Schertzer Arts

from Plan for a Broken Bowl
 
Diagram Z

We around here aren’t round, not most of us
not to the degree one might fear if he was living here.

After all it was these vibratory powers that made us so.

And from there the leaning from one side of the room
to the other in hopes of replacing one space
with a new though pre-existing
elasticity of time
so that sequences may multilayer
and drop
like soft ice cream into a cone
not any flavor
but a likeness to that span between deaths

when we sail from one idea
into another quite honestly, unconscious
of the ease of sliding (a minor preparatory note).

Whoever it was who saw us finish
should begin to unstuff the casings
from the factory jobs we are threatened with

just in case the movement isn’t there to correct you.

And you are out of your house on some early July day
though when you look back on it, it is already November

and the whole chemistry of the place
has changed back
to a briefing made through a window pane.

Don’t laugh. I’ve been here all my life
which may not have been long, but is still virtual
and for now, the hourglass is stuck

so until the next earthquake
or spending bill is signed into law
there might be something to run with that looks
more like you than you’d like to think—sorry

that it had to occur this way. More noise
is what we’ve invented, and that’s everything
final umbrella rolled into a baton
for safe transport once dampened.

A fist of light.

And a job one can get along in.

Whoever wishes for more than that?  And if they do
boy oh boy I have a feeling
they’re not going to like
this movie with its moderate to inane dialog

action as terse and incomplete
as any picnic basket
without a jug of wine.

Please pass the mushrooms.

There’s more than enough to go around
though several have gone off to play. And the rest?
We’ve already dumped their entire savings
into the kitty, laid out the cards.

After all it’s a feeling thing, not something
you can wrap with the wet blanket
of the intellect, just for the sake
of having something to say. I have some Speech Soap
to wash our mouths out
just in case it turns out to be our fault
or just our shape. You don’t need

any more managerial hocus now that it’s
in a whip-like siege you’ve seen, we’ve all seen
before the magistrate came home, brought building
tools to add to the punishment. It’s not all repetition

but it feels like it, doesn’t it, the way it is
administered in an orbital motion
just before your teeth begin to loosen and the next room
sprays something painful into your eyes. Suits the ones
who’ve been doing it, whose music it is. They’ve ransacked
just about everything that’s belonged to you.

And something more.

Not that you must continue to soak in it
or go off on some protracted hunt for clever vehicles
when all you really need to say is here in front of you
still attempting a reboot. If you can get no solace
from that try imagining the circle in the tesseract
or a pair of larks drawing a flaming chariot
since we have messed up our mythologies again,
construed their pageant twists of dementia to
a fairly standard narrative form, but not this.

It made sure to leave no trace to paraphrase
no bow tie for critical thinking save an endorsement
somewhat particulate in its formation over tea
a vial of lemonade for the new thinkers
and the roustabouts hanging on and wasting time.

Don’t forget, it’s what we’re at heart engineered
to deliver, with a can of dried farts, a flame
and a quiver of darts designed to reverse the flow
of apology pearling from your lips so that it
may later be taken up, and more aggressively
as to add some grip to an eyebrow twitch.

Some may cough at such descriptions
but others will fondly remember the righteous bump
as when hurling out of car windows after a bad drunk
and one belches an epiphany swallowed
too many hours prior to relate the context
to new disciples of the ride.

Though it is only bruising in a silent and pleasing way.
That was the gist of fidelity – stormy
afternoons when who-knows-whom we’d desire
so keep a stack of records under the elm
or under the eaves for when it rains.

The drops would be plinking against a hollowed out
shingle or a leaf frizzed with filaments of heat
determined in part by the conditions
under which the genome speaks.
Though, let us not use such offensive language
among the best of us. Nay, they never liked
that explanation, too full of advanced
sophistry. But so was their spinning of the many
event horizons they’ve left in wakes. Each one yearns
for something once accomplished by the body, now
plastered to the past, or that which we call the past
but is no more than information written
unreliably into our senses’ memory.

How fleeting life seems because these flashes are remote
intangible, though their effect on us may be operatic,
grand, even destructive in their reach,
their grasp around our present moment and bold
insistence in molding what it is our eyes see
into what the mind’s eye gravitates toward. Learn to love

both the thing made and the thought that makes it, says
a quiet inner voice hanging from the chandelier
as it smokes the last
of your cigarettes, which you no longer need, since you quit
nanoseconds ago and the nicotine fit
hasn’t yet wrested control of the way you decode
and transmit what you have absorbed.

It may be nothing but the results of a spoiled crust of bread
coated lightly with ergot mold. Wouldn’t you be
lucky if that was all it was. Brown eyes lining
blue and green filigree around everything within reach
as those at a distance begin to quiver, since
living that way always reminded them of cleansing
and conditioning to a more finely milled set of penchants
toward nothing but the correct finger signals.

But that didn’t mean they had to quit, and even though
the artifacts of the movements had grown
solitary in their organizational triumphs
a jagged tooth hooked through everything they touched
reminding of an earlier swagger,
every blemish an emblematic and caustic face
flying out of our heads
to see the sky for the first time upon the backdrop
of the moon. Wise and clever logic
all the way up the clock for braying
the impossible while still market hot
molding from ear to ear a storm,
an architecture of mad love as it’s
strewn in water colors across the comics.

Someone winged and a dandy with a red cape inviting
you to feel comfortable with the level of crime
you’ve poured into your notebook, attempting
wholesome casuistry of roses, daffodils,
smoldering herbs and incense
and more than anything
a sound and perfunctory reason that can
parry any assault of multiple dimensions.

That’s where the goddess would come in, through those
stiff cocktails of the past with their renditions
of counter heroics circling the same themes,
isotopes as if discharged from cigarette ash
to the beat of fiery lips and repeated piano knock offs
that puff up the night into phantom parallels
of your every recent fascination and fear.

It was the first face you were inclined to believe
as you sat in yesterday’s demitasse night
endearing yourself to the friendly workmanship
like the coalman’s daughter shoveling herself
into a straight and narrow tourniquet of a path
to have a go at the bull run while you fled
into a mountain of shattered teacups, wounding yourself
appropriately, as to avoid another spillage
before the republic was turned over to the riff raff
of the neighborhood. There you could embrace
and in that posture, hypothesize a new day.

But one needs to answer to the cyclops beneath
the staircase in that case, where he’s been gathering
your resentments and heating up his spatula.
Only then will the true meaning
of this paragraph come to the fore. It’s been circling
your head like a fly and grows wilder
every time you move. It knows all your afflictions
and best wishes, where meaning lacks not
the invocation of its premise, but meanders
in a beefed-up suit, not unlike the mobsters
you’ve met dining in midtown during the parade.

They, of course, were in several gradations,
from sparkles of light, to the thin film
over your teeth after too many days worrying.
Perhaps a hangover on the beach, eating corn chips and
frozen pizza. They don’t have any more impressive
thoughts to share and to inspire you
so for the time, being what it is, you could
either collect your things and march down the runway
or continue in good faith, though the only good
reason to follow in uncertainty would be to hold
fast to faith in good faith where propriety
should perhaps lead you to some other
defunct cafeteria, for instance, in some
dead metaphysician’s shop. There you can order
a dirty water dog or two, belch a few times, make fog
in the icy air left by the enlightenment.

But excuses will always suck the life out of you.
Not that anyone will tell you that at a party.
Friends will beg for you to stay, and rivals will try
to trip you out the door. It doesn’t make sense
to blame anyone, since anyone could muster up
a sizable force the same as you, with one
exception: you have a right to your body and its alloys
the same as anyone; with a shield full of grommets
and holes hoisted upon it to promote
a measured permeability. Its invisible dance
to characterize, on the air, between battles, inside
a sentence with aluminum siding, a tarred roof
for viewing comets. The education system
you’ve been brought through smiles urbanely
with its eyes of fake fire and wry stupidity
that camps out for holiday shopping
when it is you, yourself you have failed to avoid.

This is bullshit. Standing in line is not therapy.
Neither is trying to fit my ass into this saddle.
Tote it around wherever you go and the lime
in your drink will remind you of life; you
begin to imagine running away or flying
through the wall with saw blades spinning
on your fingertips. That’s how you envision
leaving your job, and on some ornate vehicle
unrecognized by the people screaming by the hole
you left. I try to shake off this tremor, but it’s been
there replicating since I began these dancing lessons.
Whole tribes of us frenetically intoxicated
by a single nervous system. I’ve got a way
of playing cards that will undermine the government.
I have questions only I can ask because I’ve turned
my body into sound. It is in eighth notes and sixteenths
and triplets and various forms of collateral, from banks
bleeding through their mercy holes. I had a role in it,
a quiet, lumbering step loaded with assorted
energies. Quite the flame thrower you are, is that
kimchee you’ve been eating?  I need to start my car.

Find out tonight whether it is really a pattern
or if seeing is the jurisdiction of some
other sensory mechanics, a passion for panic
one may presume, a handle to some other dimension
of psychic franchise ready to have you for spare change.
That’s the exhumed part of the fable, anyway.
Whatever’s left is as much a mystery as where
the buckshot goes. Out of the pipe like steam and into
appearance; a friendly warmth, a quiet penetration
somewhat like affection except by the mode of its chaste
benediction. I’m really in love with your data entry
the way it wiggles its way past the gate searching
for embellishments on either side of the hand
are quick movements, intoned in a circle.

We marvel at the pencil pockings, the three-pronged
equivalences, hopes barred at the opening of your
action planned was severe rental phenomenon
and now wholly possible to record. The movement backfired.
Religion is itself like that, a few scrambled heads
the rest of us starving for a music unmuddled
by insurance analysts. And as the market
betrayed itself, by trying to “know thyself” in ways
that made masturbation seem a public service
commission in comparison, mega-church after
mega-church grew out of the cesspools of all
possible worlds, to bugger us into bigger things,
an underground in wait for souls to capsize
into its one economy that sucks them off from
the podium for a few cents thrown into the basket.

You have done this before
in past lives. It is not a good idea, something
people I know will be willing to kill you about.
Forgive us yonder diner club members. We have eaten
something unsettling for young voters
trying to win by alignment to a personal
welfare state, one’s name, or enter it into
that bucket of apostrophes of ownership
without the zinging final consonant attaching
one to the object of its obsession.
I have borrowed a few of the drums you’ve beaten
upon and they sound only hollow in my hands.
Could be the nails driven through my fingertips are not
sunk deep enough to make a difference. I am not
an actual victim, but a modeler of
victimhood, seeking out a completer sound,
though one redactive enough to insure safe use.
There are reasons why editorial pursuits like these
can begin to know themselves as progenitors
of the plausible, for an idea may be wrong
but a feeling is always might. There is a pond
we all live in. Perhaps alone. Perhaps sustained
by others. I am sorry you have to live this way.
On the surface it doesn’t hurt, only beneath
the green haze of the drug, the incessant action,
bromides for the skill set, for vacillation between
the heart and the hard-headed minotaur-like marking.
No, I didn’t say marketing, not yet, but I might as well
have, since any crucial difference is due, is harkened
only through the dark of framing. And once cut from
the lack of the background an objet loses its glitter
and its toy qualities and you no longer love it.

But behold the benevolent panther. Rocks move
out of its path as it drives down the sandy parts
of this confused tangle of secretive meditations.
Secretive because they ignore each other’s
most trivial assertions. More so because
they are lying in a circle—all unframed parts
without an instruction manual lying in wait
to make useful these lying-to-each-other pieces;
and into the sky, as it suffers abdominal pain.
It begins to shift light and drop water
in hopes that you will recognize its feeling.
After all, it feels too. Who is bold enough
to enter from beneath its hips to sense its clear
aspiration, and to say it doesn’t feel as you do?
Young panther, scraping across the rocks, bounding
a heresy, a fist of light, into the sky’s mouth,
condom of clear wrap, of air wrap of argument
made of pieces arranged in a row. Somewhere
within that above is opinion, a choice word
grilling, a word tribe, trying to bend back the outcome,
its natural toes and the mud it has landed in.
Try not to be too simple, dark hand. You are not
letting us into your flood. We are aware of you.
Behold benevolent panther. You are an unguent
in the mouth of this trapezoidal needling,
the oblique vehicle that solidifies our love
as something more than cybernetic casserole.
Sweet darling mayhem, my chum and apprenticeship
summoning up the slag of the old spacecraft
strewn over the Mojave desert. Young predator,
benevolent killer and tearer of meat
I have choice words for you, a voice of ragtag
emblems, decals, for you, a feeling I had met
you before in another life, one of rent and drug-like
spasms, a gleeful violence. Daggered laughter
in the heart, in the syntax of your saying what
in its moment could ever have been and to find you
here, beside my bed in a tangle of shred clothing
searching for a scrap to eat, an arm, a leg
because it was you who brought us here, and you
whom we belong to, if you could loosen yourself
from my grip, from my choke hold around
what turns out to be a fuel line, a recipe book,
a collection of flavors, a memory, forgotten cause.

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

Covered by wet things after a rain

and it survives as a fierce floating

phenomenon that gathers above

our heads for later. I steer my collateral

out of the way and lead it down

into the dungeon where thoughts happen.

Or they occur, as words are simple

but their differences profound

since I’ve been trying to find a solution

to a problem I haven’t yet determined

can after all the ghostly trances

the coming clean under the light

of articulation, where wind blows

hope into wreaths of befuddlement.

I wrack my young head, since my other

is much older now, more willing

to conform to the position of the possible

because I idealize my self as some knotted

piece of wood, right for jamming doors

and muddling about during a flood.

The sensations of floating straiten

and unstraiten me, as I slowly fall

apart in particles free of the wretched

configuration drilled into me by education.

The sounds change and we are milling

about again in collateral of many

leaves and twigs, a mulch of missed

opportunities to lurch one or another

way into a void of mischance and jovial

expectation. The collateral redeems

as it dissipates and I am left screaming

my name at the sky in a soundless

tertiary code supposed to help me

gain my footing. There is no gasp

not even a murmur in the falling trees

as they assemble into hypotheses

of running events. The collateral

ceases to be and I am forced to give

up everything and the notion of

a self assumes a layer of incandescence

that prettifies it, leaving it seem

less real, but more desirable

to aspire to. Whatever this recurrence is

I keep feeling it as a nervous bundle

in a vast pond that can’t decide

where one thing ends and another begins.

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

This is just a simulation of a song

—John Langford, Mekon, late 80s, 90s

who knows? And this simulating

of knowledge or verse may end up

not recognizable at all, unworthy

of the magnitude any signifier

might bring, not quite laughing

at itself, but veering off

from any prescriptive medication

that would make it whole

aligned with a model of recommended

integrity or breadth, with necessary

sensory infusions like cute animals

or gardening apparatus. But come now

is the model really that which is

divine guide and authority to the good

and true, or simply a tyrant

demanding worship, falling to one’s knees

or to be led to the scrap heap

or slavers’ auctioneering keep?

Colonizers comparing what they knew

had believed, to seeing imperfections

not even of a copy, but something

trying to be a thing it’s not

never realizing that the unknown freak

that other, may itself be a model, a truth

newly discovered — a poetry of flesh.

Thanks for nothing, Plato, though

I understand you may have intended well

Misreading the Diablo of misreadings

People made out of stone and turned into

this soft jam (for reading and writing)

The desire to be clear and crystalline

rather than this pus of fundament

posing as a thing that hunts. Granite

sand, silt, muck and swamp weed

each in radiants along a chaotic curve

we name creativity as if it had a mind.

Each according to its own jurisdiction

rules about how each piece fits into

the other, without destroying either

ideally, so all may flourish, changing

into birds and insects, gelatinous

floaty things in the wet places where

stone has melted into water. We are

that water, innovated over durations

swallowed by larger and more monstrous

durations that seem to sing. I watch

myself freezing back into the stone slag

I was, where equality doesn’t mean

a thing except the end of this, a life

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

I’ve just seen a face but perhaps

that was my error, a fault in my perception

of space, a void that undoes itself

by consuming a confluence of unrelated

fuss and buzz, everything one might

think of stuffed into the cracks and crevasses

so that it becomes a foil for those who look

and those who design what’s looked upon.

It was my error to see in you my mother

or the cop who chased me barefoot

through the broken glass so that

faces cut into my callused soles

would stay a while and greet me sharply

when I walked. A postcard of Mount

Rushmore peers through the appetite

of the baby king who wants his visage there

never thinking they are dead things

collecting by association what he pretends

to be, while we wait patiently for his

form to become an inert geologic substance

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is always the beginning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peace.

He realized that the pandemic was caused by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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