Schertzer Arts

In the end I think it’s not about ideas or the actual state of things, not about policy, but about Trump’s physical swagger and tone of voice. It’s all a put-on, of course, a bad acting job, but in its crude way matches what most American men want to see themselves as, and how women want to see men. And that parity he creates with this mob of his is enough to engender a kind of “faith” in all that he says – not thoroughly in all cases, but at least enough to get people to hold their nose and vote for him. It would be like if the “left” (there really isn’t a viable left in American politics) were to run Di Nero or Pacino, or even Harrison Ford. Someone who can play the so-called Alpha. The trouble is when women present as strong, the men in this country will call her “nasty.” We need to change culture, and that’s the egg shell that keeps breaking and causes all kinds of hysterical opposition.

Those who respond in this way to the fake alpha male act are always people with self-esteem issues, and that’s likely due in part to the decline of the labor movement. That’s another essay all together.

When Nietzsche claimed that God was Dead, meaning the Christian god specifically, he really meant that we were all dead, at least the selves we imagined we were, based on that inherited sense from the Abrahamic religions, that notion of being created in the image of God. If there was never a creator god, then there is no image, or simulacra of the original godhead. We are therefore free to be ourselves, which is great, except we are not ourselves, not selves in the sense we are accustomed to believe, since that sort of self cannot exist without its relation to the creator. Though this may be the case, there is even among the most secular, perhaps still tattooed to the back of our brain, an image of ourselves as these unitary and autonomous beings, in the world, but somehow apart from it.

So what are we then? We are not whole, that’s one thing. We are not fully independent individuals, not as much as we had come to believe, since we live in a chronic interdependence. We cannot be born without parentage, we cannot even learn how to eat and shit correctly without proper guidance. And our support for each other especially through our most tender early years, via family, community, public infrastructure and education, is perhaps the original signs of our collectivism, our socialism (god forbid!), which we often tend to forget. We don’t even have our own thoughts, but rely on a received language, history and the ideas of others. We are in fact each of us molecular bits of a chaotic swarm, this Anthropocene, and not created to be the princely occupants of a vast palatial afterlife, only here in physical manifestation as a kind of preparatory note, though we often behave as if that were the case.

A number of the more notorious lefty French thinkers, those so-called postmoderns whose ideas have wrung right wing intellectuals like Jordan Peterson and Gad Saad into hysterical tantrums, and who get blamed for the eventual decline of western civilization, had begun asking questions about why the 1968 student and workers movement in France had eventually failed. Two such theorists, philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari pointed to the possibility that each one of us harbors an inner despot, or rather, a habituated tendency to channel our psychic energies along despotic or fascistic lines, which help en masse to carve out unconscious behavioral channels that tend to short-circuit progressive lines of flight and attempts at positive social change. And this goes as much for well-meaning leftists as it does for outright denizens of fascism. Accordingly, we are all terrible tyrants, though we are unaware, who are more than willing to cooperate with fascists, surrendering to that dark lord of our souls, and it was that inner despot who had to be dealt with first, or at least in parallel with the social movement towards a greater empathetic and egalitarian whole. It is also likely what someone like Gil Scott Heron meant when he said that the “revolution will not be televised,” since as he later explained, it is one’s mind that needs to change first before changing the world.

Guattari worked with schizophrenics, so he saw this despotic effect magnified in the erratic lives of his patients. It was a clear parallel. In fact, he conceived the image of the schizophrenic out for a walk, as illustrated in works of fiction by Georg Buchner and Robert Walser, as a better representation of a typical human being than Freud’s neurotic on the couch. We might agree, when we consider where the normalized definition of a self originated, at least in the modern western world, that anachronistic princely subject and copy of the great godhead him/herself.

Deleuze & Guattari, in their essay 587 BC – AD 70: On Several Regimes of Signs, a chapter of their A Thousand Plateaus, argued that the core goal of the education system, both public and private, in western countries, was to normalize its participants through a process which they call Subjectification, in which we become subjects – not of a particular deity – but to a particular set of statements, which we master and internalize and that becomes a kind of content of our identity, values, and hence what we think of as our individuality. These statements are a mixed bag at best. Many of the statements we took as acceptable 200 years ago are no longer acceptable today, that is obvious. What is less obvious is that we can often look back five or ten years and find the same.

Such suspicions have historically been the impetus for many experiments in art and theory, more recently in modernist movements of the 20th and 21st century, from the Surrealists, Dadaists, Situationists, abstract expressionists, and every form of poststructuralist art and poetics experimentation. In borrowing from Deleuze and Guattari, there is also a thing called schizopoetics, which aside from being a study of the poetry of schizophrenics, is also an approach to writing poetry whose aim is the dissolution of representations of the self, that composite of received statements, almost as a form of inquiry more than an approach to making art, though it has had a residual influence on the recent decades of art production in general. In my more humble approach to this writing process, one I simply call schizodelia, I often think back to Wallace Stevens. In the penultimate section of his long poem, The Man with the Blue Guitar, he says:

What Stevens asks of us is that we turn away now and then from the rotten words and ideas that make up our ready-made worldview, our illusory shape of self, the way we arrange the symbols we use to guide our minds’ lives, to throw away the lights and destroy the crust of shape, or the habit of self, which confines us, and to drill down to the molecular level of meaning. If we do so we can surprise ourselves with a new song, a song derived, not from the static shape we take as ourselves, but more from the present energy of living being.

Attempting this process is as easy as the following. Forget for a time that you are writing for publication. Forget that you write to communicate with other human beings. Instead listen to the many voices chattering inside your head, how they collide and coalesce, fuse at times or break into still smaller pieces. Converse with them and forget that you are a person, and feel that free floating sense of being many and yet part of something else, an infinite unknowable. The result of this process will engender a new form of writing. You will have escaped identity, your ego, if only for odd moments. You can then come back and go about your business, perhaps changed ever so slightly.

As one challenges his or her sense of self or subjectivity, identifying less with the unitary ‘‘I’’ and more with the multiple, one can expect the same kinds of apprehensions one experiences on the analyst’s couch. The ego wants to believe in its own integrity, and will at times go to war with itself in order to create boundaries where perhaps none can exist. We are ‘‘comfortable’’ with things because we have domesticated them, or colonized them with language, a personal adaptation of a conventional range of significance. I ‘‘know’’ what my hands are because I have been taught how to count piggies on them, and how to use them to eat, play, and take care of myself. My hands have meaning. But just as a word repeated over and over in the
mind may be transformed into a ludicrous sound, my hand may grow unfamiliar, possibly even frightening or awe-inducing, when I stare at it long enough to let its physical presence overshadow its signification. A similar thing happens when one listens, by writing, to the organism which processes the language, rather than assuming a fixed role. And losing self-definition, the armor of the ego invites the anarchy of the real, if not to burst through the
surface, at least to trace its way back and forth just below, like a shark. It makes one wonder whether true ‘‘stage fright’’ is really anxiety over adequately constructing and playing out a role for an audience, or in discovering that the actor and stage don’t really exist, and that one is being watched by an outside and inside which are in many ways indistinguishable.

https://www.academia.edu/36180977/Poetic_Schizophrenia

This is, precisely, the task of all art and, from colors and sounds, both music and painting similarly extract new harmonies, new plastic or melodic landscapes, and new rhythmic characters that raise them to the height of the earth’s song and the cry of humanity: that which constitutes tone, health, becoming, a visual and sonorous bloc. A monument does not commemorate or celebrate something that happened but confides to the ear of the future the persistent sensations that embody the event: the constantly renewed suffering of men and women, their re-created protestations, their constantly resumed struggle. – Deleuze & Guattari from What is Philosphy

A series I wrote days after the events of 9/11//2001, as a response to the terror I was and those around me were experiencing (especially those of us who had been working within a short walk to the WTC) at the time, originally appearing in American Letters & Criticism, volume 15. These will also be included in my forthcoming collection Second Nature (Spuyten Duyvil) , due out this fall.

SEPTEMBER VARIATIONS
 
1. 

Sun sets over the eastern blank
Fill in the remainder where
The square lacks least
Lacks leaks. We are a bubble coming
in over the west. Our geography
is neutral, catacombed. Inside
our separateness drenched angels
of division go, ideologies blurred.
Sun shreds you to dreads and makes
them part of a party. Let’s get in
on the rest. The rest of guts and gets.
The startled watchman. He sparkles
in the crusted cavalcades


 
2.

Or so you have the irritant
in your eye—so sharp
it’s warming. The final. You.
Marching with vapor hammers
we sway. Bend buttresses.
Shards of concrete surround
my clothes. The air. The
final sentence in a book
of gloves. The skin removed 
as the gloves are drawn.
Hands found neatly bound
in a mound of debris. We
took them as a souvenir
to a place made out of wind
and smoke. There was a fire
in the elevator and we 
stomped it. Windows changing
shape, form reinventing every-
body was happy. Everyb-
ody in the curve. Around corners
piles of books smoldering
And the warmth provided thus


 
3.

Never say never. Never say today was
If you’d really like to gain access—your 
burning thoughts—chew immediately
The sound of light entering the square
The descriptive feelings abstracting
your senses. This is the meant
and toneless vent of night. Night
in the sentence, as when the syntax
distributes the things as they are
gives up. The work of the world
bound easily, spun lazily around
a freckle in the dirt. We might think
we flood the hall with operatic 
rosebuds, but see toy soldiers
milking toy sheep and urinating
on the plaza. The wreckage rising
in stone and steel like a plaintiff
forgetting his amnesia. Absolving
with a movie and a warm milk 
a freckle heated in the microwave.
Eyes hanging out to dry. Flooding
Windows. Patch this dream with stars.


 
4.

As is the fashion. As is. Aziz
and Hamlet alone together
on the square. Cab drivers
and infantry men. Sailors
squandering their money. Truck
drivers on the plaza, the
plaza buckling up. Aziz
biting into his ham sandwich
Not one honey trader. Random
axe in Hamlet’s hand his eyes
staring off, confused with
themselves, confused with seeing
What word can be used
to describe this this this moving
this gesturing around the way
the outer world describes the inner
somewhat striptease. Aziz
sneezes into Hamlet’s handkerchief
as Hamlet loses sense of himself
The motion picture steps in. Closer
but the narrating voice hisses
to a halt. The skies burp. Aziz
and Hamlet are covered with
each other’s lunch. Freeze frame


 
5.

A daring glister portends and a seizure 
climbs up the banister ambidextrously

Or so the Manhattan skyline preambles
back and forth against the gray till splitting

its bandages it blends in dearly with itself
a dog or pile of rocks broken across its face

Downtown Manhattan, March 1988

He woke up in the living room, facing a scratch on the wall. His knees were separated at the joint and some of his toes scattered over the floor. Something stank. It wasn’t puke or anything, just bad sweat, smelling like a filthy bar rag. He pushed himself up on his elbow, saw the halo of dampness beneath his body, and dropped himself back down. The clock’s LED blinked twelve noon, as it probably had for the last several hours. He bounced up and ran to the bedroom. Bank receipts, envelopes, and coins went flying as he rummaged for the travel clock. Nine-forty. He saw it for a moment before it went blank, as the battery flew out of the back. That would make it about nine-twenty-three. Skipping a few steps on the way to the bathroom, he grabbed a photo of Sally that was stuck to his toe.

In the mirror his eyes swelled. His hair stood in a thicket of overgrowth. He splashed hot water on his face and lathered it, grabbed a disposable razor and only cut himself three times. His bloody gums turned the toothpaste pink. Reaching behind the curtain, he turned on the shower and adjusted the temperature before stripping. Letting out a long and emphatic flatus he stepped into the tub.

“Riiiinnng…,” went the phone.

Grabbing a towel, slipping on the floor, he steadied himself and dripped back into the living room.

“Hello. Yeah, I’ll be right in. No, don’t let them go without me. I’m out the door. I’ll grab a cab.”

Slam!

Sally stood next to the soap dish. As he stood drying himself, he fought off a distracting urge spawned by the fear of impending doom.

His hair was wet and it was cold out, but it helped him wake up. A swarm of yellow cabs passed before he got to the corner, but by the time he arrived there was nothing. His jaw locked and his shoulders rode up around his ears. There was an empty one about three blocks down the avenue waiting for the light to turn. A woman beside him in a leather coat and tights held up her hand. He felt an inclination to hurl himself between her and the car, but turned away and let her take the ride, peeping down at the pathetic brown wing tips, draped by the gray that fell from his tattered black raincoat. He shamefully tucked his copy of Amour Fou into his coat sleeve and turned his twisted face away from the avenue.

As tension turned another notch, the neighborhood zoomed back, as if pressed tightly against a lens bulging outward from where he was standing. On the edge moved a cab with its roof light on. He held up his hand, and when it pulled up beside him, threw himself in.

“William and Fulton,” he rasped, “just below the Brooklyn Bridge, two blocks east of Broadway.”

The cabby was grayish, several days unshaved, with a frizzed ponytail. He fiddled with something on his lap and stuck it behind the visor, saying “Jeez, what a strange morning. You’re like the third fare I picked up, and it seems like I’ve been out for hours.”

“Oh yeah, slow?” Peter asked, pushing himself into the corner to get as much of himself out of mirror view as possible.

“Menacing. Frightening. Just look around. Some real baddies out there.”
Peter looked out the window. He didn’t notice. Beyond his own immediate terror, nothing seemed any more frightening than it ever was. “Sure, I see what you mean, man.”

“I knew you would. I could tell the way you scrunched your head between your shoulders and rocked back and forth. Like you had to pee. Do you have to pee?”

Peter turned his attention to his bladder just to see if the lunatic was reading his mind. “No. Not yet.”

“Yeah, see?”

Peter glanced at his watch. He didn’t have a watch. He had lost it over a month ago, and didn’t see the point in getting another one, not with all the clocks in the city. It didn’t matter anyway. Late was late, though at this point life offered him a huge flexibility, one of the perks, he guessed, of this recent disintegration of credibility.

“Are you the searcher?” asked the cabby. He scratched his gray head and looked again into the mirror.

“Huh?” said Peter, startled out of his daze. The driver didn’t repeat himself for a few moments, but when he did Peter realized he had heard right.

“Ah, what do you mean by ‘searcher,’ and what do you mean by ‘the?’”

“Nothing. Just someone I was supposed to meet. I thought you might be him.”

“Me? Isn’t that some John Wayne western?”

“Something else, what I’m talking about. A card reader lady told me. You understand. I know it’s a little weird. People think, too many tabs of acid,” said the driver, tapping the side of his head, “maybe, waiting to get shipped off to Vietnam. Stuff like that. Sometimes I think it’s TV that does it.”

“I understand.” Peter did. “I stopped watching.”

“Christ! How’d ya do it?”

After avoiding television, movies, radio, and most magazines, for several months Peter was still suffering from heavy withdrawal symptoms, and had trouble picturing himself without the image getting overlaid by that of a cop, rock singer, or a standup comic. This happened particularly during times of duress or fatigue, and especially while trying to visualize his way out of an unpleasant situation, say, when he found himself trying to explain himself to people, most frequently his boss or Sally. He hoped that something of his real self might eventually emerge if he flushed the system, something besides a willowy emptiness, a turbulent nothing, if there was, in fact, anything else.

But there was something else, something more disturbing, and that was the thing he didn’t like to think about.

“I turned the damn thing in,” he said. “Gave it to Good Will.”

“Drastic measure.”

“Takes determination.”

Ten minutes later he was in the elevator drilling a fingernail into the seam of his coat pocket. He got off at the 14th floor and tried to sneak past the receptionist.

“Peter, good afternoon,” said sweetly smug Marion, looking and sounding like Mother Theresa’s fashion model grand niece. “Dave would like to see you first thing.”

He grabbed the message she was holding out to him, a radiant fuchsia-pink paper rectangle inscribed, in perfect penmanship, with Sally’s name and other crucial details. The time, checked off, was 9:15 AM. He stuffed it in his shirt pocket and rushed to his cubicle, removed his coat, brushed himself off, felt himself sweat for a few moments, and walked over to Dave’s office. Dave’s secretary was away from her desk, so he knocked on the door. It opened with a grave swing, slowly revealing the blue vested, red tied figure.

“Hi Dave.”

Dave stood, looked at him blankly, eyes slowly sharpening, individual hairs rising electrically out of his auburn dome. He wore a look that struck Peter on the chest and sent him backwards a few millimeters. Eyes locked, they wrestled for a moment, and Peter felt himself diffuse into the atmosphere of the room, shocked into attentiveness. Dave looked away, went back to his desk, sat.

“The other day I saw a woman with feet so swollen she could hardly balance unless she held onto something,” he said. “She was also missing some toes. You know I’m not a charitable guy but I gave her a few bucks because I don’t need shit like that on my conscience when I’ve got an office to run. It makes me feel like a good guy, like I care, like I’m doing the best I can. A couple of weeks ago I ran into some clown whose skin looked like it was just about to fall off of him, and I gave him a five-spot just for the show.” For a moment his head turned, his eyes giving Peter a disinterested stare. He turned back to the wall and continued. “Again—I’m not generally charitable, and I don’t want you to confuse me with someone who is. I don’t go handing out paychecks around here just out of the goodness of my heart, you know.”

Peter behaved himself: sat and listened, as if taking in some new and important information.

“I like to run things pretty loosely around here,” Dave continued, standing up again, pacing briefly as he kept his eyes on Peter, “as you can probably tell. I like it that way, and that’s the way other people like it—I think.” He looked away and walked to his chair and sat down, put his elbow on the desk and stared out of the window.

“Some people don’t.”

There was a pause. A silence of fifteen seconds. It spread itself throughout the office in a mist, making the air seem fresh and light, ready to yield, with traces of horror film glimmer seeping in from the edges.

“My boss, for instance, Mort Johnston, doesn’t like it one bit. People like him would just love to shut us down, Pete. He could absorb our services into a whole lot of other areas he can more easily justify keeping alive. He’s from the old school. Can’t live with ambiguity. I think he even goes to church.” Dave’s head rolled back around, drawing Peter deeper into his trance. “I’d like to keep it, this little strange machine we’ve got going here. I worked hard to grow it into what it’s become. But to them, it doesn’t make sense. It shouldn’t exist. Doesn’t follow any textbook architecture of departmental design. More of an organically grown squiggly thing that drives them nuts every time I have to explain the accounting, and what we do here. You don’t know the resistance I go up against almost every day. And every day I beat it. And sometimes your input helps a great deal.”

“But I had that meeting with Schenk today—Schenk the ballbuster—and where the hell were you? I looked like an idiot in there. And you, snoring away at home with the bottle shoved up your ass. Don’t tell me it was the plumbing again. That didn’t work last month. It’s late in the quarter, Pete. You know that.”

“Yes sir.”

Dave picked a cigarette out of his pocket and tapped it on his desk, then held it down on an angle until it bent. “I can’t take another chance like this. I know you won’t fuck up again. On another day it mightn’t have made a bit of difference. You know I don’t give a shit about time. You have it, when you need it. That’s the way I want it for me, more rope to hang myself. And it’s only fair.”

Peter began wondering what was wrong, whether he was still drunk from the night before, or something more severe. What was this incandescent calm, so untypical of him, that he seemed to be bathing in—none of the usual panicking, sweating, the melee of paralyzing thoughts whirling through his head.

“Just don’t fuck me up again or I’ll let you have it.”

With this, Dave’s eyes radiated toxicity. His head changed size and shape minutely, but his eyes stayed locked in place. At this point Peter broke back into being his old self again, the percolation of his stomach, increased activity of his sweat glands, tightness of his limbs, facial musculature, surging of his blood, faintness near to tipping over.

When he got back to his desk, Peter yanked at the fuchsia note in his shirt pocket, tearing small sections off one by one until there was little left of it, feeling his hangover shift gears, scattering with the pink scraps raining down on his desk. He dropped his head in his hands, pressed his palms into his eyes, watching the geometric patterns forming over his closed eyelids. He tossed a stack of old papers in the trash, picked up the phone, and gingerly tapped out Sally’s number.

“Verity Travel. How may I help you?” came a cheerfully bloodless voice.

“Yes. I want… Is Sally Cantor there?”

“Sure thing. Hold just a moment.”

His fingers tapped twice and grabbed at his knee. On top of the computer monitor stood a picture of Sally, blonde and upright, with softness chiseled into severity. The glare of the Plexiglas frame was broken in the middle by a faint scratch, which fell across her chest like a palm, making her seem most generous and tolerant.

“Hello, this is Sally,” said a voice he drank in that burned on the way down.

“Hi. You called?”

“Oh, it’s you,” she said. “I was worried. I thought you might have done yourself in. You know, after that…”

“Shit…” said Peter. “I know I keep promising. But things aren’t that bad. I don’t think.” He listened eagerly for her reply.

“If they were you’d probably have me to blame.”

“Not to blame. You’d be involved, surely, but there’s no blame.”

“I’m always involved, aren’t I?” Sally asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Somewhere inside you’re always blaming me for everything. I mean really, despite what you say.”

“That’s not true. I never gave you any reason to believe that. That’s you, your guilt. I only said that when things are good with us nothing else seems to matter as much.” He slouched and sketched invisibly on his desktop.

“So I’m at least the cause of your feeling the brunt of it, that mythic agony of yours. If I was more considerate, a servant only to your desires and expectations, you’d be happier. You think.”

“Okay, okay, let’s get off it. I don’t feel like arguing. I feel like my whole life is an argument.”

“Fine.” He heard something between a grunt and an exhalation.

“But Peter,” Sally continued.

“Yes?”

“What are you going to do if you lose your job?”

“No such luck.”

“No, I’m serious. Think about what I’m saying! What? Are you going to move back with your parents or something?”

“A—I’m not going to lose my job over this. That’s not how the story goes. B—Even if I did, I would be able to find another one. I’m not helpless, you know.”

“Sometimes I wonder.”

“Look, I’m here every day. I never call in sick, late sometimes, yes, but they’re not getting rid of me over something like that.”

“Don’t be so sure.”

“It’s just that my brother, you know how he likes to live it up. It’s not like he’s in the city all the time, you know. He’s like…”

“I know, Mr. Hyde, after finally killing Dr. Jekyll.”

“No, no, no—not that. I used to think Rasputin, before he shaved his beard.”

“Ha! He’s nothing like Rasputin. Rasputin was intelligent, first of all, and he was a hell of a lot more charismatic than Dennis will ever be. He was kind of wise, a mournful schizo, maybe, you know, like that guy we met that time at Moisture.”

“Oh, you mean that hippy hypocrite? The one who tried to read your palm? What was he, Eh-stone-ian? All those hippy eurotrash jerks are the same. Think they’ve got soul because they can rattle off a lot of fluff about dead German philosophers, like their spoiled-brat American, ivy-fed cousins, your friend Janet, as a for instance. They’re really all pretty two dimensional, despite all that metaphysical vomit they can hurl at you in every shape and stench.”

“Oh, and you’re not.” She had often called him out for being a little too proud of growing up in a classic suburban neighborhood where more kids just happened to end up in prison than elite colleges.

“I don’t know what I am. Fractured. I feel like a broken mirror, a wheel of surfaces. Depth is no option.”

Sally spat laughter into the phone. “Yeah. Yeah. Almost right. More like a broken record. Wheel of surfaces, my ass. I’m going to have to stop lending you my books.”

Peter rocked and then slouched in his chair.

“I hope you at least made him stay,” said Sally.

“Oh, Dennis? Nah. But don’t worry. One thing I can say about him, he’s got a great automatic pilot.”

“Make sure he wills it to you. You can have them remove it at the morgue some night.”

“Forget it. There’s more chance he’ll get mine, but I don’t see how it would do him any good.”

“I’ll say. Oh, and by the way, the reason I’m calling, my brat friend Janet can’t do it any other night this week, so I’m getting together with her later. If you want to meet me for a little while, I can do it, but you’ll have to come up here.” He sank further into his chair. Janet hated him. He hated Janet. Though he had tried briefly to befriend her, she just wouldn’t have it.

His stomach began to wrestle with itself. A small red light began flashing on his phone. He stammered and watched it blink, feeling it pulse in his temples. “Look,” he said. “I’ve got another call coming in. I’ve got to take it.”

“That place at Grand Central. You’ve got an hour, hour-and-a-half before she shows up.”

They hung up, and so had the other line. A list gurgled up from his inner database:

Record 1 She think(who) she is?
Record 2 Doing.always this_to_me.
Record 3 Shefeel() Not= love-me.
Record 4 Do(care) not what says(she).
Record 5 Me -> just_a_toy & piss_me_off.
Record 6 How (long) I_going_to_take_it?
Record 7 Me -> Feel small.
Record 8 CanDo(1, “yo_tengo”) -> nothing.
Record 9 I not(can) even_stand_up_for_myself.
Record 10 Me -> (perfect) slave.
Record 11 ***Why_do_I_let_her_do_this_to_me?
Record 12 Id_never_Get_away_with_Anything_Like_that.
Record 13 She.rights important.
Record 14 Im_not.
Record 15 Im_not_as_lovable_as_She_is.
Record 16 Im_Not_Beautiful.
Record 17 Im_Ugly_and_Despicable.

<> eof() = .t.

He let his head fall into the palm of his hand. He wore it like a patch over his left eye as his right blurred and fell on the stapler, daring it to transform, lose its banality. The cartridge shot out when he pressed the button on the back, spilling staples across the top of his desk. Composing himself, he eyed a small woven square of matches made like the rafts children make of popsicle sticks. He picked it up gently between his thumb and forefinger and inspected it like an archeologist would an object he was trying to catalog, disturbed by the precision and delicacy he had at certain mindless moments. Four bulbs flush against each side—cardboard sown into a kind of fabric. A chill traced through him as he realized he couldn’t remember doing it, although he knew, and recognized his handy -work. There was a small terror that had often accompanied Peter’s hangovers, with the idea that he was losing his mind, or that his consciousness was getting sucked away from him. As his dread expanded and spread deeper into his body, he shook his fist at Sally’s photo and swept his arm, dumping the staples and the stapler into the trash.

Available on Amazon

Or directly from the publisher

(originally published by Terra Incognita No. 5 2004/2005)

I was lying in bed, trying to get back to sleep when suddenly, tap tap… tap tap… I recognized that sound, though it took me a moment, from two or three years ago, when the current super was on hiatus in Brazil. It went on, it seemed, for months, and then stopped unaccountably.
I tore myself out of bed and scurried around the apartment until I could think of what to do, finally grabbing a pot from the stove and placing it on the ground where most of the water seemed to be landing. I moved the old pillows I’ve been meaning to throw away, and brought three books back onto dryer ground, but alas, poor Nadja was soaked through and would never be the same again. At least the Tractatus was somewhat intact.

*

Breton told me the best way to deal with the fact of war was to not talk about it, in that way refuse to participate with its desire to consume all things; but my friend Paul walked offstage, more perplexed than angry, when he found I had erased or distorted his lines. And so, what do I do, sitting here in relative comfort, trying to get the word to spin worlds, while the one that is supposedly real, before me, brought to me through a box of light and the talking box, as well as my friends and the people I meet (talking like boxes)—what am I supposed to do about that brutal patch of map where I am told there is a lot of noise, many fleshy, conscious its, like this me that sits here, as they screech in convulsions, or—in an instant—are coming to an end. What am I supposed to think?

*

This: lean forward and touch the air: it wasn’t for several days you could buy that package: the sweater and the mountain gear: and all across the street, of course: and there was a welcoming party and a big parade.

We walked into a sideshow, or a side street, and came upon a broken mirror. Forget what we called it. We called it name of dog. We called it and it came to us after dampening the ground around the rocket launcher. After a while there are others like us, and after lunch they were gone. This year the celebration had gotten very loud and our homes had become mounds we could climb on.

*

There is a treatment of the text something like midnight, which I had an hour to misconstrue. She snapped like a Venus Flytrap, and immediately we were hurtling over Morocco, in a more or less salvage-quality carpet—unreliable textile, frayed (or perhaps afraid) at the edges. But she sent us along with a collection of bologna sandwiches we were to research until we landed one day in Bangladesh, where George Harrison was having some sort of new electric guitar built out of balsa, and a wood that grows only around the Ganges. That’s if we make it through the air strike. Perhaps it’s not actually wood at all, but something imagined by the dead as they float shrouded and stiff as canoes. Wait, I’ll have mine with mustard. Maybe we could get a new one before we start off again.

*

The news arrived at the crime scene, just before the party started. It came wearing a plaid ascot and a daffodil through a button hole, but no one was allowed to decipher it. He tried to break a sailor’s neck, but the sailor just went ahead sawing away at the furniture. Soon there were two of everything, and the next thing we knew it was time for breakfast. Or nearly. We still had a half-gallon of vodka to finish, and a pint of paint thinner we had been using to remove our clothing, or the lines we had drawn beneath out eyes while we were still awake. But the news was still at it, though it had changed into a woman in a slight bathing suit, covered from head to toe with black & blue marks. Finally, I found out how to work the remote.

*

The chief imbecile recorded himself falling off the stage. We were astounded by his recreational abilities. Where did he put the microphone and where was he flying to? I had coughed up a piece of burnt linoleum after he had given me the go-ahead. What stage of life was that? It seemed like a miracle that he swallowed the audience—I remember living in an altered state for several years after that, something like Wyoming, but with less fuss over the antelope. I don’t remember what I had eaten but it disintegrated my esophagus. Whole villages made of mayonnaise, living quickly, rotting in the sun. At his instructions we catapulted ourselves against the wall behind the curtain, ran like broken eggs down-field toward the goal line, where we were each handed a number two pencil and a book of boxes.

*

This summer unrest: but why winter again, just like that? We are moving with the speed of CNN through manifestoes of circuitry. Electrical impulses gouge my brain, but I know how to enjoy it. I snake my board through the refuse of countless New York Times book reviews to meet you here, where you wipe the spittle off your dolls and building blocks, preparing for a nose bleed.

*

Who’s been playing with the air again? Sharp hot moments, three of my friends already melted, but they were only made out of plastic. I wonder if the moon is made out of stuff like this. The pavement so broken up over last night’s party. Hard to tell from your facelift. Let’s drip wax over everything. I’ve got some aroma therapy candles. You’re not going to be using that eye anymore, are you? Everything’s dropped back to two dimensions. Take what you need, and take a little more. I heard there was a formula for making lots of money. Take your fingers out of your ears. You won’t be needing them anymore.

I first want to say that you Mike are probably one of the smartest (probably a bit smarter than me) folks I’ve argued with in this group in how you can actually use your reasoning facility. So take a bow. You’re also like 100x more knowledgeable. You definitely have my respect. I will point out though, and perhaps fall in line with Mr. _____ here, that the problem is not that the laws and the notion of due process are available for us to use, but that they are used selectively. This is why the kids are fire bombing police stations – and it has part to do with social media, true, as 30 years ago the same things were happening but no one knew, and now everyone sees the evidence. Cops killing POC has been going on all along, but here you have teens and 20-somethings inundated with the information that proves to them that the real America in no way matches the one that has been marketed to them all their lives. And it’s not just George Floyd and Breonna — there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of cases in which a white cop kills a black man (it’s usually a man) under questionable circumstances and there is no conviction, not even an indictment or investigation. They also know that historically riots have been a means of communication. The poor have always known this — even Martin Luther King’s famous quote says this: “A riot is the language of the unheard.” There are actual academic studies that show that after a long frustrating period of trying to promote change, a riot will come along, and once it’s televised, change will happen. Would Derek Chauvin have been convicted without the chaos engendered by the demonstrations? I’m sorry to say, probably not. Rioting brings attention to things when the rule of law is not followed, when it is selectively enforced – that’s the bottom line. And it’s really not even the BLM group or even antifa that cause this chaos, but randomly enraged people who just show up. Believe me, I live in a historically black neighborhood, and the demonstrations I saw running through the streets are a rag tag group of all sorts, not some army organized by democrats. Many of them, especially those on the further left, don’t really see any difference between the parties — these are probably the communist-leaning and anarchists in the group, many of whom really don’t know much about those affiliations to begin with. I’m no sociologist (I studied rhetoric and literature, and have worked in finance) but I also believe there are economic reasons behind this impatience that has people hitting the streets, and disagree with me if you will, but shrinking of the middle class, to get the things prior generations more easily attained, seems to have been severely damaged by the demise of collective bargaining and supply side eco – after 40 years of the varieties of Reaganomics, we have gotten to the point where the gap between CEO and average worker pay has spread 10-fold, while higher education costs of rocketed upward as well. These young people are in crisis. And I think the reason you see people following the cult of Trump is same reason you see people throwing molotov cocktails. I’m not saying I have solutions, but the FDR-type Democrat that I tend to be at times points in the direction we are currently moving in, if my small steps. Private business has no conscience, and though the government is amoral, it has the pressures of the populace behind it.

There are aspects of progressivism that have been influenced by Marxism, true, but no serious person looks at Marx they same way they did during the early part of the twentieth century. First of all, Marx was writing during a time in parallel with early American progressivism, and his audience was supposed to be democratic and parliamentary systems in which industrial capitalism was at work. Applied to feudal monarchies, where you simply replace one totalitarian system with another, since no habituation of egalitarian ethos was in place, you’re going to end up with what happened in Russia and China. Marx was one of many socialist/anarchist/libertarian thinkers in Europe at the time, and perhaps not the best model, as there was too much left of the Hegelian dialectic, and the so-called end of history. The majority of people who see value in Marx, value him for his critique of capitalism, not as a path. And even the anarchists of today — the thoughtful thinkers along the lines of Marx and the Russian folks like the Kropotkins and Bakunins, etc. — are equally critical of totalizing systems like early applications of the things like “communism,” and see their object as the destroyers of despotic systems or subsystems within larger systems. Progressivism today shouts back to early progressivism in this way in that it is an attempt in multiple ways of being a corrective, and yes there are ties to civil rights, feminism, and a host of other things that have come up in the meantime, particularly environmental concerns. It’s really not one thing, but a collection of different groups with different gripes (many of which are aligned with what you call our supposed “core values”) who at some points find cross-allegiances. There are those who overcode all issues as if they were rooted in economics, but there are equally those who feel that economic issues are symptomatic of other things. It is very complicated, and yes, would take a book or several to even address. It’s not Marxism that subverts and destroys societies, as you say, so much, as numerous conditions and pressures. Abolition and Reconstruction were wholly justisfied events that destroyed the society of the old south. The Renaissance destroyed the older medieval order, the American Revolution was the beginning of the end of British Empire, as well as other European empires that fell soon afterward, as in the case of France. One of the things Marx was targeting was the notion of private property, which in some ways was an evolved form of feudal artifact, that was further enforced in the early US documents largely in support of the slave plantation schema, where the property owners were made to feel justified, not only owning the land, but the people who worked it. This has evolved into a formal fixation that has become bedrock to the libertarian movement in the US, I realize, and has been swept up into all sorts of ideology about money, other forms of financial resources, and in industry as well. I think he had a point. We have to understand that the creation, protection and maintenance of private property in the extreme cases as we see in the US is cause for many of our systemic problems, and is really a source of much required government infrastructure, legislation, investment in policing, a large military, and so forth. It’s really gone overboard. It is destroying things. The internet and other technologies are more responsible now for “destroying and subverting societies” than any backroom academic ideology. And that’s much the result of capitalism, and how it devours everything in its path and spits out the new. You might argue that that itself is not wrong or bad, but if you want to look for a root cause of change, look at capital, its innovations, and the way it leads to an unruly and accelerated flux. Social upheaval’s we are experiencing are part of that flux, part of the stochastic effects of social change which will hopefully find some equanimity at some point soon.

If I could have anything I wished for I would of course wish to end this war in the Ukraine, then end world hunger and other wars and loosen the tight grip on people that certain governments and other organizations have on people, socialize all global corporations so workers and other parties of interest benefit and are involved in decision making. Also I wish that my family and all families, and people without families, are safe, healthy and happy, that there is a sound safety net for all. Then some personal stuff – I’d like to be able to turn down a Nobel prize for literature and maybe play lead guitar for a hip hop jazz funk band. None of this will happen, of course. I have very little power. But, when faced with the absurd, one is best to act in the absurd, to meet and be absurd. So where to start?

I found a piece by an anonymous author, stuffed into a copy of Notes from Underground, lying outside a row of apartments on the sidewalk on my way to buying groceries. While I feel it is a bit overly dramatic about the state of our common experience, I thought it worth sharing with you all:

“Say what you mean instead of saying what you know is possible. That’s where we always get stuck. We’re so different from each other though like you I’m hanging on often by a thread in an endless ditch I can’t seem to dig myself out of. We continue to read and write, waiting for an epiphany to come. We work so hard it strangles our minds and by the end of the day we can hardly remember where or who we’ve been. Just a skeleton of a day, etched out in corridors with little rooms where intense stress occurred, and those passages in between with their voluminous faints and deliriums. I can’t imagine what it’s like for you since I’m only guessing, as I feel myself age. You have other kinds of battle scars, other types of issues with identity. You might have pink hair, green, a sheen of straight cornsilk, tight curls cropped or worn as spherical aura around your head. In many ways we’ll feel the same, at times, because our bodies are not all that different, though our situations may be night and day. I’ll never know who you are, but if you’re listening, there is something that has passed between us, and it doesn’t need to be love or even understanding. But something’s shared, not even thoughts, but these words around which we hang our own private thoughts. Again, I don’t even remember who I was most days and I imagine it’s the same for you. Something’s been stripped from us, and it’s a common wound we share, not even a wound, but a void, an absence. We can blame the scalpel of Capital, how it cuts through and removes chunks of our inner lives from us, but I think it goes deeper than that — deeper but not deep, right at the surface, but unseen, unheard, some unnameable factor that engenders capital sitting in us all, tying us together in a hopeless brocade so tight we can barely move. I want to speak your language in greater clarity since then I may have access to better articulation, vision, and to be able to see the thread, the weakest knot of the weave, that holds us here, and perhaps a few of us can loosen that taught binding, to escape, if even to live more or less the same life, though with a different sensibility. Perhaps it’s just a relationship to my own language that needs to change, shocked out of its habitual sleep, and maybe that’s why I continually torture and tear at it, beat at it with a disruptive drumming, listening to whatever soundings may come in order to detect the unsayable, unspeakable, among the things it tries to say and represent. Because now and then you sense something present in your life you’ll never be able to give a name to, something without texture or shape, and that sensing makes all the difference.”