28 Saturday Jul 2012
Posted in Creed of Core
home
to the attic
after death
played chess
with phantoms
(owed my
shrieking youth
to those
degenerates
those
freaks
those
poltergeists and banshees,
pederasts, junkies
snuffling ectoplasmic goo;
some one come all…)
day-night’s spook
shook
the kick
of swapping light
with shades whose
– “I did, I was” –
might not have been
as mine had been
and was
“In my day”-type
doggerel
embellished
– bor-ing –
killed the buzz
03 Sunday Jun 2012
Posted in Creed of Core
Protagonist and Love Interest:
Eye knew love, and loved Love.
Love, who had failed to complete her kid while
simultaneously splitting the prime infinitive (well before “white”
turned “off-white”) that was her task: to paint the
kitchen.
Thus Love’s wretched life direction – murdered Self, aborted Other
– and subsequent residence in The City of Pain and Loss, where
Federally funded ghosts roam free and pay no taxes. Same
apartment though, else eerily similar, one might conclude upon
even a brief, but discerning, inspection of the half-baked
paint-job in the kitchen.
Ten million stories in this city, none fulfilled. The Past won’t
change, not anywhere-ever, but nor will What Is, nor, for the
denizens or Pain and Loss, What Is To Come.
Whether or not it is possible to alter the patterns of action
that comprise most Lives (or these facsimiles? eternal
recurrences? forged repetitions?) in Pain and Loss, has not been
proven; but it’s certainly something these poor bastards find
extremely difficult to pull off…
Theme:
Eye watched Love transform, utterly, utterly transformed: six months
pregnant; minutes later nine months gone. On the nest certain
soon to — mustn’t it be? certain? n’est pas? — hatch. But
what, here in The City of Pain and Loss, hatch what?
Stroke of heartless drift, Oh City of Pain and Loss! Empty as
Memory of Eye’s own shadow, stranger in the mirror.
Plot:
Eye wandered, rested, entered a bar of sorts, all sorts, and sat.
One such sort entranced and enchanted, effused rich musk of
lure for both her being and her telling, her priceless telling,
telling, re-telling, in the way of Pain and Loss, vernacular of
consequence, dialect of repetition, repetition, speech-tick sign
to others, to oneself, that this tale, the My-Tale, evidence of
Self, bears repeating, for it is imperative for all
to understand, as all must explain, each in his turn, that this
all, all of this all always repeated, cannot be understood, for
anyone who could understand, would know, if anyone could, but no
one did, that these had been, or should have been, lives without
consequence, lives that should have been, should indeed still be,
continued, extant, driven by Time if not events — “No more
drama, please!” cry The Citizens — for it was all, all of it,
this consequence, these consequences of each and all, so
unnecessary, so… meaningless, ridiculous really, so absurd
and undeserving of this deep consideration and reconsideration
– unto what? death? — for really truly honestly: when viewed
in pull-back, the Big Picture, by the always all-seeing Cosmic
Eye, really, truly, what harm, relative to all that’s said and
done and suffered under the gaze of Cosmic Eye, was actually
done? What? What harm? What?
Drama, Character Development, Dialog & SuchSuchSuch:
What harm did Love bring to The Cosmos through one freak
accidental house-paint-overdose double-demise and forced relocation
to Pain and Loss — nothing much to schlep, really; in an instant
she and her son-as-yet-unborn were just … there, along with
apartment and furnishings down to every last hand-made
glass-blown-porcelain-miniature-type flub-dub ordered on-line,
the stuff of coziness and relative calm, down to the embroidered
“Home is where the hearth is” door-mat; but the outrage, the
indignity!
So sudden-unexpected; all of it.
Perhaps it never happened. Possibly. Hypnosis. Dream. Some new,
perhaps illegal, form of psych-profile cum market-research
experiment in purchase-full technology.
“Real consumer stencil stuff,” Love said directly to Eye’s eyes.
Outline yer likes, dislikes and what-the-heys on charts and
graphs, then let the networked digi-brains give it a good think.
Scary shit for real, you know?”
No. He did not know, merely believed what he was told. What
options did Eye have, at this point in time and place? He who
entered Pain and Loss that very morning in a rented car, the
simple mistake of a lost traveler, surely; perhaps a misread
road signal or gross mishearing of the disenchanted voice –
female, he always selected female, with a “foreign” accent, if
available, and of course it always was – emitting monotone
direction from the rental’s (deliberately?) damaged GPS?
The Kid had not been born alive on earth; now he was five.
The house-work, which Love had not expected to continue, remained
unfinished (the wall half white, half off) like all projects
begun prior to residence in Pain and Loss, Tour-guide-touted
get-away for souls condemned to grapple with unfinished business
and long-unspoken — so long, so long, so dangerously long for
so much so abundantly not said: untranslatable? — desires.
Conflict (of Interest?):
Love and Eye tried: to talk, to fuck, completing neither.
Pain and Loss resembled the city Eye witnessed as a student,
where trees bloomed sooty flowers in the park come Spring.
Eye smoked cigars, attempted resolve, or even solve, if possible.
He cogitated, for the first time in this world, cogged hard and
deep.
Love read poems aloud in languages Eye did not comprehend. The Kid
was at peace in the kitchen, familiar to him as the only one
he’d ever known, splotched walls and all.
Night entered with His usual drama, sporting a black velvet cape
of terrifying atmosphere. Fashionable, but unfamiliar.
Eye became confused and frightened. He did not know how to
interpret this situation. Specifically, Love’s mental, and to a
certain degree, considering the relative brevity in which Time
passed, physical decline.
The Kid believed Eye was his Dad.
Wherefore why-for whence this vanishing of Home, the land Eye’d
loved, the acreage on which he’d hunted, loafed, kicked footballs
with his brothers (gone, gone to “memory,” interpretation,
documentary mind-stuff of what had “never happened;”
or worse, “prove it”)?
Blessed soil of Home untempered by cramped-quarter, spectral
street-banquets of Pain and Loss, that day-by-day, year-by-year,
everything-everywhere-and-all-consuming vampire that sucked all
life-blood from what lived, had lived, was living.
Suddenly the Kid had not been born, not to the City of Pain and
Loss, nor any other.
Love, pregnant, splashed her smoldering glands with cold white
paint.
Love went dumb.
Cagey ruse to dodge all pain and tedium of explanation: how
heinous conceptions had rendered her thick and agonized with
child, her un-blessed, unwashed, bastard token of lunatic dreams
sown amid alien sites and sounds – so faraway and long ago indeed
was the proximity of Home, from Love as well as Eye.
Disgust distorted the unborn. The Kid stared accusingly at Eye,
with full intent to mock, humiliate, deny, possessed of a hate
too close, too intimate for one not yet – nor ever to become –
exposed to life and consequence.
“This is a situation,” said Eye.
Love, mute, gestured: command.
“Absurd,” Eye muttered.
Absurd — and comic? — proprioception of Love’s womb. Fragile membrane
– shaped like a pear, Eye’d heard (but pair of what?) – furious
to camouflage, or better yet, if possible, erase so many dead
moments etched on skin; face-index altered, twisted, rendered
weird and worse, ridiculous, by Time (Papa Time seed origin of
the Kid if true paternity would be, could be, should be known),
progenitor of Pain and Loss, grim patriarch of us, of all.
Eye sat alone with the Kid in Love’s botched kitchen, too
exhausted to scatter ghosts who laughed at his once stylish
sport-jacket; ghosts similarly wasted from long, forced marches
across Time-past filtered through night-prisms of Pain and Loss,
amplified by thunderous, unseen speakers. Rancid meat-mold
night-routine: experience repeated — still, yet, again –
and exchanged among citizens like prisoners trade cigarettes,
common dream-time currency of Pain and Loss. Eye’s confusion
joined the pack and staggered through the night without
him.
Resolution:
Eye rummaged his travel-sack for an answer to the feral,
threatening, real or imagined, pounding at the door.
The weight, the palpable metal thingness of the weapon,
jolted him from the day’s daze of wandering among discarnate
words and signals – misheard, misread, misunderstood – into
the steel-bone brilliance of his recognition.
He was not a citizen of Pain and Loss, not like Love nor any of
the others, merely a traveller who would remain until, and only
until, he completed the task that was his charge.
He turned to Love to bid her “So-long,” say one last, or
possibly first, thing, but could not locate the words that would
complete his sentence. Not yet.
He “slammed a slug into the chamber,” as he recalled hearing in
some movie, cocked, aimed, fired.
10 Thursday May 2012
Posted in Creed of Core
I think my “obsessive-compulsive” reading, that I always have to be studying something, more important, in a sense, than writing in that up till recently — like…uh…my reading of BODIES OF WORK last week — I’d taken a long break from writing anything but the “belles-lettres” type stuff about stuff that strikes me as funny or odd i.e. the whole “cancer” scam, but I never considered breaking from my monastic-type “studies.” In fact, before I decided to go back to the pile of old ‘raw material’ I have, I created a kind of “schedule” for myself: 1. Read Rimbaud, Vallejo, etc. in English side-by-side with the original (pretty easy since all these translations are “original on facing page” and seek out interesting vebs and nouns (having dropped the possibility of actually learning any of these languages, I just have to make sure I’ve got the right “basic tense” i.e. past, present, future, conditional — none of that “ablative” or “pluperfect-past-conditional” stuff, which is relatively easy cause I can read French at about a French-person’s high-school level (or a Professor of Romance Languages here in Amerika). 2. Read whatever I can on epistemology/etymology, i.e. Saussure; Cassirer; Baudrillard; Stein, naturally; Campbell, Graves’ The White Goddess (and whoever these guys recommend!) and Etymological dictionaries 3. Study the programming stuff, which is now complementing the other two.
My recent reading/re-reading of KAcker and Borges made me realize why the old “write x-amount of hours each day” no longer works for me. Actually, I’ve known why for a long time, but didn’t have the discipline not to be disciplined. I always would be actually “writing” while doing one of two things: reading or working-out, specifically, aerobic excercise. If working out, I’d remember what I’d done in my head, then write it down; if reading, I just jot it down in the notebook I always keep beside me when I read then transcribe it to computer. Also explains my “OCD” thing with revision. Hard, if not impossible, to face a blank page/screen, but if I have text before me, even in the form of notes, I can start playing.
Why let the Inner Fascist (IF — I love these acronyms; just like when I was a Systems Administrator, we were called “Intelligence Technology” or “IT.” “IF” and “IT.” Language, when you learn how to look closely, is just too surreal…) impose “working hours” in which I more than often end up doing nothing, getting frustrated, opening a book and…start writing? Cause, there were never any real “working hours” to begin with; writing is 24/7, dreaming or awake.
“Frank once said something to the effect of, ‘Writing is really just an intense form of reading.’”
– Kenneth Koch, 1984 (I assume he meant Frank O’Hara; actually I’m sure I came across that statement later on, attributed to O’Hara).”
“I do not write out of nothing, or from nothing, for I must write with the help of other texts, be these texts written ones, oral ones, those of memory, those of dream…the bestowing of meaning, the making of the world: this is what writing is about.”
– KAcker in BODIES OF WORK.
“I write for myself and for strangers.”
Gertrude Stein, circa 1910
In other words, the whole idea of writing without reading is akin to talking to oneself, never hearing anyone else, and believing you know da shit. Ludicrous. Insane.
I think my hatred of “narrative” has less to do with narrative qua narrative (i.e. Henry James, Ray Carver, Kafka, etc. wrote more or less “straight linear” narratives; never had a problem with them) as it has to do with the Patriarchal Authority whose VOICE leaves its imprint/tattoo/scar on so many little voices that they don’t even know that they’re not writing their own stuff but simply editing THE STORY by The Man. Also, my present abandonment of nearly all prose fiction in favor of poetry (especially a good translation that gives you the feel of the poem, then reading the original out loud and looking up the basic nouns and verbs, then slugging the original into one of those instant computer translating programs to see what it actually looks like word-for-word minus the co-poetry of the translator) and computer programming manuals (many of the Great Programmers, the guys who wrote their own languages, were not originally trained as mathematicians but rather, linguists and logicians…) harkens back to my early reading — age 15 – 19 — when I would plow into a “difficult text” with a dictionary beside me, accumulate ordered lists of thousands of definitions, which I memorized literally verbatim, while often not understanding what the fuck the actual books were saying, i.e. Freud; Jung; Nietzsche; Kant, from whom I got cool latin terms like “a priori” reasoning; Shelley; Faulkner etc. I had to re-read Gravity’s Rainbow, Moby Dick, Ulysses, Absalom, Absalom!, etc. not to mention Nietzsche’s entire oeuvre, five times each before I actually figured out what “the meaning of is, is.” I’ve yet to go back to Kant…
Ultimately it was not the macrocosm (the “body of ideas”) but the microcosm (the words and sentences that are the body’s cells and DNA) that I was/am really keen on. Hence, the introduction of Gertrude Stein, via Koch, was and still is a transformative experience, a revolution against both what The Man told me I wanted, and what I actually believed I believed I wanted — i.e. what The Man wanted anyway and knew he’d get by “programming” — more fun with linguistics/etymology! — me early on via television programs, school programs, computer programs, screen-writing, formulaic writing-workshop mishegas etc.
Ironic that in a life-long struggle against Illegitimate Authority, one needs Legitimate Authorities (Stein, Borges, Shelley, Dickensen, Burroughs, Joyce, Pynchon, KAcker, Nietzsche, Walter Ong, Saussure, Cassirer etc.) to to “slap some sense” into you…
I’m a slow-learner, but I think I’m finally starting to “get it.”
14 Saturday Apr 2012
Posted in Creed of Core
The buckets of blood that doused America this week, iftheyawaken it from it’s two-year stupor, might not have been spilled in vain. Perhaps it still can be a “wonderful life,” or at least notsuch a damna horrible one. Perhaps, like George Bailey, we’ll cry out “I want to live again!” and really mean it, and the world will be given a second chance.
Leave it to Bush to make a hero out of a petty tyrant like Saddam, who may well be remembered as the man who checked American aggression, the man who saved the planet from Shock and Awe and a bevy of “preemptive wars.” But then, it’s an old story. At least as old as “Frankenstein.” The monster George Bush Sr., Cheney, Rumsfeld and company helped create, by turning on it’s masters, may give the rest of us a chance to save the world from both.
What do they always tell us on the News, that you gotta stand up to these Hitler types? Well guess what? If George Bush Inc. is not stopped IMMEDIATELY, the unchecked aggression against his imaginary “axis of evil” and god knows who else will plunge the planet into even more ghastly horrors than we’re witnessing in Iraq.
I read today that at least ten American marines had been killed, and I felt sick. But no sicker than at the news of the scores of Iraqi civilians bombed to oblivion by cruise missiles. And what about the “Iraqi boys” in uniform who, unlike our volunteer soldiers, didn’t have a choice as to whether to “serve” or not; didn’t have a choice on whether to fight or not. Didn’t have a choice but to stave off the invaders of their land?
Saddam is in his sixties. He won’t live forever. For those Iraqis who are against him — and they must be legion — there must be some hope in that. There is no hope whatsoever in an American invasion and the predictable occupation, puppet government, etc.
Can we Americans take the “leap of faith” — not even a leap, more of a hop really — to understand this? Would even the most ardent of Clinton haters during the “Monica-gate” scandal have preferred an invasion by the Chinese to settling the ridiculous affair “in house?” Would Nixon’s greatest enemies have preferred his removal by the Soviet Union? However much Iraqis may hate Saddam, what kind of humans would they be if they welcomed an American force that proposed to “liberate them” through tanks, machine guns and cruise missiles; occupy their country; and IMPOSE a new “democratic” regime?
Why were those marines killed? Why were those Iraqi soldiers and civilians killed? Why is this happening? Who on earth wants this? A very small but powerful minority.
But because this has proved to be not a “cake walk” over the bodies of Iraqis — which apparently was not enough to deter us — but a tragedy for both Americans and Iraqis, we might have an “out.” We might be able to stop this madness that has already swallowed up Afghanistan (remember them?) and, if proves to be a piece of cake, will open the way toward the next targets on Bush’s list.
Dammit. Wake up. If the Iraqis are so hell-bent on being liberated, why are they fighting off the invader?
Throw away that newspaper, the one that calls America and it’s sidekick, England, the “Allies.” Turn off those television androids who urge you to support our troops. Do they mean the dead ones? What if Congress had supported the troops a year ago by calling Bush Inc. into accountability, by refusing him the power to declare all war all the time? Then we’d certainly be able to support ALL of our troops, because they’d be alive. It’s extremely difficult, even for the most gung-ho of Flag Wavers, to support a man in a body bag.
The Hydra: like with the Vietnamese and other peoples fighting off foreign invaders, for every one the Man kills, He creates two more. If the Man blows up your house and your family and kills all your friends and takes away your livelihood and you figure you don’t have anything left to live for anyway, might as well fight back — You, mein lieben Americanischer, are His enemy. Even though He has no business on your side of the planet (let alone your hometown, the place you’ve lived all your life) to begin with.
Does this register? Do we have any understanding of how humans behave? We know how WE would behave if a foreign force invaded our country, can we take that great leap of imagination and PRETEND that the Iraqis are kinda human too?
Now is not the time to criticize the MAN and HIS media while adding that convenient escape clause for ourselves: “but the American people are a kind, generous people; they just don’t know the facts.” The facts are this: bombs are dropping on civilians who’ve done no harm to us whatsoever, on children who weren’t born yet when Saddam provoked Bush I to “stay the course.” “Our boys,” in addition to dropping the bombs, are getting killed. The Iraqi people may seek restitution and compensation, as well as prosecution of war criminals, but save that for a later date. Bush, Rumsfeld, Perle, Powell etc. will have their day in court, as will, hopefully Saddam, who I’m sure will have no problem ratting out the whole line, beginning with Reagan, Bush I and Cheney for all they did to aid and abet him in becoming “the beast of Baghdad.”
Open your minds to reality and close your senses to the bombardment of Media hacks giving their opinion of how “we” should “prosecute this war.” Whaddya mean we?
If “we” heed this call, this message that tells us we cannot simply bomb our way into any sovereign nation we choose and expect a native welcoming committee — waving little REDWHITEandBLUE flags and bearing delectable treats — to greet their American liberators, perhaps the scores, if not hundreds of people, soldiers and civilian, will not have died for no goddamn reason other than to feed the insatiable hunger for deception, violence and plunder of Bush Incorporated.
Shock and Awe. I believe when Hitler did it, it was called “Blitzkrieg. ”
14 Saturday Apr 2012
Posted in Creed of Core
remember I told you about the six conglomerates that own all mainstream media on the planet and which one the MONSTER that just bought the “mom and pop” bookstores such as Barnes & Noble, Borders, etc., belongs to. This corporation that bought Barnes & Noble and subsidiaries has, as it’s board of directors, OTHER corporations, representing themselves as they are legally entitled to, as individual persons. Shit! I at least had the illusion that the CEO reports to a Board of Trustees comprised of other plutocrats; grotesques, but nevertheless “real” human beings.” The CEO, to the extent there even is only “one” reports to a board comprised of hundreds of “individuals” many of whom employ thousands, are in the Fortune Five Hundred Companies, have holding companies and a parent company, etc. And it’s not even a particularly big fish with a particularly exalted place in the hierarchy of one of the Conglomerates….
No wonder my “world view” tends toward Kafka, Borges, Pynchon, Gaddis, Salinger, Mina Loy, Burroughs, Acker etc….all creeped-out city-folk…
No matter how abstract and sinister you think “the world” is, it’s actually much more complicated and much more sinister…
Remember that day about a month ago when I went into a Barnes & Noble for the usual reason — I had to pee — and then just walked around the multi-chromatic phantasmagoria and how I once a million years ago thought that while I knew as early as age 20 my kinda work would never sell, I did actually believe it would be available to casual browsers in bookstores and libraries like the “real writers” I used to browse around for when I was young…like GARP, Irving’s hopelessly cornball yet sentimentally ingratiating gift to American Literature — such as it is…I just stood there thinking that I and all the people I know, including yourself, (beyond GCM, which, I never realized until now, was published in the year last year of Art and Literature before “mainstream-accessible” intellectual activity stopped: 1986; you just made it) on or off-line, will never end up on “regular down the street” bookstore shelves…cause there are no regular down-the-street bookstores. Only a few scattered Indys and a Barnes & Noble for every…reader in America…
Can’t help quoting — or at least paraphrasing — myself on this one:
“…nostagia fear the future. Look to the past, it’s safe, you know it’s safe, cause you survived…” (from somewhere in Cella Fantastik…)
13 Friday Apr 2012
Posted in Creed of Core
Barbara and Eric,
Definitely something about having the knack for
choosing the right books to read at the right time.
The Master Poets baffling the arrogant ignorant
perverse Churchmen with oral and glyphic symbols
relating to trees, flowers, vegetation; the
strength of belief in their “calling” that enabled
them to do this for centuries under repressive
regimes, all the while passing the “secret knowledge”
down to generations of “worthy students,” etc. etc.
really put the fire back in my soul. Graves is “the Dude”
of the moment. All of this brings me back to the wily,
ironic but anomalously passionate, almost “religious”
dedication shared by those three oddest of odd birds: Koch,
the “last avante garde” and “the gayest straight man I’ve
ever met,” according to Frank O’Hara; Grossman, the “rabbi” dedicated
to the “poetry of religion,” as exemplified by secularists
like Keats, Dickinsen, Yeats and Stevens, albeit infused with
a wicked sense of irony; and Frank Bidart, the “regular guy”
who emerged from Lowell’s cult of self-indulgence — particularly
upper-class, white, female; his fetish? — like a modern
Tireseus, able to write/speak so convincingly in both male
and female voices and personae he could easily baffle any
mind-less Turing Machine.
Tired of these arrogant, imbecilic Authorities who swagger
like Achilles because their money and/or unctuous natures
allowed them to earn their Ph.D.s in upholstery or whatever.
Got a letter from a former student, Zoe. She was actually
responding to something you had written in answer to a
statement on my external hard drive (I so hate the word
“blog” and its connotations) and rather brilliantly
suggested small presses try to “unite” internationally into
a kind of global underground. I didn’t and still don’t know
how to answer her, other than to say that going “oversees”
is what you have been doing with your work and that a big
problem for all American writers/small publishers is that
Big Media managed to convince the world that bloated
floaters like Franzen and Wallace really ARE the best this
exhausted, raging drunk of an Empire has to offer. But
even more interesting is this article she wrote on “vending
machines”
http://www.innovationnewsdaily.com/971-print-demand-machine-revolutionizes-access-books.html
that’ll print any book you type in, cover and all,
as soon as you swipe-your-card or whatever (talk about “on
demand!”).
I’m forwarding the email from Zoe with “RFC” — request for
comment/opinion or any idea how to address this in an
intelligent way.
By the way: yes indeedy. Did not even begin to work with inensity,
or LIVE with intensity until I qualified as a 4F reject,
too “weak and sickly” for the daily work-force
war-on-unmarketable-arty-stuff stampede toward DEATH:
Arbeit macht Frei!
I may be heading toward the same destination with this
cancer crap, but walking at a liesurely pace,
thinking/talking aloud. Real Whitman stuff.
“Alone and light-hearted I take to the open road…”
ASE
13 Friday Apr 2012
Posted in Creed of Core
Greatest movie-epic I’ve seen since APOCALYPSE NOW. But more
to the point and urgent; more relevant, not just to Boobus
Americanus Summum Ignoramus, but to me. Literally a modified
version — small-town community with sheriff and deliberate
faith rather than tribe with “natural faith,” chief and
shaman — of the anarcho-primitivism that Jensen, Zerzan
and others are writing about, and just as unattainable,
I think, unfortunately, so long as “things are as they
are” (but I noticed the Mexican owl’s “blue guitar,”
the electric one).
After 32 years and seven re-watchings of the Doors
documentary, WHEN YOU’RE STRANGE — also narrated
by Johnny Depp — in the past two weeks, I
understand my preternatural fascination with
them, in particular, Morrison: The Lizard King.
To mis-quote Don Corleone when he confided to
Tom that he finally figured out that it was
not Tattaglia who killed Sonny and shot him
and tried to force him into an early
retirement, but Barzini: “Tattalia’s a
pimp (and Morrison just a rock-n-roller,
albeit a shrewed one; his looks and
crooner’s voice didn’t hurt any either)!
He could never have out-fought Sonny.
But until this night I didn’t know…
that it was THE LIZARD all along.”
Whether Morrison was conscious of his
intent to “Break on through to the other
side” to meet the Lizard or the film-makers
deliberately chose a lizard as their hero
isn’t important. Language doesn’t work
that way, as Barbara taught me. Language
explains “who we are” via myths and
legends, such as Morrison followed
and ultimately became, and Rango
followed and ultimately became: human.
Maybe this odd “hobby/habit” of
studying computer programs and manuals
isn’t as half-baked as I’d recently
concluded. Machines, networks, and
the “languages” with which “we” control
them are, like anything else made by
humans, based on human understanding
of humanity and the (relatively)
timeless worlds it replaced with
its short-lived, in fact moribund,
“civilization.” I was dead wrong
about the “ugliness” of digital
animation. The only truly ugly
image I saw in that movie was that
of the City “blooming” in the
dessert by killing it via the
“old water con.” What is
“ugliness,” usually, but
something unnatural, something
that’s not supposed to be there?
Like a tumor bulging through an
old cat’s eye?
I suppose one could call the town
of Dirt “civilization.” But not
as we have come to term. The very
name “Dirt” implies that this
town/tumor is benign. Not a natural
part of the dessert, but small,
harmless, destined to live out its
life and return to dirt, leaving
behind minimal damage to the desert.
But The City (what was it supposed to
be, Tucson? Phoenix? Or just another
of the “metaphors” the old armadillo
speaks of?) is Civilization incarnate,
or rather not incarnate, because we see
no bodies or anything else living except
the obviously imported grass on the golf
course. Just steel, glass and stone towers
sucking all life from the desert not merely
to “survive,” but keep it’s country club golf
grass growing according to regulation. The
City tumor is most certainly malign, like that
first mutation that settled in Sumaria (and
China? or one immitated the other?) a mere
six-thousand years ago, if even that, and
metastasized the engulf the planet, eliminating
tribal cultures that had existed in the
Americas, Africa, Europe, everywhere,
relatively unmolested, except by rival
tribes, for tens of thousands of years.
A nice touch, in the movie, to show a
glimpse of the abandoned mud “city” the
Anastazi — or whatever tribe it was –
left behind; it was created of the
materials of the immediate environment,
and returned, albeit altered by the true
human mark, art, to its environment,
home to that environment’s native creatures.
But ultimately, our desires, needs, bodily functions are the
domain of the Lizard Brain (medulla?). As soon as Rango’s
tank falls off that hatchback and shatters his civilized
pretentions to art and theater evaporate like water in the
desert and his first “thought,” if verbalized, would be:
“thirsty!”
How brilliant that this metaphorical medulla is so
disoriented by civilization that he doesn’t know “who he
is.” This makes sense. I don’t think the Lizard Brain, or
whatever it’s “metaphysical” equivalent is has
consciousness, the way we cerebralists know it, or even an
unconscious. It just is. Like a lizard or any other living
thing just “is.” But like the kernel, the brain of the
operating systems we created, it controls all the
behind-the-scenes, and most essential, operations i.e.
heart-beat, breathing, incidental shit like that. The
kernel is the machine’s medulla; however, it can be
communicated with through signals. Programming languages,
even the most complex, like Lisp or Haskell or what-not, are
still created basically for human, cerebral recognition and
understanding. Beneath high-level languages are low-level
machine code, assembly language, and beneath that bits,
bytes, bats, whatever — the stuff the kernal understands.
There must be, there must have been, among less “civilized”
peoples a similar back-and-forth, via layers of “languages,”
or symbols recognized by the unconscious, etc. between
cerebral consciousness and the Lizard, not even a damned
primate, that runs the show. But the Lizard can’t keep the
heart beating without certain necessities like food, water,
etc. and I suppose it’s the cerebrum’s job to provide these
necessities via knowledge, imagination, cunning and all that
other oral-epic Odysseus stuff.
But our cerebrums are no longer wired for this crap.
There’s Rango in his tank, among fake fish, trees and other
lifeless things, such as the belly-up floater cockroach,
talking academic nonsense about “character development”
“role-playing,” “heros” and the necessity for conflict to
ignite a drama (all double-entendre, but who knew at the
time? except those back for a second viewing). Until the
tank is shattered on the road and he is forced into his own
story.
While he gets by, for a while, on wit, imagination, and
other cerebral linguistic pyrotechnics — i.e. lies; worse
than lies: falsification of the myths the townspeople of
Dirt, and Rango himself, have faith in — inevitably, he is
undone by — what kind of animal? — a snake. Rattle Snake
Jake, “from hell” or Eden. “Ride the snake/to the lake/the
ancient lake, baby” (where there’s water). Confronted by a
lizard (or whatever a snake is) who KNOWS WHO HE IS and
knows who Rango is not, language, imagination, ego evaporate
like the desert water and he again hears his own Lizard:
RUN!
But that’s only natural. The Lizard Brain (which may be the
medulla and/or the cerebellum; I honestly don’t know; this is
all just metaphor, the only thing we civilized cerebralists
understand) is pretty blunt in terms of basic survival commands:
fight, flee, eat, drink, sleep, shit, fuck (but only if the coast is
clear), etc. So it’s run, run, run away from your tribe and
your mate (Miss Beans, isn’t that her name?) to save your own ass. Very
lizard-like, I assume, but not human. All metaphor aside,
what makes us, or rather, what once made us human was the
relatively smooth works of the cerebral
programmer/administrator taking and sending messages to the
kernal and dedicating his single machine to something
larger; the network that is the tribe, not to mention
converting Lizard brain’s persistent nagging to get laid
into a “higher” love for Ms. Beans.
So, heeding old armadillo, not to mention The Doors, Rango
“breaks on through to the other side” to confront his own Lizard
(or Clint Eastwood; same thing).
But this is where poor Young Morrison fucked up. The shaman
breaks on through in order to bring back knowledge that will
help his tribe. He doesn’t just hang out there getting
smashed on cactus juice. The “Lizard” comes to him in a
vision — again, it can only be something the cerebral self
can understand or decode — of contemporary mythic hero,
Clint Eastwood. Shrewed and ironic on many levels, but
again, a vision familiar to his conscious self/ego/whatever
and spoken in his own language: “no man can escape his own
story” (love that line).
So Lizard brain’s command to change tactics from flee to
fight sinks in. All that’s missing is the inevitable
cerebral response: why? “Not for yourself but them” the
people of Dirt, says Clint, which helps, but doesn’t push
Rango over the edge to the pont where a man isn’t measured
by his words, which could be false, but his deeds. It is
only when he sees the water-main and the sprinkler-systems
of the golf courses and finally the monstrous city that is
the usurper and murderer of Dirt that it all “clicks:”
deep, timeless, unfathomable Lizard instinct combine with
cerebral recognition, analysis and conclusion to integrate
the fractions of Rango into a determined human being –
metaphorically — ready to play the often fatal role of
“hero” in order to save his tribe.
And then the plan — Odysseus always had a plan — which
leads to the flood, which washes away the civilization
sickness exemplified by the Mayor and his thugs, and Jake
the Snake carries said Mayor “to hell” and the sun is
shining and the water is bountiful but contained and
Rango/Noah, hand in hand with Miss Beans, calls for a “dip”
in the water — I knew there’d be some kind of
judeo/christian malarky sooner or later — and Dirt, freshly
watered, begins anew…
Shit that was a good movie…
30 Friday Mar 2012
Posted in Creed of Core
The actual chemo crap is
once every three weeks till August.
But I’m all zapped on all these
other meds I take at home, one
of which is an anti-nausea pill
that does indeed work as well as
pot, but unlike pot, doesn’t do
much for my appetite, so I might
have to invest in a small stash
to make me hungry after I finish
working, usually around 4 am.
Also…I’m taking the chemo-lite
crap for my blood, which makes you
sick all day, and prednisone, which
makes you sick — as well as the
perks: psychotically violent and
impervious to pain – pre-game drug of choice in the NFL.
Began the
mega-prednisone dosage, which
makes me want to play in the NFL
and gives me delusions of grandeur
that I actually am a 6′ 5″, 275 lb
nose-guard who can run a five minute
mile…
But I have to go in every week for
various shots — to raise my white
blood count — not to mention
blood-tests and the boat-load of
transfusions I’ll be needing — I’m
not really supposed to be able to
survive chemo with Diamond Blackfan Anemia (DBA); then again,
I wasn’t supposed to live past 25,
so FUCK THEM.
I began the chemo shit yesterday.
Had to drag myself in for that shot
today, also a “follow-up” to see how
it went.
“So, how was your first day of chemo?” asked The Doc,
awaiting a smart-ass answer. Too whacked
out to think of anything myself, I quoted
Clapton/Cream:.
“Strange brew, kill what’s inside of you…”
He’s about ten years older than I am, and has a
wicked sense of humor, so he of course recognized
the quote and readily agreed to its essential verity…
Again, while we’ve developed a type of “personal
relationship” over the past ten years, exchanging
witticisms and bon mots, I am his prize patient:
the only DBA in New York, one of only about twenty
in the country — certainly one of the oldest if not
the oldest — so he has a vested interest in keeping
me afloat.
14 Wednesday Mar 2012
Posted in Creed of Core
Once the basic form or shape or essence or whatever is created, in my own experience, the longer you can hold off and move on to something else while the mind stews or brews or ferments or whatever, the better. Few things are more exciting than going back to something you created as raw material a decade or more ago, but with the skills, knowledge, power you did not have at the time of the work’s origin. Best and most inspiring type of re-writing there could be. Like you’ve discovered the old notebook of a long-gone ancestor.
19 Sunday Dec 2010
Posted in Creed of Core
Box me on a warm bright day, (youthful, never again useful), hands, crossed over shirt and tie. Let me hear young things on the grass plan parties, raves, getaways with only legal, ethical narcotics. Booze.
Indulge me in their rites of coquetry and intrigue, tasty gossip, thunder-bump-bass sex-beat tunes and doomed dreams. Let them be ignorant of doom and miffed by the garish universe of sleep.
Grant me peace in my last and only suit. Close the plain pine lid and lower me by crane.
Let them be curious, perhaps, almost, fearful…
Gather them over me to wonder: why consider “future” after all?
Let it – all of it – be alien to them, distant as violence, truth, sorrow. Let nothing be heavy the sky so clear.
Leave them to savor aromas of Spring and skin, befuddle them with magic, music, pheromones and beer; celebration of lips and hair; lusty minds a-flirt with promises –
I’m done with all that. I wish them well.
