Selections from The Irreveries

Selections from Book 2 of The Irreveries ~ Irreveries of a Deserter, a book of parables, aphorisms, & fragments.

A Song of Desertion

If there is but one theme for enduring bards — war — the first of all bards sang a song of desertion, forever embalmed in the primal impulse of every artistic expression.

Well, what if some barbaric Thracian glories

in the perfect shield I left under a bush?

I was sorry to leave it – but I saved my skin.

Does it matter? Oh hell, I’ll buy a better one.

- Archilochus

Amongst the very first poems ever written is a poem of desertion, as if to say, 'Your values and the petty wars that serve them are beneath a dignity I want, and so I project to all future dissidents a form of experience — let's call it art — that turns its back on all that is given, all cultural values that I have not evaluated myself, to question them, and to learn to be free to imagine autonomous values'. From then on, every original artistic impulse is inherently a form of criticism by its very existence. Every artist "sides with the deserter." (Adorno). Every current calling to 'make art political' is the dumb yelp of a dutiful footsoldier still yet ignorant of art. Every one of the thousands or millions of artists in our aesthetic era knows the social significance of their activity in the first brushstroke, in the initial amusing of the faintest notion of giving up what lay before them ~ outside them ~ that which was not first questioned & evaluated by them, & taking up some stranger, more uncomfortable form, expanding what's accepted instead of aestheticizing whatever ethos happens to be in vogue.

Strawpeople Artists

The Deserter chanced upon a field of straw-men and straw-women — a long, immaculately manicured landscape decorated with the finest, most luxurious strawpeople he had ever seen, their goldenrods refracting the rosy gradient of sunset. He thought to himself, who built these strawpeople, some kind of straw-people artists? As he wandered by these large, intricate structures, he saw a school of artists intellectualizing beneath them, and upon listening realized that they were only there to build self-portraits. He was asked if he’d like to stay a while and render a self-portrait of himself as a strawman, to which he replied, ‘No, thanks’. For he knew how to paint. But the school was insulted, and berated him for turning down what was, they thought, a very generous offer — indeed in their eyes the only option. The Deserter replied, “Just because someone offers me a coupon for fast food doesn’t mean I need to take it and kill myself slowly.” The school was insulted, and said that he’d never work around there again! He never had anyway, and harbored no hopes to.

As The Deserter turned his back and left, shuddering at the sight of these menacing and mocking strawpeople glaring insipidly into the long night of civilization, he thought to himself — There’s no need to build strawmen or strawwomen because there are fields full of ‘em ready to go. And they’ve spent a lot time and resources self-constructing their own wispy structures. Just let the wind blow these poorly figured structures over or let some wildfire consume them — if you go spending time with these frail nothings you’ll end up burning with their ugly portraits. Go create something beautiful.

And off he went.

But as his back was the sexiest part of him, a couple of strawpeople-artists followed him without his knowledge.

Play With Me!

No

Why not, you don't like play?

No I just don't want to play with you

Play doesn't discriminate 

Ok fine let's play

Maybe I don't want to now

Pft, now who hates play?

I lost the desire 

Why, because I didn't want to play?

Yea

What's my desire got to do with it?

Everything 

That's a lot! Too much

I want your desire 

Why? Go get your own desire

Where?

I dunno 

A Sincere Uncovering of Rocks

We want to be sincere, to speak from the heart, give our intellect over to another thing and so transform it, to uncover all the rocks with gentle hands and open eyes, to find the concealed soul that is papered over with the pollution of cultural wars and to nurture that glimmering soul, to defend it from the elements and foster its mysterious glow with our own mimetic glow until it’s a great big flame that burns bright and singular, and only then finds other light. But saying something is not the same as achieving it; those who sanctimoniously incant the word ‘sincere’ perhaps still subconcsiously believe in ancient superstitions. And those who value sincerity the most sincerely often end up most ironic: attempts at sincerity undoubtedly fail at least once, whatever the reason, and there is truth in the ensuing frustration that often leads to irony or sarcasm, both of which are useful in articulating sincerity without, however, fulfilling it. Like beauty, the recent revaluation of sincerity is a reaction … to irony. The presumption that they're the first to resist irony — as if no one had ever thought to be sincere before — expresses cynicism as well. (As if Hegel had not articulated the limits of irony two centuries ago). And like the way beauty in our era is sometimes conflated with normalizing a particular taste that has little to do with beauty, sincerity, when unfulfilled, is often replaced with a cloying sentimentalism, as if no one would notice that it was substituted ersatz. The culture industry manufactures a dearth of images that prey on the understandable longing for sincerity in an era of readymade cynical ‘attitudes’ from which to draw, attitudes of asceticism and calculation that seem to say, ‘Do not uncover a thing or get to the heart of anything, it will only bring misery to all’. Truly, if you value sincerity, be sincere, don’t just incant it because it’s the next trend. Go uncover those rocks, do not pretend to uncover rocks. Nothing’s worse than false sincerity. And what work it’ll be to actually mean it! What work it’ll be to heave those heavy rocks! What work it’ll be to steady the hand & with a surgical precision extract the thing that resonates true.

Wizards Love Money

One thing I've learned is that wizards are suckers, entranced by any modern object. If you happen to cross one on your path to the market, you’ll see, they'll part with the secrets of the universe for a fleeting novelty or shiny coin. 

The Choral Fence

The Deserter crossed the desert, so thirsty that a splash of blue color to his eyes nearly quenched his thirst. On the horizon glimmered a long wall of people, and as he neared he noticed that each hand was holding their neighbor's, creating an elaborate chain fence, while in the other hand was a tiny shovel. As he approached one sun-hardened link at random — for they were all nearly identical — he asked for a glass of water. But this chained link said that they had no water, and urged him to pick up a shovel. Vexed, the Deserter asked what they were doing, and received the answer that they were shoveling sand by the inch, to move the plateau a little bit. Still vexed, The Deserter asked why? The wall chanted in unison — "to demonstrate our capacity to move mountains together". Even more confused, The Deserter asked why they needed to demonstrate this, and again they responded with the same answer. Chilled to the bone & skin scorched in sun, The Deserter asked to what end was this demonstration for? And again they chanted in unison — "to move mountains". But why? To where? The Deserter asked, receiving the same responses — “to demonstrate that we can move mountains”. The Deserter thought that some mystifier must have come and indoctrinated them with this absurd activity for the purposes of exploiting their labor. But clearly they were under the sway of none but each other. And there were no goods around here, not even water. This fence in the middle of nowhere did not even eat! "So what does this immense ring fence protect", The Deserter asked … " … more sand?" The choral fence responded — "to demonstrate …".

The Butterfly Chasers 

The Deserter was very drunk with associates & scoundrels one evening, & feeling effusive ranted & raved, for a second.

"When I look around at artists — so many! — trying to capture the moment, it has an air of being forced, a forced hot air, overwhelmed by desperation for relevance, a spirit of anxious chase. And LOUD! For nothing is more contemporary than to scream at the top of some calcified lung, "Behold my relevance! I am near the dream!" And yet the moment is marked by no identifiable thing so much as a burning through everything. These anxious chasers smear the landscape in rainbow coloration that lacks all nuance and aesthetic sensitivity for what makes colors contrast and illumine from within. The entire rainbow is stolen from the sky and engraft upon the prepared and re-prepared canvas of the self-distracting self, taking its place next to a hemorrhaging of the soul in desperate strain, expressed in the contradiction of grandiose words of authenticity that, lapdog-like, yearn for the acceptance of faceless masters. If their sketchy commander asks them to bleed their heart into a vat, they eagerly ask How much?!, assuming they have limitless supply. I cannot discern what they truly want or where they're going. Styleless, they are styled in the image of vapor, wreathed in the gas of their own unmaking. They have left nothing to themselves, nothing for themselves, not beauty, not freedom, not even self-confidence ~ they'll taboo anything, and to the saddest song. An onlooker would be led to believe that such commitment to tabooing is but practice to taboo themselves. Everything must be razed, but ecstatically? No. Their Dionysus suffers pathos and self-doubt, and destroys depressingly alongside a pet question mark. At home, after a manufactured riot, a people will write a long freeform treatise, with no object, subjectless without shape or color or character. When some engineered kaleidoscope of butterflies are released, they disperse in mimesis to desperately catch one and build a career showing it off. And some even manage to catch one! But then their pathos wonders why, as they begin to resent even the butterfly for being the cause to the end of their formless chase. And as their scarcity is also engineered, those without a butterfly turn bitterly anti-butterfly. These most aloof and impoverished butterfly catchers, were a lion to come and lay by their side, they would not notice. But if so, they'd find in the occasion an opportunity for neutering. And yet, remarkably, these desperate capturers who catch only vapor find new things to chase."

He then played a gorgeous virtual vexation into the night, as the public looked with rolling eyes in dismay, annoyed and compelled.

No More Traversing Frozen Lakes

Sometimes an apparition of some lost angel will drift to the surface and scream, falling up from some abyss beneath the ice at my feet. That'll make my heart pump! But then the angel freezes to death, and evanesces back into the void.

But I don't make a habit of frolicking on frozen lakes.

Museum of Talking

The Deserter chanced upon an immaculate glass structure, but when he approached noticed it was smeared with grease and a crowd of fingerprints. That there were so many entrances refracting in prisms all around concealed the fact that there was just one entrance, a thin sliver of an entry guarded by a sphinx who was currently out to lunch. The Deserter passed through, entranced by long faux-marbled hallways littered with busts of talking heads. Siamese twinned busts gossipping to each other, ruminating fickle feelings, mouths immaculately displayed, a desiccated forest of speech. And of course doubled, tripled, multiplied by myriad visual and acoustic reflections, layering with other siamese chatterboxes. Some asked for money. On the walls were scribbled instructions for how to become a chatterboxed double. These busts — aestheticized talking heads — often theorized about their own platforms (one of the few things they could see), their own reflections, their reflections overlayed with reflections of other chatty sculptures, pseudo-philosophized about the technology of their infrastructures, and speculated about what they'd be worth if they were exchanged for a different bust, amongst other suspicious reflections. 

The Deserter was transfixed, never before had he heard such a din of voices, polyphonic metababble become drone, distractedly catching stray snippets of phrases and exotic words. It was an active museum of talking! … he thought to himself. And of course, the museum was free to enter, for nothing is cheaper than talk. But he noticed that he was the only visitor there and wondered why no one was coming to this museum. It seemed as if there were no humans around, and he recalled that the entire region was vacant, the villages had been left in place, abandoned. The Deserter realized that this museum of talk was designed to absorb everything in its vicinity, to find voices to adorn its otherwise vapid halls, to sing the praises of its vapid nothingness to a phantasm of villagers. Not long after, The Deserter felt museum-fatigue and needed to exit. Of course, even the exits were hard to find, because there were so many exits refracted throughout, & all the busts gave conflicting advice. So he threw a bust through a wall and got the hell out of there.

On Saturdays We Convalesce

On Saturdays we laze, to drones of various scents of eternity. The Scarlet Algorithm hums at the speed of psychic entropy in the candlelit forgotten catacombs that, { … rumor whispers … }  were once a stop on The Underground Railroad, later, a bathhouse. A self-crafted minotaur embarks on becoming an apparition, released by a frenzy of differently toned harmonics, contemplating its own labyrinth of evoked episodic memories amidst a field of friends splayed out like subwoofers on pedestals-cum-coffins, transducers of themselves.

Upstairs an artist whitewashes a tire in a concrete garage, washes it on the desolate street that slopes forever into The Mighty Mississippi, that Strong Brown God just beyond an abandoned playground of sandboxes whose perimeter is defined by the sinuous encoiling of a mammoth cement snake, scaled with graffiti. An image of young Walt Whitman watches approvingly over us.

Brothers discuss possibilities and foreclosures on the verdant roof, sipping hyssop poison, excitedly awaiting an arrival of performances, as a daughter stays missing. The spring thunderstorm brews on high past the slow rust barges, small grouplets scatter free throughout the terraced gardened complex, lost, reflecting on, & off of the dissolution of boundaries.

A gaggle of tender dancing girls commingles on a wooden staircase lit by a single orange lamp at violet dusk, undulating with each other, mawing together as one breaks off from the collective to throw fruit at the pile of bodies she once was. A husk of used watermelon flies in the silence. The dull splat of wet flesh hitting dank flesh falls & damply resonates the cool concrete floor. And awaiting, ever expectantly, announcements that never come. In its place a silvery shrine of mirrors is lit under a stone arch underground, as the sky bulges with phosphor balls of lightning in the distance. The voluptuous girl is inhumed in a soil of her own collecting, within a colorful ring of her own variegated narcissuses & ashes.

Tomorrow we will clean our bodies. And begin anew again.

The Deserter, The Thing, & The Community

A group of people once tried to understand an enigmatic thing, and it was decided to understand it by mediating their experience. So they put an obstacle between the thing and them. Then, to understand the relationship between them and the obstacle, they mediated it with another obstacle. And so on and so on until they had a great many obstacles that formed an immaculate structure. Then they fell asleep inside it. When they awoke in the morning they agreed that this structure offered useful shelter, so they manufactured all kinds of furniture to get cozy in it, and art to adorn their new home with. Time passed, and they developed a community with solidarity, held discussions in which the community extolled the magnificence of it's own existence, and sang songs in circles while beating on drums. Then one day a stranger knocked on their door. They eyed him suspiciously, but benevolently invited him in to join the community. He said that was a kind offer, but he was only there to inform them that there was a great monster outside their building. He said, "I passed through these parts many years ago and saw this thing in a much less terrible form, it was, in fact, hardly visible, and I wondered what these people were doing wrestling with some phantasm of a mote of dust. I thought you were mad, and passed by. You can imagine my amazement upon returning many years later to see the unbridled growth of this beast! It's at your back door feasting on your trash right now. I simply wanted to tell you that it appears quite powerful, but maybe dangerous, that you might investigate and do something about it." With that, the deserter departed. Many years later he passed by this same spot, only nothing was there. He barely recognized it and indeed checked his compass twice. Covered in weeds, a few ruins were all that remained to prove his intuition correct. He sat down and wondered what had happened. Had they got up and left? Did they vanquish the beast along with themselves? A minute passed, and as he stood up to move along, a mammoth snakelike thing slithered by his feet in the tall meadow.

Beauty From Scratch 

I am a hunter of the ecstatic — for it's in ecstasy that the jingly jangly keys to eternity shimmer before the nonsensual mind's longing. And when I hear that faint jangling, with all harmonics rippling up and down the spectrum, it sends me into musical irreverie.

When I hear the tanpura & it's scintillating harmonics, it's radiant beauty, it's perfect expression of nature, I don't want to hear it playing or even to play it myself, but I want to create it from scratch, create something just like it … but a little better. I want to understand heaven in the abstract so that I can create better heavens. I enter eternity only with keys that I've fabricated myself, and entry codes brilliantly hacked. And in the middle of the night I steal myself away, carelessly leaping up & skimming stellar chandeliers with my naked, languid arms.

Rhizomes Are Annoying

In the riparian high desert of Arizona there is a utopian architectural project called Arcosanti, it has been in an interminable process towards completion since the late 60s. Banalized by muted public disinterest, it attracts leftovers: geniuses, wanderers orphaned since the 60s, Japanese architecture students, and blinded visionaries. It is both a strange and familiar endeavor, a synthesis of high modernist architecture and the socialist community experiments of the early 19th century, with a cosmic theory of humanity's progression into an ultimate womb, or 'omega seed' as an overtone whose conceptual transience draws attention to itself. At Arcosanti, in and around its elliptical desert-cubist architecture that appears to have grown as a matter-of-natural-fact from the silt itself, there is a small sustainable farm in the valley that is designed, or downright demanded, to mutually reciprocate with the architecture, often as a form of beautifying it with added utopian function. Paolo Soleri, the visionary architect, prohibited the growing of flowers on the grounds that they are too decorative. Uselessness was not beautiful to him.

In the early 80s many of the residents—perennial campers—did a bit of research and decided that growing something called Bermuda Grass would be a good idea, to give visual substance in the form of familiar greenery to the arid dirt. Bermuda grass is a type of grass cultivated for places not unlike Arcosanti, specifically because it takes root easily and can grow just about anywhere, anyone can then have a lawn. It accomplishes this through its form of densely woven rhizomes that are implacably resilient; nearly indestructible veins, surprisingly similar to white plastic tubules that look vaguely familiar but one can't say what it is they reference. By 2003 the Bermuda Grass had taken over the entire farm in some form or another, underground, overground, or both. This isn't that dramatic, the farm was more of a glorified garden. Those who embraced the idea of planting Bermuda Grass in the 80s were long-gone, transient vesicle that Arcosanti is, and who were rendered as legacy in a somewhat negative sense by the annoying insistence of this insipid weed. By the early 2000's much of the farm's plants, trees, and crops had been, or were in the process of being strangled out of existence by this grass. No one predicted this. And perhaps no one could have. Nothing could safely be planted but things were constantly planted anyway. The farm was an underground network of rhizomes that could not be seen or imagined, that choked everything it came in contact with, without pause or rest or discernment. 

So, the younger farmers, more like amateur gardeners who were there to learn something novel, had to instead contend with this unrelenting substance everyday of work. The excruciating days of the workers were conditioned by one terrible decision decades earlier, a decision that at the time seemed infallible. Who could anticipate such success, after all, of grass in the desert? In order to remove the Bermuda Grass one had to dig 18 inches underground in the caliche ground, though it wasn't exactly caliche. And it never rained. One had to then pull at the 'roots', which was like hacking at thousands of buried synthetic volleyball nets that never really broke down, though they did disintegrate into brittle little bits that would recultivate incessantly. But with the soil so naturally hard one couldn't achieve that satisfying feeling of pulling a root out completely, with that dull snap that resonates through the arm giving clear indication of success. The sun was strong, obviously, but the wind was more irritating, blowing relentlessly for five months of the year. The wind was far worse and maddened the sundried brains of the indolent weeders. With the hard soil the roots would snap at any place, and all places in that network were homogenous, one couldn't find a way to navigate it because it was without contour. So, the digger would have to fill in the hole and move to the next tile, so to speak. But even this posed problems, because when one has to repeatedly stab at the ground in order to break it, one is also inevitably stabbing a conduit of Bermuda Grass as well, so by the time one reached the obligatory and calculatedly recognizable 18 inches deep, their hole and their pile of dirt would be riddled with hundreds or thousands of tiny rhizome fragments which were necessary to sift through and remove, because they could, and would inevitably re-root. So one slumped on the ground sorting out dry and sun-hardened dirt clumps from the rhizome strands that were cooked into them, which one always necessarily missed because the manual system devised by the management couldn't really compete with a form of nature already vile but all the more so because it had been given warranty by human beings decades earlier to be much worse than it would have been, left to its own devices. Humans had given this nature an added value of ceaseless dominion, so to speak. And each day was like this, because there was no other solution presented than simply eradicating the mistakes of the past as best as one could, a best which necessarily fell interminably shorter every day.  Resignation was never really an option, though the farm was not really important to anyone. The best solution would have been abandonment, moving to another location out of reach.

A Deserting Conjuring

I desert, eyes seered shut, & conjure. 

The lawyer with her rosy buttcheeks by the old, cold window pane that overlooks a silent, deep snow, her long red hair draped over her slender, pale body that harbors a missing uterus.

The rushed insight at a checkout counter, paying for carne asada amidst the scent of horchata, where I explain to a friend that I cannot accept a sugarmama because I am too addicted to falling in love.

The desperate clutch of a sick wife on hardwood floor with child & toys, watching in desperation as her husband departs with a slingshot slung over his cold shoulder, ringlets shuddering in the night of brick garden movies.

The lone electric composer in The Octagon, in a verdant desert that just received first rain in a year, as local inhabitants bustle outside snapping the heads off locusts, & eating the leaping plague.

The snaggletoothed redhead brother summersaulting on a lonely trampoline in West Virginian verdure, awaiting his sister who winds through Appalachian roads driving toothless old murmuring men who request her dirty underwear to the marble factory.

The bearded midwesterner who diligently heats his iron, bending metal to his fiery will, warping bronze to the specific negative shapes of historical artifacts.

The wandering critic, richly impoverished stillborn bard of a neverborn species, keenest eyes that permute through highest standards, moving prism of ideals in an endless shade.

The smoking woman with yellowing teeth and green hair, forever just released from psychiatric ward, avoiding convalescence with confused commitments, feeding the world leftovers as her spirit starves with sacrifice.

The sculptor restless in a rut, a grove of birch trees and dripping sap, books of colored braille & genome sequences, smattering of bells patina'd jade with urine.

The door slams open & I awake in my workshop, drafting triangles and marvelously sealed silver risers in stolen silence.

Allegory of the Weed

The Domesticated Vegetable: Weed, stop sucking up all my nutrients!

The Weed: Actually, I can exist in your garden without stealing your nutrients. In fact, I can thrive on much less than you

V: Yes, but you taste so bitter & stringent!

W: The finest chefs & physicians know well the culinary & health benefits of bitters

V: But you are so ugly!

W: I am ugly because gardeners constantly hack me down. But it is because I am hacked to bits and pieces above ground that my roots are so vigorous. I can't even see your anemic little roots. Besides, my flowers are much more efflorescent than yours, and aren’t flowers beautiful? You may be tasteful, but I am beautiful. I know that taste and beauty are not the same.

V: But you're so useless!

W: A weed is just a plant which people haven't found a use for yet. Is it my fault that garden-tenders are so closed-minded & unimaginative? I am proud of my uselessness, for it evokes a vastly free garden with new uses & needs beyond the current one.

V: But you are on your own, not part of the garden at all!

W: But I’m here, aren’t I? And you, you are so dependent. You can't even drink your own water. Often, you can't even stand up on your own. While I'd shoot straight to the sun if no one stopped me. You could learn something from my independence.

The Last Artist 

Around the bonfire a few successful artists were talking about the most important book of their era, who pedanticized in the most novel way about never having had an aesthetic experience. They proceeded to affirm this by going around the fire and, in great detail of absence, saying that each one has also never had an aesthetic experience, as if, maybe, embarrassed to admit they might have. Until it came to one last, flabbergasted artist ~ who no one liked ~ and who reluctantly had to break silence, "What?! Do you get dressed in the morning and choose which clothes to wear based on their colors and shapes, after waking from emotional dreams that slideshow fantastic images, and then move about the city watching and judging other people's cosmetic decisions, eating lunch based on tastes and presentations of tastes, gazing at the architecture of buildings and marvelling at the methodical fabrication of their artifice, then bingewatching tv shows or movies deep into night that demanded thousands of aesthetic decisions by thousands of people all of which your highly developed faculties immediately grasp and form snap judgments on, or perhaps even attend an art exhibition or read a book or simply scan social media with an even more rapidfire flickering of aesthetic judgment, or perhaps make art yourself since you call yourselves artists, and then drift into visceral reveries before falling into the induced dreamshow of the following night, maybe after having highly specific forms of sex determined by proprioception, visceral scent, and intricately formalized positioning? Are your senses and attendant judgmental faculties totally closed, or do you just think it's hip to say you've never had an aesthetic experience, secretly wishing it were so because you're immersed, buried in aesthetic experience and actually probably know nothing else other than aesthetics? Or perhaps you're right, and aesthetic experience is determined by the quality of intellectual reflection on it, as such, which you seem to have no soul for?"

"Dinner's ready!"

The group needed a change of scenery, while the last artist jumped straight into the fire and burst into flames. He was eaten later for the main course.

The Warty God

Were some god of creativity, some perfect genius to descend upon culture and instill in us feelings of unbridled ecstacy or heartbreaking beauty, would such experience be desirable? To who? But also, to who not? Wouldn't many find some ruse of reason to resent it, to dismiss it outright? Perhaps this ecstasy was delivered by a god who, it is rumored, has a wart hidden on his foot, and to such dismissers of ecstacy or beauty such ecstasy or beauty is then forever tainted with the infectious image of a wart, and ecstasy itself is denied because of some vague and insignificant blemish blown out of proportion in an obsessively wretched imagination. 

But who would accept a warty god?

Equality

Oh yea … I remember … you know who talks about equality? 

Children!

Talk? Whine is more like it —

~ "She has 5 cookies and I only have 3!!" ~

But you don't even like those cookies!

Dawn Anew

Sometimes I want to grow into something new. When my manly arms carry most delicate baby bones & softest flesh — of one kind or another —  through smoke-ringed fields and irradiated cavalcades of bitter cultural warriors, I am the last nurturer of The Cheerful Dawn. When my sinewy legs arrive at last in your doorway, covered in the sweat of industry, and my boots are thoughtfully slipped behind as we writhe naked and sinuous as continuously swooning sine waves on the lush carpet ambience, contemplating the likelihood of comets assailing the earth, we are remembrance of possibility, lighting a final vigil on some jaggedly cut edge of the exiled avant-garde's lost bullroarer. When I'm calmest still-life as a burning stick of incense with cancered child, cosmic advisor to all the hot-messed girls now cooling quick, the fields are churned and I never look in resentment back on the days' toiling, but excitedly for the work that's yet to come, for farmers and all cultivators of luscious fruits of any kind know that a bountiful harvest means work.

Underground Bars

There aren't enough underground bars. Literally under the ground, not as in culturally underground. There's something deeply pleasurable about going under & spending a sunny afternoon in a dank cellar sipping a Guinness & a coffee (a favorite combo that a friend recommended years ago). You're supposed to be at work, but your affable childhood friend, who is also a drunk, convinced you to ignore it & meet him underground in the middle of the city. Every hour or so you'll emerge like a mole to suffocate your lungs in cigarette smoke & squint at all the passersby frantically going places, & who scowl at you like a schoolmarm who is yet to be employed as such, & so works extra hard to act disapproved at your smoking, which is now a taboo amongst the newly repressed youth, which is not coincidentally the exact time you took up the habit. And after relishing in that for a while, your friend will reveal the tiny but powerful bluetooth speaker he carried with him & play his own music selection overtop whatever punk muzak is on. And if anyone complains — even rightfully — a switch is flicked & he turns into adolescent rage, whining & berating closed-minded people who don't understand anything. And you stand there grinning like a drunken fool in friend-love. His girlfriend will call, & he says to act normal when she arrives with her friends. You are still a human-in-training, after all. They'll arrive & you decide that the only way to act normal is to not say anything at all, since every word that has ever come out of your impish mouth has betrayed you & occasionally ruined a strangers' life forever. Conversation about jobs, aspirations, ambitions, goals, possibilities! Personal histories & experiences that led beautiful women to their current luxurious successes. All that is & could forever be exciting! And when such beautiful, overachieving adults a fraction of a hair away from perfection itself ask you what you "do", what you're about, you don't just say nothing — you say "Nothing."

Sisyphus

The physical form that Sisyphus' torment ultimately took was not pushing a singular boulder up a mountain with his defiant musculature. After time the boulder disintegrated into countless lesser rocks, so Sisyphus' physique had to adapt to scrambling rapidly about the mountain side cobbling together all the fragments. Each time the boulder tumbled, it crumbled a bit. With each iteration it disintegrated a little bit more. With each iteration it lessened and it dispersed into disjecta. It finally proved to be Time who was Sisyphus' tormentor, and who would not let him perfect his craft, but rather kept him on his toes, requiring reconceptualization of his practice, and transformation of his physique into an agile and spritely nervous system with tentacles sprawled over the hills. In the end he was an unrecognizable octopoid type creature who was also a critical historian of rocks.

The Sigh 

Even curiosity & terror become fatigued. We wear our fatigue as a fashion, in vain attempt to overcome it. In the distressed wrinkles of our clothes, in the weariness cleaved into the crinkles on our faces, in the self-pitying sighs with which all people today complain "what a day, what a year, what a life!" Suicide clubs would be quite a profitable enterprise. And yet it's been shown that sighing is a healthy form of release. Perhaps the great form of our era is the sigh. Where are the architects for grander bridges of sighs? Where are the new composers of sighs?

The Beautiful Word

There are times when I write a little poem or aphorism that celebrates a good feeling, for there are many good feelings if one knows how to find them. Above all, pleasurable feelings, those rare moments of spiritual elevation, in whatever form they may come, should be celebrated because they are so rare. Celebration can be a form of learning, of remembering. But most often I have to try to write these little lovely thoughts because loveliness does not just come, it is not a visitation, it is not some inner light, it is not natural and there is little in our world that is beautiful and lovely enough to remind one to write a lovely thought when they get home from whatever nihilistic social gathering they’ve managed to disentangle from. Truly, I have to force myself to see what is beautiful, to find what is lovely, and I must squint my eyes to see it, like finding an alternate, magical image in visual noise. Every time I write something beautiful, it is inevitably accompanied by an awkward grimace, as if it's so unnatural to go looking for beauty, as if beauty has to be delivered by some wretched Igor. What is natural is to resent, to scorch the earth with scathing criticism — for the shallow and petty character of most things in our civilization wants to burn and be burned. Everything deserves to perish. To write something beautiful is to write something beautiful — it is a matter of form imposing its historical otherness on the ugly calumnies of daily ‘life’.

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Marsden Hartley, Desertion, c. 1910. oil on paperboard, 14 in. x 22 in. (35.56 cm x 55.88 cm). Colby College Museum of Art, Gift of the Alex Katz Foundation; 2008.218