Wednesday, December 30, 2020

Open University for the Trans-Armies Database & Future Classics: cinetagmatics_022

22.1. Far away and long ago and we are faced, effaced, with a frozen imaging, an ancient chariot suspended in the vast Argentine Pampa; it fixes itself steadily before dawn or dusk, we are not sure which, some kind of question about history from the standpoint of the faced effacement, whether something is rising or rather setting, dice-tossed into auxiliary prairie, the awakening that is the condition of the reinsinuation of the dream by underhanded means.
 
22.2. A Gaucho sits by his fire.

22.3. Time breaks itself in pieces, science of scarcity and absurdity of bean-count, to take the reinsinuated dream serious, like a meter maid or old aardvark arriviste, the Old World conjured for a dead man now born, i.e. Why does He return to this sad place once decorated by man? Himself, His aerial mother, His brothers His sisters. À la recherche. Things past, or adjacent theretofore.
 
22.4. Like the graceful Blanca, strange and ambitious, who let the man devour himself with passions, get caught up in the netting, trapped in his britches, after kissing her up against dawn or dusk, we are not sure which, all is linked…she knows that the weak let doubt destroy their hopes and she is surrounded by shrouded women to whom she is nebulously bound; she is one of them, a woman in a gossamer mask. The flower of nightmares. Black widow. Her man his death she brings. Because he is weak.
 
22.5. He too is bound by tragic memory, a world a word a logos where monsters are also ever-present, but not necessarily feminine or shrouded, they come and go within and without…as when they buried His dog and He saw His own Self in the pit before the dirt was piled on top. It was not the fact that He then came to terms with His own mortality, not that He apprehended in death its promise to someday take Him…this is not the frightening looming obelisk-of-heavens hallucinated-afore that frightens…rather that He was or is already dead…Somewhere.
 
22.6. He is told that “death makes no distinctions” but realizes that it cannot be so simple or complex because, in such an equation, such an absurdity-of-bean-count, life goes unaccounted for, dropped for convenience, bottom of a well.
 
22.7. A distant version of Himself unveils that He only ever wanted “to live, live eternally.” He sees that he is already succeeding but that He must also die eternally.
 
22.8. The devil looks on but the devil is a child like Him and is neither shrouded nor imposing; the child-devil too rides in all directions, but does so on horseback.
 
22.9. And in the devil’s wake appears war also on horseback and it brings the Gaucho to his knees to bleed on this treasured maternal soil, once decorated by man. War is Mars and not Mars and it leaves a dead prisoner out front of his family’s estancia, dead eyes piercing downward through earth as the dead man hears beyond the veil of the postmortem the Gaucho pronounce solemn last rights for the world, purely formalized ritual: “The war, again the war.”
 
22.10. Neither Darwin nor captured birds may sate His hunger for eternity and He is afraid to defend Himself.
 
22.11. Another bird is caged. Margarita is dead; “so beautiful…dead.”
 
22.12. He comes together from every place in time to greet death and tears appear again, he asks his mother: “Why did Margarita die if she was so full of life?” Faced, effaced, with a frozen imaging, an ancient chariot suspended in the vast Argentine Pampa, it fixes itself steadily before dawn or dusk, we are not sure which, history rising or setting. He is answered with His real question.
 
22.13. He comes together from every place in time to greet the Gaucho, realizing that “many years have passed” but none have, and He turns to Himself and the Gaucho and says: “I have come to say goodbye to everything.” But the land, that which was once decorated by man, auxiliary prairie, does not bid farewell.
 
22.14. Suddenly we see, faced effaced, erasure beyond censure, or the reverse and perhaps also in reverse, a frozen imaging of an ancient chariot suspended in the vast Argentine Pampa…and it is suddenly free to approach, the horizon narrows, the barrels spins, the joints lock-up, a contraption the mechanic has fixed, almost as though by accident. The Gaucho and his fire are permitted to go out, history sundered in sunders and put to bed and the madness and the grave exhalation of the grave itself and of a spread-open not knowing.
 
22.15. The past and future are slowly escorted out by the present or its rough equivalent. He wonders in his chariot whether the sun is rising or setting.
 
22.16. Both and neither and God’s aura or God’s rough equivalent and this of course is enough. Somewhere He is dying. And being born.
 

 

Thursday, December 24, 2020

Open University for the Trans-Armies Database & Future Classics: cinetagmatics_021

Gayatri Charavorty Spivak, in her essay “Harlem,” a piece collected in the superlative volume An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization: “Identitarianism is a denial of the imagination. The imagination is our inbuilt instrument of othering, of thinking things that are not in the here and now, of wanting to become others. I was delighted to see, in a recent issue of the Sunday New York Times devoted to the problem of race, that Erroll McDonald, a Caribbean American editor at Pantheon Books, thinks that 'at the heart of reading is an open engagement with another, often across centuries and cultural moments.' In the academy, the myth of identity goes something like this: the dominant self has an identity, and the subordinate other has an identity. Mirror images, the self othering the other, indefinitely. I call this, in academic vernacular, an abyssal specular alterity.” Spivak first arrived to notoriety and a certain amount of renown on account of her ambitious and altogether remarkable translation of Jacques Derrida’s daunting 1967 door-stopper Of Grammatology, and, like Derrida, she is a theoretician for whom difference is always first and foremost heterogeneous difference, which is to say manifold and hyperactive, a precondition for any kind of discernment or perception whatsoever. A face resembles other faces when we recognize in that face all the various different components that add up to a face—eyes and nostrils and lips and so forth—just as we perform this operation by distinguishing the face from the phenomenal field surrounding it; we differentiate the face from what is not the face, then we differentiate the different elements of the face in mentally processing it as a face. The differences adding up to any given face will also differentiate that face from other faces which we also recognize as faces, but different ones. People are made to look at police line-ups or folders of mug shots: they are expected to differentiate all the faces, and presumably it is hoped that they will remember one in particular. Spivak regularly notes that the persistence of rigid segmentations of difference around racial/ethnic lines and those of binary sexuation are most pervasive and deeply imprinted because these are the first primary differences a child is able to notice with its sensory apparatus before the child comes to attain anything like operational sense from the standpoint of one or another language or sociocultural domain. A huge part of how we come to be socialized involves formal and informal instruction in how to codify these differences within a field of sense. Racism and sexism become routinized campaigns of programming, meant to establish fidelity to the tribe, submission to prescribed roles, and suspicion (or worse) of those classified as Other. These are legitimate issues, they are utterly pervasive, and only the worst kind of sophist would seek to convince you otherwise. Marginalized voices, communities, bodies, and peoples need to and do advocate for themselves. That being said, the identitarian “abyssal specular alterity” that begins by accepting the dominant’s rigid and exclusionary classificatory operations begins by handing to racism and sexism what would on the face of it appear to be both the terms of the debate and a short-circuiting of intersectional opportunities. When awareness of the pure heterogeneity of difference is cut off, it is not only difference itself that is lost in bulk, but along with it the possibility of identifying imaginatively within difference. That racism will tend to have already quite comprehensively poisoned those tasked with resisting it is a fact that was hardly lost on James Baldwin, who shows us some of the forms this can take in his book The Fire Next Time. Baldwin spoke from a place of trauma on behalf of the dormant “humanity” of his countrymen. What he mourns above all else are opportunities never born, a legacy of hatred and violence having arrested a nation in its sundry tribalistic purgatories, the soil rendered inhospitable to any kind of genuine communication across enemy lines and thus of any opportunity for collective growth. In “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind,” the second, lengthier essay of the two incorporated into The Fire Next Time, its title already suggesting a focus on the imagination as an exemplary political tool complimentary to Spivak’s above-quoted formulation, Baldwin writes of growing up in Harlem, a neglected and yet aggressively scrutinized community that came to progressively take on a great deal of what the oppressor projected upon it (at it, into it). Baldwin writes of having rapidly fallen out of love with the church and its hypocrisy. Instead of the tenets of “Faith, Hope, and Charity,” Christendom came to seem grounded in “Blindness, Loneliness, and Terror, the first principle necessarily and actively cultivated in order to deny the two others.” Terror, fear: those pervasive spiritual and intellectual cripplers, whatever a person’s skin colour. “And the passion with which we loved the Lord was a measure of how deeply we feared and distrusted and, in the end, hated almost all strangers, always, and avoided and despised ourselves.” A person could not hope to find a more apt encapsulation of abyssal specular alterity. Baldwin suspects he apprehends in the racial intolerance of whites a kernel of self-hatred and self-ignorance, already the emergence of a suppressed self-identification within difference that throws supposed binaries—“the self othering the other”— into confusion: “whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.” There is an absence of authentic conscience, but it is preceded by a failure of imagination. In Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, Baldwin sees a force of black supremacy rising up against white supremacy, and in its so doing becoming mirror image of the dominant, ineffectually Africanizing the tropes of a long extant white supremacy. From the standpoint of Christian white supremacy, black people are the sons and daughters of Ham, cursed as such, unequal, consigned to slavery. From the standpoint of the Nation of Islam, black people are Allah’s chosen, they will rise again, white people are literal devils of whom Allah disapproves. Baldwin: “Whoever debases others is debasing himself.” Hatred and violence are loss, hurt, neglect, and need, before they erupt in the form of explosive animus. But they are above all based in a fear or a terror that produces spiritual atrophy and paralysis of the imagination. “Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.” The tribalistic segmentation of difference is a lie that seeks to suppress the dynamism and polyvalence of difference itself, the sole tool we have at our disposal to recognize elements of ourselves (or possible elements of ourselves) in others and identify with them outside of or peripheral to the mandates of the normative. Most of us surely know this, even if we don’t know that we know it. Think of the home in which you grew up. Parents, siblings, any number of intense gulfs between disparate parties, volatile disputes, unexpected changes in trajectory, weird intimacies and alliances, each member of this “nuclear” cell impossible to mistake in their uniqueness for any other, even should there happen to be one or more sets of twins on hand (who can only be confused momentarily). A family of origin is one kind of institution that cannot be summed up meaningfully—if we take my family as an example—as four Caucasian people who happen to not be from the Caucasus and are also quite a bit taller than average. An exemplary film here is, to my mind, anthropologist-ethnologist and peripatetic cinematic-situation-enabler Jean Rouch’s 1961 La pyramide humaine. Rouch thought of himself as a maker not of documentaries but rather of collaborative ethnofictions in which participants from a given milieu contribute to the telling of stories extrapolated from their lives and from the myth-systems of their heritage. Of the collaborative films Rouch made in Africa, he is doubtlessly most famous for those such as Mammy Waters (1953), The Mad Masters (1957), The Lion Hunters (1966) and Jaguar (1967) that focus on myth and ritual within the context of (often remote) tribal microcosms. La pyramide humaine is a purely contemporary urban feature, perfectly easy for the unschooled viewer to take for pure documentary employing more than usually aggressive self-reflexive/self-interrogative techniques, set within (and within the context of) an interracial lycée on the Ivory Coast. The film was made during a period of multiple active movements for national independence in French-speaking African territories, and there is, as one would imagine, a considerable amount of racial tension in play. The film incorporates the students it depicts as agents of critique and disputants in the negotiation of alliances and splits, the film telling us outright that it intends to get to the bottom of why white and black students almost completely avoid fraternizing outside of school. The white student body consists of reactionaries, radicals, and moderates, as does the black student body. Very quickly, it becomes very obvious that the film is not and cannot be a dialectical one about two cleanly divided camps, each Other to the other. This is first and most lastingly evident because all of the black students and all of the white students are dynamic, curious, idiosyncratic individuals, not properly anything resembling a stationary stereotype, though some will, naturally, from time to time embody general tendencies germane to their respective castes, some of the more reactionary students, either black or white (though generally male), remaining more than a little resolute in their avowed support for some sort of general segregation, though the practical logistics of the situation mean that the enforced separation or barrier only really exists in their limited imaginations. This is an institution in which intersectionality hardly needs advocates because it is so obviously an inevitable byproduct of the situation. Black and white students will not only meet outside of class—and have long been doing so—they will meet for far more than merely chitchat, not that this is without its capacity to make trouble for them. What intersectionality needs is a schooling as pertains to its ongoing negotiation, which is to say a pedagogy, which is what Rouch’s film ultimately attempts to instigate, in so doing aligning it with Spivak’s work on the necessary impossibilities of effective aesthetic education (institutional practices devoted to the use of the imagination in producing new alliances and/or lines of fortuitous development). Let us now consider how two recent longform television/streaming series situate the problem of the inauthentic or excessively narrow segmentation/compartmentalization of difference within institutional or extrainstitutional spaces. First consider the second season of the Netflix series Mindhunter, in which behavioural scientists, forensics specialists, and F.B.I. field agents working out of Quantico in the early 1980s, having already begun to compile an exhaustive database concerning patterns within the case histories of serial murderers, consistently find their data ineffectual at best, the condition in which they investigate ongoing cases the same fundamental one of presiding opacity it has always been, the data and the various tenuous assurances it affords, if anything, only muddying the waters all the more. This is the early 80s we are addressing, as mentioned, and in case there should be any doubt, season two has consistent cutaway sequences featuring active serial killer Dennis Rader (The BTK killer), who will not be apprehended until 2005 (by way of old-fashioned police work, facilitated by slip-ups from Mr. Rader). The motto of the series in toto could well be a quip offered by gruff agent Bill Tench (nicknamed “Colonel Patton” by a local lesbian bartender), who responds to free-associate spitball postulations respective what is “known” about certain kinds of criminals from his zealous younger colleague by ruefully observing that he once knew an Irishman who only drank milk. Consider secondarily the remarkable BBC ONE/HBO series I May Destroy You, created by, co-written by, and starring the absolutely astonishing Michaela Coel, the whole all-too-timely premise of which, aside from possibly having something to do with the Hindu concept of māyā, rests on the core precept that as necessary (or at least unavoidable) as it is to have learned preconceptions and strongly held principles, in going out into the world each day one can expect the messy lived affairs mobilized within unavoidably intersectional social environments to throw those preconceptions and principles into an utter shambles, and one will have to adjust, which may even mean ultimately coming to recognize oneself in the worst and most seemingly remote enemy one had heretofore ever imagined was out there somewhere, this specular enemy also having for some time taken up destabilizing residency in one's head. 



Wednesday, December 9, 2020

Open University for the Trans-Armies Database & Future Classics: cinetagmatics_020

Loneliness is the only test of any worth. You don’t have to pass it. You don’t have to do anything. There is nothing at stake in this world: nobody gets out alive. Still, loneliness is a test, and it can fuck a person up real good, because it, loneliness, is also the perfect embodiment of Pharmakon, in that it can come to serve a rich solitary practice, veritable panacea, just as it may send the lost soul into a shame spiral and/or vivid living hell. Pure shame is: I am the worthlessness that is All. What if shame and loneliness take you to a very bad place? And what if you happen to be for all intents and purposes a dude? If nobody wants anything to do with me and that makes me feel mentally and physically and spiritually ill, is this merely an unattractive feature of my ego and the rigidity of my (gendered) programming? If a baby is left in a dumpster by a desperate mother who cannot care for that baby and is herself stuck in some kind of living hell, we do not tend to consider the baby’s problem an ego problem. But the grown-ass man is not a baby. Except of course we routinely recognize the baby in the grown-ass man. The “pop psychology” archetype known as the “inner child” is the part of us that is wailing from the depths as soon as the cold air hits exposed nerves. What is the inner child or the helpless baby? Fear, hurt, and need. Bundled up in tissue. The Hank Williams song that perhaps most speaks to me is “Cold, Cold Heart.” I have been thinking about this song lately. Hank was a scared, hurt person, and an addict, slave to need. He died at the age of twenty-nine, laid out on the floor in the back of a moving Cadillac. The song “Cold, Cold Heart” is addressed to a guarded beloved, a woman who it is presumed has been wronged by men in the past and therefore appraises her latest suitor with gun-shy suspicion. “Another love before my time made your heart sad and blue / And so my heart is paying now for things I didn't do / In anger unkind words are said that make the teardrops start / Why can't I free your doubtful mind, and melt your cold, cold heart.” Note that immediate leap from “things I didn’t do” to “In anger unkind words are said.” The narrator of this song, the voice transmitted through Hank’s, may not be especially self-aware. Yes, this woman has been hurt before. And she additionally very much ought to be wary of this voice, the lonesome pleading voice that may well shortly grow short, agitated/combative, as it confesses to having previously done. Nineteen-year-old me and forty-one-year-old me read and hear “Cold, Cold Heart” very differently. It is well known that the masculinist ego has a propensity to presume the unimpeachable reasonableness of its uninflected objectivity. This is analogous to what is lost on many people with respect to “white supremacy,” the fundamental foundation of which is the uncritical presumption of “objective” values, legalistic or general, that descend unambiguously from the European Enlightenment without their needing to be consciously understood to have done so. Nineteen-year-old me weeps vicariously for Hank and in so doing weeps for his naked baby self. Forty-one-year-old me is confident that he does right in his outrageous performativity and twenty-four-seven cha-cha dance of irony, just as he believes the Other, object of amorous projection or not, does right in putting up an impenetrable barrier against him. That is how this goes. There is no legitimate “ought” here being transgressed by either party. I write lately with some regularity concerning how the actress is generally my principal point of identification in the cinema. I think of myself often as a diva, which is not a closed conditionality, but rather an open question. During the last Calgary Cinematheque season, I amused one of my fellow programmers very much when I told him that Cruising (1980), the notorious William Friedkin film situated in and around the New York gay leather bar scene, which we had included as part of a Sexuality series, is, for me, totally an abstract intellectual exercise about fascism, fluid subject-positions, uniforms, and bodies…until the very end of the film when Karen Allen, who plays the girlfriend of Al Pacino’s undercover dick, puts on a the leather jacket and cap, indulging in a momentary bit of happenstantial butch drag, and I immediately think: “wait, oh my God, this movie is about ME.” This is not a claim I make facetiously; it is precisely how I experience Cruising. I am more or less male and am surely perceived by and large to be so. The vast majority of my lovers—though not the totality—have been female. What do we make of my identification with the actress? Is it perhaps a kink or perversion analogous to Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs? Do I want to put on their bodies as costumes, walk around wearing them? Maybe, in a sense, that is part of it. What seems more salient to me is that each of us is our very self the wellspring of difference and the shock of a recognition, the instantaneous emergence of a perceived complimentarity or similitude, has to be fielded by difference, thrown into relief by it. Difference is the condition of recognition. I identify with the incorporation or inclusion of something we might have imagined excluded or exclusive. I am a rare bird and I seek my compliment in other rare birds. For me, personal identification is already rarity and decadence. This happens to only be part of why I identify so strongly with the Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman. Akerman’s suicide in October of 2015 affected me powerfully, uncommonly so. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder (one or two) as I am myself, her work routinely suggested a moving dialogue with a problem and a solution, an alienation working toward and in dialogue with a creative praxis. In Akerman I see a working through and within the conception of Pharmakon I opened this piece by establishing. Key films like Golden Eighties (1986), A Couch in New York (1996), and Tomorrow We Move (2004) seem especially characteristic of a tendency in her later work to foreground salubrious communal exchange, suggesting of the cinema that it might provide an ideal space for a kind of collaborative play, an inclusive extraterritoriality for those excluded, the audience able to avail itself of some of the core benefits. Akerman was a month and two days older than my mother, and she took her own life shortly after the death of her own mother. Having caused my mother as much pain as I have, especially during the years of active addiction and endless harrowing crises, I am conscious that it would be unpardonable now for me to kill myself while my mother is still alive. I took my mom, who is no cinephile, to see Akerman's mother-and-daughter-and-dying doc No Home Movie when it played in Calgary in 2016. I think she was quietly moved by it, even if she had very little point of reference. In My Mother Laughs, the final book Akerman wrote, published in English translation in 2019, the author writes of routinely feeling like a kind of alien and alienated child. “As soon as the child arrived, ever exhausted by the adult life it couldn’t live, it went straight for the couch and slept a few hours. Afterward, a little less exhausted, it ate.” The adult child reverts to torpor and ultimately to eternal rest. Self-care becomes a desperate sink-or-swim proposition. It is a slippage, precisely the demarcation of a zone of reversion. This is the thing that is at stake every lived day if there is indeed anything at stake. If I am an impassioned, gregarious, outlandish, and even a joyful performer of my everyday life, this is the surface manifestation of a spiritual struggle, the application of a panacea that can at any moment be revoked…or turn on itself. My spiritual practice and my jouissance need to be threaded through with a present and accounted for knowledge of the immediate accessibility of reversion and shame spiral. The two-sided coin of Pharmakon: a love the size of everything or a proportional cancer, one the double of the other, each alive and reachable right here and right now. The fellow programmer I amused with my distillation of how I read Cruising, asked me, in a separate incident, whether or not there are men or actors I relate to in the cinema. Naturally, the answer is yes, and in elaborating, I cannot help but trace the outline of a developmental schematic. In my teens I identified strongly with Johnny, David Thewlis’s character in the 1993 Mike Leigh film Naked, an aberrant monologist and apocalyptician who passes through ressentiment and bad conscience so as to achieve Zarathustra’s mad zeal. I open my mouth and, to steal the title of Chantal Akerman's first short film, I saute ma ville. If you live this way…you start to rack up bodies, leave wreckage…and you find yourself mired in nerve-shredding frenzy. When I read Georges Bataille's Blue of Noon near the beginning of the 21st century, I was astonished to discover the degree to which it expertly encapsulates this woeful infirmity of the nerves. No other work of fiction had previously nor would subsequently come anywhere near it in this respect. Trapped in this hell, another performance projected itself to me for me to ritualistically absorb and somaticize. This was Warren Oates’s performance in Monte Hellman’s 1974 film Cockfighter. Another renegade monologist, though one who has overshot the mark and is angling to do penance. Oates’s Frank Mansfield, trainer and handler of fighting cocks, has run his mouth, alcohol a mitigating factor, and has both made a fool of himself and set himself back professionally. He thereafter aspires to maintain a vow of silence until he wins Cockfighter of the Year. Which he does. He remains silent. And wins. Warren Oates communicates a baby’s stubborn sagacity and a nearly impossible amount of hundred-proof pathos, his silence and his eyes a wound that triumphs and is triumph. He symbolically and symbologically castrates himself; this proves to be the precondition for his ability to give himself to Patricia Pearcy’s Mary Elizabeth, the wary beloved, something of an analogue for the addressee of “Cold, Cold Heart.” A kind of fraught détente is attained, but Oates’s trainer of fighting cocks perversely bungles it by performing an aggressive and obscene act with his (ahem) dead cock—one which cannot help but provoke horror and revulsion in the affronted beloved. Our errant hero then utters the only words he will verbalize in the film’s present tense, these words tinged with an irony so ruthless that they suggest not only one individual man’s lack of proper perspective, but a universal absence of coherent metric. Cockfighter defines my twenties in that it suggests a false hope, another level of potential self-mastery, a higher tier of being, and then guts me, emptying the cavity, its fatuous degree zero established as the false start that stands in for all false starts. The male performance that comes to encapsulate my period of sobriety and recovery, from age thirty-three to the present day, exactly a month after my forty-first birthday, is that of the French rock star Jacques Dutronc playing the painter Vincent van Gogh in the 1991 Maurice Pialat film named for him. Dutronc as van Gogh expresses a total embodied gnosis with respect to what stakes there are if stakes we are willing to countenance. He shows you with a remarkable compression of means a specific tightrope walk through a tenuous recovery, almost as though those famous fields of Northern French yellow are replete with land mines. Vincent has been through the wringer. Repeatedly. He wears it well, even if this ultimately only means that corrosion becomes him. He knows—and tells you silently that he knows—that to be blown to smithereens has nothing on the damage a still-living person can continue to carry around, doomed to agonizingly persist. His gaze and gait are just deliberate enough to betray the immediate proximity of invisible trap-doors in and around inhabitated spaces. While sex workers are a safer bet, Vincent no longer has any illusions about romantic love, about anyone owing, about anyone being owed, and least of all concerning personal salvation by means of coupling. Still, part of what Dutronc’s Vincent is telling me is that living beyond the illusions cannot guard you against the fission of contact. You can see the trap you are walking into, and, in seeing it, be absolved of nothing. The lover who has lived sufficiently to attain sapience is Dr. Caligari’s somnambulist automaton, aware of walking the plank, even if certain death is itself never certain, what is ahead established only by arriving there. The cold and ruthless world is both beauty and internment. The world is your true beloved, whether you accept it as such or not. The world also happens to be something you are imposing on the phenomena you encounter, though God save you if you imagine you are wholly in control. Ecstasy is not properly ecstasy if it is not conscious that it can be ruthlessly ripped to shreds. A wary smile is the only honest smile, because it carries a little of the hurt it has earned honestly. Were you to ask me this week how I am doing, I might simply answer: “van Gogh…at a low ebb…”

 

Wednesday, December 2, 2020

Open University for the Trans-Armies Database & Future Classics: cinetagmatics_019

19.1. Le général Yamamoto a été mis à pied. Nine eleven. Ground zero. The sky changes. Nobody was on the street thinking about summer. It is not, after all, that kind of holiday. Tomorrow I saw them dismantle a van. Summer shadow is cast by limber arbor lover, trees smell like being a child in place of actual childhood, childerhood, rabbithole. Dead when born and born when dead and without resistance to the touch of women who are…on that watch. You got that watch. That compass-watch. Keep on that watch, hon. Count me down. Tie me off, count me off. Keep time hereabouts. Don’t rush it. Tomorrow I saw them dismantle a van. Hereabouts. A tactical unit. Pressurized spectator. A man against the chassis handcuffed, waiting for the light to turn green. They have begun to ask questions, honey, about the stain that umbrellas us here and encases us with our planet in tandem, in tatters, asking me just why it is that I happen to choose…one word…where another would have done just as well in its place. Or what is meant by joy for example. Okay, okay. The whole ides, the whole pone, hon, is I’ve to reach this…this fever pitch. Keep on that watch. Approaching me at all hours with loose women, a bottle with my name on it, narcotics of weakness and discipline to cancel one another out. Frenzy. I in turn grow to worry of the lungs and heart, matter cut up and disjoined…remnants of _____, conceived on the baseboards, blind birth, keeping the heat in the basements of my ________, not to spill out into the garbage and stone. Honey, I need you to pay attention. No, not to me. Tomorrow I saw them dismantle a van. Saw and absorbed. No doubt I have no hope for the homes of my children and their children in tatters in tandem with bells and whistles burning lights lit up in their accidental Occidental sockets. Hardly even able to light up the night without drowning it out. Another Scotch in paper cup with tap water, no visitors this Sunday, nothing calling down nor to task, neither voices nor their trolley cars of anticipation ringing in the kitchen on the phone left by the…the cable cut off yesterday to clamp down on my drinking partners, and no doubt to make me…squirm. There is a thunder in our collective underpant. They name her Act of God. I will show them, pants around ankles, ankles signing their own checks, two or three things about the colour red, in full dynamic and innovative expansion. And a safety pin thru my prick hangin’ out my shorts is what they see. When I open the robe daddy handed down, all expansive red around the rosie. They ask and don’t get it. Make the beast with two back, mattressback. The Baroness. Barking in her lorry. Barbarossa. Esperanto. Afternoons reduced to fancies abandoned in adolescence or great fields of lazy excess dreamt there on cartoon bedspread, a relapse in the family tree, adapted vices and vases, on the mantelpieces in pieces, dredged up in the attics of elsewhere. Forever I am lost in the mazes of inheritance. Honey? Yes, hon. Surely I do not go wayward in crediting to you the ability to mind the compass-watch, to count me down, count me off, eyeball with your own eyeball the necessary adjustments. Surely, hon. Godforsaken. Folded rolls and rows of folderol. My Lucretia. Night, its not masking the thing. The stain. My left headlight cutting in and out. I see in the reflections of grocery stores and their windows my hair has grown down past the concrete, how dirty am I, reflected in groinlocked gridlock. They have cut off the overhead. They have weakened in the knee. Having avoided my reflection it stuns me as it creeps up on me in the city at night driving alone. Clock it. Tomorrow I saw them dismantle a van. A quatrain of vein and muscle and a meal in the eye. Like celluloid in a fogged-out fever, but still looking and still laughing. Lunging, now, intent in there. Blue intent. Human imagination disposed all things in such a manner as would be most easy. Oh Christ, steady, girl. Lying on the floor with the bottle almost empty. They have begun to ask questions about the stain that umbrellas us again and in synchronous sputtering and exacting extractions and thrusts enter the sleep I have so far succeeded in keeping to myself, coming to at dawn sweating on the carpet and unsure of the lapses that alerted me to my life on the floor and in full view of the good goat god who shines down through the windows and hurts me. Tomorrow I dismantle a week for a week in van. It is not, after all, that kind of holiday. Steady, steady. Ugh. My eyes were harbingers of headache before they were even eyes and looking down I see myself lifeless yet all agitation and rubbing off dead skin all over me, eating it for breakfast, finishing off the bottle, and going to the store for more. Gracious. They visit me again at dusk and speak of stains. All right by me. Sometimes there is a caving in and I drink and listen to them and they are full of all the nonsense that keeps me buoyant, so there is nothing to do but squirm some more on the floor and finger the empty cup nervously once it gets that way. Again it is night and I transform the front room into a Cinematheque with my friends in the ceiling and two packs of cigarettes, one in each inner pocket of the sport coat. I begin to imagine that everything on earth could be translated into English and that this is the industrial magic of the cinema which has grown quite close to me like a brother or sister might, given the time to…adjust. I am too cocksure to fall under the Scotch to sleep. My car keys all jangling up the stairs to an early bed of nails, to lie awake and read revisions stacked like produce or legislatures in journals of vagary and pages of nothing but page. My darling. If you are not a book…nothing doing. My bed, my Lucretia, is a monocle. Bedecked painter syphilitic. I sleep on. Francis Bacon. I sleep on. Mona Lisa, for no reason save time. Loose lipid in bed awake, asymmetrical warfare on the radio. The president always sounds like he’s reading you a bedtime story. How appropriate in this case. Then the. Then the president. Then the president quotes Revelations and drops bombs. He appears not to stop. Nine eleven. Clock it. Here we are. Interrupted. Rod. In a gear. And another now. And another now in synch. I keep the radio on for possible sirens. I keep on. You. You with me? Hon? Honey? My bed is a harbour for those visitors with their talk of stains. I keep. I keep my floor. I keep my floor buckled to my belt loop until the good goat god shines. Use the empties as pillows and i-beams. I sleep beneath a sky. I sleep beneath a sky without the aerial ceiling fan of airplanes. No trouble with Port Authority. No worry of parking tickets. No need to move whatever. No money to drink down but all manner of ancillary surplus. To jam them. Gears, rods. All of them in tandem, in tatters on the transom. One must finance one’s revolution against surplus from the floor. Both possibilities. And, additionally, both possibilities. The paradoxical terminal at Port Authority. All possibilities on the road to becoming nothing doing. Getting there, Lucretia. Getting there not fast enough. No, no. Don’t rush, honey. But roughly visible beneath the stained blankets and speakers. Airborne daggers of juniper. A little to the right. Dogs mobilized down the street in the park. I am not driving, my car is not with me. A little to the left. I have come under attack in the parking garages: past, present, future. A little higher, honey. Where the history shell-be-written. Stored on bookshelves incommensurate. Lower, dear. A little lower. Draw this the fuck out. Ripped-up from binding. Dredge. Dredge. Torn from the binding. Blocking the pipes in the winter. Mmmmf. Mmmmm. Binding and blocking. Pipes. Oof. Heat blocked-out in the natal furnace, the navel burnished. The god cut out. Eternal December. Ugh. Mmmm. Fuck, yeah. Nothing to remember. Or not remember. Or spit. Blood. Jesus Fucking Christ. Welp and Warp. Goodness Gracious, thank you, hon.

19.2. 

Sows, one by one, slosh slosh
agrave in the beshat realm conversing
(one of them is belching)
varnished by pink frippery
meandering like words sloppily slipped into the margins
of the not-particularly-special day
(chickenscratch’d swatches) –
into the margins of stupid bloody tomes
maneuvering for slop.