Confess

The egomaniacs in art are as the salt in the sea. But we are the waves. As the waves. That strikes me now as an egomaniacal thing to say. For the sun is shining.  But we must speak as the ocean. We do as the waves, putting salt in touch with other salt. Such friction. It is funny work. I was walking along the ocean one morning this October and a rose had washed up in the night. It was bedraggled from the waves, all that travel. Her terrible, lovely hair. Entwined in a white grosgrain bit of string. There must have been a wedding party at sea. I visualized them barefoot. I visualize you barefoot. Always. This tells you more than I wish to confess.

That Was the Year

That was the winter I went around making false graves. I would tie sticks together into crosses with twine and plant them in the earth in the middle of a forest where few would pass. I was often on all fours clearing snow and leaves with my hands, which were like paws in my big gloves. The gloves were ancient. They were so ancient, they remembered you.  Or I would erect little cairns with white stones. Once, I made a memorial cross using an old bear trap I had found. Such a horrible mouth to think of there in the darkness. In the night. Often, I wrote first names on these monuments, Christian names mostly, but sometimes I chose names that used symbols from other alphabets or languages that are ideograms. Google would help me make the graves. Sometimes I used the names of characters from novels who had meant something to me. I laid these beloved characters in the earth, on which they had never truly lived. For instance, I made a grave for Bartleby. Sometimes I would want the people who would stumble upon one of these hallucinations to think it was an animal's grave rather than a human's. Or I would want them not to be sure. Many names have this ambiguity. The important thing is the feeling the person would have and how the grave might change the person for an instant or longer. I don't think these made people afraid, although it probably did make them wonder. And fear is leaven, anyway. This had nothing to do with art and everything to do with being a person. This is, I suppose, a failing. The thing I didn't want to tell you is that you have to actually dig a grave for this to be convincing. Even if there is no one, no animal, no human within it. But this is good exercise. My blood pressure came down that year.


--after a photograph by Walter Stoltz

Levi's Photo Workshop (18 Wooster St.)

was such a cool idea.

Way to go, Soho!

R.I.P.

Yes, I realize you can rent high-end vintage cameras, have them shipped to you and then return them after a certain number of days of use. But I love the way this was there on the street and community-based and meant to foster creativity.

I Wonder

I wonder if there are people who intend to vote for Trump who don't realize that if he gets elected the National Guard will be in so many major cities at once, until it is overtaxed and overwhelmed and the barricades all fall. Many of these cities will be shut down for long periods of time.

People who look at these Trump rallies and are not disturbed that it is only a sea of white faces (and mostly old white faces) and that so many of our neighbors and fellow Americans are not represented there at all, are sad cases. They are really not good countrymen, not good Americans. They don't believe in unification. These are the believers in an American caste system.

You don't have to worry about Trump's finger on The Button. You have to worry about Trump's ability to abuse power and the police state which he will attempt to institute. He will fail, but it will be after so much bloodshed. If you think life is difficult now, take 1968 and multiply it by a hundred.

I know we should be reassured that he's down in virtually all the polls. But I have this horrible, sinking feeling that his brand of demagoguery might work on the uneducated and those who will accept a Pyrrhic victory if it means their racism can be reflected down upon America from the White House.

It's just unfathomable that so many poor and middle class people are cutting their own economic throats by voting for a man who has made it abundantly clear he intends to defend the interests of the one percent and corporate America. He is repulsed by the people who adore him most.

(don't forget to vote)

In the Future

     A man had killed his wife and her lover. He had done it in the classic style, right there in the matrimonial bed where he had discovered them enjoying their blood sport. The case was not adjudicated in the usual manner, for it was discovered that the man had complete belief in his innocence, indeed he was innocent, as he had used neurotech to excise not only all memory of the murder, but all memories of his wife involving her lover. He had curtailed the story, substituting a narrative which ended the day before he had discovered his wife had a lover (the day he had murdered them).  He had used a bootleg Chinese program. So he knew nothing of his wife's murder. Such innocence is a social problem. Forensic neurologists testified that they had discovered the tell-tale signs of erasure throughout the man's brain. At that point in history, such erasures were not yet done in a seamless manner, neurologically speaking. For those who specialized in such work, there would be traces they could search for and find. The technology used left its own little markers and such bootleg technology rarely came without some largely harmless spam serving the political agenda of the country which had manufactured it. You might see some political shifts in the individual as well. They might be a walking billboard defending that foreign country's interests. That part of the investigation sometimes yielded very funny stories. There was even a television program about that. It was a humorous show. You had to be careful with what you bought on the street and used on your brain. Murderer X had actually moved to a new city, started a new job, deliberately lost most of his friends and acquaintances. He didn't like the feelings they aroused in him, how they looked at him as a guilty man and attempted to make him feel like a guilty man. Because most of them knew he was guilty; the facts were pretty bald. He had established a new life and it wasn't a bad one. He had just distanced himself from his family and friends because he didn't like the cognitive dissonance that came with this set of people. In due course, he was found guilty and sentenced to have his memory restored. The false end of the narrative he had contrived was removed and the truth was re-ingrained. He would be tested for cognitive revisitations of the murder while in prison. If the process (call it guilt or self-punishment) showed signs of lessening over the years (and this often happened with inmates) his mind would be wiped, retooled, and the memories of his love for his wife would be "freshened" to bring a new and revitalized sense of loss much closer to the surface. If the murderer in question lacked guilt, there was a special process whereby it could be successfully simulated. So even sociopaths were no longer immune from corrosive regret. Also, the diminishing pain of the punitive sense of being imprisoned (after five years or so, the mind adjusts) would be "fixed," refreshed at the same time. In the future, one could not "get used" to prison. Prison did not allow this to happen. The way some might touch up the grey in their hair, the State could now touch up the pain in the conscience of its prisoners.. It was a great help and a great pleasure to those involved in doing the work of the fatherland, with the rare exception of those few nervous nellies who suffered pangs of conscience, who might still believe the rank doctrine of the autonomy of the human mind. But these were soon themselves corrected through the miracle of neurotech, if they wished to remain in their well-paying jobs. Most exercised this option and were fine literally overnight.



---after Foucault

If

If the shadows of trees are upon me, if the shadows of the leaves of trees and the shadows of the needles of conifers are dappling my face, the shadows of humans are probably not upon my face. If this condition is true, there is probably less, possibly nothing, to explain. But the thought occurs to me that there is nothing to explain. And I have just put this thought down in words like green leaves in shadow. Why does the thought occur to me? To exonerate myself?  It is a parasite like a caterpillar. The trees themselves do not care for solitude. After all, they are all together. But we believe it is solitude. Probably they are communicating, possibly they even comment on my passing through their shadows. They look down on me in the literal sense. Possibly they do in the other sense too. But I don't worry about it, since they are sworn to their green silence. They talk when the wind picks up, they sound disturbed, but possibly this is an erotic moment for them. Though they lose the most leaves then, in wind, you always lose something in erotic moments, don't you? That's largely the point. Now I feel I have intruded into their secret lives, even if only at the level of speculation. Speculation is an intrusion. I look up and shadows pour down on my face. It is the money shot of darkness. It is cool and smells like nothing. Shadows are the money of the forest. Shadows are the money of trees. I come here to steal and pretend I do not steal.




---after a photograph by Marta Bevacqua

There is No Pain

There is no pain you can inflict on the past versions of myself. Not even the "me" that was here yesterday. I have slipped it as perfectly as the insect that molts. It is an outfit removed and left on a bed by an open window. Eventually, this is what the name entire becomes.

Nevertheless, it can rise and return to you, if you wish.

Somehow (still) it can embrace you, this emptiness like clothes.

It has such a primitive heart.

Maybe

Maybe you are strong and already know your way. But I have put these magic gloves on the street for you to find. Just in case. They are not mine. Actually, they are not "gloves." They are mittens. They are a child's mittens. I figure you will find them since you are a creature of wandering. Although this is an empty street with no houses and only trees are watching here. The symmetrical spiderweb patterns with the eyes on them is for you to appreciate the starkness of such childish beauty. Childish beauty, like what quantum mechanics is doing down under the day. All day today.  Didn't you fall in love in childish beauty, with it all your life?  I have placed them, the foundlings, as they would appear in the "natural world," i.e. left on the left, right at right. Although the universe has other symmetries. They are not to keep you warm, but they might. It is bald winter, after all. You may have to stretch them to fit your hands. As you are not a child, except in matters of total darkness. You are totally dark. So you stumble towards a woman's body. Another one then. In a closet you take her. The women's bodies are as illuminated, lit up, x-rayed. They have dark grammar. You should pick up the mittens. The gloves. Call them gloves if you must. You are on your way there. To the place where there are no children. Where the closets are no longer filled with women facing into darkness, but actual brooms and true darkness.


--after a photograph by Atsushi Ito

She was embarrassed to have to go into the street with the three boys who had all known her. Well, they hadn't known her, but they had known her. The crazy way her mother talked.

She thought of the movie Carrie.

So she stood around in the street while her mother watched from the picture window. The girl was picking some peeling rubber off her mint Converse she had drawn on with a pen, running her fingers through her...stop watching me, she grimaced at the window. The curtains banged shut like an impossible old maid, muted.

Rach smelled two of his fingers and then crossed himself nervously, not even realizing he did it.

"What food do you smell?" Nial asked. He didn't wait for her to answer. "Bananas? Do you smell bananas?"

"No," she said.

He had been practicing to be a hypnotist using YouTube. Which she figured meant he was practicing to be a rapist.

(He had to be buying those ugly clothes for something.)

"Barbush barbush barbush barbush barbush" practically hummed someone in stoner monotone.

What she had been doing before her mother chased her from the house:

She had been dissolving various colored dyes in glasses of water in the kitchen. Peering at them like a Russian scientist. She was conscious of the soft fact that she liked the high ceiling in that room and how it was always deserted in there since her mother was useless. Psychic. Useless. The sound of colors dissolving in water was no sound at all. The air was cleared of some sort of static by this process.

It was as though she were holding the hand of water like a mermaid.

She had been watching the colors plume out into phantasmagoria, vivid arabesques and serpentines. Sea serpents and orgasms. She was a girl, after all. She was these essences, she knew. Was she any good? If she just listened, she knew it would be the way she wanted in life somehow. If she just listened. So she stood on the street with the three boys who had all known her and wanted to know her again and she wondered. Was she really any good? And what good were these boys with her mother behind the curtains she was holding in both  hands now, unsubtle. Her so-called psychic mother who fought and pleaded and fought again with banks like lovers. Her bankrupt psychic mother. Who could not cook or suck a man's cock to save her life. And that was the woe of both of them, wasn't it?

She chased off a perfectly good trucker, a perfectly good idiot, this summer. And he worked ridiculous overtime. Solvent and invisible. What an idiot her mother was.

If she could just haul off and hit her in the face. She knew the feeling but couldn't quite own it, tame it. Punch her. But through that iron curtain. While she cowered in her pusher manners behind the walls of the house they would eventually lose. Let it just happen. Let them ride the wind. Maybe she could pare off from her then. On the wind of shared failure, the way people do. The way people divorce reasons. Or promises. There is beauty in such errors. Such fuck-ups.

"What do you smell now?"

It was Andy, mocking the august mannerisms of the junior rapist-hypnotist.

She was inside the color blue. It could not touch her if she remained inside the walls of the color blue This was an actual place like a prison, the color blue, but with this difference: the rest of the world was looked out and that externality was the prison. Blue means within. This shade of blue was a vivid sapphire. It was a roaming spirit condensed in a still person. It was what gave water its sexual prowess. The sexual powers that water has at night, all night. Wild water. Even the water in a night bathtub has a shade of this.

Neon has nothing on water, except when neon reflects in it. Then it might win. Like a serpent against a mongoose. The mongoose has nasty powers. You know Riki Tiki Tavi. She let the smoke out slowly from her nostrils. She did it right under her mother's glass nose. Let her press behind the curtains into the glass of street looking. Fairy pimp-mother. Let her fuck off, let her hear this thought, psychic bitch.

So her mind wondered and the boys touched each other. Their hands covered each other's hands like lovers. They pushed. They walked backwards. Their language skipped beats like hearts will do when the closeness is all anticipation. The boys. Nervous coiled springs in them like you see in hunting dogs. She noticed how they were doing this over and over. Unconscious, since they were boys. Boys are unconsciousness, she thought. She figured there must be exceptions. But they were lovers in this way. These three in the street. Dancing into each other. Giddy not awkward. They were like Three Graces. Maybe a little homely but still.

Three Graces. With a basketball under the arm of one.

"That must smell like your body odor," she said. But she said it soft, so friendly. So that it was a tease. A sexual poke. A sexual poke given out of boredom, acedia. The sexiest kind of flirtation. The insincere kind with nuance.

She wondered if she would be sentenced to be the insincere flirt (the word is cocktease, she knew) all her life?

Why was it a question? Why was she sentenced to asking questions instead of making declarative statements like the idiots do?

"Do you want to play basketball?"

"No. Kerry." She had to make it clear she understood the real beg there.

"Behind the 7-11..."

"I know behind the 7-11, Kerry." She was forced to be stern with this horny boy nostalgic already for what had happened over and over in his mind.

Did he really not wash his hand for days? You hear the thing.

The dog on the carpet with his belly upturned. (Look at my yummy, well-behaved balls.)

Just imagine the power, she thought. Why am I not abusing the power? She thought she must be crazy like her mother. Was she merely "psychic" too? To call oneself a psychic was to confess one saw oneself as passive before and within the universe. It was not a magical power. It was a form of usual victimhood. There was a sisterhood. A weakness. It was to believe in feeling over knowledge over feeling. Folding over knowledge over feeling. Like laundry.  How did she know this when she was just fifteen? She just did. A puppet. If you sit on playground swings alone, you will eventually become a philosopher. Everything's eventual. She was a girl philosopher. She had spilled her essence but not her thoughts all over the crooks of these boys who believed that brown longnecks behind the 7-11 were magic talismans on a road somewhere.

She was told that she was prettier than the prettiest girl in the best magazine inside the 7-11..With her legs pinned back like a Japanese butterfly.

She should know.