There is no consciousness in space
Wavering frostiness of judgement
Light bent
Entire continents of psyche and kind.
Dark echolocating sea-bottom mind
Coincidences attract on an abstract map.
Sneaky people who can’t sneak for shit.
The bat doesn’t know what darkness is
Hanging upside down
A signal signals deep within a signal
A spiral spirals for awhile.
Scale is the indignity of all reaching
As I bounce my crown off the
Motherfucking ceiling.
My name is Christian Todd Richardson, a preacher from Northern Alberta, Canada, near them tar sands, you understand, and I’m only hard on sinners. Those who have been saved skate until they’re once again out sinning and doing invidious abuses against God’s very brightest and most sacrosanct ideals. But guess what, folks?! I’m the most mercurially redeemed of all the very worst of the sinners, and I know this because my wife remains extremely engaged and angelic during our dinner debates about germ warfare and school zoning and the like, the kids running around the table legs like rampaging warthogs, shimmering gold cosmic dusts enshrouding her, all peach and unthreatening Walt Disney mystery. The living cost of God is living in the lap of God and eating of the Flesh of his Son. The mystery of the crucifixion is why anyone would stand there and watch it happen under that hot sun. They say that the great Hollywood studio mogul Louis B. Mayer used to beg and plead and snivel in order to make business deals and that for him everything was a business deal. I can buy it. That is what supplication before God has got to look like, folks, begging for eternal pulverizing light…in your face like its time to get the books from the blue shirts…just like little Joan of Arc in her armour and boy’s haircut showed us…dying awfully, admittedly. Supplication is less about asking for something than it is about having your spiritual, inside face squashed to sensorial satisfaction like a wriggling grape of wrath. Civilization is cratering and the earth, sirs and mesdames, is atremble—has been since the Protestants and the 16th-century religious wars that turned Europe into an upturned trough and led to rebellions in the British Isles. God doesn’t care until in his enveloping divinity he does so, spurred by whatever reason or drive. There is an old parable about how when the rescue boats come, that is the Sanctified Divinity saying hi. One time I was lost in nature, the situation becoming increasingly dire, and a white horse with a grey saddle just came along out of nowhere. The horse told me to get on and, oh, Lord of Lords, you know I did. The thing about being much more terrified than anybody ever gets terrified normally is that you’re expecting for sure to die and just hope the physical sensations don’t persist too long. God and His Godchild the Christ approve. Can I have an amen from the viewers at home?! Be there in the terror and the flavourful waking nightmare to feel the full fury of the Divine Light. Say to the Lord: Wow, what the heck?! I had to prepare for Destiny by getting back up when the population density of demons dropped me as though it were hot. Calgary, city of snivelling, craft brew wraiths and careerist ingrates. I had to walk at death like Edgar Allan Poe, wanting to have a stern word with it on the wharf. I had to get lost in the barrens. A redeemed Christian is like a worn keepsake, hold it close and it will make no mistake, floating on the lake next to an ice skate. Place your Christian on the mantle and stare it down until it is bedtime. The Master Race was the Aztecs and nobody’s ever going to be forgiven for the cessation of their plentitude and civilizing, least of all the Green Bay Packers. Right? Wrong? Indifferent? Legendary Packers coach Vince Lombardi was an aggressive anti-segregationist during the Civil Rights Era. People shoot people and people is people. You love them all the more for being dopey and scattered. They say that the Ancient Babylonians called intelligent design or simulated reality something that roughly translates as “Cosmos,” and it has something to do with perspective and pictorial distortion, the not knowing where you are or why you are being the whole reason that you are here. When I was in the seminary they made fun of me for having argyle socks that ran up to my wrinkly knees. I showed them and went and became a preacher and Himalayan adventurer. The Lord works in mysterious ways. Gimme that amen I know you got in you. Alright, that about sums up that...
Go and espy what the chasm might upload
Oh, oh, Mariner Joe
You have a long ways in sea-time yet to go…
A thresher is a piece of agricultural equipment
That separates the seed from the stalks
Use became widespread in the early 1800s
Countless grisly accidents occurred;
Mechanization took hold
The Occident got waylaid and old.
The USS Thresher, America's first nuclear submarine
Was lost at sea, one-hundred-twelve sailors
And seventeen shipyard workers
Gone on April 10, 1963—the sea, the sea, the blimey—
Our Lady Thresher…imploded during deep-dive…
There is nothing to the enucleation of the eyeball
A new dance from the South of France
Where nothing is off but then you politely cough
Meanwhile doing the foxtrot in your store-boughts.
To all foreigners who descend from foreign lands
Your land was always this one
And you just don’t understand
Every snaked-eyed neighbour has got to
Shake they boss hand, upstanding in grandstand
Decamping with sock puppet to Maryland
Sot-weed factor country, curdled milks and zinc honeys.
The last time I got this horribly lost
I found myself awaking nailed to a fishmonger’s cross
Wearing as a necklace a live albatross
Selling this crummy halibut and not giving a bloody toss.
When I was writing all those unwieldy essays on the social media site Goodreads, tagging the side of the somnambulist literary establishment like a phantomic Graffiti maverick, or so I imagined, the run-off added up to a manuscript of nearly 400 pages and boy oh boy was it a hot mess. However, during that protracted period of funnypages prurience and caffeinated mayhem I came to a powerful realization about the five juiciest lines uttered by male actors in American movies, from hilt to kilt: 1) in sublime 1941 romantic comedy The Strawberry Blonde, featuring top-ever performances from James Cagney and Olivia de Havilland, Cagney says, indignantly, "Well, that's the kind of a hairpin I am!"; 2) in Dennis Hopper's extremely surprising 1969 blockbuster Easy Rider, a dying Peter Fonda, lying by the roadside, says: "You know, Billy. We blew it," and he says so 'cause they sure as shined snakeskin boots done did so, don't get confusin' yourself; 3) at the end of 1974's Cockfighter by Monte Hellman, Warren Oates places the severed head of a fighting rooster in the hand of his horrified beloved, causing the poor lady to run off in disgust and indignation, then shortly thereafter says to his assistant, proud as a cock, having been intentionally mute for the vast majority of the picture 'cause of he previously humiliated himself running his mouth: "She loves me, Omar"; 4) in 1981's Cutter's Way, the alcoholic Vietnam vet and amputee played by John Heard, asked why he isn't getting wasted and combusting in the aftermath of the suspicious death of his common law partner, says: "Tragedy, I take straight"; 5) in Quentin Tarantino's 1997 jewel of a picture Jackie Brown, Samuel L. Jackson says to Robert De Niro before shooting him in a stationary vehicle, with a mere huff: "Our ass used to be beautiful."
The tall coiled sorcerer and the morose greengrocer
Made a date to eviscerate a marmoset
That had not paid his dang grocery bill yet;
Those caught watching from the street corner
Were entirely fascinated by the morose greengrocer.
In the insidious plots of the haves and have-nots
Two dollops of thought can go a long way
T’ward permanently boxing the seat of the plot;
If your instinct is that your instinct is right
Then go ahead and fly your sky-blue kite.
You put a heap of chaos with just a little order
Suddenly regular citizens think they’ve
Sorted the disorder, got it backed into a corner
But the jeering meanness rolling back up at you
Is simply the Universe and you're not its keeper.
The foremost motion picture that is an exact genetic splice of exactly two previously distributed motion pictures on the public record is John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13, which is a clean and mean genetic splice of Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo and George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead. Don't knock it 'til you've rock-a-cock-cuck-cocked it. Bird is the wüürd, sailor.
I’m left with little more than my basic kindness and generosity when you take away the name that would live in infamy. The war was asymmetric but I was barely with it. You can’t storm a garrison with a soup spoon. My tendency to harass and harangue seldom pleases me much more than it does the target. The rolling thunder of compulsion leaves me feeling lost in blurry motion in mid-contortion. Folks have all kinds of opinions and believe their opinions and beliefs to be sacrosanct. They would oftentimes have you be different from how you presently are so that they’ll be able to fit you in their hip pocket and massage you like a pet rock while they put on lip gloss and walk-and-talk. Never really knowing the real you that never was. If you know the game is rigged and you continue to play you shouldn’t expect legislators to come save the day. If you want to get the stalactites of peanut butter from off the roof of your damn mouth, you do the hokey pokey and you turn yourself around. Naturally, I’m plenty able to wince at what enmity compelled me to do…upon such occasions that it has actually been me what gone done it. They say that resentment is drinking poison in the hopes that the other person will die. You can turn your guts to motor oil. It is a beautiful summer day with a breeze. I have not really gotten manic this summer. How can I be sure? I often need one or even two short naps during the daytime. I’m feeling a lot of pressure in the surrounding atmosphere and my head is frankly more thought-clogged than I would prefer. Sometimes my sinuses feel like they’re clogged with gravel. The cumulus clouds over the city are riding low and easy. Every few years I get to a place in my creative work where the spree comes to a short halt because every single first next step is a step into oblivion and the discontinuous stellar lines of the outer limits. I need to huddle inward and hum. If you let your thinking do your thinking for you, don’t be surprised when good fortune choses to ignore you. The voices you should be listening to are not going to sound a lot like friends to you at first, but either you take on the mass of that divided part or the open air may no longer be there to saturate your hiccupping heart.
When it comes to narratives and the art of making them bustle and boogey—whether we’re talking about a barroom joke told to a woodpecker, a short story, a novel, or a major motion picture from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer—the main thing a person ought to know about plot and story is that story is the entire planet and all of time stretching back to the Big Bang and the void of no yesterdays that precedes it, whereas plot is Google Maps. One of the fun things the marvellous and drunken detective fiction writer Dashiell Hammett likes to do with plot is to employ it in the opening chapter in such a way that the reader starts off with a bit of a mistaken idea of what the story is and where we’re physically supposed to be atop its surface. In Russian Formalism, “fabula” is the earth’s crust and crudeness and wanton babbling brooks—its timequakes and spaceways—and “syuzhet” is the plot, a grocer’s itemized inventory as scrolling banner advert. There is a special feature behind-the-scenes documentary on the Arrow Blu-ray for Terry Gilliam’s classic 12 Monkeys where we see the director arriving on set early in the morning looking like he got his ass kicked by a kangaroo and complaining, as he no doubt searches for the script supervisor, that he never remembers what he’s supposed to be doing on any given day of production anymore. That is a man who is swamped in story and has lost the plot. The secret truth behind how you build suspense that’s used by all the top professionals is that you have the story everywhere all around you at all times and then the plot moves like a slow, rickety sled through the, uh, permafrost. Things are materializing in front of you and you’re impatient because you can’t see them clearly yet. If there are trapdoors in the plot you can play snakes and ladders with the story. Actors who ask their directors for backstory should be ashamed of themselves. The whole fucking cosmos is backstory, thespian.
When Winifred got home from work I had already started dinner and it reeked of garlic throughout the apartment. I asked her how her day went and she said: ugh, I’m afraid it’s going to remain something of a hostage situation for so long as I remain alive. Winnifred spent some time with her meddlesome aunt Gladys yesterday evening and her tongue has been a little sharper than normal since. I guess the question of children and when we’re going to have some came up again…but the answer remained: we are absolutely not having any children ever. Winifred told Gladys that it’s immoral to bring children into this putrescent and mouldering world. Why?!, exclaimed Gladys. Well it was certainly immoral to bring you here, snarled Winifred. To her credit, she didn’t feel great about it by sundown.
Neither Winifred nor I drink alcohol anymore. You could say we developed an allergy. For a time she experimented with mocktails, but it really was all very frou-frou and saturated in silly ritual, especially since I would probably prefer a glass of tap water anyway. We always keep coffee, tea, Coca-Cola, and Pellegrino. I like sugary breakfast cereals and Winifred doesn’t really approve. She was born in Medicine Hat and comes by that small town toughness real natural. A few years ago we went to see Guillermo del Toro’s remake of Nightmare Alley at Country Hills, and when Rooney Mara came on the screen for the first time in her period sideshow finery, I turned to Winifred and said that she and Rooney Mara betray a bit of a physical resemblance. I thought it flattering and gentlemanly. Her lip curled slightly. Yeah, she said with mild disdain, because we’re both so farmy.
Winifred and I each consider ourselves specialized connoisseurs of Cold War-era Eastern European science fiction, and following the dinner I basically botched but which we finished off most of, we decided to throw on the new Blu-ray of Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel that Amazon delivered earlier. It’s adapted from a Strugatsky brothers novel that I read a long time ago but distinctly recall to this day being by far the zaniest and most odd thing I’d ever read from those august filial noble notables. The movie is like Twin Peaks, Tarkovsky’s Stalker, and Dario Argento’s version of Fawlty Towers all rolled into one tight little motherfucker of a blunt. It made me delirious and I couldn’t really follow it…but it was fun. Crazy purples and blues and reds. When the weather is nice, we usually like to sit out on the deck during all or part of sunset, Winifred dutifully making sure she’s got on the proper viscosity coat of sunscreen, which is not something I’d be inclined to fret over myself. I don’t take a lot of precautions and never did. I was the touring bassist with a popular rock ensemble for awhile and one time a significantly younger musician came up to me before the set and asked if I’d forgotten to put in ear plugs. I never use them, I told him. The music doesn’t sound as good. The little brat looked at me with absolute terror and nausea. He looked like he’d just sucked a lemon.
Believe it or not, there was a time where I had made such a great big mess of things that there was almost no coming back. I was a pariah and I stood out like Big Bird. As I watched Winifred sleeping, almost tranquil and not yet snoring, I quickly realized how grateful I was to have had her to cushion my landing and recalibrate my settings. There was the sound of a branch lightly slapping against the bedroom window and the commencement of steady rain. I was reading in a science magazine that was lying around about synchronistic movement and mirroring between creatures. In interrelating, creatures develop an “automatic imitation bias.” It helps build trust, empathy, and collaborative spirit. Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel isn’t really a science fiction story. It has the kind of comedy and magic you find in classical antiquity, but it’s really a story about people snowbound at a very remote and very absurd hotel in the middle of nowhere that is also a madcap museum, and then Agatha Christie stuff starts to go down with the bodies piling up and the suspects shape-shifting. Well, I guess it is science fiction after all, isn’t it? It’s openly suspected that many of these chameleonic hotel guests and suspects manqué are actually extraterrestrials.
When Vittorio sat down at the table on the terrace at Le Hibou in Paris’s six arrondissement for our annual tête-à-tête, the first thing he wanted to get into as he worked on that first shimmering, golden cognac was actor, comedian, and needy populist Adam Sandler and how everybody knows he’s only given two really remarkable, superlative performances, first in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love from 2002 and then Uncut Gems by the Safdie brothers from 2019. Looking thinner, more wiry, and more unkempt than I remember him being this time last year, Vittorio commenced to arguing in his winding way that anybody of sense would rather be Sandler in Uncut Gems as opposed to Sandler in Punch-Drunk Love. I don’t want to wear that idiotic blue suit every single day, bow and scrape for tepid laughs, break the glass door with my fist in an impotent rage, or do semi-cannibalistic kink stuff with Emily Watson in Hawaii, says Vittorio. I told him he only likes Uncut Gems because he fences stollen jewelry. Touché, he said amiably, a young green-haired gal at the same moment setting down another cognac. I can see Vittorio slump down into a thoughtful meditative stupor. The scene near the beginning of the final act of Uncut Gems where Adam Sandler and Julia Fox make that hand-off window-to-window, says Vittorio with gravity, is the most romantic thing I have seen in my entire life.
My hotel is a block-and-a-half from Chanel and as I weaved through the human traffic, trying to keep a reasonable, steady pace, I contemplated the obscurity of language and the clarity of things. Whenever they send me in to do a cleanup job on some expensive, incoherent screenplay intended to go into production in a fortnight with an untested neophyte director and a cokehead production manager, I read the screenplay over and over for twelve days and twelve nights and then I slaughter a lamb in the bathtub with sage burning. Not in Paris. You can’t do that here. But they’re cool with it in the provinces, and they were cool with it back in Southern Ontario pig shit country. Solitude, malaise, creativity…the beast with two backs. I am not a self. I am not a name. I am to an extent what I survived. Roger that. Weary chronicler, where is your walking stick? I went looking in the vents and light fixtures for strange high-frequency sounds I was hearing and all I discovered was this fistful of sinewy wildebeest hairs. The hotel has an elderly lady with a wide grin in a proper French maid’s get-up who serves me coffee and breakfast while I watch Al Jazeera or the BBC. As soon as she comes around the corner my day brightens and I think of it as one of those “good indicators” the Scientologists in the yoga workshops talk about. Paris is my favourite city, but only for twelve days and twelve nights. I watched some porn on the hotel TV but wasn’t feeling it. All the formality and staging make me itchy. Some of these ladies are wearing far too much foundation. Pornography is just endless stimulation and release for today’s busy on-the-go consumer, but obscenity can be art.
After I got back from a quick, solitary lunch and extended gambol along the Seine, I received a text from my eldest daughter Mirilia: “Did you know that consciousness is extensive of physical brain structure?” I’ll have to sit with that one, I thought. Within the hour, Solange from the production department, the only steady and capable person around, or so it would appear, came up to the room and I pored us each some wine. The first time I met her, Solange told me that she’d had a film professor who when he lectured on the poetic realist strain in French cinema of the 1930s for three consecutive Fridays, kept a large map of Montmartre pinned over the blackboard and referred to it regularly in reference to scenes in important films that had been shot out on the streets. The film we’re supposed to be working on is an adaptation of James M. Cain’s lesser-known Galatea. It is set with distinct purpose in Southern Maryland. Holly Valenty is wife to farmer-restauranteur Val Valenty and the daughter of a prominent family, using “prowtocowl” for protocol and “hawndshake” for handshake. “You git, and git quick,” demands one character of another. The narrator is Duke Webster, a washed-up boxer and itinerant labourer who only really had any fight in him when he was seriously pissed off. We’re going to keep the voice-over or we’re fried. Holly’s husband would appear intent on feeding his wife to death, fattening her to an early grave. Foie gras metaphors are utilized. When Duke first lays eyes on Holly, what he sees instinctively horrifies and disgusts him. However, in short order Duke and Holly discover that they are able to be tender to one another as nobody has ever previously been to either party. The moral of the story is: tenderness and devotion will not save you. Love. Desire. Insanity. As Holly gets larger and larger and Duke more and more pissed off…somebody in Wisconsin is bound to die. Solange and I actually both like this story a lot. On paper. How are we supposed to put this up on the screen? How are we to credibly make the lead actress appear to grow fatter and fatter? Twice now producers have tried to explain this to me, but nothing I heard satisfied even remotely. Alas, I’m comfortable knowing I’ll receive my modest stipend before all the larceny and backstabbing starts to set in. As Solange left for her pilates class, I opened the Dalkey Archive edition of Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point on the bedside table and read her the following pair of sentences aloud: “If you’ve never had a religious experience, it’s folly to believe in God. You might as well believe in the excellence of oysters, when you can’t eat them without being sick.” Yum, said Solange.
Is consciousness the electrical expression of physical, organic brain structure? Probably. I spent part of the morning Googling and surfing. There was a video about consciousness and birds. Vittorio, Brother Blunderbuss himself, sent a text and suggested we go catch a screening of John Sturges’s brilliant ‘50s Technicolor pressure-cooker Bad Day at Black Rock at the little repertory cinema on Rue Christine on account of he’s leaving for Johannesburg early in the A.M. Having sat dutifully until the maroon curtains closed, we retired to a minuscule tiki bar with Polynesian music that Vittorio said he likes and where extremely attractive young women from the Sorbonne apprised us with open contempt. I always look at them hard and cold like I’m Shylock here to turn in my pound of flesh. My wife told me she’s expecting a baby, confessed Vittorio. And I asked her: at what time is this baby expected to land? I was drinking a strange teal cocktail with orange peels floating in it, thinking that today was finally the day Gilles de Rais and the Latinate Primitives all finally shit the bed in revolting anticlimax.
"Give me your hand," entreats Clarice Lispector, or at least her looming and fastidious narrator G. H., addressing a reader who is no doubt lazy and bored, hurt ‘cause ignored. This morning I got up quite early, walked in the direction of Montmartre, and found myself at Sacré-Cœur before there were any more than three or four tourists milling about up there. It was foggy and slightly chilly but I wore my windbreaker. Sacré-Cœur was built as a supposed beacon on a hill in what was essentially a working class red light district immediately following France’s profound demoralization in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War and the brutally suppressed Paris Commune. Somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 were executed in the streets beneath that church during the suppression of the 1871 Commune. Sacré-Cœur is a paternalistic building. It was not meant to mourn or honour the dead. It was intended as a vehicle with which to restore decorum and good order to working class streets. And yet we splay ourselves out in the gutter—arms akimbo—like Oscar Wilde whether you Siamese please or Siamese don’t please. All I’m after is Clarice Lispector’s “opaque piece of thing.” Pardon me if I’m hunched over outside Sacré-Cœur like a tall pigeon with harsh angles and techno-semiotic backdrop. There’s some Scandinavian jazz luminaries playing at the the jazz bar from Rivette’s Haut bas fragile tonight. I’m going to see if Solange wants to go check that out.
Alcoholics are like snowflakes: all very similar but no two are deformed and mangled in quite the same way. The character defects emerge way before the drinking actually commences, and my main one is toxic pride. Ask just about anybody. It can get ugly, but I’m usually a drunk who implodes instead of exploding. I’m the kind of drunk who camps out on the floor for eternity and a day. An unpleasant curse attached to my lived delusion-formation—we all have them—is that my dominating and most impregnable triggers to relapse, consistently, are the heartache and romantic disappointments I bring on myself. I’m a bad enough and old enough low bottom alcoholic to know at this point that when I pick up a bottle I am summoning all the infernal, flaying resources of hell to go to work for me and devour me comprehensively in so doing. I usually hit the pavement below at least as fast as a jumper would. Recovering alcoholic Charles Jackson’s 1944 novel The Lost Weekend is almost certainly the most brutal and accurate depiction of late stage alcoholism found anywhere in literature, though the popular Billy Wilder film adaptation is not generally taken very serious by actual alcoholics on account of its being so sanitized. If you don’t believe me, Nick Tosches says so too in his excellent but unsettling Me and the Devil. Charles Jackson goes in like an ace surgeon in front of a cohort of medical students, showing everybody around the affected body. Resentment, self-pity, inward loathing ballooning, the soul pocked with tailings ponds, another sack of meat leaning against another sack of meat in the meat packing district and no way back to dear old Omaha. Mania, torment, obsession, visions of the dead. Asked by the extremely skeezy doctor he’s chatting with on a large oceanic passenger vessel if he knows what the expression “running amok” means, the narrator of Stefan Zweig’s 1922 novella Amok thinks it perhaps has something to do with “a kind of intoxication affecting the Malays…” Doc: “It’s more than intoxication…it’s madness, a sort of human rabies, an attack of murderous, pointless monomania that bears no comparison with ordinary alcohol poisoning.” Buddy, you’re spilling all my secrets! The villagers in Malaysia get it. They’re able to ascertain that no accessible power can halt a man running amok, so they shout warnings ahead when they see him coming—‘Amok! Amok!’—and everyone beats it for the trees. Yes, the doctor and his story are tragic, but they are also manipulative and cruel, evidence of a compromised spirit intent on taking hostages. A legitimate spiritual guru once told me: stop telling your story. Sometimes the plague passes itself on through stories. Storytelling that unburdens? No, it is poison and it knows it and it does what it does anyway. There is no absolution. There can be no absolution for anybody who didn’t have the time or the vantage point to have their heart break for every last living creature. You cannot undo the damage done by the alcoholic in active addiction, but you can work with the alcoholic as you find them today…even if it’s only working at making a ham sandwich or sorting through bills. Alcoholism is in large part a spiritual disorder and spirituality is about connections to both worlded and otherworldly things. Try not to leave the sick person in isolated disconnection. If you can help it. I understand perfectly well how frustrating it can be. I worked in a homeless shelter and a treatment centre. It’s no better with normal people, actually. As soon as you have approximately five people you’re basically herding cats. I have ingrained bodily memory of my own traumas along with all the ones I missed out on, too. The database of the whole history of our pain is in the part of your spine where there used to be a tail sticking out. Go ahead…rub it.
