| I
do not believe in Evil. But there are people who are like "wounds"
on the young, impetuous body of our civilization. They bleed messily,
in answer to injury. They spread pain thgroughout the body. And the
eye horrifies when we discover them.
A
prayer is something you ask of no one in particular.
The
coolest thing about the coolest people is they can see more than they
can do. The worst thing about the worst people is they can do more
than they can see.
It'd
be one thing to get morality out of the law -- a miracle, in fact.
But, the thing is, in San Francisco, sex is a little freer of morality,
and therefore a little freer of the law.
We
don't actually "buy" things; we pay for the jealous privilege
of denying the buyer at a slghtly lower bid.
The
limit of our forgiveness is the extent to which we are able to recognize
in ourselves a capacity for offense. To forgive is to say "I
could have done that." As a society, as a species, we may glimpse
our best and our worst in the dialogue between our most grievous victims
and their offenders.
The
innate difficulty of the parent-child relationship owes in considerable
part to the impossibility of empathy between them. The only thing
they have in common is a tendency to assess their own merit by the
virtues of the other.
"Hey,
you know how it's perfectly legal to buy an album in the record store,
play it in your house to your heart's delight, etc. Just like it's
legal when you play that very music for your friends, when they come
visit you. A DJ too, though someone's pinching an admission at the
door, may spin the disc for all "his friends", and still
not be afoul of any copyrighting laws. So I was wondering about the
line that there must be somewhere between the playing of "one's
records" for "one's friends" and making money on the
talents, the good name, and, most offensively, the assets
of another man."
hey,
i'm beginning to get a sense of how the digital technologies have
been transforming art. sorta like the way the communications revolution
of the previous century brought a sense of instantaneity, fleetingness,
and greater subjectivity than had ever been dared before. "digital"
calls into question the genuineness of everything. there are no originals
any more, only "bits" of things, coming together to make
aggregates, which evoke poignantly originals. and these lost originals
seem to us increasingly remote. they appear as possible hallucinations,
materializing into recognizibility for only a moment, like an image
in a sea of dead-TV-channel snow. our minds are no longer static reflectors
of a fixed reality, nor even strangely personal filters that denature
and transform some truth we COULD all see in the same way, if we wished.
no. a given moment of consciousness is now nothing more than a snapshot
of a perpetual apocalypse. the art (music, literature, "imagery")
that is symptomatic of the Digital State is that which honors no truth,
no expectation, no pre-existence whatsoever, as if everything could
be broken down into a fungible code.
Rule
No. 1772 (from
The Guide to Optimal Living on Planet Earth, 2ed.) Whenever, and I mean
WHENEVER you hear somebody use the word "amazing" (as in that
curry was amazing, or you are amazing) you must, must, must, must add
the words "...and magical!"
A
Jew for Jesus puts a pamphlet in my way today. And I'm thinking about
hippie-chick pierced midriffs and Chinese girls' toes waving from
the fronts of their flip-flops. But I come to a stop, and I pivot
on my heel when he says "Well, can I ask you a question?" So, I say
"Sure". And he asks me if I think Jesus was a man and my savior. Gary
was his name, so I said "Gary, there were many men who died for me."
And Gary listened closely to me when I told him it's no easy thing
to speak with God. It's much harder than going to the DMV when you
are a Kurd off the boat, and trying to get a learner's permit. I think
there have been these gifted cats, in history. They came, and died
in all these fucked up ways, and before they went, they let us know
that God makes use of interpreters, Gary. Even our most inspired,
our most illumined brows, see only a teeny sliver-glimpse of the Absolute.
And Gary knows what I'm talking about, cuz he looks all about and
towards the sky. Yes, my son, the Divine pervades all of this. The
paths from the questions that we ask our silent selves as we await
sleep in our beds, the paths upward, all begin right here, in the
blade of grass, or in the sliding of bodies, just so, which brings
the falling cigarette butt (from a porcelain hand dropped) into my
glorious view. Then my eyes widen, and I get that miraculous sort
of look on my face. I believe in inspiration, Gary. I believe that
whatever else there is wants us to somehow get it. So, every now and
then, a prophet is born. A man will come wriggling into the world,
and it will be as if the fingers of God have plucked him from that
vacant, feminine place. Call him Jesus. Or Mohammed, or Buddha, or
Gary. And he will work out a dictionary of sorts. And it will serve
the men who heed the drama on the prophet's face, the men who have
themselves known mortal dramas and suffered loss. To them, the prophet
will speak in clear and terrible tones. They will gather round him,
and check the impulse to touch his garments only because they are
old men. But still, they will lay their heavy heads upon his lap,
each one in his turn. In privacy, they will come to confess and purge
the contents of their fragile souls to him. The patience of The Father
will be his, and he will forbear judgement against them, and he will
listen silently in that way of listening which draws spoken words
into nothingness. The men will clamber round him in their gratitude,
and they will lift him over their own heads, that he may be a head
which exists between the heads of men and their God. They will make
a language which binds their tongues into a single tongue. They will
speak within themselves and to the prophet, that the words they speak
may bridge the unbridgeable gulf. And the prophet will remove himself
from the center of their attention. And he will make them understand
that the words they speak with a single tongue are not meant for the
ears of men. Nor even for the ears of a prophet. Then the men will
follow the finger of the prophet with their eyes, until he points
toward the face of God. And he will point his finger into the earth.
The men will ask, "Why, prophet, do you indicate our own Earth, which
is only one of his merest creations? Show us the residence of God,
not the abased place where men place their feet." And the prophet
will answer their confusion first with an awesome silence, and then
with the words which will come from God into his mind. "God does not
look upon you from afar", he will say to them. And then he will close
his own eyes and drive his hand into the earth, though it ruins his
flesh to do so. "I am a leaf, green and full of promise, burst forth
from the dying tree. Do not burden me with your orchard ambitions.
Pray instead that the sun pours all its living light upon me, and
that the supple green may harden into bark. For God is the ache within
the seed. And the seed is God. And the soil which cradles the seed
is also God. And it is evidence of God in you that you seek God outside
of yourselves. A man aches, as a seed aches, to transcend. But he
is neither fed nor watered by the sky. God lies, circled like a cat,
around the feet of men. And he clutches tightly to their ankles, even
as they seek him in the clouds."
Of
all the mysteries in life, sex must surely be its densest ravel. Whom
and how do we fuck? We are born naked, but not pure. Our infant bodies
enter the world already marked by a handprint, the dark residue of
an ancient contact we will never clearly recall, and against which
we are doomed to measure all who touch us in this life. To this dubiously
fated search for sexual correctness, the beautiful person adds the
additional difficulty of having no body to offer even the tenderest
of lectors. Only a surface marred by terrible impacts. What might
have been read and understood by a lover, has by childhood been devastated
to unintelligibility by the brutal lust of strangers. Beauty destroys
itself against the desire it begets.
Unuttered:
"Creatures such as you do things which feel cruel to creatures
such as me. There are a thousand different dialects of kindness and
savagery between us, and no two do we share."
i've
spent all my days in heaven, and all my nights in hell. but which
is the sin and which the wage, i still cannot tell. ask me at the
sunset or the dawn. do not ask me when my hat and gloves are on, or
when i'm lying naked in the sun. the nights are as cold as they are
warm, and the day is dark as it is bright. ask me and i'll tell you,
only truth is light.
I
started by wondering how getting older changes the way you think.
And not all the assorted degenerations of mind which accompany age
and the inescapable organic degeneration of brain. But how, by itself,
the sociological phenomenon of getting older might affect consciousness
and self-perception. Outside in, as it were. I thought it would be
really cool if, for example, our recovery time for emotional injuries
got shorter as our recovery time for physical injuries gets longer.
It may provide a more accurate way to understand the concept of maturity
if we see it as a process of accumulating experiential data, which
gradually raises our emotional ability to suffer, rather than as some
mysterious condition of adulthood which comes on like a light. Then
I started thinking about how men in their late 30's and early 40's
get "baby-friendly" all of a sudden when it hits them they're probably
not ever going to be rich or famous. Scary moment when a person decides
to become a parent only to create an external life-support system
for their twilighting dreams. That's how I separated the desire to
procreate from libido, or first realized the two are separable. Oops.
This realization, however, immediately clarified the price paid by
the individual in exchange for the benefits of mass socialization.
And by mass socialization I mean the myriad behavioral concessions,
and self-repressions we commit in order to get along in very large
social groups (i.e. cities, nations, etc.) It seems perfectly rational
to see the desire to have sex and the desire to make a baby as two
different things. Well, it is rational. But wholly unnatural. The
ability to separate the desire to procreate from sexual libido is
a modern phenomenon. Only about as old as agriculture, or some earlier
moment when human intelligence first and forever joined pleasure and
consequence. Increasingly complex social groupings, with their many
indirect dependencies, created the super ego within us. And, this
internalized policeman has built his office between our deepest impulses
and their sweetest gratifications. The ability to seek or avoid sex
because we are aware of the procreative consequences of sex is a high
monument to human intelligence. We are aware of animals who may physiologically
and hormonally encourage or discourage procreation in response to
environmental conditions. But that is different. That's called instinct.
The lioness does not have a conscious link between the sensory reality
of scarce prey and the psychological state of oestrus. Nor is she
able to override her feelings of "frigidity" on a non-oestrus day,
where opportunity, desire or boredom might compel a human to do so.
We celebrate our procreative enlightenment through the exercise of
"Choice". It is our ability to ask the question, whether we pose it
before, during or after sex, which creates an unbridgeable chasm between
us and the rest of nature.
You
know you're an alcoholic when you realize one day that you've drawn
a line through the kingdom of beverages. On the one side of the line
are beverages with alcohol, and on the other side are the beverages
you drink only when they're free.
(Filigree
Style. Soyez-Vous Avise! Yes, yes, y'all..... bust it out y'all...)
Although it may be said, and, indeed, may ever be said of me, that
I am a man, teetering on the splints of his own precipice, always,
ALWAYS, always a man who stands receptive to new and interesting encounters
(from whencever cometh they), I have learned to be very discriminating
as to the sort of person to whom I will accord the covettissimo
prize of my friendshiphood. Truth be to Gospel what I is to my minions.
Yes, yes. y'all. A poor choice spells danger both for them and for
me. And more hardship never came down in the 'hood than upon these
(oh deliriously vivid memories, still...!), these bad, bad choices.
My shit is all real. For you see, I cannot walk into a room without
turning on the lights. Let a brother, play his shit. But. non, no,
nyet. In spite of my frequent desire to not do so, in spite
of having repeatedly faced the unpleasant consequences of doing so,
I still cannot help myself. (S'why I sigh.) It is simply what I do,
as a matter of inescapable nature. I do not say that my "light"
is an objective light, nor connected in any sense to absolute truth,
or even especially revealing. But it is a light which possesses as
its primary attribute the one certain quality of all light -- the
ability to change things. "Dip the oar sloooooooowly into the
'morrow................................. (splat!)"
I
was blinded by paranoia. It was exactly like that thing I do whenever
I'm walking in the dark among low tree branches. I squint, for fear
that some wayward branch will pierce my eye, when what I need
to do is open my eyes wider to see the danger from afar.
Racism,
nationalism and religious intolerance are only the modern symptoms
of an ancient human ill: We see differences too well, and in them,
only something to fear. If I were sitting in an airport lounge with
another man, a television and a remote control, I would not wish to
be the man with the remote control in his hand, because it is my nature
in such situations to adhere very strictly to the Prime Directive
(in the Star Trek sense). If this man (and let's build him in our
imaginations as my physical antithesis, an endomorph, small-cranial
capacity, etc.), if this man were to make for his channel selection
something that, well let's just say, would not have been my first
choice, like the WWF, or something, I would be totally cool with that,
really. Not "happy", per se, but content, in the
way a bettor is content, if not happy, to see the roulette wheel slow
and stop on the wrong number. And beyond contentment, I would become
curious about this man, this square-jawed selector of strange TV programming
in the airport lounge with me. "Who is this person, and
how rare an opportunity is this?", I would think to myself, with
mounting excitement. And then I would have to sterilize him with the
laser beams from my eyes. Kidding. Not.
Creationists
on Evolution: "It's hard to believe in something I don't understand."
Evolutionists
on Creation: "It's hard to understand something I don't believe
in."
Hey
motherfucker, "You complete me." The person you love never
really exists. They are merely the mannequin that best fits the idealizing
"suit" of your affections.
Superstition
is simply the technique of luck.
A
horrific generalization, I know. But close enough to.... Anyway. "Men
lie. Women lie... to themselves". Also cuz I thought the old
standby "Men play at love to get sex, and women play at sex to
get love." was more than a little bit sexist and way old-thinking.
On
astrology and all that sorta shit: Yeah, the purely physical argument
is hard to hold up. I mean, the gravitational forces from a cosmic
body 20 light years away "tiding" the amniotic fluid in
some stoner hippie-chick's belly as she tokes a blunt on Telegraph
and spaces nicely over the jazz-like beauty of her white-painted toe
nails aching petulantly toward the sun from the ends of her her way-worn,
way-traveled, earth-momma-to-the-max Birkenstocks. (Fuck, I love Berkeley!)
Knowhattamean, jellybean? So, anyway, my thing is what if it's not
that the relative positions of the planets and the stars directly
affect human births here on earth. But rather, that the appearance
of certain personality traits and psycho-behavioral tendencies among
children born during certain times of the year is evidence of (Oh,
let's call them...) Universal Energy Cyclings, which also affect where
in the sky over Memphis on a Wednesday night in May you might find
Orion's cock. Sorta like during periods of economic inflation, when
you have both high interest rates and low unemployment, but, of course,
there's no direct cause-and-effect relationship between the two phenomena.
Pay attention, Horatio. Whole lotta shit goin' down. You best go on
home now, little fella. Let us imagine you to be as intelligent as
your silence will allow.
At
no other moment will a woman give a man so certain a glimpse of her
soul as she does when she let's him see her in the presence of the
music she loves.
There
is nothing on earth which so perfectly embodies all that is male,
as a trout thrusting itself desperately up a river falls, to the final
fulfillment of his life's purpose, and certain death.
(As
Martine) "i think the higher propensity to orgasm with alpha
males owes simply to arousal, or more precisely, to that KIND of arousal.
why would having your clit rubbed or licked by a 'sensitive' guy make
your body want to conceive with his seed? especially since your vaginal
canal may never even receive his seed, since his 'sensitivity' makes
him less likely to even want to fuck you in the first place. provisional
evolution has screwed us by shifting the set of 'success-ensuring'
attributes away from the things that also generally accompany lots
of testosterone, like big tiger-bashing muscles. not enuff of the
henry rollins sort draggin' clubs around. it's a problem."
Art
is the dirt on my glasses.
Sometimes
you can find these wack-ass parallels between the rules of the physical
world and those of life. Oh, yeah... I'm talking like Newton for the
former and Deepak for the latter, right. So everybody knows that pressure
is force divided by surface area. Usually we think of the numerator
in that formula as the really changeable variable. The force part.
As in "I'm going to squeeze your head more tightly between my
thighs now, Jack." But a funny thing happens when you fiddle
with the denominator. Start shrinking your surface area, and the same
amount of force amounts to greater pressure. And greater pressure
makes things happen. Imagine that, through the agency of some quirky
mutagen present in the drinking water in the small Eastern European
village of her provenance, my benefactrix's thighs have a sharp metallic
ridge along the inseam. Now, the same loving squeeze turns into a
scene from a Troma film, as my head cleaves apart like a halved melon,
'gainst the pressure of the incising ridge. The life lesson here is,
if you want to get something done quickly and affirmatively, focus
your efforts on as small a point as you can -- and "squeeze".
Only
God can turn a conservative into a liberal.
We
all experience moments in our lives, when a strange clarity seems
to "switch on" over all that we see, feel and understand.
Almost miraculously, we can see the truth, know it to be truth, and
can, with a singular resolve, pledge our actions to the service of
truth, exclusively. At such times, our actions seem to flow from vast
reservoirs of certainty. Can you imagine an existence free of moral
equivocations and compromises, one in which the only true and absolute
Kingdom of Morality in the universe has parted its gates to you? Well
I know a certain little pill that will grasp you gently by the nape
of the neck, and dip your face into the cool, crisp waters of the
truth. A baptism in truth. You may not like what you see, but you
will never forget the exhilaration of the discovery. It is Ecstasy,
in name and in effect.
Let
us for a moment imagine a universe comprising only Objects and Events.
Events act upon objects, sometimes changing them, sometimes not. At
other times, events will act upon objects in a way that will itself
beget another event. And so on. You get it. I am an object in such
a system. I have been acted upon and changed by events in my life.
I have, when it has been my turn to do so, given rise to events. Some
of these have taken their effect on the objects around me, markedly.
The cascades of consequence are plainly visible, as I look out across
the table of objects before me. Empathy rises. Sure, there are "big"
events, which touch all of us. But these are few and far between --
or meaningless. Truly shared experiences are uncommon. Mostly, we
toil and twist, dance and die, under the effects of "little"
events. Those born out of the spicy stew of a personal fate, affecting
only one person. Only you or only me or only her. And I am grateful
for their smallness, even against the bite of their small, well-aimed
arrows. I am grateful for a system which both alienates and unifies.
My own Sunday-at-noon vicissitude cannot distract me from the day's
surrender to night, or make me miss the shift from March to April.
Even the fall of a foreign potentate, or the arrest of a rock star,
cements my membership. I belong to you, and you to me. Though we each
(in our billions) rise daily from a private sleep, in the daylight
we are not alone.
Advice
for Poets: You will on Tuesdays, and on the sabbath, and on your
mother's birthday produce words. They will be the expression of your
most interior truths. They will be pregnant with all the significance
of your life's experiences. You will cherish these words and any items
which become connected to them, such as napkins and trees and people.
You will share them shyly or arrogantly with your lovers. Some of
you will never let another soul read them. But if you do, you will
see (indeed, many of you have already seen) a facial expression which
you will likely misinterpret or, perhaps most wisely, never question.
The expression strongly resembles that of a person being told the
dream of another person. It is a mixture of arc-browed bewilderment
and thinly veiled contempt. Unless it is a part of their job to know,
most people couldn't give two shits that last night you were fucked
by Caligula. The same is largely true of poetry. Too personal. Too
private. Too embarrassing. Too...... YOU! Which is not to say that
I am in any way advocating the extrication of the poet from the poem.
That is impossible, in any event. What I am saying is that good poems
can stand on their own. Without you. Given a stage, some dramatic
lighting, and a staff, I think I could convey to you that I am Lucifer,
that my lieutenants in hell have just ousted me and that I need to
use the men's room very badly, all in one good "Aha!". But
on the page, in black and white, Milton himself could not imbue the
single word with so much meaning. Language can fill the black chasms
of difference between people and between cultures. But it is also
intensely alienating. In our minds, words become connected with concepts
and percepts and emotional events, inextricably and in a manner as
unique as our very identity. Words, much more so than the things they
stand for, live in the subjectified world of our most densely coded
symbols. We use them because we have to. (I point when I can.) So
when you feel the stirring to write (a necessarily destructive impulse,
by the way), do more than simply dispose of your emotion by dropping
it into the most comfortable and immediate vessel of language. That
much alone is fairly easy, and makes for no more than a good beginning.
Remember that you are writing, not vomiting. You have choice and control.
Use this power to make things. Think conversationally. Tell a story.
Conceive of an ear, then speak to it. And above all else, get out
of the way! Your audience will cherish you as an artist only when
you offer them a glimpse of themselves, of a place they recognize
or of a place they long to visit. I'll give Huxley the last word:
"The poet-artist's uniqueness ... consists solely in his ability
to render in words or (somewhat less successfully) in line and color,
some hint of a not excessively uncommon experience."
Parce-que
moi je compose, je...
Est-ce
que tu ne me connais pas?
Je
suis la jardiniere de la maison de ta naissance!
C'est
moi que t'a changee des Pampers, quand vous etiez emmerde.
Est-ce
que tu ne t'en souviens de mois? Encore...?
Oh,
c'est lamentable. Ca me cause du douleur, ca me fait mal. Je suis
finis.
Au
moment precise.
Is
Communism a Religion?
essais
perdus
*
|