Month: April 2020

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.

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.”