A poetics. A poetics of acquiescence. There is a hole through which it all pours. Up. As plants rise in the direction of the sun.
Contact high in proximity to martyrs. The two of us, she and I, our tea steeping. And the Owl of Minerva gazing on. Not necessary to verbalize between us this shared sense that when we worship what we worship primarily are sacred agonies.
So long sleep. You were an aberration, an evolutionary hiccup. Relayed in from some Henry James telenovela, The Eternal Unwanted Gentleman Caller awaits the kiss of the axe blade. They have set him up at the Sheraton. Continental breakfast and continental wreckage. Does this town have but the one newspaper? No matter. The news is all bad. Been saying it all along. If time is fundamentally "horror-spreading," our collective acceleration wasn't destined to be pretty.
The time of the groupuscule was a time of dream revelry and pirates. Under the paving stones, the beach. Though no man is an island it was always in the interests of The Conspiracy that he convince himself he is. Ideally: every upstart an artist like van Gogh born to an out-of-the-way Asylum, assailed by rays. Talk of solidarity is so much mashed potatoes. All the kids who subsequently grew up reading Pynchon in the suburbs as though in curious camps of internement. And what of the singularity? Clearly God can only make one Juliet Berto.
The undersigned would like to present himself as public witness to the power of the encounter, suspecting (perhaps merely hoping) that it could well benefit those more or less neutralized by despair and stagnation to be reminded that on any given day, no matter how immiserating the slough in which one finds oneself, there is the possibility of striking up a casual conversation that shifts the axes and alters the gradients so entirely that forever thereafter once will be able to look back clearly and decisively upon a turning point.
Have the last fifty years worth of reports of cinema's death been an "exaggeration" in the manner of the May, 1897 announcement of Mark Twain's? All I know is that nobody goes to the cinema because everybody is a creep.
Even as a young man, baroque freewheeling autodidact Looney Tunes chemical spill that I was, and well before I had even the faintest idea that I was destined for monasticism, the priests of twentieth century literature and cinema were my fraternity. Something about alienation enhanced by vestments and I-can-barely devotion. I adore and admire nothing quite so much as a priest who somehow keeps standing like an utterly exhausted boxer in the double-digit rounds. Of all the seemingly uncharacteristic things one might not expect me to love, the only thing I love more than a quiescent, suffering priest is freshly unretired Swedish pop star Robyn. Robyn and her "emeralds on the pavement."
Youth is beautiful because the young have not yet been inured to the stultifying bullshit that predominates in our institutional and interpersonal arrangements. Youth is tragic because in aggregate the young very quickly will become so inured. Even when they were beautiful they were already dumb, mean, vain.
It has been said that form is the inhuman, God-like dimension of art. In both the workaday world and in the work of art, form is founded in the play of difference, and difference is spawned more or less by inexhaustible variations in paints and technique. That being said, all creatures pull from the same tempestuous well of feeling.
Signed,
Ensign Acéphale
