Schertzer Arts

After several weeks of economic shutdown due to the pandemic, as well as the fallout, the decisions made, they realized ever more that the world was being run by a shady group of corporate elites, so a group of kung fu-trained schizoanalysts and anarchist hackers organized a secret community with an aim toward tapping into the investments of billionaires to pay for food, rent and medical treatment for the most vulnerable, and thereby prove once and for all that the faux moralizing contribution-based order was a canard. But no one was interested in buying the story, partially because the big houses feared offending their benefactors and nobody knew what a schizoanalyst was.

There were so many things about it that depressed him, but reading that people of color were at a greater risk, and suffered to a greater extent than his supposed own people just took everything out of him. And he just lay in bed, in a kind of paralyzed conscious coma.

Maybe it was just because he wanted to complain, wanted to feel justification for his complaining, because he often felt so miserable about everything. But he hoped it was something more meaningful than that, something that would lift him out of the wretchedness he felt himself to be — maybe, possibly, somewhere down below all the cringe-worthy narcissistic malaise was something like empathy.

He recognized that there was this heroic drive in everyone, something like a continuum stretched between honest desire to do good, even great things, and a mere selfish desire to feel one’s greatness, and have the recognition of others. Any hard-core Star Wars fan knew that.

Dan felt that within the confusing heap of muck he knew of himself there was no way to pick through it all, every fragment of fantasy, and figure out which way he leaned, though he feared it was toward a fealty to some glorified sense of self. Still, he thought, even that it may be possible to put this ugly underbelly to work and reap some good of it.

But it was hopeless, because even if he could believe in the most selfless possible self he might imagine, there wasn’t really anything he could do besides follow the directives: stay at home, wear a mask when you go out in public, and don’t interfere with the people who are in roles that really can do some good.

These non-whites, the people who, because of the grotesquery of history, neglect, and even present day hate and fear, end up filling more of the least desirable service jobs — the caretakers, store clerks, and delivery people — are really just like him. They are the same race, but not, the same but not, the same but not. There are too many things alive in the air, the social fabric to keep them from being the same, and yet, they are. He had none of their noble struggle to form an outline around himself, to create a sense of resolve, and a desire to better oneself.

That he also had white friends, close friends, in those jobs just confused things more for him, since it drove home that it wasn’t such an easy and hard-defined line, but a statistical trend, a matter of numbers, and it was the math that always gave him the most difficulty. It was too perplexing to think through. And it just drove him deeper into what, something they called moral poverty in the one philosophy class he had before he dropped out of the physics program and took a job as a coder.

He had no right to complain, he realized that. But everything hurt. He was lonely, and he didn’t like being on the wrong side of anything, yet what could he do? By asking this question he maintained the same tendency he hated about his people, himself, but he couldn’t find a way around it.

He didn’t want to be himself anymore, not this thing, this advantaged human who appreciated none of it, who turned down every opportunity to better himself because it seemed shallow and unfair to use it to make life simpler and more pleasurable for himself.

Yet there was nothing heroic about any of his choices and he knew it. He would never get to the other side, turn the particle into wave. For this is what he must do, though he knew it was impossible.

He took a breath, shut down his thinking for a moment, and felt that heat of his frustration rise from his skin. Yes, he really did have to become something else, something unknown and unheard of, something beyond just this or that race. Someone who can do and not do, who can override that ugly binary between, that either/or of doing for me or doing for other.

And it would not be human. Not anymore. It would need to be something unimaginable, yet it would need to be imagined, if not by the mind, by the bodiless of the body occupying space. It would have to be like music.

To the scrubs crew, lovingly

The cheer goes up at 7 PM
hands clapped red in frustration

of paralysis
at inability to lift one iota – to help

And I see across the street
on the roof of the homeless shelter
that even the lost adore you

They dance their merry dance and kick the imaginary around
while we stand at our windows and flame

You who are the fated, reluctant gnostics
of our time, eyes wide to an immediacy
numbers of bodies and their last breaths

Tell them that I love them
Wanted to show them more
Say that I am sorry
They can have my car

Words before intubation

How they evaporated like water pouring from a cup
one after another ticking the seconds of the day

And you taking the hit each time they leave
feeling it heave in your entirety
failure after failure — a condensation
of many lives, their folds into these past few weeks

Your own bodies so near disaster

Because keeping them alive is your religion
and ours is howling on the rooftops
at our windows if only once a day

Forget gratitude and the many tritely thanking words
and phrases that pox the internet

There are no words worth anything at all from us to you
only this noise and bodily incantation

The first slide had just COVID-19 in bold red on a black background, with an arrow and the word DESIRE in all caps in a kind of purplish-violet, much harder to see.

The voice of the Schizoanalytic Studies lecturer was grave and awkward sounding, though rich and resolute, as if it had endured much, but knew well how compose itself as it went along.

“The reason this virus is so unprecedented, why it’s made such a presence in your lives, and why it’s so hard to tame, is because it is you.”

A period of silence followed. This was a one-way audio connection.

“The virus is a machine.”

“Just as you are a machine.”

The screen changes to a picture of a bee landed on a flower, something with pink petals and a yellow core. The bee was laid across it, as if being held by an unseen grip.

“An assemblage of life processes.”

A slide of a young child of undetermined sex reaching up into the sky after a bird.

“It wants to flourish, as you do, it wants to help what it loves flourish and grow. It loves itself and what it produces, its offspring. Though unlike you, it is its offspring.”

A slide of an Amazon valley forest hewn of its vegetation.

“It wants to flourish and expand, and just as you do, it confuses quality for quantity. This is one of the chief criticisms of Henri Bergson — the solution to the problem oftens tends to be more or less of something, rather than an understanding of differences.”

A slide showing a Chinese wildlife market.

“There are points of vulnerabillities, but it is your expansion — our expansion — and our misunderstanding and mistreatment of desire that brings us face to face with ourselves. The shadow of ourselves, which lives in this virus. It is us, in a sense — not the cellular entity itself, but the problem we have caused by entering into its world as if it was a world of objects, and not a self we are a part of, which we contribute to, a thing we assemble into. Just as the cells of our bodies assemble this unit of flesh you recognize as yourself, and the molecules that make up the cells, and so forth. It is all a life. A complexity, far reaching and incomprehensible, no matter what my colleagues will try to tell you.”

“Don’t blame the purveyor of bats, or any other animal that may make us squeamish to think of eating. She is only following the directives of capital. She desires nice things just as you do, and would love it if she could send her children to a school like this one.”

A slide showing an emergency room, people in scrubs, masks and lab coats, and one person on a stretcher receiving oxygen.

“The immediate problem may seem like a medical one, and it’s rather obvious that the solution will be as well. But the overall and continuous problem is one of desire and understanding.”

A slide showing a medieval portrayal of a devil or demon.

“The evil incarnations we have represented in our cultural activities throughout our history, our so-called religions and superstitions, are not entities as we are, but the relationships among things, among ourselves for instance, and those things we have mistakenly objectified as out in the world, animals, plants and nonliving things. Things we think of as nonliving, at least, though they are as much a part of the life we assemble as the dead skin on your fingertips, touching your keyboards, your hair for instance.”

A blank black slide.

“Between you and I, in our desire to dominate the other, there is a demon which we give power to the more we surrender to that desire of domination.”

“Instead of love. Love is a much friendlier demon.”

“I’m telling you this is what you get when folks start working witchcraft at things like cursing the Trump presidency, or even attempting something more benevolent like calling on the nature spirits to protect the earth, you just unleash all kinds of awful shit.”

“Huh? What are you talking about? What does this have to do with anything. We have enough toilet paper for a while…”

“No, this whole thing. This virus is a demon. It makes sense to me now. I just heard something like that on a podcast…”

“Wait, what?”

“Well, they maybe meant it more metaphorically, but I’ve been thinking.”

“So what you’re saying is you’re not talking metaphors, you really mean this thing is a demon? You been taking your meds? Or have you been sneaking into mine?”

“I’m not kidding, Ben, you know about all of those mouth breathers and flat earth folks have been accusing witches of attacking Trump, and not that I would blame them if they did, and then you can also suppose that the Crowleyites in the Thelema schools, playing with their Kabbalistic flamer throwers. The green witches have been trying to invoke Pan forever. And no shit, Pan is the beginning of Pandemic – see what I mean? Meanwhile the Crowley folks have their Pazuzu invocations, a demon of plagues! See? We’ve gotta figure out how to put these things back where they belong. Damn!”

“Either you’ve been reading too much sci fi or you’re playing too much Dungeons and Dragons. And stay out of my snack drawer, I’ve warned you before about that. There are things in there, the power of which I just don’t quite understand.”

He could never really understand, no matter how hard he tried, what deconstruction was, but COVID-19 seemed to be as close as he got to knowing it in its full energy. The virus itself was almost like an echo or a shadow of the idea materialized in physical form the way it wiped clean the blackboard of one’s future self, that is, all one’s plans for the immediate future, and how that changed the meaning of the past, and one’s identity itself.

Yes, the future was something he could no longer see, that thing he never knew he could see, or at least imagine, prior to it disintegrating just like that. There were vacations planned, and between them, various places he expected to go – a brief trip to his in-laws for a weekend, to his parents in Vermont – people he would see off and on, moments they would share, the jokes, the expressions on their faces – all gone, because who knows now, with this year disrupted, what was going to happen? Whether he and Liz would keep their jobs, stay in their Brooklyn apartment? Who knows if even the New York City school system, where their children would be in high school, would even be able to provide the education they’ve promised and intend to? Fuck, one or more of them might even be dead in the next few weeks.

Well, he wasn’t too concerned about the being dead part, though that was a possibility, however vague. But what was beginning to occur to Peter was how often he found himself dumbfounded, and at the same time relaxed and calm, or at times in a state of complete giddiness.

It was as if the whole rigamarole of having his expectations slashed, left in shambles, had begun to destroy the image of what and whom he thought he was, and it would just stop his thinking dead. And since he had trouble understanding who he was, it was actually harder to imagine his death, since he was unclear who it would be who was dying.

There was this aspect of deconstruction that was like the termite of all identity and civilization, all moral standards of truth that everyone tends to rely on, but there’s this other side of it which seems like some of the more rigorous side of Zen Buddhist exercise, not the popular, hokeyness that sold books in the business section at Barnes and Noble, and that was the more rigorous and flagellant part that interested him most of all.

Yet there was a book that his professor of many years go had written, condemning Paul DeMan, and deconstruction in general. He thought of it guiltily, having never read it through completely.

And yet, this same man poured an enormous amount of energy promoting many similar ideas, as well as John Ashbery, whom Peter thought of as the most deconstructive poet of them all, the way his words and phrases seemed to slip out from beneath the need to mean anything at all, or tended to mean too much, to be a kind of – no…not that… a kind of aporia.

And David himself played dangerously close, with his poetry of formal contrast, of paradox, the way it stitched together incongruities and irregularities that somehow worked, and seemed so simple. This was maybe the sneakiest form of deconstruction, when you put two or more things together that shouldn’t be together, and make them seem comfortable, the lion lying beside the lamb, that kind of thing.

But if it worked it worked, and if healed something within one, or helped to set one free, then that’s a good thing, is it not? It’s like telling the crystallization process that tries to turn us all back into earth and stone to fuck off, isn’t it?

After all, wasn’t it Stevens who said “How should you walk in that space and know / Nothing of the madness of space, / Nothing of its jocular procreations? / Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand // Between you and the shapes you take / When the crust of shape has been destroyed…”

Yes, to Peter that was all of deconstruction and all of schizoanalysis. Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, they mean well, they really did. But Stevens, he explained it.

He didn’t know what would happen, who and how they would survive this, but reports were saying that carbon monoxide levels were down 50% in New York City.

“Thanks for calling. I think it’s just bad cold but I don’t think you should come by, you know, just in case. I do appreciate the soup idea.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah, sure as shit. I’ll just lie here in my many layers like a Joseph Beuys sculpture.”

“Joseph Boyz?”

“B-E-U-Y-S, first name probably pronounced Yosef, in his native language. He was a German sculptor. Hold on a sec, I’m gonna switch my phone to my other hand.”

“Oh, another one of them German artists, aye? I feel the gray clouds of despair wrapping around my head like a wet blanket.”

“Funny. He actually made a lot of things out of fat and felt, and that’s what it feels like under this pile of wool. In fact, I’m the fat and felt part, since felt is hair. The other part I think is maybe obvious.”

“Geeze, you mean art made out fat and felt? Why?”

“The story goes, and some people say that it was just a story, that he was a bomber pilot during the war, and was shot down a few times, and the last time he was pretty much left for dead. But some nomadic Tartars found him and wrapped him up in fat and felt, to keep him alive, and dragged him around for a while.”

“Hmm… Right.”

“Yeah. And eventually the German army found him and took him back to their hospital. But he supposedly had gone through some interesting psychological changes during that time. Being close to dead and all, and with these strange people who don’t even speak your language. Again, there’s argument that this may all have been a story he made up to sell art.”

“Whoa, that’s a pretty fucking crazy story. Do you think it’s true? The near dead thing, the mysterious ‘other people.’ Another fucking self-mythologizing artist, more likely, just finding a way to promote himself.”

“I think he also wanted to promote some other stuff. I’ve always liked some of his ideas, like how everyone is an artist. But he also got very spiritual, in a kind of witchcrafty, shamanic way. I think after the Tartars, he got interested in the mysteries of more indigenous people, or maybe the pre-christian people of northern Europe, when they were more like people of color, perhaps. Even though he claimed to be christian. A odd kind of christian, obviously.”

“You mean, Vikings and shit? Celts? I don’t think everybody’s an artist, I’m certainly not an artist. Not like you. I mean, I do some memes stuff on Instagram, but that’s not…”

“What he meant was that everyone is an artist because we have an endless number of problems we have to solve just to survive, and every one of our occupations, our jobs are like that. We are always creating something, sort of a continual work-in-progress, a social sculpture that we all participate in. Hold on a second, I’m gonna switch my phone back to the other hand. It’s kind of awkward talking like this in a horizontal position.”

“Sure. Half these chats we have end up feeling like a lecture, you know. I guess that’s the price one pays for having an art history girlfriend. When do I get a chance to see you?”

“Let’s see how things go by the end of the week.”

“Okay, you don’t think you’re part of the pandemic, do you?”

“We’re all part of the pandemic, deary. We’re just not all sick. I don’t think I have that specific strain of corona virus, if that’s what you mean.”

“Good. Just worried about you, love.”

“Thank you sweetie.”

“I’ve been Googling this guy – there’s this picture of him at the MoMA with a coyote. What the fuck. And what’s this thing with the metallic looking mask and the rabbit?”

“Hare.”

“What a fucking weirdo.”

“Yeah.”

“There’s also this video – I’ve got to watch this. It’s gotta be golden. He’s in his farmer suit and the hat, singing in a punk band or something. I’ll save it for later.”

“One last thing about him, and then I’m gonna have to go back to sleep. And I think you’re going to like this part. He had this concept he called Kunst is – he used an equal sign – Kapital.”

“What? Say that again?”

“It’s German for art is capital. He had this idea that true capital isn’t what the owners say it is, but it’s art, the art you make as an artist, solving your everyday problems. In other words, you are the owner of your art, which is the true capital of the world’s economy. Am I saying it right? I’m kind of confusing myself.”

“I think I hear you loud and clear, love. That’s beautiful. You mean, everything belongs to all of us, because we’re living in this system doing stuff.”

“I think that’s kind of what he meant.”

“Shit. That’s a right idea. Why didn’t I think of that?”

“Ow! Stop that!”

“I’m just trying to wash away the little bit of blood. You have a little cut.”

“That fuck. That was a hate crime, you know. I’m a victim of a hate crime! Shit, I’ve been living here all my my life! And I fucking never!”

“Calm down. You’re gonna have quite an egg on your head, you know. But I don’t think there’s gonna be too much damage.”

“People hate Asians. Especially these days.”

“I love you. Besides, try being Haitian. Sit still. Did you report it to the cops?”

“Half the cops in South Brooklyn are these same thugs. You know that. You walk around at night.”

“Yeah, but you’re not as used to it as I am. I guess.” Philipe laughs. “Yeah, I hate it too. You know I come from that ‘Shithole,’ at least my parents did.”

“I never called it that.”

“You didn’t have to. I’m not blaming you, Alex. I’m being ironic. And I’m trying to keep processing it as a whole, in the context of all other things, and from a distance. I’m a Buddhist, ya know.”

“A Buddhist with a PhD in comparative lit. I still don’t know how you managed that.”

“I told you. I got a 1560 on the SAT, and nobody from my school was expected to do that. We were the poor, dumb kids from the shitholes. And for the Ivies, it was like sending missionaries out. They’d spend any money to look like nice white folks, cleaning up the natives, ya know.”

“Ow! Stop that! I don’t know how you put up with it.”

“You’re about to find out. Anyway, please promise me you’ll stay in? You’re supposed to, you know.”

“But we ran out of tequila.”

“Yeah, that’s a thing.”

She noticed that more people were wearing masks that day. It had been a few days since she had been out. There was a line outside the new Food Emporium she hadn’t noticed, being surprised when the automatic door hadn’t opened for her, and she was directed to the end of it, where people were spaced at about six to ten feet apart.

Her scarf kept falling away from her face, no matter how well she thought she stuffed back into her coat collar, which was a relief, because it made her feel as though she was smothering, and the heat from her breath was stifling.

It was a lot better than the pandemic horror movies, where sudden depopulations sent civilization reeling into utter anarchy. This was merely a cold with teeth. Yes, it killed more people than it should, and put large numbers of people in the hospital, but it wasn’t science fiction.

Granted, it was scary enough just as it was, and Sarah knew she was of a “vulnerable age,” though she felt as strong as she ever was, and could run a mile in under ten minutes.

There was one movie she remembered from when she was a kid. A virus, instead of making people sick, made the healthier and happier, made them more inspired and loving.

However, the fallout was that fewer people were smoking tobacco, purchasing alcoholic beverages, prescription medications and expensive entertainments of all sorts. And fewer people worried about their investments, things like retirement, and so they quit their jobs so they could spend more time with others.

Of course, because of those things, it was a virus that threatened the financial environment, so it had to be cured as well. And when it was, people went back to their old sorry selves, just like old times.

Social distancing when you live in a two hundred square foot apartment was certainly not the kind of life he would intentionally design, not something he would recommend. It’s bad enough he only had the distance of two or three steps back and forth from his desk to the bathroom, but he also didn’t have his stove hooked up to the gas, and his refrigerator was a two-foot by two-foot cube — just enough for some leftover take-out and a six pack of beer.

Not that there was usually any take-out or beer left, and he was tired of microwaving the stuff anyway.

With all the bars closed he really didn’t have a life. He hated social media. He was tired of every single video game imaginable, felt nauseated each time he went into the App Store on his phone. So he tried reading some of the books he promised himself he’d finish eventually.

Wasn’t Infinite Jest like the pinnacle of late twentieth century novels?Gravity’s Rainbow? These were things his professors had raved about. A page or two and he’d fall asleep. He needed to move around more. He was beginning to feel like a piece of furniture left in storage.

What he really wanted was to see people, but there was nobody around. After what happened with Amy, a rift had grown between him and all of his old college friends. Not anything really dramatic, just a simple, fuck it, who needs it.

There were about three bartenders and five wait staff at his favorite hole-in-the-wall whom he felt closest to now, that is, besides the other jerks he worked with coding educational software. Yeah, right — tell me another. It was merely a way of selling a mishmash of snake oil psychobabble to supposedly increase one’s charisma and leadership qualities.

He’d go for walks, but there was nobody. Plenty of people scattered here and there, but none he’d imagine talking to, and they all swerved around him as he passed. Except for some bratty kid on a skateboard who almost took him off his feet.

No, it was best to stay inside, wash his one pair of socks, underwear and a teeshirt in the bathroom sink and hang them over the shower rod.

He stared at the wall, held his old beat-up guitar, and wiggled his fingers around the fretboard while his pick plunked the dull tones from deadened rusty strings.

Each sounding made the wall seem more brittle, liquid, or perhaps translucent, as his eyes fuzzed and he could imagine seeing through it into the building next door, and through that into another, and so forth, so many rectangular spaces one after another, he could imagine, going on indefinitely.

And the spaces would move back and forth as his fingers moved, and other dull tones were made, dancing in his head like a wind chime.

But there were no people.