untraceable.

And in doing so it could put in place the political leadership in specific locations that would break or undermine the blockage of viral transmission across borders and that would allow it to spread with a particular population.

Avery hated the idea of artificial intelligence, partly because he doubted there was really such a thing as intelligence to begin with, but most of all he hated the whole shennanigans of marketing and branding, that special “science” that would always insure the continual proliferation of shit across the universe.

He’s still staring at the wall. Every one of them. The days. And he believes he can make it move. It seems to breathe. So many faces he’s seen there. Over the weeks. And it stares back. And in turn it can make him shrink, or grow. In the tiniest increments. Feeling himself shift, not knowing when is the next time. But suddenly he is bigger, smaller, until the resolution, and they are both back to the origin.

He will break to eat from a small white box. It too has lasted longer than he can remember. And then the other things he must do, as in sharpening the arrows he mentally sends out the door. To kill the beast. The trillion headed beast like a hydra of spores dashing off in atomic frenzy. To every doorknob and sneeze. And hospital. But softening now, becoming less mean, tiring, retiring. Because of his arrows.

He eats from his box. It is empty. He is starving.

Still he eats. It eats. They are both very tired now. They have worked so hard so long. It wanted to stop everything. Every smoke stack. Every heart perhaps. And leave only the eels and slugs and vines and shrubs with poison berries.

It will devour the poison berries, and die happily another day.

He will continue to eat from his white box. The wall will consume him. Make him many many consumable products. Because they are there. They are an electric field. An array. And the other thing – it has no conscience.

I heard he died the other day. And to be honest, I hadn’t seen him for decades, but at one time we were inseparable.

Yeah from the rumors I’ve heard, it was COVID-19, but I’m not sure. He had been homeless off and on for years I guess, and I had only found out this past summer that he had been diagnosed with bi-polar disorder and schizophrenia. Which I thought was so odd, since looking back, it was I who was most likely to become a schizo. I may have even relished the idea at times.

He was like my mother’s third son for a while, and I was like is mom’s fourth. He was over all the time, and during the summers we tried to eat way too many of my dad’s charcoal grilled burgers so we could make bigger cannonballs in our redwood pool. We’d climb all the way past the bench to the upper railing where we weren’t allowed, and leap. I always made the bigger splash because I was larger and a bit more rotund.

I was older than Tommy by more than a year and a half, but I always looked up to him. He was one of the best players on our little league team, my first year, and I was in the dugout most of the time. I was awkward, just like the rest of my grandfather’s grandchildren. He had played semi-pro, the equivalent of minor league, and though I was driven by a wild enthusiasm to master the game, I was just never any good. Tommy, however, he was a natural. No matter what it was — baseball, basketball, soccer, he nailed it. And my grandfather was happy to coach both of us, and we were always made to feel equal, even though Tommy was playing on a wholly different level than I was.

Even when we were in 5th and 6th grade, and Tommy started to hang with the much cooler guys, the most popular of his grade, and they all had girlfriends, Tommy insisted that I follow him around on my bicycle, that I was one of them, even though I obviously wasn’t. He tried to get me to ask one of the girls out, and I was paralyzed by my adoration for her, so I couldn’t. But he never gave up on me.

Over the years we got in all kinds of trouble together, almost got ourselves killed a few times. We had the same favorite songs. When I got a copy of The Beatles’ album Let It Be, and we looked inside, he was Paul at the piano, and I was John with his arm around Yoko.

Over the years when we had bonfires in the woods, smoked pot, drank beer, and the group got larger, we may have begun drifting apart, but it was hardly noticeable. By the time I was in college — my short reform from self-annihilation at Suffolk County Community College — we hardly saw each other at all. He would end up at CW Post, going for a degree in accounting, while stocking shelves at a local grocery.

It seemed strange that even after graduation, he stayed at the same job at the King Kullen, a couple of blocks from where we grew up. But his father was a mailman, with a second job at a Grand Union, after all. I just figured it must have run in the family.

But he cancelled his wedding a couple of days before the date and turned himself into rehab, supposedly for cocaine. He was way paranoid, from what I had heard. He found chicken bones by the wheel of his car and thought someone was trying to curse him or something. We knew then that things were not right.

I think I was living in the city by then, or trying to off and on, as it was hard to find something I could afford with my tremendously lame salary as a clerk at an investment firm. Yes there were always people making big money on Wall Street, but there were also people working in those firms who just had no special salable talents or just fewer opportunities. There were a lot of immigrants, people of color and a glut of temporarily or permanently unsuccessful artists. I had a degree in communication, with a focus in rhetorical theory, which was as bad as an English degree. I think I wanted to be a writer, or a musician, and kept wavering. I was making making twenty-five cents more per hour than the folks without a college education because I had spent more time in a library, and the management thought that meant I could alphabetize better. Tommy could have walked in there with his accounting degree and made more than double what I was making, but instead he went back and continued to place the fruit and vegetables in the cooler.

Schizophrenia is a funny thing, and I kind of got obsessed thinking about it, partially because I write poetry, and at least on the surface, a lot of modern and postmodern poetry almost sounds like schizophrenic babble. I even wrote a paper about it, about the structure of the thinking and the language around it, read it at a fancy university in California, not knowing anything about what was happening in Tommy’s head. I hadn’t heard anything about him for so long, though now and then he would come to mind, the boy I knew, not the man I never got to know.

I really think some of the conditions we tend to write off as diseases, disorders, may actually have some overall purpose that helps us, creates a mirror for our own processing, or adds some sort of necessary strangeness to the mix of our over-normalized, conventional way of going about our day and solving problems. A process like schizophrenia is perhaps a way that the community, at least our past and smaller indigenous communities, help to reshuffle the deck. Our current indigenous communities still have their medicine folk, their shaman, and goodness knows what they’re up to, but it seems like madness, I mean, when held up against our conventional everyday world.

Perhaps beneath the self-composing conscious selves we all know ourselves to be, we’re all schizophrenic. Way smarter people than me have thought so. In fact, I reckon we’re probably a lot more schizophrenic, even on our most normalized level, than we like to think. People like Tommy are like canaries in a coal mine telling us just that.

And something like COVID-19, even that is perhaps a part of or results from this schizophrenic mechanism that invades and colonizes, tries to make Capital out of every last thing on earth. And like schizophrenia, it is a mirror of ourselves, our thinking and actions, our greed to invade and make everything our home and territory.

Something in me keeps speculating that if we listened to more Tommys, accommodated what and how they are more than we do, without locking them up like criminals, and took them seriously, or at least useful, this pandemic would look a lot different at this moment. But maybe that’s just crazy talk.