I assumed that free citizens cultivated their responsiveness to works of art in order to mitigate their narcissism and fuel their imaginative grasp of that which is irrevocably beyond themselves, to transform their anxious discomfort at not-knowing into a kind of vertiginous pleasure.
“People received energy and solace from wanting things and then getting them. Pearl wanted energy and solace. She felt that if she could only get interested in and knowledgable about a kinky subject, for example hockey or sharks, she would be a more contented person. She could not just be fucking all the time. Soon something more would have to happen.”
After dark the stillness falls, the hour of withdrawal, houses in shadow, the street a private place, a set of mysteries. Whatever we know about our neighbors is hushed and lulled by the deep repose. It becomes a form of intimacy, jasmine-scented, that deceives us into trustfulness.
Slight wander of innocence
flickers in this wavering
echo of what it had come for,
gone to, and forgotten.
... Wild Bill had said the trouble with self-analysis was the built-in human eagerness to accept all sorts of preposterous and absurd suppositions, not the least of which were both the possibility and desirability of knowing one's self. Bill had likened this to using a corkscrew to pull your image from a mirror.
Can you imagine the body being
The really body the being the reality
Body being the body if reality
Is what it is it is, not that reality
Doesn't infer the body, still
The body being the bearer of reality
And the barer of the body
The body being reality
That is reality's reality
Hardly on earth ever seen
But from it we have the word connubial
Which means
The body bearing the body in reality
And reality being the body
And body-reality being borne.
I am bearing a burden
Which reminded me of you
Bearing away the swell
Of the sea
But can yo imagine the body bearing reality
And being reality
That's where we get the
Word connubial which is a word for the body's being
Being in reality and being a body
In reality and bearing the burden
Of the body in reality, by being real
And by being the body of the real.
'Here is a hymn for a post factual democracy sung joyously by the disenchanted and forgotten as they tumble teary eyed into the arms of their oppressors.'
Late night lethargic yet nervy Tallinn viewing of GAME SEVEN elimination pending Eastern conference finals....
I had invented a way for people to take really specific artisanal baths. I used the old cassette tape drives from Commodore 64s and came up with a standardised system of bath-related metadata stored on cassette. Then, I made a protocol to attach some specialised hardware (which would control temperature, volume, and additives such as salts, oils or other nice things) to communicate between the cassette tape drive and the bathtub itself. I rigged up a prototype at my aunt's house and I had invited a bunch of investors to her place in order to show them how it worked, but when they got there I discovered my aunt had removed the tub part (the spigots and knobs were still on the wall, rather high up) and placed a sofa underneath. But it was too late to stop the demonstration so water was just pouring onto her sofa and getting it wet. I was pretending like everything was OK and trying to undress to get in the sofa/tub myself, but my t-shirt was really tight and also there were an infinite number of layers, so every time I wiggled out of the t-shirt, there was another one underneath.
Through the years, humanity, like a tide of refugees or pilgrims, shoeless and in rags, or in Mercedes, station wagons, running shoes, were traveling on, joined by others, falling by the way. And we, joined though we may be, briefly, by other strays, or by road travelers on their little detours, nonetheless never quite joined the continuing procession, of life and birth, never quite found or made it to the road. Whose voice is this? Not here. Not mine.
