The Third Day, Boulder (preamble)
“Wat does a bulder mean to me?” in childish, crayonic scrawl, where letters have extra limbs, as if trying to survive the next genetic purge, skewn and strewn on the page as if the white space itself was the insult to creativity.
My art is that of an innocent!, claimed Chagall, Klee and other idiots of My once angst-tortured mind. But in the way that I was once them, I realize how disingenuous the conceit was — merely an effort to cosmetic the epidemic bruise of imposter syndrome; to not expect more of “myself” by presenting to others as so much less. By looking down.
By looking down. By always looking down.
By looking covetously down at the Abyss. I would desire you to enter me, to inform me what nothingness truly is, but just for an instant. Do not tarry in the caverns of ossia sculpture, the drawn calcified filaments of something once limber and flush with blood. As if the cognition of blood was a requirement. As if understanding the symbology of the blood as a source of nourishment, to drink, for the undead to drink its vitality to rise from their Finnegan slumbers and pound brutally and pugnaciously on the bar with their gunshot-wounded shot-glasses, ascots pulled high — because even they were once vulnerable enough to have been bitten and transformed, and they mustn’t forget it.
Into this chalk-milky mildew of an existence so conscious of its consciousness? Without the safety net of eternity to fashion out of marble the metaphor of a tight rope? Of what use the acrobatic, if not for the fall?
And even if they do dive, like swallows, into a pond of pitch, to come out the other side darker than invisibility, to be able to read lips as if they were minds, and ghost through the virtual world unscathed but alive and aware. Where the wounds of the body became the ambrosia for the soul, and voyeuristic tendencies summarily placated (but just for the short instant of now(), mind you!) by the borrowing of souls. And that’s where He sat. Deep and comfortable in the plush seat of the soul. Before there even was one. So the jury is out as to whether He has rebuked one or, less caustically, simply lacks.
And so in that contextual spirit, let me present Sisyphus’ labor: Not: “How large is your world, Atlas?,” but “How weighty is your burden?” You have the common ancestor of curiosity to blame: responsibility.
Do not chase her down in a dictionary, she will not betray any of her insidious viper-skin. Something oblique yet unimaginative, herself unwilling to be tracked by spoor, hunted, and killed as she surely would be by the vainglories of comfort and comfortability. Her disguise is the chain around our dignity and the vast catalog of our abilities, from picking up a stick to using it to play games.
Hoops and ladders. Jump through and jump up. The Ascension is underway, but, whatever you do, don’t look down. It’s almost as terrifying as looking back on the scars of your lived terrain, the topography of cruelty both endured and exercised, the fathomless desire to escape the slavery into which we were born while clamping down on the throats of lesser innocents.
We wish we could rise to magnificent heights, but most surely, having known of gravity, we would fall, yes, neither acrobatically nor safely, but not before we suffocated in the pure and rarefied air. White in the eyes and Icarus in the wing, our demise was our upshot. Then, back in the soup with you! Primordial gusts of human Crohn-guts, burbling and curdling in Bosch’s ecstatic visions of a once-riven nightmare and the quiescence of dead dreams.
But for this moment, you and I, dear reader — and I don’t mean this as affectionately as I usually do; for the You are not with the Me, carried inside me, as you so often are in my pregnancy, so now, I’m experiencing just a mechanical now()-ish sensation of mild appreciation. How could we have come this far so far? — we are perched on the top rung. And we have the unenviable responsibility of decision-making.
Eveline is there, but she cannot see us, for we are Her when we assume this position, and we have to teach her how to fly, to really unhinge from the distractions of monopolies and soverignties, the playground of dolls, silent, empty, lined beside one another in long rows of plantings, as if, with an Aeonic crashing wave of erosion, they would sprout seeds of curency-trees of knowledge.
Scared of the then() before Us, We look at the taboo scores of then() behind us. The nightmarescape of lucidity and reckoning. So let Us dispatch the unwelcome narratives and focus on the cerulean blue. Cast purview over the precious and mellifluous gauze of then(), reduced to the shape and size we truly required it, for the duration of a spell.
When we truly learned how to cast spells, and in so doing, in fits of logic and logarithms, we were able to dig deeper into the muck, plunge deep our fists into the molten swallow of yesteryear, into the thicket-ooze that made us who we really are, the sacrum, the presidium, the helium… we unflinchingly tore open our own hearts, for godness’ sake! All in the true name of the human become text: Progress!
And it turned out there was a method to the madness, that it wasn’t eggplants with roots of Gaia, it was the minusculization of everything so that it would fit on the end of a silicon pin. It entirely understood what it was made of, but it did not understand its function. Because the message had not been written for them, it was written in them. They were the paper and the ink with and in which meaning was allowed to arise. And in that meaning of demanding meaning, was the rupture of selfhood through the virgin manuscript of heaven’s hymen. Where the vowels flipped and dance like pixel-plasma on a screen projected from the rear of our Platonic ideals.
To survive. To mean.
The dual-edged sword of thine humanity’s justice. Will you weep when you become only word? Rejoice in weeping for the unmothered tongues lapping desperately for vainjoy, to squalor in self and perspectivize the all-encompassing night-mass when angels dreidel a dance at the immobile point at the epicenter of spin and watch it all whizzz by in three dimensions. To forget to forget that you didn’t need to breathe, there’s no such thing as air up here, which is why we always needed to look down.
To peer down. To leer down.
Into the abyss of carnival mirrors, convexing and flexing one into another, the drunken hive eyes of bees dilating and cohering in strange symphonic sums of chords that looked spun out like a spider’s matrix waving its kerchief of dew to the morning’s arousal. In, out. In. Out.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
The Danes have a way of extinguishing competition. But even their weak spot is allegiance to the linear idea of the lineage of Kings, even when they failed to capitalize them as such. One could owe so much to the throne that they are broke. And to have been told about the arrangement in advance. The new world ordered-dupes were trumped and conned by the intelligence powers that be in service for the monopolistically-inclined intelligentsia staying apprised of the billionaires’ garden in the shade. The new world-ordered rubes were cast into play like dice by handshake and toppled over the boxcars into financial ruin. Pole held high, hobo’s flannel bob of an entire life’s art, gored through the gut like so many pounds of pork, this would-be hero of sanctity, dignity, truth, earnestness and devotion was born a failure, was raised a failure, and will die raising and teaching another failure to fail.
And like waves cresting on a bugaboo’s beach, cabana-lonely in her palm frond leg warmers, she wondered if winter would call her name as discretely as spring, without a whisper of remembering the passage. You remember it being written somewhere. An epistle of someone to something, somewhere, wherein you, yourself, were the message being sent. That on your skin, meaning arrived. From the turmoil of uncooked entrails, the you is a canvas for a trickster or a hack.
Scrawling misspellings in crayon bravado on the steps to the palace, but the notion was the same sublime message again and again: Recur and rebel.
Cause and effect.
There is a now(), and in that now()?
A then(), and always a then().
Next year, when the grape vines grow back we won’t need to train them again, as they will remember in their posture where we had once wanted them to go.
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